August, 2006 - October, 2014

In a match against Slovakia in 2006, Erik seriously injured his back. The medics told him to start taking it easy. They told him he was only twenty-nine and still fighting fit. They demanded that he get plenty of bed rest, and to try and avoid the hard painkillers. If he could do that, then there would be hope for him yet.

He broke the wrist of his dominant hand against Switzerland in 2008. The medic pulled him aside and diligently wrapped up the useless appendage. He warned Erik that at his age, thirty-one, that he would probably be feeling this injury for many years to come.

In 2009, against Austria, he broke his ankle. The team gave him sympathetic side eyes, and Erik couldn't help but feel that the doc was leading him to the back of the building to put a bullet between his eyes. Instead, he told Erik that his days were soon going to be numbered if he didn't pull back on the throttle. Erik had shaken his head like a mangy mutt. He was only thirty-two, goddamn it.

2011, the twin towers collapsed, and Erik couldn't get hold of Magda. The match against Finland is a dull roar out in the rink compared to the hurricane of emotions Erik can feel in his chest, and his broken collar-bone protests his panicked, heavy breathing. He cried when she finally answered. (And when he was finally able to calm himself down, he indignantly told her that he was a thirty-four-year-old man and that he shouldn't be crying. Her answering sigh over a placating word should have been a warning, even then.)

And in 2015, a match that he had been warring against his beloved and estranged wife for too many years, finally ended in divorce papers and a broken heart. Erik's back spasmed as he bent over the too-small desk to reread the sheaf of papers. His wrist twinged as he wrote out his name. His ankle ached as he jounced his legs up and down in anxiousness. His collar-bone protested when he folded his arms across his chest a tad too tightly.

He was thirty-seven, but he felt five all over again.

She wanted the twins. Pietro, with his silver hair down to his familiarly broad shoulders and Americanized name of Peter, popped his gum and stared at his nails by her left side. He bopped his head up and down to whatever music was being filtered through his earbuds. Wanda, who wore fingerless gloves and a vacant expression, sat silently on her mother's right. She didn't like to make eye contact or to be touched; she rocked back and forth in her seat.

They both called him Erik.

He couldn't help but feel incredibly guilty at the crude picture he had unknowingly painted with his own hand. So, when Magda demanded custody, he didn't fight her.

Several months into 2015, Erik furiously fucked Magda once last time.

The divorce was official a week later.

Magda said she may have met someone else. She was teaching, finally, at an American school. They had met there. His name was George Odekirk, she thought it was becoming serious, and they were now looking for a place together.

She tossed aside a black turtleneck that wasn't hers and thought that she finally had the last of her belongings packed up. She was kind enough to allow him one last peck on the lips.

The twins were visiting Magda's family in Poland when they received a call from George: there was faulty wiring in the apartment. It was an accident. She tried to get to the third floor, an ineffective effort to save a scared child, but they didn't make it. She didn't make it.

Erik was alone in his empty house. He had been called into the office that morning and was formally released from his contract with Germany's National Hockey League. The infamous incident with LaFlamme earlier that month was the final straw, and behavior like his own was no longer going to be tolerated.

So, Erik had gone back to his vacant home and drank and drank until he was violently sick to his stomach. Then he drank some more. His cell phone had rang and rang during his drunken episode. He had finally managed to grab it up, and only then realized he had missed eleven calls. He answered it on the next one. He accepted the charges when asked if he would like to do so.

An American officer wanted to know if he was Erik Lehnsherr, father to Pietro and Wanda Lehnsherr, and ex-husband to Magda Lehnsher, née Maximoff.

"I am," he slurred in his confusion.

He listened to what the officer was carefully trying to tell him: an accidental fire. An unknown pregnancy (a fact the officer had thought Erik should know, in case he had been the father. It didn't help the situation in the slightest.) She tried to save a child. They perished in the flames, along with one other. He needed Erik stateside; the twins' custody situation needed to be discussed.

Erik let the cell slip from his hand in his numbness.

He cried and cried and cried until he couldn't breathe, and darkness blissfully overtook him.

TBC...