via
http://ift.tt/2BxwLMJ:
For @elenothar, who requested ‘Graves and a [redacted for story purposes]’. Which, to be perfectly honest, stewed in my brain for a few days as I tried to link the two together - only to be inspired when I accidentally stumbled into the ‘His Dark Materials’ section of AO3.
Author’s Notes: Officially Not Mine. Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them is Not Mine. His Dark Materials is Not Mine. This is also a fusion between His Dark Materials and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find them - namely, the concept of dæmons. Might be a bit OOC, but - well, it was written in something of a hurry, rather late at night.
Accretion
They found Percival Graves in the cellar.
Seraphina is quite sure that Grindelwald’s choice of the aforementioned location was no accident. The man was meticulous to the extreme - look. He was saying - not to her, but to the man he had captured. Captured and held in his own home, what should have been Percival’s seat of power - it was insult piled on insult, deliberately designed to further denigrate his victim.
Not that he had needed to, by the end.
Seraphina was there when they broke down the cellar door. She knows full well that by the end - by the end, Percival would have been unable to appreciate the subtleties of the insult.
She will remember Percival as he was. That is her promise to herself. She will remember her friend - who laughed with her over arithmancy equations and stood by her at her wedding, who kept her stocked with chocolate and firewhisky through her divorce. She will not allow herself to equate what - what they found in a cellar that stank of piss and shit and rotted flesh with her friend. He’s more then what a sociopathic madman did to him.
Percival Graves is her friend.
Seraphina shivers, fingers running down the slick glide of Oraculum’s scales as the brightly colored viper curls around her wrist.
Dindrane was Oraculum’s friend. Once.
She doesn’t know if her friend’s soul wants anything to do with her.
**
Tina’s heard the rumors. She doesn’t need to.
She was there when they carried Director Graves from the cellar, shouting, screaming for a healer, any healer, now! She was there when the mediwitches and mediwizards descended in a rushing horde.
She was there, when they opened the door, and for a long, long moment her brain simply could not comprehend the sight before her eyes.
That can’t be a person. Bones don’t bend like that. That was her response, in the split second before she realized what was in front of her. When she realized she could see bone.
She could see bone. She could see dried blood, and rotting flesh and swollen limbs and burns cuts lashes spellfire maggots no -
Percival Graves is expected to make a full recovery. Physically, at any rate. Mentally, no one knows. Especially with his dæmon’s - condition.
He wouldn’t let go of her. Tina knows that much to be true - Dindrane had been clutched to the Director’s chest with a strength that would have killed a flesh-and-blood entity; the healers had had to do everything short of literally breaking his bones in an attempt to make him loosen his hold. A dead man’s hold - no one had said that, but they’d all thought it.
As bad as Director Graves’ condition had been, Tina knows that it is his dæmon who will haunt her nightmares.
Lupercus nuzzles comfortingly at her side. Tina shivers, resting a hand on the wolfhound’s head.
Lupercus and Dindrane had never been particularly close, but even Tina had admired the eagle that could have been a mirror replica of it’s counterpart in the Great Seal of the United States of America. Dindrane - recruits whispered that the bald eagle could see everything. Especially the clumsy habits of new hires; there were rumors that Dindrane’s unblinking gaze was a particularly effective assist in interrogations.
She had been powerful and beautiful, a badge of honor, and she -
Percival Graves had been found clutching what might have been an eagle. The most that could be said about it was that it was bird-like. Feathers plucked, broken wings so much char, beak shattered, talons ripped from her feet -
And for all the qualities Grindelwald’s nameless wolf-dæmon possessed, opposable fingers were not among them. That amount of damage - that kind of damage - would have had to have been delivered by human hands.
Tina wanted to vomit. Wanted to cry and scream and shout at the taboo of it - there was a word that no one dared share, one that hovered, unsaid, in the air between them. There was a word for those that forced themselves upon others.
And there had been one last thing.
Dindrane‘s proportions hadn’t been anything near to those of an eagle. Not anymore.
**
Re-Settling after a traumatic event wasn’t entirely unknown.
Newt had even seen it before - in the War, and during the aftermath. Strange, what people discovered themselves to be on the battlefield, when they found themselves doing things and being things they’d never thought themselves capable of. Newt had seen monkeys turn to butterflies, and leopards shift to wolves - not often, but he’d seen.
Axolotl huffed behind him, a laugh that held nothing of humor; Newt ignored her as he bent over the prone body of the other man.
Right. The point was that a settled dæmon re-settling into an entirely new form was - not common, but not unheard of. The problem, however, appeared to be that no one could figure out just what had happened to Director Graves’ soul. Or, more precisely, just what shape his dæmon had taken for her own. Harder still to tell when the small crushed form was swathed in bandages and smeared with salves.
Until someone, apparently, had remembered that Newt was, in fact, a licensed magizoologist. With extreme familiarity with - quite a vast array of animals, in various conditions ranging from healthy to - not healthy. The latter far more often then he’d prefer, personally, but - well.
“She’s not an eagle.” Newt murmured softly, eyes tracing the arch of one wing. “The wings are all wrong - “ He frowned slightly. “Too small as well. Too small by far.” There was a shiver to one side as Tina clasped her hands together; Newt shot her a quick, apologetic wince before returning his eyes to the devastatingly still form.
The frown deepened as Newt mentally ran through a list of the more common avians - raven, crow, sparrow, falcon, eagle, bluejay, chicken, pheasant - no, no, no, and no. The size was wrong, proportions didn’t match, the angles were off -
“I’ve seen this kind of bird before.” He had. He had, he knew he had. But - where? Axolotl was a firm, steadying presence at his side, and - his own dæmon. Something tickled the edge of his mind. Axolotl was to him as Percival’s unnamed dæmon (really, no one had bothered to introduce her) was to him. Yes, there was the obvious, but there was something more. Something about the specifics of his and Axolotl’s interrelationship was mirrored in Graves’ own connection to his soul, and -
Oh.
Oh.
Newt stared at the body sleeping in the hospital bed in outright wonder. “Oh.” The words were tiny, seeming to come from a long, long way away.
“Newt?” Tina was at his side. “Do you - what is she, Newt? What - “ and he could hear her swallow. “What’s happened?”
“I - “ Newt plunged a hand in his pocket, searching frantically for paper, for a quill, for - he had to write this down. He had to make notes he had to take so many observations. “It’s incredible.” Axolotl was shimmering forward, her own wings half-raised - Tina shrank back instinctively as his dæmon shoved past her to stare greedily at the prone patient. “I must take notes, I didn’t think this was possible, I -” Newt’s head snapped up, hand stretching out in a futile gesture of warding. “Axolotl, don’t - “
A horned head sank; Newt watched, his mouth dropping, as the Common Welsh Green’s snout brushed, with utmost delicacy, against a small form wreathed in bandages.
Fire exploded into being; the heat hit them like an eruption as the sudden light scalded their eyes - they might as well have tried looking into the sun. Newt was dimly aware of an alarm ringing in the background, the frantic rush of feet and the cries of startled magicians - “Tina, don’t!”
Newt grabbed Tina, jerking her away and curtailing her instinctive lunge towards the hospital bed. “You can’t!”
“Newt, let me go he’s burning let me go!”
“No! You can’t interrupt!”
The flame billowed higher, and for one split-second his own dæmon was outlined in incandescence - dragons had an extremely high heat tolerance, Newt reminded himself. He wasn’t worried.
He wasn’t - all of his attention was fixed on the shape moving in the heart of the fire. On the song rising through the air - rusty and unfamiliar, but growing in strength and surety with every moment until the melody was a scream of joyous triumph.
The phoenix settled into place, plumage shining the red and gold and glory of a living flame.
**
Dindrane chirped, head tilting to the side as she stared curiously at the strange dragon.
Percival Graves opened his eyes.
**
“For a star to be born, there is one thing that must happen: a gaseous nebula must collapse. So collapse. Crumble. This is not your destruction. This is your birth.” - Zoe Skylar.
(Your picture was not posted)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
