round 3 overflow post

[starkmodistries.livejournal.com]

Round 3 Overflow Post

This post is for Round 3 fills only. We ask that when a round hits 8500 comments, fillers begin moving their fills to this post.

Format:
SUBJECT LINE -- Round #, short description of fic (ex: "Alex/Hank, lab partners")
--- Link to the prompt
--- Text of the prompt

--- Link to the fill
OR
--- Entire text of the fill

EXAMPLE:
Prompt: http://xmen-firstkink.livejournal.com/6437.html?thread=1038472#t2038174

Charles/Erik -- Charles is a bakery owner whose most frequent customer is Erik.

Fill: http://xmen-firstkink.livejournal.com/6437.html?thread=0139482#t4502942

Charles started off the morning the same way he always did...

Comments

FILL: The Better Men (22b/30ish)

[turtletotem.livejournal.com]

"And what's that?"

"The wand. Shaw needs four things to make this spell work: Cerebro, a sacrifice, Samhain, and a Lehnsherr wand. Of all those, we can only reasonably attempt to remove one from the equation, and that's the wand."

"You barely got out of there last time."

"Which is why you'll need to do a significantly better job distracting him this time. I don't care if you have to put on a sparkly blue dress and sing him a love song, you keep him out of that tower."

Erik shook his head. "Let me do it this time. I told you already, he's less likely to kill me offhand. And it is my wand – who knows, maybe it'll turn against him if he tries to use it on me."

Charles bit his lip, considered a long moment, then said, "Abracadabra."

Erik blinked. "What?"

"That's the password. It'll open the door."

"What will?"

"Abracadabra."

Erik's forehead furrowed. "What? I can't understand you."

Charles said it again, slowly, enunciating carefully. Erik only shook his head.

"I know you're saying a word, I know I should be able to understand it, but I just... it doesn't make sense, it's garbled."

"I was afraid of that," Charles sighed. "I'll have to ask Professor McGonagall how I'm supposed to pass it to someone – surely I'll need to someday. For now, it looks like I'm the only one allowed to know it."

Erik ran a hand angrily (and distractingly) through his hair. "Fine. I'll keep Shaw busy while you get the wand."

Charles stepped close to Erik, smoothed a caressing hand down his cheek. "I'll be fine, Erik."

Erik pressed his hand over Charles's and closed his eyes. "I'm holding you to that."

---

Erik paced his office, rearranged books and chairs, rearranged them again. There wasn't much to fiddle with – Erik was a sparse decorator by nature, and what little he'd brought was only half unpacked. If Shaw didn't show up soon, Erik was going to start organizing his books by size and color, and then Charles would kill him for wasted all his hard alphabetizing work.

They had hoped Erik might simply keep an eye on Shaw as he went out and about, but instead had found the men cloistered in his tower, with instructions not to be disturbed. They'd been prepared to take drastic action if Erik's urgent message went unanswered, but to their surprise
Shaw agreed to meet Erik in his office.

Theoretically. Soon.

Erik found himself against the window, watching a dozen or so students chasing each other across the grass below. It was so very strange being around children. As clearly as he remembered his own student days, it was still hard to imagine himself ever being that young. He
did not remember himself as small so much as he remembered the world as large...

How many of the children down there were Muggle-born? How many of them would die, lives unlived, if he and Charles failed? How could they ever, for one moment, live with themselves if that happened?

Shaw had worked his ideas of Muggle and Muggle-born inferiority deep into Erik's moldable little mind, he could see it now. And to be fair, he'd had help in the form of independent evidence – Muggles had killed Erik's parents, Muggles had treated an orphan wizard boy like trash. Erik couldn't pretend that he hadn't seen the cruelty, carelessness, and stupidity of Muggles, seen it reflected in their inexplicably magic-touched children.

But he'd seen it in wizards, too, often enough.

Erik knew these children. Some were cruel, and some were stupid, and some were Muggle-born. But he hadn't seen that any of those traits necessarily traveled together. The worst he could say for the Muggle-born students, on the whole, was that they were ignorant. Well, they were here to be educated, were they not?

He wasn't going to let Shaw hurt these children. No matter what it took to stop him.

Or the teachers, for that matter. How many of the teachers were Muggle-born? Alex Summers, for one, and Moira, and—

—and how had it possibly taken his brain this long to acknowledge that if Shaw pulled off his lotus spell, Charles would die?

He leaned hard against the window, trying to breathe through the rising sickness in his throat, through flashing images of Imogen Cox cold and stiff in the mud, of brilliant blue eyes clouded over and still.