OMG - I finally caught up on this thread and all the amazing fic.

Deb, Connie, Steph, Plei...you are amazing. The way you nail the voices of the characters...I am in awe.

Deb - Needfire is amazing. And to find out you are in the Bay Area is an added bonus (not quite sure why, but nice to know you live near me).

This lurker is doing the snoopy dance!!!

Oops, thought this was the Bitches' thread!

Deb, Connie, Steph, Plei...you are amazing. The way you nail the voices of the characters...I am in awe.

Speaking for myself, THANK YOU!

And me likewise, with the thanks.

Lexine, so delurk, already. We're waving madly at you.

and I am bowing before you...

Hi, lexine. I know! Aren't they great?But they put their pants on one leg at a time like the rest of us.

I put mine on two legs at a time. Or wear skirts.

I'm funny that way.

I'm calling this one "Magneto Dreams" for now. It's kind of a pendant story to the Wolverine one that FayJay did just a while ago 'cause I realized that you could come at some of the same material from a different perspective.

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Erik Lensherr, who styles himself Magneto, waits every evening when guard shift changes to practice for his inevitable escape. He has every confidence that this will happen, whether on his own or perhaps through the good offices of Mystique, his most loyal lieutenant. He waits until the guards are ritualistically signing in and out. He has rote-learnt their conversations word for word and gesture for gesture. They are unimaginative men, stolid and righteous, not unlike the Nazis of his youth.

The guards take scrupulous care not to let metal near Magneto. All his dishes, utensils, trays are plastic, his wood-framed bed and furniture are held together with pegs, and his clear Plexiglas cell is suspended in the middle of a vast space, at a calculated distance from load-bearing metal girders and metal air-conditioning ducts, away from nails and screws and nuts and bolts, a million pieces of lethal potential.

But they underestimate how much metal is present in tiny things, like the staples in a magazine, or the eyelets on a visitor’s shoe. Magneto is devious, he simply removes one staple and leaves the rest, or else slims them down by removing a little steel all along their length. He’s accumulated enough for a small key or an improvised bullet. To beat the regular metal detector sweeps, Magneto has stretched it into a slim wire that he keeps tucked up between his lips and his gum, where the metal in his few fillings will disguise its presence.

Magneto long ago learned to thrive in captivity. Compared to the concentration camps, this is very nearly a luxury hotel. He would honestly blanche at the suggestion that he is habituated to institutionalization.

Magneto takes advantage of the guards’ inattention to practice extending his power. When he first arrived, he could barely feel along the perimeters of the giant outer cell – by design, Charles Xavier having been consulted as to the best method to imprison him. Through months of discreet practice, Magneto has increased his grasp by a good ten feet, not quite enough to control the automated systems that keep the doors locked and the communications with the outside world secure.

A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Magneto tells himself. He spends this evening tracing the control circuits that extend the plastic bridge to his cell. Moving the current from here to there will enable his escape; while Magneto can fly, suppressing the alarms while simultaneously overpowering the guards and overloading the door circuits will be a tad taxing.

Besides, there is a certain style involved in strolling out of his prison that he can’t entirely resist.

Magneto shifts in his cot to a more relaxed posture and bids sleep come. Next week will bring Xavier’s monthly visit, and he doubts he’ll be ready to move before that… unfortunate because he’ll have to be especially cautious when Charles probes. Magneto believes his Psi defenses have held against the gentle onslaught – how typical of Charles to assume that if mental rape is non-violent, it is not truly a rape.

How strange that his self-knowledge exceeds Xavier’s – his ‘old friend’ has lived a relatively sheltered, privileged life, while Magneto endured a nightmare childhood and adolescence, endured unambiguous physical rape as well as the more subtle ravages of fighting for his survival on every level, including stealing food from the hands of those too weak to fight back. Young Erik learned to harden his heart and do what he must. Why is it that sheltered Charles does not recoil in horror at what his mind invasions do? True, the accident that left him in a wheelchair was a tremendous hardship that must have brought him sorrow and self-pity, but how ironic is it that Magneto is the one repulsed more by the thought of a mind-rape?

But Magneto will endure this visit as all the others, keep close his thoughts of escape, and enjoy the intellectual sparring, enjoy putting a spike into the wheel of Charles’s arrogant assumption that just because he had put his “old friend” behind bars that he has won.

Magneto dreams but lightly at first, small flashes of images, his powers flexing within him. His magnetic powers are part of his nervous system and they fire off just as the rest of his brain does in sleep; long ago he learned to remove easily lifted metallic items from his sleeping quarters. His keepers here were greatly startled when their detectors would sound when their prisoner was asleep, and never when he was awake, his somnolent powers are randomly immense, sometimes much more so than any waking thought has ever commanded them.

As Magneto slips into deeper sleep, coherent dreams animate bits and pieces of his personal history. Always, there is the prison camp; the dream powers are at their strongest torrent here as they were not during the actuality. As has happened every dreaming night of his life, Erik relives the guards dragging him away from his parents, sees their faces, hears their voices pleading and his own screaming, feels the rain beating down on his face and the mud sliding beneath his cheap boots, the flex of his nascent power beating ineffectually at the bars and gates.

Magneto’s keepers are quite concerned by the awesome power on display some nights. If they could watch his dreams, they would know what triggers them; Charles Xavier could tell them, if they knew to ask.

Eventually the dreams change to softer images, if not truly pleasant ones – scattered images of tender caresses stolen in forbidden moments, of alliances and even friendships that developed only to be smashed by separation, illness, brutality, and of bartering his young body for better treatment, or so much as a small bowl of stew or a moldy rusk of bread; even that had been twisted comfort of a kind.

Magneto hardly ever dreams of the liberation of his final camp. He had been in the final stages of typhoid, and had hardly the strength to lift his head from the pillowless bunk when the American medics arrived and triaged him to a hospital. Bald from the fever and brain-dazed, it had been weeks before it had sunk in: he was no longer a prisoner, but a patient. He had not realized how small his globe had shrunk, that he could not conceive of a world greater than his prison camp; in a sense Magneto is still, will always be in prison.

Next are the dreams of his post-camp life when he had tried to forget the things that he had done and had done to him, when Erik Lensherr had found integration into human society a poor fit at best, had tried to tell himself that the strange powers that stress had elicited were dissociations and hallucinations. By chance he’d run into young Charles Xavier who was investigating, even then, the incidence of unexplained powers. Met and connected, they’d become colleagues, and then lovers. Charles had been hale and hearty before his accident, and in his dreams Magneto remembers beyond their physical consummation; Charles had touched him on a deeper level, one that troubled him greatly, for it was the sense of self that had let Erik fight his way through the camps, his will to keep himself whole. With Charles’s damned telepathy, the boundaries between lovers was more frangible than nature intended. They had only themselves as mentors to explore their mutant powers, and mistakes were made, bitterly regretted.

The dreams shift for Magneto, he sees Charles as he is today, imagines the scars that must surely decorate his aged body. In his heart, Charles is still twenty-five, with a head full of hair; his present crippled condition sickens Magneto.

Often, he dreams of more current events, and current people – Mystique, certainly, has offered herself to him repeatedly, in any form that he would care to love. He has never in his waking life accepted her offer, but his dreams betray him; she lays in his bed, python-strong and python-lithe, shifting from one form to another, now Charles, now Wolverine, now the girl Rogue – Marie – the little girl who stole his powers.

Sometimes he dreams of Marie, appallingly young and innocent, handcuffed in the boat, or lashed to the machine atop the Statue of Liberty. Except now her piteous cries arouse him, and all his patient explanation why he must kill her for the good of all mutant-kind fails him, and he moves to take her, as he himself was taken when he was no older. Or else he dreams of how it felt to actually touch her, to feel his powers, his self slip away, like the little death of orgasm. Sometimes he is Marie, chained to the posts like Andromeda, sobbing for help, for release, for his parents to come and save him. And then a shining stranger is there to consume him – sometimes with his face, or Charles’s, or even that of Wolverine.

And then there are the dreams with Wolverine. Magneto is contemptuous of the animalistic Sabertooth and Toad, brutally twisted by the world’s treatment of mutants. They are evolutionary off-shoots, tools he can use to a better end. Wolverine would be another such; Magneto has seen him slash with those metal blades; what could such a man be other than an animal, a guided weapon at best? He is surprised that Charles willingly associates with such a one; Charles has limited his recruiting to the comely, the civilized ones. Magneto is content that it should be so; he sees himself as the force that will change the world, and the kindler, gentler mutants such as Charles and his brood will inherit it. But still, Wolverine – how that snarling face haunts him. Mystique had stolen the records that Jean Grey made of his physiology, Charles’s speculations about his hidden personal history – and Magneto is intrigued by the thought that this Logan was the victim of hideous experimentation, calculated sadism for science, reminding him of the Nazi scientists who got their hands on young Erik for far too long.

He imagines what such torture might have been, in his dreams – bones replaced by impossibly tough metal, the pain and fire inside, such as he knows when his power flows through him. And he imagines torturing Wolverine, his power manipulating those bones, animating him like a puppet, pulling him to pieces and putting them back, like clay over a metal armature. Or else he dreams of the animal-man crawling over him, devouring him, forcing those claws again and again into his bleeding body….

In the morning after such nights – and they are frequent here – Magneto wakes, shattered, weary from the parade of horrors, soaked with sweat or other fluids, and sits on his cot, getting his breath under control, and forces himself to think of his goals, of the iron control he must assume to reach them, dismissing his doubts and his humanity as mere paltry things.

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