Disclaimer: Marvel owns Magneto. I ain't never HAD any money. Warning: Okay. Unpleasant thoughts ahead. Please don't read if you're sensitive. It's about Magneto, and it's about a man accused of Nazi war crimes. It couldn't possibly be cute and happy, could it. Icky imagery and stuff. And if you're looking for good vigilante justice, this isn't for you. Poi and Dannell and a newspaper gave me this idea. Falstaff, Samy and Diamonde wouldn't let me drop it. Thank you. Dreams Remain By Mel After all this time, after all that has happened, those memories still have the power to hurt. Still have the power to appear as I try to sleep, edges blurred, but the fear, the impotent rage, the dirty, tired, bone-deep despair still catches me up short and shakes me viciously out of sleep. Those awakenings, and what caused them have shaped so much of my life. My life has revolved around what went into that death camp, and what came out. Yet there he was, seemingly oblivious to my pain, oblivious to what he and his kind had done. Moving, immigrating when the country he had chosen as his own showed him her righteous anger at those long ago crimes that could be neither forgotten nor forgiven. Those hideous, mindless crimes my memory show me over and over again in the quiet. "No proof," he'd said, over and over again, his only attempted defence against the fiery rage of a race. Refusing the right to trial his new country had offered. The right no one had under what he had believed, and upheld brutally, as a good rule. He moved, then moved again, trying to avoid the families of those he had slaughtered, stolen from, skinned as animals and less than animals. Ordered the strip-mining of people for every grain of worthwhile matter. Taken away what was human, taking away hope, love, life, dignity, pride, skin, bone, fat. It was almost three years, and more than five decades before I went to see him. To face him, call him by the name we only heard by mistake, the name we would be beaten bloody, or discarded as no longer useful if we ever said aloud. To see him, to face him for those crimes which had so branded themselves into my muscles, my heart, my soul, the way that they branded numbers into my skin. He looked tired. How dare he look tired when it was my sleep he'd scarred. My dreams he'd soiled with his blind hatred and thoughtless violence. The years had aged him, but then he looked up at his name and answered. That voice, that dialect. I could feel the pain and rage, no longer impotent, burn ice-cold in me. He nodded, and in that harsh language, made harsher by his coughing, by his age and that particular, peculiar accent, the one branded into my memory, welcomed me. He didn't ask for absolution. I was not one to give it, but he didn't show regret. All these years, all those deaths, and he didn't repent. Even at the end. "I expected this," he said, with that smile, once sardonic, now tired. No anger. No fight. No regrets. The dreams remain. The dreams always remain. They are there to remind me who I was. Who I am. Who I must be. ** There was another man. Another man who had the same name. Who came from the same region in Germany. Probably cousins, someone suggested, with an almost blasphemous cheer. Another man, but this one had no chance for regrets. Barely a decade after he'd snatched dolls from cold fingers, children from cold arms, skin from cold backs, he'd drowned. Drowned, drunk and forgotten, at a party, far away from his northern home, in a country filled with compatriots and a burning sun. There had been no proof. Another face follows me in the dark. My dreams, though, are unchanged. The secret, constant horror unabated. My race will mourn forever. The crimes are not forgotten. The criminals must learn the price. But the dreams will remain. As will I. ------ Join 18 million Eudora users by signing up for a free Eudora Web-Mail account at http://www.eudoramail.com _____________________________________________________________ Keep up with breaking news! Join our Hot Topics list. http://www.topica.com/lists/breakingnews/t/12