#the knarls were originally One Two Three and Four

[aethelar]

So, uh, a while back you wrote a thing for Magizoologist!Graves and Head of Magical Security!Newt. I found the Newt piece, but did you ever write the one for Graves?

Nonnie, I did not. Very remiss of me. We shall rectify; in part one, we had Newt Scamander, Head of Security at MACUSA - now let’s bring on part two and introduce Percival Graves the Magizoologist.

How, you might ask.

Percival Graves of the boss-man suits, the judging eyebrows that judge without shame, the complete lack of chill and the vocabulary that is primarily swear words - that’s the Graves we’re going with, and we’re asking him to abandon his promising career as an auror in favour of playing Mummy to a host of, of assorted highly illegal most likely viciously poisonous things.

Graves does not have the background that would suit a magizoologist. His entire resume can be summed up by: grew up with two dogs, once managed to redirect a sparrow outside after it had got stuck in the office.

So. How does he become a magizoologist?

By accident.

Newt joins MACUSA in the early days of 1919 and, although he doesn’t cross paths with Graves, his mere presence has an impact. Newt takes the spot on the Criminal Investigations team that Graves was angling for but that’s fine, that’s ok. At least two of the of the other teams are interested in the promising new recruit and have offered jobs to the latest heir of the Graves’ vaunted line.

Three teams, if you count the Traffic team, but Graves does not count the Traffic team, so. Two other teams. Special Ops try and tempt him with a frankly ridiculous wage packet to join their diplomatic missions, and let’s face it, Graves is tempted. International diplomacy is what makes and shapes the world, and America might be newer on the scene than some of the other magical nations but the Graves name will still carry some weight. He could do a lot of good. He could also royally fuck up and cause the next world war, because maybe his however-many generations back ancestor was good with words but Graves himself finds punching things a much better solution. With that in mind, he ends up in the Defence and Response Corps and, blunt and straightforward as DaRC are, he thrives.

Maybe in another world he’d learn how to talk the talk to back up his walking the walk and be part of the ICW, but in this world his job consists of identifying threat, taking threat down with extreme prejudice and/or explosions, and shielding the fuck out of whatever target he was sent in to protect. Nothing gets passed his shields. They’re multi-layered frequency-shifted beauties and they earn him the nickname Gravestone for how immovable he becomes once he plants himself, and in four years of working with DaRC he never once loses a target. Not once.

In his fifth year, his target is a short, scrappy woman beset by a pack of Black Dogs. The malevolent ghosts come out at night, baying their omens of death and plaguing the people of the town - three children have already vanished, stolen, most likely, by the evil creatures. The woman is running her magic dry trying to keep them away, and though she’s reluctant to call in DaRC she fears she has no choice if she wants to survive.

That’s how she puts it, at least. Graves turns up, and something sits wrong with him, but - well, he’s not with Criminal Investigations. He’s with Defence. He digs in, builds his shields, and waits for nightfall. The sun sinks, the temperature drops, and he turns his lumos down low to preserve his night vision. The thermos of coffee in his pack has a careful combination of warming charms and space-distortion, and it holds enough to keep him going for several nights in a row, but - if the dragon-fire flares do their job - he’ll only need it for one. He waits. Occasionally the woman peers suspiciously from her window or opens the door to check on him under the thin guise of offering him tea. Once she starts singing loudly, off-key, to a song she doesn’t know the words to. There’s a thump, a hissed shut up, one more line of the song and then silence.

Roughly twenty minutes after midnight, the Black Dogs arrive. The pack is a dozen strong, maybe more, and under the grey moonlight they look pallid and sickly. Their fur is tattered, their eyes glowing baleful red; one of them has bleeding stumps in place of its ears, another flickers between ghost and corporeal, a third has too much skin for its bones and the folds make it misshapen and grotesque. Graves raises his wand and lets one hand hover over his flares, but though they circle him, they don’t attack.

Inside the house, a soft whimper. A hissed reprimand. A slap, and a stifled gasp of pain.

The Black Dogs hover just out of reach, their crouched forms as tall as Graves at the shoulder, their pupil-less stares heavy and expectant. They’re all here. All within reach, and he isn’t going to get a better shot. If he were doing his job, he’d burn the pack now and be done with it.

“Miss Glover,” he says into the charmed pin on the collar of his coat. “Remind me again why the dogs are targeting you?”

Her voice crackles back, high and angry. “They’re evil! Dark creatures, foul children-snatchers - they don’t need a reason!”

He hums, considering. They still haven’t attacked. “Some people say they protect children,” he says lightly. “Watch over them in the night, warn them away from danger. Guide them home when they get lost.”

There is a pause. The dogs are so still they barely move. Graves keeps his grip light on his wand and doesn’t breathe.

The spell she fires at his back is not unexpected and he twists easily to dodge it. The child standing behind her, eyes blank as he holds a jagged knife to his own throat, that Graves’ hadn’t predicted. He curses himself and stops his own spell before he fires it.

“I’ll kill him,” Glover says. “You think - you even think of firing, and I’ll tell him to do it.”

“The Imperius curse is illegal,” Graves grits out. “Under section 7 part C - “

She spits a hex at him and he dodges again, not daring to risk using his wand to deflect. “Go fuck yourself,” she snarls. “The law doesn’t protect no-majs, does it? I’ve done nothing wrong.” Graves’ mind races because that, that really doesn’t sound right, but he doesn’t know for sure, in this universe he hasn’t studied the laws enough to know, and if she’s right - if she’s right then legally, there’s not a damn thing he can do to her. MACUSA protects magicals. If the children aren’t magical he can’t act to protect them. That sounds bullshit, but the law says is a solid block he’s coming up against, and he doesn’t know what to do about it.

She gestures impatiently at the silent, watchful dogs. “Well?” she prompts. “Don’t you have a job to do?”

Graves hesitates, but eventually lifts his wand slowly, hands outstretched to show her what he’s doing. “I need my spells,” he says cautiously, carefully not looking at the child-hostage in the doorway. Glover waves a negligent hand at him and he grits his teeth, thinks fuck it and resettles his wand in his grip, raises his magic in preparation for the spell -

and brings his shields crashing down.

The Black Dogs move as one. Graves dives for the kid, grabbing the blade and ripping it away. Behind him, Glover shrieks, firing one, two, three spells at the pack, but outside the protection of her house and wards she’s no match for them. She doesn’t fire a fourth spell.

When it’s done, the dogs paw at the doorstep, whining and plaintive until Graves goes in. He finds the other two children in the upstairs bathroom, huddled behind the shower curtain and armed with a half-empty bottle of shampoo. They cry when they see him, and cling to him, the girl in stoical silence, the boy asking again and again to go home. Graves carries them both downstairs to where the other boy is waiting, shell-shocked, on the front step, and when they won’t let go of him he carries them to their respective homes.

The dogs follow him every step. The no-majs don’t see them, of course, which is probably for the best - at least four of the dogs stayed with the kids, two with the first boy and one each with the children from the bathroom, circling the house like particularly ominous guard dogs. Graves doesn’t know what Glover wanted with the kids, what she used them for - he probably should have obliviated them just in case, but it’s unwise to obliviate wizards soon after traumatic experiences and he sees no reason why it would be different for no-majs.

When he gets back to the house he’s down to three dogs following him, and the witch - her corpse? - is gone. He pointedly doesn’t acknowledge his shadows, just checks the perimeter, shuts the front door, and apparates out.

He has the following morning off (he always does after working nights) and he uses it to pull the auror-issue law books from underneath the wonky table they’re propping up. By midday, he’s discovered that Glover was right; the law sees nothing wrong with kidnapping no-maj children and keeping them trapped in your upstairs bathroom. By two in the afternoon, he’s tracked down the precedence and the sub-clauses that make it legal to use the imperious curse on no-majs, so long as the statute of secrecy is upheld. By four, he’s several hours late for work, and is eighty percent certain that he could be prosecuted for murder and the use of dark creatures as a lethal weapon. DaRC will have to send out a second team, a full hit team to cleanse the area of the Black Dogs, Graves’ career is in ruins - if not his life, if Glover has enough family to push for his prosecution, and this whole being an auror to protect people schtick is sounding far more naive than it did this time yesterday.

By six, he’s packed what he wants from his cramped auror flat; by eight, he’s left his badge on the table and psyched himself up to walk out the door.

There are three dogs waiting for him when he steps out onto the street, each one as tall as he is with glowing, pupil-less eyes. The no-majs walk through them as though they aren’t even there.

“What, am I a kidnapped child now?” Graves jokes, but even to his own ears it falls flat. His entire life is  packed into a worn leather backpack and a standard-issue field belt with three night’s supply of hot coffee in one of the many enlarged pouches. He doesn’t know where he’s going, or what he’s doing, and he’s pretty sure he’s majorly fucked up. More than fucked up. He’s a murderer on the run in league with demonic ghost dogs. Fucked up doesn’t even begin to cover it.

The largest of the three dogs, thin and bony with a whip-like tail, turns to walk down the street. The other two follow, one on either side of Graves, their bodies surprisingly warm as they press him along. Graves only goes because he doesn’t have anywhere else to be. Because, right at that moment, he’s a little bit scared and a little bit disbelieving and a whole lot lost.

And, you know, Black Dogs are good at leading lost souls home.

(the first place they lead him is a construction site with a snallygaster chained behind the piles of steel girders, and Graves isn’t sure how the snallygaster ended up following him after he freed it but it did)

(the second place is a garden beset by knarls, and they move into one of the pouches on the utility belt which Graves really wishes they hadn’t done, but they’re there now and they don’t seem to be moving out)

(the third place is the sea, no creatures, no-one to save, just the empty beach and the open sea and Graves sits curled against the dog he’s called Sadie with the dog he’s called Spot sprawled over his feet while Snally the snallygaster plays with the waves and Knarls Ay Cee and Dee start digging in the sand. He lifts up Knarl Bee from where she’s curled, prickly side out, in his lap and it’s been a month, now, since the dogs led him away from New York.

“I,” he tells her, “am clearly insane.” She waves tiny clawed feet at him and wriggles her quills into all the sensitive parts of his palm. He nods in agreement. “That too, but mostly insane.”

Bee sneezes, and that settles it. If she’s staying, then the pouch is clearly an insufficient home for her - today a cold, who knows what she could catch tomorrow? Graves has spent most nights so far sleeping under his jacket with a shielding charm pulled over him, what kind of home life is this for a growing Knarl? He might not have Newt’s flare for fitting pocket dimensions into a suitcase but what he does have is a great deal of experience expanding his coffee thermos to unreasonable sizes and a handy field belt with a handily unspecified number of pouches on it. They’re meant for ammunition and flares and the odd potions vial, but they’ll do well enough. By the time the sun rises and his dogs fade into ghost-fog for the day he’s made enough space on his belt to carry half the population of Manhattan around with him, Snally has haughtily demanded trees in his pouch, and Bee has progressed to nesting in his hair and sticking quills in his ear whenever he moves his head too vigorously.

Graves might not know enough about magical creatures to know if this normal behaviour but it makes her happy, so why not.

He should probably learn about magical creatures though. Seeing as, you know, he appears to be collecting them.

Maybe.)