Summary: Emma Frost joined S.H.I.E.L.D. as a consultant long after White was pulled from the Arctic. Her first meeting with him wasn't in the cold—but in silence, in containment, with the subject wide awake and deeply wrong. There was no psychic aura. No mental field. Just absence. Since then, Emma has kept herself close to him—not out of fear, but for control. She's not afraid of the monster. She's interested in what he might become… and what she can do with him.
...
She first saw him through a wall of glass.
Seated. Awake. Alive.
Not screaming. Not moving. Just... staring. At nothing.
The figure in the cell—barefoot, bare-chested, coiled in stillness—was unlike anything Emma Frost had ever encountered. And she had encountered plenty. Mutants. Machines. Gods with crowns and bastards with claws. But this one?
This one felt blank.
No psychic field. No passive thoughts. No resonance.
It was like her telepathy had walked into a soundless room and shut the door behind it.
"Is the feed dead?" she'd asked Fury.
"No," he replied, not even looking at her. "That's just what he is."
That was the first time she saw the man they called "White." She didn't speak to him. She didn't try to probe. She just stood there, mind brushing silence, and thought:
He's not asleep. He's waiting.
Emma wasn't with S.H.I.E.L.D. by accident.
After the rise of enhanced individuals—gods falling out of the sky, monsters smashing cities, billionaires building arsenals—mutants had a problem.
They were no longer the strangest thing on the map.
Emma didn't like problems she couldn't control. So she offered her services. "External consultant on post-human bio-psychic anomalies." The contract was loose. The access? Not as limited as Fury would like.
She didn't trust him. He didn't trust her.
But they both trusted leverage.
And White?
White was leverage incarnate.
She observed him from one floor above—her own suite wired into every camera, heartbeat scanner, heat signature, and audio feed tracking his cell. Technically it wasn't a cell. Technically, it was a secured "habitat."
It was a cage.
He never paced.
Never spoke.
He ate like a starving animal—measured, mechanical, fast.
He trained like a soldier from a world that never stopped fighting.
He meditated for hours, eyes closed, breath steady.
No escape attempts.
No threats.
No boredom.
He moved through the days like time was irrelevant.
S.H.I.E.L.D. ran sedative tests. Oxygen shifts. Ambient noise disruptions.
Every test failed.
Emma suspected he let them fail.
The day of the invasion, she'd remained at the East Wing substation. She refused to evacuate. Instead, she poured wine, opened Garou's file again, and watched the monitors.
When she saw the Leviathan fall from the sky, writhing as something tore out its spine from the inside, she whispered aloud:
"Of course it's you."
Later, when they tried to find him in the rubble, she didn't help.
She already knew where he'd be.
Right back in the cage.
Because that's what monsters do when they're tired of chasing prey.
They wait.
Emma had no illusions about her role.
She wasn't there to cure him. She wasn't there to protect anyone else.
She was there to understand him.
To stay one step ahead.
And if White turned out to be what she suspected—something shaped for war, something old and still learning what it could become—
Then she intended to be the one who decided where he pointed.