#classification-newt-scamander

"I was about to ask you the same thing,” Theon murmured against Newt’s ear. He kissed behind it, for a moment simply nosing that wild red hair. Newt hadn’t combed it, it seemed. It was too long, and far too shaggy. He wondered, idly, whether Newt was even planning on seeing people for the next few weeks. He sighed.

He knew he was safe, more safe than he has been in the last few months when he waited with dread and fear wearing him down even more than the spell that forbid him to sleep, but now he was in a hospital and surrounded by his people from MACUSA, doctors and nurses that smiled and gently asked if he deeded anything. And truly he didn’t. He had all that he should need for anyone to be at ease and take the rest that his body needed to heal but also his mind. Some scars are more than skin deep and the impact that was left in Gellert Grindelwald’s wake is not an easy trail to smooth over, when even for a simple no-maj, it takes a whole ocean and the moon to erase their footsteps on the sand.

He was lying in his bed. It was the first day after he’d been found in the basement of his own house and as the afternoon sun lit softly the white room he was given, thankfully a room just for himself, he was waiting for a visit, as he has been announced by the nurse, with a book in his hand, reading to pass the time. 

Percival Graves had spent ten months between Grindelwald’s hands. Ten months during which the dark wizard had taken everything from him - His name, his pride, his face, his wand, his reputation. But, worse of all, his hearing. Percival Graves, Director of Magical Security and head of MACUSA's Department of Magical Law Enforcement, was deaf.

Fortunately, no one had seemed to notice it - No one but Picquery, when she had visited him at the hospital, five days later, and she had noticed that he couldn’t answer to her when she wasn’t facing him. She had asked him to tell her the truth, and so he had. He had explained her that Grindelwald’s hexes and curses had left more than one scar, and that he had been deaf for three weeks now. He only managed to talk with people by reading on their lips.

And so, a month later, he had been sent back home - his old house, where he had been kept prisoner. Where his blood was still on the floor of his bedroom, where every wall reminded him of blond hair and mismatched eyes. It had taken him another couple of months to be able to walk around with a cane without having to stop every five minutes, and another month to go back to work.

He had found a spell to inform him when people talked to him, but it didn’t work that well, and he lived in the constant fear of people noticing that something was wrong with him. Fortunately, it had always been a habit for him to look at people when they talked to him, and to not accept when people didn’t look at him in return, so it made reading on their lips easier, but there were still moments when he didn’t quite catch what they were saying.

He hadn’t gone to meetings neither, as keeping track of a conversation between several people who talked at the same time was near impossible for him. And, most importantly, he hadn’t come back in the field. He was useless, now, unable to defend himself, to hear the curses flying to him, and despite Picquery’s encouragement, he had refused to leave his office.

It was in that state of mind that, five months later, he waited for Mr. Scamander to meet him in his office. He had sent him a letter a month ago to ask him to come back to America, as he wanted to hear - haha, what a joke - his side of the story, and he knew that the man had finally arrived in boat the day prior.

What Percival finds most appealing about Newt :)