Chapter Text
Graves thinks it is a curious thing indeed to be haunted by the memory of someone you have never actually met. It starts as dreams, or fragments of a dream. Swirls and whorls of black smoke that slip through the sieve of his consciousness until he wakes trembling.
Sometimes the smoke takes form, long lean bones and cheekbones sharp enough to cut through diamond. Graves wakes with strangled cries and biting guilt keeps him up the remainder of the night for crimes he can't remember committing.
Sometimes the smoke is faceless, murmuring to him through the small hours, and somehow Graves can't help but feel like he has failed it somehow.
He knows the smoke by name but only through scattered accounts of others who were witness to the Calamity.
Dangerous.
Unpredictable.
Beautiful, Newt says sadly, before muttering a half-assed excuse and scuttling away. Graves doesn't miss the way his eyes glisten with moisture before he flees.
For the most part, Graves feels like the others at work take great pains to avoid saying the name around him at all, as if calling it by name will summon the darkness. A taboo.
He knows the list of offences committed by that individual, of course, they were quick to show him that at least, as if that was all that he consisted of.
Smoke and sin.
He knows the terrible and immense power barely contained (and more often, not) within that pale parcel of skin and bone.
But it's utterly maddening - the way they cut their conversations short when he accidentally stumbles upon a discussion. Or the way they change the topic when he tries to broach the subject, when all Graves wants to do is ask what he was like? Beautiful. What was his life like? Terrible.
What Credence meant to him and why there's a fierce ache in his chest when the case file falls across his desk one day before it is quickly snatched up by one of his assistants.
"Sorry, Director Graves." The apology is hushed, almost embarrassed. She's a pretty flighty thing, one of the Goldstein girls. She's trembling beneath her blonde curls but her fingers are nimble and firm as they grasp the file.
He grabs the wrist of the girl, allowing some slack when she gasps as though branded.
"Why?"
"Sir."
"Why won't any of you look me in the eye when you talk of Credence Barebone?"
There, he said it. Graves feels a hush fall upon the room, and if the smoke has ever been present outside his dreams, it's now and here. Licking and pouring over his skin as the name rolls of his tongue. Somewhere deep inside him a sombre piano note plays over and over, waiting, anxious.
"Sir I- I'm not the best person to speak to about this."
"I need to know." Graves realises with no small degree of shame how much it sounds like pleading, even to his own ears, but there's no going back. Not from here, not from this. If Credence Barebone was ever anything more than a borrowed memory he needs to know. It itches and burns under his skin as though he's been hexed.
Even if he would never see him in this life.
Even if he were gone.
Graves has to know.
Queenie - that was her name - looks at him with sympathy, but a startling clarity too as though she can read things hidden even to himself.
"You...but...Director Graves. How can you love someone you've never even met?"
Graves flees.
**
He's holed up in one of his safe houses, a ramshackle loft apartment in the city's seedier quarter. He's shook, even though the apparating comes easy to him and there isn't a safer place in all of New York. He's never alone, not these days. His demons won't let him.
Mr Graves...
He ignores it. A memory, that's all it is, and not even his own. Some form of transference from the dark magic that allowed Grindelwald to wear his flesh suit. Graves grits his teeth against the pounding in his skull.
Mr Graves...
"In mercy's name, leave me alone," he pleads with the darkness. If he slits his eyes and peers outside he could just imagine tendrils of black, oily and sinuous, lapping at the edges of light pooling below the lamppost.
Mr Graves...
"I said go away!"
"Director Graves is that you?" The voice comes from outside his door, the wards at least doing their part.
"Scamander?"
Incredulous. How Scamander is able to find his hiding place when few others know even of its existence is impressive in and of itself. What he is doing here, however, is another matter.
"Scamander I must ask you to leave."
"I'm sorry Director Graves, Queenie, she..."
Newt is clearly at a loss for words. Graves would snicker at the mental image of Scamander ducking his head of scraggly hair and scuffing his worn shoes against the skirting...if only he weren't consumed by the mortification of what exactly Queenie had told the Zoologist.
"She said...never mind. Sir I think you should know. Credence Barebone is alive."