fridgetothefire | 009 ☣ Private Messages + Zero spam

009 ☣ Private Messages + Zero spam

[Private text to Lua, Ben, and Alex, with a voice version sent of the same message sent to Cass]

I have a decent stockpile of non-perishable food, bottled water, and an extensive first aid kit in my cabin, 5-13. It's in the cupboards under the window seat. You've all got access. Take it if you need it.

[Private text to Pietro]

Are you busy?

[Private voice to Erik]

If you're not dying, talk to me.

[Despite the demand, her voice is strained, shaky, raspy. She's not going to cry, but she's already been screaming tonight.]

[Zero Spam - arrival - OTA]

She sprawls onto the floor of her cell with a thud, off-balance from the sudden shift in velocity, her hair in a wild mess as though she were caught in a windstorm, her face shocked, her breath coming in shallow gasps. After a few moments of stunned stillness, she drags herself to a corner and curls into as small a space as she can. Keeping her eyes open, She focuses on a point on the far wall, counting her breaths as they slow, trying to figure out what on earth to do next.

[Zero spam - later - OTA]

She's pacing, with long, mathematically precise strides, a look of furious concentration on her face. She's standing rigidly upright, taking up more space than usual, exhausting the confines of her cell. Pained flinches twitch across her face but she doesn't let it break her stride. Sweat trickles down her face but she only brushes it out of her eyes, refusing to even strip off her overshirt. She can see the fire, feel it, hear the jeering. But her body isn't damaged, isn't small enough, doesn't fit into the horrors of memory. She moves and it responds. Step-step-turn, step-step-turn, step-step-turn.

[Zero spam - some other time - OTA]

She's shivering hard, but it's better than the heat. She's learned that practicing her drills to keep warm - anything strenuous enough to get her short of breath - will lead to visions of Castiel choking her again, struggling uselessly while her vision blurred black, caught in a limbo of dying and not quite getting there.

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I'm waiting, okay? I'll see how it plays out. I just don't. I don't like being trapped.

[And it's the last bit where her resigned detachment crumbles, where she sounds like what she is, young and scared.]

I know. I'm sorry. [He's thought, more than once, that maybe he shouldn't be down here, that maybe this all hits too close to home, but he'd ignored it, because just because he'd been kidnapped and tortured for four days, held prisoner with no hope of escape didn't mean he couldn't help people, didn't mean he couldn't try to do something to help the people stuck down here.

Right now, though, he feels like this was all a mistake, because he doesn't know how to help her, and he hates himself and maybe - a tiny, selfish part of him - hates Anya for it too, but mostly he hates her father and the fake Admiral, and he doesn't know what to do to make any of this better, and he wishes he did.] Let me get you some water.

[She swallows, then nods. She and Charles always seem to clash terribly, even when she doesn't want to, though today she can't really blame him for it. There is no good answer, not unless the warden items start working again.]

That would be. Yes, please.

[It really is like an uncomfortable step parent and child relationship, where neither really knows how to act around the other, and Charles finds it frustrating on a good day. Today is definitely not a good day.

He gets up and goes to retrieve a bottle of water and a blanket, just in case, passing both through the bars and sitting back down in front of the bars.]

Pietro called me.

[The temperature has hit a downswing, and she wraps the blanket around herself gratefully, gulping down a mouthful of water and then groaning as she puts together the pieces, realized how it must have ended with him. She'd seen her father, seen him so clearly.]

Oh, god. Can you - tell him I'm sorry?

Of course. [And he's sure she'll have plenty of opportunity to do it herself, when this is over. However long that takes.] He wasn't upset with you though, he was just worried.

[And it's good, that she has someone like that, although he wonders how much Pietro knows, and if he'd be acting the same way if he had the full story. He's certainly not going to be the one to tell him though.]

Right. Okay.

[She worries the edge of the blanket, pretends that it's the reassuring weight of her cape.]

I thought he was - well. He probably told you.

[He nods, not really surprised. Of course she'd see him, if the cell was making her hallucinate. He just hoped Pietro would be alright with that knowledge, considering he had a less than positive relationship with his father.]

Would it help to talk about something else?

Probably.

[She takes another sip.]

I'm not - I'm okay. Erik talked me down some before you arrived.

Good. [That was surprising to hear, in some ways, but certainly not in a bad way (he hoped).]

What would you like to talk about?

[She makes a face for a moment, because she's certain he'll say no, but it's what she wants to talk about, and she's starting to shiver, and she's been fresh out of subtlety since she almost got dragged into the void after Junko, and ended up here instead. She pulls the blanket tighter.]

Will someone please tell me what happened to him? He's different but I don't know why, I don't know how the pieces fit together and it's like, it feels like quicksand. I don't know how to trust it. Alex won't tell me because it's too personal, I am ninety-eight percent certain that I could have gotten him to tell me today because he would have, if I said it made things better but, but it obviously hurt him to say anything about his past at all and I couldn't go through with asking it so can you just - I want to understand him, okay, just a little, just, enough to rely on and know how to avoid the landmines, could you tell me that much?

[It's an outburst born of frustration, but she isn't angry at anyone, not about this. Just struggling and lost.]

[Charles hesitates, licking his lips, because this is all so personal, and he's not sure if Erik would want him to say anything, but it's also entirely possible that Erik would want to tell her and just not be able to. It wasn't something he talked about with anyone. Charles only knew because he'd seen it largely by accident, and it wasn't like they discussed it much after the fact.

So he lets out a breath and just starts talking, almost mechanically.]

His mutation manifested when he was first separated from his parents at Auschwitz. He bent the metal gates as the guards pulled him away from them. A man - Erik knew him as Klaus Schmidt at Auschwitz, but he went by Sebastian Shaw later - who had seen the incident happen brought him into his office and tried to have him replicate what he'd done to the gates by telling him to move a small coin. He couldn't, and so Shaw brought in his mother and told Erik that if he couldn't move the coin on the count of three, he'd shoot his mother. Erik still couldn't move the coin in time.

[And the borrowed memories were so clear, it almost felt like he could hear Shaw counting - ein, zwei - and the gun shot, the body hitting the floor, as if he'd been there himself.]

Shaw spent the next year torturing him, trying to figure out how far Erik's abilities could be pushed by any means necessary. When he wasn't being hurt by Shaw, he was forced into working as a sonderkommando at the camp. Shaw abandoned him as the Red Army advanced, and Erik was selected with a group of others to dig their own grave and be shot before the Russians could liberate the camp. He was able to stop the bullet, but had to dig himself out of the mass grave it pushed him into after lying under the bodies of the others and pretending to be dead for hours. [And that made him want to be sick as he said it out loud, that people could be that heartless, that so many people had just been wiped off the face of the earth like they didn't matter, and again, the memories made it seem like he'd been there, biting his tongue bloody to keep from screaming or crying even though there are bodies on top of you.

He forces himself to talk past the sudden nausea, not really looking at Anya as he continues.]

He spent most of his life after the camp was liberated hunting down and killing the people responsible, and trying to find Shaw to make him pay for what he did to his mother. Last year, he met me, and we stopped Shaw from starting nuclear war.

[She listens, solemn and quiet but not shocked. After Charles finishes she lets the silence spool out a little, letting herself process the horrors in the words, offer them some small due of vigil. And for all the horror - it does stitch together different things she's learned, brings Erik into clearer relief. When she speaks, it's soft, with the sort of incisive, sympathetic insight she so rarely allows herself about her own family.]

Oh. I think - my parents rarely talked about it. But I know Mama was the only one that survived, that he knew. And I don't think he was singled out. He didn't know what he could do until - until I was a child.

[But Charles knows that story already.]

I think part of him hated himself a lot, after he realized, for not knowing sooner, not stopping what happened. Sometimes I wonder if that's part of why he treated us the way he did. If humans weren't worth saving, was it easier to live with, that he hadn't?

Maybe. I've heard far less rational justifications for discriminatory behavior. [It's certainly possible, although he still sort of hopes he never has the chance to ask the man in person all the same.

He could leave it at that, but for some reason, he keeps talking, thoughtful and sad, still not really looking at Anya.]

For Erik - for my Erik - I think it was just too hard to forgive the American and Soviet navies when they fired on us. He told me he knew they would, that I was naive for thinking they wouldn't, and I just think he couldn't handle the idea of watching the people he cared about get hurt again, or be hurt himself now that he had the power to do something about it. He couldn't do that when he was at Auschwitz, but he could in Cuba.

But he didn't hate Moira, and he doesn't hate you, or his parents or Magda. I think he's just afraid of what people's fear and prejudice makes them capable of, and thinks it's better to hit back first before they have a chance to hurt you at all.

...are you seriously telling me he was playing wildcard in an incipient war zone between the two most paranoid powers on the planet and he's mad he got shot at? Of course they did!

[She makes a wordless growl of aggravation, lets go of the blanket enough to scrub her hands over her face. He wouldn't have had the same propaganda drilled into him that she did, not if he spent the fifties traveling the world, never setting down roots.]

[Charles shrugs, running a hand through his hair.] We had just stopped the world from being plunged into nuclear war, and our government wrote us all off as collateral damage because they were afraid of us. It didn't matter that we'd saved them, or that Moira was a human who worked for them, or that Alex and the others were all kids. We were all hurt when they decided to fire on us.

I understand why they did it, but that doesn't stop it from hurting.

[She sighs. She understands more than she wants to: she knows what it is to be scared, and to be cast aside. In the end, there isn't much to say.]

...Alex isn't a kid, any more than I am.

[That actually gets a small smile out of him, even though you know. Things are still pretty terrible.]

You know what I mean.

More or less.

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009 ☣ Private Messages + Zero spam

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