Percival returned to the balcony. He didn't look down at his scattered descendants lying in the snow. He looked up instead, watching the shape of Usagi drifting in and out of the clouds, half-visible and enormous.
Something moved in Percival's eyes. A quiet, hungry flicker.
If he had a companion that powerful at his side... the odds of his revenge succeeding would rise considerably.
Tom hadn't been wrong about him. After Grindelwald's escape, revenge had been the single thread Percival had kept himself alive by following. Even a mutual destruction would be acceptable. The reason he hadn't shown himself when Grindelwald rampaged through North America was precisely because he knew he wasn't ready. He needed to wait. Wait for the day he was certain, and then strike like thunder from a clear sky.
What Percival didn't know was that Grindelwald had watched every one of his reactions from start to finish, and not a single one of them had registered as a concern.
He had the example of Andros as a reference point now. Grindelwald understood all too well how profoundly a broken spirit could shackle even a talented wizard. A man whose nerve had been knocked out of him, dressing it up as "gathering strength and waiting for the right moment", that was fear, nothing more. The same conservative instinct that had cost Grindelwald the initiative against Dumbledore. Until Percival made peace with what he actually was inside, he would never win.
...
In the library, Tom was moving books past his eyes in quick succession with a flick of his magic, projecting each one into the learning space as they passed.
When a volume titled "The Graves Family Chronicle" came through his hands, he stopped. He took it properly and read through it at speed.
When he finished, he set it down with the look of a man who had expected treasure and found a very ordinary rock.
He had convinced himself there must be some obscure reason why the Graves family had chosen such a remote location for their ancestral seat. A secret, a source of power, something worth protecting.
It was a gold mine.
Grindelwald had been watching Tom's expression the entire time. He couldn't help but laugh.
"Tom, think about who actually made it to North America back then. They were failures, most of them, people who had lost somewhere else and were starting over with nothing. For the Graves family at the time, money mattered more than anything. A gold mine was the foundation of everything they built here. Of course they put the manor on top of it."
"Not a shred of ambition." Tom dropped the thick chronicle aside, then asked, "What's happening on your end?"
"It's not that straightforward," Grindelwald replied with a short sound. "You know why Albania's forests are so beloved by dark wizards on the run? That forest carries a strange atmosphere, hostile to survival, disrupts the performance of magic, erases magical traces. Even I would need considerable time to track anything down in there."
"I may be able to help with that."
A gentle feminine voice entered the exchange. Ravenclaw had appeared at some point without either of them noticing.
"I developed a tracking charm once. It was how Rowena found Helena."
Grindelwald's eyes lit up immediately. A spell invented by a legendary witch herself.
Tom fixed him with a flat stare. "Look at Rowena. Now look at yourself. Can't even manage something this basic."
Grindelwald's expression collapsed into something pained. If Voldemort were easy to find, Dumbledore wouldn't have been sitting on his hands all this time. Even if capture was impossible, he at least could have made the man suffer.
...
Tom finished scanning every book in the library, found a vacant room, systematically dismantled every connection in the manor's Floo Network, and headed outside.
The Graves members had been waking up in the snow one by one, but he paid them no attention. Every wand had been broken. They weren't toothless tigers, they were toothless house cats. Not a single one of them moved as Tom walked straight through the middle of them, though the hatred in their eyes was sharp enough to cut.
He reached the outer iron fence, selected one section, and bent it into an arch just large enough to crawl through. He planted a new sign beside it.
On the sign, he wrote: "Dog Flap."
Then he crossed out the word "dog" on the large original sign at the entrance.
He turned to face the assembled Graves members scattered across the snow and addressed them pleasantly.
"I thought about it, and honestly, dogs are humanity's best friends. It didn't feel right to compare them to you. My sincere apologies to dogs everywhere."
"That said, you're all still welcome to use this entrance. I'm not a monster."
His smile was radiant. On every face watching him, it registered as something considerably worse than monstrous. If any of them actually crawled through that hole, they would be agreeing, openly, visibly, for anyone to witness, that they were exactly what the sign called them.
How were the Graves supposed to show their faces anywhere in North America after that?
"I'll be off, then. No need to see me out."
He said it the way you'd say goodbye to old friends after a lovely visit, gave a cheerful wave, and walked back into the wind and snow until the storm swallowed him.
...
Several hours after he left, the Graves family members who had been away began returning to the manor. They attempted to use the Floo Network and found it dead. They were forced to travel to the nearest public fireplace and Apparate the rest of the way on foot.
Usagi's dragonfire came down from the clouds the moment they materialized near the grounds, forcing them out of their Apparition mid-transport and slamming them into the earth just outside the gates. A ground-shaking roar followed, then a series of explosions in rapid succession.
Percival looked down at the two family members slumped unconscious at the manor's front gate and exhaled slowly.
"Contact MACUSA for assistance."
He hadn't expected Tom to press this far. Leaving his dragon behind to guard the entrance, that was a deliberate, calculated humiliation. He genuinely intended to grind the Graves family's face into the dirt.
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