Chapter Text
There’s a girl robbing his audience.
Daniel lets his eyes gloss over her for the fourth time this evening. watching as she slips her hand into a pocket and it comes back with a wallet. She’s good, he has to admit — her target hasn’t noticed a single thing, and if he were any less familiar with pickpockets, any less well-trained in knowing what to look for — he likely wouldn’t have, either.
He has, though, and he can’t say he’s particularly appreciative of it.
The crowd cheers as he flicks his deck of cards into the air, pretending to make it disappear and feeling it slide safely back into the false pocket he’s sewn into his left sleeve, and plasters a blinding grin on his face. “Sorry, that wasn’t your card. Was it?”
His chosen audience member, a young man with bright eyes and a brighter smile leans closer, shaking his head perplexedly. Daniel tsks at him, brandishing his empty palms before deliberately turning back to the tree behind him, a murmur making its way through the audience as people start noticing the card that he’d pre-emptively hidden onto the stem, now being revealed as the flashlight he’d fastened above it earlier flashes on, earning him a dazzling applause for his efforts. “That’s because you’re looking too closely.”
Audience properly distracted, he risks another glance to the thief slinking past the furthest edge of the little crowd he’s gathered, only a few dozen people gathered for his unannounced pop-up show. Her hair glistens— pink? he wonders briefly, as she passes underneath one of the street lights, and then a watch disappears from someone’s wrist.
People are going to be pissed, he muses briefly, flicking his arm again to let the cards re-emerge from his sleeve and he folds them easily into a fan. “Thank you all for coming, and goodnight!”
It’s his closing speech, his way to announce the end of the night — and he lets the cards billow up, creating a showy display to distract people from looking at him while he hurries back to his pre-planned escape route. He’s halfway out of the park when there’s movement in his periphery, a shadow flitting along the other side of the fence, and when he looks over — he meets the wide, startled gaze of the pickpocket.
He quirks an eyebrow at her and watches as she pivots, sprinting off and leaping off a park bench to hop the fence just ahead of him and taking off at a breakneck speed, crossing the street and disappearing in a side alley.
He stares after her, near-indistinguishable footsteps rapidly disappearing, and he briefly debates going after her. New York has always been rife with pickpockets, and he knows that the crowds that gather at his pop-up shows are an easy target. It’s not ideal — there’s the chance that people will associate their missing valuables with him, which would be bad for his reputation, but—
There’s something familiar about it, he realises hesitantly, about having a shadow flit around at the edge of your periphery nimbly lifting wallets and watches and jewellery. He remembers similar brown eyes, wide and startled, staring up at him the first time he’d managed to catch Jack in the act, his hand firmly clasped in his own from where he’d felt it slip into his pocket — and he remembers the stories, the unhappy twist at the corner of Jack’s mouth as he’d told them all, late at nights, about harsh winters and cold winds and dodging security at shopping malls just to get by.
No one pickpockets only for the fun of it. It’s an art, and it’s a skill, and there’s a thrill in knowing you’re quicker than your target, in being fast and unnoticeable enough that you can take whatever you need from them without them ever realising — but it’s risky, out on the streets, and no one does it solely for the thrill of it.
He remembers the faraway look in Jack’s eyes as he’d told them about learning, about making mistakes and miscalculating and taking risks because the alternative was nothing — and though he’s sure Jack never quite told them everything, he’d told them enough for him to know that no one — not even bold, thrill-seeking magicians — pickpockets only for the hell of it.
He blinks, and the thief’s eyes flash in the back of his mind — bold eyeliner, smudged and cheap, nearly enough to distract from the wide-eyed, wary look she’d worn — and decides to let her go.
She might not have known who he was, and the chances of ever seeing her again are slim. Pickpockets don’t stick in one spot too long — it’s risky, and if she’s clever and quick enough to lift as much as she had tonight, then she knows better than to linger.
He sighs, shrugging his coat a little higher onto his shoulders and picks up the pace. It’s getting colder, the usual western October breeze steadily giving way for a colder, northern front. The days are getting shorter, darkness encroaching a little more early with the day, and it does nothing to keep the spiteful, cold thing in his chest at bay.
He briskly winds through the alleys, careful to check over his shoulder for anyone following him — but there’s no one at his back. He’s on his own, as he has been for the past few years since the Horsemen broke up — and he swallows thickly against the swell of bitterness that rises in the back of his throat, the same way it always does whenever he thinks of them. He thinks of them more often than not.
It’s been seven years — more than enough time to get used to it, he supposes sardonically, but then again — he’s never been all that good at letting go of things he got attached to. There’s nothing else for it, though — they all went their separate ways after magnificently, spectacularly burning every single bridge they’d ever built together, spite and fear and grief all mingling together into an explosive, corrosive mixture that tore them apart better than anything else could have.
He doesn’t keep up with any of the others — he knows Merritt went off to Rosarito, years ago, but there’s no telling whether he’s still there or if he’s found a different dwelling place to haunt. Jack’s face had shown up on an advert for a cruise, a year or two ago — and he’d stared at it until he’d felt sick, the logo proudly displaying The Great J. Wilder like a mockery of all that they’d ever been.
Lula’s name had started buzzing in the circuit around the same time, shows of magic popping up here and there — she’d started doing magic on her own, apparently, and the last he’d caught of it was that she went off to try her hand at it in Europe. Henley’s name hasn’t crossed his radar in years — he hasn’t dared to google her after the last time, when she’d shown up in the alumni list of the University of California in Los Angeles, her smile bright and content on her student picture in a way he hadn’t seen in years.
They’re all gone, out of his reach and further out of his life — and he does his best not to think of them at all.
It’s useless, in the same ways most of his coping mechanisms are — he still makes his coffee with the same awful brand Merritt used to favour, and his clothes are sorted by colour in the system Lula explained to him after weeks of complaining about his previous sorting system.
The tune that Jack used to hum while brushing his teeth plays in the back of his head every time he grabs the tooth paste, and he stares in the mirror and forgets that he doesn’t have to watch his elbow anymore, that there isn’t anyone to complain about him taking up their space now that he doesn’t share a bathroom with Henley.
The worst of all is Dylan’s voice in the back of his head — he wonders, all too often, what Dylan would think of him, if he could see him now. He used to think Dylan would have been furious with him, with all of them — Dylan was in prison, left there forever, all because they couldn’t figure out how to get him out, how to make up for all the ways they’d ruined his life—
Over time, it’s lessened from something angry, an enraged and seething presence in the back of his mind to something colder — something disappointed. Dylan always had high expectations, demanded nothing but the best — and none of them had lived up to it. He wonders how Dylan’s doing, these days — he still hears the echo of his voice in the quiet mutterings of day-to-day life, recognises him in the cashier’s voice that falls in the same low register or one of his neighbours who has the same rough twist to his words.
He’d thought he was going crazy, at first — his heart stuttering and faltering in its rhythm, skipping a beat any time someone looked a little too much like Dylan, spoke a little too similarly, or— anything, really, that reminded him of Dylan, led him to think that maybe, maybe there was still a way he’d gotten out, gotten back to them.
Dylan was in prison, though, and the other Horsemen were long gone, presumably moving on with their life and finding other things to keep them occupied — and he’d drifted by in a haze, barely aware of time ticking past until he’d blinked and it had been eight months since that fateful performance, since they’d messed it all up and lost the most important person in their lives.
He’d snapped, in some way — all of a sudden it all got too much, the memories of everything that he’d lost and the quiet hope that clawed out of his ribcage any time he heard the jangle of keys outside his door and thought, for a second, it was one of them coming home, and the endless, mocking sight of Dylan’s name still on the deed of his safehouse.
He’d left everything behind, booked a plane ticket and disappeared into the Australian wilderness.
He doesn’t fully remember his time in Australia, if he’s honest — he’d floated in a half-awareness, trekking slowly through the Outback and barely remembering to resupply whenever he came across another town. It wasn’t until he’d blinked himself awake in a backwaters hospital, concerned hospital staff letting him know he’d been brought in with heatstroke and asking if there was anyone they could call — that he’d realised that however bad things had gotten, dying a John Doe in the remote Australian bush was worse.
None of that matters now, anyway — he shuffles past the cars parked out in front of his building and finds the entrance to his apartment, one of the Eye’s safehouses sequestered away in New York. It’s not the one they’d been in while preparing for their initiation shows — that one was raided by the FBI and requisitioned by the authorities, but he’d been surprised to find there was a whole list of safehouses scattered across the country, with several options in New York.
He hasn’t contacted the Eye in a while, other than requesting a place to stay — he arrived back in New York roughly a month ago, two of the Eye’s safehouses at his disposal just in case something happens and he needs to run. He’s currently staying in the house in Queens, close enough to several parks and underground places to host little pop-up magic shows, but far enough that he can rotate spots without growing predictable just in case the authorities figure out he’s here sooner than he wants.
He hasn’t actually performed on his own in a while — not since they split, and the adoring crowds, the starstruck audiences and cheers and applause are not quite as he remembers. It feels hollow, these days, but he doesn’t have much else he can do, currently. He’d figured it was an easy choice to make — either he feels miserable while sitting at home, or he feels miserable while going out and bringing a little joy to the few magic-enjoyers still out there.
Ultimately, it’s for the greater good — or so he tells himself, jamming his key into the lock quickly and shouldering the door open. It’s good to get back in the game, show his face on the streets a little more often and find some of the thrill back in what he used to do.
Everything’s felt flat and boring lately, the world around him dull and gray as he’s let life pass him by. Perhaps running for his life from the authorities will bring some warmth back into his veins — and if it doesn’t, he’ll simply quit again and go back into hiding. It doesn’t matter much, in the end — there’s no team to wait for him, no Dylan to make plans and no Eye to deliberate with.
At least he’s managed to do something good, tonight — his audience had been elated with the few tricks he’d shown them, as many as he could fit in his self-allotted seventeen minutes before he needed to head out, still needing to be careful of the authorities.
With Mabry and Tressler both behind bars, with charges for attempted murder, racketeering and cybercrime on several accounts, a lot of the crimes the Horsemen had been held accountable for after their initiation shows were being reconsidered. They’re still wanted for more than enough crimes — their robbery of the Crédit Républicain de Paris, destruction of property after the stunt on the FDR bridge, obstruction of justice and withholding information—
It’s just that it’s mostly circumstantial evidence against them, nothing that definitively proves they were directly aware of and involved with Dylan breaking Thaddeus Bradley out of prison, amongst other things. Most of their show in London had consisted of trespassing and evading the authorities, but it wasn’t actually illegal to pretend to stop rain or do magic tricks on the streets, nor were there laws against pretending to fly a plane on a wharf on the Thames, though they hadn’t exactly filed for the correct permits.
Their crimes against Arthur Tressler and his company had been cast in a new light, however, with his involvement in Walter Mabry’s cybercrime and the abduction-slash-attempted murder charges he’d been indicted with.
All that to say — there was a pretty ambiguous legal gray area, with the disappearance of Dylan Rhodes and the Horsemen in the years after their London show. Allen Scott-Frank, one of the members of the Eye that had stepped up after Dylan had disappeared and the Horsemen had all but fallen apart, had contacted him two years back to offer the possibility of brokering a deal, to find a way to regain enough freedom to start doing shows again.
Daniel knows they arranged something for Henley, after she left the Horsemen, and he’s fairly sure Jack must have worked out some kind of deal given that he seems to be working out in the open — unless his cruise is in international waters, which is a legal loophole on its own. Whatever the case — he’d rejected the offer, decided he’d rather stay on his own and figured he’d try and fly under the radar where he could.
There haven’t been any specific searches for him, either way, but going out into the public eye to do little pop-up magic shows again might be toeing the line, drawing some unwanted attention, so he’s resolved to be careful nonetheless.
He locks the door behind him — both the key and a second, manual lock he’s installed. He’s overly familiar with lockpicks, and there’s no picking a lock that isn’t accessible from the outside. The safehouse is comfortable — there’s a stylish couch in millennial gray, petrol-coloured throw pillows and paintings doing little to bring some colour to it.
He doesn’t pay much attention to it — the other New York safehouse he has, down in Bushwick, is eerily similar to the apartment he’d stayed in the year between their show at Five Pointz and the Octa performance, and feels almost too familiar. Here, in the bland, almost inhospitably spotless apartment, it feels a little more like he does — temporary.
This isn’t forever, and this will end, someday — the exposed brick walls and with warm light falling through the large windows of the Bushwick apartment feel too much like a home. It doesn’t feel like he belongs there — it’s not his home, and the near-sterile white decor of the Queens safehouse feels a little more apt for the way he feels similarly empty, wiped clean of anything that made him him.
He goes into the world and the crowds find him, people whispering his name and seeing J. Daniel Atlas, the showman, grinning blindingly back at them, and he does his best to show them exactly what they want.
When he stares back at himself, in the mirror, he’s not quite sure who he is, anymore.
None of that matters, in the end — something has to give, eventually, and there will be something to shake him from the endless slew of days floating by in unremarkable mundanity.
Until he finds it, he’ll keep doing what he does — and he’ll survive.