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.