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Every second Tuesday in the Lane-Kent household was Family Game Night for any family member or family adjacent friend who happened to have the time. Jay Nakamura didn’t have the time, but he would never miss a Family Game Night, not when Jon so clearly wanted his company, and when the Lane-Kents were more than happy to supply food, and when his actual boss made a habit of taking second Tuesday evenings off for the occasion. It also helped that he and Jon had come to dominate Family Game Night. With the two of them working together, Scrabble was simple, Jenga a joke, and Monopoly was, well, easy money. The Kents really should have thought twice before picking bridge, a team game, as December’s game of the night, because not even the super twins, who Jay was beginning to think might count sibling telepathy among their super powers, could best the greatest team to ever grace Family Game Night.
It was long after they had thoroughly broken the spirits of every hero who had dared challenge them, late in the night as Clark washed up and Lois put the kids to bed. Jon and Jay sat, knees together, at the big round kitchen table, chairs angled towards each other as they broke up rounds of intense two person rummy and collaborative solitaire with a quick game of crazy eights. It really wasn’t fair. Jon had, at some point, picked up half the deck, and was currently doing his best just to hold his cards as they leaked through the cracks in his fingers and dribbled down his arms. It was a sorry sight, but he still had that determined look in his eye, the one that said anything was possible, that with enough will and a clever enough strategy, even Jay, with his one card, could be defeated. Jay couldn’t wait to wipe it off his face.
Jon mulled over his hand, thought, and then re-thought, and then thought again, before placing down a four on a four and changing the suit from clubs to diamonds. A clever strategy, to change the suit and hope it forces the opponent to draw, but it was always to be a meaningless gesture.
“I’m sorry to say, Jonathan,” Jay said, “that your resistance has been futile .” He revealed his final card– a wild eight.
Jay leaned back in his chair, preparing to bathe in Jon's over-the-top expressions of frustration, his groans and lamentations, but when Jay looked at his boyfriend, all he got was an inexplicable mix of delight and awe, which became less inexplicable when Jon said, voice filled with childish glee, “you can do magic?”
Jay’s senses crashed into each other in a fiery explosion of understanding. Somehow, in his reverie over his inevitable win, the part of his brain that lived for drama and presentation had run away with his muscle memory, dodged the massive wall of his self awareness, and pulled off a move Jay had thought long repressed. He had pulled that winning eight from thin air.
Not literally, as Jay explained, “just sleight-of-hand. Kid stuff, no actual magic,” but Jon’s excitement over this development could not be tempered.
Jon left his card fan on the table, forgotten, and said, “can you do it again?”
Jay did, because how could he possibly say no. There was no showmanship this time, though. Even a child without any of Jon’s super perception could figure out how he did it, but Jon still had that look of wonder. Jay smiled a little and did it a third time, this one with the classic misdirect of pointing at something invisible flying by before snatching the card from the ether. Jon actually jumped .
And then he asked “where did you learn to do that?” and Jay was taken a decade and a continent away.
~;~
It had never been easy to be Jay Nakamura, but his challenges had been a lot more normal , once upon a time. For example, the classic problem of how to make friends in elementary school. There was the extra layer that his mom happened to be a very important and well known politician who would soon become the president, but Jay had yet to fully accept or even realize that he was different from his peers, that most kids’ moms were not known by everyone in the country and usually had the time to pick their children up from school themselves. So the problem remained simply ‘ how do people make friends?’
He remembered actually sitting down with a piece of paper and making note of his observations from tv and the few interactions he had eavesdropped on to collect his data. Lots of people seemed to start off a friendship by simply talking to each other, but what do you say? What do people want to hear out of potential friends? What could he possibly do in that first conversation to make it clear he was worth being friends with?
The answer came one night while he was browsing the internet over his limited computer time. He had clicked on a video of a man enthusiastically showing off how to pull a card from thin air. This was it. The perfect tool for making friends. He had never seen anyone else doing this before, so it would make him unique, irreplaceable. What could Jay Nakamura offer as a friend? A show. Imagine how cool it would be to be friends with the kid who could pull a card from nowhere.
He spent the last half hour of his computer time watching the same man’s videos and quickly scribbling down his instructions so he could practice later. Card tricks, trick cuts, coin tricks, and more transcribed in a nine year old’s scrawl for later.
Jay spent that weekend practicing in front of the mirror. It was the best way to practice, since the effect of the illusion could only be seen by an audience. The magician themself only sees the backstage, the palming and the preparation, the work that should be invisible to a viewer. He grimaced at the awkward claw his hand formed as he tried to palm a card for the first time, hand too small to hold the card exactly as the man in the video had. He spent the first hour adjusting it until it looked natural in the mirror. He spent the next hour practicing the pull.
When he was satisfied, he switched to the next trick, a one handed cut, and the next, a disappearing coin, on and on until dinner, and on and on until bedtime. Jay discovered, in his extensive practice time, that he actually liked magic. The physicality of it, the short and to the point demonstration of skill, the satisfaction of getting it right, and then never getting it wrong again. He kept practicing for weeks, fulfilled, but never sure enough to try anything in front of another person, and for one simple reason. No matter how much he practiced, it was still obvious that he was trying.
The coolest people at his school didn’t try. Everything that made them cool came naturally, and if it didn’t then it wasn’t that cool to begin with. Someone who seemed like they were born with the ability to pluck a card from nowhere was cool, someone who spent hours and hours practicing to learn how to do it was trying too hard. So, Jay spent even more hours trying to cover up the hours he spent. It didn’t work.
After months of practice, with dozens of tricks under his belt, Jay scrapped the idea entirely. He’d find something that came easily to make friends with, but maybe his illusions could be good for something else.
One night, Jay joined his mother at the dinner table with a deck of cards clutched in his sweaty palm, and said “Mom! Can I show you something I’ve been working on?”
She agreed between quick glances at her cell phone.
Jay smiled the way the online magician had told him to and fanned out the cards, “pick a card, any card! Look at it, memorize it, and then put it in your pocket.” Sara looked surprised and delighted, and did as told, tucking the card into her blouse pocket. “Now, I’m going to shuffle the deck, see how–”
The phone started ringing. Sara’s light expression was immediately replaced by a common seriousness as she checked the name on the screen and said “Sorry, sweetheart. I have to take this. We’ll finish later, ok?”
Jay’s mother walked away, cell phone between ear and shoulder, and six of spades in her pocket.
~;~
Years later, when his problems became far from normal and being Jay Nakamura became considerably harder, Jay took up magic once again. It had been some time since he and his mother had been taken, separated, and while he no longer had that weighty, compressing fear that he was going to be imminently executed, he wasn’t exactly comfortable. It happened when he was being moved to his third holding facility, a major point of anxiety in the moment, but in retrospect likely another symptom of Bendix’s incompetence as a leader. The man didn’t even know where to find a good mass prison.
Jay, fourteen and terrified, was being escorted to his new cell by a pair of particularly large and scary guards, when he saw something shining on the dirty linoleum of the hallways right outside the place they were going. In a moment of foolish, mindless bravery, Jay kicked the shining thing into the room as subtly as possible, hoping the men flanking him wouldn’t notice. He didn’t even feel the pain or the shame when they shoved him into the cell, too caught up in the relief and pride that he had gotten away with it.
When he was certain they wouldn’t be coming back, Jay observed his new treasure. It was an American quarter, certainly dropped by one of Bendix’s lackeys. Jay wanted to get rid of it then and there, shove it under the crack at the bottom of the door and forget about this reminder of the outsiders in his home, maybe spit on it first. But he had learned how lonely and boring this time could be, and Jay knew how to use coins.
He sat on the edge of his cot, coin in hand, and gently maneuvered it into a half remembered palming technique. The ridged edge of the coin dug into the soft pad at the base of his thumb and the center of his palm, just as it had when he was nine. When he was certain he had it right, he flipped his hand and smiled in satisfaction as the coin stayed put.
He stood and smiled, deciding on the first trick that came to mind. He moved to drop the coin into his other hand, and closed his other palm around nothing. Then, he opened the decoy hand to reveal that the coin had disappeared. He rubbed the empty hand with the other, subtly dropping the coin, and then fully revealing it. Jay grinned at the simplicity, then held out his hand for the audience to inspect, the final step of any good illusion, he had been told.
Except, of course, there was no audience. Jay had never managed to show another living soul his magic, and now he likely never would. Magic tricks only mattered when there was an audience to fall for them and be amazed. By himself there was no mystery, no anticipation. If a magician falls in a forest does he make a sound? Would Jay ever make a sound again?
Jay sat back down, dejected, and spent a long time staring at the coin, its proud image of an eagle, wings spread wide, perched on a branch and surrounded by laurels. It turned his stomach. He flipped the coin over. It wasn’t much better that this side said “LIBERTY” in big, American letters. He flipped it again, and again, and again.
It reminded him of something else from those coin videos, a flourish the magician often did, but never explained. Before teaching his tricks, the man in the video would flip the coin across his fingers, end over end, and then back again. It would be done in a second, rolled swiftly over the tops of his fingers. There was no deceit involved, no audience necessary, just skill. Maybe Jay could figure it out.
He held the quarter between the joint of his pointer and middle finger, and kept it there for a minute as he tried to figure out what to do next. The coin needed to flip into the next space between fingers. He tried letting the coin fall, hoping it would just end up where it needed to be, but it only slid across the back of his hand. He kept at this for quite a bit of time he couldn’t measure before he realized that the trick was to let the coin sit on the middle finger and to push it up with the pointer, allowing it to fall into the next gap, and then the next.
After a few weeks he could get from pointer to pinky every time. A few weeks more and he could also roll it back. A few more and he could do both quickly. A few more and he was doing it without even thinking. It was a kind of meditation, and soon the only way to force his mind anywhere but the room he was trapped in and the stewing, fearful anger at the core of his person. Only the feel of that metal between his fingers, cold but quickly warming in his grasp, could give him the certainty he needed to believe that one day he’d find a way to take Bendix down in a fiery blaze of justice that he was more and more certain would kill them both. That coin, and the things he could do with it, was all he had for hope.
He was doing just this, flipping the coin back and forth and thinking, the first time a pair of guards barged in unexpectedly. He managed to drop the coin into a fold of his thin blanket where it wouldn’t be easily seen before they dragged him off for his first time in that lab.
Jay didn’t like thinking about that time in his life. It was in the past now, taken care of, for the most part. Anyone who wanted to know the details about it now didn’t want them for any good reason and Jay was more than happy to keep them to himself. There was a lot of pain, and a lot of fear, and a whole lot of anger, and for most of the six months it was all for nothing. There was no change. Until there was.
When they threw Jay back into his cell after the day they had finally made their longed for breakthrough, he was shaking in agony. There was something between his muscle and skin, too big for his body. It was pushing and pushing and any minute it would burst past the too tight suit it was wearing and leave Jay as ripped shreds on the ground. He laid there for hours, the salty scent of his sweat and tears mixing with the metallic stench of blood, all too reminiscent of the smell of his hand after a day holding that quarter. He waited dreadful hours for this bit of familiarity to leave him, for Jay Nakamura to be replaced by whatever thing they had put into him over the last four cursed months. That waiting was the worst part. Any thought could have been his last.
That moment never came, which, ultimately, made it worse. It meant it could still be coming; any day now the other shoe would drop, and Bendix would get the last laugh he always wanted.
But he didn’t then. And after hours of being immobile from pain, and then from horrible anticipation, Jay got up and walked on tingling feet to his cot. He reached for the quarter among the folds of the blanket. His hand went right through it.
~:~
The first time Jay held a deck of cards afterwards, he was sitting on the floor with Wink, Aerie, and Javier, the four of them deciding on a rainy day and a whim to learn how to play bridge. Aerie was on their phone reading the rules while lo-fi rock and roll hummed and buzzed its way out of Wink’s frankly terrible phone speaker. Jay had been asked to shuffle.
His hand had unconsciously gone to the starting position for most trick cuts, deck laid with the back facing the sky, middle and ring finger on the tops of the cards, pinky and pointer on either side, thumb on the bottom, suspending the deck above the palm. He was struck by how different the familiar gesture felt, how much bigger his hand had become since he last held a deck like this. He dropped the bottom half of the deck into the palm of his hand like he was beginning a one handed cut. The cards staggered as they bumped into the still healing scar on his thumb, one of many covering his body. For reasons he couldn’t explain he suddenly wondered if he ever got the six of spades back from his mom’s pocket and found he couldn’t remember.
Jay took the bottom half of the deck and started shuffling.
~;~
And then Jay was back in the present, and Jon was still waiting for an answer. “I watched some videos when I was younger, practiced in the mirror for a little while.”
“That is so cool!” Jon grinned.
“Jon, you can fly and shoot lasers out of your eyes. You know actual wizards.”
“Sure, and some of those wizards are jerks. This isn’t like superpowers, this is a real skill!”
“You are vastly overestimating the importance of close up magic.”
“C’mon, Jay. I know you, and I know you don’t do things unless you care about them. It’s one of my favorite things about you, actually. How much you care.”
It was funny. All of Jay’s worst fears from when he was first learning magic were being confirmed. His first time doing a trick in front of anyone and he had been unable to hide how hard he tried, unable to keep the work secret and sell the illusion, even after all this time. Jon had clocked him immediately. And he found he didn’t mind it so much.
“Do you want me to teach you how to do it?”
“Yes!” Jon exclaimed, like it was obvious. Who wouldn’t want to learn a bit of magic? He grabbed a random card from his overstuffed fan.
Jay showed him how to palm the card and hold it under tension, then demonstrated how to pinch the card's corner so it flips into sight faster than the eye can process. Jon’s card flew out to the side the first time he tried it, and they laughed, but the second time he managed, through awkward hand positioning and an obvious look of extreme focus, to reveal the six of spades.