AU where the Second Salemers are less of a fringe religious organization, loud but ultimately ineffectual, and more of a fringe /terrorist/ organization, posing a real threat to the magical community.
Mary Lou has reason to believe that the witches are infiltrating their meetings, and thus sends Credence to get close to Percival Graves, who she suspects is one of them, possibly even one of their leaders.
Credence is tasked with finding out how many witches there are, where they tend to congregate, how to intercept their communications, and what any weaknesses might be in their plans.
He is told to do this by any means necessary, with the heavy implication that this means he's supposed to seduce Graves, because while The Cause is still heavily couched in religious ideologies, any good leader knows that morals come second to getting what you want, who cares whether it's gonna fuck Credence up real bad or not. And anyways, Mary Lou knows that all the witches are horrible perverted sodomites and Credence is exactly the kind of boy such a person would want to go after, so he's perfect.
Of course Graves immediately tries to use Credence in exactly the same way Credence is using him, but as is the way of these things they both end up with Emotions about the other one and things get very complicated very fast.
P.S. I'd prefer this AU to not involve Grindelwald, or at least not in a way that he polyjuices himself into Graves at any point, BUT it would be cool for Credence to still have magic/be an obscurus <3
Original!Graves/Credence, Credence is a spy for the Second Salemers
Mary Lou has reason to believe that the witches are infiltrating their meetings, and thus sends Credence to get close to Percival Graves, who she suspects is one of them, possibly even one of their leaders.
Credence is tasked with finding out how many witches there are, where they tend to congregate, how to intercept their communications, and what any weaknesses might be in their plans.
He is told to do this by any means necessary, with the heavy implication that this means he's supposed to seduce Graves, because while The Cause is still heavily couched in religious ideologies, any good leader knows that morals come second to getting what you want, who cares whether it's gonna fuck Credence up real bad or not. And anyways, Mary Lou knows that all the witches are horrible perverted sodomites and Credence is exactly the kind of boy such a person would want to go after, so he's perfect.
Of course Graves immediately tries to use Credence in exactly the same way Credence is using him, but as is the way of these things they both end up with Emotions about the other one and things get very complicated very fast.
P.S. I'd prefer this AU to not involve Grindelwald, or at least not in a way that he polyjuices himself into Graves at any point, BUT it would be cool for Credence to still have magic/be an obscurus <3