For him, standing on a street corner in the middle of a big city was rather akin to a normal person walking into a stadium full of cheering, screaming fans, all yelling something different, usually at the top of their lungs. The magnetic fields around him were a cacophony composed of car engines and traffic light switches and electrical wires and radio/TV waves cauterizing the air, howling in his head. He could stand New York City, he could stand Paris, and that was about it-- the cultural opportunities both afforded compensated for how irritating he found cities in general. Philadelphia, however, was probably fairly high on the list of least pleasant cities to spend his time in. What passed for culture here was provincial American glorification of their ridiculously recent past. In general, he preferred Americans when they didn't try to pretend they had a past... fortunate, since in his work, he had to deal with a lot of Americans, and most of them were completely myopic about history. Not an endearing trait, that, but better than their patriotic glossing over of the genocides they'd committed and the assassinations they'd caused, the litany of their crimes. It wasn't as if the Americans were actually any worse than any other nation, of course, but they were so damned self-righteous about it.

Whereas you, of course, haven't a single self-righteous bone in your body. He smiled thinly, recognizing the hypocrisy. But then, he didn't pretend to be anything other than he was-- a terrorist fighting for the freedom and security of his particular minority. A freedom fighter by any other name. History would decide whether he was a visionary or a madman on the basis of whether or not he won.

And right now, whether or not he won probably depended on how well he prepared for the inevitable battle, which was what he was doing in Philadelphia in the first place. His supplier-- an import/export company dealing in bulk foods, a very discreet business that had so far never asked him why he wanted enough food to stock a small city-- had moved to Philadelphia because the superhero insurance was a lot lower. Ironic, that, considering that one of their biggest customers was a wanted supercriminal who might well accidentally draw a battle down onto them simply by standing in their office. But then, the world thought he was dead, so Magneto considered the chance of this happening to be reasonably slight. The meeting had gone well, the next shipment of food to his staging ground in the Pacific had been arranged, and now all he had to do was get out of this accursed city without attracting the attention of Cerebro, 140 miles to the north. It wouldn't do for Charles to know Magneto lived, yet. Mostly because he was still too weak from his fall from the heavens to withstand a battle with the X-Men, and after the catastrophe their last meeting had turned into, he knew that no matter how reasonable his words, however sensible his beliefs, the X-Men would still attack him, simply for being alive and for not kowtowing to almighty Charles' vision of ideal human/mutant relations.

So he stood on a street corner, impatiently waiting for the light to turn, though he was perfectly capable of reaching out with his power and throwing the switch himself, because any use of his power this close to Cerebro would probably be rather like sending Charles an engraved invitation. That, and he felt like a bull in a china closet here. Cities were such delicate things, to one who perturbed magnetic fields simply by existing. A simple use of his power to change a traffic light here might send a flux through nearby power lines that might electrocute innocent people, and he was still trying to avoid hurting the innocent. He might have to kill civilians in his war for a mutant homeland, but he considered it morally imperative to make the casualties as low as possible. Certainly he didn't want anyone to die just because he wanted to cross the street in a hurry. Thus he held back, waiting.

Words didn't do justice to how much he hated cities.

As he waited, a young woman approached him, a frantic and distracted look to her face. "Excuse me, sir, can you tell me how to get to City Hall?"

He glanced at her. "I'm not a native of this city. You'd do better to ask someone else."

She looked around at all the people bustling past. "Are you sure? I mean, you don't have any idea at all?" she asked in a lost voice, as if she considered him her only hope.

As it happened, he did have some idea of what she was talking about. "I believe that you can take a subway there. Or no, I believe here they call it an elevated train. There are stops all along Market Street--" he pointed in the general direction of Market Street. "Cross over to that street and ask a native where the nearest El stop is. I don't recall the cost of the fare, but it's probably inexpensive, and there is a stop for City Hall, I believe." He didn't take subways himself-- taxis were considerably more anonymous, and rented cars better still, for one who considered money no object-- but he tried to know as much as he could about the rapid transit systems of any given city he visited, as he could cause serious damage by using his powers too near a subway's third rail if he didn't compensate for it. And also because, in general, he liked to know his way around. It wasn't inconceivable that he'd have to hide from pursuers in a subway. Certainly preferable to hiding from them on a boat, something he actually had done and regretted every minute of.

She smiled broadly. "Thank you," she said effusively, and reached to clasp his hand. "Thank you so much--"

Startled, but not wishing to be rude, Magneto let her touch his hand. He didn't imagine for a moment she might be a threat, until the world exploded, and then it was far too late.

The first thing he noticed was that his head hurt worse than it had in twenty years, when the migraines he used to get had finally tapered off. The second thing he noticed was that he was in some kind of vehicle, being transported somewhere, and that he was leaning against something warm and large and human-shaped. And the third thing he noticed was that he didn't know where he was.

This was actually quite terrifying. Magneto's sense of the geomagnetic field ensured that no matter where he was, no matter what had been done to him, he always knew where he was. The talent was not always as useful as it could be-- when he'd been kidnapped by the alien Stranger and taken to another planet, all his powers had been able to tell him was that he wasn't on Earth, which he'd known already. But even then, there wasn't this terrifying absence, this total blindness and numbness to the electromagnetic fields around him.

He tried to summon power. Nothing came. Not even pain, which usually accompanied unsuccessful attempts to invoke his magnetic abilities. It was as if his powers were simply gone. Even the passive ones-- he hadn't been able to wield magnetism until past his 24th birthday, but he'd had an internal compass since he could walk far enough to get lost if he hadn't had one. Even under the effects of power suppressant fields, even when Zaladane had stripped him of almost everything he had, he had always had that. Now it was gone, and the surge of fear he felt gave him sufficient energy to open his eyes.

The light was blinding, additional agony to go with the pain in his head. Involuntarily, he moaned, shutting his eyes again and trying to lift his arm to block his eyes, so he could open them with better control of the light flow. But his body was sluggish and unresponsive.

"You're waking up already? I'm impressed."

The voice was strangely familiar. A man's voice, deep and resonant, with an American accent. He knew that voice. It was coming from right beside his ear, presumably from whoever he was leaning on. Magneto turned his head toward the sound-- moving slowly, as any sudden movement made it feel as if his head was about to fall off-- and cautiously opened his eyes again.

And stared at his own doppelganger, silhouetted in red afternoon sunlight.

Afternoon? It was early morning when I lost consciousness... For a moment he floundered in confusion. Could he have managed to mistake afternoon for morning? Without his power to tell him what direction they were traveling, he couldn't know that reddening sun was setting instead of rising... but no, he didn't feel as if he'd been unconscious through an entire night and toward a new morning. And the sun had been higher and brighter when... whatever had happened had occurred. Had the woman attacked him? It was the only possibility, but then what was the significance of the man who looked just like him? Shapechanger, perhaps?

He felt a hand on his leg. It felt as if the hand was touching bare skin, though he 'd been wearing pants when he lost consciousness. "Well, I'm glad to see you waking up so promptly," the voice said, and now he knew where he'd heard it. It was exactly like his own, except that the speaker had an American accent and cadenced his words very differently than Magneto would have. Like a different person, speaking in his voice. Not a perfect doppelganger, then. "It hasn't been any real fun with you asleep."

The hand moved up his leg, stroking it. The sensation was irritating and overfamiliar. Magneto looked down, and stared stupidly at what he was seeing for several seconds, unable to process it. The hand on his leg was grotesquely huge, even though it looked just like his own. No, it wasn't huge. It was just bigger than it should be against his leg. His leg was too small, too thin, and shaped wrong. And the wrong color. It was still white, but with a more sallow tinge to it than his own extremely pink flesh. And why was he able to look directly at the flesh of his leg, anyway? Where were his pants? Whatever shirt he was wearing, it was too light, too cool-feeling to be his shirt, and there was something constricting around his chest, and his socks and shoes were gone, replaced with wooden clogs and bare skin, and instead of pants he seemed to be wearing something blue that bunched up around his waist and upper thighs and left all the rest of his legs bare. And the hand lying limply beside his leg was far too small, and...

He looked back up at the doppelganger. "Who... are you?" he forced out, past a dry and hoarse throat-- and froze in shock. The voice speaking those words was cadenced as his own was, did have his own accent-- but it wasn't his voice. It was a woman's.

"Isn't it obvious?" the doppelganger said, and smiled broadly, an expression that would never have made its home on Magneto's face. "I'm the Master of Magnetism. And you... are nobody."

Suddenly he knew what had happened. Painfully he looked down at the hands that probably belonged to him, focusing on trying to move them. They twitched, proving his theory. Delicate female hands; the strong masculine hand that should have been his and wasn't was still running up and down the leg that shouldn't have been his and was.

"My... body..." he said hoarsely. "You... took..."

"You are quick on the uptake," the other said. "Yes, I took your body. And a lovely body it is, too. Why, I can control almost every aspect of this car without even having to think about it hard. We ran out of gas two hours back, and it just doesn't matter."

Car. Yes, that fit. The ride was too smooth, too quiet to be a train or plane. He was in a car, in the back seat, sitting next to the body snatcher, leaning on her in fact since he didn't seem to have the strength to support his own weight. It was a taxicab. He could see someone in the front seat, driving the car. But that didn't make sense; she had said she was controlling the car, with the powers she'd stolen from him when she took his body and left him in hers. Did she leave him in hers? That made sense; he hadn't been able to see what this body looked like very well, but the blue thing bunched around his waist could very well be the denim skirt the young woman on the street had worn. Of course, there were no guarantees that that had been her real body, either. She might be serially jumping from body to body, dumping her new victims into the bodies she'd just vacated.

"Driver...?"

"Oh, you're concerned for the driver? Don't be. He's quite beyond your concern." She smiled cruelly at him. "If I were you, I'd be more worried about what I'm going to do to you."

His head hurt so much, and he was starting to feel nauseous. He really was in no condition to deal with this. Not that it mattered. "Taking me... where?"

"Someplace safe. Someplace far removed from civilization, where no one's likely to come investigate." She grinned again.

This was not promising. "I've... allies... find me... stop you..." A lie. His Acolytes were all dead, murdered by Cortez's manipulations and his own blind foolishness in succumbing to them. He still didn't fully understand why he had lived, why once again he'd been the sole survivor. But he had vowed not to let anyone else flock to his banner until he was prepared, until he had once again raised Asteroid M and made all the necessary provisions for its inhabitants' safety. Right now, he had no allies, no one who would notice if he lived or died. Most of the world thought him dead already. He hoped, though, that perhaps the lie would give her pause.

"I doubt it," she said cheerily. "If they come looking for you, what they'll find is me. And I'll seem to them to be you. I don't think any of your allies would be overly concerned about one human woman, now would they?"

"I... will stop... you..."

"I'm sure you will. One fragile, feeble, powerless female against the Master of Magnetism. I'm already trembling with fear."

Her voice-- his voice, her tone-- was amused, as if he were so little threat to her that his posturing couldn't even make her angry or defensive. Which, in his current condition, was very likely the case. Magneto cursed the impulse that had let the woman touch him. Lost his edge, not paranoid enough by far. He should at least have thrown up a biomagnetic shield. But the damage Cortez had done him had weakened him enough to make such subtle operations difficult, and who expected a slightly pudgy, ordinary girl with mousy hair, asking for directions on a Philadelphia street, to be a threat? Stupid, stupid. He'd been in this business long enough to know better. Never let down your guard. Well, he wouldn't make that mistake again, if he survived this.

The car, which had been making its way up a pebbly dirt trail through forest, now came to a rest beside a small wooden house, nestled in a small clearing amongst the trees. "We're home. I suggest you take a good look at the outdoors while you still can. This is going to be the last breath of fresh air you get for a very, very long time."

She got out of the car. Frantically he tried to make his borrowed body work, fighting the pain and the sluggishness, trying to crawl away from the door. This didn't faze her in the slightest; she simply walked around the car, opened the other door, reached in, and pulled him out, using nothing more than his stolen body's physical strength. Weakly he tried to resist, but this body simply had no strength-- he desperately hoped that was a temporary aftereffect of the transition, not a permanent state. She lifted him, and now he could see that the driver was dead, springs from within the seat driven into the back of his neck, holding him in place. Fury welled. The body snatcher had murdered an innocent with his powers. But there was nothing he could do-- he hadn't the strength to escape her grip as she carried him into the house and down a flight of stairs into a basement.

"Your body is so magnificently strong. I can carry you with hardly any exertion at all," she gushed. "This is wonderful! Oh, I'm so glad I went into Philly yesterday. To think I'd have missed this opportunity!"

There was a bed in the basement, also a bathroom with no door. The body snatcher dumped Magneto on the bed. "You're still entirely too out of it," she said. "Take a nap, relax. The weakness you're feeling will pass. Then we'll begin the real fun."

She floated back up the stairs, chuckling gleefully. At the top of the stairs, he heard the door close and an iron bolt slide shut on its other side.

Move! He didn't know how long he had before she came back, and he was fairly certain he didn't want to be around for it if at all possible. If he was going to escape, it would be best to do it now. He forced himself to sit up, kicking the wooden clogs this body was wearing off his feet. The world swayed dizzily, and the nausea increased severalfold. With a terrific effort of will, he forced himself not to throw up right there, and tried to stagger off the bed, heading for the washroom. He was too dizzy to stay upright, though, and fell to hands and knees as soon as he was off the bed. The skirt tangled around his knees as he tried to crawl; he had to keep stopping to pull it free, and every brief delay to do so made him think he wasn't going to reach the washroom in time. But he was practiced enough at fighting nausea that he did indeed make it to the toilet before finally letting this rebellious borrowed body have its way.

Even after he'd emptied the contents of his stomach, he was racked with dry heaves for a minute or two more. Eventually he got them to stop, and by leaning heavily on first the toilet and then the nearby sink, got himself upright. He stared at the mirror over the sink. It was the young woman who'd wanted directions, all right. Smallish, maybe 5 foot 4 at most, with thick, somewhat greasy light brown hair, shoulder length and straight. She had brown eyes, set slightly too close together, and a nose a little too big to be attractive, and she weighed a little too much-- it showed in the puffy roundness of a face that should have been more like a triangle. Not a tremendously attractive girl, which made him think that this was her original body after all. Why would a body snatcher steal such an ordinary looking body? And if that was the case, that placed her age-- this body was somewhere between 23 and 27, he was fairly sure. So the body snatcher was young, possibly inexperienced. Advantages for him. He needed all that he could get.

When he tried to drink some water, to compensate for what he'd just lost, his stomach rebelled again, and he retched. Obviously he couldn't put anything in his stomach now. He settled for rinsing his mouth out with the water without swallowing, to wash the taste of the vomit out of his mouth and fool his dry and acid-burned throat into thinking he'd drunk something.

Though much of the nausea had passed now that there was nothing left in his stomach, the headache had if anything gotten worse, and he still was too dizzy to stand unassisted. There were ways to deal with headaches. Close your eyes and let them unfocus under your lids. Rub your temples. Breathe evenly and deeply. None of it worked any better than it had the last few times he'd had truly severe headaches. Magneto opened his eyes, giving up on the attempt to conquer the migraine. He lurched from the sink to the doorjamb-- the bathroom had once had a door, it had just been removed, apparently-- and from there fell to the floor and crawled back to the bed, again wrestling with the skirt as he did so.

In this condition, it was unlikely he was going anywhere. Magneto scanned the room, looking for anything that might mean a weapon or a way to escape. The windows were the kind you found in basements-- small, looking out just over the dirtline, and they were glazed with safety glass and barred. The bars were the sort to keep burglars out, not prisoners in, but the effect would be the same. No escape there. The top of the stairs might be possible, if he were stronger-- the door had been bolted, he'd heard that clearly, but perhaps he could break down the door, or smash a hole in it. But he'd only be able to do that if she left the house, as she'd certainly hear him trying to escape that way, and she'd probably think to reinforce the door with steel, given that she had his powers. He'd already seen there was no exit from the bathroom, so unless there was a hidden door someplace, he was not going to be able to escape anytime soon.

The question was, what would that cost him? The fact that she hadn't killed him immediately didn't mean she wouldn't kill him at all. Serial killers often kept their victims captive for hours, days or weeks before killing them. Which was it? If she was going to kill him quickly he had to keep struggling to find an escape route, regardless of how sick he felt and how little chance he had, because he couldn't simply give up and allow someone to kill him. On the other hand, if she was planning to keep him alive for some time, he could take the chance that there would be a better opportunity to escape later, when he was rested and this horrible sickness had worn off. Whatever she chose to do to him could be endured, as long as it didn't kill him.

He considered. If this was her original body, she might be reluctant to kill it, perhaps even unable. A fragile thread to hang his life on, but there was more. She had said he wouldn't be seeing the outside world again "for a very long time," implying that she intended to hold him captive for a very long time. If she had intended to kill him, it was most likely that she'd have said "ever."

To hell with it. He was probably rationalizing, trying to convince himself that she wasn't going to kill him so that he could excuse trying to sleep off the sickness. He really didn't have sufficient evidence one way or the other. But he couldn't escape right now. He was entirely too sick, and if he used one of the very few opportunities he'd be given to escape, in his current condition he'd just end up wasting it. If she intended to kill him, there was absolutely nothing he could do. He curled up on the bed and closed his eyes, trying to force himself to sleep despite the tension he felt. It was not that hard a thing to do-- he'd become practiced at sleeping the night before battles, or sleeping the night before the Germans made their selections and condemned people to the gas chambers, when either way he might not live to see another sunset.

The sound of the door opening awakened him. He pulled himself into a sitting position, feeling considerably better, at least physically. The nausea and dizziness were gone, and his head only ached slightly, nothing he would ordinarily even take notice of. As she came down the stairs, he struggled with himself to remain calm, not to visibly clench his fists or position himself for a battle. It was very unlikely that there would be a battle, at least in the physical sense. Whatever she wanted to do to him would most likely occur, no matter what he tried to do about it. But it was all but impossible not to prepare himself to fight back.

She was carrying several steel cables as large loops. "I hope you're all rested up. I brought us some presents."

The cheerful, almost gleeful tone in what sounded so much like his own voice grated far more than the same tone from an unfamiliar voice would. "Why are you doing this?" he asked evenly. "I understand the motivation to steal my body well enough, but why not simply keep me captive? Or let me go, for that matter, since it's hardly likely I could do anything to force you to give me back what you took?" Another lie. He had several ideas as to how he might accomplish that, once he was free.

"No, that isn't how it works," the body snatcher said. "You've had power all your life. It's time for you to learn what it's like to be powerless."

He almost retorted that this was hardly a lesson he needed to learn, but bit it back. If she had somehow managed to miss the fact that he'd been a prisoner in the Nazi death camps when she'd learned whatever she had about him, he wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of knowing about it.

The steel cables moved suddenly, arrowing toward his limbs. Magneto leapt off the bed to avoid them, trying to get past her. He'd miscalculated his own strength, though, and landed short of where he'd meant to, still short of her. When he tried to dodge around her, she grabbed him.

Unlike a man born, the body snatcher was probably not trained to protect the more vulnerable points of a male body, and since she was still wearing his clothes in their civilian style, she was effectively unarmored. He drove his knee into her crotch. As she gasped and doubled over, Magneto bent, scooped up one of the wooden clogs he'd kicked off when he'd been first imprisoned, and struck her in the head as he straightened, hoping that the blow to her groin would prevent her from concentrating enough to protect herself from wood. She went to her knees. He hit her again, trying to use just enough strength to knock her out without damaging his body seriously, and she went down all the way. Magneto dropped the shoe and ran for the stairs, trying to leap up them three at a time to put as much distance between her and him as he could.

Unfortunately, he didn't know how to leap steps reliably in a long denim skirt. It went down to mid-calf, loose enough that it hadn't interfered with him running or kneeing her, but jumping three steps at once was beyond what it would allow. Near the top, his knee got caught in the skirt and slammed down against the nearest stair, and he fell half the flight before managing to catch himself. He started up the stairs again, this time one step at a time, but had only gotten four more steps when a steel cable wrapped around his chest and dragged him off the staircase, carrying him over to the bed and dropping him on it.

The cable remained wrapped around him, tight enough to impair his breathing. He couldn't get loose, and couldn't get off the bed. Magneto looked over at the body snatcher, who was kneeling on the floor, rubbing her head and breathing heavily. He'd hurt her, but clearly not enough to keep her from using the powers, or to knock her out as he'd thought he had. He was starting to feel dizzy and faint from the constriction when it finally released, the body snatcher sitting up on the floor and looking at him. One of the cables caught his leg before he was able to scramble off the bed again, and dragged it to the other side of the bed fast enough to wrench muscles. He winced in pain, and continued to struggle grimly against the rest of the cables, trying to keep his wrists and remaining leg free of them. The body snatcher remained on the floor, watching him intently, directing the movement of the cables without getting to her feet. Galling, that she should have such control of the powers, so quickly. How the devil had she done it? He couldn't have done this a day after he'd first discovered his powers.

The outcome was really never in doubt. Within a minute, he was lying flat on his back on the bed, arms and legs bound spread-eagled to the bed's legs with the steel cables. He stopped struggling, recognizing that at this point it was worse than useless, as all it would do would be to please her, and stared over at her with hate-filled eyes.

She got to her feet and walked toward the bed, slowly. "You really shouldn't have done that," she said, rubbing her head again. "You hurt me."

"You're the one that wished to have a man's body," he said coldly. "Besides, I'm quite certain you intended to hurt me from the moment you entered this room, if not the moment you stole my body. I don't see myself as having a great deal to lose."

Her free hand fell to his neck, stroking it. "I could hurt you a lot worse than I'd planned," she said, and began to tighten her grip.

"You... might also... kill me," he gasped, not out of fear but because he couldn't breathe. "You're not... experienced... might... accidentally..."

"I might also kill you deliberately," she said, and her hand tightened further.

He couldn't speak anymore, or he'd have pointed out that if she'd wanted him dead, she could have saved herself a lot of time and effort by killing him before she'd tied him up with cables. Desperately he concentrated on trying to breathe, sucking in as much air as he could get. It wasn't enough. The world was starting to darken around the edges when she released him.

"The next time you try to attack me, I'll do far worse than that," she warned.

Very well. The next time he attacked her, he'd make sure she was disabled by it. He breathed deeply, hungry for air, and didn't waste any of his precious breath on a reply.

"Of course, now it doesn't really matter," she said, her voice-- his voice, twisted by her-- dropping. "Too bad for you that you didn't hurt me badly enough to spoil my plans."

That surprised him a little. He'd expected the blow he'd delivered would have made what she clearly intended out of the question for hours. He must be much weaker than he used to be, more than he'd imagined. "I intend to have that body back eventually; I had no desire to castrate it," he snapped back at her, and then realized what he was doing. His pride was hurt by the way she'd defeated him, by the ease with which she'd stolen his body and the fact that, with it, she had near-total power over him. He was justifying his failure, trying to sound more threatening than he felt himself to be. Foolish, that. If he had a chance at all, it would lie in her underestimating him now that he had no mutant powers. He resolved not to answer her goads again.

She unbuttoned the blouse this body was wearing slowly, stroking his neck, his breasts and belly. Not his. He had to concentrate on that. Nothing of his would be affected by this. But he could feel it, and despite the fact that he could see his own body doing this to him, it was very difficult to think of the body he now wore as something completely alien to him. The bra had a front clasp; she unsnapped it and moved the cups off him entirely. "I can see what men like about this," she murmured, cupping this body's breasts in her hand and squeezing, at first gently, then painfully hard. She smiled at him maliciously. "You never expected this could happen to you, did you? To be used for someone else's pleasure? No man ever expects this."

Her misconceptions would almost be funny if she weren't using them as some sort of twisted justification for her acts. Magneto had expected exactly this. There was nothing surprising and nothing new about any of what she'd done to him thus far, nothing he hadn't endured before. He felt humiliated, yes, and enraged at his own helplessness, but it wasn't as if he'd never felt such things in his life. There is nothing you can do to me that hasn't been done already, in worse ways. It was ironically one of his greatest strengths in his chosen career-- no matter what happened to him, he'd always endured worse.

The denim skirt was apparently a wraparound-- she untied it and peeled it entirely away from him, leaving his legs exposed completely. With the clogs off, his feet were bare as well. The underpants were scanty and had Velcro side fasteners, so she was able to peel them away as well without having to untie him. Magneto realized that she'd intended to do this when she'd gotten dressed in the morning-- she might not have known he was the mind she'd entrap in her body or that his body would be the vehicle for her to do it, but she had gotten dressed with every intention of taking a male body and raping her own. The thought sickened him. How many others had she done this to, or was he the first?

She removed his own clothes from the body she'd stolen the hard way, using stolen power to undo the buttons but apparently unaware that the entire suit was made of metallic fibers, such that she could simply disassemble it and cause it to fall off. Presumably her control over his powers extended to obvious magnetic operations-- moving steel cables, driving a car forward-- but she didn't yet seem to know the non-obvious ones.

He was cold, with all but his arms naked in the chill of the basement, but that was preferable to the warmth of her body heat, when she climbed on top of him. Her weight was oppressive on him, making it hard to breathe, since of course she wasn't considerate enough to take her weight onto her elbows. He felt her fingers probing his new female anatomy-- a very strange sensation, not quite analogous to hands on the male equivalent-- and then her penis penetrate and start thrusting, a sensation of painful stretching and friction. It was not quite as painful as what he'd expected and remembered, probably because female anatomy really was designed to take this kind of assault better than a young boy's body could. It had been a lifetime ago, but he still remembered being a pretty child in the camps, remembered the terrible bargain he'd made for his life, and the sensation like being torn apart from the inside. As badly as this hurt, it wasn't as bad as that had been. He held as still as he could to minimize her pleasure, gritted his teeth, and endured. At first he stared at her with the stark rage in his face, but it was too obscene to see what looked like his own face contorted with pleasure as she raped him, so he stared at the ceiling instead and imagined killing her.

When she was done, she slid off him, running an entirely too familiar hand up and down the body she'd trapped him in. "I think I really enjoy being a man," she said, her voice still thick with pleasure. "It's so intense for you, and it builds so fast. In my own body it takes forever."

"You might want to consider that most non-psychotic men get even more pleasure out of having willing partners," he said acidly.

"You, a terrorist and mass murderer, are going to give me a lecture on the morality of rape? Don't make me laugh."

"What I have done, I have done for the sake of my people, not for my own twisted pleasure. You have no cause but your own desires."

She released the cables. He sat up and rubbed his wrists, trying to restore circulation to them. "I have a cause," she said. "I've spent my entire life being weak and powerless, at the mercy of men and other people with power. My cause now is to teach those with power what it means to have none. Society grants you men all the power in this world."

"Has it escaped your notice that society also denies mutants any power whatsoever?"

"Society doesn't need to grant you power. Mutants have it. You personally had more power than almost anyone in the world. Now I have it instead. And I intend to use it to do whatever I want."

"How noble an ambition," he sneered. "Someone victimized you, so you plan to victimize others, just because you can."

"That's pretty much it," she agreed. "I wouldn't get on a moral high horse about it if I were you. You've done worse."

"Not for such a trivial reason. And I have never committed rape."

"No, but you've murdered. Does that mean you think rape is a fate worse than death?" she mocked.

"It is a question of motivation. All other things being equal, I would prefer being raped to dying," he said dryly. "However, I have killed only for the sake of my cause, or in self-defense. The ends, to some degree, do justify the means. You have no ends worth speaking of, which makes you far more evil than I."

She shrugged. "Believe that if you want. I'm sure you'll need something to cling to."

There was really no answer he could make to that. He ignored her and set about trying to rub circulation back into his ankles as well.

"You still think you're going to get through this with your dignity intact, don't you?"

That got his attention. He turned his head to face her. "If you expect me to grovel and beg simply because you have the power to kill or harm me, you don't know me very well."

Her eyes narrowed. "A challenge. I like that."

"No you don't. You haven't been doing this long enough to enjoy a challenge. You want me to validate your beliefs by cringing and whining in fear, and it bothers you that I don't."

"How do you know how long I've been doing this?"

"Because you're untutored and naive. Your conversation reflects the fact that you expect the simple presence of your power to have some great effect. I can tell you now, from personal experience, it doesn't. People will be as ready to oppose and defy you because you have power as when you didn't, perhaps more so."

"That's ridiculous. People aren't that suicidal."

"The ordinary man on the street won't oppose you, no. You'll get a higher caliber of opponents. And without my knowledge and tactical skills behind those powers you so prize, they will defeat you. If I were you, I'd play less of a high-stakes game. Give me back my body, and take one of lesser power, one the entire world won't conspire to destroy." As if he wouldn't destroy her the instant he had his body back. But it would hardly do to mention that.

She shrugged. "I don't plan on running out and trying to conquer the world, so I doubt they'll even notice me. We're quite some distance from major population centers here."

"Indeed? Where are we?"

"Nice try." She shook her head. "You aren't as good as you think you are, and you aren't as right as you think you are. I've been doing this much longer than you think. You're just the best prize I've caught." The body snatcher grinned. "In fact, I think I'll keep you."

"Keep me? For how long?"

"Well, that's what I mean by 'keep.'" Her grin broadened. "I killed all the others, you see. After I was done having fun with them, I killed their bodies and jumped back. But who would want to go back to that--" she poked him-- "when they could be this?" She gestured at herself in his stolen body. "No, Magneto, I think I'm going to keep you forever. Which means I have plenty of time to make you 'grovel and beg,' as you put it. By the time I'm done with you, you will."

On that note, she left, taking the wooden clogs with her, while he was still trying to muster up something more intelligent to say than "We'll see about that" or "I'll die first" or some other cliched defiant comment. What she'd said relieved him on a certain level-- given plenty of time, he would escape, he was sure of it. The reassurance that she wouldn't kill him was good news, from that point of view. On the other hand, it also made it even more imperative that he had to escape. She was right in a sense-- given long enough as a helpless captive, with no one to interact with but his tormentor, eventually even he would break. He was no psychologist, but he'd studied what happens to prisoners. Prisoners confined with other prisoners could maintain their hatred of their captors, as he and his fellows had in Auschwitz, but someone kept in solitary confinement and subject to certain elementary brainwashing techniques would eventually come to identify with and seek to please the captor. His resistance to such things was probably much greater than most people's, but he wasn't so arrogant as to believe he would be completely immune.

So. He had to get away before that happened. Painfully he levered himself off the bed. His wrists and ankles still hurt, and his thighs and hips were bruised, and there were wholly unfamiliar internal pains that might have seriously frightened him if he'd still been in a male body, since in male anatomy they would have to reflect some sort of deep internal injury. In a female body, however, it was probably no more than the aftereffects of a rape. She hadn't been terribly brutal-- he'd survived worse in a body designed to deal with it less well, so he was fairly sure he wasn't seriously hurt. It was simply the unfamiliarity of the pain that was bothering him.

He limped to the bathroom again and did his best to examine himself. As nearly as he could tell, his initial guess was right-- no serious injury, just bruising and soreness. He also had a better chance to examine the amenities the body snatcher had left for her victim. A fairly civil psychopath, from the looks of it-- she had left him toothpaste and toothbrush, a hairbrush, a towel, a washcloth, shampoo and soap. No razor-- at first he thought this was a precaution against suicide, and then realized that it was more likely because women didn't need razors. There was some sort of horrible-smelling depilatory cream that would have been utterly useless against a man's beard, but might do passably on a woman's legs. Not that he had any intention of using it, but perhaps these were actually her toiletries, the things she used on this body when she was occupying it. Most of the items were sufficiently poisonous that he could kill himself with them if he had any desire to, which either indicated she knew more about him than she'd thus far seemed to, or she was really quite naive about keeping prisoners. Just because he would never resort to suicide to escape captivity if there was any other alternative didn't mean other men might not try.

A long, hot shower with plenty of soap and shampoo did not quite wash away the humiliation or the tactile memory of her hands on this body. But it helped. Afterward he dressed-- the only available clothes were the ones she'd been wearing when she captured him, which was deeply annoying. He despised the long skirt, most especially after having tripped and tangled in it so many times. But it was chilly in this basement, this late at night. The stone floor was particularly cold on his bare feet, and he rather wished she hadn't taken the clogs, though wooden shoes that wouldn't stay on his feet were an uncomfortable reminder of the camps.

Systematically Magneto explored his prison, ignoring the pain of bruises as he searched everywhere for any other conceivable exit. There was none. Part of the floor was packed earth, so it was possible he might be able to dig his way out, but there were no tools in the basement. No old clothes, either, nor old furniture, nor anything except a wall of stacked cans and the items that went with his cell-- the bed, bedclothes, the steel cables she'd left behind, and the bathroom with its toiletries. He might be able to smash the safety glass of the basement windows by throwing cans at them, but the bars didn't look as if he could bend them without specialized tools, even with his own body's physical strength, much less this weaker form. Plus, it turned out he couldn't even reach the basement windows. The windowsill, such as it was, was set just above his eye level, and when he tried to pull himself up to it he discovered quite how feeble this body's upper arms were. He literally could not lift himself off the ground even so much as a fraction of an inch; he could rise to the tips of his toes, but could go no further. When he exerted himself heavily to do so, he ended up with shaking, trembling arms and legs, but didn't get any closer to getting off the ground than before. Physical fitness had obviously not been the body snatcher's forte before she'd captured him.

That brought a malicious grin to his lips. She'd learn the hard way that she couldn't let his body go to pot the way she'd let this one and still expect to use his powers at their full level. Even when he'd been doing the equivalent of desk work in zero gee for two years, Magneto had always made sure he kept his body in shape as a matter of survival. There had been times in the past, before Isabelle had died and he'd focused on world conquest as a reason for living, when he'd grown despondent and escaped into a bottle for weeks at a time. The effect was always the same. When he went long periods of time without exercise, when he gained a significant amount of weight as fat instead of muscle, or when he skimped on dietary iron, his powers grew markedly weaker, and to attempt to use them at higher levels brought heart palpitations, violent headaches and flashes before his eyes. His powers placed enormous strain on his body, and only by being at the peak of physical health could he dare manipulate their upper limits. If the body snatcher didn't take up a physical fitness regimen, she was in for a nasty surprise.

Of course, if he was lucky, she wouldn't have long enough in the body to be surprised that way. He intended to escape as soon as he could, and there was, perhaps, the possibility of rescue. She'd been using his powers in Philadelphia, most likely-- unless she'd been able to operate both his stolen body and her original at the same time while he'd been unconscious, she'd have had to do something about the fact that she'd have been dragging an unconscious woman's body around. Probably hailed a cab, and then killed the driver and took control. Magneto himself had been trying to avoid using his powers in Philadelphia because of the risk of attracting Charles' attention... if she had used them, perhaps she had alerted Charles. Perhaps he would send his X-Men to attack her, and thus find Magneto... but no, no. Charles had never been proactive. It was one of the man's greatest failings-- not only did he think humans and mutants could get along, not only did he think that creating an all-mutant strike force would help humans and mutants get along, but he actually didn't even manage his strike force correctly. Charles had generally never sent the X-Men after him unless he was actually and actively engaged in a plot. If she didn't "plan on running out and trying to conquer the world," as she'd said, Charles might never bother to send his X-Men to investigate. At least, that was the way Magneto's life worked-- the one time he actually wanted X-Men interference, they wouldn't show up. No, he couldn't rely on the hope of rescue. Which was just as well, considering. The X-Men had betrayed him quite horribly last time, Wolverine gutting him while he still had thought they were allies, still remembered the friendship and tried to answer their accusations reasonably. Reason had had no place in that last battle. He didn't want to think about what the X-Men, and Charles, might do with him if he had no powers at all. No, he could trust no one but himself.

So, concentrate on what he needed to do to escape under his own power. This body had to be gotten into shape. He had to learn its limitations, stop overestimating its strength, increase that strength as much as he could, and get a feel for the way it balanced. It felt very odd to walk about in this body, with his center of gravity completely shifted and his gait forcibly altered by the limitations of anatomy. If he did manage to escape, his life might depend on how far and how fast he could run-- the odds that he could defeat her in a fight were not encouraging, given that he didn't dare maim his own body. So he needed to know this body as well as he possibly could, and improve it physically as well as he could, in order to have a chance at all.

Stripping off the skirt -- it would only get in the way-- he began stretching cautiously, something necessary before one began an exercise regimen for the first time. Interestingly, he noted that this body, despite being ridiculously out of shape, was inherently more flexible than his own. He had forced a greater degree of flexibility through his exercise regimens, but his own muscles were naturally enormously tense; he'd always thought that was mostly due to personality, but even now, when he was a captive with no good prospects for escape, under tremendous stress, the physical tension in the body he now wore was less than he usually found in his own. That was a good sign. Not that being flexible would help him fight off someone with his powers particularly well, but it indicated at least that this body wasn't completely without physical advantages.

And it would probably help save him from injury during the inevitable future rapes.

He pulled his mind away from that particular dark contemplation of his future here and back to what he was doing. Since this body was out of shape, he couldn't overdo it. Half an hour of stretches, then another half hour total, interspersed with several five-minute rests, of simple calisthenics-- pushups, sit-ups, the like. He tried benchpressing a wooden board with cans stacked on it to create a weight, but the cans kept falling off. There wasn't much beyond that he dared do without knowing when she'd next feed him; exercise increased appetite for a reason, and if he didn't get food reasonably soon, he would suffer for every bit of exertion. Of course, he had endured such suffering before, but that wasn't any reason to set himself up for it if he didn't have to.

With nothing left that could be constructively accomplished tonight, and his hair mostly dry, he stripped off his clothes, used a small amount of soap to wash them in the sink, and hung them in the bathroom to dry overnight. There were enough blankets that he shouldn't be cold, and quite aside from the fact that he was used to sleeping in the nude, if he was going to be allowed only one set of clothes to wear, he was going to have to establish a routine of washing them at night or they'd get unbearably filthy.

He took a can with him to bed, putting it under the pillow. Since she'd taken the clogs, he wanted something else that might conceivably work as a weapon. Not that he seriously expected to be able to use it, but the fact that she hadn't disassembled his body's clothes might mean that she hadn't yet learned to see the fields, or not well, anyway. He would be able to see a metal can coming if he were in his body, but perhaps she wouldn't. Or perhaps he could stun her and then use the can. She'd never leave him an opening for a groin strike again, but unless she bound him every time she raped him, sooner or later she'd leave him an opening for an eye strike, and then while she was stunned he could hit her with the can. Or she'd simply be too distracted to pay attention to him grabbing a can and hitting her with it until it was too late. It was probably the best chance he had, anyway.

It was much harder to sleep this time than it had been before, when he'd been so exhausted and nauseous. This time he lay awake a long time, his mind racing, trying uselessly to formulate escape plans. He knew better; he needed sleep more than he needed to waste time running down the same tracks he'd gone over and over today, especially when he had a weapon and a plan that might conceivably work already, but it was almost impossible to stop himself. And when he finally did sleep, it was restless and nightmarish.

It was the sound of the door unbolting again that dragged him fully out of his uneasy sleep. He ached far worse than he had last night, this body reacting to both the rape and the unaccustomed exercise. Light streamed in through the basement window, indicating it was probably about 10 am or so. He started to push aside the covers, and realized belatedly that he'd made a tactical error in leaving his clothing in the bathroom, out of reach.

The body snatcher came downstairs with food on a tray, floating behind her. Her eyes lit up when she saw him. "You got ready for me? How sweet of you!"

Magneto clenched his fists in fury, fighting not to make a retort. She knew perfectly well he wasn't naked for her sake; to say anything would be to admit that she'd humiliated him. But the body snatcher continued, as the tray set down on the floor. "Why don't you just push those blankets aside? You haven't got anything I haven't seen before; I used to occupy that body, you know."

"You're welcome to do so again any time you wish," he said coldly.

"No, no. I plan to occupy it in an entirely different sense," she said, grinning. She walked over to him and tugged the covers off. "Did you know that 'occupy' used to be a euphemism for sex a few hundred years ago?"

"I don't collect historical euphemisms for sex, as I don't share your rampant obsession with the subject."

"'Rampant obsession.' I like that." She stroked her groin through the pants-- they weren't still his pants; she had changed clothes. "It's rampant, all right. You know, I have to thank you again for providing me with this body. I'm sure one of your girlfriends must have told you this, but you're pretty well hung. I like that."

"I don't tend to date women with such crude mindsets," he retorted.

"What, well-hung is crude? Your tender sensibilities would just shrivel up and die at what I consider crude, then."

"I suppose someone must play the role of uneducated lout. And you do have a well-suited personality for it."

She laughed. "Am I supposed to be insulted?"

"In an ideal world, yes."

"This isn't an ideal world." She pushed him back against the bed, leaning on it herself and looming over him. "Though it'll get a whole lot more ideal after I fuck you." She started to undo her pants, kneeling over him.

Magneto waited until her pants were partially off, restricting her physical movement. Her shields weren't up, and he wasn't quite able to believe she was leaving him this opening again, but he wasn't going to waste it. As soon as she was vulnerable, he struck, bringing his leg up into her groin. She folded with a hoarse gasp, falling to the side, trying to pull away, but that still left her open for another strike. He punched her in the groin, and when she weakly squirmed away, trying to block him, he hit her in the stomach, as hard as he could manage. The pain didn't seem to be forcing her out of the body. Too bad about that. He grabbed the can from under the pillow, and swung it down at her head, but it jerked out of his hand and went flying before it got there as she instinctively summoned power. All his hair stood on end in the center of the magnetic field, but her control was crude in her extremity of pain, unable to affect a human body. He hit her in the stomach again, and in the crotch again, and then slammed his fist into her temple as hard as this body could, several times. There was no need to hold back out of fear of damaging his own body-- this body simply didn't have the physical strength to permanently damage that one. He could use every bit of strength this body had in disabling her, and he did.

By the time he was done he was breathing hard, his muscles ached fiercely, and his hand hurt like the devil, but she was unconscious. Her pulse was still strong when he checked it, but she was plainly down for the count. Good. He ran to the bathroom, ignoring strained muscles, grabbing the still slightly wet clothes and throwing them on as he ran up the stairs. There was no time to manage putting on the bra or underpants-- the only reason he even bothered with the clothes themselves was the fear that running around outside in a nude woman's body would be an invitation to assault by other parties. The door to the kitchen was open, and from there it was three steps to the back door, and outside.

The house was nestled into the woods on the top of a hill, enclosed on three sides with no signs of neighbors. The home of a serial killer. He wondered if the ones she'd bragged about killing were buried on the property. The taxi was still sitting on the pebbled driveway, but the engine had been partially disassembled-- no doubt she'd been experimenting with the powers. So, no getaway car. He'd have to do this on foot. The driveway, unfortunately, was covered with small rocks. Magneto ran parallel to it, skirting it on grass and then the edges of the woods, with long, wild grasses lashing at his running legs, until the pebbles ran out and the road became bare dirt. That, he could run on. It wouldn't be pleasant-- these feet had few calluses, and those not of the sort conducive to running barefoot outside-- but he'd managed worse. He hiked the skirt up to above his knees with one hand and went into full bore down the hill, running awkwardly because the center of gravity was lower and his arms kept flailing at his sides without the weight he should have to balance him. It didn't matter. The muscles he'd strained yesterday were badly pulled with the length of his stride, far too long for what these legs should naturally do, and the bruises she'd left inside him with the rape ached as the running muscles tugged at other muscles, connected to the ones inside. There was a painful stitch in his side. He was getting out of breath. None of it mattered. He sprinted down the dirt road as fast as this body could go, using the downhill slope for momentum, almost falling over with the imbalance of it but keeping onward, until the dirt road and the hill both ran out and he skidded out onto paved road.

It was a narrow road winding through the woods, one lane on each side with a double gold line running down the middle. No cars passed by here. A rural road in the middle of nowhere. Inwardly Magneto cursed. His plan had been to hitch a ride with the first passing car, figuring that a disheveled and desperate-looking woman shouldn't have difficulty inspiring sympathy and aid, but this road looked largely untravelled. He glanced both ways, but the road simply disappeared into the trees, bending out of sight, on both sides. Arbitrarily he went right, figuring that if he was fortunate, she'd have neighbors in this direction, and instead of hitching a ride perhaps he could escape onto their property and ask their aid. They'd think she was her. He could always claim a dangerous crazy had attacked him-- no, she was a killer; if he said that they'd send the police and she'd kill the police with ease. If he said a dangerous mutant, though, people like the Avengers might be summoned and then how would he get his body back? Perhaps he could just hide. He ran down the road, unable to go quite so swiftly this time since he was no longer running downhill. By now his breathing was coming in labored gasps. This body was not used to running. It wanted to slow to a walk and cool down. Magneto had other plans, and drove it as ruthlessly as he would his own. He had to get off the road and to safety before she--

The hair on his arms stood on end. Static electricity lifted this body's hair and tangled it into his face. The smell of ozone, as familiar a scent as his own, tinged the air. Desperately he glanced up, and saw her hovering in the air, some distance behind him on the road.

How had she recovered so fast? He probably would have, but that was a function of his willpower and experience-- wasn't it? Was it only his body that allowed him to recover so quickly from being beaten into unconsciousness? She couldn't have willpower equivalent to his, or nearly the experience he had in being physically attacked. Magneto threw himself to the side of the road, hoping against hope that she hadn't seen him yet, hoping he could hide in the woods and she would pass by, never noticing--

No. The tingling and the static electricity increased, and then something hard and heavy and agonizingly painful hit him in the back, and he fell. The blow winded him, and bruised his spine and the muscles of his lower back badly. When he tried to force himself back to his feet, to keep running, he couldn't get up. He could see what had hit him, a can of green beans, rolling up against a bush to lie there uselessly. Frantically Magneto crawled forward, half-dragging himself by the arms, willing himself to move, to escape into the woods where he could hide from her.

He heard her land behind him, and rolled over to face her. She was glowing. Quite aside from the fact that she would undoubtedly wish to punish him for hurting her and trying to escape, he realized suddenly that she might be unaware that she was charged, that simply touching him now might electrocute him. It also meant that he had no effective way to fight back-- he'd planned to try to kick her, the only move he could manage from his position, but with her charged it would certainly hurt him worse than it would hurt her. He tried to back away, as best as he could when he couldn't stand up. "Wait-- don't--"

"I warned you," she said harshly, leaned down, and grabbed his arm before he could pull away.

Magneto had never actually experienced an electric shock. Even when he'd been young, before he'd manifested his full power, his body had absorbed electricity and converted it into personal energy; he'd found that out the hard way, by being thrown into the electric fence by Nazi guards who'd expected to see him die for their amusement, and were themselves rather shocked to see him survive it. He had inflicted this particular pain on others without ever knowing quite what it felt like. Now he knew. It was just like it had been when the child Kitty Pryde had disrupted his natural magnetic field by phasing through him, except much, much worse. He felt himself convulsing as a rather distant awareness through an enormous amount of pain, and when the pain subsided, his body was still stunned, numb, twitching and unwilling to move, with a sensation like pins and needles throughout him.

The body snatcher pulled him to his feet while he was still convulsing, and then threw him to the ground again, face down. She stepped on his head, grinding his face into the dirt. He was still too numb to move, to even try to struggle, when he felt his wrists and ankles being bound together behind his back by something, most likely the steel cable again. He tried to breathe, but all he could get was dirt. Her foot released his head, and the power picked up his hog-tied limbs, levitating him and turning him to face her. Now he could get air, at least. He breathed raggedly, the body still spasming and twitching in the aftermath of the shock.

"That was good," she said, hissing angrily. "That was very good. None of the others ever even tried something like this. I hope you're glad of how far you got, Magneto, because you're never going to get that far again. And you're going to learn not to try to hurt me."

"You could try... protecting yourself better," he said, his voice still weak.

She hit him. It was a hard, solid blow, dizzying him further. And then she shook her head. "No, no. You probably get beaten up on all the time. Big occupational hazard of being a supervillain, right? We're going to think of something else to teach you not to fuck with me." She reached her hand under the skirt, sliding her hand between his thighs despite his best efforts to keep his legs pressed together. "No undies? That turn you on?" The power pulled his bound ankles back sharply, bowing him-- he gritted his teeth to keep from screaming at the pain this caused his bruised back-- and forcing his legs apart under the skirt. The body snatcher slid two hard fingers into him, probing him roughly, and then shocked him. As he gasped with the pain, fighting not to cry out, she let him drop to the ground, where she kicked him in the stomach. When he managed to twist onto his stomach to prevent her from kicking it again, she yanked his skirt up and drove a booted foot between his legs in a vicious kick.

The pain was not as bad as if he'd had a male body and she'd done that, but this was rather like saying that the pain of being beaten senseless was not quite as bad as the pain of being burned alive. It was true, but awfully little comfort for the victim of the beating. Her power lifted him again. "There's a lot more where that came from, but we'd better get you home before we start your lessons. Can't have someone coming along and seeing the evil Magneto beating the crap out of some poor defenseless woman, after all."

She kept him turned face down as they flew back to the house, and the pain of having all his weight coming down on the bindings that held wrists and ankles together, as well as the cruel strain on his damaged back, was almost enough to make him black out. He fought to remain conscious as she carried him downstairs, where she undid the ties that held the wraparound skirt on and pulled it off him. Still levitating him face down, she forced his knees apart and stepped between them. He expected rape, and wondered how she could even think of sex after he'd hit her in the groin several times. But she was, apparently, not ready for that just yet-- she played with him, using her fingers to probe all his exposed sensitive places and deliver occasional sharp shocks for several minutes. Then she flipped him over, undid the blouse, and squeezed and fondled his breasts for a bit, pinching and shocking the nipples. Involuntarily he jerked with the small shocks, his muscles convulsing and pulling against his bonds hard enough that he'd likely end up with bruises on wrists and ankles. He was breathing in short hoarse gasps, all his concentration on fighting not to scream.

She turned him over again, dropping him face down on the bed, and pulled the blouse off, bunching it around the bindings on his wrists. Then she released the bindings, allowing his legs to drop to the bed, pulled the blouse all the way off his arms, and flipped him onto his back again with physical strength. He was too weak from the shocks to resist her. The cable she'd used to bind him, and the rest of the ones that had remained behind in this room, rose up, locked to the bedposts and then around his wrists and ankles again, pulling him spread-eagled.

"Now," she said, "I'm going to go take a nice, long, hot shower and take some pain medication for these bruises. When I get back, we're going to get into your lessons on What Not To Do. I want you to spend the time until then thinking long and hard about what a stupid fucking move that was, and how completely useless it was, and how badly you're going to hurt to pay for it."

She left. He lay quietly for several minutes, breathing, regaining air and strength. When he felt he'd recovered sufficiently, he started to try to work his wrists free, pushing aside the fear of what would inevitably happen if he couldn't. Unfortunately, the cables that bound him were not cuffs-- he could have possibly dislocated his hand to slip out of cuffs, a trick he'd heard about but never actually had opportunity to try. The cable was rather more like rope, wrapped firmly around the wrist, chafing the skin, but magnetically welded to itself rather than knotted to form the bond. Even if he chafed against the metal hard enough and long enough to draw blood, the lubrication still probably would not allow him to slip free. The cable bound the wrist tightly enough to constrict it, to slow circulation to the hand, and when he tugged as hard as he could the cable did not slip up to the lower edge of his hand and catch there-- it stayed put where it was around his wrist. The other side was no better.

There were bonds you could work your way out of if you struggled, and there were bonds you were stuck with. These were plainly the latter. Which meant he wasn't getting out of this.

She won't kill me. She said she plans to keep me alive. That didn't prove anything. She'd said that before he'd attacked her. What reason did she have to keep him alive? If she needed this body alive, perhaps that would be sufficient reason, but if it were only that she wanted him alive to play with while she ran about with his powers... that probably wasn't enough reason for her not to kill him, after what he'd done. Surely she would realize, now, he was too dangerous to let live.

No. No, he couldn't think that way. If she killed him, she killed him, and there was nothing he could do about it, but he had to assume that wouldn't happen. He had to assume he would live, and focus on getting out of this.

The minutes dragged on. He kept looking at the window to try to gauge how long it was. Hours. The cables were not pulled so tight as to strain his muscles further-- he had a tiny bit of motion range. But they were wrapped closely enough around his flesh to be limiting circulation. He couldn't feel his hands or feet anymore. And he was thirsty. Dear God but he was thirsty. He hadn't had anything to drink since waking up this morning, and the exertions he'd gone through had left his mouth parched and sore. Oh but what he would not give for a glass of water right now. To make matters worse, he could see the food she'd brought him this morning, lying on a tray by the stairs-- soggy cold cereal in milk-- and the thought of the cool milk on his dry throat was impossible to shut out, impossible to stop longing for. He was also hungry-- he hadn't eaten since he was taken captive, and he'd thrown up whatever this body had eaten before that time--but that he could ignore, whereas the thirst refused to be pushed aside. Ironically, he also had to urinate, a need that grew steadily worse as the time wore on. By the time she finally came down the stairs, boredom and dread and physical discomfort had brought him to the point where her appearance was actually a relief. Finally this would be over with.

"Thought about it?" she asked.

"I'm impressed, actually," he said, his voice hoarse and slightly cracked from thirst. He wasn't impressed, really-- disturbed was more like it-- but perhaps if he played a bit to her ego, she would give him more information. It was a trick that he'd realized some time ago worked distressingly often on himself. "I expected you to be unconscious for far longer. And your control of the powers is far greater than I'd assumed. It's obvious that such a simple trick as what I tried won't work on you. How have you gotten such control, so quickly?"

The body snatcher laughed, and fell into his trap. "I've impressed an internationally infamous terrorist killer. Should that make me jump for joy?" She sat down on the edge of the bed. "I get echoes. Anything your body knew how to do, I guess. So I'm not up on the location of your secret bases and your world conquest gizmos, but if you knew how to play the piano, I could sit down and put my fingers on the keys and the fingers would remember how to play, even though I personally don't know shit about piano playing. Good thing you trained so very hard with these powers of yours, huh? Got it all at the unconscious level, the body level, where I can get at it. Thanks."

"Well, in the light of that--" it wasn't very hard to force himself to sound defeated, even though he wasn't a very good actor, and he didn't want to think about why that was-- "it's clear that there would be no point to my attacking you again." He turned his head from her, trying to feign resignation. "You were right the first time. You have me. There's nothing I can do."

She ran a hand up his leg, across his belly, up to breasts sore from the shocks she'd inflicted earlier. "You're right about that. Glad to see you know it."

He turned his head to face her, swallowing his pride. If he could just make her think she had defeated him, if he could just make her think he had already learned his "lesson," perhaps he could get out of this. There was no way to avoid being raped, most likely, but if he could get water and be freed to use the bathroom, that would be enough of a victory for now. And she'd given him information, and he could use it to come up with another plan. All he had to do was humble himself for a moment now. "Please... could you let me free? I won't resist you, whatever you want. I swear it. But my hands are going numb, and I've had nothing to drink all day..."

She looked at him for several seconds. "Oh, sure," she said finally, in an oversolicitous voice. "Of course I'll let you get up and get your drinky-poo. You only tried to beat the crap out of me this morning, but we can let bygones be bygones, riiight?" She laughed harshly, dropping the sugary tone. "You must think I'm either very soft or very stupid, Magneto. Did you think I was just going to forget the lesson I promised you? That after I'd had a chance to shower and relax, I was just going to go, oh, you tried to beat me up but it's okay?"

He dropped the submissive act. "I'd hoped that you'd be big enough to tell when an opponent is beaten, and when you can afford to be magnanimous," he said acidly. "I see I was wrong. You are simply a thug."

"Oh, right. Advice on how to be a good supervillain, from a past master? I'm sure you were always so generous to your enemies when they were beaten. That why you never conquered the world, huh?" Her hand fell on his breast, squeezing painfully, twisting the nipple cruelly between her fingers. "I thought I had you beat this morning. You proved otherwise. So I'm not going to take for granted you've learned any lessons till I teach them to you."

With that, she channeled electricity through her fingers into the nipple she was tormenting, shocking him badly, far worse than what she'd done this morning. He gasped, jerking in his bonds, pulling every muscle painfully again. When he could speak again, he said, "You don't... know what you're doing. Even if... you know how... you don't know the limits of what's safe. Electricity is dangerous, woman. You could end up killing me by accident."

"You said that last time. You're really convinced I don't want you dead."

He tried to shrug, but with his arms bound over his head to either side of the bed, it was pretty much impossible. "If you do want me dead, no doubt you'll kill me. But if you don't want to kill me, I'd rather you didn't by accident."

She laughed. "You're right. I don't want you dead. So let's find out the limits of your tolerance gradually, shall we?" Her hand toyed with the other breast. "Nipples are extremely sensitive, especially for women. But then, you probably figured that out already. So if you can take it there, you can take it anywhere else."

It was like Zaladane again-- torturing him for personal amusement, reveling in what she'd taken from him. Except that against Zaladane, he'd had allies, and some slight hope of rescue. Here he had nothing, no powers, no allies, not even the physical mobility to escape. Nothing but his own strength of will, and his pride.

He had no clear idea of how long it went on. The thirst and the hunger and the numbness in his extremities disappeared into the welter of pain. The pressure in his bladder solved itself a different way; he'd known that would happen, known there was no way to avoid it with the convulsions the electricity was inducing, but knowing was no antidote for the sick humiliation. Curiously fastidious, she stopped the torture to get a washcloth and towel, cleaned him off with an expression of disgust, and put the towel underneath him. Then she returned to her experiments, slowly increasing the intensity of the shock with each terrible pulse.

Desperately he fought to keep from screaming, and only later realized what a fool he'd been to do so. She was testing his limits. He should have let her see his agony, shrieked, begged for mercy, feigned unconsciousness, anything to make her think the intensity of the pain and damage caused by the shock was worse than it was. But his pride was too great, and it went against everything he'd been trained in by his harsh existence. In his experience, weakness caused people to hurt you worse; in Auschwitz, if you cried out or complained, you were likely to get shot outright. Only those who could grimly endure would survive. So he'd held out as long as he could, biting back his cries of pain until the agony became too much for him to do so, trying desperately not to writhe, to fight the convulsions and hold as still as he could. Eventually he realized that this left her with far too close a notion of what his upper limits actually were, but by the time he realized this, he was already pushed to the point where he couldn't stop screaming, and it was too late to do anything at all.

At some point she seemed to decide that playing with his nipples was boring, and moved down to lower, even more sensitive regions. Causing him pain there seemed to excite her tremendously; shortly after moving the site of the shocks, she stripped naked and climbed atop him. His first reaction was actually an exhausted relief, assuming that while she was raping him, he would be spared the shocks.

For the first time in a very long time, Magneto's imagination for horrors failed him. He was taken totally by surprise when she channelled electricity through her genitals and shocked him inside. His convulsions and hoarse screams seemed to thrill her, and she did it again, and again, her face twisted with sick pleasure, until he was clinging to consciousness by the barest of threads, convinced that the torture would kill him, and desperately trying to hang onto consciousness as a way of staying alive. By the time she finished, he was utterly lost in a haze of pain, having forgotten where he was, why he was hurting, and very close to forgetting why he was trying to survive this.

Slowly he came out of his pain-wracked daze to find her stroking his body and the steel cables undone. Not that it really mattered that she'd untied him. He literally could not move; the convulsions against the unyielding steel had strained every muscle he had, and completely cut off the circulation to his hands and feet as well.

"Why?" he whispered hoarsely, barely audible.

"I told you," she said. "Because I can. And I like it."

She stood up. "Maybe next time you'll think twice about hurting me," she said. "Although that was so much fun, I'm not sure I'd need an excuse to try it again. You wouldn't believe how good it feels to have someone going into spasms under you like that."

Most men achieve the effect by pleasing their partners, not torturing them until they're half-dead, he wanted to say, but his voice was far too hoarse, and he was too weak, and it didn't matter anyway. She liked being a monster. It didn't bother her in the slightest.

Several minutes after she left, he was able to force himself to move. It was hideously painful, but at least now the muscles were obeying his commands, and they weren't going to get any less stiff and strained if he just laid there. He crawled into the bathroom and ran a bath as hot as he could stand it. As the tub filled, he reached up to the sink, grasped the cup in numb hands, and filled it with water from the tap, again and again, downing five glasses before he felt he'd drunk enough. Then he painfully pulled himself up over the lip of the tub and into it. The hot water did something toward soothing his tortured, overstretched muscles and his bruised back, but couldn't touch the terrible pain in his genitals and breasts, and couldn't begin to wash away the feelings of humiliation and helpless rage.

He stared down into the water. Fool, to believe he could escape so easily. He was used to being one of the special ones, the people who were hard to kill, hard to imprison, hard to defeat. To be held captive, tortured, used as a plaything, with no realistic hope of escape... that was something he would have sworn could not happen to him. Not anymore. It didn't fit the definition of Magneto, the self he had carefully built for himself over the past twenty years. Something like this belonged to his childhood, when he was easily rendered helpless, when he was only an ordinary human with an ordinary human's resources.

As he was now.

No. He shook his head, denying that. It was different now. He had extensive combat experience, had endured and survived horrors that had killed countless others. Even without his powers, he was still formidable...

...was he? Against an opponent with his powers? When had an ordinary human, however well-trained, ever defeated him? It had generally taken entire teams of super-powered beings to take him down...

But he didn't want to take her down. Once he was free, he could worry about that. All he wanted to do was escape...

...but his certainty that he'd be able to do that had dissipated, and he couldn't recapture it. He hurt so much, and she hadn't even worked up a sweat defeating him. He had hit her as hard as he could, taken advantage of her vulnerability, done everything he could... and not only hadn't it worked, it had nearly killed him. The hot water eased the aches only slightly. It would be sheerest agony to try to exercise in this condition... and she'd liked it. She might do it again, any time she wanted to. The slightest desire to gratify lust, in a body with, as he well knew, entirely normal male appetites, and she could do it again. Two or three times a day, if it pleased her to.

He couldn't take that. He wouldn't take that. If there was truly no hope of escape, nothing but the unbearable pain as often as she wanted to inflict it, he really did see no other way but to kill himself. He'd always thought of that as the coward's way out... but if that was all there was for him...

No. He wouldn't consider that. Not yet, anyway. He had suffered a setback; these things happened. He had been tortured; well, he'd been tortured before, and he'd lived. There had to be a way to escape. He just had to survive long enough to find it... and prevent her from damaging him as she had tonight. It would take some days to heal from this; he couldn't allow her to do it to him on a regular basis if he was going to be in any condition to escape.

Which meant open defiance was no longer an option.

The thought sickened him. It was not what he did, not him. The Master of Magnetism did not cooperate with his enemies, did not degrade himself to escape pain.

But Erik Lehnsherr had.

Water dripped from his hair and nose as single drops, disrupting the smooth surface of the water. The woman's body that stretched out before him in the water dissolved and rippled with the drops, changing and blurring. It was alien to look at, but the pain it felt was his pain. The sore overstretched muscles, the agony in its particularly female parts, these were not alien sensations. They weren't familiar, but they were as much a part of him as his magnetic senses had been, and those hadn't been familiar all his life. The awakening of his sexuality, the awakening of his mutant power, the transformation from an old man to an infant and then to a man in the prime of his life... all had involved shifts in his self-definition, transformations of who he was, accompanied by sensations unfamiliar and yet very much a part of him.

He couldn't be Magneto. Magneto was nothing without his powers. That self, that collection of strategies for life, involved being powerful, virtually undefeatable, dangerous even when beaten within an inch of his life. He could afford to be defiant, uncooperative as a captive, since who could hold him for long? That no longer fit, and wouldn't until he got his body back. The arrogance that had characterized Magneto was only going to get him hurt. And Magnus was the same as Magneto, only slightly more human, less a facade of invincibility. No, he'd been cast back to being Erik again, the name he had dispensed with as belonging to his human self, the person who could be victimized by Nazi evil and who couldn't even save his daughter's life. The helpless man, the man who'd had to resort to begging, lying, stealing, even prostitution, to stay alive. That was who he was now.

And he hated it. But there was no other way. Pretending he was still Magneto was a luxury he didn't have if he didn't want to be tortured into immobility again.

Slowly, painfully, Erik climbed out of the tub and dried himself. He was still very weak from the effort his muscles had expended in straining uselessly against his bonds during the torture, and he still hurt terribly, but the hot water had loosened things up enough that he could stand up, even get dressed. Clearly he no longer had the luxury of being able to go naked, and besides, the cellar was especially cold in contrast to the hot water. He managed not to stagger as he walked back into the bedroom.

The food was still there, a congealed mass of green that had turned to a porridge-like consistency. It was some awful ultra-sugary concoction for children that had turned the milk bright green and tasted like it could bring on an instant diabetic attack. He ate it ravenously, and drank down all the milk, licking the bowl to make sure he'd gotten everything that was remotely edible. The sugar on his empty stomach hit like a drug, making him restless and twitchy, desperately needing to move despite the pain it caused to do so, and he used the sugar high to do some exercises. There wasn't much he could do, aside from basic stretches-- he hurt too much. Trying to do just one sit-up brought a wave of nausea as his stomach muscles, abused from the convulsions, informed him of exactly how unwilling they were to contract. Running was a little more successful, but there was little room to do it in-- he ended up half-running, half-staggering to one end of the room, slamming against the wall with arms out, pushing back and reversing to repeat it. Not a great exercise, but it was something.

Predictably, the sugar rush wore off and left him exhausted, shaky and hungry. Erik crawled back into bed to conserve his energy until she fed him again. Hopefully it wouldn't be sugar this time.

In fact, she was not demanding about the second feeding -- the position of the sun indicated it was perhaps 4 or 5 PM when the door opened, the tray with empty cereal bowl levitated up the steps, and a second tray levitated down, to set down on the floor of the cellar. Two open cans of dog food, stale and petrified Italian bread, and half a bar of moldy cheddar cheese constituted his lunch. The intent was probably to humiliate him, but it failed miserably; Erik could still remember when a chunk of bread this size was a prize to be coveted and meat, any meat, was a delight unheard of. The dog food tasted terrible, of course, but that wasn't the point. It was meat, and under circumstances like this, he couldn't take meat for granted. The bread became edible, though still not tasty, when he got a cup of water from the bathroom and soaked pieces of the bread in it until they became soggy, and after he used his fingernails to scrape the moldy parts off the cheese, the largely intact interior was actually very good. Overall it was actually a better meal than the sugary cereal, satisfying his hunger more, although it didn't taste as good. Something his wealth had largely managed to conceal from others was that, although he enjoyed good food and ate well whenever he could, which was most of the time, in fact Erik could and would eat anything that wouldn't make him ill if he had to. It was impossible for him to entirely take food for granted.

There was little to do in the cell-- more exercise, more napping, more useless exploration, and somehow he managed to kill time until the body snatcher came down the stairs with what appeared to be dinner, around 9 PM. He tensed immediately. The food was something he was looking forward to, but he was already conditioned to expect pain and humiliation when she entered his cell.

"Din-din," she said mockingly. "You hungry?"

He didn't answer, watching her face, not the food. He might have to give in far more than he wanted to, but he didn't need to play along with obvious attempts to verbally humiliate him.

"Well, if you're not hungry, I can always send it back," she said, and the tray started floating up the stairs.

He'd have let it go, but he needed the food. He could have disregarded the hunger-- he'd gone hungry before-- but that same experience had taught him not to go without food needlessly, and he needed to keep his strength up. "I'm expected to beg for my dinner? Is that it?"

"That's a start," she said.

"Then yes, I'm hungry. Please give me the food."

"I don't know. I don't think that counts as begging. I want to see some serious groveling here."

Erik forced down his pride, hating her. And himself, for giving in to her. "Please. I beg of you. I need food, please." And she had better be satisfied with that, because he wasn't going to do any more than that. He could go without one night if he had to.

"Let's see quite how badly you want it," she said, as the tray lowered to the ground. She knelt, took off a bowl of canned mixed vegetables, and dumped it upside down on the floor. "Eat that, and I'll give you the rest of it."

Again, a transparent ploy to humiliate him. Like the dog food, this bothered him less than it might have. He sat on the floor, folding his legs Indian-style, and picked the vegetables off the concrete with his hands. At some point while he was eating, he realized that the position he was sitting in allowed her to see his crotch, and that she was staring at his underwear. He shifted uncomfortably, suddenly painfully aware again of what she would probably do to him when he was done eating, and changed the way he was sitting so he was more kneeling on the ground. That hurt, but he didn't like being stared at and vulnerable.

After he finished, she grabbed his arm and dragged him to his feet. "You can have the rest of your dinner later," she said, pushing him toward the bed. "This time if you try kicking me in the crotch again I'm going to shock you senseless and then fuck you with the shocks again. I wouldn't try it if I were you."

He was still in a lot of pain from the assault this morning. The idea of enduring another one was almost unbearable, bad enough to make him consider bargaining. "Wait. Please."

"Why should I?"

"I--" His mouth had gone dry. This was sickening him, but he had to do it. He'd been bleeding slightly all day from the injuries he'd received this morning. He had to try to protect himself from worse damage, whatever it took. Erik swallowed and forced the words out. "I have an... alternative proposal."

The body snatcher's eyes widened. "You've got my attention. Go on."

"I... am aware, now, that it's pointless to resist you. I didn't intend to fight you... but I'm--" No. His pride would not allow him to admit that he was still hurting from this morning. He couldn't give her that much satisfaction. Instead he took a deep breath and skipped the justification entirely. "I was wondering if you would accept... an alternative."

"Like what?"

She was not going to make this easy. In fact, she was clearly enjoying his humiliation. "I could perform oral sex on you instead," he said, trying to hide how deeply it bothered him to offer.

"Don't you ever use words like 'blow job'?"

"No."

"Well, I want to hear it. No more of this prissy 'perform oral sex' shit. Make your offer again, but I don't want to hear these faggy weasel words anymore."

"Very well. I could give you a blow job instead. Is that what you wanted to hear?"

"Instead of what?"

"Instead of..." He realized then what it was she wanted him to say. Well, the hell with it. His preferred sexual terminology was less earthy than what she wanted, but he knew the ruder words in English well enough. "Instead of fucking me."

She smiled broadly, her face a little bit flushed. She hadn't yet learned how to use her magnetic powers to hide how ridiculously fast skin that fair would blush or show any sort of excitement. "Still all bruised up from your stupid stunt this morning, huh, poor baby?" The body snatcher laughed. "Sure, I'm game. But no half-assed jobs. Give me a really good blow job, and I'll leave your poor little cunt alone tonight. Do a shitty job, and I'll still fuck you. That sounds fair, doesn't it?" Her voice hardened. "Take off all your clothes first, though. I want you naked."

He obeyed, and did as he had said he would. It was not the first time he'd performed that particular service on a man, though it had been many, many years ago. Since then, he'd acquired considerable experience doing the equivalent for women, and being the recipient himself. Since the body snatcher was in his body, he knew exactly what she would like, because it was what he had liked when women had done it to him. At least, he assumed that was how it worked, and her reaction seemed to bear the hypothesis out. Remembering her warning, he set out to do as good a job as possible, ignoring the nausea and the part of his mind that screamed in horror at what he was doing. He managed to make her cry out, more than once, and by the time he was done she was gasping, sated.

"Well." She ran a hand through his hair. "You even swallow. I'm impressed. You get a reprieve tonight, sweetheart." As she pulled up her pants and stood, she grinned mockingly at him. "Where'd you learn to do that? Your sexual history a bit more checkered than I guessed?"

He shrugged, dully. He hadn't moved from his kneeling position by the bed. "You have my body. I know what I like."

"Good point. Well," she ruffled his hair again, "you're never going to get what you like again. So I suggest you learn to like what you get."

On that note she left the room again. He remained where he was for several long minutes. Eventually he mustered up the willpower to go over to the tray. There was an empty bowl where the vegetables had been, cold macaroni and cheese, and a slice of steak, burnt on the outside and incredibly fatty inside. He ate, chewing the steak methodically, welcoming the taste of cheese and burnt meat and slightly congealed blood to drive out the foul taste from his mouth. He'd completely forgotten how bad the taste was-- when he'd tasted himself by kissing a woman who'd just pleasured him, it hadn't been nearly as rank-tasting as this had been. Maybe circumstances had a lot to do with it. He'd probably have been a lot more inclined to find anything pleasurable while lying with a woman he loved than while being degraded for a captor's enjoyment.

He had to get out of here. The thought that he could fall so low, that he could willingly offer to degrade himself like that to avoid pain, disgusted him beyond all measure. He had cast aside the person he wanted to be, the person he had built himself into, to be the person he had left behind years ago, but his emotions were still Magneto's. Erik had eventually learned to shut off most of the horror and disgust, to accept what he had to do to survive and not to think about it much. Magneto had forgotten how to do that, a persona created by pride. There were things he had done as Magneto that horrified him, but they were crimes against his current moral standards, not bendings of will and pride. And he didn't want to relearn how not to be horrified, didn't want to have such familiarity with degradation that he barely noticed it anymore.

The next few days passed with the kind of non-time one felt when one was a captive with nothing to do. Erik exercised frequently, showered or bathed twice a day, and slept a lot. The body snatcher fed him three times a day, mostly leftovers, dog food, and the stuff in the cans, and demanded sexual favors at least twice a day, sometimes more. As long as he obeyed her demands, she didn't torture him. It was more bearable a captivity than Auschwitz had been-- no hunger, no forced labor, little risk of death. If it weren't for the rapes, his situation would be almost tolerable, and even they were easier to deal with when he cooperated-- when she didn't bind him, he could shift his body to minimize the pain.

"Not as bad as Auschwitz" did not by any stretch of the imagination constitute "good," however, and thoughts of escape occupied his every waking moment. An inch-by-inch examination of his cell turned up a somewhat rusty nail file, half-buried between the baseboard and the tiles of the bathroom floor. He tried the file on the bars of the cell, but it was softer than they were-- all that happened as he sawed away was that the file itself wore down.

However, the nail file could help him implement a different plan. He had been reluctant to start digging, because it would be obvious. The nails this body had come with were not long by female standards, but certainly longer than his had been, and the extra length made them useful as digging utensils and possible weapons, so he hadn't bitten them short. However, if he'd used them to dig, he'd get enough dirt under them that the body snatcher, if she had any powers of observation at all, would probably notice and ask questions he wouldn't be able to answer. Having a nail file would enable him to get around that. So he rearranged the cans in the back so that they were no longer flat against the wall; instead, they allowed a slender passage behind them to a region wide enough for him to kneel down and dig in the dirt floor, using his hands and an empty can he'd stolen off his dinner tray one night. After digging, he'd bathe and use the nail file to eliminate all the evidence of his activities.

It was slow going-- he couldn't risk being back there when the body snatcher came down the stairs to feed him or demand sex, and her schedule was erratic. Breakfast could occur anytime between early morning and noon, dinner came between late afternoon and long after sunset, and she brought him lunch whenever she felt like it. And sometimes she demanded sex between feedings, so even that wasn't a reliable guide. The only time he knew she would not be coming in on him was an hour or so directly after the rapes. So instead of showering directly afterward, as he had before, he would eat if she'd brought food, and then, without dressing, channel the rage he'd had to force down during her assault into attacking the dirt floor for an hour and a half or so. It usually hurt to kneel on the hard floor and dig after his body was cramped and sore from the acrobatics she demanded, but his motivation to escape was at its highest then, and the shower afterward to wash the dirt from his naked body cleansed her touch away as well.

Still, he couldn't fool himself. At the rate he was able to dig, he'd have a tunnel to the outside of the house in several months, and he was sure he'd go stir-crazy before then. He needed to get outside. He could live in an Antarctic wasteland, or in space, or any number of other hostile environments with recirculated air and somewhat claustrophobic quarters, as long as he knew he could leave any time he wanted. Being trapped in a basement with no fresh air, his only exposure to the outdoors a pair of narrow windows overlooking the dirtline, was driving him mad.

Erik broached the subject with the body snatcher one night, while she was still lying in the bed after raping him, stroking him as if she were trying to pretend he was her lover rather than her victim. "I was wondering if you'd consider a request." He hated asking her for anything, but it was clearly the only way to get what he needed, and at the moment he would rather do a bit of begging than remain trapped here.

"Maybe. If it entertains me to grant it."

"I'm going insane from being trapped down here. Please, could I be allowed outside to exercise on occasion?" If he didn't beg, she wouldn't grant it. His only hope was to entertain her. It didn't make the sound of his diffident plea any easier to bear. "It's not as if I could get away from you, I understand that. I don't expect to escape, I only need fresh air and some free space to run for a little while. Maybe an hour, half an hour, whatever you can manage." Whatever she could fit into her busy schedule of spending outrageously on his credit cards, he thought sarcastically. She'd bragged to him about how his money was financing a complete redecoration of her house. Fortunately, since he'd had a habit of accidentally denaturing his cards, he'd only kept two on his person at any given time, and he was wealthy enough that she could spend to the limit on those cards without significantly impacting his finances, but on principle it galled.

She laughed. "You know, just about a week ago you told me you'd never grovel to me, and now here you are, begging to be let outside like a doggie on a run. Who'd have thought?" There was nothing he could say to that. The body snatcher levered herself up on an elbow and looked at him, running her free hand over his knees and inner thighs. He held himself still, tolerating it. "What do I get in return for this favor?" she asked, grinning.

He stared at the ceiling, not looking at her. "I'd assumed sexual services," he said quietly.

"Nice idea," she said, her hand slipping between his legs, fingers exploring his sore female parts. It was very uncomfortable, but he forced himself not to squirm. This was what he'd bargained for, after all. "Trouble is, you already bargained that away. I can fuck you whenever I like, however I like, and you already do whatever I want because you know I'll hurt you if you don't. So you actually haven't got that to bargain with anymore." An involuntary gasp escaped him as she pinched a particularly sore spot. "No, you'll have to think of something else."

He hesitated. "I could give you the number of one of my other credit cards. One of the ones I wasn't carrying."

"Thanks for the offer. When I run out of what I've got, I'll consider it. But that's not what I want." She withdrew her hand abruptly and rolled onto her back, gesturing with one hand. Several cans rose into the air-- fortunately, not enough to expose his digging work. "I can play games with metal objects until the cows come home. But there's a lot about these powers I don't know. I want you to teach me."

As if he would do anything to help a murderer and a rapist become more powerful. "No."

"Then you don't get to go outside." She smirked.

He sat up, folding his arms over his chest. "Then I withdraw my sexual cooperation."

She looked at him hard. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"I can't stop you from raping me. But I can refuse to cooperate. You seem to get a lot of pleasure out of the fact that I'd more or less voluntarily try to please you. I do that because it makes my life easier, not because I quake in terror at what you can do to me."

"If you don't, then you're an idiot," she said dangerously. "Maybe you need a little reminder of last time you defied me?"

She put her hand on his knee and shocked him. The leg kicked convulsively, without volition, but he refused to cry out. "I don't deny that I fear what you can do," he said hoarsely. "But I have never let fear rule me. You are not the first to threaten to torture me. Do what you will, but remember that if you cripple or kill this body, you'll be trapped in that one forever." She had admitted that to him one night, perhaps unaware of what a weakness she was revealing-- the reason she was keeping him alive was that when she was in a foreign body, the only body she could switch to was her own. "I am over 60 years old. I'll guess you are under 30. As well-kept as my body is, it's not going to last as long as yours could. Kill me, and I'm free of your tortures, but you have just lopped 30 years off your own life." This wasn't strictly speaking true. After Mutant Alpha had made him an infant, the Shi'ar agent Davan Shakari had restored him to adulthood at a physiological age of 30 or so. Physiologically, his own body wasn't much older than the body snatcher's own. But if she didn't know he'd been in the death camps of the Nazis, she probably didn't know the rest of his history either.

"Who's talking about killing you? All I need to do is hurt you."

"Which will, eventually, kill me."

"Not for a good long time."

"It doesn't matter. I will resist until then if I must." Her casual possessiveness toward him, the way she made free with him and expected no objections, her gloating over his degradation and his willingness to beg, all had boiled over and left him with a furious determination. If he died under torture in order to prove that she could not own him, that all she could do was make it worth his while to obey, so be it. He was terrified, and some part of his mind was screaming that challenging her was impractical and stupid, but none of that mattered now. She didn't own him, and she never would, and he would die to make her understand that if he had to.

"All right," she snarled. "Let's see you put your money where your mouth is." She shoved him back down against the bed, pinning him with her weight, straddling his chest with her legs crushing his arms and her genitals thrust toward his face. "Suck me."

"No."

The charge went through him where her legs and groin touched his body, and shot down from his chest to his feet. He screamed, bucking.

"Ready to suck it yet?"

"Guarantee... that I can go outside... and I'll do whatever you ask."

"You're not going anywhere. Suck it or I'll hurt you."

"Then hurt me," he gasped defiantly.

She did. Again and again. At some point his struggles became frantic enough that he was able to buck her off him. He rolled for the edge of the bed, blindly seeking freedom, but he was uncoordinated and weak from the shocks, and it was no effort for her to capture him and bind him.

This time she suspended him in midair over the floor, the cables around wrists and ankles pulling him spread-eagled as if he were stretched on a rack, almost upright. She raped him in the anus, shocking him there while her hands roamed the front of his body, delivering shocks and cruel pinches to sensitive places. He screamed, stretched too tightly by her power and the cables to even writhe with the pain. Over and over she shouted in his ear, asking if he gave in, promising she'd stop hurting him if he'd agree to suck her. When he had breath and presence of mind to do so, he cursed her in reply. The rest of the time he just howled. By now he no longer cared about going outside, but the fact that she would do this to him enraged him. He hated her so much. He would never give in. Repeatedly Erik screamed for her to stop and repeatedly rejected her offer to stop if he'd give in, sometimes in the same pain-wracked breath.

As she became too excited to concentrate on the cables, he fell to the floor, and she threw herself on top of him and finished in a few grunting thrusts. By then he was crying with the pain, hating her all the more for that. He hadn't cried with physical pain since he was a child. Even Zaladane hadn't been able to make him cry, not with physical pain, anyway. Someday she would pay for this. Someday. Oh dear God he hurt, he hurt so much.

For several seconds she lay on top of him, panting. The shocks had stopped, but he was still sobbing weakly. After a moment, she got off him and flipped him onto his back. Through the tears he couldn't control, he glared up at her with as much hatred and rage as he could put into a look.

"Still refuse to suck me?" she asked.

It took a few seconds to understand the question. When he did, he nodded furiously. Yes, he still refused. "Don't... own me," he choked out past the sobs and a voice too hoarse from screaming to talk. "Never... own... me..."

"Let's see about that." She lifted him with the cables and stretched him out on the bed. With her sexual arousal at his pain satisfied, she was able to focus all her attention on torturing him, and did so. Eventually he blacked out. She revived him the first time it happened. The second time, he thought he was dying, and welcomed it. He had won. She could kill him but she couldn't own him. He was free.

When he woke up, he wasn't anywhere he recognized. It looked like a private bedroom of some sort. He was alone in the room, and he hurt terribly. There was a strong smell of antibiotic cream; when he looked down at his naked body, he could see that some sort of substance had been applied to his nipples and a few other places on his body that hurt very much from the electrical shocks. In one or two places there were even band-aids.

Slowly, painstakingly Erik dragged himself out of the bed and over to the window. This was the second floor. He could see outside; the woods were not far from the house, maybe forty or fifty feet. Directly underneath the window were leafy bushes. If he could get the window open and jump, chances were he wouldn't hurt himself much. At least no worse than he hurt already. Trying to flee the house naked might not be a brilliant idea, but it was summer so he was unlikely to die of exposure, and if he got scratches and bug bites and poison ivy from fleeing through the woods, it would be a small price to pay for freedom. He reached down to the insets in the wooden frame of the window where hands were supposed to go to lift, and started to try to open the window.

The body snatcher came in. Quickly Erik dropped his hands to his sides so it wouldn't look like he was trying to escape. "How do you feel?" she asked, her tone strangely subdued.

That was an amazingly stupid question. He turned and glared at her. "I live, no thanks to your idiocy," he snarled.

"Of course you're alive. I wasn't trying to kill you," she snapped. "Believe it or not, I do have some notion of how much you can take." She walked over to him. He backed up against the window, instinctively trying to get away from her, though intellectually he knew there was no point to it.

"Indeed? And how did you come by this knowledge?" he sneered. "I doubt I'd have known precisely how much electricity a person could survive when I first came to my power, and I suspect I was far less sheltered than you."

"You were there when I did the research, remember? Or did you think I was too stupid to remember how much electricity it took to make you scream without killing you?" Her hands reached out for him. He stiffened, pressing himself against the window, and when she tried to lift him he struggled, pushing away from her. She dropped him.

"Stop fighting me," she said, rolling her eyes. "You'd think you'd know by now you're just going to get hurt if you struggle."

Which was true. He did know that. After what she'd done to him last time, though, her presence was sending a shrieking fight-or-flight response through his nervous system, and it was all he could do to control it, to let her touch him, although realistically he knew that if he fought she'd just overpower him. The body snatcher lifted him again and swung him up to be carried in her arms, like a perverse parody of a man carrying his wife over the threshold. He let himself go deadweight, not helping by putting his arms around her neck or anything else to make her load lighter. Not that it mattered. He knew perfectly well that even without using power, his own body was physically strong enough to carry the one he was in now, no matter what he did.

She carried him down the stairs, through the living room. The furniture looked new and expensive, and there were an absurd number of overpriced knickknacks cluttering every available surface. They were heading in the general direction of the basement door, and he tensed. It seemed obvious that she'd been keeping him in her bedroom, to keep an eye on him while he recovered. Now that he was conscious and clearly not dying, she was going to lock him in his subterranean prison again, and probably rape him while she was at it. If there was any possibility of escape, any at all... but dear God, he hurt far too much to handle a punishment for a failed escape right now. What she undoubtedly planned to do now would be horrible, but he could endure. If he tried to escape, and failed-- and he would fail, there was no way in this condition that he wouldn't fail-- that didn't bear thinking about.

But she didn't turn toward the basement. Instead she headed into the kitchen. The door to the outside of the house swung open under her power, and she walked outside, still carrying him.

Outside. It was somewhat overcast, hot and muggy with the sky mostly a shade of white and the sun visible only as a hazy smear. It didn't matter. He was outside. He took a deep breath, savoring the pollen and the perfumes of flowers and the woodsy smell of trees and the fresh scent of the mown grass. The impulse was overwhelming to leap out of her arms and bolt for the woods, but he knew better. Not only would he never get far, but it would prevent her from ever granting him this much again. He looked up at her face, unable to understand why she was doing this, but her expression was unreadable.

She set him down on the stone stoop. "You win," she said. "Congratulations, Magneto."

He stared at her. "Are you letting me go?"

"No!" She laughed. "Don't push your luck. No, I'm giving you what you asked for. You wanted to go outside, here you are."

Erik had honestly never expected her to capitulate. Had he been in her place and it had been an issue he cared about, he would never have. But then, obviously, she wasn't him, however much she might look the part. He wanted to gloat, to rub her face in her capitulation, the first victory he'd won from her. That would be foolish, though. "Thank you," he forced out, though after the torture he'd endured to get here he didn't feel in the slightest grateful. Or didn't want to feel in the slightest grateful, anyway. It was almost impossible to avoid feeling gratitude for the warm fresh air and the diffuse sunlight and the soft grass under his bare feet. A slight wind stirred, cool and refreshing against his naked skin. Infuriating that he could have fallen so far that this, which he should be able to take for granted, was something he would actually feel grateful for, and grateful toward a torturer and rapist at that.

"I'll give you half an hour every day," she told him. "You can exercise if you want or whatever. Then you pay me, and it had better be worth my time, do you hear me?"

He nodded. "I understand." And promptly pushed that part of his bargain with her out of his head. He couldn't enjoy this properly if he thought about what he was going to have to do to pay for it. Painfully Erik stood, wobbled, fell onto his hands and knees and forced himself upright again. He had to walk. There was no way he could run or do any sort of exercise today, but he knew from harsh experience that he'd heal faster by pushing himself, and he wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to be outside, to walk about unrestricted in an area so much bigger than the cell he'd been living in for over a week now. This would be easier with a walking stick to help support him, but he couldn't find anything that would suit and wouldn't ask the body snatcher for anything now.

The grass was cool under his feet, not cold like the packed-earth floor of his cell. He walked slowly, taking small, painstaking steps, his muscles stiff and terribly sore and not entirely willing to support his weight without protest. Though he knew he wouldn't be able to range very far, he did walk around the corner of the house. The stolen taxi he'd been brought here in was gone, in its place a beautiful, expensive sportscar. The dirt driveway that had led to the house had been repaved with blacktop, flowers planted along either side of it. Clearly she hadn't been lying when she'd talked about all she'd spent on his credit cards.

As he turned to walk back, he noticed that she'd followed him-- which was no more than he'd expected, but the appraising stare she was giving him reminded him suddenly and painfully of his nakedness, and of the price he'd have to pay for this privilege. He shuddered slightly before he could stop himself. Erik was not one to hide from frank appreciation of his body-- if he'd been, he never would have adopted the skin-tight costume he usually wore-- but there was an enormous difference between seeing women, even women he was uninterested in, appraise him when he was incredibly powerful, male and in his own body, flattered by the attention and in no danger from it at all, and having a captor who'd raped him repeatedly look at him like he was something good to eat, while he wandered around outside stark naked. He tried to turn away, tried to forget about her and concentrate on the freedom of the outdoors, but it was too late-- he could feel her eyes burning into him, exploring him as her hands would later. What a narcissist. Did she really think this body was so attractive? He wouldn't have given it a second glance. It was still a little puffy, though the limited diet and the constant exercise had worn away some of the fat, at least. Maybe it was a little bit more attractive now that he'd had it and had been working to improve it for a week, but certainly not worth staring at like that. Why couldn't she find other partners? His body was attractive enough; she should have no shortage of attentions if she wanted them. What was her fetish for him?

He couldn't take the suspense anymore. Erik turned around and walked toward her as purposefully as he could given his weakness. "I'm done here for the day," he said harshly. "What would you have from me?"

A smile started to spread across her face. "That eager? You've only been out here twenty minutes."

"I'm tired, and I want to get this over with. Well?"

She reached for him, pulling him in close against her chest, one hand wrapped around his waist and the other running over his body. He couldn't keep from wincing as she touched his breast, with the nipples still aching from the shocks. "Oh," she said, and released him. "Oh, of course, you're injured. It must still hurt a lot." Her tone was solicitous, but he wasn't at all sure he believed it. "I guess if I fucked you now it would leave you in a lot of pain, wouldn't it?"

That much was obvious. If given a choice he'd far prefer to use his mouth right now, and it looked as if perhaps she'd let him. "It would," he acknowledged. "Would you prefer a blow job instead?" The degrading gutter language she wanted him to describe sex acts in still irritated, but he used it because it was what she would accept.

The body snatcher grinned broadly. "Actually, no. I want to fuck you."

She shoved him, and he fell to the grass, twisting to catch himself with his hands. He wasn't fully successful; the impact bruised his hip and leg. "Get on your hands and knees. I'm going to fuck you right here."

He obeyed, breathing deeply, bracing himself for the pain. When she entered, he gritted his teeth until his jaw started to ache, fighting to keep from screaming. She seemed to be trying to cause him pain, deliberately slamming herself against sore spots. Eventually he did scream, which seemed to excite her further and bring harder, more painful thrusts.

She finished finally. He turned over slowly, trying to face her without having to sit down or otherwise put any pressure on his groin. It felt like something might be torn inside. "That's what you get for trying to dictate terms to me," she told him as she got dressed. "You win your little victory, Magneto-- you get to go outside, as long as you do whatever I want sexually. And if it hurts you, too fucking bad."

She carried him inside, down into the basement, and threw him to the earth floor of his prison, knocking the wind from him. He didn't manage to recover and get to his feet until after she'd departed.

In the bathroom, he drank three glasses of water, trying to moisten a throat sore from screaming. Then, as best as he could, he examined himself for damage. He was bleeding, heavily enough that it frightened him. It was possible that it was menstrual blood, but given the brutality of the rape he'd just suffered, that didn't seem like the most likely possibility. But he doubted he could summon the body snatcher by pounding on the door to his cell, and even if she came who knew if she'd allow him to see a doctor? She'd be more familiar with the sorts of injuries women could suffer, and she might well laugh at him and tell him this was nothing, hardly life-threatening, gloat about the mighty Magneto panicking over a little blood. If it persisted until she came to see him again, he'd tell her, but he wasn't going to act like it frightened him. No, mild concern at best, that was the tone to take. Or better yet, ask her offhandedly if she'd expect this body's time of the month to occur now, and if she said no, suggest she get him a doctor, acting like it was her problem and not his.

In the meantime, he found supplies in the cabinet where the other toiletries had been. First he tried a tampon, but with the pain he was in that was simply unendurable. A pad was mildly irritating, but he felt he needed something to keep the blood from running free and couldn't imagine that he'd be able to bandage the actual injuries, assuming the bleeding came from injuries at all. He then went and lay down, dressed only in his underpants since, after the shocks, clothing on his body was irritating and painful, with his feet propped up on pillows to elevate his pelvis and let gravity help stanch the bleeding.

It was difficult to sleep with the pain he was in. He began once again to run over all the possibilities for escape. They were very few. Being allowed to go outside might make his captivity slightly more bearable, but if she continued to demand sexual favors that caused serious pain and some degree of damage in payment for going outside, in the long run it wouldn't be worth it. He couldn't afford to let himself be badly damaged, or he'd never be able to escape.

The thought occurred to him of using the blood to try to write a note and smuggle it out with a doctor-- if he could get her to get him a doctor-- but there were a number of things wrong with that. Write a note to who? Police coming in here would be decimated by her power. Heroes like the Avengers wouldn't be particularly eager to see Magneto get his body back, and while they would probably not recognize him if he didn't tell them the truth, and therefore they would treat him decently, it wouldn't help him a lot if the body snatcher was captured and imprisoned. She would either switch, giving him his own body back but leaving him a captive of the US government, who would undoubtedly take steps to ensure he didn't escape, or she wouldn't, in which case he still wouldn't have his own body. And he refused to turn to the X-Men for help. Not after the fiasco of their last meeting. He had considered them friends and allies, and they had attacked with intent to kill. To say nothing of what Xavier had allowed MacTaggert to do. No, he would never allow himself to be helpless in the hands of the X-Men, either. The body snatcher was almost preferable. She could torture him physically, but couldn't rip his heart to shreds with betrayal.

His Acolytes were dead. His children, last time he checked, blamed him for taking advantage of Wanda's mental breakdown to "force" her to join him-- apparently so charitable a thought as the notion that a father should look after his daughter and give her emotional support when she was mentally ill had never occurred to either of them. Lee had decided that even just being friends with a mutant terrorist was a bit too much of a strain on her hectic lifestyle-- not that she'd be any help anyway. Excalibur might be willing to help-- if he recalled correctly, that team had Shadowcat, Nightcrawler, and Rachel Summers on it, all people he'd parted with on good terms-- but they were in Britain, and he hadn't the faintest idea where, exactly. Besides, he'd parted with Storm, Psylocke and Wolverine on good terms, too, and Wolverine had tried to gut him. No, there was no one he could turn to for help, even if he could smuggle a message out-- which was only what he expected. He'd never been able to rely on anyone other than himself.

What had he missed? There had to be something he had overlooked, some key he could use, some method he hadn't thought of to get out of here. Assuming he hadn't been unconscious longer than a day after the torture she'd inflicted, this was his eighth day of captivity, and he was no closer to getting away than before. He had to focus on that, had to devote the resources of his mind entirely to working out a way to escape, because if he started to think about what he'd just been through or the pain he was in, he would be overwhelmed with rage, and there was no outlet for it. He wanted her dead so badly the hunger choked him-- but even if she was powerless and bound before him, as long as she was in his body he didn't dare seriously hurt her, and he couldn't imagine how to make her switch back if kicking her in the crotch and braining her with a shoe hadn't done it.

It was late when the body snatcher interrupted his increasingly frustrated and morbid thoughts with dinner. "Lying around in bed? I'm surprised at you. I thought the Ubermensch didn't believe in resting when he could be working out instead," she said mockingly.

He shrugged. "When was this body's last menstrual cycle?"

"Why?"

"I'd like to know whether I'm simply menstruating, or hemorrhaging to death," he said in as off-hand a tone as he could manage.

It worked. Her eyes went wide. "What?"

"Well." He turned to face her. "I'm bleeding, and inclined to think you've caused some sort of internal damage with your little power games. On the other hand, this could be perfectly normal. I don't really care all that much which-- while I don't particularly wish to die, the thought of your stupidity causing the death of your body and trapping you in mine, to die much younger than you'd have otherwise, is actually attractive."

She was over at his side in a second, the tray of food lowering quickly to the floor behind her. "Let me see."

"I can't stop you."

"Take the goddamn panties off and stop being an asshole."

"Or what? You'll hurt me?" He looked up at her with his best sardonic expression. "That would certainly improve this body's health no end."

The body snatcher made a snarling noise and tore the underpants off him, roughly grabbing his legs and pulling them up to allow her to look at his genitals. He didn't resist, though she was ungentle and her fingers on his sore places were quite painful. After a moment she released him, sighing in relief. "That's nothing. I thought you might be reacting like one of the others did."

"One of the others?"

"Yeah, I hurt him pretty bad. Ended up having to kill him and take the body in for medical attention-- I claimed he raped me, and the medical exam confirmed it of course. But that was big gouts of blood. This is barely what I get when I get my period. You're not going to die." She smiled cruelly at him. "Relieved? Or are you so upset with my hospitality you actually wanted to die?"

"Somewhat relieved. I don't want to die, but I'd be delighted to see you dead, and without this body as backup and with my reputation hanging over your head, my death would mean yours as well before terribly long." He kept his voice casual. "Tell me, if I had been bleeding-- 'big gouts of blood,' I think you put it-- would you have killed my body and switched back?"

"Hell no!" She shook her head vehemently. "Where am I ever going to get a body as good as this one? Handsome, strong, well-hung, and one of the most powerful superbeings on the planet. No, Magneto. I told you I'd keep you forever, and I plan on it."

"So you would have allowed your own body to die?"

"No, I'd have taken you to a doctor."

"Ah." He nodded. "Thus begging the question of how such damage was caused, as well as running the risk that someone would recognize you as me. Sounds like a very risky proposition. You must be quite relieved it wasn't necessary."

"It'd almost be worth it, though. If it became public knowledge that 'Magneto' had brutally raped a mutant woman, your rep with your own kind would be shot to hell. People can respect a terrorist, though God only knows why, but even you feel like you've got some moral high ground to condemn rape."

He ignored the second half of what she'd said entirely. "You are a mutant?"

"Do I look like the kind of person who gets the right to go up in space and get superpowers from cosmic rays?" she asked bitterly.

"Stranger things have happened. In the past, I assumed everyone with powers was a mutant unless proven otherwise. Now I try to be more cautious."

"Oh yeah, I'm a mutant. At least I assume so, since I started being able to do this when I was about 16." She grinned ferally. "My older brother used to fuck me when my folks were drunk, which was all the time. Last fucking mistake he made. He was the first one I did