Chapter Text
Sometimes, Erik wonders what his life would have been like if the first mutant he’d knowingly met had been anyone other than Emma Frost.
*
One hour to midnight, the party is in full swing. The penthouse is done up in a garish modern style, with floor-to-ceiling glass doors running along an entire wall. Half the guests are gathered on the other side, on a wide balcony overlooking the sprawl of Buenos Aires. Inside, amongst tuxedos and evening gowns and tedious little silver paper hats, there is entirely too much German floating around for Erik’s liking—but he’s under no illusions about the guest list for the evening, given the couple who own the place and the money they bought it with.
He grabs a champagne flute from the tray of a passing waiter and is surveying the contents of partygoers’ jetted pockets and silk clutches when he feels a light mental nudge. He grips the delicate stem of the glass a bit tighter as he takes a sip.
Relax, sugar. He’s not here yet.
Emma’s mental voice, just like her external one, always manages to sound bored and amused at the same time.
But I thought—
He’s cut off by a tap on the shoulder, and Emma is standing beside him, dressed in a shimmering white floor-length gown, an elaborately layered diamond necklace at her throat. She plucks the champagne from his hand and downs the glass in one go.
“Don’t worry,” she says, smiling tightly. “Slight change of plans, but I’m not concerned.”
He grips her bare arm and pulls her closer. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” she says, rolling her eyes and tugging her arm free. “You’d think after all these months you’d have learned to trust me.”
“Forgive me if I’m a bit tense on the single most—”
“Relax,” she repeats. She takes a step back and gives him an approving once-over. “For all your faults, you sure do clean up nice.”
Erik sighs. “Emma—”
She laughs, throwing her head back and exposing a long line of diamond-clad neck. “Get another glass of champagne and try not to murder any of these Nazis in the next half hour, all right? After tonight, you’ll have a lifetime to kill them.” She gives him a pat on the arm before brushing past, vanishing into the sea of blond hair and white dinner jackets.
Erik had met Emma eight months prior, on a train from Zurich to Milan. A trustworthy source had assured him that Schmidt would be onboard, and while he was waiting for the train to climb up a remote Alpine pass—the spot he’d pinpointed as the best to separate one carriage from the rest—a blond woman in a white traveling cloak and pillbox hat had slipped into his compartment and proceeded to read his mind. He ripped out the door handle and was still fashioning it into a projectile when her entire body transformed to diamond.
It was only as he was stretching the door handle into a thin steel cable and wrapping it around her crystalline neck that he realized: he wasn’t the only one with seemingly inexplicable abilities. He wasn’t alone.
Emma, he learned, had been traveling with Schmidt for about a year, sharing his bed if and when Schmidt felt like it. He had half a dozen aliases that Erik was aware of, but she knew him as Sebastian Shaw. They’d fought the night before, the most recent in a string of violent arguments, and when she’d come to in their hotel room that morning, she was bound tightly to the bedframe and Schmidt was gone.
“That’s that, I think,” she’d said, her mouth stretching into a close-lipped smile while her eyes remained impassive. “We all have limits. I suppose I’ve found mine.” She cocked her head to one side and studied him for a moment. “You were going to try to kill him today.”
Erik snorted. “Not just try, I assure you.”
“While the bluster suits you, it’s not as simple as that,” she said, her tone skirting the edge of mockery. “Sebastian’s like us.”
“He’s nothing like—”
“He’s a mutant,” she said, and whether his expression or his mind gave him away, she elaborated. “Genetic mutation. That’s how I can do this—” She tapped the side of her head with one long fingernail, and then gestured to the malformed door handle lying at her feet. “We’re not anomalies—we’re more evolved. Didn’t you know?”
He hadn’t known. He’d wondered, abstractly, about the root of his power, but he’d never seen much sense questioning the one thing he knew for certain was truly a part of him—the single reason he was alive today, and the reason that many people who had deserved to pay for their crimes were not.
But to hear that Schmidt was extraordinary as well—and to think of everything he’d done to Erik, without saying a word of his own abilities, the rows upon rows of instruments he’d—
Stop.
The word reverberated inside his skull, the full weight of a command beneath it, and he blinked and looked up. He’d been pulling the ceiling of the compartment downwards in his rage. Emma frowned and folded her arms across her chest.
“You need to learn to control yourself, honey,” she said.
Erik ignored her, pushing the ceiling back upwards with a flick of the wrist. “What’s Schmidt’s power?”
She looked at him evenly for a beat, and then sighed. “He absorbs kinetic energy. Hit him with anything and it just makes him stronger.”
“And your…” He gestured vaguely at the side of his head.
Her frown deepened. “His mind…is unusual. It’s dense. Even reading it, it’s like…like pushing a knife through a block of wet cement.”
“But could you hold him still? Or put him to sleep?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Unless…”
He leaned forward. “Unless what?”
Had they met a month earlier, or maybe a month later, they would have tried to kill each other in earnest. Emma later admitted as much, during one of their check-ins, clandestine calls from hotel lobbies in far-flung locations. But if her relationship with Schmidt was like a pendulum, Erik had caught her on a downswing, and after that, there was no swinging back. She began the slow, methodical work of seeding Schmidt’s mind with telepathic triggers, pushing forward every day, so small he’d never notice the difference.
Erik stirs from the memory as he commandeers a fresh glass of champagne. He’s fantasizing about gouging peoples’ eyes out with their own hairpins and cufflinks when he spots Emma again, clear across the room. A man with a dark curtain of hair is leaning in to whisper something in her ear.
Janos has readied a room upstairs. All we need is Sebastian.
Her voice is as clear as if she’d spoken six inches from his face. Of course it is, she says disdainfully.
He laughs softly as he takes a sip of champagne. A man opens the door to the balcony and shouts, “Quince minutos!” and the rising anticipation in the crowd is palpable, corks popping as waiters hurry to refill the guests’ glasses. Erik’s own anticipation is a tight thrumming sensation just beneath the skin, his entire mind sharpening around his goal, like turning a lens into focus. Fifteen minutes until—
He’s here, and he’s moving fast, Emma cuts in. Get upstairs.
Erik abandons his glass and slips up the stairs as the rest of the crowd is pushing towards the balcony.
Second door on the left.
It’s a bedroom, the enormous bed in the center done up in pristine white linens, and Erik takes a seat in the low-slung leather chair in the corner.
After a few minutes, Azazel appears in a burst of sulfuric smoke, dressed in his standard high-collared jacket, his tail swishing behind him.
“Everything ready?” Erik asks. Azazel jumps and whirls around, clutching his chest.
“Christ, Lehnsherr, are you planning on just giving him a heart attack while you lurk in the shadows?”
“Let’s call that Plan B,” Erik says.
Azazel laughs. “Well I’m happy to report that Plan A is moving along swimmingly,” he says.
After a few months of their calls, Emma had brought Azazel and Janos into the fold. Azazel had popped the trio down to Haifa, where Erik had been picking up details for a brief, diverting assignment hunting down an SS officer, and they’d spent an evening brainstorming specific scenarios for Schmidt’s demise. Temperamentally, they were opposites—Azazel was as gregarious as Janos was reserved—but neither man felt any great loyalty to Schmidt; Emma, they said, had drawn a more convincing picture of the future.
Plan A is Emma on Schmidt’s arm as he greets his old friends at the party, laying on the sex appeal to coax him upstairs. “I’ll play up the teasing in the final few weeks,” she’d promised in their last phone call before he’d flown to Argentina. “Lift the embargo, as it were, at the party.”
Erik doesn’t envy Emma her role in all of this, but he’s long believed that no sacrifice is too great in pursuit of an outcome.
As if on cue, the door slams open, and Emma pushes a man in a double-breasted tuxedo into the room. It looks more like they’re attacking each others’ faces than kissing. Schmidt seems poised to push her down on the bed—they need him there, and Erik nearly rises to intervene—but Emma reaches for Schmidt’s belt buckle and deftly switches their positions. With one final bruising kiss, she presses him down against the mattress.
She stands, looming over Schmidt’s prone form, and Erik finally gets a good glimpse of the man; his hair is longer, the mustache gone, but somehow, he doesn’t seem to have aged at all in the past decade and a half. Erik stands too, and as he and Azazel approach the bed, Schmidt’s glazed-over expression clears and he snaps into focus, confusion giving way to anger as he seems to recognize Erik.
“How—?”
“Don’t worry your pretty little head about that,” Emma says with a smile. She leans over and presses a long silver-painted fingernail to each of his temples. “Goodnight, Sebastian.”
Schmidt’s eyes roll back in his head and his face goes slack. Emma prods at his face for a moment, then taps his temples once more for good measure. “He’s out.”
Erik kept the coin that could have saved mother’s life, if only he’d been strong enough to move it, and it’s been sitting in his pocket all these years, a reminder of everything he couldn’t do, and everything he would do someday. He pulls it out now, and it hovers in the air. Absently, he tries to process that the moment he’s dedicated more than half his life to is finally here. Schmidt looks smaller than he remembers.
“Herr Doktor,” he begins. “Here’s what we’re going to—”
“I don’t want to interrupt what will likely be a very moving speech,” Emma cuts in. “But you have about 90 seconds, tops, before he wakes up.”
Erik glares at her. She raises her hands in a gesture of protest.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” she says. “Do you want to kill him, or should Azazel take over?”
“He’s mine to kill,” Erik bites out.
He focuses everything within him on the coin, and it vibrates as he pushes it forward. He hears Schmidt’s voice in his head, counting to three, as the metal hits flesh and then bone, and he’s pushing, pushing, pushing—
“It’s done, sugar,” Emma says quietly. Erik slowly lowers his arms. Schmidt’s eyes are still closed and blood is pooling beneath his head, blossoming out across the crisp white bedding.
Distantly, he hears the countdown from ten, a mix of Spanish and German, from the party below. There’s a knock at the door and Janos appears, a bottle of champagne in one hand and four glasses in the other.
Azazel takes the bottle and pops the cork as an enormous cheer rises up from downstairs. They each take a glass as he pours. Erik takes his absently; he can still feel the coin, warm and resting beneath Schmidt’s skull.
Emma raises her glass and smiles. “Happy New Year, gentlemen,” she says as they clink their glasses together. “Welcome to 1961.”