Work Text:
(9:31 AM) War: Are you aware that magic is real?
…
Dylan Shrike had two phones just as he had two lives.
His phones like his lives were nearly identical and hung out in his pockets like dead weight.
(It was not a perfect metaphor.)
His phones like his lives were carefully constructed, designed to look inconspicuous but expensive.
His phones like his lives struck an incongruous picture with his scruffy beard and worry lined face and his ties that no matter their expense never seemed to lay flat. Nobody would look at him and guess that he was the long dead son of a famous magician or that he was a high paid FBI agent doggedly on the trail of the most famous criminals of this century. Nobody would ever think that Dylan was the kind of man who had two sleek black highly encrypted phones in his pockets.
…
(9:31 AM) War: Are you aware that magic is real?
(9:33 AM) War: Don’t Ignore me.
(9:34 AM) War: We both know that you know and now I know so there’s no point pretending anything different.
…
He was in the middle of morning check in at the Bureau when his phone buzzed. It’s the wrong phone, of course. Damn Atlas. It’s Atlas of course, none of the others ever text him, but he’ll have to spend the rest of the meeting thinking about what if it was one of the others. What if it was Jack or Merritt who had legitimate problems to which he could provide legitimate answers.
“Rhodes?” Section Chief Natalie Austin said, her voice like a sharp needle thrown to pierce him, “Are you with us?”
“Yes Ma’am,” he said.
“Do you want to give us an update on the wild horse chase?”
“Yes Ma’am.” he said again, and wondered if she could his drawl, if there was anything that could place him on the map. With no accent at all you sounded flat, with one you were unmistakable. The magic of being more than one person was as much an ongoing calculation as it was showmanship.
Dylan steps to the front of the room, cleared his throat. “They’re ghosts,” He said mater-of-factly.
“Is that all you have for me.” It is not a question. It’s not even a statement. It a single line communication in which Dylan can read the implicit. Her look says; I am putting my self on the line for you and this investigation because I like you. Her look says; I am putting my self on the line for you because you are clearly no threat to me. Her look says: I am putting my self on the line for you because I feel bad that you are no longer on the management fast track because a case got ripped out from under you and so I am giving this to you on the assumption that you will not have mysterious single lines about ghosts and will actually provide me with something useful.
“The horsemen are ghosts,” Dylan begins again, “and that tells us something. They are ghosts despite the fact that we have spent the last 6 months prying into every available bit of information they left behind. Each and everyone of them was a performer. Most of them had regular shows booked at prominent venues. Even Jack Wilder performed on stage occasionally. Excepting Wilder, who is of course dead, non of them should be ghosts. And yet…”
Dylan gestures, spreading his open palms, showing his cards.
“And what exactly does that tell us, Rhodes?” She raises a supercilious eyebrow.
“What is the first thing they taught you in the academy?” he sighs.
“When somebody pulls a gun on you, you duck.”
Dylan laughs; that’d be the first thing they taught you in con-man school to if there was a school for that sort of thing. Magician school too, now that he thinks about it.
“The first thing they tell you in any class about actual investigation,” he says, “is that you have to look for the gulfs between what you expect to be there and what is there. What we expected to have on the horsemen is something, anything, and what we have is nothing. So what does that tell us?”
With a sound that should not be audible, but by some magic is, Section Chief Natalie Austin’s patience snaps like a string on a badly made violin. “We’re not at the academy, Rhodes, so stop teaching and start briefing.”
For a brief moment in time the two Dylan’s had seemed to be in focus, like two lenses in a telescope that revealed a remote vision, but at this they snapped away and Dylan was back to cringing like the beaten down desk-jocky Rhodes was destined to be.
“There is something wrong, and there is something working to erase them from the world. They had more help than we have them credit for,” he says.
She stares at him. He wonders what she sees. She wonders what he expects her to see. He’s crazy she thinks, of course he is. The Horseman broke him, left his life shattered like a cellphone on the concrete.
“You’re saying There Eye is real?”
Dylan shrugs.
…
(9:37 AM) War: Coward.
…
Dylan buys tickets to New York before he even texts back.
He did not select Atlas to be a horseman because he was an easy person to get along with. None of the Horsemen were selected because they were people who would let go of something easy.
Magic is not an art of well… magic. Magic is the art of brute force. How many times can you perform this vanish, until your hands become creatures of their own, until it just happens every time you hold a coin, until muscle memory enables the miraculous.
It takes a certain kind of person to put in the hours.
None of The Horsemen are easy people but, lord, Daniel Atlas was a real bastard.
…
(11:03 AM) John of Revelation: Of course magic is real. You do it all the time.
(11:03 AM) War: You’re deliberately misunderstanding me.
(11:05 AM) War: I’m talking about real magic, not fake stage magic.
(11:06 AM) John of Revelation: You used that magic to steal billions of dollars.
(11:07 AM) War: Don’t tell me to wait.
(11:10 AM) War: I’ve never been and idiot in my life.
…
(12:21 PM) Death: What did you say to Daniel?
(12:22 PM) Death: He’s on the war path.
(12:50 PM) Death: I just want to get back to sleep.
(12:52 PM) Death: He’s yelling about breaking up the horsemen.
(12:56 PM) Death: Pls… Shut Him Up.
(3:01 PM) John of Revelation: I’m trying.
(3:21 PM) John of Revelation: Also I told you not to use real names when texting me.
(3:22 PM) Death: well ~~war~~ is on the ~~war~~path
…
You have received 29 unread messages…
…
Dylan waits in the rain for Daniel to open the door. Rain drop after rain drop drips down his face. He looks like a disheveled cop. He is a disheveled cop.
“Nice of you to answer my texts,” Daniel says with a sneer.
“I don’t talk business over text,” Dylan replies. He keeps mis tone measured and tired and sleepy sounding. He is not merged and tired and he is not sleepy, he is instead thrumming with the knowledge of what is about to happen.
“So you came all this way to tell me magic isn’t real?” Daniel hasn’t stopped sneering, his face is distorted by it.
Dylan looks at him and at his deliberately rumpled, prentisouly unpretentious shirt and his cold hard mouth.
“No,” Dylan says.
He pushes past Daniel in a swirl of black overcoat and drops his briefcase and his backpack in the hall. He walks to the couch and sits on it. He waits in a silence of expectation that has been building for the last 24 hours, or maybe the last year, or maybe the whole of his life.
“If magic is real,” he tell Atlas, who has reluctantly followed him in to the main room of his own apartment and who looks like he is about to tell Dylan not to drip on the sofa. “If magic is real, Daniel, then show me some.”
With one imperious eyebrow raised Daniel snap his fingers.
Nothing happens.
….
For two hours Daniel snaps and claps and flips cards and Dylan says nothing.
“if magic is real,” he says finally, “do it now.”
“You do it,” Daniel snaps, “if you are so high and mighty ‘Mr. Revelation’ then you do it. You preform magic.”
Dylan smiles the slow smile of a long con playing off. “I could,” he says and and pulls a cigarette out of the air, “but magic shouldn’t be used for petty tasks like showing up fools.”
Dylan snaps his finger, and a flame springs from his fingers. He lights his cigarette and leans back into the couch.
….
(11:42 PM) Death: I told you to shut Daniel up
(11:43 PM) Death: sorry… shut WAR up
(11:44 PM) Death: He’s yelling even more what did you do!??!?
….
(11:46 PM): Pestilence: Really what DID you do to him?
(11:47 PM): Pestilence: If you seriously hurt him, please send pictures.
…
“This is why I said you had to breath together like a single organism,” Dylan says, “You’re not ready.”
They are on opposite sides of Dylan’s apartment. Merritt and Jacks apartment is below them and the empty husk of Henley’s apartment is above them. Other criminals would go to ground separately but they are protected by the fact that nobody expects them to have bought a fashionable brownstone in Brooklyn and set up shop.
They are protected by the eye. They are protected by the four hand gestures Dylan had made over the threshold that made it a closed space, a finite loop, a sanctuary.
They could yell all they want and nobody could ever come and find them.
“See I think when you say that you mean us,” Atlas still has the same pinched pain in the ass expression and not you. Did you have to have a partner, a team when you learned magic, or did you just do it be cause you didn’t have a self centered prick telling you what to do?”
“That,” Dylan says, “Is different.”
They have each stepped closer to each other. One step closer, then another, like gunslingers at high noon.
Daniel coats his tongue with poison and opens his mouth again. “How is it different? How are you any better than us? Is it because you pretend to be boring and let men in suits walk all over you? Or maybe you’re just pretending to be better than us because the eye doesn’t tell you anything either and you just want to pretend it does?”
“This isn’t making me want to teach you magic any more than i already do, Daniel,” Dylan spits.
“I already know magic,” Altas crows, “I’m the brightest magician of my age.”
Dylan lunges. He pins Daniel’s writs between his hands. He can feel the fire pulsing there. He can feel all the years of simmering Daniel has done. He burns. Dylan has been a dead fire for years, old beyond his years, waiting to be kindled into life to scorch his revenge upon the earth. He has been coals and Daniel burns.
“You don’t know magic,” Dylan says, “you don’t. You don’t even know how much fire is in you now. You don’t know a damn thing. Everybody says you have control issues, and yeah they're right. But really you were just an under-oved kid who turned into an asshole and your whole life you thought that if only you could control the world then maybe you wouldn't be so lonely and now you've discovered that magic is real and you can call fire out of the air but its not consistent and its not easy and it hasn't made anybody like you one lick more because you never learned to just sit down and listen to anything but your own ego.”
Dylan breaths, “Listen to me now. Magic is dangerous, and magic can’t save you.”
He forces Daniels hands to move through the air, he forces motion into them. They pull back and forth, pulling ribbon of growing light between them as they struggle and as Dylan wins. They teeter. Dylan releases and suddenly Daniel is ablaze.
“Is this what you wanted?” Dylan asks.
Daniel looks down at his hands, at the fire.
“Why are you scared of this?” Daniels asks, “This is glorious.”
….
All the magic in the world didn’t save his father.
All the magic in the world didn’t make him whole.
….
Dylan leans in and eats the flames off Daniel’s lips.
….
(1:00 AM) Death: Are they…??
(1:03 AM) Pestilence: Fucking. Yeah.
(1:21 AM) Pestilence: Finally.
….
Dylan Shrike had two childhoods just like he was two types of magicians. Dylan was the the most well-adjusted kid the foster care program had ever seen. Okay he was a little sad and a little dull but he bright and focused. He had a grey colored childhood, like smoke, like smoke and mirrors.
In his bedroom, behind closed doors, in deserted hallways and locked closets, he twisted his hands and imagined a world where he could raise the safe from the silt of the river as easily as he could raise himself. He called birds to him and whispered his secrets to them, he asked them what they knew about the secret of the universes. He asked them if The Eye was real. The birds never thought to answer him.
But nobody remembers Dylan Rhodes’ childhood. He slipped in and out of it without ever making a mark on it. It was like he stepped into that empty sterile apartment on the first day of FBI training fully made. He was a ghost as much as anyone.
He called magic into the world because he needed it. He called Rhodes into the world because he needed him. He found The Eye because he needed there to be something deeper going on. He called up the horsemen because he needed them, because he needed somebody else to burn for him.