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 (23b/24)

[turtletotem.livejournal.com]

"Always intended," Erik repeated. "Shaw, I find it hard to believe you ever intended me as anything but a tool. A Lehnsherr wand with convenient sacrificial lamb attached. How long did it take you to figure out the redirect? You didn't even start to try, did you, until your idiot lamb lost his wand in the lake, and it looked like you'd have to start from scratch?"

Shaw looked taken aback for a moment, then amused. "Very well, I confess – at the time that I first brought you to Hogwarts, I thought it inevitable that Lotus Letalis in its full form would kill its caster. Fortunately for you, since I would otherwise have simply killed you and taken your wand then, with no one the wiser."

"Instead you decided to raise me loyal enough to you and your ideals that I'd sacrifice myself for them."

"I'm very pleased that that turned out to be unnecessary. You're far too powerful a wizard to be wasted like that, not when such a perfect example of Muggle-born worthlessness will do just as well."

"So set on my wand, all this time – there are other Lehnsherr wands in the world, you know." Something was shifting into place in Erik's mind, some memory shuffling to the forefront…

"Well, I wanted a blackthorn, you see, if I could manage it. They're particularly good at this sort of thing. My own would have been blackthorn, if I'd had my choice."

"But you didn't." Erik barely heard his own voice, breathless and distant, as it all came clear in his mind. Was this what Divination felt like? "You're not loyal enough to attract a blackthorn pre-made, and when… when my parents agreed to make one for you..." A half-finished blackthorn wand thrown on the fire, his father's voice We're under no obligation to make a wand for someone, if we have reason to fear what he'll do with it. The angry customer escorted to the door, looking back over his shoulder – how had he ever forgotten that face, even distorted with rage and so many years younger, Sebastian Shaw's face, eyes locking on the blackthorn wand in the hand of the wandmakers' son, standing wide-eyed on the stairs. "You hired the Muggles," he said. "To come back and steal – not my wand, surely, a stolen wand wouldn't have worked. Your own half-finished wand? But it was already destroyed. And then my parents – came back early—"

Shaw nodded gravely. "Now that you know the truth, I can finally apologize. I never meant for your parents to be harmed, Erik. That was all Muggle panic and stupidity."

It was astonishing, Erik thought, how deeply insincere Shaw could sound even when speaking the absolute truth. Erik had no trouble believing that his parents' deaths had been no particular intention of Shaw's.

Too bad for Shaw that he didn't care.

"It was, oh, days and days, maybe weeks, before I remembered that the Lehnsherrs' son had had a blackthorn," Shaw had continued. "By then, you'd been shuffled off into a labyrinth of Muggle paperwork and incompetence. Your papers were crossed with another boy's, Max Eisenhardt – both from Dusseldorf and you looked very similar – it took me two years to track you down. Fortunately for you, as I said before, since it gave me time to realize that better than controlling the wand would be to control its wielder. And then you lost the wand, idiot child, and it was only a year or so ago that the thing finally washed up again. Irritating, that McGonagall survived that carefully engineered heart attack to name a successor, but I managed to get the position anyway. And now here we are." Keeping the gun trained on Charles, Shaw pulled a wand from his robes. Fourteen inches of battered but sturdy blackthorn wood. Erik wanted it like he imagined Muggle junkies wanted their drugs, wanted to hold it in his hands and drive the point right through Shaw's heart.

"Time to make your choice, Erik."