Commentary: Ellen
Seated upon his couch rather than at his desk, Erik has a notebook open on one knee and a glass of whiskey propped up on the other. Occasionally he scrawls out a note or reaches to drag over a book or magazine from the disorganized pile on the cushion at his side, but for the most part, he seems to be sitting and thinking.
There is a gentle rap at the outer door to the White King's office, and then the sound of it opening, as Ellen's Pawn escort deposits her back at, really, home base. Today she is wearing black, and black: the fairness of her pale skin is stark against the softness of black linen, and her hair is drawn back with a floral-looking red scrunchie that she is really probably not responsible for. Under her arm she carries a leather-bound book filched from the library, with a thin strip of white paper folded over inside it to serve as a bookmark.
HELLO and welcome to the first commentary I’ve written in over a year. I must start by saying that I am not actually sure what Erik is doing, here. Usually when he’s reading this way in something that isn’t a novel or a paper it’s because he’s researching, so I am inclined to assume that he is researching the asteroid problem. He did this for a long time hoping that some kind of alternate mathematical solution would creep into his head and he could save the world without actually getting directly involved. Actually, at this point I think he was still hoping to find a flaw in the original calculations (a typo’d variable -- anything) that might make the entire thing a null point.
Alas, no dice. I also believe this was around a month before he was arrested, and shortly after the InCi rescued Ellen. He was not getting along with anyone at the time. I do not think he ever found a fit with the Circle, unfortunately, so. Lots of time spent sitting in his office and trying to figure things out on his own. Ellen is wearing a scrunchie. It is oddly 90s in my head. I don’t know if it’s just the scrunchie or the fact that it is a bright red floral scrunchie with an all black background. It is weird how something like that can become a hook. I mean. It is a piece of elastic. That goes in hair.
Right.
Re: the drinking, there was a period where Erik was pretty intensely alcoholic. In the weirdest form of therapy ever, he had a more controlled (and arguably evil) version of himself telepathically copy pasted over his brain. This brought many fun new problems into play, such as far less consideration and sympathy given to people that he might like to kill or maim and a massively magnified version of his existing opinion that the world would be a much better place if everyone would just shut up and do what he says. But it also made drinking frequently and to excess distasteful for him. Also, smoking. He’s tends to go up and down with both of them and uses alcohol in particular to behave sort of like a normal person, but he hasn’t been nearly as bad as he was since before that happened.
Magneto looks up at the knock, blue eyes clear in their study of black linen, and more inevitably, red scrunchy as Ellen enters. Dressed in softer shades of smoky grey over cornflower blue, he looks the part of the professor or businessman more than the international terrorist, and his greeting is mild despite the hour. "Evening."
"Evening," Ellen greets with an inclination of her head, her thumb scraping along the thumb of her book as she lowers it before her. Her gaze flicks over Erik -- his clothes, his nearby pile of materials. "The kitchens here are very odd."
"Oh?" Once his survey of Ellen is complete, he reaches to tug wire-rimmed glasses down the bridge of his nose and leans to set his mostly full glass down on the coffee table. "I haven't spent much time in them. How do you mean?"
"Mr. Eisenberg brought me some form of -- duck thing," Ellen says. She blinks at Erik almost owlishly as she shakes her head. "There were truffles. It was peculiar." Food is a daily new discovery for a woman grown accustomed to prison standard fare. "I am sorry to interrupt," she adds, taking a few steps forward in her sensible flats in a fairly drifty way, directionless except for an intent to come further into the room and away from the door that Luke has closed behind her. Her fingers drum against the leather cover of the book. "I almost think I begin to uncomfortably resemble Ms. Oyama."
Ellen and Yuriko are alike in that they are varying degrees of insane, and so inclined to walk in on him and make random observations that he has to respond to like it is perfectly natural. He has a lot of experience working with crazy people at this point, and while he rarely condescends to them and generally prefers to treat them (and think of them) like normal people, that tends to require that he acts naturally in response to whatever they say or do so as not to make them feel stupid or agitated or whatever. In this case, Ellen has some observations she would like to share about the kitchen. Ooookay! Erik can talk about kitchens. He finds the abstractness of it endearing. That with so much terrible shit always going on, they can still find time to be like, “This refrigerator door opens to left instead of right! How unconventional!” That and the fact that they tend to appreciate him mostly unconditionally.
Despite the fact that she is crazy (and crazier than usual post-prison rescue) she is one of very few “friends” that he actually has and feels comfortable with. Because of her consistency and crazy devotion, I’d hazard to say that she is of more worth to him than most in that respect because of the unfaltering levels of stability and trust that he has come to expect from her. No matter how terrible things are or how stupid he is, Loyal Ellen is always there to reassure him that she believes he will somehow manage to do what is right and necessary.
UNTIL TODAY.
"Ah. Yes. There is some notable departure from..." The peanut butter and jelly lifestyle they were so familiar with before. It goes unsaid, perhaps a little apologetically, and Erik folds his glasses over so that he can drop them next to his whiskey. "You are not interrupting." To the last, he looks her over again and draws in a deep breath, but does not quite allow it to become a sigh.
"Oh. All right." Ellen pauses where she stands, holding herself quite straight with her book tucked against her hip. "Is there anything I can be of help with?" she asks. Who knows what that might be.
"Not really." Glasses and whiskey temporarily disposed of, Erik settles back into the couch and lifts a hand to push his thumb and paired fingers into his closed eyes. "Not unless you can stop the end of the world. How are you feeling?"
"It is not yet time," Ellen says, with a faint crinkle of her brow as she flicks her gaze in a northerly direction. Her frown deepens for a moment's silence, and then she seems to remember the latter half of his words, the part that did not involve the apocalypse in any significant way. "I am all right. I am doing better, I think. It helps that I am not alone all the time."
Despite what some former Brotherhooders seem to think, living alone with Erik is rarely an ideal arrangement. He does not like shopping, for obvious reasons, and does not like cooking, because he is Magneto, and Magneto should not have to cook. He can cook. I believe he did a lot of the cooking when he lived with Magda and from then on, but once he got to where he was living with Charles and they had help to do that sort of thing for them, and then the Brotherhood…well. Having someone else cook for you is certainly preferable, and he had more than enough time to get spoiled. He tends to think of food as a means to an end now, and will eat whatever is fair game. If that means nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for an entire month, oh well.
He made sporadic attempts to offer more variety for a little while, but after Yuriko vanished and Ellen was captured, why bother? This is part of the reason he looks like utter shit a lot of the time, coupled with the fact that he never gets any sleep.
Re: his utter lack of optimism in the face of the apocalypse, there wasn’t a formal plan at this point that he was aware of. He was resigned to the worst and not particularly bothered by it. That is what happens when you think existence and God hate you and it might be better if everyone just died. So. Not a malicious, “I want everyone to die,” at this point, just. Apathy. Everything he’s suffered and fought for might have been for nothing because of a big rock. Great!
He worries about Ellen any time something like what has happened to her happens. Anything that might upset the balance. That she was killing herself with cancer speaks poorly of her mental health, but at the same time, he trusts that if she does feel “wrong” somehow, she will tell him, and they can try to sort it out before she does anything too crazy. He feels responsible for her, and appreciates the Club’s acceptance of her more than they know. The fact that they can actually give her something to do is a huge help, and it makes him feel better knowing that she has something worthwhile to keep herself busy with so that he hasn’t just essentially moved her from one madhouse to another.
"I'm beginning to think that it might be." Ever the optimistic monarch, Erik remains where and how he is for a long moment before he drops his hand, pushes his notebook aside, and gets stiffly to his feet. "I'm glad to hear it."
"I believe there is more yet to the cycle. There has not been nearly enough betrayal and death for Ragnarok," Ellen says very gravely, lifting her chin as she watches him rise.
"I don't know. I've betrayed and killed a fair number in my day." Voice low, Erik stretches and flexes without actually moving much at all, then turns to pace for his desk, where his watch resides slack around a cluster of metal spheres.
Ellen does not immediately speak, watching him move with a thoughtful expression. She shakes her head slightly. "Perhaps the sky will be lit aflame and the seas will boil," she says. "If you expect the end, perhaps it will come. I do not know. I am only lately free of my own mortality and I do not wish to look it in the face again so soon."
He is not usually directly cynical at Ellen. He is a little bitter right now, maybe, about the state of his life (and future.) The things she says do not bother him in that they are crazy and pagan, but they do bother him. Something about her resilient faith in the idea that a religious cycle will save them.
Erik is not an atheist. He is not really a Jew either, or anything else. He (usually) respects God, and certainly believes he exists. He thinks of him as a powerful entity, and a good one (a teacher, a bringer of light, wisdom and understanding) but does not think he is very reliable in the sense that he cannot exactly be expected to do things for you, or in a timely manner. Precisely in the sense that you cannot really expect an enlightening philosophy to rescue you from drowning. He believes God is a god that requires that you go and do things yourself, and if you go and cry to him about not saving the world and letting it be destroyed by a big rock, he will say, “Well I was busy being God. Why didn’t YOU stop it?” and not feel bad in the least, because he’s left everything up to his people. And if his people decide that it would be a good idea to herd another branch of his people into camps and burn them in giant ovens, well that’s their fault for being dickheads then. He’s not going to reach in and pull them apart and set them on in different continents so that they can’t be mean to each other.
Obviously, not actually having come close to the suffering that he has endured, that is just my interpretation of his behavior in the movies based upon what I know of his history. He has some unusual ideas about death as well, but they aren’t really relevant to this so PERHAPS ANOTHER TIME.
With the nearing of the asteroid, though, it’s becoming increasingly clear that God is definitely going to sit back and let the world end if people can’t be bothered to stop it themselves. Why can’t he be the kind of god that reaches in and helps the people he is supposed to love? He’s so passive at times as to be nearly hateful in what he allows. It is difficult for Erik to accept that a being so powerful absolutely refuses to step in and use that power for good when so many people might suffer and die. Again.
He gets angry at Charles Xavier for many of the same reasons.
"My mortality is as familiar to me as my reflection. I fear that turning my back to it now would serve as nothing more than an invitation for it to finally overtake me." Grim in the slack of his jowls and the hooded knit of his brow, Erik lifts the weight of his watch to squint at its face, then sets it back down.
"But I am the hand of death. I hold it in my grasp." Ellen smiles in a brief, sharp flicker, and then turns to cross the room and set her book down on top of the nearest empty flat surface. "Why do you expect the end?"
"We are running out of time to stop it." Erik lingers at the corner of his desk, tired and closed against a nagging touch of frustration. "We do not reside in a world of happy endings."
Ellen tips her head slightly, lips pursing. "I suppose that we do not," she says. "I do not think that I can help. I will pray and perhaps the One-Eyed Lord will show us the way." That is very helpful, Ellen.
I do not really know what there is to expound upon, here. He is being honest. He is depressed. Frustrated. And now is a particularly bad time for her to be placing her faith in a pagan god over him. It isn’t fair to her, really, to have that expectation. She should be allowed to believe whatever she wants. It’s just that normally “whatever she wants” includes a lot on how great he is, which he could really use right now, but here she is off placing her faith in an intangible religious figurehead.
A part of it is that he knows he didn’t go for her soon enough. He left her there to rot. She went crazy. She lost faith. That is what happens. So she is kind of also his latest failure staring him in the face and he is starting to wish she would go away and leave him to his thoughts before he starts thinking too hard about what she must have suffered because of him.
"Perhaps." Tolerance is more forced than natural, and it shows in the eyes of his eyes and the stiff set of his shoulders. He then looks at his desk chair rather than at Ellen, conversationally unhelpful.
Ellen studies him in thoughtful silence for a moment, her head canted to one side and her pale gaze a little on the blank side. She looks away and shifts into motion, pacing lightly across the office with her hands clasped neatly behind her back. "Prayers are worth little to a man of no faith. I am sorry I have nothing else to offer."
"There is no point in having faith in a God that hates and destroys and tortures those who serve Him." Only slightly bitter, Erik cannot suppress a flicker of the deeper anger that threatens to fight its way onto his face. "Not unless it is within the context of having /faith/ that He will be conspicuously absent the day a lifeless rock seals the fate of His tender flock."
"There are fates that even the gods cannot overcome. Patterns in life that none can evade. If the ending comes, it comes and so be it." Ellen has grown bold, her voice edged in ice; she has drawn to her full height with her spine held blade-straight. "But whatever ending is to be ours, whether it comes from a lifeless rock in the sky or the barrel of a plastic gun, we meet it fighting, and we serve our purpose. Hate God if you will."
Erik is angry at Ellen, both for not having faith in him and for assuming that he is faithless, but he is much angrier at God. Again, he perceives him as so passive as to be malicious, and cannot comprehend what lesson there is to learn from having his family taken from him or his children killed or the world destroyed. He has always tried to take something from it, or to find the lesson in it, but I don’t think he ever really could. Nothing beyond how malignant and hateful humanity is as a whole, anyway. Ellen is sort of getting caught in the crossfire here, but he’s angry enough at her and in general that he isn’t interested in pulling his punches.
The fact that she suggests that he hates God just makes him madder. HOW DARE SHE SUGGEST THAT? Can’t she see how hard he tries to appreciate God for what he is despite everything he hasn’t done? Well, no, she can’t, because she is not a telepath. Erik has no investment in the idea of some overarching purpose or destiny for him or anyone else. If you want something done, you must do it yourself.
For a moment, Erik says nothing. His eyes narrow, just slightly, and he watches her, taking in her voice, and her posture. "Forgive me if I am not content to stand idly by in accordance with some divine plan while my people are wiped from the face of the planet. I do not hate God, but I certainly do not trust him."
"I would never ask that." Ellen looks affronted, canting her head again with pale eyes narrowing in turn as she meets his gaze. She speaks with an edge of contempt. "Trust to divine will and do nothing ourselves? No. These are not times for peace, for indolence. In these times, the only path is the warrior's." Ellen unfolds her hands from their neat clasp behind her, and cuts a sharp gesture through the air with both. It is dramatic, as the pass of a sorceress's hands to call up something unseen. "We fight. We wait when we must. We plan. But we do not stand /idle/. That way lies poison, and nothingness, and the darkness of a cage. The battle is our path, our righteousness, and it is in our fate and in our blood and bone. Do you think /I/ would love a god that would cast our people to fade to nothing in the mists?"
Again, there is a delay before Erik speaks. One brow twitches down, creating an awkward angle between itself and the other as he finds himself confronted with the utterly unexpected and unfamiliar. Contempt on Ellen's tongue, directed at him. /Him/. He is not quite sure what to do with it, and can do little more than look severely put out for some sixty or seventy seconds. A lot of seconds basically. Too many. He does not reply, but his eyes say, 'I don't know. Maybe?'
"I am /many/ things, but I am not a fool, please." Ellen inclines her head, almost ironically, and turns partly away from him, her arms folding over her stomach and her gaze dropping to the ground. "I do not expect the hand of God to protect me from anything. To intervene to save my people." She breathes out in a low snort, her breath a quiet rush of frustration. "We /are/ the hand of God, sir. There is no aid but us. No battle but the one we fight. Faith need not make me complacent."
At the same time all of this is in the air, Ellen is arguing with him. ELLEN. His Ellen is condescending him about religion and God. That in itself makes him fairly intensely unhappy, but it also lets the air out of him some. Things are not as they were. Rather than offer him support and asspats, she is telling him he is being stupid, like everyone else. He is not entirely sure of what to do. Some people might start to think that maybe they are wrong at this point.
Not Erik! He is undermined, and betrayed, and alone. NO ONE UNDERSTANDS HIS PAIN. NOT EVEN ELLEN. He really does not know what to do. If this is an isolated incident, it would be a bad move to flounce and show her how flawed he really is. If it is the beginning of a trend, than he may need to re-evaluate her position in his life. That is, if she’s decided to become more independent, he may not be as open with her for fear of her actually somehow using the information or telling someone else or who knows. He may not be able to use her as a crutch the way he has in the past. She may not be interested in being a crutch.
Regardless, it was staggering to see her do something as simple as deny him with body-language. She isn’t really an open person, but he’s always perceived her as open to him, if that makes any sense. Welcoming any gesture or touch or thing he has to say. Past some initial growing pains when she first joined the Brotherhood, he has thought of her as his. Now she is acting as if she belongs to herself. How troubling.
Eventually, his natural response is…to respond naturally. So that is what he does. He isn’t sure where this is headed, but his usual ability to smooth everything over with his iron will isn’t there. Maybe Ellen knows something he doesn’t, but he sincerely doubts it.
Magneto persists in being baffled, if silently so. His jaw works as if against a bitter taste in his mouth, and his eyes trail coolly after her beneath the uneven level of his brows. "What is the point of having any god if he cares not to do anything more than watch?"
"You don't understand." Ellen smiles and glances back at him. "/I/ am what he has done. I. Valkyrie. I carry death and life with me to give as gifts. With my love, you have both at your command, do you not? What more do you ask of him?" She looks away again, and frowns seriously at the wall. "Perhaps I come as curse and blessing both. The favor of a god is never easy to bear."
"No. /You/ don't understand." It is amazing how much quicker Erik is to reply to /that/. "Charming as you are, charming as /any/ of us are, our existence does not outweigh the things I have seen. Some of the things I have /done/. Ellen--" The old mutant breaks off there, too frustrated to dictate what he's even trying to convey. "It's like you have no comprehension."
Ellen tightens the fold of her arms, drawing them closer and higher against her torso, beneath her chest. She says, flatly, starkly, "Perhaps I am only mad."
Haha. Yeaah. Arguments never end well when someone tries to tell Erik what his problem is. Particularly when they’re informing him that he’s wrong about the way he sees some aspect of the world. Erik has seen and experienced a lot of bad things. A lot. There are not many bright spots in his many decades of life, and he has seen the worst side of humanity over and over and over again. He is religious enough that he does not take the idea of questioning God lightly, but he has had such a shitty life that he is finally getting to the point where he is beginning to wonder what kind of god is content to sit idly by and watch what he has watched. What has God done to earn his trust and his faith?
I think this is the closest he has ever come to outright telling Ellen that she needs to shut her mouth because she is crazy and doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She has had to push him much further than most to get him to snap, but she’s managed it. At the same time he is speaking out of anger, he is speaking out of exasperation. He wants her to understand. He almost always wants people to understand. He wouldn’t talk so much otherwise. But they don’t. He is used to it, but that Ellen doesn’t know where he’s coming from is kind of a last straw in the scheme of things. Is he really that incredibly crazy? He can’t even get his one enduring minion to understand him?
I love how Ellen smiles when she talks about her religion. She never questions it. Everything just is, and that is fine. Whatever happens was meant to happen. She is Faith 5 Devotion 5, fo sho.
"I am reasonably certain that I am." The heat has faded from his voice, and Erik reaches to fumble with the buttons at his collar for lack of anything better to do with his hands.
"I know what it is to see and do horrible things. To know them as horrible. I have done it, I have seen it, I have destroyed almost everything I have ever touched, Dr. Lensherr." Ellen's sharpness recedes to mildness, to quiet acknowledgment: but she is still firm even as her arms fall, and her hands turn; one rests at her hip, the other turning out as she again just slightly cants her head. "There are more powers on this earth than righteousness. Even as there is more to fate than what the gods command. But I don't believe that changes what I am or what my path is."
Magneto absorbs this less aggressively than that which has come before it, but gives no indication of agreement, or even acceptance. He finishes with his collar, and there is a slight sink of air when he sits himself down in the leather of his desk chair.
Ellen's silence comes in its own turn, now, and she folds her hands before her, tipping her head just slightly down.
Pretty much the moment she closed off after he was like DO YOU NOT SPEAKEN THE ENGLISH? he felt bad. Erik does not get any jollies out of crushing the easily crushed, and he loves Ellen in a weird…way. Obviously not parental since he sleeps with her, but. Some kind of weird family thing. I don’t know. He is protective of her, and he doesn’t want to hurt her, particularly in the knowledge that she is insane and sort of ill-prepared to defend herself against insult.
As much as he seems to instigate and feed off of conflict, when it’s personal like it is here, it just makes him unhappy. He needs Ellen as a security blanket. She does not want to be a security blanket. He got mad at her. That did not actually fix the problem. He withdraws, unsure of what to do again, and sits at his desk to mull over the prospect that he’s just snarled at his one remaining supporter. There is not anything on his desk with an answer scribbled on it, unfortunately.
There is a lot of interesting body language going on in this scene. Ellen tends to say a lot in the way that she moves, as does Erik. They communicate more effectively that way than most, when they’re together. I think. Ellen’s player would have to argue one way or the other, there. But their silences are telling, and their postures are transparent, for all that both of them tend to be stoic about the face.
Magneto does not reach for a book or papers, or anything else. He just sits and stares gloomily at his desk.
Ellen is frowning at the floor, thinking very hard about something. She turns the interlace of her fingers up and spends a moment's study upon her palms. She almost says something but then stops again.
Magneto looks up after a time, not to see if she's still there -- that's obvious -- but to see what she is doing. But he is silent as well.
Eventually Ellen moves. She crosses the room again, and folds herself down to a perch on the couch that he previously abandoned. She still does not speak, but arranges herself with her hands in her lap.
Eventually, Erik leans forward enough to rest his aching head in an upturned palm. For a time, the rustle of his suit with the movement is the only sound he makes. Eventually, a muffled, "Sorry," trails after it.
"And I, too." Ellen speaks gently, without raising her gaze from the loose clasp of her hands where they rest over her thighs. "Sorry."
AWKWARD. He scrabbles in the silence, dragging it out, hoping that she will somehow be the first to cave and make amends even though she is completely socially retarded and it isn’t going to happen. But back in the Nohari thing, Rossi pegged Erik as needy, and he was right.
As rarely as Erik apologizes, he will do it when he realizes he’s in a position where he’s screwed himself out of someone he needs. He is more prone to weakness about it when he’s in a bad place, as he is here. The last time he apologized to Mystique, it was shortly after Charles tried to kill him. Now the world is going to end and he needs Ellen around as a crutch. Even if she doesn’t understand why he does.
He means it, too. Ellen is obviously unhappy and uncomfortable. He is not used to seeing her like this because of something he’s done. He is sorry. He really didn’t mean for this conversation to go where it did, but his heart is sort of attached to his mouth and that can be problematic. Particularly when the subject matter is something he’s had a lot of time to build up a lot of anger about. She really is the last person he wants to fight with, and he still isn’t clear on why she started arguing with him anyway. So. Band-Aid attempt. His social skills are, at their heart -- and when they are honest - fairly juvenile and fumbling. For all that he has learned to intimidate and manipulate people, he is very bad at having successful social relationships.
"It's alright." Slow to speak, Erik does not alter his posture, but he does reach his free hand out to draw a copy of the Times into his range of vision.
Ellen stays quietly where she is, still looking down. It is kind of awkward!
The paper crinkles, but Erik does not really read. Eventually, both hands fall to the desk, and he pushes up again to track behind the couch, where he pauses for a moment at Ellen's back before he continues on into his bedroom.
He read this as a fail, in terms of his groping attempt to patch things over. No response. She is still withdrawn, not looking at him. Not saying anything. Not accepting his apology. When it gets too awkward for him, he creeps off into the doghouse to screen himself off from it. The fact that he submitted first is telling in terms of how crappy he feels.
The incident was significant enough that it drove them apart for a while. He was very depressed. It got kind of blackholish, particularly after the fight he had with the InCi, and I had him arrested so that I could sort of not deal with it until asteroid. I think the time apart gave them both time to maybe miss each other and reaffirm their individual appreciations of what the other stands for, for them. That is a weird sentence. But true!
THAT IS THE END. If I missed anything or there are questions, ask, yo.