Chapter Text
The first time Molly Weasley saw her third baby, she knew he was a Percival. She didn’t question it further because sometimes magic just happened, mysteriously and unexpectedly.
The first time Arthur tried to introduce Bill and Charlie to their new brother, he became Percy.
And the first time Percy remembered being Percival, was the day after his ninth birthday party. He woke up with the thought that he had overslept, that he was very late and that he needed to go to the office immediately. His aurors needed guidance and often a bit of motivation to go to work (except for Goldstein).
At that point, Percy stopped. ‘My aurors? My office?’ he thought. He was nine years old and didn’t go to work. But he remembered. He remembered something; a great hall full of witches and wizards, a beautiful woman with an ornate, gold headdress, his aurors and his office. ‘What a strange dream. It felt so real.’
The strange dreams continued. More often than not, Percy’s nights were filled with a different life, the life of Percival Graves, leader of the American auror forces. During the dreams, Percy was another man. During the day, Percy was a child, was himself.
However, soon he noticed that these dreams were influencing his thoughts, his actions. He found most games childish and boring and kept more to himself. He preferred reading and the quiet. He knew it was strange but he didn’t want to go to his parents with this issue, Fred and George made fun enough of him as it was for being boring and rule-abiding. It always hurt to be excluded and ridiculed by them, even if he didn’t want to play with them all the time and refused to take part in any of their pranks… He just wanted them to be save! Their antics could get dangerous very easily!
Thus, Percy continued to keep his dreams a secret. They were interesting, exciting and his own. That was another reason he didn’t tell anyone about them. He didn’t have to share them – they were no one else’s but his.
Early in his first year in Hogwarts, Percy learned that his dreams were more than just fantasies. He could explain knowing the spells his parents used by just that – he obviously had seen them before and either asked how they worked or looked it up.
Still, most of the spells he learned in class also seemed familiar, even the ones he was certain his mom and dad hadn’t used in front of him. However, he had seen and used them in his dreams. He also knew answers to most of the questions his teachers asked, without consulting his textbooks, previously Charlie’s, and could often think of tangents that his teachers didn’t even mention.
So, in one evening, when all his housemates were hopefully asleep, he snuck out of his dorm to the Gryffindor common room. Before he entered, he looked if anybody else was there, but thankfully nobody was. Percy entered quietly, closed the door behind him and took a deep breath.
He was nervous. If he could indeed do magic he learned from dreaming about being Percival Graves, then they were magical and weird. Because no wizard or witch he knew of had learned spells from sleeping. Why would anyone go to Hogwarts if that were true? Anyways, he didn’t want to be not-normal. Less normal than his normal anyways. And that was bad enough.
His classmates were friendly and seemed to be nice kids, but Percy felt disconnected to them, felt so much older, so far away from their problems and ideas. Sometimes he played a round of gobstones with a girl from his class and he was cordial with most of the Ravenclaws he met in the library. His dorm mates seemed nice enough even if they were obsessed with Quidditch. Percy was friendly with most of the people he met, but couldn’t claim to be friends with any of them.
Percival, he had noticed, had a similar problem. Only he did it on purpose; to be professional he treated even the people who were his friends as professionals, as colleagues, as subordinates or superiors. For Percival that seemed to work fine, he loved and lived his job. But Percy wanted some friends because school couldn’t keep him as focused as crime fighting and he wanted real connections to people. He didn't want to be lonely.
For that reason, he sometimes wanted to be more like all the other kids. He sometimes wished that he didn’t have these dreams and that if he had to have them, at least he wished them to be normal dreams of a boy, a brother of many siblings, who wanted to be a cool, strong auror everybody respected and not anything else that set him apart.
Right then he really wished the dreams were normal, even if the dreams about hours upon hours of paperwork didn’t fit into that concept. Even if that reflective, so grown-up thought didn’t lend itself to that idea, he had some hope that he just had a wild imagination and was unusually far developed for his age.
Again, he took a deep breath, readied himself and cast Wingardium Leviosa and Engorgio on one of the parchment sheets lying on one of the tables, letting it fly and making it bigger, followed by Reducio, shrinking the page again, Diffindo, cutting it, Reparo, repairing it, Flipendo, flipping it away, Stupefy, stopping it in the air, Duro, turning it into stone, Fumos, filling the room with fumes, hiding the sheet, a Finite Incantatem, vanishing the fumes and letting the re-transfigurated page fall back on the table. The spells all worked. He continued on and tried some more magics he had only seen in his dreams.
An hour came and went before Percy stopped casting spells he never knew were real. Then he broke down a little. His dreams were true, even if those spells were a lot more difficult than the auror made them seem. He felt tired, empty and had never been so exhausted before as he was then.
The next day was hard, his sleep had been troubled after this revelation. Even his dreams were harsher than usually. Percival was in a dark space, alone and helpless. Many acquaintances of Percy asked if he was alright. He didn’t know how to answer them or even how to feel about all of this. So he just said that he hadn’t slept well, which was true, and thanked them for their concern. How could he feel about his dreams? If they were that. How did he see probably very real events in his dreams?
Or was he just mad?
After silently freaking out throughout the day, Percy went to the library and began a wide search for books related to magical dreams. At first, he thought he was a seer, that he had a rare but real ability to see the future. However, the books on that matter agreed that the future was always uncertain, always shown in riddles and possibilities, mostly observed with the utilisation of some object, such as crystal balls or tea leaves, and with a particular question in mind. Dreams were unusual conduits to the future, even visions were more common.
Moreover, closely following the life of only one person in first person perspective was unheard of. Percy doubted that he would ever experience anything else than such snippets from Percival Grave’s life. He concluded that he most probably wasn’t a seer.
His next avenue of research was into the man himself. With the help of a very useful spell to indicate books containing specified words, Percy surprised himself a little as he found a book in which the name Percival Graves was mentioned. ‘The Grindlewald War’ was its name, a historical text about one of the most notorious dark wizards of recent history according to the summary.
Percy shuddered. That name made his skin crawl. Grindlewald. In a flash, he saw a pale man with wild hair, then Percival with a cruel sneer on his face. It frightened him, even if he knew he was safe in Hogwarts, one of the most secure places in Wizarding Britain.
‘I need to get over myself,’ Percy thought. ‘I want, no, I need answers. Answers why this name makes me so afraid, why I have these dreams.’ He took the book, sat down in a chair in a remote corner, and opened the book at the indicated place. The soft light from the searching spell made the book look warm, a wild contradiction to Percy’s thumping heart and shaking hands.
After his flight to America, Gellert Grindlewald took the shape of Percival Graves, at the time the Director of Magical Security and Head of the American Department of Magical Law Enforcement, as well as a friend of Seraphina Picquery, the then-President of the Magical Congress of the United States of America.
Through this deception, Grindelwald gained access to classified information on ongoing investigations into public and unexplained magical occurrences happening throughout New York. In the course of this investigation, he found a boy named Credence, an obscurial whom Grindelwald sought to weaponize. […]
While Grindelwald was temporarily caught and the Obscurus destroyed, Percival Graves was never found. A new director of magical security was eventually sworn into office in 1927.
Percy’s head swam. So he dreamt about a long dead man whose life earned a short paragraph in the book on another man’s ambitions. ‘That’s it. Part of it at least,’ he noted dispassionately and still confused. He thought it would give him more if he learned something so significant about his dreams. Now he knew Percival was real, a real, historical figure.
It was quite weird to read these dry sentences when he vividly remembered Grave’s life, which from Percy’s perspective amounted to one adventure after another, divided only by short periods of paperwork and sometimes passionate, sometimes drier and mostly exhausting meetings.
‘Now,’ Percy thought to himself, ‘the only question remains is why I dream about you, Percival Graves.’