Unspoken // Theseus Scamander

Chapter Seventeen - Alive

Word Count: 2,977 words. 

Warnings: None.

It was two weeks later when the news hit the wizarding world. Gellert Grindelwald had escaped from captivity. The headlines screamed of his freedom, and I felt like screaming at the headlines.

"Clayton!" one of the Auror's called me from across the room.

"Jones," I returned, placing the paper down and titling back in my chair to look at him. The Auror, less that five years older than me, was a kind man. Carson Jones. He went to Hogwarts as I did and had moved quickly up the ranks of the Ministry upon leaving. He was ever so similar to Theseus a lot of the time. Stubborn, egotistical... charming. 

"We're going out for a drink, you want to come?" he posed, one hand in his pocket. 

Behind him stood five of the other Auror's in the office. They weren't as nice, but I didn't hate them. "I'm good Jones. Going to catch up on some paperwork," I told him.

Carson rolled his eyes. "The reason you moved to this office was so that you didn't have to do all the paperwork Clayton."

I laughed lightly as they turned to leave. "You're telling me," I muttered, turning back to my desk.

It wasn't paperwork, per say, but rather all of the information I could find on Gellert Grindelwald, all the legal papers about his crimes, his movements in the past two decades and a list of his victims. It was missing a couple of names.

I knew that he was bound to get out, and I cared little for how it happened, who he manipulated to do it and how far away he was from where I saw him last. He was a man on the run, a man, like any, determined to keep himself alive, but more than that, he was Gellert Grindelwald and if there was one thing that I surely knew about him, it was that this small blip wouldn't stop him from getting what he wanted.

World domination, an end to the muggle race, wizard supremacy, take you pick because the list was long. As was the one that named all those he had killed.

It was handwritten, as most things were in the Ministry, but what shocked me was that it hadn't been written by the same person. Rather than re-writing the names every time he took a new victim, it seemed as though whoever was in charge of the case simply added the casualties as they occurred.

Some were only a single name long. The longest entry by one hand was twenty-two names. Five with the same surname. A family. Being a witch, it was hard to be certain in the definition of a monster. There were many creatures that could warrant the name, magical animals that had the capability to destroy entire cities if threatened. I had met most of them, and in my knowledge of monsters Gellert Grindelwald outranked them all.

The dreams that haunted me were the worst. Not the memories, not the permanent scars on my heart, but the dreams. The dreams in which the memories became real and the scars were remade. It had been a year since New York and yet I wasn't sure that I had slept through an entire night, not without waking up.

I envied those that dreamt of falling or dying, even more so those who remembered nothing of their dreams. The prospect of dreaming of happy thoughts was something that I was now sure I would never achieve. What was there left to be happy about?

"There is nothing either good nor bad..." he began.

I straightened, eyes turning from the files in front of me. "...but thinking makes it so," I finished.

"You remember your Shakespeare," the Professor commented.

Twisting in my chair, I spotted Albus Dumbledore looking at the desk of one of my colleagues. He pulled open a drawer.