(Author's note: So, I watched the first X-men movie again for the first time in what has to be a decade and I can't help be fascinated by the past between Charles and Erik that was hinted. According to the Professor, they met when he was 17, which is a good deal earlier than First class. I wanted to play with the idea of the two men meeting at such a raw time in their lives and how that relationship might have developed.

Also, this chapter and probably others will have mentions of the Holocaust simply because for Erik, it is still very much at the forefront of his mind. And I feel like ignoring it would ignore a great deal of what makes Erik who he is.)

~xXx~January 24th, 1949~xXx~
It was raining, funny how it always seemed to be raining nowadays. The water poured down in great angry sheets, as the wind raged. Most of the other passengers had retreated into the bowels of the ship, doing what they could to ride out the storm. But not him.

He stood on the bow of the ship, shivering as his wasted body was buffeted by the rain and wind. Even years after the war, the ghetto, the camps… food had been scarce. Post-war Germany had been almost as dire of a hell as the war, and the Red Army soldiers were hardly more sympathetic than German soldiers. But none of that mattered now. All that mattered was what rose up from the dark depths of the storm, the very thing that had kept him out in the icy downpour. Even in the darkness, Erik could pick out the pale green of the weathered copper, the folds of her sculpted robes, the torch held aloft.

She was beautiful, even around the grim backdrop, just as he knew she would be. He leaned against the metal railing his eyes glued the figure. He'd seen pictures before, heard the stories as his father told them over dinner of a land across the ocean, far from the old wars, of a land where capitalism, not Imperialism, was the driving power. Where a man could make his own way, regardless of the circumstances in which he was born. Where there were no Nuremberg laws. The boy had listened, but with the same detachment as he had about fairytales told to himself and his sister as they fell asleep. America sounded just as fantastic to his young ears.

And now he was knocking at her proverbial gates.

He should be happy, he supposed. To have escaped the graveyard that was Europe; it was nothing short of a miracle. He should have been happy, ecstatic even. And he probably would have been, if happiness didn't feel as far away as those nighttime stories told by a man who no longer existed. By the man whose very name had been wiped from history. Whose body had disappeared and mingled with the ashes of millions of others, to be carried off by the wind and dispersed over an unfamiliar Polish landscape.

~xXx~
The rain showed no signs of letting up, the raindrops echoing through the empty manor. Not that Charles heard any of it as he slept, no the rain that resonated in his mind came down on a very scene, on a boy huddled under a jacket far too thin for the weather, his face aged by the gauntness of his cheeks and the past horrors reflected in his deep set eyes. Charles had heard about the events in Europe, had seen the newsreels, the pictures, the reports so macabre that it was hard to believe. He'd seen the chimneys, the pits filled with skeletal pale limbs and dark hair. He had struggled to pronounce the alien names that soon became terrifyingly familiar as more and more reports filtered across the Atlantic. Chelmno, Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek… Auschwitz-Birkenau… Charles had seen the pictures, but nothing compared him for the images he'd seen playing behind those haunted eyes. Even staring at the Statue of Liberty, the symbol of hope for countless of travelers, refugees, and immigrants, the boy's mind couldn't escape the barbed wire and roughshod barracks.

Charles mind couldn't escape either. He could feel the whispers of the boy's fellow passengers, their excitement; their nervous anticipation all seemed to congeal into one larger consciousness. But Charles remained with the boy, as though his psyche was a black hole in which Charles couldn't escape. He was at once struck with an overwhelming pity and a powerful fascination for this boy. The boy who dared to brave the ongoing squall to face the symbol of the land he was arriving on. Whose mind, unlike so many nearby, was filled not with plans, but with images, with the only proof that he had once been human, rather than a reminder of atrocity. It was strange, and almost overwhelming to be so immediately immersed in such immense memories.

There was only one new thought that Charles could latch onto, a single name that repeated in the boy's mind in a sharp staccato. It wasn't his name. Charles was sure of that. And yet the boy repeated it so much, his lips forming around the words as though they were trying to memorize the feel of them, so that they didn't feel foreign when he needed them. So that they sounded as though they had been with him his entire life. Charles watched his trembling lips repeat themselves, though the sound of the storm, but it was the look in his eyes that caught the telepath's attention. There was a determination in them, a cold steel that seemed to run through them as he practiced the alias that was meant to distance himself from a past too painful to remember and too important to forget.

And when Charles woke up with a start, it was with the name "Erik Lehnsherr" echoing in his mind and the storm still raging outside.

~xXx~

Next up: Erik needs a hobby... come to think of it so does Charles.