We have to go back, Marty! Back to 1987!!
Chapter Text
1987
I had often wondered what I would do if I found myself in the past, far enough that certain bits of knowledge could be put to use. I'd also asked myself, on more than one occasion, what I would do if I found myself in a fictional universe. There were the expected answers, like investing in companies that you knew were going to make it big.
(Which, to be fair, is exactly what I did – I made sure to purchase stock in Microsoft, Apple, IBM, and Sony, just to name a few. And I'd even managed to make a killing on Stark Industries stock, though I would forever regret that I now needed to pay attention to shareholder meetings, or at least remember to request the meeting's minutes.)
But then you get to the more interesting answers. Maybe you want to make a change in the world, whether for personal benefit or for otherwise. Perhaps there's something that exists that you want to experience before it disappears forever – and I will forever be saddened that I was off the mark from being able to see the complete Beatles, John Lennon and all, in concert.
(But I did catch Freddie Mercury! And oh, my god, that was practically a religious experience, let me tell you…)
In my case, there was, in fact, something I wanted to do. Something that was mainly for the hell of it, but that would also leave a positive mark on the world when it was done.
For you see, I wanted to take part in the Great Jewish Pastime: hunting Nazis.
(Now, I don't mean this in the sense of "break down their doors and shoot them dead". That was... not something that was within my wheelhouse. All I wanted to do was find them, report them, and watch in glee as the lives they managed to build, insulated from their crimes, were swept out from under them. I wanted to see the world take from them everything they took from their victims. I wanted justice, not vengeance. Vengeance got you killed. Justice let you sleep at night.)
The best part of it all? I had a rough idea of where to look. In… well, in what would have been the future now had I not slid several universes to the left, a major Jewish organization published a yearly list of the most wanted Nazi war criminals, and older versions of the list had been rather easy to find. I may not have had it on hand, but I did remember where the rather small number that could be found in the United States were, roughly.
But see, that's the hard part. I knew roughly where they were. And as for looking it up on the internet? Well… the internet didn't exist yet. It's amazing just how much I'd taken Google for granted, especially now that I was stuck doing my research the hard way. That meant I had to conduct my search in libraries, and was left with card catalogs, microfiche, and other physical media. Even knowing where I needed to look, it still took me the better part of three years to find one Nazi.
And even once I'd narrowed down my search, I was still in need of further information. I had a more defined location, but I was based in New York City. What I needed to finish my hunt was all the way in Portland, Oregon. Which meant…
"Alright, you will be in row twenty. As that is the exit row, are you able to discharge the duties expected of you should the need arise?"
"Yes, of course," I said.
"Very well then," the gate agent said, and tore off the stub of my ticket before handing it back to me. "Have a nice flight, miss."
"Thank you very much."
… that I got to be amazed at just how much easier it was to get on an airplane in the eighties. You simply went to the airport, bought a ticket there, slid through security with almost no fanfare, and boarded the plane. All of the security I'd grown used to, living in the 21st century? Nonexistent.
Once I was on the plane, I made my way to my seat – window in the exit row – and pulled what I needed out of my carry-on: a legal pad, several pens, a large manila folder, a pair of headphones, and a Walkman cassette player. I put on my headphones and pressed play, only to realize I hadn't rewound the cassette, so had to spend a few minutes letting it do that before I could block out the world around me. While waiting, I lowered my tray table, set down my legal pad, flipped open the manila folder, and got to reading depositions and evidence exhibits. Because even on what I'd told the firm was a weekend getaway, I still had a chance to log billable hours. Yes, even though it was a Friday night, and I was on an airplane bound for the other side of the country.
Welcome to working in a high-end law firm in Manhattan. Work is life, life is work. And after five minutes with this depo, I could already tell that come Monday I'd be asked to draw up a motion in limine so we could keep this witness off the stand. Much as I would have loved to just find a payphone and call the office so a paralegal could do this, I couldn't. Motions in limine were legal arguments, so it fell to me, the less senior lawyer, to write it up.
And me without a computer. Well, there went any chance of my getting to sleep on Sunday night.
I really should've just spent the few thousand dollars on a laptop. Twelve pounds to lug around was still worth not having to spend all night drafting a motion.
"Welcome," the librarian manning the desk at Multnomah County Public Library, an older woman with gray hair pulled back in a severe bun, said as I approached. "What can I help you with, miss?"
"I'm from out of town and need a phonebook," I said, offering the librarian a friendly smile. "And the ones in phone booths tend to be a little grimy, and, well." I gestured down at my attire, a blouse and skirt combo that was just slightly below business casual, paired with understated jewelry and a simple black purse, all of which helped speak to my age – I could only stand being mistaken for a teenager so many times before I started dressing more formally, if only so people would assume I was closer to my actual age.
"Oh, I understand completely," she said amiably, turning to pick up a binder. "Let me see… you'll be looking between 913 and 919, dear. And let me know if you find what you were after and need to make a call, it wouldn't be a problem."
"Of course, thank you!" With that, I turned towards the stacks and made my way through the stacks, praising the Dewey Decimal System as I went.
If this goose-stepper had been so easy to find just by picking up a phone book and flipping through it, I wouldn't have had to spend three years narrowing down my search. But the problem I'd faced is that I knew roughly what part of the country to look in, but had forgotten both the proper name and the precise location. This left me combing through fifteen years of publicly-available information records, from 1945 to 1960, and copying down every single German-sounding name I could find. Then I had to filter out all of the ones that were actually just Ashkenazi Jews like myself, to find the names it could be. Once I had that, I needed to make an inordinate number of day and weekend trips down to Washington, DC to browse the National Archives for what I needed. But eventually, I had a name, and a city. I just needed a phone book to search it in.
Once I rounded the corner of the stacks, though, I realized that this might be a little more difficult than I expected. Because when I checked the stacks, all of the local phone books from the last 30 years were… well, not there.
Which meant it was likely that somebody else in the library had them.
I left the stacks and went towards the common areas, filled with long tables and study carrels, and looked. I looked specifically for somebody, or perhaps multiple somebodies, surrounded by several feet's worth white and yellow books, spread out all around them. Sure enough? There they were, if a bit off the beaten path.
The man who'd taken all the phone books sat at a study carrel along the back wall, hidden behind rows upon rows of stacks. The surface of the carrel, and of the other two carrels beside it, were utterly festooned with phone books, and the man flipped through them in a manner that was at once hasty and deliberate. He had short-cropped brown hair, going a little bit gray at the temples, with a schnozz that I could have told you was Jewish from a mile away. The part that struck me as odd was that he was wearing a long-sleeve shirt and slacks when it had to be at least 80 degrees out, before humidity. All of this gave me a hunch, but he appeared to be a bit young for that, to me. If he was only starting to go gray now, more than forty years after the war…
No, that was unimportant. What was important is that he was hogging the phonebooks, and I needed one.
"Excuse me?" I asked as I approached. "Could I borrow this year's phone book from you?"
I received no response. The man simply ignored me, and continued to check through the phone book he was looking over, before he apparently didn't find what he was searching for, flipped it closed, and moved on to the next one. The one he'd pushed away from himself was 1964, and the one he'd grabbed was 1965.
"Excuse me?" I tried again. And once again, I received no response.
I wanted to sigh, but refrained from doing so. I wasn't sure whether he was ignoring me because I was a woman, because I was speaking English, or because he was just so engrossed in his task that he wasn't paying attention. Which meant I had to try a different tack.
It was almost immediately after I woke up in this time that I learned my new body hadn't been spun for me from whole cloth. Sure, there had been some… ahem, changes that occurred when this woman's body became mine, but before she vacated the premises, so to speak, she'd been a person who took actions, wrote diaries, and spoke languages.
And the knowledge on how to speak one of those languages, one which I hadn't known beforehand, stuck around.
"Excuse me, sir?" I asked again. But this time, in Yiddish.
The man gave an almost full-body flinch as his head snapped towards me. I watched his eyes as they looked from my face to my pale blonde hair, at which point his eyes narrowed a fraction. Suspicion, if I was reading him right; I would wager if he actually was a survivor, his opinion of me just based on my hair color was rather… unfavorable. Especially since a couple of words in Yiddish was easy enough to pick up just by spending time around certain groups of people.
"Are you using this year's edition?" I asked as I waved at the phone books. I continued to use Yiddish, and as I spoke, the suspicion faded from his eyes… though it was replaced by something else instead. "If you aren't, would you mind if I borrowed it?"
"Of course," he replied in English, accented in a way I'd heard dozens, even hundreds of time before, though far less strongly than I'd expected. "My apologies, I was not paying attention."
"It's not a problem," I reassured as I searched through the piles of phone books for the 1987 edition, switching back to English myself at the clear invitation. "You seem to be having a bit of trouble searching for something. Can I help in any way?"
"Thank you for the offer, but I don't think you can," he said, then pulled a set of yellow pages out from beneath four others. "Ah, here it is. And yourself, miss?" he asked as he handed me the most recent phone book.
I weighed my options as I took the phone book from his hands. A fellow Jew, possibly even a proper Holocaust survivor, scouring through all of the local phone books in a location that I knew had an escaped Nazi in it? What were the odds?
"Well," I started, my choice made, "you could say I was hunting for someone."
The man's eyes flicked straight down to mine, and he stared, as though he was searching for something behind them. I looked up at him and matched his gaze, unwavering, unflinching. I'd dealt with more unnerving stares in the courtroom, but even so, something in me desperately wanted him to find whatever it was he was searching for in me.
"... in that case, my dear," he said, breaking the stare and offering me a roguish grin. "I believe we may be tracking the same person." He held out a hand for me. "Erik Lehnscherr."
A sudden chill ran down my spine, all the way to the tip of my invisible tail.
"Noa Schaefer," I said, taking his hand despite my sudden fright. Then I felt a static shock, and I couldn't help the widening of my eyes as my glamour broke.
With a rainbow shimmer and the crackle of static, the mystical light that hid my true appearance from the world dissipated. I saw his eyes dart to the scales on my hands, arms, and face, before drifting to the hollow horns I had instead of ears, and finally down to my tail when I unconsciously flicked it out of nerves.
"I wondered what that was I felt," he said with a self-satisfied smile. "How sad it is that you feel you need to hide yourself."
I glared at him, then reached for the desk lamp at the carrel and flicked it on. A quick turn of my wrist lensed some of the light through a cubic zirconium on my bracelet, and I grabbed at that brief rainbow with my other hand. It spun around me for an instant before settling over my inhuman features, and they faded away, the light showing only their human equivalents.
"I don't know what else it is that you can do," I said, blatantly lying to his face (not that he had any way of knowing that, though), "but I frankly don't care. Don't do whatever it is you just did to me again. Understand?"
"I understand perfectly well," he said, holding up his hands in a placating gesture. "My apologies, your secret is safe with me. Now, where were we, exactly?"
"Doing something that should've been done a long time ago." I turned away from Erik and picked up the phone book, flipping through the white pages to the E's, and then flipping further through them until I found the name I was looking for. "There he is, address and everything," I said.
"Excellent." Magneto's smile held a promise in it, one of wrath and retribution, and yet I couldn't spare a shred of pity for a man who deserved all that and more. "I'll drive."
Navigating to an unfamiliar location in the age before GPS takes a substantial bit of focus, a lot of care, and often a few papercuts. While I did manage to avoid the papercuts this time, the attention needed meant that neither of us could afford to start an actual conversation during the drive. This meant that we spent thirty minutes in what started as companionable silence, interspersed by directions and navigation. As we drew closer to our destination though, the tension ratcheted up as we anticipated what was coming.
Erik pulled the car up to the curb, and he again treated me with a look of amusement when I unfastened my seatbelt.
"What?" I asked, not able to keep my tone from sounding testy. "It's a safety thing." He could only give an amused sniff as he exited the car. I followed suit moments later, and the two of us walked up to the Nazi's house.
It looked like any other slice of American Suburbia. You know the type: green lawn with a small, waist-height (or sternum-height, if you're as short as I am) white picket fence, standing before a two-story house that looked almost exactly the same as all the houses next to it. It looked completely and utterly normal. What glimpses the two of us could see through the windows also appeared to be utterly average, with nothing in particular to distinguish it. Hell, there was even a boring landscape painting that I could swear was on the cover of Hallmark cards everywhere, hung on the wall in a cheap frame that probably cost at most five dollars.
"Looks like nobody's home," I said, pointing at the driveway. There was a clear pair of tire treads from where a car came in and out, but that car clearly wasn't here now.
Erik saw this, then stepped past me and made a light gesture with his hand, at which the door to the house slid open.
"Then we might as well prepare our 'friend' a warm welcome," he said, stepping inside.
It was around this time that I started to have my doubts. My original plan had just been to track the Nazi down, get some photographic evidence that he lived here, and send it to people who could actually do something about him. Not once during the times I'd envisioned how this would go did I imagine that I would actually be confronting a Nazi in hiding in his own home.
But there was also no way I could have anticipated coming across the Master of Magnetism himself in the process.
Looking back on things, maybe I should have just walked away. Maybe I would have spared myself a lot of hurt and misery if I'd turned around. But that wasn't what happened.
Instead, I followed Erik Lehnscherr inside.
The interior of the house was more of the same as the outside, if not a little… I don't know. Something about it was off. I could imagine seeing everything about this house in the pages of a Sears catalog, but at the same time, it resembled exactly that too much. This place felt sterile, like nobody lived in it.
"Why do you do it?"
The sudden question from Erik made me do an actual double-take, and I looked back at him in confusion.
"Why do I do what?" I asked.
"Hide yourself," he said, waving a hand in my general direction. "You've been given a gift, Ms. Schaefer. To be better than humanity, to be more. And yet there you are, tucking it away beneath your powers."
Oh, wonderful. It's time for the propaganda pitch.
"Because I want to be able to live my life without being gawked at on the street," I replied. "Also, it's really not that hard to be, as you put it, 'better than humanity'. Your average human being is overall selfish and greedy, if predisposed to odd bouts of altruism on occasion. All it takes to be 'better' than that is to make compassion be your default instead of a treat for special occasions."
"I rather think behavioral norms to be beside the point," Erik countered, even as he gently pushed on every one of the books on the bookshelf, their spines oddly uncreased. "When I say 'better', I do not mean the manner in which you comport yourself. I speak instead of the fact that you possess abilities that no human can match without requiring technology or augmentation. Abilities which you seem content to use only to lower yourself back down to their level."
While Erik checked the living room, I busied myself with what resembled a home office. I say 'resembled' because I couldn't find anything that so much as appeared to be a business document. The closest thing I found was a past-due utility bill, which was for a different address than the one we were at.
"And what would you have me do with my powers?" I asked, raising my voice so that it would carry into the other room. "Or should I just parade around in my normal appearance as a curiosity for people to stare at?"
Erik chuckled.
"Listen to yourself," he said. "Where is your drive, your fire? Does it not stifle you to hide this part of yourself, to cover it up for their benefit?"
I huffed, and dropped the stack of papers I'd been going through before walking back through the living room into the kitchen so I could speak to him face to face.
"Of course it does," I said, arms crossed under my chest. "Do you really think I like having to be careful how close I get to other people, or how long a handshake lasts, just so that my glamour doesn't break? Do you think I like having to sit awkwardly in solid-backed chairs because they weren't made with tails in mind, and having to pass it off as 'just how I sit'? Of course I don't, but I don't really have another option here."
"And what if you did?" Erik waved a hand, and the various cabinets he'd been searching through all closed of their own accords. "Believe me, I have spent a long time learning the lessons of the past, and the time has almost come for me to take those lessons and change the world for the better."
"For the better?" I asked, leaning against the kitchen counter. "The better for whom, just mutants? Is it going to be worse for humans afterwards, even though they severely outnumber us?"
"That would depend, obviously." He was smooth, but I knew a hedge when I heard one.
"On what? And how do you plan on 'changing things' anyway? More than that, how sure are you that anything will even work?" I pushed off the counter with a huff and walked past Erik, not bothering to wait for an answer. Instead, I went all the way around and up the stairs, to the furthest room in the house from Erik: the bedroom.
As I'd expected, it was the only room that looked like somebody actually lived in it. The bed was made, almost impeccably so, but there were a few wrinkles in the pillowcases that let me know somebody used it. A glass sat on the nightstand, with a tiny bit of water left inside and a ring of condensation on its coaster. A pair of hampers in the corner had dirty clothes in them, separated into whites and colors, and one of the drawers in an old wooden dresser was slightly less closed than the rest of them.
I checked those dresser drawers first, but found nothing but men's clothing that had gone out of fashion over a decade ago. The closet, on the other hand, brought back that uncanny feeling that nobody lived here: clothes sat on hangers, perfectly spaced, but a quick finger over the top of a coat hanger came away with a thin layer of dust. If I was right, our Nazi only really took clothing from his dresser, and barely considered the closet.
The only other place of interest was the nightstand, so I walked over to the side of the bed, pulled open the drawer of his nightstand and… that couldn't be right.
I put a hand inside the drawer and let my fingers touch the bottom before wrapping my hand around the edge. The height of the drawer from the inside was only about halfway up my palm, but when I tried to do the same from the outside, the height of the drawer was the same as the length of my whole hand.
I pulled the drawer out of the nightstand and flipped it upside-down, emptying its sparse contents (a passport, a checkbook, some pens, a letter opener, an old book of crosswords, and a travel-size thing of tissue paper) onto the bed before flipping it back upright so I could take a closer look.
When I got to the back of the drawer, I found what I was looking for: a small seam, a carve-out in the drawer itself. It was the work of a couple minutes (and the letter opener from the drawer) to figure out how to get the damn thing open. When I did, I tilted the hidden compartment open, and shook its contents loose. Out came a small, leather-bound journal with yellowed pages… and a ring. I picked up the ring, then flipped it so I could see its face.
And staring back at me was a skull, surrounded by six grasping tentacles.
My gaze drifted down to the yellowed notebook that had been stored alongside what could only be a HYDRA ring. Part of me wanted nothing more than to burn this book, to destroy any remnant of the horrors that this… I hesitated to call it an organization. That these monsters had wrought. But at the same time, there was more to consider. I'd thought I was just tracking down a Nazi who thought he'd actually skated past judgment. But HYDRA? That changed things.
Whatever else I was going to do, though, would have to wait. The sound of a car pulling up the driveway was unmistakable, which meant I now had to hurriedly undo most of what I'd just done. I secreted both the ring and notebook away in my bag before sliding the cover of the hidden compartment back into place, then filled the drawer back up with its contents. The front door opened as I was sliding the drawer back into place, followed by the beginnings of a shout that ended in a strangled wheeze and the slam of the front door.
"You have escaped justice for quite some time, haven't you?" I heard Erik say. "Well, I'm afraid that ends now."
"Wait, stop!" I yelled out in Yiddish, almost tripping over my own feet as I left the bedroom. "We need to—"
A sickening snap cut off anything I was about to say. When I finally got down the stairs and back to the front door, the Nazi was already dead, the lamp and power cable Erik had used to do the deed already drifting back to its position on the floor of the living room.
I looked at the… the corpse, and then back to Erik, who only now seemed to realize he wasn't alone. An idle wave of his hand picked up the Nazi's corpse by his belt buckle and deposited him on the sofa, while the other hand opened the house's front door.
"We should go," he said. "Best we not be seen standing near a corpse."
I wanted to just stand there. Stand and stare at the spot where a human life – a horrid, sickening, monstrous example of one, but a life nonetheless – had been snuffed out with as much thought as one gave taking out the garbage. Stand, and stare, and wonder at the choices I'd made that led me to the point where I was now guilty of accessory to murder. Had we left any traces of our crimes? Would anybody care enough to try and find us? I thought about the ring in my purse, the one with HYDRA's insignia on it, the one I hadn't managed to show to Erik before it was too late to stop him. Who did this man know? Had we just been made into targets?
I wanted to stand there. But I couldn't, because Erik was right: we had to go.
And so we left, with a Nazi rotting away in our wake.
It was seven or eight minutes into the drive when we finally left a residential area and started hitting red lights again. It was also seven or eight minutes into the drive when Erik finally deigned to comment on just how furious I was.
"Why are you acting as though I've done something wrong?" he asked. "That man forfeited his right to live a long, long time ago."
"And you couldn't have waited five more minutes?" I snapped back, refusing to even look at him.
"Five minutes, five hours, five days. What difference would it have made?"
I wanted to scream at him, to yell at him that his not knowing what difference he would have made was precisely the point. Instead, I reached into my bag, pulled out the HYDRA ring, and set it in the cupholder. The movement of a single finger from Erik was all it took to bring the ring to his eye level, and when he saw it, he froze.
Or at least, until the honking from behind us got him moving again. The ring fell back into the cupholder with a clatter, and we were on our way again.
"... I see," he said, after we'd driven another five minutes in silence. "Tell me, what do you know of that symbol's meaning?"
"I know that HYDRA and the Nazi party were intertwined in some way," I told him. "About a decade ago, my parents were asked to tell their stories. Dad was at Auschwitz, and Mom at Treblinka, but both of them mentioned how you could tell who was actually important if they used 'Hydra' instead of 'Hitler'." I shrugged, getting ready to lie again. "That's about the long and short of it. So, just enough to know that if this man was hiding that," I pointed at the ring, "in the false bottom of a drawer, then he probably knew more people."
"And now we'll never know, because I killed him," Erik finished for me.
"Yes, and now because you couldn't let justice forty years late go for another five measly minutes, who knows how many more of them are now in the wind." I turned away from Erik to look out the window as we left the suburbs and returned to Portland proper.
"You mention you found the ring in a hidden drawer."
"What of it?" I asked.
"Was there anything else?" Erik spared a glance my way, but kept the majority of his focus strictly on the road. "I hesitate to think that his ring was the only thing tucked away."
"There was a notebook." I reached into my bag and pulled that out as well, and spared a second to flip through a couple pages. "Looks to all be in German, though."
"Then leave it with me," he said. "I will be able to decipher its contents."
I didn't really have a response. Instead, I just tossed the leather-bound notebook into the glove compartment, and resumed my silence. Thankfully, Erik was content to let that silence last a little bit longer.
"Back at the house, you asked if I had a plan," he started, breaking the calm, if tense, silence that had fallen between us.
"And?"
"I have… the makings of a plan," he confessed. "It has not been perfected, nor is it set in stone. My end goal, as I've said, is the betterment of society for the sake of mutantkind. As for how to get there…" He trailed off for a moment. "For us to have met at all, you must be capable of formulating an approach, and must also possess the drive to see it through. From one such person to another, what would you suggest?"
I saw this tactic of Erik's for what it was. He buttered me up first, likely in an attempt to make me see him more positively in response to how he seemingly found me. But I had preconceived notions of what kind of person Magneto was, and I'd held those opinions long before I met him. The man was a case of tragic irony, so determined to prevent the tragedy of his people from happening again that he instead became exactly what he hated, a little bit at a time.
The problem I had now, though, is that I wasn't sure who I was talking to. Was I speaking to Magneto, leader of the Brotherhood of Mutants, mutant terrorist who would be willing to destroy the rest of the world and sacrifice some of his own kind if it meant he could secure a future for the majority? Was this a Magneto for whom any mutant deaths, whether on his side or against it, was a tragedy to be avoided at all costs, regardless of the human death toll it would require?
Or was this somebody else entirely, and I just didn't know it yet?
Either way, I needed to say something. And at the very least, my answer wouldn't change, regardless of which Magneto I was speaking with.
So I took a deep breath, gathered my nerves, and answered.
"What do you know about the mere exposure effect?"
Magneto scoffed. "I ask you for your opinion on a plan of action, and this is your response? You want me to wait? To simply expect people to exist alongside mutants until they tolerate them?"
"Do you have any better ideas?" I challenged. "As in, actually, demonstrably better ideas? Because I don't. But just because I don't, and you don't, that doesn't mean nobody does. And it's entirely possible that someone out there has the answer, right now, and you wouldn't ever think to ask them because they're not a mutant."
Erik didn't have a response to that, at least not for a little bit. We drove several blocks in silence, and it was only as he pulled into a left turn lane and flipped on the blinker that he spoke again.
"You are particularly insistent that we mutants need allies. That I need allies," he said, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. "Who exactly are you trying to foist upon me, then?"
"Hm? Oh, hell if I know." Erik turned away from the road and glared at me. "What? I'm not the one looking for help for a massive social movement. That's your job."
"You are infuriating," he said with a sigh, guiding the car into a left turn.
"I'm a lawyer," I told him with a smirk. "Being infuriating is about half of my job."
I would forever consider it a minor miracle that we parted on (mostly) amicable terms.
Despite giving him my number, and he giving me his, I heard nothing from Magneto for many weeks after we'd met. And when I did hear of him? Well...
FEDERAL PRISON BREAK!
MUTANT CRIMINAL RESPONSIBLE?
'From the front page of the New York Times' wasn't exactly the way I'd hoped.