Warning: This fic contains potentially disturbing material on the Holocaust.
He wakes to strains of Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana with tears in his eyes and no memory of his dreams. A single word, incomprehensible, lingers in his sleepy mind. Genosha.
For a moment, he can feel the beating of his heart more clearly than the familiar soreness that a night on this hard bed causes in his joints and neck. The Germans have a word for this dull weight in the chest, this stopping of the breath in the back of one's throat: Heimweh, home-longing. But he yearns for something, somewhere, that he cannot name.
This peculiar desire has always been with him. He might have told himself for several years after breaking with Charles that he only missed his life at the mansion. Or, if he held with Jungian theories, he could have attributed the yearning to a wish of the collective Jewish unconscious to see Israel, the Promised Land, but he knows that it began before he was taken from his childhood home to Auschwitz. He's not sure if he's ever lived without it, if he's ever lived in a place that was his, a place that spoke to his blood and his marrow and silenced their quiet demand. No home, no history; the Wandering Jew indeed.
He gets up and stretches carefully, feeling his age in all of his limbs. His head spins a little--he rose too quickly--and the room seems to constrict around him for an instant, but he keeps his back straight and his breathing steady even as the old claustrophobia rushes in. The guards are always watching, and he refuses to show them any sign of weakness.
When the world rights itself, he runs his fingers through his hair and, forgetting, rubs a palm against the back of his neck. Skin salty with sweat meets skin burned by acid. His breath hisses out between his teeth. Stryker visited yesterday morning, and the wound hasn't begun to heal yet.
He sighs. Charles will be visiting him later in the day, and he wishes that he could remember what passed between him and the colonel. Nothing good, of that he's sure. He recalls Stryker's attitude toward mutants from the school's early days, and he'd been keeping an eye on the man several months before Liberty Island.
But even if the serum hadn't robbed him of all but the vaguest memories, what could he possibly tell Charles? He
has no doubt that every conversation that passes in this cell is taped, and the designers didn't even bother to hide the surveillance cameras. Whatever warning he might issue would be lost about three seconds later when the guards stormed in with a straitjacket for Charles and tranquilizers for them both. He smiles with fond pride for a moment, pitying the fool who'd try to subdue Charles Xavier without the aid of a sedative. But, as amusing as the thought is, he knows that they'll be better prepared. That knowledge is frightening, and every time Charles visits, Erik holds his breath and wonders if this will be the one when Stryker springs his trap. Two of the world's most powerful mutants in one cell--how could a fearful government resist?
He tries to warn Charles, as best as he can. "Doesn't it ever wake you in the middle of the night, the feeling that someday they will pass that foolish law, or one just like it, and come for you... and your children?" Sometimes he sneers at the guards when they wheel his friend in, sometimes he makes allusions to other visitors, prior beatings. None of it works. Either he has lost his subtlety (doubtful, he thinks), or Xavier is simply refusing to face the facts.
There is one other way, of course. But after all the effort Erik went through to design a helmet to keep Charles out of his head, Xavier has been scrupulously polite about his mental blocks since Liberty Island. There are ways around that, he knows (after all, one didn't spend years sharing a bed with a telepath without learning such things). He could project his thoughts, or drop his shields, or any number of things to make Charles sit up and take notice.
But he doesn't use any of those tricks. He tells himself it's because Xavier won't believe him anyhow, not after so long, not after what he nearly accomplished on the night of the UN summit. He tells himself that Charles puts greater faith in the inherent good of mankind than in his words. He'd teased Xavier once, long ago, that for someone who could read other people's minds, he was an extremely optimistic man. Those words are still true, even if Erik no longer considers such a statement a jest. But he knows that neither of those reasons are why he holds back. He is afraid to examine his motives any further, lest he find that he doesn't issue a direct warning simply so Charles will continue to have an excuse to visit him. He wonders, briefly, if that is also why Xavier refuses to comprehend his veiled comments.
The floor is cold beneath his toes. He slides his feet into his slippers and pads across the cell to the sink. Lukewarm water spurts out of the tap and he rinses the last remnants of sleep from his face.
The speakers click once and the song changes. His spine goes rigid for a moment, then he recognizes the music. Mahler's Symphony No. 5. He can breathe again; they aren't playing Wagner.
Mengele had owned dozens of records of the German composer's works. He'd played them religiously in his labs, claiming that they "soothed his nerves and inspired him to greatness." It wasn't until many years after Auschwitz that Erik learned of Wagner's anti-Semitic leanings.
He smiles grimly to himself, glancing through the glass bars of his prison at the control room where his guards sit. They think that he's been broken, simply because Stryker and Laurio visit him every five days--the former to interrogate him, the latter to beat him. They think they've won because they can keep the lights on in his cell twenty-four hours a day and keep watch on him while he bathes.
They have no idea what he's been through, what he's survived, what it will take to break him now.
He didn't even suffer the worst of it at Auschwitz. Mengele had taken care to keep him relatively healthy while performing his experiments. The scientist hadn't wanted to run the risk of his test subject dying before collecting all his data and exhausting every avenue in the search for the source of the mutant's powers (short of actual dissection, for which Mengele would have happily let Erik die). The Kapos had taken him to the labs almost immediately, waiting just long enough to shave his head and tattoo his number into his arm.
"I threw up twice that first morning," he'd told Charles once, years ago. Xavier had woken him from a nightmare and held him until the terror retreated. Erik did not often speak of his experiences then, but that night the memories had been particularly close, and he gave voice to them in the darkness, sometimes speaking aloud and sometimes directly to his lover's mind. "The first time was when they brought in a young Jewish girl whose pregnancy was just beginning to show. They laughed about 'scrambling eggs.'"
There had been a long pause while both men tried to pretend that Erik wasn't crying.
And the second time? Charles had asked, gently.
"About a minute after I'd washed the last of the vomit away, one of the guards told me that I'd just scrubbed myself with the remains of some of my fellow Jews. If, in my disgust and terror, I hadn't sent a rack of tongs flying into the wall, I think they would have sent me to the gas chamber then and there. Mengele had no tolerance for untidiness." He'd paused again and shaken his head, even though Charles couldn't see the movement. "I didn't think I'd have the heart to survive." Not when so many others were dead or dying or sentenced to die.
So how did you survive, and why?
Abraham
He could have passed for any age between twenty-five and fifty; Erik never found out exactly how old he was. He had been brought to Mengele's lab with his brother for the scientist's twin studies. When Erik arrived, Abraham's brother had just died from the torture, and he himself was a week away from the furnaces, though neither the boy nor the man knew it at the time. He'd had the features of an El Greco saint--all hollows and shadows, elongated and purified by suffering, with the visionary sort of beauty that comes to some men near death. When he was taken away, Erik had said a Kaddish for him--the first and only one he spoke in Auschwitz.
"He took me aside when rations were handed out that day and forced me to chew and swallow every bite. And he told me..." Again, Erik had lapsed into silence.
Yes?
"He told me: 'Do not be ashamed of surviving. You must live.' And when I asked him why, he said, 'Because to let them reduce you to something less than human would be to let them win. Because there must be someone to tell the world what man has made of man in this place.'"
They'd had no intention of letting him survive, of course. There were to be no witnesses of what man had made of man in Auschwitz, much less what the scientists had done. When the end had come, the "experiments" in the labs were among the first to be "evacuated" in the middle of the night, never to return. Erik had watched the disappearance of the group of Jews who'd manned the furnaces and seen the proverbial writing on the wall. When Mengele began packing up his instruments and burning his charts, Erik had used his powers against the man who'd trained him to control them.
He'd reached into his own blood, manipulating the scant iron he found there until he gave himself anemia. On seeing their prisoner grow progressively weaker, the scientists and guards decided that he would be a cold corpse before the Russians reached the camp. When Auschwitz-Birkenau was emptied in January 1945, he'd been left behind with the invalids too near death to be herded off deeper into Germany or to the furnaces. When the victorious army had arrived two days later, he was too weak to stand or speak, his body too much in shock from both voluntary and involuntary deprivation. But he was alive; he had survived.
So whatever the guards may think now, he is not broken. He refuses to let them strip away his humanity this time, always standing and sitting with as much dignity as he can muster. They bring him the books he requests, as though he is a toddler who can be distracted from thoughts of escape by a shiny bauble. He lets them believe what they will, and turns his back to the control room for hours on end as he immerses himself in Spinoza and Kant. They give him paper, too, and he uses it to copy down the poems in his memory: Schiller, Shakespeare, Sassoon. (This morning it was Goethe: They hear no more the sequel of my song, / Who heard my early chant with open ear; / Dispersed forever is the favoring throng, / Dumb the response from friend to friend so dear.) It doesn't matter that they take the pages away at the end of every day – probably to burn them, fearful that the neat lines of iambic pentameter contain coded instructions to his associates. He lets them do this and does not try to squirrel away any of his work. It is enough to guide the blunt pencil over the crisp sheets. It is enough to discover, morning after morning, that they have not yet triumphed over his mind.
But some things the body does not forget. When they march him out of his cell and down the corridor to the showers, he has to fight to not betray how his hands tremble until hot water instead of yellow gas spurts out of the faucets. When they collect his dinner trays, he can never help wondering if he's just eaten his last meal. And when they play Wagner, not even plans for escape or thoughts of revenge can chase from his mind the memories of bright scalpels, the cloying scent of chloroform.
A small commotion in the control room catches his attention, and he turns his head to observe. Charles has arrived, a figure in a dark suit sitting calmly as the guards scan him for weapons. Scott stands behind him, all business in his visor and suit, trying to look everywhere except in Erik's direction.
It amuses the older man, a little, how the youngsters try to distance themselves from him. They are somewhat more successful at it than Charles, but when Cyclops blasted him at the torch, he wasn't aiming to kill. And Jean could have done any number of things to him with her telekinesis, but she didn't.
He crosses his arms across his chest and straightens his back as Laurio wheels Charles down the walkway. The doors to his cell swish open and several seconds pass, then Charles lifts his head and looks his one-time lover, now his adversary, in the eye.
Erik's pulse no longer quickens at the mere sight of the other man. Too much time has passed, both before he left the mansion, and after, for that sort of excitement. But there is something else, deeper, stronger. The thought crosses his mind that this too is a form of home-longing.
"Hello, Erik."
He nods. "Charles."
"I brought you something," Xavier says, proffering a package wrapped in brown paper. Erik reaches out and takes it, careful not to let his fingers brush Charles's. He sits down at his desk to open the gift, first running a hand over its flat surfaces and thinking, amused, about the proverbial girlfriends who bake files into cakes.
But no, of course not. It's a book, with no hint of metal about it. Ever the rules follower, Charles. Besides, if Xavier truly wanted to break him out, he wouldn't have to resort to such subterfuge.
He'd unwrapped the book with its front cover facing downward, but he knows what it is even before turning it over. Some things the body does not forget, and he recognizes the alternating white and cornflower blue stripes, remembers the weight in his hands.
This is the first English book that he ever loved. He first read it in London after the war, when he'd lived there for a brief time with a soldier's family. The writing had been perfect for a new student of English: not too difficult to understand, difficult enough to be rewarding. The world of knights and chivalry was so different from the horrors he had experienced, and the legends were steeped in such grandeur and mystery as to seem utterly removed from his own life. He'd gone on to read Tennyson and Malory's accounts of the story; he'd sought out Geoffrey of Monmouth's texts and even tackled Nennius once, but T.H. White's version would always remain his favorite.
He turns the book over, eyes taking in the familiar bold letters proudly emblazoned on the cover. The Once and Future King. He opens the cover and his own script confronts him:
For Charles,
Merry Christmas.
Love, Erik
Everything comes full circle, Erik thinks. He looks across the room at Xavier, who smiles at him.
"Do you like it?" It's a question unlike Charles, and it shows that he's feeling a little anxiety about being here, though Erik can't say if his nervousness stems from their surroundings or his own presence.
I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts. He says, instead, "You don't wish to keep it anymore? Afraid that they will accuse you of fraternizing with the enemy if it's found in your study?"
Charles doesn't rise to the bait. "My former relationship with you isn't a secret, Erik."
He looks down at the book again, thumbs through a few pages. His fingers remember where his favorite passages are--he's always loved the description of all the objects in Merlyn's room, as well as the antics of the Orkney boys. The part where Arthur is transformed into an ant he does not prefer. The images of numbered workers, dumb and soulless, hit a little too close to home. He skims several lines, comes across the Antlanders' chant:
When Other blood spurts from the knife,
Then everything is fine.
He snaps the book's cover shut. "You didn't have to do this, you know. It was a gift."
A gift given twice over, for when he'd packed to leave the mansion, he'd left the book sitting on Charles's bedside table. He remembers that day to its smallest details: he'd made the bed that morning, straightening the blankets and propping both pillows against the headboard. The afternoon sun had slanted through the window and left leaf-shaped patterns on the oak floor. A cup of tea cooled on the bureau while Charles sat by the door and tried to talk him out of his decision.
"Mankind grows more tolerant, Erik, not less."
"Tolerance is not acceptance," he had said. "Its very meaning necessitates a distinction between the Self and the Other, Us and Them. Humans might be tolerant of mutants they way they are of their favorite dog who vomits all over the carpet, or of their eccentric maiden aunt, or of militant environmentalists, or Jehovah's Witnesses, or homosexuals." He'd leveled a look at Xavier. "They might tolerate you, but they will never accept you, Charles. Never."
Now Charles wheels himself across the small distance between them. "I'm not repudiating you," he says, amusement in his voice. "I have my own copy now, and thought you might want yours back. There is so much history attached to it, after all." He reaches out, places a palm over Erik's hand. "Please, just take it."
Some things the body does not forget, and he cannot help the small tremor that passes through him. He turns his face away, looks out into the dark void beyond his prison.
It's a mistake. He remembers the bruises that Laurio left on his face when he hears Charles inhale sharply at the sight.
"Are they mistreating you?"
No, I've taken to banging the side of my head against my desk in my spare moments. It's quite amusing. He remains silent.
Xavier lowers his voice. "Perhaps if you cooperate with them-"
Oh, Charles, you have no idea. He merely raises an eyebrow and says, "Arbeit Macht Frei? I've heard that one before."
Charles sighs. In this one area, history repeats itself between the two of them every time.
"What happened during the war--"
"Don't tell me that the Holocaust was a new thing," he says. "Look at Shakespeare's Shylock, the Spanish Inquisition, Martin Luther. Anti-Semitism has only become politically incorrect in the last fifty years, you know. And don't say such things will never happen again. They will happen. They are happening." When Other blood spurts from the knife...
He brings his fingers to the back of his neck again, this time careful about the wound, touching only its very edges where the skin is less raw. When it heal---if it heals--he will carry the scar forever. He doesn't need to roll up his sleeve to see the numbers on his arm. 214782. He has been marked twice by hate, and he has no intention of letting it happen a third time.
Charles leans forward and Erik catches a whiff of his cologne. Sudden memories of sharing bathroom space, of getting dressed and ready for the day together each morning assail him. Some things the body does not forget.
"You cannot fight the whole world," Xavier says. "You cannot destroy the innocent majority for fear of a vocal minority."
Erik opens the book again, flips to the middle and marks a line with his pencil before passing the book to Charles.
It seems, in tragedy, that innocence is not enough.
"There are no innocents," he says. "The genocide in Darfur is no secret, and yet what has this country done in aid? To stand aside and witness the destruction of an entire people without acting... that is not innocence, Charles."
Xavier tilts his head to one side, then turns the pages back to another passage. He clears his throat and reads, "'Personal reasons are no excuse for war,'" before placing the book back on the desk.
"I am not trying to avenge myself on the world at large," Erik sneers. "This is self-preservation, Charles. Survival of the fittest."
"So there's no accounting for symbiosis?" Charles shakes his head. "Give them another chance," he urges. "Come back to Westchester with me."
Ever the optimist, aren't you. But do you want this for the sake of humanity, or for yourself? Erik doesn't dare ask. "I'm no Sybil at Cumae," he snaps, because anger is a better mask for vulnerability than truth. "For all that I am trapped in this cage, I have no desire to die just yet."
This surprises Charles. "Neither do I, old friend. Do you honestly think you wouldn't be safe with me?"
No, not safe, neither with you nor from you. "You have no idea who you're dealing with."
Xavier smiles and taps his temple. "I have a small inkling. Besides, it's only physical harm that you speak of. I've lived through worse."
"All the more reason to be on your guard." He wonders if the worse that Charles speaks of refers to their separation. He sighs. "You think that this is the place for me, don't you? If I'm not back at the mansion, you'd much rather I be here than free and outside of your supervision."
Before Xavier can reply, the doors of the cell slide open again. Erik turns toward them and sees Laurio enter. Their conversation has made someone in the command chain uneasy, and it is time to take the Professor away before he can learn anything more.
"Say your goodbyes," the guard tells them. He looks over Xavier's head and smiles at Erik. When Other blood...
"Until next time then," Charles says as Laurio takes the handles of his wheelchair and pulls him away.
Erik nods. He watches the guard push Xavier over the threshold of the cell; the doors glide shut and he sighs, allows his body to sag a little.
And then the familiar ringing echo and bright fullness rise in his mind (some things the body does not forget): I have never wished to cage you, Erik. But there was another Sybil, you know. Ask yourself this, isn't what you're advocating just another form of eugenics?
Charles's mind recedes from his, leaving only shadows and half-tones and silence. Erik closes his eyes so that he will not have to watch the far doors of the walkway close behind his friend.
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A/N: This fic was written for the 2005 XMM Ficathon, for mogigraphia, who requested: Erik/Charles; any event, any time, but any acknowledgment of the depth and permanence of the feeling between them would be nice.
"Write what you know and know what you write." In researching the Holocaust, I consulted quite a few texts, both academic and biographical. Especially helpful were Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, Elie Wiesel's Night, Robert Wistrich's Hitler and the Holocaust, and the "Remnants of Israel" chapter from Frank Manuel's Scenes from the End.
Richard Wagner has been called the fons et origo of German anti-Semitism prior to World War II, and his writings greatly influenced both Nietzsche and Hitler. Joseph Mengele was the head scientist of the laboratories at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and a notorious music lover.
Erik's mention of the Sybil at Cumae is in reference to one of Petronius' tales, in which the immortal seer replies 'I want to die' when she is asked what she desires. Charles's "other Sybil" refers to the Delphic oracle's famous axiom "Know Thyself."
Arbeit Macht Frei--Work Makes Free--was the ironic motto of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Endlösung is German for Hitler's euphemistic "Final Solution.
eta: Transcendenza wrote a gorgeous remix for this fic for Remix Redux V: "The Caged Bird's Song (the Hand in Hand Remix)"
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