5 Times Erik Woke Alone And 1 Time He Didn't, a x-men: the movie fanfic

Notes -

Unbetaed currently, so any crit. is much appreciated.

Additionally, I took a few liberties with history due to my own ignorance. If you know better than what I've written please let me know and I'll correct it.

Five Times Erik Woke Alone (And One Time He Didn't)

by Orockthro/BalrogsBreath

The guards he killed in his fit of rage are quickly replaced and the new ones don't wear metal helmets. They take him by the shoulders and lead him to his room, a single occupation cell with a hole for a toilet and a square of soiled cloth for a bed. It's the nicest place he's had to sleep in days. Before they lock the cell for the night Herr Doktor comes to see him. He is dressed in his silk shirt and his fine wool jacket and he is smiling as though he forgot Erik just killed two of his men (as though he forgot he just murdered his mother). "Ah, Erik. Settling in, I see. These accommodations, they are not nice. If you cooperate I'll make sure the guards know where you should sleep tomorrow. A real bed, I think, is fitting for a boy like you."

Erik says nothing. Herr Doktor continues and the smile doesn't falter. "Yes, yes, I think so. Gute Nacht!"

The door slams shut and Erik can feel the key sliding into the metal lock. He throws up once Herr Doktor is out of sight. His mother is dead, her blood spilled on Herr Doktor's slanted cement floor and washed down the grated metal drain in the middle of the room. He vomits endlessly that night, though he has nothing substantial to vomit up and only the acidic bile forces its way through his throat. It is horrible, he thinks, to be surrounded by metal that he can't move. If he could, he could escape. (If he could, his mother would still be alive.)

He curls up in the corner farthest away from the latrine hole and wraps the fetid blanket around him despite the smell. But he forces himself to keep his eyes open and watch the door. He will escape, it is just a matter of time.

He dreams that his mother is holding him like she used to when he was a child, before they were rounded up like animals and loaded onto a cattle train. Her arms are soft and round instead of skeletal and she is wearing her favorite soft cotton dress with little printed strawberries. When he wakes and he is alone he lets himself sob. It is the last time he cries free of anger for years.

The liberation teams swarm the place. German soldiers line up like the Jews used to and drop their guns into massive piles while the US and British soldiers watch. Erik, now tall enough to see over Herr Doktor's office window, thinks of piles of shoes and bodies. Herr Doktor is shouting on the telephone when the soldiers break into his office. He shoots the first six that come in and throws his spent pistol at the seventh. "Erik, kill them!"

Erik looks at the pistol on the floor. It's metal and he can feel it in his mind, cold and hard. It's the gun that killed his mother. Erik looks up at Herr Doktor and shakes his head. "Nein, Herr Doktor. Nein."

Herr Doktor roars and heaves his beautiful mahogany desk over. It face cracks down the middle and it sounds like a gun. He walks over the bodies of the soldiers and closes the great metal door. "You stupid child!" Feet clatter through the hallway outside English shouts flood Erik's ears. Herr Doktor pulls something, a switch in his bookcase, and Erik is left alone in the room while the Doktor slips into his escape tunnel. "You are a monster, Erik!" is the last thing he hears the Doktor say for eighteen years.

Erik slips the latch open on the door and watches the British soldiers file in. They shout and say things in clipped voices, their guns searching for whoever killed their fellow men, but they only find Erik. They shout at him, and when that doesn't work they talk softly to him, but Erik doesn't know what they say. He doesn't need to know English to understand their look of horror when they see the experimentation room. The knives, Herr Doktor's most recent obsession, had never been put away and Erik still wore the leather cuffs on his too-thin wrists. They take him by the hand and lead him out of the camp.

There is an interpreter there who asks if he has any family. He shakes his head. The other camp refugees refuse to go near him, whispering things like, "the Doktor's pet," and, "Nazi child." The interpreter, an American soldier with black hair and black eyes, shoes him away, saying, "go on, go on. You're free now," in badly accented German.

Free. Erik rolls the word in his mind. Free from the Nazis, free from Herr Doktor. Erik did not kid himself. Even if all the camps were liberated and the Nazis all destroyed Herr Doktor would find him, somehow. He vomits into the snow. He hears shouting and someone kicks snow over his sick. A rough hand grabs the back of his neck and he is shepherded into a tent. Separating the sick from the well, the strong from the weak. There is a pile of shoes by the door of the tent and Erik begins to scream. English is shouted at him, harsh and foreign, and finally the black eyed interpreter grabs him by the face and says, "shut up, kid! Shut up! For god's sake, we're not going to hurt you!"

Erik drops to the ground and lets a nurse stick a thermometer into his mouth. He falls asleep on a pile of someone else's clothes on the floor and when he wakes the interpreter and the American soldiers are gone. He cuts the leather cuffs off his arms with a bone saw and steals a pair of shoes. He runs hard and fast. (He runs so fast no one will ever catch him again.)

Erik tries not to remember. His mother's full name, her birthday, her favorite color; his father's favorite cologne, the way he laughed, the way he made his mother smile. He forces the memories away and instead remembers Herr Doktor. He commits everything to memory, repeating it over and over again until it becomes what he breaths and eats.

He is Erik. Herr Doktor killed his mother. Herr Doktor made him a monster. Erik will kill Herr Doktor.

He steals wallets and purses and becomes acquaintances with the black market merchants who don't ask questions when he wants cash for a strand of pearls. Stealing is easy: a flick here and a tap there and the gold and silver dances off its owners into his palms. All he needs to do is to feel the weight of the metal in his mind and it becomes his.

Erik sells everything he steals (he never sells the riechmark) and buys train tickets and bus tickets to where ever he has heard a rumor about Nazis in hiding. It's a good living and he hardly ever goes hungry. The Nazis he finds are never Herr Doktor. They're too-fat bureaucrats who never set foot in the field, never killed anyone in cold blood, never did anything but sign papers and eat chocolate.

Erik kills them all, slowly.

When the deed is done he steals more gold, buys another train ticket, and continues on. There are countless Nazis. Eventually, one of them will be Herr Doktor.

He continues this pattern until he forgets how old he is, how many days or months or years its been since he started running. He falls asleep in abandoned warehouses and under bridge in the beginning. When he starts to accumulate wealth from his thieving he invests and he starts falling asleep in hotels with beds instead.

He wakes alone.

He is Erik. Herr Doktor killed his mother. Herr Doktor made him a monster. Erik will kill Herr Doktor.

He is caught by the French police. He'd been careless and over confident, stealing in broad daylight in the wealthier communities. He'd been studying languages everywhere he went, talking with whomever would let him speak and flirting with older women who enjoyed correcting his grammar.

His jailor takes one look at his arm and the numbers marked there forever and drives him to his home outside of Bourdaux. They burn the arrest record in the fireplace and the old man spends the evening teaching Erik as much French as he can manage.

They don't talk about Nazis or death camps or tattoos. They have wine and bread and for the first time in years Erik feels content. The old man lets him sleep on the sofa in front of the fire. "Stay as long as you want, child," he says, first in French, then in German, and then in Yiddish.

Erik falls asleep the crackle of the fireplace. When he wakes, to the screams of his dreams, soft morning light is just starting to peak through the window. He leaves all his stolen jewelry on the table, takes a round of cheese, and leaves. He promises himself to look the old man up after he's killed Herr Doktor. (Years later he returns to the house to find the old man long dead.)

Herr Doktor, Schmitt, and now Shaw. He's been collecting many names. Charles Xavier, still damp and shivering slightly after diving into the ocean to pull him off the submarine, tells him that the man he's looking for is the man they're looking for too. It seems too unlikely, both of them mutants, both of them looking for the man who destroyed him.

But then Charles tells him it's not 'them' as in he and his sister (who is also a mutant) but 'them' as in the CIA and the United States Government. Erik nearly walks away right there, nearly drops everything and dives back off the boat. But Charles has his wrist in his hands before he can even twitch towards the deck and whispers gently into his mind, don't, my friend. Don't. I don't like being this involved with the government either. But we need them right now. This might be the only way.

Erik rips his arm away. They are alone in a tiny crew cabin the CIA agent Moria secured for them. The lighting is poor and the bobbing of the ship on the ocean would have made Erik ill if it weren't for the comforting feeling of steel surrounding him. The numbers on his forearm tingle from Charles' touch, a phantom pain he knows isn't real. "Do not invade my mind," he hisses. The warm presence trickles away leaving his head feeling empty, missing something he never knew existed.

Charles holds his hands up in a mockery of surrender, "I'm sorry, my friend," he says. As if they were friends. "I will not go where I'm not wanted, but I hear what I hear when a man thinks as… loudly as you do." A pause. "And I hope that maybe one day we will be friends."

Erik ignores the comment. He does not have time for friends, not while Herr Doktor is alive. Charles' hair is stringy and too long, hanging wet into his blue eyes. It might be fashionable even, when dry, but it was hardly a serviceable cut for a war. And a war is exactly what they'll be going into. "You do know what Herr… What Shaw is capable of? This will not be as easy as you think. I spent years tracking him, and now he's lost again!"

The stringy hair flops as Charles nods too enthusiastically. "I know, it will be a long path. But," he grins, and Erik can't help but look at his teeth, "you've never had a telepath on your side before." Charles springs to his feet with a young ease that, exhausted, Erik can't think of replicating. He hasn't felt that young in years. "Come on," Charles is saying as he yanks open the oval crew door, "I think Moira should hear what you have to say about Shaw."

Erik watches him place one bare foot over the threshold, pause, and turn back to face him. "Aren't you coming?" Charles has an insufferable grin plastered on his damp face.

Erik crosses his arms over his chest. "Give me one good reason to spill my secrets to the American government, friend." Even Erik admits, as quietly as he can in his mind, that he is being a little cruel. Technically speaking this man saved his life. Technically speaking this man also allowed Herr Doktor to escape once again, so Erik doesn't feel so bad in being a little bitting.

Charles turns to face him completely. His left foot remains inside the room, the right poised on the deck outside. Erik can feel the pull of the metal in his shirt, his pants, his shoes; he can feel the indecision. "Because if you don't come with me you'll be alone again. Erik, we can do this," and damn the man if he didn't sound convincing. "We can stop Shaw and we can make the world a safer place to live. But we can't do it alone, not yet."

Erik says nothing. Charles says, "Please?"

They walk through the hatchway and sit down with the CIA. Erik tells them everything he knows about Herr Doktor (Shaw, he corrects in his mind) and his pattern of movements, his high spending and his need to buy hand tailored suits wherever he went, about the two others Shaw had with him this time, about his interactions with other surviving Nazis.

Erik falls asleep sitting next to his door that night in a CIA holding facility. He keeps his boots on and his knife (they took his gun) in his hand. When he wakes up and he is in the same place, his room untampered with and his lock still in place, he wonders if Charles isn't right after all.

Shaw is dead. Herr Doktor is dead. The man who killed his mother is dead. His corpse is on the sand, discarded like the unwanted bodies of his people, like trash.

Erik wants to feel it, to feel the triumph, but all he can think about is the thrum of metal against his mind, the pulse of a thousands missiles turning away from humans and towards a handful of mutants on a beach. "Tell me I'm wrong," he says to Charles, and god above if he doesn't wish Charles could. But the truth is the truth and those missiles are being launched and nothing Moira says on the radio will stop them.

But Erik can. He holds his hand up and catches them like flies in a net. They vibrate against his call, wanting to explode, to maim, to damage. He turns them slowly so they face the ships they were launched from. It's child's play compared to what Charles had him doing earlier. The metal of the missiles begs to do his will.

Charles is pleading with him, begging Erik to let them live, "They're just following orders!" But Erik has been at the mercy of men, fine men with families and children and wives, who were just following orders. And he has killed dozens of them. What is a few hundred more to add to his list. It is a weak argument from a telepath. A telepath, Erik realizes, who can no longer read his thoughts.

Erik tears the helmet off and lets it drop like lead in the sand. "Just following orders? Do you hear yourself, Charles? It doesn't matter!"

Charles looks at him, really looks, and Erik feels as helpless as he did the night the telepath plucked him from the ocean. Charles looks up at him. His eyes are tired, Erik thinks, with dark bags under them that shouldn't be there. "I know," he says. "I know it doesn't matter. What's been done to you was wrong, so wrong, my friend." Erik is no longer sure if Charles is speaking aloud or not. He feels as if the world has melted away and only Charles and the missiles are left in it. "I wish I could have been there for you when you were young. I wish men like Shaw didn't ever have to exist. But they do, and we need to stop them because we're the only people who can. We need to protect ourselves, but we also need to protect these people, these humans."

The metal throbs in his mind. So much potential, so much death, is at the tip of his fingers. "How can we protect them when they are the ones who want our deaths?"

"I don't know." Charles drops to the sand, his legs tucked under him like a child. "All I know is that killing them, like this, is wrong. This is what Shaw would do. You aren't Shaw. You are so, so much more."

Erik lets the missiles fall into the ocean. The humans don't fire again and Moira's message of, "for god's sake, there are children here!" finally gets through.

Erik doesn't know what happens next. He drops to the sand with Charles and lets himself lean in to the man. His body hurts in places he's never hurt before, but more than that, he doesn't know how to process the end of his quest. Shaw is dead. Erik closes his eyes and lets himself drift away, listening to the harried sounds of English voices.

When he wakes he is tucked into a bed. He can feel a bandage on his forehead from the cut glass and there is an IV taped to his hand. He can't feel the presence of drugs in his system, but he rips the contraption out anyhow. There is a rustling beside him and he opens his eyes to the bright light of a midday afternoon. Charles is curled up in the bed beside him, young and healthy.

Erik lets himself drift back to sleep. Charles was right after all; he was not alone.