Title: Arbeit Macht Frei
Author: Sarah Spinelli, AKA PyroPixxy, AKA Myranda Wright
Characters: Okay, so there are no characters actually named in this fic. I entirely admit it. But I still owe Marvel for the character that this fic is based on (it's Magneto, stupid ^_~).
Rating: PG for historically accurate violence against civilians.
Summary: Very short and rather depressing jaunt into Magneto's brain. It was written in a sudden, thirty-minute burst of inspiration late at night, so there's no real plot. This is just a slightly updated version of an older fic, cleaned up a little around the edges.
Note: I realize that perhaps this fic would be better labeled with a stronger rating than PG. However, the events that are spoken of within the following few pages are entirely accurate of what could and would have happened, and there is no use in censoring history. If you want to flame me or convince me to change the rating, please e-mail me and give me a good explanation of why I should do so (not just "It's sad and icky, boo-hoo!"). Oh, and please review!
Disclaimer: They're not mine, as if you didn't know. Don't sue. All I have is second-hand anime DVDs and a lot of student loans, anyway.
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Even now, so many decades after those last few moments when the gate had finally faded from view, he could see it clearly. It was burned indelibly in the flesh of his brain, those puzzling German words of twisted wrought iron lying starkly against the white of the clouds, so much of a mystery until long after, when he dared to finally define them. Such a contemptuous and disdainful thing, he had eventually come to know, to wave over the heads of the people being slaughtered there.
These nights were endless ones, as they had always been, while sleep was an uncommon prize and the serenity of dreams, so innocent and perfect in its embrace, was almost impossible to obtain. Certain thoughts plagued him as much as ever, filling his brain with poison as he lay in bed and stared at the blank canvas of the ceiling. They lingered in the back of his skull even during his walking hours, when modern life should have been all that concerned him.
Coldness filled his bones as it always had, and a painful hunger gnawed at his belly. So, he would eat, and fill himself with whatever he chose to swallow, and would be sick all over again. It was then that he realized, as if for the first time, no matter how often it had occurred, that the emptiness and hunger pains were not borne of a need for physical sustenance. They were something different and terrible, and it made him want to weep.
Memories of hunger and cold were not, of course, the only badges he wore of those days, or the only things that told him it had not been just a nightmare. Scars can dwell in the flesh far longer than we want to see them, even longer than the senile mind can grasp their significance, but even they are known to fade and wrinkle as time begins to pass, as age changes the body of the man and the scars of the horror into something else entirely.
The scars on his heart and the numbers on his arm leaked fear into this cursed man's bones, and hatred into his veins. They pumped a bitter tear into his eyes, but never let it fall. When the material chains that locked him to his prison were shattered, he was turned upon the world again, little more than a child with skeletal arms and ribs that showed through his coat, and he was aimless and afraid.
Somehow, he found his way to the land of which he had dreamed endlessly during that eternity locked in earthly hell. He now believed in such a place, this hell, if not in the same sense as his Gentile counterparts, and knew that he had known it, and might never fear it again. This lack of fear of retribution by an angry God lent to our boy, who had once actually been quite sweet and gentle, a hardness of spirit that was not unlike that of those who had so wronged him.
Now, as he slipped gradually into old age, this hardness had never left him, and was solidified even further, perhaps, which each passing night, when he returned to his hell, and lived through it again. He was a waking nightmare, a living statue carved from the flesh of the victims who had died beside him and the ones that he himself had killed. He was marked with their blood, and its fading warmth brought only a deeper immersion into the memories and the anger that fueled his pounding fist.
And still these iron words drifted over him, serpentine and alive in their unspoken power, telling him that only his labor would set things right again. Only his most holy work might set him free.
He could feel the eyes of the others upon him as if it were happening now, and sensed even the eyes of the men that stared down at their own feet, some bare and some clad only in meager paper slippers that couldn't keep out the slightest of chills. They burned into him like cattle prods, these starving gazes, but when they met his own the fervor seemed to melt away, leaving only a dull, flat surface of unburnished metal in their stares. They would turn back to their trowels and hack at the cold brown earth, or simply stare back, a look of breaking down and the loss of sanity etched upon them.
These were the forgotten men, the perpetually anonymous. They were alive, and yet they were so close to death that it hovered on their shoulder, sucking them of blood and passion, leeching away their will to battle against it. Their bodies were fragile and impossible to believe in their fineness, until one looked down and saw his own labor-wracked frame, shaking with weakness, a belly either distended with hunger or sunken as the cells ate themselves to survive, with spidery limbs that were so unbearably thin and knobby, sticking out at odd-looking angles. It was these men, the ones that all looked the same with their bald heads and flimsy uniforms, that he had joined, and he had never truly left.
He rose with all of them when the bells rang in the morning, and ate the paltry food that they were given as they stood together in a queue that stretched the length of the camp, twisting between the wooden-framed buildings and ending just short of one of the many barbed-wire fences. They would sometimes hold his hand, and partake in its youthful warmth, or sigh when they found that it no longer retained it. He was a small and slender version of each man that looked down into his uplifted face, radiating the sky in that white oval, and, here and there when he thought it was safe, giving off a bit of his own warm glow.
The younger men watched him with a faded longing, a desire to hold this boy as they might hold their younger brothers had they not already been entrusted to the rocky fingers of the soil. They often hated him for his ardor, and his apparent beauty, and the way that he was somehow managed to survive when so many of his tiny brethren had passed, their youth a token of weakness tied around their tiny throats. Others loved him for all these reasons, while most cared for him in neither way, and he became just one more narrow body on the floor of the quarters, taking up space and food but giving them warmth in the winter.
As the men and boys saw in him their cousins and brothers, the older men saw their own sons in the way he held his head, and the way he tried not to cry lest he look like a child. Some told him stories in whispered voices that could be heard only by the boy. They spoke in languages that he had never heard, and with accents he only barely remembered, but they went on until their haggard throats had been worn thin and they fell asleep in their cots, exhausted. Others turned away at the sight of the boy, and wept at the thought of what might have been. Had there been women with them, they too would have likened the boy to their own, and thrust their arms out to him, in the hopes that clinging onto this frail, light-haired child may let them absorb his youthful gentility and remember it, until the day when they might feel the slight, bony bodies of their own against their breasts again.
But he heard none of them, neither their loving words nor their hating ones, and could not recall the events in any of their tales. He did not feel the gentle hands of one particular old man, who cradled him when he'd been beaten, and heard nothing of the voices of the dying as they cried out in the night, unless he thought one of them might be a voice that he might recognize, and he would then lay stock still, shivering against the wooden plank beneath him.
He heard only his mother's voice and saw only her face, thin and sobbing, an insipid mockery of what it had once been, and he imagined what she might have been instead.
Before it had all began, she had been a lovely woman. She spoke in hushed tones when only he was there, and never any louder when she addressed a whole room. She wore her red hair long but swept it up and pinned it into place, so he never saw it unless she was lying down to sleep, and it would sweep around her shoulders like a fan, or a dancer's skirts, or willow branches in the midst of a storm. Her dresses were always red, the color of cherries, and soft beneath his fingertips when he walked beside her on the streets or shopped at her side in the market before such a thing was outlawed. When his father would tease her, and tell her that the people in the town were talking about her roaring clothes again, she would smile and push him away, her laughter ringing gently before being carried away.
When he slept lightly or woke with a frightened start, she would take him on her lap and hold him thus, stroking back his shock of pale locks and watching in wonder the rapidly shifting waters in the depths of her only child's eyes, letting her quiet voice lull the boy back into his lost slumber. He was her son, and the solitary blossom of her womb, her only treasured item in all the world, even as he was torn from her arms and she was stomped into the soil forever, screaming out helplessly for her wounded boy.
He had watched in his childish agony as the dress, as red and lush as the blood that stained her shoulder and marred by the ugly yellow badge that had once been a symbol of faith, was stripped from her body by uncaring hands and tossed aside. But still she screamed, wanting only her child, uncaring of her nudity and the bareness of her white skin, even as strangers took the chance to chortle at her frenzy. Around her, other women cried quietly into their hands so their little ones might not know the truth of what was so soon to be their fates, but his soft-spoken mother had taken her last breath and made the most horrible and stabbing sound that she could muster, piercing the twilight with a mother's laments.
The bullet passed through him, as it was meant to do, and into the woman's exposed body. She had fallen backward and into the pit, and he was juggled loose from her arms to fall on the warm corpse of another, her dying child shedding tears in the crook of her throat. He lay there, too frightened to move, until he felt the earth begin to close in around him, and he rose his hands up to make a pocket of air until the voices from above were gone, and he crawled out and into the brush, his bloody wound unnoticed. In his mind, his sweet mother had never landed, and fell forever toward a light beneath her that was as red as her skirts and as white as his pale hair, where he would find her again one day, and ease her fears.
This light was the thing that he sought now, in his autumnal years, as the stiffness and pains of age were gradually catching up to the stiffness and pains of his eternal inner workings. He did not know where he would find her, holding the lamp outward to light the footpath of the weary traveler, but he knew that as he approached his grave, a thing he still fought with all the fear and fervor in his soul, he approached, too, his mother's light.
It was the reason that, later in his youth, when the virtue of early childhood had faded and left in its wake a boy as young and small as ever but nonetheless hardened by the things he had known, when the roaring of furnaces died down sometime after midnight, and the stiff-faced child lay shivering while an old man gently laved a wound upon his cheek, he remembered only her.
And they thought that it couldn't happen again! They thought, in their heart of hearts, that such cruelty had been purged from mankind's utter core, had it ever existed there as more than an anomaly, and it lay only on his outward face, like a headdress twined together from the rotting and broken bodies that were its handiwork, from the wretched minds that were its fuel.
Fools, all of them, with mothers in red dresses who had never fallen into a pit, or seen their children bleed. Such clean-minded, innocent fools, full of naïve hopes and the folly of ignorance.
But, oh, how he wished he were one of them.