(no subject)
Words are a cold measure of feeling and it is as though I have lost mine. I remember what was before but dimly, through a refractory haze. Like seeing things in grayscale. I know that for a long time before I was ... taken ... we did nothing, were nothing, and that there are more cages in this life than those of iron or concrete or both. And yet.
Even now that the cancerous growths are gone from my womb, even now as I sit by a murky window wider than four inches. I do not know what was before anymore. I cannot remember it. I do not know who I was or what I felt like. I cannot remember frustration. I cannot remember despair. I cannot remember victory. I remember facts and figures, faces, names. But I retreated so far within myself, in that poisonous cage, and came so close to my own death, that I do not believe I can be that woman anymore.
So. Ellen died that day. Ellen Louise Dramstadt, daughter of two corpses, sister of one splattered brain blent with blood and shattered fragments of bone. Sister of the Brotherhood. Valkyrie.
She died. Now here I stand. I will not let this freedom of mine be empty. I will not let my life be reduced to the quiet hidden shadows of a cage. Whoever I am. Whatever I become.
Does faith die? Can you cut out a heart and throw it to the street and let it still beat? I know our purpose. I know my gods. I know Him, the Allfather, One-Eye, Spear Shaker, Wise One and Wand-Bearer, God of the Hanged. God of a thousand names. My strength, my victory, my voice, my heart's truth, all are yours, Lord of the Aesir.
Men make mistakes. They are fallible. They are prone to the petty cruelties and stupidies and frailties of their flesh. There is no world more mad and difficult and full of suffering than the world of a man who has been touched by greatness and divine intention. Thus is my life. Thus also is his.
Erik Lensherr is only a man. As I am a woman. And if I am sworn to his service, and if I have sworn my heart's beat and blood to his cause, and if I love him, so be it.
Crisply dressed in a suit of middling ash grey over a shirt of soft cornflower blue, Erik has parked himself in the kitchen, where he is watching coffee drip, drip, drip into painfully slow existence. He does not look as if he has slept well, but stands upright and alert, cleanshaven and otherwise sharply cut.
Ellen has made a long and extensive use of the shower. However, despite the scalding heat of the water she used, by the time she emerges into the rest of the apartment she no longer resembles a boiled lobster. She has dressed herself in borrowed clothing. Men's trousers hang funny on her, if their dark shade is familiar; men's shirt hangs similarly funny on her torso, loose about the stomach, rumpled tight close to her breast. But, dressed. She has however neglected to wear socks or shoes. And her head is still bald but for a thin layer of blond fuzz. Her feet pad softly over the wooden floor, and her gaze wanders a little uncertainly here and there as she goes. It is an unfamiliar place.
But the hollow look has receded somewhat from her face, and she looks as though she has had real sleep for the first time in a long while.
In the living area behind the kitchen, some ancient National Geographic narrator rattles on about lions and crocodiles and water buffalo. It is due to the occasional glances he casts back at the program that Erik turns in time to see Ellen emerge. Blue eyes scan quickly from fuzzy head to bare feet, then back up again, not entirely happy with what they see. "Evening," he greets, watching her for a few seconds more before he gestures to the refrigerator. "I have all manner of sandwich materials and frozen dinners. There is bread and soup in the cabinet as well."
Ellen does not immediately reply in words. Her head cants to one side and her gaze wanders to the refrigerator. She pads lightly over to it and then leans into the door as she pulls it open, tipping her head down as she narrows her eyes at its contents. She holds still there for a moment too long, shivering a little from the fact that refrigerators are kind of cold on the inside. She pulls out a package of sliced sandwich meat, and then pulls back and closes the refrigerator. Then she pads a few more steps to the counter, pulls out a few slices of the meat inside with a crinkle of plastic, and nibbles delicatey on them as she holds them in her hands.
Perhaps it is a sign that not all is well with the world that she did not immediately seek out peanut butter.
Indeed. Erik watches her in unobtrusive silence, chilly gaze following the progress of meat from refrigerator storage to its demise at the hands of Ellen. "How are you feeling?" he asks only after she's had a short time to eat. "You look better."
"I am..." Ellen pauses, turning over a half-eaten slice of turkey in her fingers despite the dampness that it leaves, and considers the question. "I am all right. I am not in prison. Thank you."
"I've missed you," Erik says after another pause, briefly awkward as he continues to track the turn of the meat in her hands. "I should have come earlier. I have many reasons for not having done so, but none of them are very good." Again he pauses, this time to squint at his coffee. Then he pushes off from the counter to step for her across the kitchen.
"I was going to die." Ellen speaks matter-of-factly, and turns her gaze upon him almost curiously, something nearly childlike in the tilt of her head. "There was a time when I would always have believed that you would come. There was a time when nothing would have convinced me otherwise."
Magneto stops in his advance when he's not quite within reach, eyeing her in her bald-headed totality with a distance that does not become him. His brow furrows slightly, and he looks down at her bare feet. Then he takes a step back, retreating to stand guard over the coffee maker once more.
"It does not matter," Ellen says quietly, and she folds the remnant of turkey in half to eat it all at once. It is difficult to be stately about eating sandwich fixings from their plastic, but she does seem to be making the attempt. She swallows and goes on, "I do not know what to do with your reasons, good reasons, poor ones, do they matter to you? I am free now. Is that what is important?"
"Yes," says Erik. But that is all he says. He reaches up to swing the nearest cabinet door open, extracts a mug, and sets to pouring coffee for himself. Black. His shoulders are rigid and his expression is closed in thought.
Ellen peels off another slice of meat and studies it with an air of contemplation.
"Yuriko is still missing. Mortimer has fallen out of contact. Raven has vanished," Erik mutters once he's taken a sip and replaced the pot, with the scent of hot coffee heavy in the air. "Jason and Sarah are the sum total of what remains."
"Strange." Ellen sets the meat back down on top of the plastic, and turns to bow her head with her palms pressed against the edge of the counter, as though stretching out her shoulders. "That chaos would stay loyal so long. He is fire and she is fury. Perhaps it fits. But I would have thought that Mr. Toynbee would be the last."
"We've been out of contact. I suspect he has nothing better to do." Voice rough, Erik sips again, looks Ellen over, and turns to pace out of the kitchen and for the couch. "Sarah has been here since she was captured and tortured by an independent entity interested in mutant experimentation."
Ellen is momentarily silent. When she follows him out of the kitchen, she drifts like a falling leaf, although she remains on its threshhold and rests her hand upon the counter as she looks after him. Frowning faintly, she asks, "Are any of them still alive?"
"One of them escaped," Erik says softly as he sinks down into first cushion he comes across, coffee still balanced in hand. "I wasn't there. The X-Men handled the situation."
Ellen makes a clicking noise with her tongue that suggests mild disapproval.
Magneto sighs. It is a more subdued sound, made even quieter by the fact that it's spent directly down into his mug.
Ellen taps her fingertips lightly against the counter, and then drifts onward, out into the living room. "What were you thinking, when you chose to retrieve me?"
"That I have been a poor excuse for a revolutionary, lately," is the answer, fairly earnest for all that it is grudgingly given.
"I am not a cause." Ellen lifts her head slightly, pale eyes narrowing as she studies him. "I have held my death in my womb and watched it grow like a sprouting seed. And I hold death under my skin every time you touch me. But I am only a woman."
"You are symbolic of the cause," says Erik to his coffee. "Or -- you were, at one time. You have saved my life on numerous occasions, anyway. It would not be right for you to rot away in some human prison over a pair of idiot children."
Ellen does not speak for a long moment, watching Erik and his coffee in a silence that approaches eeriness in its stillness. That is, her stillness: she does not move and barely breathes. Finally she says, "You are the symbol and the man. At my most symbolic I am only Valkyrie, disciple and warrior and servant."
"You are of symbolic significance to me, specifically," Erik replies after a pause that is not so still or silent, as it entails a slow sip of coffee and the rustle of the couch at his back as he settles deeper into it, and attempts to relax. "I have not done much of anything, lately. Now that I have done /something/, perhaps I can do more."
At this, Ellen smiles ever-so-slightly. She says simply, "You can."
"The problem is, of course, what." It is a large problem, and Erik is resigned in the knowledge of as much. He lolls his head back to look at her, coffee balanced on his knee.
"Perhaps we should not ask." Ellen draws herself all the straighter, even as she tips her head to one side. "I don't think asking what to do has ever done us any good. Thinking about plans and grand schemes and goals. I never never been very good at it."
Magneto just watches her, not speaking, with his eyes heavy-lidded and his expression largely unreadable. "I cannot ignore cause and effect. If I do, I am no different from them."
Ellen turns on her heel again and begins to wander back towards the kitchen, wetting dry lips with a flick of her tongue. "I do not even know what the world is anymore. I cannot pin any what."
Erik's eyes cast down after her heels and linger there for some time before he lifts his head to squint at the murmering television, and turns it off with a flick of his fingers. "Do you want to remain here, or would you prefer that I make other arrangements?"
"I do not wish to be alone. But I am very tired. I am not yet well. The cancer is gone, but I still feel--" Ellen stops talking and scowls, staring unseeingly into the kitchen for a moment. "I do not know. The world looks different."
"Alright," says Erik mildly to the television, voice quiet. "I don't think the world has changed. Merely your perspective on it."
"Yes." Ellen pads into the kitchen and turns on the water in the sink, cupping her hands beneath the faucet to drink rather than attempting to retrieve a cup. She splashes cold water on her face, and smooths damp fingers through the fuzz that will one day be her hair. "I am ... strange," she says, after she turns the faucet back off.
"You are Ellen Dramstadt," is Erik's reply to that, and he finally leans to push back off of the couch, finishing off the last of his coffee as he goes. "You have always been unique. Do you need anything, aside from your own clothes?"
"There has probably been new science in the world." Ellen stares at the faucet, drawing two fingertips down the curve of its spigot. "I should like to know what it is."
"Bahir has made some interesting advancements in...certain enhancements that I am sure will be relevant to your interests. I was telepathic for a short time. Between you and I, of course." Voice lower, now, Erik edges over to the sink to set the soiled mug down into the basin. "Then there is the matter of the coming apocalypse..."
Ellen does not actually speak in response to either of these pronouncements. She does, however, turn to face him and blink.
Granted the gift of a slight height advantage by the fact that he is wearing shoes and she is not, Erik blinks back at her. "I am sorry," he says after a moment, coffee breath trailing closely after the words. "Truly."
Ellen bows her head and stays silent for a long moment. She draws breath, finally, and lets out in a long, low exhalation. "I know," she says.
Magneto nods at that, his head tipping down after hers. That position is retained for a few seconds, and then he turns to move for his bedroom. "I will be in my quarters. Tomorrow I will see about getting you a computer."
"Thank you." Ellen stays where she is a few heartbeats longer after he has turned away, and then she moves back to the pile of meat and its plastic, possibly to go about constructing a more sandwich-like sandwich for herself. "Good evening."
"Goodnight," says Erik. He slips in through his door and mostly closes it behind him, leaving a sliver of a crack open into the black of his room, just in case.
Magneto apologizes.
Even now that the cancerous growths are gone from my womb, even now as I sit by a murky window wider than four inches. I do not know what was before anymore. I cannot remember it. I do not know who I was or what I felt like. I cannot remember frustration. I cannot remember despair. I cannot remember victory. I remember facts and figures, faces, names. But I retreated so far within myself, in that poisonous cage, and came so close to my own death, that I do not believe I can be that woman anymore.
So. Ellen died that day. Ellen Louise Dramstadt, daughter of two corpses, sister of one splattered brain blent with blood and shattered fragments of bone. Sister of the Brotherhood. Valkyrie.
She died. Now here I stand. I will not let this freedom of mine be empty. I will not let my life be reduced to the quiet hidden shadows of a cage. Whoever I am. Whatever I become.
Does faith die? Can you cut out a heart and throw it to the street and let it still beat? I know our purpose. I know my gods. I know Him, the Allfather, One-Eye, Spear Shaker, Wise One and Wand-Bearer, God of the Hanged. God of a thousand names. My strength, my victory, my voice, my heart's truth, all are yours, Lord of the Aesir.
Men make mistakes. They are fallible. They are prone to the petty cruelties and stupidies and frailties of their flesh. There is no world more mad and difficult and full of suffering than the world of a man who has been touched by greatness and divine intention. Thus is my life. Thus also is his.
Erik Lensherr is only a man. As I am a woman. And if I am sworn to his service, and if I have sworn my heart's beat and blood to his cause, and if I love him, so be it.
Crisply dressed in a suit of middling ash grey over a shirt of soft cornflower blue, Erik has parked himself in the kitchen, where he is watching coffee drip, drip, drip into painfully slow existence. He does not look as if he has slept well, but stands upright and alert, cleanshaven and otherwise sharply cut.
Ellen has made a long and extensive use of the shower. However, despite the scalding heat of the water she used, by the time she emerges into the rest of the apartment she no longer resembles a boiled lobster. She has dressed herself in borrowed clothing. Men's trousers hang funny on her, if their dark shade is familiar; men's shirt hangs similarly funny on her torso, loose about the stomach, rumpled tight close to her breast. But, dressed. She has however neglected to wear socks or shoes. And her head is still bald but for a thin layer of blond fuzz. Her feet pad softly over the wooden floor, and her gaze wanders a little uncertainly here and there as she goes. It is an unfamiliar place.
But the hollow look has receded somewhat from her face, and she looks as though she has had real sleep for the first time in a long while.
In the living area behind the kitchen, some ancient National Geographic narrator rattles on about lions and crocodiles and water buffalo. It is due to the occasional glances he casts back at the program that Erik turns in time to see Ellen emerge. Blue eyes scan quickly from fuzzy head to bare feet, then back up again, not entirely happy with what they see. "Evening," he greets, watching her for a few seconds more before he gestures to the refrigerator. "I have all manner of sandwich materials and frozen dinners. There is bread and soup in the cabinet as well."
Ellen does not immediately reply in words. Her head cants to one side and her gaze wanders to the refrigerator. She pads lightly over to it and then leans into the door as she pulls it open, tipping her head down as she narrows her eyes at its contents. She holds still there for a moment too long, shivering a little from the fact that refrigerators are kind of cold on the inside. She pulls out a package of sliced sandwich meat, and then pulls back and closes the refrigerator. Then she pads a few more steps to the counter, pulls out a few slices of the meat inside with a crinkle of plastic, and nibbles delicatey on them as she holds them in her hands.
Perhaps it is a sign that not all is well with the world that she did not immediately seek out peanut butter.
Indeed. Erik watches her in unobtrusive silence, chilly gaze following the progress of meat from refrigerator storage to its demise at the hands of Ellen. "How are you feeling?" he asks only after she's had a short time to eat. "You look better."
"I am..." Ellen pauses, turning over a half-eaten slice of turkey in her fingers despite the dampness that it leaves, and considers the question. "I am all right. I am not in prison. Thank you."
"I've missed you," Erik says after another pause, briefly awkward as he continues to track the turn of the meat in her hands. "I should have come earlier. I have many reasons for not having done so, but none of them are very good." Again he pauses, this time to squint at his coffee. Then he pushes off from the counter to step for her across the kitchen.
"I was going to die." Ellen speaks matter-of-factly, and turns her gaze upon him almost curiously, something nearly childlike in the tilt of her head. "There was a time when I would always have believed that you would come. There was a time when nothing would have convinced me otherwise."
Magneto stops in his advance when he's not quite within reach, eyeing her in her bald-headed totality with a distance that does not become him. His brow furrows slightly, and he looks down at her bare feet. Then he takes a step back, retreating to stand guard over the coffee maker once more.
"It does not matter," Ellen says quietly, and she folds the remnant of turkey in half to eat it all at once. It is difficult to be stately about eating sandwich fixings from their plastic, but she does seem to be making the attempt. She swallows and goes on, "I do not know what to do with your reasons, good reasons, poor ones, do they matter to you? I am free now. Is that what is important?"
"Yes," says Erik. But that is all he says. He reaches up to swing the nearest cabinet door open, extracts a mug, and sets to pouring coffee for himself. Black. His shoulders are rigid and his expression is closed in thought.
Ellen peels off another slice of meat and studies it with an air of contemplation.
"Yuriko is still missing. Mortimer has fallen out of contact. Raven has vanished," Erik mutters once he's taken a sip and replaced the pot, with the scent of hot coffee heavy in the air. "Jason and Sarah are the sum total of what remains."
"Strange." Ellen sets the meat back down on top of the plastic, and turns to bow her head with her palms pressed against the edge of the counter, as though stretching out her shoulders. "That chaos would stay loyal so long. He is fire and she is fury. Perhaps it fits. But I would have thought that Mr. Toynbee would be the last."
"We've been out of contact. I suspect he has nothing better to do." Voice rough, Erik sips again, looks Ellen over, and turns to pace out of the kitchen and for the couch. "Sarah has been here since she was captured and tortured by an independent entity interested in mutant experimentation."
Ellen is momentarily silent. When she follows him out of the kitchen, she drifts like a falling leaf, although she remains on its threshhold and rests her hand upon the counter as she looks after him. Frowning faintly, she asks, "Are any of them still alive?"
"One of them escaped," Erik says softly as he sinks down into first cushion he comes across, coffee still balanced in hand. "I wasn't there. The X-Men handled the situation."
Ellen makes a clicking noise with her tongue that suggests mild disapproval.
Magneto sighs. It is a more subdued sound, made even quieter by the fact that it's spent directly down into his mug.
Ellen taps her fingertips lightly against the counter, and then drifts onward, out into the living room. "What were you thinking, when you chose to retrieve me?"
"That I have been a poor excuse for a revolutionary, lately," is the answer, fairly earnest for all that it is grudgingly given.
"I am not a cause." Ellen lifts her head slightly, pale eyes narrowing as she studies him. "I have held my death in my womb and watched it grow like a sprouting seed. And I hold death under my skin every time you touch me. But I am only a woman."
"You are symbolic of the cause," says Erik to his coffee. "Or -- you were, at one time. You have saved my life on numerous occasions, anyway. It would not be right for you to rot away in some human prison over a pair of idiot children."
Ellen does not speak for a long moment, watching Erik and his coffee in a silence that approaches eeriness in its stillness. That is, her stillness: she does not move and barely breathes. Finally she says, "You are the symbol and the man. At my most symbolic I am only Valkyrie, disciple and warrior and servant."
"You are of symbolic significance to me, specifically," Erik replies after a pause that is not so still or silent, as it entails a slow sip of coffee and the rustle of the couch at his back as he settles deeper into it, and attempts to relax. "I have not done much of anything, lately. Now that I have done /something/, perhaps I can do more."
At this, Ellen smiles ever-so-slightly. She says simply, "You can."
"The problem is, of course, what." It is a large problem, and Erik is resigned in the knowledge of as much. He lolls his head back to look at her, coffee balanced on his knee.
"Perhaps we should not ask." Ellen draws herself all the straighter, even as she tips her head to one side. "I don't think asking what to do has ever done us any good. Thinking about plans and grand schemes and goals. I never never been very good at it."
Magneto just watches her, not speaking, with his eyes heavy-lidded and his expression largely unreadable. "I cannot ignore cause and effect. If I do, I am no different from them."
Ellen turns on her heel again and begins to wander back towards the kitchen, wetting dry lips with a flick of her tongue. "I do not even know what the world is anymore. I cannot pin any what."
Erik's eyes cast down after her heels and linger there for some time before he lifts his head to squint at the murmering television, and turns it off with a flick of his fingers. "Do you want to remain here, or would you prefer that I make other arrangements?"
"I do not wish to be alone. But I am very tired. I am not yet well. The cancer is gone, but I still feel--" Ellen stops talking and scowls, staring unseeingly into the kitchen for a moment. "I do not know. The world looks different."
"Alright," says Erik mildly to the television, voice quiet. "I don't think the world has changed. Merely your perspective on it."
"Yes." Ellen pads into the kitchen and turns on the water in the sink, cupping her hands beneath the faucet to drink rather than attempting to retrieve a cup. She splashes cold water on her face, and smooths damp fingers through the fuzz that will one day be her hair. "I am ... strange," she says, after she turns the faucet back off.
"You are Ellen Dramstadt," is Erik's reply to that, and he finally leans to push back off of the couch, finishing off the last of his coffee as he goes. "You have always been unique. Do you need anything, aside from your own clothes?"
"There has probably been new science in the world." Ellen stares at the faucet, drawing two fingertips down the curve of its spigot. "I should like to know what it is."
"Bahir has made some interesting advancements in...certain enhancements that I am sure will be relevant to your interests. I was telepathic for a short time. Between you and I, of course." Voice lower, now, Erik edges over to the sink to set the soiled mug down into the basin. "Then there is the matter of the coming apocalypse..."
Ellen does not actually speak in response to either of these pronouncements. She does, however, turn to face him and blink.
Granted the gift of a slight height advantage by the fact that he is wearing shoes and she is not, Erik blinks back at her. "I am sorry," he says after a moment, coffee breath trailing closely after the words. "Truly."
Ellen bows her head and stays silent for a long moment. She draws breath, finally, and lets out in a long, low exhalation. "I know," she says.
Magneto nods at that, his head tipping down after hers. That position is retained for a few seconds, and then he turns to move for his bedroom. "I will be in my quarters. Tomorrow I will see about getting you a computer."
"Thank you." Ellen stays where she is a few heartbeats longer after he has turned away, and then she moves back to the pile of meat and its plastic, possibly to go about constructing a more sandwich-like sandwich for herself. "Good evening."
"Goodnight," says Erik. He slips in through his door and mostly closes it behind him, leaving a sliver of a crack open into the black of his room, just in case.
Magneto apologizes.