Excerpt of a letter from Jean Grey-Summers to Scott Summers:
"To even begin to tell you about my life," Sir Erich shifted in his seat, "I must tell you about the city of Frankfurt, in Germany, where I was born, and more specifically, about the Judengasse. It means 'Jews' Alley'. It was a single narrow street, lined with houses, and it was the only area of Frankfurt where Jews were permitted to reside—and even then, only on sufferance. It had been established some five centuries before. It was only ever intended to house perhaps a thousand people, but when I was born, over three times that many lived there, crammed in cheek-to-jowl.
"We were locked in at night, and during the day on every Sunday and every Christian Holy Day—as if we were animals in a single overcrowded cage. You can imagine how devastating disease and fire were, under such conditions.
"We were not people—we were Jews. We could only practice a handful of professions. We were made to wear yellow rings on our clothing to identify ourselves. Only a certain number of marriages among Jews were permitted per year, lest we become too numerous.
"It was not until 1864—not even a quarter of a century ago, that Jews were granted the rights of full citizenship in Frankfurt, despite the many generations who lived and worked and contributed to the society over the centuries.
"In such a closely knit community, everyone knows each other—everyone is related to each other. Kitty and I are related, as a matter of fact—cousins of some degree or other. Second or third, once removed, or perhaps twice. Her paternal grandfather's mother was my father's sister, if I recall correctly.
"It was in the Judengasse that I was born, and lived until I was twenty-three. I was the eldest of four; I had a brother and two sisters. We lost our father when I was twelve. I was there when they brought him home. He had an errand to run outside of the Alley, in the rougher part of town. It was an incident like one of those you have experienced here, Kitty—."
"Incidents, Kitty?" asked the Professor.
"Um. Yes. I'll tell you later." she winced.
"So you don't tell him everything…It was an incident that might have been no more than a casual occurrence. A group of young ruffians and lay-a-bouts began to harass him. One of them picked up a stone, and threw it at him. By chance, it struck him on the temple—the thinnest and most fragile part of the skull—and it killed him. His killer was no more than four or five years older than I was.
"Times were hard for us, that first year after he died—of course it was terrible on a personal level, but as a family we suffered deprivation and poverty. My father's mother lived with the four of us, and our mother took in washing.
"Things got better once I began to come into my powers—although I didn't know them for what they were, at the time. Do you know what I did to help support my family? I became a muckraker. Not in the journalistic sense, but literally. I raked through muck, through drains and sewage, to find anything of value that might have been lost or thrown away. I was very good at it because I could sense where something metallic was concealed. After a while, I learned to distinguish between the different types of metal—if the something I sought was a rusty nail or a silver spoon. Eventually, I learned how to call it to my hand. I was very successful at my trade.
"Successful enough that I could afford to get married. Her name was Magda. She was seventeen and I was nineteen when we married—that was normal, in our community. I had known her all my life. She—you might not have called her lovely, but I found her so. Perhaps it's only the rosy memories of a man who is getting old, but it seemed as if we had what all the world searches for—true love and happiness within our marriage. We still lived with my family. We couldn't afford not to! Three thousand souls crammed in together… It worked, though. She got along with my mother, she was a sister to my sisters. About a year after our marriage, we had a child. My daughter, Anya. She was—a joy.
"We were doing so well financially, that three years later, I had begun to further my education. It only made sense for me to study metallurgy and the sciences. The university admitted me despite my race, and two days a week, I dressed in my best clothes, after I washed and scrubbed any trace of muck from myself, so that even the most acute nose wouldn't have smelled it, and went off to classes.
"One day, I stayed so late, talking with one of my professors, that it began to grow dark. I couldn't possibly have made it back before the Judengasse gates were locked for the night, so my teacher generously offered to let me stay with him. I woke in the middle of the night to the cries of 'Fire!', and—there was a sullen orange glow over the Alley.
"I ran across Frankfurt. I was desperate. I reached the gate nearest to my home—and ripped it apart with my powers. I could have sworn I heard my daughter screaming.
"It is worth mentioning that only that morning, Magda had told me we were going to bring our second child into the world.
"Flying metal from that gate killed three people. When they came to take hold of me for those deaths—while I stood there, among the ashes of all the people in the world that I loved, mother, sisters, brother, wife and child—I lost control of my powers.
"I don't know how many of them I killed. I don't know if they were Jews or Gentiles. I wasn't entirely sane for a long time after that.
"Over the next twenty years, I kept busy. I made a great deal of money, and then doubled it, quadrupled it. I learned from Darwin what I was—what we are. I met Charles, here—and eventually forged a new purpose in life: to ensure the future of the Evolved—to see to it that we do not become as subjugated as my other race…
"For depend upon it, the Evolved will be even less tolerated than the Jews. They will want to do more than control us—they will want to obliterate us. I will not let that happen in my lifetime.
"Charles and I agree that must not be allowed to happen. We disagree on how we ought to prevent it. Charles is a peace-maker, a negotiator—."
"Guilty as charged." commented Professor Xavier.
"He would have us show the Sapient how useful we can be, how they will benefit from having us among them. I believe peace cannot come about between our kind and theirs until we are the ones in power. People can accept it when their superiors rule them—they will never agree to hire them out like day-laborers, to perform miracles on demand."
"I'm not about to get into this again—not now, at any rate." remarked the Professor, mildly.
"But one area where we are completely in agreement is the need to protect, educate, and train the young Exalted who come in greater numbers every year. To that end, I adopted Kitty."
"I'm sorry, but I'm not following you." Kitty said. "You did try to kill me, the first time we met."
"I have been profoundly changed ever since." Sir Erich said. "Because when I looked at you, lying there unconscious, I saw Anya. Never mind that you were ten years older than she ever lived to be. I was shocked by what I had done. I had become someone I did not recognize. I gathered you up in my arm, and wept for the first time in years. Can you forgive me?"
"For that? I already did, really." she replied. "I had noticed that you tend to act paternally toward me, but—the adoption came out of nowhere."
"Not from my point of view. I—kept an eye on you, over the past five years. I watched your progress, your academic development—tracked your background. After last winter—."
"Sir Erich spent five months at Xavier House, last fall and winter, recuperating." I explained for Erik's benefit. "A woman stabbed him with a glass dagger. I had to take out several feet of mangled intestine and sew him back together."
"Please, Jean! Kitty, I realized that I had come to regard you as I would my Anya. I would have been proud if she had become a young woman like you—brave, loyal, intelligent, and trustworthy. So I did—what I did. I didn't want to say anything about it until it was complete—in case it fell through for some reason. That was why I kept it a secret."
Kitty's expression was positively mulish.
Erik coughed, and said, "In my teens, I had a mentor, who I regarded as my father. If he had come to me one day, and said, 'You are my son now, by law. I have adopted you', I would have—it would be a wonderful thing, to be so—wanted."
She looked stricken. "Ah—but you are—I mean, you should have been. I'm not rejecting him, it's just that—my father signed me away. He signed me away, twice. I—I've always hoped, always wanted things to go back to the way they were before."
"He signed you over to those who truly valued you and wanted you." said Auroré. "And things never do go back to the way they were before. Even if they could, you could not. Would you want to cut off all the parts of you that no longer fit into your old life, and into the mould they wanted to cast you in? You would not be a dancer, nor a mathematician. You would never have traveled to Japan, and learned the ways of the Ninja. Where would your sword and your fighting skills fit into your old life, or into the life of the wife and mother you would have been?"
"They wouldn't." she sighed. "But how does adopting me fit into the need to educate other Evolved?"
"It's rather complicated." said Sir Erich. "Charles and I—we're not young men. I'm well enough for my age, but Charles was so ill a year and a half ago that he assigned me as alternate guardian for every Evolved underage in his school. Charles isn't married and has no son. Neither do I, but I can leave my money and property where and as I like. I'm a jumped-up parvenu Jew banker.
"Charles, on the other hand, lives on land his family has owned since 1067, and everything he owns in this world is entailed away. Unless he marries (and soon) and gets himself an heir, his closest relative and heir is a dreadful cousin who will turn all of you out of Xavier House before you can sneeze.
"My plan is this: I adopted Kitty, as my principal heir, but much of the property and money will be held under a particular trust—for the school, should it need to relocate. You'll be one of the administrators of that trust. I chose you because you can be trusted, because I would like to see my lands go to someone who is kin to me, in more ways than one—and because I love you as if you were my daughter."
"That's a big responsibility. That's a huge responsibility! But I can understand this—I can even agree with it—where before, it all just seemed so—random. Boom! I've adopted you! I really don't know how I feel about it right now. I don't think I can just say, I love you, out of nowhere."
"I understand." Sir Erich said.
"This is precisely what I was hoping to accomplish," smiled the Professor. "That through explaining what we mean and how we feel, honestly and openly, we might come to a better understanding of each other."
TBC…again.
A/N: The information about the Judengasse of Frankfurt comes from their website. Any errors are most probably my own. Certain parts of Sir Erich's history are adapted from the extra features they ran with the Classic X-Men reprint series.
Shout outs: Erik's Girlfriend—I'm writing as fast as I can!
Rozzandmaya: Wow! A review from somebody whose story is on my favorites list. I adore your 'Little Moments That Would Have Changed the Story'. I think that even the most fervent E/C shippers agree that Christine's personality needs to be hauled into the shop for a rebuild—starting with her spine. The X-men were my Charlie's Angels—The X-Women who kicked butt were my role models.
Queen Ame: No! Not Abandoned! Yes, I have the DVD. It's in my laptop right now. So happy…
Ellen: Whoa! Russia! Tell me more!
Sarabelle, SperryDee, and SelenaWolfe: Thank you, thank you, thank you!