Arbeit Macht Frei
By: Tangle
Disclaimer: All your base are not belong to us.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Between the panels of Weapon X #5
~~~
One month, one week, four and a half days she had been here--one of the originals in this hellhole. Gassed unconscious and loaded up on the first of many transports to come. Marked on arrival and thrown in a decaying barracks with the two dozen other people she had shown up with. People she had never seen before and with whom she had only one thing in common. They were all mutants.
But she was one of the lucky ones--she survived the first week. Even luckier--it was discovered that she had a medical degree. They weren't going to waste one of their own treating the mutant terrorists so they pulled her from the work fields and stuck her in the aid tent. There she stayed for the days to come, the weeks to come, the months to come. She treated everything from broken limbs to malnutrition to suicide attempts. More often than not, she lost her patients.
Like today. Like now. Her feet dragging, Cecilia Reyes made her way outside. It wasn't a walk so much as a continuous fall, occasionally broken by the sudden appearance of her feet beneath her. She sighed deeply, letting her back hit the ever-crumbling wall as she slid down to the dirt and rocked back on her heels. That one should have been dead on arrival but he was only a kid, sixteen at the most. And tough-as-nails Cecilia didn't have the heart to tell the nine-year-old with him that her brother wasn't going to make it. After over a month of this, one would have thought she'd have hardened to it but seeing a kid with his arms slashed open, wrist to elbow, would beak her heart every time. And just like this one, they never pulled through.
Barring that there were no more emergencies in the next fifteen minutes, Cecilia was going to take a break. Her heart was racing, her limbs were shaking, and there was blood splattered across her clothes--none of it hers. She had just pulled a straight thirty-eight hours and if she didn't sit down for a moment she was going to collapse. This sort of thing always happened when a new load showed up, it took at least a week for their bodies to even start to adjust. And rumor had it that another transport had gotten in just this morning.
"Get your bladdy hands off Eenie, twee gat jakkals(1)!"
The words registered. The accent registered. The voice registered . . . she knew that voice. It wasn't one she had heard recently but she still remembered it. Cecilia caught her fifth wind of the day and pulled herself to her feet, forcing her way towards a growing crowd. Someone in uniform was stalking away, leaving a blue man standing alone in the center of the group. A blue man who had some sort of creature in one hand and an identical one wrapped around his waist. Cecilia made her way through the sea of people until she stood at his side. A smile begged to stretch across her face but all the muscles there had learned to save their energy for communicating. So she settled for landing a hand on his shoulder, startling the shit out of him. "You know, Maggot," she told him, her grin in her voice instead of on her face. "I never did figure out how you told those things apart."
To his credit, Maggot recovered quickly. "Ag, Cecilia, you know I just use whichever name comes to mind. And they're me girls, not . . ." He shuddered dramatically, "things."
"Yeah! So don't call 'em things! They're his girls." Cecilia stared in astonishment as one of the small children in the crowd stepped forward to stand beside Maggot, his chubby arms folded over his chest as he faced Cecilia. The young face was scrunched into something that was a cross between a scowl and a pout and something else utterly laughable. Looked like the South African man had found himself a friend. Good for him--it was more than she could say for herself.
With a bit of a sigh, Cecilia knelt down to stare the little boy straight in the face. She was too drained, both physically and emotionally, to deal with put-out brats right now. "I know that," she told him, her voice laden with exhaustion. "I worked with him for a long time. His 'girls' ate my stuff faster than I could replace it." She glared pointedly at Maggot who smirked and winked at her. The underwear drawer incident obviously had yet to leave his memory. But Cecilia wasn't finished speaking. Once her mouth got going, trying to stop it was like sticking a fly in front of a locomotive. "And besides," she added. "I just pulled a thirty-eight hour shift. I'm going to call them whatever I want to call them. Comprendes?"
Wide-eyed, the kid nodded and stepped back into the crowd.
"If you're done terrorizing the basie(2)," Maggot told her, his tone more than condescending. "Mind telling me what exactly is going on?"
She glared at him, noticing out of the corner of her eye that the crowd dispersed as they lowered their voices. "Nice to see you too," she muttered. Truthfully, though, she was happy to see someone she knew. Everyone in this place had been an utter stranger to her. The only other mutants she had ever met were the X-Men and like hell they were ever going to get themselves caught. She hadn't even seen any of them since she left--with the exception of Hank, but that was a different story entirely. "When'd you get here?"
As the crowd left, Maggot's attitude changed. He no longer held up his ever-cheerful front. "Ag, you know I missed you, doll. Been a long time, hasn't it?" He sighed, staring over her head at the children trying to play some improvised game. "This is all deurmekaar(3). Windgats(4) got us here this morning. Bit of a shock to all of us, especially the pikkies(5). I mean, look at them." She looked. "Don't deserve this. None of us do, but them least of all. Terrorists my blooming arse."
"We live as best we can. Once you're used to it, you're used to it," she assured him, "But . . ." There was always a but. There was an exception to everything in a place like this except the certainty that death was sooner rather than later. "But you've always got it looming over your head that today could just be the last. Like take me for example. I'm camp doctor, that keeps me immune. But someday someone's going to come whose better than I am and I'll have outlived my usefulness. It's only a matter of time."
He shook his head. "Not for me, doll." Cecilia was confused until he opened his hand and showed her his palm, and the red 'M' inscribed there. "I last a week. Maybe."
Red meant death, everyone knew that. It meant you had days to live at most. Red meant useless. Green was higher, a worker. Going to survive for a while longer unless you screwed up too many times. Blue was the highest, the luckiest. It meant you were specalized in something helpful--like Cecilia herself was. Hers had been green, made blue when she was made doctor. But Maggot was red. "I-" The normally well-spoken Puerto Rican was at a loss for words. "I have to get back to work," she finally stammered out. "Before they come looking for me. See you around."
And without so much as a proper good-bye, Cecilia fairly fled back to the relative safety of the medical tent. Here she was in control. Here those anti-mutant Neo Nazis couldn't boss her around. Nazis, that's all they were. Nazis who had snatched her from her life and plopped her down in the middle of a bad World War Two movie where friends were found and lost in a heartbeat. They kidnapped. They rounded up. They sorted through, rooted out, murdered, enslaved, and experimented to their hearts' content. There was only one missing thing she could find that would grant them their own Auschwitz and that was a sign over the gate.
Arbeit Macht Frei
~~~ End ~~~
1) twee gat jakkals-- too odd to translate. An insult.
2) basie-- literally "Big little man". Basically just a way of referring to a male child
3) deurmekaar-- crazy. Messed up. That sort of thing
4) windgats-- another insult.
5) pikkies-- children.