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Dan's tent was the smallest on the lot, tucked between the strongman and the popcorn stand, and he liked it that way. Fewer people to bother him. Fewer people to see through the lies, which, for the record, Dan saw through perfectly well himself. He'd never once believed a card in his life. He was very good at reading people, though, and dressing that up in an elaborate shuffle and a bit of candlelight paid better than most things a law school dropout with an interest in the macabre could hope for.
Then the acrobat started showing up.
The first time he came, he was in full costume, sequins glittering in the dim candlelight and blond hair still damp from the show. He folded himself into the chair across from Dan like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"I need a reading." he said, entirely too cheerfully for a man who'd just fallen forty feet into a net.
Dan let out a short noise that was almost a laugh. "You need a better sense of danger. You just did like three somersaults off a platform with no rope."
"I'm Phil," he said, unbothered, "and I'd like to know my future, please."
Dan, suddenly at a loss for what to do with his hands, shuffled the deck and looked up at Phil, taking him in. He had seen him around before, much like everybody in the circus, but they’d never actually had a conversation before. And he definitely didn't expect him to ask for a reading.
"Your future is you're going to fall on your head one of these days and I am not going to be surprised."
"Ooh, ominous," Phil giggled, grinning like Dan had told him he was gonna win the lottery instead of brain trauma.
He came back the next night. And the night after that. Always after the show, always in costume, always asking a question he very much did not need answered. “Should I learn a new trick”, “Will it rain tomorrow”, and “Do you think the lion tamer's new haircut suits him” were among Dan’s favourites. Dan pulled cards for all of them with the theatrical solemnity of a man who had absolutely clocked what was happening and was choosing, for reasons he refused to examine, not to say anything.
"The Tower," Dan announced one night, flipping a card with rather more flourish than the question, “should I get a pet”, strictly warranted. "Sudden upheaval. Chaos. The collapse of everything you thought was stable."
"So... no on the pet?"
"I'm saying you should get a hamster and see what happens."
Phil laughed the way he always did, giggling and covering his face, as if Dan had actually said something clever rather than just deeply unserious, and Dan hated, hated, how much he'd started listening for that laugh through the tent walls on nights Phil didn't come.
It went on like that for weeks. Dan told himself it was harmless. Free entertainment, a bit of company that didn't cost him the effort of caring. Phil was someone who didn’t mind Dan’s sharpness, who took it as flirting instead of the hurt or annoyed reactions he was used to. Which, fine, it was flirting, Dan had known that for a while now and had simply elected to keep pretending otherwise for the sake of his own dignity.
Then, one night, the night it stopped being pretend, Phil didn't come in costume. Came in his own clothes, his hair dry. There was no show that night, the circus had a rare evening off, tucked between towns. He sat down across from Dan looking, for once, genuinely nervous rather than performing it.
"I don't actually have a question," he admitted.
"First honest thing you've said to me in a month."
"I just wanted to see you. Outside the whole—" Phil gestured vaguely at the tent, the candles, the deck between them. "The bit. If that's alright."
Dan's hands went still on the cards. He was good at a lot of things. Cold reading, deflection, making people believe he knew things about them he'd simply guessed from the way they spoke. But he was not, historically, good at this part. The real part where someone says something honest and raw, and wants the same thing back.
He drew a card anyway, because his hands needed something to do and it felt safer than looking up. Turned it over.
The Knight of Wands.
He didn’t say anything for a second. Just looked at it. There was a horse rearing mid-gallop and a knight holding his wand up high like a torch. He felt his chest do something complicated and unhelpful before looking up.
“What is it?” Phil asked, leaning in.
“Someone’s about to have a big impact on you,” Dan said, and heard, too late, exactly how his own voice had gone. “Energetic. A bit of a warrior, sort of. Hasty. Quick to love, quick to hate, no in between with him at all.”
“Sounds like a lot.”
“He is a lot,” Dan said, before he could stop himself, and the words hung strangely in the air between them. There was no ‘he’ in this reading except the man sitting there holding the deck, and they both seemed to realise it at once, unspoken words slotting neatly into the silence between them.
Phil went very quiet, carefully choosing his next words. “Is that meant to be someone in particular,” he said slowly, “or is it just a card?”
Dan looked at him for a long moment. He was good at hiding his feelings, but for once he didn’t reach for any of his usual deflection.
“I think it’s supposed to be me,” Dan said. “Which is new. I don’t usually end up in my own readings.”
“Quick to love,” Phil repeated, soft, watching Dan now instead of the card. “Is that true, then? About you?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never really tested it.” Dan huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh, half startled by his own honesty. “Feels like it might be, lately. With you asking, specifically.”
Phil reached across the table, but he didn’t take the card. He took Dan’s hand instead. “Good,” he said. “Because I think I’d very much like to find out.”
Dan gave a small rare smile. For once in his life, he didn’t have a single clever thing to say to fill the quiet, and didn’t especially want one. The Knight of Wands sitting face-up on the table between them was already proven to be right.