Chapter Text
"How do you do it?"
Will's brain was doing something he could only describe as buffering.
How do we do it, his brain repeated back to him, helpfully. How do we do it. How do we- well, the honest answer is that Jane's brain was experimented on by the US government in a secret underground laboratory when she was a child, which granted her telekinetic abilities she has spent the better part of a decade learning to control, and I have a residual psychic connection to her from the period of time I spent as a host for an interdimensional being of immense power, which occasionally allows me to amplify or sync with her abilities in ways neither of us fully understand, and also sometimes I just know things, and we've been doing it so long it looks like a performance, but it IS a performance, it's just that the thing underneath the performance is also real- actually no. That's not an answer we can give. That's not even close to an answer we can give. That is the answer that gets us on a government watchlist. Or a different government watchlist. We're probably already on several-
"We practice a lot," Jane said.
Will almost laughed out of sheer relief.
"Right," Simon said, slowly, like a man testing the weight of an answer. "You practice."
"Constantly," Will agreed, finding his voice. "It's like— you know how a dancer does something and it looks effortless, but that's ten thousand hours behind it? It's like that. We've been doing this since we were kids." This was technically true. "We've developed our own system." Also technically true. "It's a lot of trust and timing and physical memory." True, true, and true.
Simon was quiet.
"Mm," he said. Which communicated absolutely nothing.
The silence stretched. Will couldn't tell if they'd cleared the hurdle or if Simon was simply building to something worse. He had the sudden, vertiginous feeling of being read, because Simon did read acts on stage, he looked at people performing and found the seam between what was real and what was constructed.
Don't find the seam, Will thought. Please. There's a lot behind the seam.
Then Simon leaned forward and said:
"I want you to win."
Will blinked.
"I want you," Simon said again, delivering a prophecy, "to win Britain's Got Talent."
There was a pause.
"Okay," Jane said carefully. "Yay?"
"Because," Simon continued, "I see myself in you."
The silence that followed was a specific, loaded kind of silence. Will watched Mike's face do something complicated. Then Mike said:
"What the fuck."
"Mike."
"No," Mike said. "Dude, what? Absolutely not. You don't- he doesn't- what?"
"I see–"
"You see yourself," Mike repeated, incredulous. "In them. You see Simon Cowell, a sixty-year-old British man who has been married multiple times and once told a woman on national television that she sounded like a cat being stepped on, you see that person, in Jane and Will, who are teenagers, from Indiana, who–" He stopped. He appeared to be doing math. "I'm sorry. I need you to explain that sentence."
Simon shrugged. "Do you want a chocolate?"
"I want you to explain yourself."
"Mike," Will said.
"Will," Mike said back, with feeling.
"I had the same drive! The same power! You stay hungry, you devour, you put in the work and hours and take what's yours!" Simon said dramatically, like his face lit up and all. It really sounded like he was just quoting some song lyrics. "And, furthermore, we had same refusal to remain ordinary." Says a middle aged white man.
But Jane thought about the lab. She thought about the numbers on her arm and the first time she'd seen a television and the first time she'd eaten a waffle and the first time she'd stood in front of an audience and felt not afraid, for once, but seen. She thought about Will, and the way he painted like it was the only language that didn't require translation, their magic tricks, their home being a stage.
"Oh," she said.
"Yep," Simon said.
She still didn't totally know what he meant but that oh had landed somewhere real so she was going to let it sit.
"Also," Simon said, "I know."
Jane's oh evaporated. Simon didn't have to say it, because I don't have the time to write all that dialogue so yes he knew about their powers. Because I said so.
"Are you going to tell someone?" Will asked, and his voice was doing the thing it did when he was terrified but had decided to be calm about it, which Jane knew as well as her own heartbeat.
Simon gasped Britishly. "Tell someone??"
"We have to ask-"
"I have been in this industry for thirty years." He said it like a verdict. "Do you know how many inexplicable things I have seen? Do you know how many artists have walked through my doors with something other going on? Something I couldn't explain, couldn't account for, couldn't fit into any reasonable understanding of what a human person should be able to do?" He paused. "I don't tell people, William. I find people."
What does that mean, Jane thought. What does THAT mean. What kind of- how many- WHO-
She looked at Will again, desperate.
Will's face said: I don't know.
Mike's face said: I'm just here for the chocolates at this point.
"The most successful act I've ever worked with," Simon said, "had nothing like what you have." He gestured at Jane in a way that somehow encompassed her entire existence. "But on a stage, they were impossible to look away from. Five boys who should not have added up to what they added up to. Something between them that I have spent years trying to explain and never quite managed." He looked between her and Will. "The audience didn't just like them. The audience needed them."
Jane had a feeling. She did not want to say the name attached to this feeling out loud because she was aware, dimly, that this might not be the appropriate moment.
"Like them," she said.
"Like them," Simon confirmed.
"Like-" Jane heard herself say it before she could stop herself, "-Harry?"
"Like the band," Simon said. "All five of them."
"Harry Styles," Jane breathed.
"Among others-"
"He's saying we're like HARRY STYLES," Jane said, turning to Will with the energy of someone receiving a prophecy.
"He's saying we're like a band-"
"A band CONTAINING Harry Styles!"
"The STAGE PRESENCE, Jane!"
"Are you being for real." Jane asked, and it wasn't quite a question. It was the tone of someone who had been kidnapped, blindfolded, offered chocolates, and interrogated in a nice room, and was now being told it was for whimsy.
"I'm always for real," Simon said, which was such a Simon Cowell thing to say that Will almost respected it.
"WILL-"
"Okay," Mike said, loudly and with great suffering. He turned to look at Jane. "El. You have telekinesis. You faced down an immortal evil MULTIPLE TIMES. You are the single most powerful person in any room you have ever stood in, including this one, including every room ever." He pointed at her. "Simon Cowell just told you that you're destined for greatness. And you are focusing on Harry Styles."
Jane considered this.
"He has very good hair," she said.
Will put his face in his hands.
"The point," Simon said, with the patience of a monk, "is that your finale act needs to blow the audience away, people need to be compelled to vote for you. Unless people like you, your magic thing is nothing."
Will made a face. "People like us!"
Mike turned to him. "Do they."
"Well, whatever, they will," Will said, and he said it with the particular certainty that Jane had come to understand as something more than confidence. "Our act will blow you away."
"I expect it," he said. "That's why I arranged this meeting."
"YOU COULD HAVE-" Will stopped to breathe, a pause tremendous restraint. "You could have sent a note."
"Where's the fun in that."
Mike was going to kill himself.
"More chocolate?" Simon said.
Actually he was not.
It was very late when they got back. Jonathan opened the door before they could knock.
"Look what the cat dragged in," he said. "Do you have any idea what time it is? I thought you got kidnapped or something."
"We did get kidnapped," Jane said.
Jonathan snickered. "Yeah? By who? Harry Styles?"
"Simon Cowell," Mike said, already walking past him. "He believes in us because we remind him of One Direction. Night."
Jonathan shrugged at Jane, already heading back to bed.
The finals were in three days.
Jane knew this because there was a countdown on the wall of their hotel room that Mike had made. It was a piece of paper taped to the peeling wallpaper, but the numbers were crossed off with such ferocity that the paper was currently tearing in two places.
"Stop looking at it," Will said, face buried in his pillow.
"I'm not looking at it," Jane said, looking at it. Her eyes were wide and unblinking, like a deer that had just realized the headlights were actually a train and the train was on fire and also the train was her responsibility.
"Jane."
"I'm literally not." She looked away. She looked back. The three stared at her judgmentally. "It's still three, right? It didn't accidentally become four while I blinked? Time is weird, Will. I don't trust linear time. Time is a social construct invented by clock companies to sell more clocks."
"It's three," Will said, he had been having this conversation, in various forms, since approximately 11 PM. It was now 2 AM. "We are fine."
"We are not fine. We are about to go on national television and do a trick that relies on us feeling the same emotions at the exact same second. Last week, you cried at a car commercial, Will. A car commercial."
"I didn't cry," Will hissed. "My eyes were sweating. It was emotional, okay? The dog found his way home!"
"If you cry during the finale, we are going to levitate the jury box into the stratosphere and then what? We get disqualified for assault? Manslaughter? Do you get charged with manslaughter if you telekinetically launch someone into space? Is that still manslaughter or is it-" she paused, "-spaceslaughter?"
"The problem," Jane interrupted, staring at the menacing scribbles on the wall, "is that the monsters wanted to kill me. That’s simple. I know how to handle 'kill.' The audience wants to be entertained. They want magic and joy. That is a terrifyingly vague brief."
"You've been doing this your whole life," he said.
"What if I give them 'mild contentment' instead of 'euphoria' and they throw tomatoes? Do they still throw tomatoes in Britain? Is that still a thing?"
Will chucked a pillow at her head, which despite her telekinetic abilities and her supposed constant vigilance and her entire backstory of dodging things that wanted to kill her, she did not dodge. It hit her square in the face with the sad little whump of inevitability.
She sat there with the pillow over her face for a moment. It felt appropriate. It felt like where she belonged.
"Okay," Jane said, into the pillow, her voice muffled. "But what if some British girl gets on stage and starts singing 'Imagine'? What do we do then?"
Will's rolled his eyes. Man that song sucked- (YOU MAY SAYYY I'M A DREAMMERRR) shut up, brain.
He also briefly considered jumping out the window to escape this conversation, did the mental math on the four-floor drop, decided that broken legs would not help the finale performance, and stayed put.
Self-preservation. Look at him. Growing.
"We've practiced," he said, the restraint should have earned him an award. "We know our act. We're good."
"But what if they add beatboxing puppies," Jane said.
Will blinked. His brain gave up and started playing elevator music.
"What."
"Beatboxing puppies," Jane repeated, she was thinking about this for a while and had reached conclusions. Troubling ones. "What if someone brings beatboxing puppies. Or a dancing parrot. Or a child who plays the violin while doing backflips. Or a backflipping parrot who plays the violin. Will, we have telekinesis. That is our thing. But what if their thing is cuter? What if cute beats telekinesis? Has anyone studied this? Is there research?"
"Jane, we've been knowing how to do magic."
"BEATBOXING PUPPIES, WILLIAM!"
"Okay," he said, with the patience of a saint. A very tired saint. A saint who was running on four hours of sleep and the fumes of determination. "First of all, there are no beatboxing puppies."
"You don't know that—"
"Second," he continued, speaking over her with the confidence of someone who had learned that sometimes you just had to keep talking, "we have the connection thing. We have been training for this our entire lives, even when we didn't know we were training for it. A British girl with 'Imagine' does not have what we have."
"She might have a really good voice—"
"Jane."
"GUYS," Mike's voice came through the wall, muffled but clear and also very, very done. "If you two don't shut up and go to sleep RIGHT NOW, I'm voting for Clarissa out of spite. I'll make a hundred accounts. I'll vote a hundred times. I'll vote so much they'll think it's a glitch in the system. I WILL COMMIT VOTER FRAUD FOR CLARISSA."
There was a very long pause.
"He wouldn't," Jane whispered, with the tone of someone who was not entirely sure.
"He absolutely would," Will whispered back, with the tone of someone who had known Mike Wheeler for a very long time and understood exactly what he was capable of when pushed.
They both looked at the wall like it might have answers. The wall did not have answers. The wall just had Mike behind it, probably glaring at it from his side.
"Sorry!" Jane called.
"GO TO SLEEP!" Mike called back. "SLEEP! THE THING HUMANS DO! AT NIGHT! WHEN IT'S NIGHTTIME!"
"Okay!" Will called.
"I'M GOING TO BED!" Jane added.
"YOU SHOULD ALREADY BE IN BED! IT'S TWO AM! WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS!"
"SORRY!"
"STOP APOLOGIZING AND START SLEEPING!"