Here's my version of events after Erik leaves the White House at the end of the 1973 timeline in Days of Future Past. In some ways, this is a companion piece to "The Future That We Bring," which was my take on him at the end of the 2023 storyline - but it can be read independently, too. I'm sure that Apocalypse will render it AU.
For my own reference: 96th fanfiction, 9th story for X-Men.
In retrospect, keeping the TV cameras on his face for so long was a mistake. Now all the humans know exactly how he feels about them and exactly what he looks like.
His mistakes are always easier to see in retrospect.
But his helmet censored his face a bit, and he's lucky to get out of DC easily enough. North of the city lie farmlands and rolling hills. He comes to a sleepy, small town, where he knows that nobody will recognize him - the sort of place where people pay no mind to the problems of the outside world, certain that they'll never reach their quiet little lives. It was the same sort of place where he'd lived in Germany as a boy, a village so small that even the Jews were certain that the Nazis would never waste their time there.
It's a small town, but it has a hotel overlooking the highway, and he decides to hole up there while he plans his next move. He's still as good at robbing banks as ever, and he has enough cash to stay for however long he wants.
She shows up on this fourth day there. He sees her coming on the walkway outside the rooms - a heavy-set Hispanic woman wearing a maid's uniform and too much makeup - and he scoffs and swings his door open just as she's raising her hand to knock.
"This hotel doesn't even have maids, Mystique," he snaps.
She pauses for a moment, caught off-guard - most people don't see through her disguises so easily - but she recovers and slips inside, closing the door behind her. Erik doesn't know why she's here, but he feels a surge of triumph as he slides the locks into place. Raven's powers can't do her any good when the two of them are locked in a room together, especially a room with so much metal.
Raven turns to face him as she morphs back to blue. He's sitting in a chair by the window, holding a towel wrapped tightly around one arm. She supposes that he must be treating some injury he got back at the White House... even though the one on his neck looks healed enough.
He doesn't bother asking her how she found him again, and after a short silence, she says, "I thought you'd be out recruiting your army."
"I intend to. The war is still coming," he mutters darkly, still holding his arm, "but first things first."
Raven's yellow eyes narrow. She takes a deep breath and asks, "Are you planning to kill Charles?"
The genuine shock on his face calms her fears, but it only lasts a second before it's gone, replaced by his typical stoic stare. "Kill Charles?" he repeats. "What - why would I want to do that?"
"Maybe because you dropped a stadium on him!" she explodes. "For someone who doesn't want to kill him, you sure came close!"
Erik glowers and rubs his hurt arm. She has a point, but he doesn't like hearing it put so bluntly. He carefully peels the towel away then, and Raven gasps when she sees what a bloody, mangled mess his arm is.
"What happened to you?"
"First things first," he repeats. "I'm experimenting with embedding metal beneath my skin, so I can't get captured again."
He should've thought of it sooner - implanting metal inside him, making it part of his own body, so he can never possibly be without it. It's painful, yes, but he can't risk getting captured again, not when he has so much work to do for mutants. And it's fitting, in a way, that he's the one experimenting on his body now, instead of some sadistic doctor. He doesn't need to strap himself down to a table.
Raven's brow furrows, almost as if she's concerned. "But won't you get metal poisoning if you do that?"
"Of course not. You don't get metal poisoning if you do it right. I'm using non-corrosive metals that can't be absorbed into my bloodstream."
Raven can't help feeling relieved. She could've killed him at the White House, but she doesn't want him to actually die. For a few minutes in Paris - right after Charles and Erik burst in together, right before Erik tried to kill her - for those few minutes, she'd thought that they would be on the same side again, all of them together. How she'd loved the idea. She had remembered those minutes when she stood on the White House lawn, remembered how happy they'd made her, and then she purposely shot Erik to wound, instead of kill.
She follows after him when he stands up and goes back to the bathroom, where's he's laid some surgical tools out on the counter.
"I saw your speech on TV. It was very... rousing," she says, her tone somewhere between sincere or sarcastic. "You'll probably have lots of mutants wanting to join up with you. I'd probably want to, if, you know, you hadn't tried to kill me."
Erik sits down on the toilet lid and threads a needle to stitch up the gash on his arm. His experiment hasn't quite succeeded yet, but he's not discouraged. He'll make a deeper incision next time. He glances sideways at Raven and remembers her pointing the plastic gun at his head outside the White House.
"I'm not sure I'd be interested in recruiting you anymore."
"I know who you're interested in recruiting," she almost spits. She produces a small stack of photos out of nowhere and drops them on the counter.
The needle slips from Erik's fingers to the floor, forgotten, when he sees the boy in the photos. He recognizes him immediately, of course - the silver-haired mutant boy who broke him out of prison, the boy whose mother once knew a man who could control metal.
He grabs the photos and peers at each one closely. The boy, Peter, is outside in them - in a park, it looks like. He's blurry in some photos, but in others, his face is in focus, and Erik scrutinizes him for any resemblance to Magda or himself. He doesn't really look like either of them... but his face is familiar.
It wasn't possible... was it? When had Magda come to the United States? When had she learned English?
"Go to the last picture," Raven prompts, and her tone troubles him. He flips to the final photo, a wide shot of Peter walking through the park. He doesn't really look like either of them. No, he looks, more than anyone, like Erik's father.
Erik almost has to put the photos down.
He stares so hard at Peter that until Raven tells him, he doesn't notice someone else in the photo.
"You see who he's with?" Raven asks edgily, and only then does Erik see the little red-haired girl. She's walking alongside Peter, smiling and holding his hand. Raven leans forward and points to her. "She's his little sister, see?"
But Erik barely glances at her. The girl might be Peter's sister, but she couldn't be his daughter. She's too young - only four or five, from the looks of her. She would've been born while he was in prison. Erik's gaze shifts back to Peter, with a surge of something almost like fatherly pride. Such a powerful young mutant...
Raven looks at him as if waiting for something. "Don't you see?" she bursts out, when Erik still says nothing. "She's his little sister. He was taking her to the park."
Erik frowns, puzzled, and his eyes trace Peter's arm down to the little girl's hand.
And then, suddenly, he does see. The girl isn't Erik's daughter... and she almost certainly isn't mutant, either. Odds are that she's human. Peter has a human little sister. He looked bored in the photo - typical teenage boy - but he was still taking her to the park. He was still holding her hand. And she was smiling, happy to be there with him.
It's almost like being back on that beach in Cuba with Charles in his arms, watching the future that he'd dreamed of crumble to pieces. I want you on my side. We want the same things, he'd pleaded, and Charles had answered, We do not. Peter probably doesn't want the same things as Erik, either. He has a human sister that he loves. He would never want humans to stay out of their way or feel that they were inferior to mutants.
"You see?" Raven asks again, interrupting his thoughts. "He's her big brother, and she adores him. I could tell. You shouldn't even try recruiting him. You can't mess that up for them."
Erik realizes then what Raven wants him to see. For her, this isn't about him, or Peter, or his sister. It's about Raven and Charles.
He finally tears his eyes from the photo of Peter to glare at Raven. "You think I messed it up for you and Charles?" he challenges, and her face falls, taken aback, as if she really did believe that this was about Peter and his sister. "You think I forced you to walk away from him on the beach? I've never made you do anything you didn't want to do. Charles was the one -"
"Shut up!" she snaps, slamming one hand down on the counter. "I didn't come here to argue with you. I just wanted you to see the pictures."
She just wanted him to know that Peter would never want to be on his side.
She leaves after that, and Erik lets her go. He's alone again, alone with that photo of Peter holding his human sister's hand. His arm is bleeding again, a thin red line snaking down his wrist and dripping off his hand, forming a little crimson puddle on the white-tile floor. His plans for the future seem to be bleeding out, too. He hadn't even made any specific plans for himself and Peter. He'd just thought that - he'd hoped that -
But Peter having a human sister changes everything. Of course, Madga was human too, but she was different. She was an adult, and teenagers naturally rebelled against their parents. If he really wanted to, Erik could've manipulated Peter's feelings for his mother out of the way. But this little girl... she stood like a wall between them. Peter's only sibling, and so much younger than him - he would naturally feel protective of her, responsible for her.
Erik shakes his head. It doesn't make any sense. He's a powerful, multilingual mutant and expert strategist. He survived the Holocaust, torture, and ten years of solitary confinement. He could raise a satellite, a submarine, a stadium. And yet, in a way, this child, this powerless human girl, seemed to have defeated him.
Since I wrote this story, the "Rogue Cut" of Days of Future Past has been released, and one deleted scene reveals that Peter does have another sister. Of course, fans can only theorize on what might happen with Wanda in the next movie, but the point of this story remains: Peter still has a little sister who's likely human. I think that placing her on Peter's lap during Magneto's speech was no coincidence.