Chapter Text
There are, broadly speaking, two types of immortal beings. The first type knows they are immortal. They acquire followers, titles, grudges, and occasionally tasteful lightning.
The second type rents apartments.
Daniel belonged firmly to the second category.
He didn’t remember being born or created, which he considered either profound or rude. It was like reality developed stage fright and pushed him on stage, instead. He took its place in a way. Or perhaps he stood just off to the side, moving along its edges and challenging it to keep up. Time passed around him like weather does around buildings, it’s noticeable, but rarely personal. He watched humanity learn, prevail, slaughter, curse and grieve. Mostly in that order, though not always. He watched them give birth. He watched them die. He was there when the sky turned dark and when the sun whispered promises of another tomorrow, which it did with admirable consistency.
Reality, on the other hand, was very personal. It didn’t whisper. It didn’t make promises. It bent. It curled around him and changed itself in ways Daniel found convenient. It didn’t bend dramatically in the flashy sense. Reality is not fond of drama unless properly incentivised. But if Daniel misplaced his keys, they would reconsider the matter and present themselves. If Daniel preferred not to be observed, observation would experience a scheduling conflict.
He didn’t consider this a gift. It was simply how things had always worked for him. He looked human even though he probably wasn’t. He was a consciousness occupying a male presenting body that he’d never felt particularly attached to, but he’d made peace. He’d learned human customs, laughed and cried with them. But mostly he’d done as he pleased and moved through time without interfering. If there was no greater power, he felt no inclination to seek out what pleased it, and how to keep it satisfied.
Especially when a crowd gathered around to watch him perform. Street magic, while not as grand a pastime activity for someone like him, kept him entertained. It also kept reality on its toes.
He stood in the late afternoon sun, sleeves rolled just enough to suggest honesty, which is the traditional uniform of liars everywhere. A small semicircle of tourists and office workers watched him with the careful suspicion reserved for men with charming smiles and quick hands. And even faster speech.
Daniel preferred small crowds. Large audiences have expectations. Small ones have curiosity. Curiosity is much easier to work with.
He made a coin vanish and reappear. Applause followed, slightly delayed, because humans like to confirm with one another that they had, in fact, witnessed something impressive. A card selected at random was revealed with satisfying inevitability.
He did not cheat. He had expectations and simply allowed the universe to arrive at the correct conclusion. The card appeared where he expected it to appear. He didn’t often palm anything. Objects had a tendency to cooperate. A card that ought to be on top would always find its way there. A gust of wind would hold itself back at exactly the right moment. Observers would glance away precisely when required.
He figured that’s what made magic tricks so appealing to him. It allowed him to show off what he could do without letting them know the details. There were people who insisted they knew how a trick was done, and he would simply smile at them.
“Is this your card?” He liked that line. It was the grand reveal after another successful evening. It led to the return of his quiet existence once he flipped the suit around. And if his gaze lingered too long on an audience member and they showed as much enthusiasm at the idea of a Private Performance, who was he to deny humanity its smaller, more immediate curiosities? Eternity is long. One must diversify.
He flipped the card, eyes alight with smug confidence. But the weight felt off. This wasn’t a card that belonged to this deck. Or any of his other decks, which was an impressive feat considering the amount of cards he owned. It thrummed with something he’d never encountered before. It felt heavy and oppressive.
He turned it around, breaking eye contact with the woman who’d grown increasingly interested in where the evening might lead. He inspected the tarot card that had found itself in his deck, the image of a heart, pierced and inverted. The Lovers reversed. Daniel frowned, a small, genuine crease between his brows, and then smoothed it into something that looked like it had been intentional. With a snap of his wrist, The Lovers card was pointed upright. He offered the woman a conspiratorial wink, and pocketed the card before whipping out another one in one clean motion. He’d expected the card to be in his pocket, so that’s where it was.
“That’s it!” The woman said, delighted.
Daniel bowed with a flourish, soaking in the applause as though he’d earned it honestly. The woman beamed up at him, utterly convinced she had witnessed something extraordinary.
And she had. Just not in the way she thought. He slipped the deck back in its case, movements smooth, unhurried. The tarot card rested in his pocket, one he could feel as he slipped away the deck of cards from sight. There would be time to look at it more closely, later.
The crowd had begun to dissolve around him. Humans were so easy to disperse. A word, a smile, the suggestion of something better elsewhere. A vague notion of something they had seemingly forgotten to do made them wander away without lingering to talk to him.
When he finally stepped out of the streetlight and into shadow, his expression thinned.
Across the city, Merritt’s expression was warm and encouraging. The couple in front of him had come up to him on their own, the wife was vibrating with excitement, sharp and fizzy, like champagne bubbles under his skin. Hero worship mingled with mild anxiety, and beneath that a flicker of self-consciousness she hoped he wouldn’t notice. He did. He always did.
Her husband carried himself differently. Amusement rested over a layer of scepticism, carefully arranged but not particularly convincing. A thin thread of insecurity tucked underneath it. There was a quiet fear of being the less interesting one in the relationship. That insecurity brushed against Merritt like a draft in a closed room. And deeper still, was guilt tethered to fear, and tangled with something that still resembled love.
“She’s a huge fan,” the husband told him.
Merritt smiled at the wife, bright and reassuring, and gently nudged the fizz of her excitement higher. Just enough to make the moment sparkle without overwhelming her.
He never created feelings, he poked and prodded at them until they rippled. Unlike his own feelings, these sensations were external, not invasive, but present all he same, like an instrument only he could play. He could look at the wife and feel her joy, look at the husband and feel the careful construction of his scepticism.
He liked believers, they were pliable, open to wonder. Sceptics required more finesse, but they weren’t an unwelcome challenge. In fact, they usually weren’t a challenge at all.
Merritt had long ago decided that there were three kinds of immortal beings.
The first were the ones who bragged. Demanded worship. Built temples and called it humility. Merritt didn’t care for those. They were mostly stories anyway.
The second were adjacent to him. Though they claimed allegiance to higher or lower powers. Heaven-made, hell-made, he’d crossed paths with both and found neither particularly forthcoming when he’d asked where, precisely, he was meant to fit. He didn’t belong to either side.
The third kind was not heaven-made. Nor hell-made. It simply was. When human self-awareness became too loud, Merritt condensed out of it.
He was there when war raged and grief became too loud to ignore. He was there when a mother wept over the first child who never drew breath. He was there to suppress those feelings and allow them to heal. He was created from it. Negative feelings had a way of encroaching on the positive ones, polluting them until they became something dark and viscous.
When Merritt came into being, his soul had been crushed beneath the weight of human suffering. He loathed the thing that had created him. So he smiled. Pulled at the cheer and wonder, brought mirth to those who didn’t remember what it had felt like to smile. That didn’t mean he was incapable of cruelty when the situation called for it.
His gaze shifted back to the husband, who was cheating on his wife. The guilt was fresh and he could taste it like a metal spoon that hadn’t been washed in a very long time.
Merritt leaned a little closer to the wife, lowering his voice to keep their attention on him. Aiming for a tone that made them believe something important was about to happen. Humans respond very well to lowered voices. It convinces them that secrets are being shared, even when the secret in question is merely stagecraft.
“Now,” he said gently, “all I need you to do is focus on my voice.”
She nodded eagerly, her excitement fluttering higher under the smallest encouragement. Merritt allowed it to rise a little further, smoothing the edges into something soft and warm. Hypnosis, he had long ago concluded, was less about control and more about permission. People liked the idea of letting go for a while, particularly when someone trustworthy was there to catch them.
Her husband shifted beside her, arms folding loosely as he watched. His scepticism hadn’t vanished, but it had softened into curiosity, which Merritt found far more cooperative.
“Take a slow breath,” Merritt continued, guiding her through the motions with patient ease. “Good. Now another. You’re going to find that the more you listen, the heavier your eyelids begin to feel.”
He felt the moment the suggestion took hold. He hadn’t forced it there, but her mind welcomed it with open arms. Her shoulders had relaxed completely now, her earlier excitement settling into a calm, pleasant stillness. Merritt watched the shift with quiet satisfaction. Humans often imagined hypnosis as something dramatic and forceful, but in truth it resembled a gentle rearranging of furniture inside someone’s mind. Nothing was removed, nothing was added. Things were simply placed where they would be most comfortable.
A murmur of interest moved through the handful of people who had paused nearby to watch. Street performances had a way of accumulating spectators like snow gathering along a windowsill. Merritt had learned not to question the process too closely.
“Very good,” he said softly. “You’re doing perfectly.” He lifted one finger in front of her face. “In a moment,” he continued, tone even and hypnotic, “you’re going to open your eyes again. When you do, you’ll find that speaking feels rather difficult. Not impossible, just … inconvenient. Your feet will feel leaden, rooted, but strong.”
Her husband chuckled under his breath, clearly expecting the sort of harmless embarrassment that usually followed stage hypnosis.
Merritt allowed the sound to linger for a moment, soaking in the amusement and allowing it to brush against his very core.
“Alright,” he said and snapped his fingers. The woman’s eyes opened and her mouth moved just as quickly, no doubt prepared to say something enthusiastic about the experience. Nothing came out. She frowned, surprised, and tried again with considerably more effort, which produced the same result. The surrounding onlookers began to laugh softly, and Merritt gave them a small, apologetic shrug that suggested this sort of thing happened all the time.
“You see,” he said pleasantly, “the mind is a fascinating instrument. Convince it that something is slightly out of reach, and it will obligingly place it on the highest possible shelf.”
The wife glared at him with playful indignation, which only made the small crowd laugh harder.
Her husband, however, had begun to look distinctly less amused. It soured against his core and made it ripple unpleasantly. Merritt turned his attention towards him instead, studying the man with polite curiosity as though noticing him properly for the first time.
“And you,” he said lightly, “seem like the sort of fellow who prides himself on honesty.”
The husband blinked, clearly not having expected to be addressed.
“Well,” he said cautiously, “I try.”
Merritt tilted his head, considering that answer with the thoughtful air of someone entertaining an interesting but slightly suspicious antique.
“That’s admirable,” he replied. “Although honesty can be such a flexible concept, don’t you think? For instance, some people define honesty as never lying. Others define it as never getting caught.”
The audience was clearly invested now. The husband was exuding waves of worry. The guilt he had sensed earlier was still there, background noise beneath the surface, like a wire carrying too much current. And Merritt continued smiling while he reached for that wire and snagged.
“So let’s try a simpler question,” Merritt said, folding his hands loosely together. “How long have you been cheating on your wife?”
The silence that followed had a remarkable weight to it. The husband’s face drained of colour almost immediately, which Merritt found both impressive and extremely informative.
“I,” the man stammered, “What?”
Beside him, his wife turned sharply in his direction, her eyes widening as she attempted very determinedly to ask a question that refused to cooperate with her vocal cords, not to mention the force with which she was trying to get closer to him. Fortunately, her feet refused to move.
Merritt watched the exchange with mild interest, like a scientist observing an experiment that was proceeding exactly as predicted. It was almost boring.
“Oh no,” he said sympathetically. “That appears to have touched a nerve.”
“I haven’t-“ the husband began, then stopped, the words tangling together under the pressure of his own panic.
The wife folded her arms.
Even without the ability to speak, she was managing to communicate an extraordinary amount. Merritt allowed the moment to really settle, long enough to become uncomfortable before clapping his hands together.
“Well,” he said cheerfully, “I think we’ve all learned something valuable about communication this evening.”
He turned back to the wife and softened his voice again. The excitement was gone. In its stead, Merritt found betrayal and hurt. He had to remind himself he hadn’t been the one who put that there. Or had he?
“When I snap my fingers,” he began gently, “you’ll find that speaking becomes wonderfully easy again. The heaviness in your feet will simply fade away, and you,” will forget. No. “you’ll remember to tip very generously.” He finished with a nod and a coy wink, snapping his fingers almost in sync with the sharp sound of a hand meeting cheek. She had struck her husband and had proceeded to grab her purse and throw a wad of cash at Merritt before storming off. Anger followed her and even if it wasn’t aimed at him, Merritt had to shake it off before it clung to him for the rest of the evening.
Eventually, the small audience dispersed as well, their curiosity satisfied now that the show had ended. Street performances had a natural lifespan, and Merritt had never seen much reason to fight it.
He turned back toward the table and noticed a card that wasn’t his. It lay neatly in the middle as though it had been placed there with careful consideration. Merritt frowned slightly and picked it up.
The card stock was thicker than the usual bicycle deck he was used to handling. The Hermit. Right side up. He huffed in amusement. He did feel rather lonely, sometimes. He noted the address with a brief, careless glance, careful not to linger long enough to look interested. Just in case.
Merritt slipped the card back onto the table and stared at the illustration. Cards rarely explained themselves, which he considered both unhelpful and entirely on brand for the sort of cosmic forces that liked to communicate through cardboard illustrations.
He left it there for a moment, the lamplight catching the worn edge of the image. The Hermit gazed serenely out of the artwork, lantern raised as though searching for something that had wandered off without permission. He’d never been fond of tarot. It was too theatrical, too symbolic, too many people pretending cardboard had opinions about their lives. Yet this particular piece of carboard had managed to appear in a place where cardboard was not previously invited, which elevated it from prop to problem.
Merritt had never been fond of riddles. He stared at it with a faint crease between his brows, the sort of expression that suggested his mind was quietly rearranging several possibilities and discarding most of them for being ridiculous.
Which was an interesting thing, considering the one that remained was still fairly ridiculous.
Outside, the city moved on as it ever did. Cars honked. Planes flew overhead. Bikers shouted at pedestrians that walked where they weren’t supposed to. Ferries moved along the water and carried locals and tourists alike. On the upper deck of that ferry stood a young man with the relaxed posture of someone who had never in his life been accused of taking anything too seriously.
Jack Wilder held a spoon. Now, a spoon is not normally the sort of object that gathers an audience, but Jack had a way of arranging circumstances so that people felt they would very much regret not paying attention. He leaned casually against the railing, sleeves rolled up just enough to suggest transparency, and regarded the crowd that had he’d forced to watch, trapped on the boat as they were. He watched them with the patience of someone who knew the universe had already decided how this would go.
It usually had.
Jack had discovered that a long time ago.
Not always in obvious ways. The world didn’t warp itself dramatically for him, and lighting never struck on command. Instead, things simply leaned in his direction. A coin landed on the side he preferred. A distracted guard looked away at precisely the right moment. Cards drifted towards his fingers in a deck that had supposedly been shuffled.
There were two types of immortals, Jack figured.
One type demanded your attention and made you believe they were a saint. Only to then lead you down a lonely path and into something dark.
The second type were like him. He didn’t think he was human. Not quite. It was like probability got bored one day, stretched itself lazily across the universe, and decided to see what would happen if it gathered itself into something with a pulse. Jack had been the result.
He hadn’t asked for it, but he had discovered the advantages fairly quickly. Luck followed him the way loyal dogs follow butchers. Doors opened when they ought to have stayed shut. Coins landed correctly with suspicious consistency. Dice rolled in ways mathematicians would frown at if they were paying attention.
Which, conveniently, they rarely were.
“Alright,” he said, turning the spoon between his fingers so the metal caught the overhead light. “I know what you’re thinking. It’s a spoon.”
A few people chuckled politely. He held the spoon between his hands. For a moment nothing happened. Which was precisely when probability, having been gently encouraged in the correct direction, decided to cooperate.
The metal bent.
It didn’t bend so it would alarm any sensible physicists. It simply softened in his grip, curving as though it had always intended to do that. A murmur moved through the small audience.
Jack smiled, right on time. They were approaching land.
Then a man snorted loudly. “Oh, come on,” he said. “It is a trick,” the man said loudly. “They’re all trick spoons.”
Jack turned his head slightly and studied him with interest, as though the interruption had been part of the performance all along.
“Well,” he said, “that would certainly make this easier.”
The sceptical man stepped forward immediately and snatched it out of Jack’s hand, examining it with aggressive suspicion.
“It’s soft metal,” he said. “You heated it or something.”
“Of course,” Jack agreed cheerfully.
While the man inspected the spoon with mounting irritation, Jack’s hands moved with casual precision. The crowd was focused exactly where he needed them to be, which made the rest very simple.
Wallet.
Watch.
Phone.
All removed with the gentle efficiency of someone tidying a cluttered desk.
Jack slipped them into his jacket pocket and waited patiently while the man finished proving absolutely nothing.
“It’s fake,” the man declared triumphantly.
“Then I suppose you’ve won,” Jack said.
The man looked satisfied enough to turn and push his way back into the crowd. Which was when Jack cleared his throat.
“Sir?” The man paused.
Jack reached into his pocket and produced the man’s wallet, holding it between two fingers.
The sceptic stared at his own wallet with the deeply offended expression of someone who had just discovered reality was not taking his side in the argument.
“You might want this back.”
The man stared while Jack placed the wallet in his hand, then added the watch and phone with helpful efficiency.
“Check your pockets,” Jack suggested.
The discovery that they had already been checked by someone else a moment earlier did not appear to improve his mood.
A ripple of laughter spread through the crowd. Jack gave them an easy half-bow, the kind that suggested he might have done something impressive without ever admitting exactly what.
While the man recovered from the experience of briefly existing without personal possessions, Jack stepped lightly away from the gathering. His hand dipped into his pocket again, though this time the object he removed was not returned.
A folded collection of notes.
A few minutes later, when the ferry docked and the passengers began to spill out onto the street, Jack drifted through them with the comfortable ease of someone who had learned how to exist between people rather than among them. A hand brushed a coat here, a shoulder there, fingers moved lightly enough that even suspicion rarely found purchase.
Somewhere along the dock sat an elderly man wrapped in a coat that had seen better decades and was currently arguing with the wind.
Jack slowed as he passed, glancing into the wallet he’d lifted earlier. He took out the bills and neatly folded them. Without making a show of it, he slipped the small roll of bills into the man’s cup. The old man blinked down at it in surprise just as Jack continued walking, hands in his pockets, whistling softly to himself.
He never tried to linger. Probability tended to sour when people tried to thank it too much. The world had always behaved this way around him. Doors opened. He rarely got caught. Dice landed kindly. He didn’t test whatever this was, he’d learned to move along with it. He wasn’t sure he could control it, he didn’t want to control it. Control was something older beings preferred.
Jack hadn’t met them exactly, but he’d watched from a distance over the centuries. They were the sort that moved through the world with gravity wrapped around their shoulders like a cloak. Compared to them, he felt … newer. Less like a law of the universe and more like a suggestion it occasionally decided to follow.
Luck, perhaps. Not fate. Never fate.
Or the universe experimented with the idea that sometimes, things should simply go someone’s way.
He made it halfway down the pier before he felt something unfamiliar in his jacket. He frowned and pulled it out, the sun catching on the white frame of a tarot card. Death. Ominous. There was an address on the back and he hummed out loud in thought before turning back to the water.
Water didn’t belong in a tank. Not usually. But it wasn’t an unusual sight for Henley Reeves. It stood proud and tall, bathed in light so people’s eyes would draw to it even if its mere presence could have done that on its own.
The audience was wild, excitable and loud. It was wonderful. They had a collective personality, a shared curiosity, and a deeply ingrained habit of looking exactly where they were told to look.
Henley liked crowds.
More accurately, crowds liked Henley.
Spotlights reflected off the water as she raised both hands slowly, acknowledging the audience with the easy confidence of someone who had done this hundreds of times and survived every single one of them.
Which, in fairness, she had.
The announcer’s voice boomed dramatically through the theatre, explaining the various locks, chains, and time limits with the sort of breathless enthusiasm normally reserved for imminent disasters.
Henley listened with half an ear. Her attention was elsewhere. Not the locks, or the chains, it was on the audience.
She could feel their attention the way a sailor feels the wind. Hundreds of individual strands of curiosity converging toward the tank on top of the stage. Some were quietly hoping something would go wrong because humans, as a species, had a complicated relationship with spectacle.
Henley gathered that attention together and gave it the smallest possible nudge. The crowd leaned forward as one.
It was not mind control. Not hypnosis. She didn’t push thoughts into people’s heads or remove them. She simply adjusted where they were looking. If attention was a spotlight, Henley knew exactly how to tilt the beam.
There were three types of immortals. Henley had encountered only one of them and that was usually in the mirror. She huffed a laugh at the thought, reminded of the control freak of a man she’d briefly befriended. If only because his best advice, according to him and him only, came from none other than himself. She shook her head to get her thoughts back on track.
One type was fictional. Legends that walked the earth and terrorised humanity.
The second type was something otherworldly. She’d caught the attention of something that didn’t quite belong to this realm, two centuries ago. If she’d had to explain it out loud, she’d probably call it demonic in nature.
The third type were people who took on regular jobs or amused themselves doing magic tricks in front of an audience. Glorified dogs in human shape, if you will.
When the first storyteller gathered a crowd around a fire, humans watched with suspicion, admiration and curiosity. Something learned to watch them back. And so Henley crystallised.
The story had been about a being that had effortlessly willed reality to curl around its hand, where it looped and warped until it took the shape its master demanded of it. Absoluteness wasn’t absolute. Henley had found the idea interesting, but utterly ridiculous.
The crowd erupted when Henley appeared at the back of the room, soaking wet and bowing dramatically as though she had not spent the last thirty seconds quietly walking into the audience while every eye in the room remained fixed on the empty tank.
Attention, once properly guided, was remarkably obedient.
Henley had found it easy to utilise it for escape artistry. The lock didn’t even have to click. Eyes went wandering, making them believe they’d watched cuffs lock onto wrists because they’d watched it happen, right? Right. Henley had noticed the difference over the years, how people tended to lose focus more easily. Their attention something feeble. While it only enhanced Henley’s suggestion to “look away” or “look here”, it made her feel sad. Sad for the storytellers who spent hours, days, months and years, creating their craft and not a soul would linger to look beneath the surface of what they’re being told.
So Henley shouted, “Come on! This is bullshit! Whoever thought of this is a sick sadist!”
Bringing their attention back to her.
Later, the building would be empty and she would find a card. The High Priestess. Floating calmly in her tank, like it had all the time in the world.
And for a moment, Henley thought about humanity and how brief their lives were. Here they were, celebrating with her, but tomorrow, this night would start to fade until it was just an event they’d attended at some point.
For a moment, Jack closed his eyes against the sun reflecting off the water and he smiled. Humans tended to walk alongside fate, tempting and bribing it, but never succeeding in befriending it. He wished they would understand and look at what was around them every once in a while.
Still, for a moment, Merritt paused as he left the building and thought about the couple. They would never understand the hurt they inflicted upon each other. Would they understand once it was too late? Reflect on the things they never got to appreciate while there was still time?
Time, Daniel thought, was not on anyone’s side. Time held no grudges, but it also favoured nobody. Not even him. Least of all humans. He watched them on the way back to his apartment, and he wondered, for just a moment, if they knew. Did they know there was no “right time”. That it was always going to be “too late”? Daniel sighed, feeling every bit his age.
For a moment, they all contemplated humanity and whether to feel guilty or thankful for walking among them. They looked at the address on the card they each received and decided, why not. Why not tempt fate just this once? They were above human law, anyway.