Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

One Week Ago

“That’s her.”

“Hey!” Lula said, waving from her perch on the table as Jack, Danny, and Merritt watched.

“Hi,” Danny said, leaning against the railing awkwardly. He looked uncomfortable from his lack of understanding of the situation, but then again, they were all in the dark about why this woman was randomly here.

“You’ve met Lula?” Dylan asked, giving the woman a name. Lula. It was quirky and unusual, just like her. Not that she was bad, not that her name was bad. Lula. It fit her well, like the name was made custom in a magic shop. She even looked like she was built for magic, quick movements that made you want to check your pockets and a mesmerizing way she spoke, like she was drawing Jack in. ‘Come in close,’ he could hear her having said on a street corner, hustling with Find the Lady or card tricks. Disappearing to only show up somewhere else, it was like second nature as she flicked from the edge of the table to the ground. 

“I’ve met her,” Danny trailed off before saying “What is she doing here?”

“Well, I’m the new Horseman, of course! I’m the girl Horseman! Whoo! Yeah!” She raised an eyebrow at the men’s distinct lack of a reaction, but dismissed it and continued. “Nobody? No excitement? Jack? Okay then, whatever.” Having someone around that would smile and not read your mind, that made Jack seriously interested. Having that same someone be a gorgeous woman that was good with magic, good enough to have her in the Horsemen? Well, that just upped the interest level.

“Explain to me what’s going on here, would you?” Merritt said, climbing down the stairs towards Dylan. Danny followed after, and Jack trailed behind, not as much as interested in Dylan’s explanation as he was in Lula. He ducked his head, hiding a smile. No, she couldn’t see that he was interested. Henley was different, he decided. She liked being lusted after by Danny, and by Merritt. She loved the attention towards her, loved playing the cat-and-mouse game that always had her pawing them around in a circle. But Lula wasn’t like that. He could tell in the embarrassed way she had held Atlas’s gaze before dropping it, as though she could be intruding. 

He was interested in Lula, to say the least. Jack wouldn’t bother to lie to himself about the way his heart beat fast when he got close to her, close enough to see how her eyes were an astonishing color of sage green, or how he became acutely aware of every time she fidgeted (which was a lot). He also didn’t bother to try and cover the fact that he was standing close enough that he could smell the intoxicating scent that wafted off of her, like vanilla and cinnamon. 

“Well, Lula’s been on the underground for about a decade,” Dylan started, as Jack tried to figure her age. He was only 24, and Lula looked as though she was younger than him. 22 or 23, he decided, only half listening to whatever Dylan was saying. She must've started out young, younger than Jack did. Probably on the streets. “And I’d like to try her out onstage to balance out the duo.” The duo. As in, Merritt and Danny. As in, not Jack. 

“What? Dylan, man, you said I could get back onstage after Henley left, not someone who just showed up!” Jack was suddenly seething with rage. One year of not showing his face to anyone, to lurking in the shadows. The next act, the performance, that was going to have been his moment. And now it was gone, just like that. Gone, sold off to the beautiful woman on his left, who had a smile that looked like it was there just for you, eyes too green for this world, a voice that made his knees wobble and his head go floating. Damn it. Jack should have been angry, no, Jack should have been furious. But even that was ripped away, peeled back layer by layer into an annoyance of ‘I can’t perform with them, I can’t perform with her.’

“I said I’d think about it, and I have, and Jack, I really need you behind the scenes a little bit longer with me.”

“Come on man, I’ve been behind the scenes my whole life,” came his last-ditch attempt to persuade Dylan for a spot with the rest of them.

“Which is a crime, I might add, have you seen this man’s face?” Lula’s voice broke him out of his temporary annoyance, but instead of showing the way his heart nearly skipped a beat, he merely cocked an eyebrow. Jack wasn’t going to give up control. Danny had too much. Dylan had too much. Damn it, even Merritt had too much. Lula had so much control already. Over the rest of them? Oh, definitely not. But over the way his heart beat and his hairs pricked up on the back of his neck, that was too much control, something no one had ever had on Jack before. 

But then again, too much control may not be a bad thing.

Chapter Text

Now

Everything was going to plan. Well, the bruise that Jack could feel forming on his ribcage was unexpected, but would be worth it. Merritt had that glint in his eyes that promised revenge, and Jack could see the gears churning in Atlas’s mind, already planning his moment in the spotlight. 

It was all going to plan.

“Start with her.”

And then it wasn’t.

Lula shrieked as one of the assorted henchmen (there really wasn’t another word for them, was there? God, Mabry was going straight to the depths of hell if Jack had any say in it) pulled out a knife, wicked sharp and gleaming like it had just been cleaned for this very purpose. Jack thrashed and fought until he was restrained, still struggling to get to Lula. Her big green eyes, normally the most stunning shade of sage, were huge, pupils dilated and pleading. The knife inched dangerously to her throat, her chin thrust up in an effort to get away. Her whole body was melded against the leather of the seats, and Jack couldn’t do anything. He felt more helpless than he ever had, only being able to watch. “Give him the card, Atlas!” Merritt was kicking at Danny’s shins underneath the table, as Lula twisted in an effort to have more space between her and the glinting blade that was fixed at her throat.

“Give him the card,” Jack said, fixing him with a stare filled with rage. 

“Danny, give him the card.”

“Come on man,” he said, unrelenting as Atlas fumbled, then flicked out the black case that held the computer chip, the card that Mabry thought their lives, Lula’s life was worth. All of this fear, all of this running and lying and tricks just keep their blood pumping and bodies intact because of his fucking vendetta.

Jack was going to send that bastard straight into the Devil’s waiting embrace.

He didn’t realize that his fists were clenched, knuckles white and tensed, until he relaxed his grip. The rush of blood through his veins was almost painful, the release of his fingernails that dug deep into his skin. 

“What the hell, Danny?” came the sharp question from Jack, his own words a blade not too unfamiliar. It was the same way he spoke when he had been overlooked or disrespected: cold and uncaring. 

“What? Oh, to save your little girlfriend we all have to get royally screwed over?”

“To save my little - he had a knife to her throat!”

“I’m a Horseman, you dick!” Lula said, her expression dark and stormy. She looked angry and tired, tired of being disrespected and beneath Atlas’s high-seated ego. Jack was too, they all were. “And you, what the hell is your problem, man, what’s your deal?” Lula said, emotions high in her voice, anger the most apparent as she directed her question to Merritt.

“They’re not going to get blood all over the nice leather seats,” Merritt said, triggering the hypnosis he had cast, for lack of a better word, over his brother. “They’re probably just going to throw us out of the plane.” Jack saw Chase’s demeanor change subtly. Shoulders rolled slightly, posture straighter and more defined. Only if you’d been around hypnosis, and been the unwilling victim of Mer would you know the signs. Mabry and Tressler had no idea what was coming to them.

“It’s real.”

“What does he mean, it’s real?” Merritt muttered the question, barely able to be heard over the engines and the ‘wind’ blowing harsh outside of the plane. Lula shrugged, mouth bent into an expression Jack would have chuckled at if he hadn’t been so royally pissed off at Danny. What the hell was his problem? He never respected the others, never thought of themselves as a team unless he was too far under to not function without them. The only reason the Octa launch was screwed over was because of him and his ego, because he was the one to refuse to work together, as Dylan liked to put it, ‘as a single organism’. Jack knew he was bitter and frustrated, strung out from stress and fear, but that couldn’t stop the wave of emotions that were bubbling to the surface, inhibited so long by his awe of who had been his idol. 

He stopped his mental tirade as he saw Lula, still shaking. Her eyes normally flitted from one area to the other like a hummingbird, always moving, but now they flicked back and forth like darts snapping into points of a dartboard. Jack was filled with an aching sort of horror, the kind that erupted with the ‘what if’ questions that you asked yourself. What if Danny hadn’t given up the card? Would they have backed off the threat to something new? Or would Lula’s throat be sliced open and pouring blood? Jack shuddered, as his whole body yearned to be close to her, to see the honey golden strands of hair that twined with the dark brown, creating a darkened halo around her, to have her intoxicating scent of cinnamon and vanilla envelop him. 

“Chase, what shall we do with them?” Walter’s words shot through the atmosphere, his posh accent marred by the childish malice of his words and the gleam that flickered in the eyes of Merritt’s twisted twin brother. This was it. Everything so far had been set-up, but now? They were almost at the big reveal.

“Toss them out.”

The hatch opened up, and the air around them sounded overwhelming in Jack’s ears. He could see things in vague notions: Merritt being kicked out of the plane, Dylan thrown down next. And then they grabbed her.

Lula thrashed and kicked, pressing against Jack as she fought to escape. Her acting, her illusion, it was beautiful, impeccable. Her hands were latched onto a door frame, with a looseness that allowed her to be ripped away, shoved down the chute. To anyone else, she would have been just a woman fighting desperately, but overpowered in the end. But to Jack, to those who saw how she painted illusions with the fluid movements of her body and the emotions she swirled in her voice like paint, she was a lethal force, feinting to snag what she wanted at the last second, a cat burglar of your capacity to understand. 

God, she was beautiful.

Jack followed shortly, slamming into the mats before righting himself, darting up the stairs to the wing, where Lula beckoned him to the window. Atlas was right behind him, and together they waved hello, grins spreading over their faces while laughter bubbled out of Lula and Merritt, seeing the shocked expressions of Arthur and Walter.

This was the set-up. Now it was time for their big reveal.

Chapter Text

Two Years Ago

It was always going to be the same. Introduction, the ‘ladies and gentlemen, I’m the next great magician of New York City!’ and the endless variations. The crowd that speculates, every once in a great while picking up on the scheme and snagging the hundred dollar bill in Jack’s back pocket. The wallets he took back, the light flashing off the spoon, the sunglasses peered through to watch.

This time though, this time it wasn’t. 

There was a smart-dressed man who took his money. A crowd of people he ran from off the ferry, the wallet he slid out of a pocket and a watch he nabbed from a wrist. And a woman. Beautiful, she was beautiful. Laughing eyes, red lips, brown hair with curls Jack could count for days. Eyes so green they didn’t seem real, like the florescent paints that hurt to stare at after a few minutes.

Jack would gladly stare at those eyes forever. 

But he had to run, off of the ferry and away from the pissed-off man whose pocket he pulled leather-bound freedom from, away from the green eyes and tilted mouth that pulled him in, beckoning Jack for conversation, to learn who the green-eyed woman was. He might have slipped, but he wasn’t an idiot: he saw the slide her foot made in front of the man to trip him up, to give Jack a getaway. And he wasn’t going to say that he wasn’t grateful, after all, he could have ended up in jail. 

But he did wish he could have gotten a name for those green eyes.

And then he slid the card out of his back pocket, an eye painted tauntingly, hauntingly. 

It was beautiful. But nothing like those green eyes.

Now

The look on his face, on that smug bastard’s face when they pulled the rug out from under him, exposed him? Oh, God, it was priceless. Jack wished he had a camera because that was a photo he would have loved to have had. 

Of course, he could always pull a still from one of the countless video feeds streaming across the world at that moment. 

"Happy New Year." Danny’s voice said from behind him, the slack-jawed look of surprise still painted across the framework of Mabry’s face. He couldn’t stop the grin that broke out across his features, the way his eyes crinkled from the laughter Jack couldn’t stop bursting out from him.

The smile on Lula's face made everything worth it: coming back from the dead, having Merritt's brain get hacked by his jackass brother, stealing the chip for Mabry, getting punched in the face and thrown out of a plane, he would do it all again to see that look on her, radiant. Light and bright and everything she was and how she made him feel, feel like he was happy, something Jack hadn't felt in what seemed like years, what may have very well been years.

And sure, the look on Mabry's face didn't hurt either.

But when the fireworks went off? The Big Ben was lit up in the night sky like one of the Fourth of July sparklers Jack kept tucked in one of the bags he ran with, only replicated on a huge scale. The crowd was screaming, deafening white noise flooding across the Thames. The barge they were standing on shook underneath them as they jumped, ecstatic from the success of their trick, of their show. Jack wanted to bottle that feeling and drink it forever, the feeling of success and freedom and joy, the feeling of performance. It swept him off of his feet, flooded through him in waves of escalation.

Soft hands grabbed his own, and suddenly he was staring into the same green eyes he’d seen two years ago, intelligent and laughing, like they knew the punchline to life. The grin on Jack’s face grew, and then Lula moved. Her hands slid onto his shoulders, and she kissed him. Jack could smell her vanilla-and-cinnamon fragrance, taste the flavor of bitter chocolate and sweet strawberries that clung to her lips. Feel the silk of her curls on his fingertips, the curve of the smile on her mouth, the quirky one he loved the second he saw it a week ago. If he’d thought that what he felt before, before he was kissing Lula May was the best feeling he’d ever experienced? This, this moment, it dwarfed it completely. It was like comparing his first card trick to the one he’d done half an hour ago, disappearing in a cascade of playing cards, Kings of Diamonds and Queens of Hearts taking his place. This felt like the first time he broke fifty bucks on a street hustle in Brooklyn, the first sip of champagne he’d ever had at seventeen, the first time he’d realized what he was seeing, the card someone had slipped in his back pocket. 

It felt like when Jack realized, in the middle of the Octa launch, watching Lula in total command of the audience on stage, that the green eyes he’d seen two years ago on the ferry were here again, just as stunning and belonging to Lula May. 

It felt like waking up from a good dream and seeing what was around you being just as great. 

Rough hands grabbed onto Jack’s arm, pulling the two apart. It had been only seconds, but it felt like forever, like one of the only moments that had ever truly mattered. Merritt’s smug face, laughing as he pocketed what looked like a hundred dollar bill, smirked at him as Jack laughed. He didn’t care, for once, what Merritt thought. He’d teased Jack all week, from their hotel rooms. “Just go for it, man,” he’d said, drinking cognac and vodka and whatever else he could find that was alcoholic in the mini fridge as Jack practiced severing a thin fishing cord with a card. “Or else, she’s gonna get tired of waiting, and you’ll have lost your chance, Wilder.” His speech would have been the cocky voice of a mentalist performance had it not been for his mispronunciation of half the words he'd said.

“How do you know I’m even interested in her?” Jack had said, keeping his eyes focused on the cards he snapped out of his hands. Of course, it was a lie. Even Danny could tell that Jack had fallen for Lula after she’d stolen his wallet (and belt. And the peanuts in his jacket pocket. God, how did she do that?) in the magic shop. And maybe Jack hadn’t been exactly subtle in his interest. Staring at her flipping the card and hiding it with ease, watching her when she expertly pried a paperclip apart to fling it at Merritt, knocking it off of his head when he had had his third drink in the bar, having to hide his smile. But he still wasn’t going to give the smug hypnotist the right to be right about this. 

“Because, Mr. Smooth, you’re blushing. I don’t even have to read your body language to know that you’re in freaking love with her. So pass me the whiskey, and tell me all about how you’re desperately in love with Miss May.”

“It’s one in the morning, why would I give you any whiskey? And no. I’ve had too many drunken conversations with you before, I’m not giving you the satisfaction of having this one with me.”

“So you admit you’re drunk!” Merritt had slurred, his bowler hat sliding onto the potted plant behind him.

“I haven’t had anything all night, while you, on the other hand, are on your fourth glass of vodka.”

Jack flicked Merritt on the back of his head, disappearing with the rest to gather at the air space Mabry had reserved. Was it petty to reveal that he’d been alive, then get him arrested, and then fly out on his private plane? Maybe. Was it completely worth it? Yes.

And Jack didn’t care what anyone thought of him, not after the heart-stopping kiss Lula had given him in the back of the car.

“Boundaries, guys!”

Chapter Text

"God, you guys have been together for what, a day? You're already making me sick to my stomach."

"Deal with it, Danny.” Lula said in a sing-song voice. She and Jack had been curled up in the backseat of the car, driving out of the airport to the hideout Li and Grandma were providing them with. Jack laughed and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, allowing Lula to lean into him more and rest her head on his shoulder.

“How long have we been driving?” Jack asked, trying to distract the already-tense Danny. 

“Four goddamn hours,” Merritt grumbled from the front seat of the car, where Dylan exchanged a wide-eyed look with Jack. “I swear to God, if we don’t get there soon, I’m going to find whoever started the Eye and hypnotize them into saying ‘I’m a little teapot!’ for the rest of their lives.”

“Didn’t you ever look up the Eye, Merritt? It was started in Ancient Egypt, so whoever began the organization of the Eye is long since dead. Actually, I think I have the article on my phone -“

“No more articles, Danny!” Lula and Jack said in unison vigorously. They’d sat through all the news articles about themselves on the plane (as though they weren’t there to actually do the tricks themselves) as well as the ‘informative’ lectures about Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. 

“You are way too obsessed with ancient civilizations, man.”

“Well, after this article you’ll see differently Jack.” Dylan rolled his eyes from the passenger seat of the car, choosing to look out of the window rather than at the bickering Horsemen. 

“Oh my God, are we there yet,” Lula moaned to Merritt, flopping her head onto Jack’s chest in a dramatic (though not visible to Merritt) display of exhaustion. 

“Do you want to be driving this thing?”

“And the Eye was established because of the need to bring power back to the people rather than the corrupt leaders of their time, which as you can tell is exactly parallel to what we continue to do today, bringing us to the conclusion -“

“Danny man, shut up.”

“I will pull this car off the road, I swear to God!”

“I’m going to jump out this car window.”

“I’ll join you.”

It took four arguments within twenty minutes for them to achieve peace: Jack and Lula were curled up peacefully and listening to music from a shared pair of headphones, Danny was reading an article about Mesopotamia on his phone, Dylan was reading a book in the passenger seat, and Merritt was driving with a large coffee sitting in the cupholder next to him. 

“Jesus, can we be going any slower?”

“Atlas, if you want to start controlling traffic, be my guest!”

“Oh my God, can you not.”

“And you had bet they would last a whole hour before going insane, my, my, Jack, you certainly went over. I said they would last fifteen minutes, and that was how many?”

“Seven,” Jack grumbled, pulling his wallet out of his jacket (or at least attempting to, anyway). “Did you -“

“Yes,” Lula replied, handing him back the battered leather wallet with a smirk. “You still underestimate me. Also, I think you’ll probably want this.”

“How did you take my belt again? You are literally on top of me!”

“God, guys, boundaries!”

“Oh, suck it Danny. You’re just jealous that you’re not as adorable as us.”

“Did you mean nauseating?”

“I’m ready to turn this car around, I swear to God!”

Needless to say, they were all very pleased to exit the van.

“I need a drink,” Merritt said, reaching for a bottle of cognac, the bottle of alcohol being the closest to him. 

“I second that,” they chorused in unison, each getting a bottle of alcohol: Danny took the wine, Jack had a beer, Dylan a whiskey, Lula took vodka.

“I’d rather be hungover than stuck in that car listening to another damn article."

“Agreed.”