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Nick walked. That was the only imperative his fragmented mind would allow: forward motion, relentless and purposeful. The steel pipe, still tucked beneath the back of his shirt, was a constant, cool reminder that he was armed, anchored, and dangerous—a truth his mind denied, yet his body emphatically affirmed.
He had emerged from the industrial docks, a forgotten district where the city's heart was just cold machinery and rust, and now the architecture was shifting. The narrow, shadow-choked arteries gave way to slightly wider, busier streets, though they were still uniformly filthy, echoing with the sound of distant sirens that seemed less like a call for help and more like a permanent, whining soundtrack to urban decay. This was not the gleaming Gotham of the towers he had seen from the alley; this was the guts of the city, scarred and perpetually bruised.
The atmosphere was a constant assault on his senses. The smell of frying oil mingled unpleasantly with refuse and stale beer. The sound was a cacophony of engines, shouting, and the low, aggressive rumble of a city always on the brink. Every glance from a passerby was fleeting, suspicious, and predatory. He felt like an animal walking through a territory staked out by more established, equally desperate predators.
Despite the total void of his personal history, his mind was operating with frightening efficiency. He processed the information around him with the cold precision of a military strategist assessing a battlefield. He wasn't learning how to be safe; he knew it.
Avoid the light. Light meant attention, and attention meant trouble. He kept to the building line, using every available shadow, doorway recess, and overhang.
Observe feet. Where people were looking was irrelevant; where they were walking told him their intent. A quick pace, head down, meant self-preservation. A slow, weaving pace meant menace or vulnerability.
Metal is protection. His eyes were unconsciously drawn to anything metallic: street signs, manhole covers, utility boxes. They were resources. They were potential.
He realized he was hungry—a deep, gnawing emptiness that made his coordination sluggish. But his survival programming overrode the need for food. His first need was not nourishment, but identity.
He stopped by a tattered newspaper stand, pretending to look at a magazine, while his eyes devoured the headlines of the Gotham Gazette. He was searching for his own face, a missing person report, a frantic plea from a desperate family. There was nothing. The news was full of political scandal, a looming threat from the Black Mask crime syndicate, and a cryptic editorial about the city's silent watcher, the Batman.
He focused on the name. Batman. The word held no prior association, yet the concept—a masked vigilante operating outside the law, imposing order through fear—felt disturbingly familiar. It evoked a primal, complex reaction in the ghost that was still trying to fully inhabit Nick's body: a blend of profound skepticism and grudging, professional respect.
He moved on, following the main thoroughfare that led to the city's financial district. The transformation of the cityscape was stark and cruel, making the city's inherent injustice a physical reality.
One moment, he was among cramped tenements with laundry hanging from fire escapes and windows boarded up with plywood. The next, he crossed an invisible line—a wide, clean, freshly paved avenue—and found himself gazing up at the sheer, monolithic towers of corporate wealth.
The Class Divide.
He stood by a traffic light, watching the people. On the high street, the wealthy were encased in their towers and behind the tinted glass of luxury sedans that glided by, utterly detached from the grime below. They wore coats that looked heavy enough to be armor, and their faces were smooth, devoid of the weary fear that lined the faces of the people in the lower districts.
He felt a deep, slow-burning contempt well up in his chest. It was a potent emotion, so sharp and defined it couldn't possibly belong to a man who had woken up hours ago. It was an inherited ideology, a ghost memory of a profound, generational injustice.
They live in comfort and safety, protected by systems they control, while the forgotten starve in the streets, the cold thought crystallized in his mind. They are not better. They are just luckier. And they are oblivious.
It was the ideology of Erik Lehnsherr, the seed of the man who would become Magneto, taking root in the fertile, festering ground of Gotham. The city's structure—the gleaming towers looking down on the squalor—was a perfect, modern reflection of the prison camps and ghettos of the memory fragments that haunted him. The principle was the same: the powerful separating themselves from the powerless, justifying their own survival at the expense of others.
The intensity of the feeling almost buckled him. He pressed his back against a cold brick wall, forcing himself to breathe deeply. This was more than just a passing thought; it was a fundamental truth that his former life had carved into his very being.
He had to eat. He found a small, greasy diner tucked between a pawn shop and a liquor store. He didn't have money, but he had something more valuable: the knowledge of how to procure it.
He chose an inconspicuous booth in the back, shielded from the windows and with a clear line of sight to the entrance. As he waited, pretending to read the stained menu, he listened to the low-level, venomous chatter of the city's inhabitants. It was all complaints, anger, and gossip about the rising cost of living and the latest gang activity.
A thick-set man in a denim jacket with greasy hair and a perpetually annoyed expression—the short-order cook, judging by the apron—came over. Nick looked him straight in the eye.
"I need work. Right now. An hour." Nick's voice was low, resonant, and spoke with a clipped authority that made the cook pause. It wasn't an accent, precisely; it was a manner of speaking, precise and economical.
"What can you do, pal? We ain't hiring."
"Anything. Cleanup, stock rotation, moving heavy items," Nick stated, gesturing vaguely toward the cramped kitchen. "I work fast, I don't ask questions, and I don't need cash. I need a meal, and a pack of cigarettes. Anything left over is yours."
The cook, intrigued by the offer and perhaps intimidated by Nick's intensity, hesitated, then scoffed. "Fine. There's three crates of potatoes and onions in the back. Get 'em stored."
Nick didn't wait for permission. He moved. The crates were heavy, unwieldy wooden boxes, but Nick handled them with startling efficiency. He didn't lift with his back; he employed a controlled, martial movement, using his legs and core like a taught steel spring. He stacked them in the designated storage area with geometric precision. In less than twenty minutes, he had done a job that would have taken two minimum-wage workers an hour.
The cook watched, dumbfounded. When Nick returned, wiping his hands on a napkin, the cook slid a thick mug of coffee and a plate of scrambled eggs toward him.
"You move like you got an engine inside you, pal. What were you, military?"
Nick paused, lifting the fork. The metal felt right in his hand, a small comfort in a world of uncertainty. He looked up, his eyes cold and neutral.
"I was a soldier," he said, the phrase sounding true, though he didn't know which uniform he had worn, or which war he had fought. "In a past life."
He ate quickly, efficiently, restoring the energy to his starving body. The coffee was bitter, the eggs greasy, but the physical sensation of the warmth spreading through him was deeply gratifying. He left the cook with his change, a silent acknowledgment of the deal, and walked out with a small pack of cheap cigarettes, the only concession to a comfort he couldn't explain. He didn't smoke one immediately; he just kept them, another resource cataloged.
As twilight began to paint the Gotham sky in shades of oily purple and black, Nick knew he needed shelter. He couldn't risk the warehouse again; he'd exposed his presence. He needed a place to lie low, a place that offered maximum visibility with minimum exposure.
He found it in the upper levels of a derelict commercial building, its lower floors stripped and vandalized. He scaled a broken fire escape—a feat of silent agility that again reminded him of his mysterious skillset—until he reached the seventh floor. He forced open a loose window with a single, sharp shove, and slipped into the cavernous, empty office space.
He chose a spot behind a support column, where he had a view of the street below and the rooftops opposite. He lay down on the cold floor, pulling a few crumpled cardboard boxes for meager insulation.
The transition to sleep was immediate and brutal.
The darkness came not with rest, but with fire.
His dreams, or perhaps they were flashes of his former life, were no longer just confusing fragments. They were sharp, visceral, and terrifyingly coherent.
He was a child, small and freezing, his breath misting in air thick with smoke and a horrific, metallic odor. He saw barbed wire, a labyrinth of it, stretching endlessly under a sky the color of ash. He could hear the guttural, shouted commands in a language that, to his surprise and terror, he understood fluently: German.
Then, the image shifted. He was older, perhaps a young man, dressed in rags, his face thin and drawn. He was running, clawing at a chain-link fence, the sounds of shouting and gunfire echoing behind him. There was a desperate face pressed against the wire, the image of a woman, older, her eyes wide with a terror that seemed to pierce his own heart.
A word, a name, was screamed in the dream, but it was muffled by the gunfire, a desperate cry for help that he couldn't grasp.
He woke with a gasp, his body drenched in cold sweat, the memory of the barbed wire feeling so real he could almost feel the phantom prickle of steel against his skin. He sat up, shaking, his hand instantly going to the metal pipe resting beside him. He dragged the cold iron across his skin, grounding himself in the present, forcing the ghosts back into the vault.
Barbed wire. German. Fire. Who was that woman?
He didn't understand the vision. But the profound, bone-deep grief and the cold, unyielding hatred that accompanied the fragments were terrifyingly real. They were the true inheritance of his lost identity.
He remained there, hunched in the shadows, waiting for the dawn, his mind churning over the little he had learned.
Language: He understood German, Polish (he had heard a short exchange between two delivery drivers earlier and understood the frustration in the dialect), and a scattering of what he instinctively recognized as Yiddish. Languages of the victims, of the forgotten, languages of old Europe.
Ideology: A fierce, visceral contempt for systemic oppression, a deep-seated belief that the powerful must be held accountable.
Skill: An uncanny proficiency for movement, assessment, and finding resources, coupled with a combat readiness that spoke of severe, professional training.
Nick knew, with the terrifying certainty of a man who has lost everything, that he was more than a man. He was an echo.
As the first sliver of weak, gray light crept into the abandoned office space, he stood up, his exhaustion momentarily forgotten. He felt the weight of the steel pipe in his hands, feeling safer, more complete with it there.
He was in Gotham now, a city built on the very oppression he was subconsciously programmed to fight. He was a creature of incredible power whose past self was violently demanding to be heard. He was a lost man, yes, but he was also a ticking clock.
The memory of the class divide—the wealthy in their glass towers, the forgotten in the grime—solidified his immediate goal. He wouldn't beg, and he wouldn't steal from the weak. He would use the skills he couldn't explain to acquire the resources he needed to understand the man he had been.
He looked down from the seventh floor at the grimy, waking streets. The city was a brutal, unforgiving mechanism. He would need money, and he would need it fast. He had to figure out who he was and why he had woken up with the soul of a revolutionary and the hands of a killer.
He slipped out the window, his movements silent and fluid. The pipe was now firmly affixed to his back, a hidden extension of his spine. The city was waiting for him. And somewhere, the man who had been Erik Lehnsherr was stirring.
Survival is the first step, he thought, pulling his borrowed collar high against the biting Gotham wind. Purpose is the second.