Archive of Our Own ^beta

What exactly the ritual was, he couldn’t say — all he knew is that he was trapped in the sort of Dark magic so intrinsically foul that his lungs ached even from breathing it and he didn’t know if he could stop screaming, now that he’d started, not with something intangible and malevolent flaying his magic from him like—

He'd think of what it was like he wasn't shredding his own vocal cords against the pain of being devoured, like something alive was consuming his magic and ripping at his chest cavity to get at more. He couldn't move, the same something that had him splintering open had him by the limbs, by the hips, a hard intangible grip at the nape of his neck--

Full screams had come down to a thin animal keening by the time the ritual was complete. The Director's sounds weren't terribly different from any of the broken gibbering of the other sacrifices, but he at least had excellent reason for them — the unbonded Obscurus from Sudan had held him tightly enough against his struggling that his leg was broken and his shoulders twisted into positions that weren't geometrically impossible but certainly weren't physiologically correct. A slight miscalculation — he'd assumed that the force of the Obscurus was more psychic than physically-grounded, but that was easily fixed. He willed them healed, waved the Elder wand with the sort of lazy precision to be expected of a fledgling god, and was pleased to watch the visible injuries straighten into more normal lines.

The bruises he left. He liked the look of them, the marks that Percival Graves had agreed to bear when he'd promised himself over in exchange for the attention Gellert might have offered the boy.

He laughed a little, when Percival flinched blindly from touch and then went limp in his grip — he had not lost his fighting spirit, even as his magic was being channeled in new ways for the good of the Order and any man might be forgiven for having retreated fully into unconsciousness to deal with that sort of strain. Not his dear Director, though, still so strong and wild--so perfect, to act as the buffer for the Sudanese Obscurus’s full might, so that it might be properly tethered to the array of mirrored capture spells and ultimately back into him and the Elder wand.

“I knew you’d be perfect for this, my dear, and you were, you are.”

Percival whimpered--pain, not only fear--when he scooped him up, panted like a sick dog at being jostled. Gellert frowned a moment, peering into the threads of magic that power made visible, if not fully tangible.

“Ah, I see the trouble. It is never a hardship to take what’s mine, of course, and your magic just needs the reminder, doesn’t it? Now don’t worry, my dear Director— I’ll manage the heavy-lifting tonight; you’ve done a beautiful job and deserve a nice reward, hmm?”