log; mystique & magneto WHO: Mystique + Magneto WHEN: After this conversation, Feb. 26th WHERE: The forge WHAT: Erik falls asleep on his desk and doesn't come home, so Raven goes looking. They end up having a heart to heart about their childhoods. WARNING(S): Discussion of the Holocaust and child abuse. No graphic descriptions.
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Mystique was hardly Magneto's babysitter, but she did notice when he didn't come home.
Out of habit, she changed shape while walking the halls, appearing human and mostly keeping her head down to stay unnoticed. She imitated the Skaikru's clothing more than any of the drifters from the pods to keep anyone from looking twice. Mount Weather seemed safe, but that was no excuse to be careless on purpose if she just wanted to get from Point A to Point B unbothered.
It was late enough that she didn't expect to find anyone but Magneto in the forge, and she wasn't wrong. When she let herself in, she knocked on the doorframe before closing it behind her. "Mag…?"
Erik was bent over his work table, his head resting on his arm and his tablet just barely held in his hand. He was surrounded by his little projects: blocks of metal to use later, a perfect sphere the size of a fist resting on a stand, a massive copper tree that wound up around the desk with branches stretching over his head. It was all neat, meticulously organized, and completely devoid of any tools.
At her voice, he snorted awake, setting down his tablet to rub at his face. "Mystique. Hello."
He did his best to look like he hadn't been dozing off. He looked toward the wall for a clock, but in the absence of one he checked the tablet instead. Oh. He'd been down there a while, now.
"I just. I fell asleep down here, time got away with me. I'll come back."
"You okay?" Making her way over, Raven touched his shoulder and slid her hand over his back, brushing over his shoulderblades. Either of them staying out when they had roommates wasn't unusual just because of the lack of privacy, but they were alone now.
"Yes," Erik said automatically. "I was…"
He pushed his hands back through his hair and sighed, taking his time and trying to compose himself. He had a certain demeanor that was rarely ruffled, but he was somewhat undignified when he was just waking up and his hair was all over the place. Only Raven got to see that.
"I was … speaking with Hope, actually," he said. "About some things that I haven't talked about in a very long time, and I just sort of lost track of the time."
A flick of his fingertip and he was floating over a shiny metal cup full of water. He curled his fingers around it before taking a sip.
Raven slid her arms around him and leaned down against his back, kissing his shoulder. "Really."
"Yes." Erik took his time to answer her, sipping at his water as he gathered his thoughts. "She was asking me about the Nazis. Actually, she was asking me about building her an obstacle course, but she'd asked me about the Nazis a couple of days ago and I told her to go read a book."
"She finally got to you, then." It was more a statement of fact than anything judgmental. Erik was hard to get to. She managed, Charles had managed, Rogue managed. It just took a while. "I'm glad you're making friends here."
Erik let out a breath that was almost a laugh, and he shook his head. "She's not my friend," he said softly. "She's a child. She's…"
Actually, he didn't know what to make of her. He didn't know whether to feel like her father or her follower. She was the mutant messiah, and that meant something to him, even if he didn't know how to respond.
"Anyway." He took another drink and switched his tablet on to check his messages. "She was asking me about Germany before the war. I told her I didn't remember."
He never spoke about his past, not even to Raven. It was something everyone knew but no one dared to ask about. For Erik, it was buried away, not to be brought up. His childhood self was lost, gone, and Erik didn't feel like he deserved to connect to those memories.
A lot of it went unsaid. If Erik wanted to share, he would. Sometimes she would ask, sometimes she would get an answer, but they both had agreed at some point that now was more important than before. They had taken new names at Raven's suggestion. After that kind of rebirth, it felt rude to ask about another life too intently.
"Was that all?"
"That's not my life anymore," Erik said, pensive. He wasn't satisfied with his answer, even as he closed himself off again and set his cup down.
Raven paused for a few seconds, seeing if he would continue, before asking, "Do you want to talk about it?"
Erik inhaled, like he was about to speak, and then he turned in his chair to look at her. "There's nothing really to talk about," he said. "I had a life, I had a childhood. It was taken from me. It was taken from millions of others."
He was a special case and he knew it, but he didn't like to think about that, either.
"Nothing good comes out of this discussion," he said softly, wearily. "It's a lifetime ago."
Setting aside the cup and the bits of metal on the center of the desk, Raven pulled herself up to sit on it. "If you ever want to talk about it, you know I'll listen." She nudged him with her foot.
Erik looked up, leaning back in his chair with a little smile. "Because you think I want to talk about it or because you're curious? I don't know anything about you, either. I know who you were when we met. I know you now. You christened yourself Mystique, I don't need to know what came first."
"Of course I'm curious, but you seem like you want to talk. You also don't know anything because you don't ask." Mystique propped her feet up into his lap. Socks, but no shoes. She'd probably changed that when she came in.
"I seem like…" Erik sighed. He traced his fingertips down Raven's leg and closed his hand gently around her ankle. "I don't know. Perhaps I do."
Something shifted in his accent, a little slip. Raven knew by now that Erik's natural accent wasn't American, or British, and he could sometimes fluctuate between the two. He was German, his first language German, and he'd only learned English when in his twenties.
"So talk to me." Leaning forward, she braced a hand on the desk and used the other to straighten his collar. When she spoke again, she switched into lightly accented German. "You should be able to talk to me."
"It's not you," said Erik, in German. It felt simultaneously foreign and familiar, comfortable without being comforting. "There's no part of me that belongs to that life."
It wasn't true, but Erik felt that he'd lost his humanity in Auschwitz. He didn't consider himself a victim, not after the things he did. It was difficult to identify with the other people who'd lost their lives, the other people who'd survived. They stripped him of his right to call himself a person, and now he was a monster.
"No? Aren't we all affected by our childhoods?" Raven's tone was gentle and a little expectant, in the way she'd learned from Erik. She didn't come close to his charisma, but it wasn't as if she had to put any effort into drawing him in in the first place.
Erik was quiet for some time.
"My mother was a teacher," he said, after it seemed like he wouldn't say anything at all. "My father fought in the First World War, he was respected, decorated. He mended watches." If anyone deserved to know all of the details of his story, it was Raven. Erik struggled to let people in, and people kept finding things out through other means — psychic invasion, or Rogue's touch. He'd never volunteered information like this before.
"We lived in Nuremberg, until I was eight years old, and then we fled to Poland. They destroyed my father's shop. It wasn't safe." It was difficult to imagine Erik as a child, sometimes.
Raven nudged the chair, inching it closer with the heel of her foot to invite more contact. They were probably a little off-putting to be around; they were usually in physical contact or staring at each other, and barring that, they were just… they were a little intense. Painfully aware that they were the only ones from their particular pocket of time and space.
"They found you in Poland, didn't they?"
Erik was running his hand over her leg, fingertips gentle. "Not in the way you're thinking. We left for Poland. The Nazis occupied it a year later, and we had to live in the ghetto in Warsaw. There was no work, people were starving, there were no opportunities. My mother ran an illegal school, she said it was a soup kitchen. I would sneak out with other children and bring food back, as much as we could."
Apparently, now that he'd started talking, he had difficulty stopping. Memories were flooding back, long buried, and he felt like if he kept them inside they'd break him. "When they started deporting us, some of us resisted. My father was a soldier, he knew what he was doing. He put a gun in my hands. For a while we had control of the ghetto, but it…"
He shook his head. "My father died in Warsaw. My gun jammed, German guns jammed, cars crumpled … My powers came to me for the first time and I didn't even realize it was me."
"Did you get away that time?" She knew how the story ended, but she still wanted the bad parts to be as short as possible.
Erik nodded. "My mother and I, we ran. We hid for almost a year. There was a young couple, sympathetic to the Jews. They had a false wall in their bathroom that led to a storage space, not quite big enough to lie down."
"What happened to them?"
"They're dead," Erik said quietly. "At least, I assume. I don't really know, but I can guess."
"They were alive when you left…?" Raven sifted her fingers through his hair, making a motion to tuck it behind his ear even when it wasn't long enough.
"We didn't leave. We were arrested and dragged out. They were arrested, too."
"Oh."
Erik shrugged. "Then we were taken to Auschwitz," he said, detached. He reached out and traced his fingers over a smooth block of metal. It rippled under his touch.
"I haven't talked about my parents since then." He didn't sound like he knew how he felt about talking about it now.
"They sounded like good people," Raven said gently. "I'm sorry they met that kind of end, but I can see them in you."
Erik glanced away. "No, you can't."
"Stop it." She gripped his chin and made him look back at her. "Yes I can. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there."
"I'm not that person anymore, Raven."
"Sure." Shaking her head, Raven leaned in for a quick kiss.
Erik didn't let her get away. He reached up, pulling her back in for another kiss, a little more insistent. No one had ever told him that he resembled his parents. No one could, because he hadn't told them anything. But to hear that he wasn't entirely a monster born of the Nazis, to be told that somewhere, he was still the boy his parents had raised … he needed that more than he realized.
Raven pushed herself away from the desk and settled in Erik's lap instead, letting her legs rest over the arm of the chair. Keeping him in the kiss with a hand braced on the back of his neck, Erik could feel the telltale flutter of her skin as she changed, her more human appearance melting away.
That was better. Erik's hands ran over her scales and he sighed with approval, tipping his head to kiss her jaw. "If you leave, I don't know what I'll do," he said softly.
"So don't think about it." Raven wasn't, if she could help it. They both knew what would happen, it just…
It wasn't worth thinking about.
Shifting a little to get more comfortable, she kissed Erik's cheek and settled in against his shoulder. "I miss home, but I don't miss being hunted. I just wish this had happened before everyone died."
Erik wrapped his arm around her, content to hold her in his lap. "I know," he said quietly. "This place doesn't care about time. There's still a possibility that they'll be here. They could have another life here, a better one."
"That's a nice thought. Or they might show up and disappear like Charles did." And then: "Did you want to know more about me from before we met?"
Erik leaned back slightly, looking up at her with surprise. "Do you want to say something about it?"
Raven shrugged awkwardly. "Not if you're not interested."
"No, I am," he said. He'd just never asked. They didn't talk about things like this.
Chewing on the inside of her cheek, Raven considered telling him about growing up with Charles, but… "My parents weren't as nice as yours," she admitted. "They were Catholic. Really, really Catholic. I got my powers when I was little and I hid them for as long as I could, but…"
"But they thought you were an abomination," Erik concluded for her, his expression darkening. The anger was just bubbling under the surface as he reached his own conclusions about what was done to her. He'd had no idea.
"They did." Raven nodded, letting her gaze wander without focusing. She'd talked to Charles about this decades ago, but it hadn't come up since then. "They called their priest, and…" She gestured vaguely. "I don't know how long it lasted. It could've been weeks? I kept trying to fake being 'cured', but the stress kept me from holding another shape long enough."
"What happened to them?" Erik said, his voice soft. The metal blocked on the table, however, were starting to warp.
"I don't know. I managed to slip out of the restraints when priest wasn't around. My older brother caught me leaving and they tried to stop me." Raven's jaw tightened as she spoke. "It didn't work. They were too jumpy, like the 'demons' were contagious. I managed to get away. I didn't go back to look for them."
Erik would have found them later. He would have tracked them down and killed them all. He would have made each one of them look at his face before they died.
— He was vaguely aware that most people wouldn't behave that way.
"Good. Don't think about them," was what he said, but it rang hollow. He was disappointed to leave things so unfinished.
"Tch. You sound disappointed." It shouldn't have made her smile, but it did, and she turned back so she could kiss his cheek. "Charles never would have let me, and by the time I'd left, I was a little busy." Revenge had certainly crossed her mind in the years, but Charles' approval had always been too important to consider it seriously.
"They should have suffered for what they did," Erik said seriously. "They were probably relieved you were gone, they probably thought God intervened."
"They probably hoped I died after I left." Raven rested her head on his shoulder. "I like to think they spent the rest of their lives feeling guilty for unleashing a 'demon' and failing to stop it. I wish I'd found the time to look them up before everything went south at home."
Erik stroked her hair, letting his eyes close. "A missed opportunity. We won't let that happen again. You won't let anyone else get away."
For Erik, that was romantic, and Raven took it that way.
After a few long, comfortable moments, she affectionately patted his chest. "Let's go home."