(no subject)
Seated upon his couch rather than at his desk, Erik has a notebook open on one knee and a glass of whiskey propped up on the other. Occasionally he scrawls out a note or reaches to drag over a book or magazine from the disorganized pile on the cushion at his side, but for the most part, he seems to be sitting and thinking.
There is a gentle rap at the outer door to the White King's office, and then the sound of it opening, as Ellen's Pawn escort deposits her back at, really, home base. Today she is wearing black, and black: the fairness of her pale skin is stark against the softness of black linen, and her hair is drawn back with a floral-looking red scrunchie that she is really probably not responsible for. Under her arm she carries a leather-bound book filched from the library, with a thin strip of white paper folded over inside it to serve as a bookmark.
Magneto looks up at the knock, blue eyes clear in their study of black linen, and more inevitably, red scrunchy as Ellen enters. Dressed in softer shades of smoky grey over cornflower blue, he looks the part of the professor or businessman more than the international terrorist, and his greeting is mild despite the hour. "Evening."
"Evening," Ellen greets with an inclination of her head, her thumb scraping along the thumb of her book as she lowers it before her. Her gaze flicks over Erik -- his clothes, his nearby pile of materials. "The kitchens here are very odd."
"Oh?" Once his survey of Ellen is complete, he reaches to tug wire-rimmed glasses down the bridge of his nose and leans to set his mostly full glass down on the coffee table. "I haven't spent much time in them. How do you mean?"
"Mr. Eisenberg brought me some form of -- duck thing," Ellen says. She blinks at Erik almost owlishly as she shakes her head. "There were truffles. It was peculiar." Food is a daily new discovery for a woman grown accustomed to prison standard fare. "I am sorry to interrupt," she adds, taking a few steps forward in her sensible flats in a fairly drifty way, directionless except for an intent to come further into the room and away from the door that Luke has closed behind her. Her fingers drum against the leather cover of the book. "I almost think I begin to uncomfortably resemble Ms. Oyama."
"Ah. Yes. There is some notable departure from..." The peanut butter and jelly lifestyle they were so familiar with before. It goes unsaid, perhaps a little apologetically, and Erik folds his glasses over so that he can drop them next to his whiskey. "You are not interrupting." To the last, he looks her over again and draws in a deep breath, but does not quite allow it to become a sigh.
"Oh. All right." Ellen pauses where she stands, holding herself quite straight with her book tucked against her hip. "Is there anything I can be of help with?" she asks. Who knows what that might be.
"Not really." Glasses and whiskey temporarily disposed of, Erik settles back into the couch and lifts a hand to push his thumb and paired fingers into his closed eyes. "Not unless you can stop the end of the world. How are you feeling?"
"It is not yet time," Ellen says, with a faint crinkle of her brow as she flicks her gaze in a northerly direction. Her frown deepens for a moment's silence, and then she seems to remember the latter half of his words, the part that did not involve the apocalypse in any significant way. "I am all right. I am doing better, I think. It helps that I am not alone all the time."
"I'm beginning to think that it might be." Ever the optimistic monarch, Erik remains where and how he is for a long moment before he drops his hand, pushes his notebook aside, and gets stiffly to his feet. "I'm glad to hear it."
"I believe there is more yet to the cycle. There has not been nearly enough betrayal and death for Ragnarok," Ellen says very gravely, lifting her chin as she watches him rise.
"I don't know. I've betrayed and killed a fair number in my day." Voice low, Erik stretches and flexes without actually moving much at all, then turns to pace for his desk, where his watch resides slack around a cluster of metal spheres.
Ellen does not immediately speak, watching him move with a thoughtful expression. She shakes her head slightly. "Perhaps the sky will be lit aflame and the seas will boil," she says. "If you expect the end, perhaps it will come. I do not know. I am only lately free of my own mortality and I do not wish to look it in the face again so soon."
"My mortality is as familiar to me as my reflection. I fear that turning my back to it now would serve as nothing more than an invitation for it to finally overtake me." Grim in the slack of his jowels and the hooded knit of his brow, Erik lifts the weight of his watch to squint at its face, then sets it back down.
"But I am the hand of death. I hold it in my grasp." Ellen smiles in a brief, sharp flicker, and then turns to cross the room and set her book down on top of the nearest empty flat surface. "Why do you expect the end?"
"We are running out of time to stop it." Erik lingers at the corner of his desk, tired and closed against a nagging touch of frustration. "We do not reside in a world of happy endings."
Ellen tips her head slightly, lips pursing. "I suppose that we do not," she says. "I do not think that I can help. I will pray and perhaps the One-Eyed Lord will show us the way." That is very helpful, Ellen.
"Perhaps." Tolerance is more forced than natural, and it shows in the eyes of his eyes and the stiff set of his shoulders. He then looks at his desk chair rather than at Ellen, conversationally unhelpful.
Ellen studies him in thoughtful silence for a moment, her head canted to one side and her pale gaze a little on the blank side. She looks away and shifts into motion, pacing lightly across the office with her hands clasped neatly behind her back. "Prayers are worth little to a man of no faith. I am sorry I have nothing else to offer."
"There is no point in having faith in a God that hates and destroys and tortures those who serve Him." Only slightly bitter, Erik cannot suppress a flicker of the deeper anger that threatens to fight its way onto his face. "Not unless it is within the context of having /faith/ that He will be conspicuously absent the day a lifeless rock seals the fate of His tender flock."
"There are fates that even the gods cannot overcome. Patterns in life that none can evade. If the ending comes, it comes and so be it." Ellen has grown bold, her voice edged in ice; she has drawn to her full height with her spine held blade-straight. "But whatever ending is to be ours, whether it comes from a lifeless rock in the sky or the barrel of a plastic gun, we meet it fighting, and we serve our purpose. Hate God if you will."
For a moment, Erik says nothing. His eyes narrow, just slightly, and he watches her, taking in her voice, and her posture. "Forgive me if I am not content to stand idly by in accordance with some divine plan while my people are wiped from the face of the planet. I do not hate God, but I certainly do not trust him."
"I would never ask that." Ellen looks affronted, canting her head again with pale eyes narrowing in turn as she meets his gaze. She speaks with an edge of contempt. "Trust to divine will and do nothing ourselves? No. These are not times for peace, for indolence. In these times, the only path is the warrior's." Ellen unfolds her hands from their neat clasp behind her, and cuts a sharp gesture through the air with both. It is dramatic, as the pass of a sorceress's hands to call up something unseen. "We fight. We wait when we must. We plan. But we do not stand /idle/. That way lies poison, and nothingness, and the darkness of a cage. The battle is our path, our righteousness, and it is in our fate and in our blood and bone. Do you think /I/ would love a god that would cast our people to fade to nothing in the mists?"
Again, there is a delay before Erik speaks. One brow twitches down, creating an awkward angle between itself and the other as he finds himself confronted with the utterly unexpected and unfamiliar. Contempt on Ellen's tongue, directed at him. /Him/. He is not quite sure what to do with it, and can do little more than look severely put out for some sixty or seventy seconds. A lot of seconds basically. Too many. He does not reply, but his eyes say, 'I don't know. Maybe?'
"I am /many/ things, but I am not a fool, please." Ellen inclines her head, almost ironically, and turns partly away from him, her arms folding over her stomach and her gaze dropping to the ground. "I do not expect the hand of God to protect me from anything. To intervene to save my people." She breathes out in a low snort, her breath a quiet rush of frustration. "We /are/ the hand of God, sir. There is no aid but us. No battle but the one we fight. Faith need not make me complacent."
Magneto persists in being baffled, if silently so. His jaw works as if against a bitter taste in his mouth, and his eyes trail coolly after her beneath the uneven level of his brows. "What is the point of having any god if he cares not to do anything more than watch?"
"You don't understand." Ellen smiles and glances back at him. "/I/ am what he has done. I. Valkyrie. I carry death and life with me to give as gifts. With my love, you have both at your command, do you not? What more do you ask of him?" She looks away again, and frowns seriously at the wall. "Perhaps I come as curse and blessing both. The favor of a god is never easy to bear."
"No. /You/ don't understand." It is amazing how much quicker Erik is to reply to /that/. "Charming as you are, charming as /any/ of us are, our existence does not outweigh the things I have seen. Some of the things I have /done/. Ellen--" The old mutant breaks off there, too frustrated to dictate what he's even trying to convey. "It's like you have no comprehension."
Ellen tightens the fold of her arms, drawing them closer and higher against her torso, beneath her chest. She says, flatly, starkly, "Perhaps I am only mad."
"I am reasonably certain that I am." The heat has faded from his voice, and Erik reaches to fumble with the buttons at his collar for lack of anything better to do with his hands.
"I know what it is to see and do horrible things. To know them as horrible. I have done it, I have seen it, I have destroyed almost everything I have ever touched, Dr. Lensherr." Ellen's sharpness recedes to mildness, to quiet acknowledgment: but she is still firm even as her arms fall, and her hands turn; one rests at her hip, the other turning out as she again just slightly cants her head. "There are more powers on this earth than righteousness. Even as there is more to fate than what the gods command. But I don't believe that changes what I am or what my path is."
Magneto absorbs this less aggressively than that which has come before it, but gives no indication of agreement, or even acceptance. He finishes with his collar, and there is a slight sink of air when he sits himself down in the leather of his desk chair.
Ellen's silence comes in its own turn, now, and she folds her hands before her, tipping her head just slightly down.
Magneto does not reach for a book or papers, or anything else. He just sits and stares gloomily at his desk.
Ellen is frowning at the floor, thinking very hard about something. She turns the interlace of her fingers up and spends a moment's study upon her palms. She almost says something but then stops again.
Magneto looks up after a time, not to see if she's still there -- that's obvious -- but to see what she is doing. But he is silent as well.
Eventually Ellen moves. She crosses the room again, and folds herself down to a perch on the couch that he previously abandoned. She still does not speak, but arranges herself with her hands in her lap.
Eventually, Erik leans forward enough to rest his aching head in an upturned palm. For a time, the rustle of his suit with the movement is the only sound he makes. Eventually, a muffled, "Sorry," trails after it.
"And I, too." Ellen speaks gently, without raising her gaze from the loose clasp of her hands where they rest over her thighs. "Sorry."
"It's alright." Slow to speak, Erik does not alter his posture, but he does reach his free hand out to draw a copy of the Times into his range of vision.
Ellen stays quietly where she is, still looking down. It is kind of awkward!
The paper crinkles, but Erik does not really read. Eventually, both hands fall to the desk, and he pushes up again to track behind the couch, where he pauses for a moment at Ellen's back before he continues on into his bedroom.
Erik finds himself in the unusual position of being savaged by a goldfish.