Author's Note: Take note of the M rating and the Horror/Tragedy genres. A more detailed warning would be a summary.
Written as an exploration of psychopathy in the service of expediency.
Wizards were an incurious lot.
They never asked where the magic that powered their wands came from, nor how they lasted so long and so well. Nor did they ask how mere foci could transform them from beings who struggled to perform a single act of magic in a fit of violent emotion to ones who could cast all day without blinking.
That was partially by design, and partially just their nature.
It really was remarkable how none of them asked, when wands were so expensive and so valuable, why no competitors had appeared to drive the old shops out of business. After all, the wandmakers so generously listed their ingredients, and what runework and engineering there was could be reverse-engineered with little difficulty. Yet somehow it never seemed to work.
A particularly smart reverse-engineer might ask if an ingredient had been left off the list.
Garrick Ollivander hummed to himself as he worked on the wand supply for the coming school year. Fortunately, none of them had a chance of guessing correctly; to borrow a Muggle quote he had found amusing, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". And the Wizarding world as anyone knew it depended on not guessing the special ingredient.
Perhaps with the exception of the Dark Lord... but the Dark Lord was gone, and his enormity and greatness with him.
He reached over and patted an ingredient on the head. He had to admit to a certain fondness for them; for all that other wandmakers, like Gregorovitch, might view them as interchangeable, he valued each and every one for the unique component it was.
The pity of his profession was that no one would ever understand the true labor of his work. Collecting unicorn hairs and dragon heartstrings was nothing compared to the dedicated hunting his true job required.
Yawning, he stretched and gazed out over the rows of unconscious Muggleborns, each laid out in their own bed. Their chests rose and fell in unison... but not for very much longer.
No, he was no mere wandmonger, as others were: he was an artisan. He knew each and every one of their names, and held a special place in his heart for the memory of their capture. Timothy Williams, taken outside his home as he played in the dusk. Daisy White, lured away from Mummy at the mall. Joseph and Joshua Lewis, twins - oh, how he loved twins - out on a lark in the woods. Lucy Hall, hiding outside her home because Daddy was drunk again. Caleb Green, left in an unlocked car. Nancy Baker, playing truant from school.
How the list went on and on. The Unspeakables were most helpful in providing the lists of pre-Hogwarts Muggleborns; it would be terribly tedious if he had to hunt them based on his own surveillance alone. But their ancient alliance with wand-makers, which was the spiritual continuation of certain bargains wrought in the decadent days of Rome, served him very well indeed. With their aid, he could hunt several dozen a year and still have enough free time left to run his business.
But now was not the time for sentiment, not with the school year approaching. Keeping the next inactive wand at the ready, he began to delicately cut up his next ingredient.
Oh, this was a feisty one; it came partially awake, even through the potion that should have kept it sedated. Ollivander smiled despite himself: he would sell little Timothy for a high price indeed. He bound as he cut and cut as he bound, so that its magic couldn't interfere with his operation, and set up the proper shunts in the spinal cord. Improper drainage could lead to wasted magic, and that was most undesirable.
The ingredient's mouth opened in a silent scream as Ollivander flicked his own wand (Jack Marshall, a present from his father on his seventh birthday) through the requisite patterns and began the separation. How he wished Dementors were not such greedy automatons; if only they would disgorge their meals, he could skip the messy, expensive, and complicated portion of this procedure. Alas, wandmakers were left doing things the ancient way.
A white, wispy substance began to flow up from the spinal cord - it was always easiest to extract directly from the nervous system, and the brain was too fragile and volatile - and up through the channels to the inactive wand. Ollivander, long since an expert, watched the diagnostics carefully as the flesh convulsed. Sometimes one broke free in one last fit of resistance; even if it was by then too weak to put up much of a fight, that invariably ruined the wand. When he was younger and more reckless, there might be more danger than that... but he had long since passed the age when he was daring enough to experiment with Obscurials. Ah, what wild and wonderful days those had been...
With face and body twisted in indescribable agony, it at last gave one last shudder and was still. Ollivander lowered the almost-finished wand into the chest cavity, sealing the soul in with its own heart-blood, and performed the final few bindings to ensure optimal durability and performance. The personal touches were what had made him the wandmaker he was today.
As he withdrew the dripping rod, he smiled at the small, broken form and pulled its bloody blanket over its head. In life, Timothy would have been just another second-class wizard, frustrated with his lot and stirring up trouble. In his second life, he might rise far beyond the station his blood would decree for him; why, he might even be at the right hand of the Minister. It would truly be meritocratic - all up to him and the wielder he chose.
Ollivander set the new wand aside to dry for a while before he made further modifications, then moved on to the next ingredient. His mind drifted to the inventory of fine wands he already had, and whether any who had long lay dormant might find a wielder this year. Some, of course, seemed destined to disappoint: he'd been so proud when he'd successfully contained the twin Obscurials, his theories about the superior capacity of phoenix feathers bearing fruit with their confinement, and yet only one had actually sold - and achieved great things, yes, great indeed - while the other spent decade after disappointing decade unmatched, as useless as any mundane stick...
Well, one never knew, he reminded himself as he started preparing Daisy. Even the most refractory wands might find an owner yet.
Author's Note: 140,000 children go missing in the UK every year.