titled: headlining.
summary: This is how the fire starts. (A story about disappearing wallets, reappearing doves, coffee addictions, a gilded world, and the ties that bind.)
rating: T, for language and situations.
disclaimer: 'Now You See Me,' its characters, and its universe do not belong to me.
notes: Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy this first chapter and first dip into the Now You See Me fandom!
From the minute she is born, Vera Volkava is told that she is perfect (and where she is imperfect, she will be made perfect, just you wait and see). Family and her parents' friends call her an angel, the most beautiful little girl I've ever seen. Her mother dresses her in the prettiest dresses and ties ribbons and bows in Vera's copper hair.
She never goes wanting, this beautiful girl. Her life is impossibly easy: the top marks, the friends, the coveting boys (though none get very close). People simply flock to her: she's magnetic, someone says, once, and it's not perfect, but Vera almost likes it better. She is the effervescent, beautiful, loving, perfect daughter of Matvei and Alena Volkav.
(It's still a bit later until she realizes what that actually means.)
Life happens, as it does, and Vera becomes Vera, the harder syllable forming with the softening curves of her body. She is permitted to learn about kings, about wars, about mathematics and the natural sciences, but she is not permitted to think of them. For her to develop an opinion would be foolish; to join in her father's discussions at the dinner table, unacceptable.
It is better this way.
Vera doesn't care to learn about how or why the rain falls or that plants are able to produce their own food. It is not important to her what the stars are, just that they are there, just that they grant her wishes.
(They never do, but then, more often than not, Vera forgets her wishes as soon as they're made.)
The business is left to her father, the social graces to her mother; Vera is all that is left of the both of them: not the best of them, because neither her mother nor her father will be outshone by anyone, least of all their daughter - no. Perhaps they learned to hide their own flaws, but their daughter does not learn to do the same. Vera grows up to be a dreamer and a flight risk, talented in ballet because it's the closest she can get to flying, but always with a foot (and on the very worst days, her mind) out the door.
Her chest is raised, her legs stretched and straight - they could start shaking, but she knows better than to let it show - and even when the door opens, she doesn't move. Her arabesque is beautiful, because everything Vera does is beautiful - but she wants it to be diamond sharp and flawless.
"Surely you can do better than that."
There's a soft scuff when she sets her back foot on the ground. She glances in the wall mirror, sees a man - or the reflection of one. The lighting is almost clinical in this studio, enough so that most girls avoid it. It brings out the dark circles, the jutting of their collarbones. Vera likes the quiet, likes the simplicity. Now, it enters into a study of contrasts with this newcomer. His features are the darkest parts of the room; his smirk, the most dangerous.
"You don't know much about ballet," Vera says. It is not a critique, but it is a fact.
Still.
Still, there's a tightening in her chest, and she swings her back leg up, pops en pointe. Stares at herself in the mirror, forces her leg as straight as possible, imagining herself as a solid as a statue as she irons the shivers of weakness out of her body. She pulls her back toe up, up, up, imagining a string dragging her like a marionette.
"Maybe. But I know beautiful things," the stranger says. There's something in his hands. She thinks, at first, that it's a bird, that the rustling is its struggle to break free, but then - "Pick a card."
"My name is Vera Vol-"
"I asked you to pick a card, not to tell me your life story." He holds the deck out to her. It's not fanned, just a brick of cards, and she takes it from him with a shaking hand, fans them herself before choosing one and bending a corner back to look at it. "Hey, hey," the man says. The smirk is back, more playful but somehow just as venomous as before. "Did I ask you to look at it? You're lucky that's how this trick goes. Have you seen it before? That ruins some of the fun, then, doesn't it?" He motions for her to shuffle the deck, and once she hands it back, he cuts it a few more times.
He flicks a few cards carelessly onto the floor and then flicks the remaining top card into her direction. She picks it up, but it's not a card. The backing is the same, stars or a galaxy or - or perhaps just a speckled black background, but it's a ticket, with the day's date and the address of a theater in the city. The majority of the graphic is a golden geometric shape, emblazoned with the words The Four Horsemen.
"I don't understand."
When she looks up, the room is deserted. There's movement in the corner of her eye and she turns, but it's just the reflection of the door closing and - and her card, stuck to the mirror.
"Is she coming?"
"Box 17."
"She's probably not coming. I knew we should have sent Wilder."
"She's coming, alright? I said that she's coming."
"Oh, yes, I'm sure you charmed the pointe shoes right off of her feet."
"As fun as this back and forth is, you are aware that we have a show in less than five hours? And I'm sure you all have a trick or two that could use some tightening."
Vera tugs her scarf more tightly around her neck, tucks her hands into the pockets of her coat. It's not terribly cold out, but it has always been in her temperament to feel a chill where there is none. Her grandmother had always said that it meant she was open to the spirits, that there was a crack in her humanity; when her babka was on her deathbed, she did not even allow Vera to see her, sure that the spirits who traversed the veil did so through her granddaughter and that nothing good could come of getting caught in that sort of purgatory.
So Vera stayed at a distance, did her mourning quietly and without audience.
Now, at least, it is autumn in Saint Petersburg, and the cold is becoming more and more palpable to everyone. She walks the final few blocks to the theater: it is old, but - or perhaps, because it is old - it is beautiful, ornate, a former opera with private boxes encircling the stage, plebian seats on the slightest of inclines, and a wide, gaping mouth of an orchestra pit. There are jewel tones everywhere, and though they are faded, the mosaics and chandeliers are no less beautiful for it.
An attendant leads her to a box. It is big - she wonders if it is just for her, and wonders whether she wants company or not. This is a magic show, she has learnt. A quick search on the internet told her about FBI chases and millions of dollars given away. It's romantic, she thinks, and she watches video after video: news reports, messages straight from the Horsemen themselves, audience tapes that shaky enough to give her a headache and loud enough to hurt her ears.
But through them all, magic.
Too soon, the house lights go down, leaving only the spotlights on the stage. Four neat circles of light, waiting to be occupied, waiting, waiting, and then -
And then they are.
"Alright, Saint Petersburg," the pretty woman - Henley Reeves, Vera knows - says in a strong, clear voice. "Let's get this show started, huh?"
The crowd roars in response. Vera, sitting alone in box 17, twists her hands into her scarf and leans as far forward in her chair as she can before she grows dizzy with the steepness of the drop from her box to the floor seats.
For the next hour, the Four Horsemen work together as a unit - they are not individuals, they are not even partners; they're one living, breathing unit, sending silks twirling through the air and producing doves where there were none before. Jack Wilder sets fire to a hoop and Henley steps inside; the platform raises - see? There's nowhere for her to go! - an instant before the flames bellow high, and the crowd inhales as one, Vera inching forward, hands tucked beneath her legs to keep them from shaking, watching closely as Jack gathers the flames back into his hands and smothers them between his palms.
Henley's absence is almost palpable, but the remaining Horsemen don't stop moving.
Merritt McKinney deftly navigates a young couple's messy dating history, and sends them back to their seats with some rather good - if unsolicited - advice.
And through it all, J. Daniel Atlas stands at the center of it all, a spoke, watching carefully and reacting, rather than acting. He does not act, not once, and perhaps that is an act but if he lets it show, Vera misses it. And perhaps she did; she could not be blamed, for it is all such a spectacle.
" - but you've been listening to us talk all night, how about we get some audience participation?" Merritt says.
She thinks, for an awful moment, that they are going to choose her.
(They don't.)
"Hey, pretty lady."
The house lights have long since gone up, much of the audience moved on to the foyer, where there is champagne on silver trays, but Vera is still in the plush seat the attendant had left her in. She jumps, a hand fluttering to her chest, but Henley doesn't take notice. Just slips gracefully into the adjacent seat.
"Did you enjoy the show?" Henley asks, stretching her legs out in front of her. There are no scorch marks, nothing to suggest that Henley had disappeared from within a wreath of flames and had, later, appeared tucked inside that silly rabbit box - the rabbit had gone in, and Henley had popped out.
"Very much. Thank you," Vera says haltingly. "For inviting me, I mean. I mean - Daniel - Mr. Atlas? He brought me a ticket, so."
She's hurt when Henley laughs, and wounded when she says, "What a flirt!" But Henley smiles, and Vera is suddenly aware that Henley is not laughing at her, but, rather, at Atlas.
They're silent, watching as more attendants come in. This was not a crowd that would leave garbage in their wake, but there is a fur - mink, if Vera is not mistaken (and she rarely is; her mother saw to that) - stole left in a seat, a gentleman's wallet found on the ground. Trinkets left so carelessly in that way that only the wealthy can.
"I'm Vera," Vera offers.
Henley raises one of her eyebrows. "Not Vera Volkava, tonight? I get it. Sometimes, you just have to be someone else. I like to be lots of people," she says mischievously.
It's true. Henley loves her life: she loves who she is, what she does, and the people that she works with. She loves to see people's faces light up at the idea of magic - true, honest magic - and she loves to be the one who put it there. And honestly, is pretending really that different than magic? She's never thought so, and so she grew up putting on accents, toying with men in bars and getting out of traffic tickets with a helplessly confused shrug, a slight tilting of her vowels, and a cutting of her consonants just so -
Jack might be the mimic of the group, Atlas the so-called 'ringleader,' but Henley is the performer.
Vera, she's sure, can appreciate that.
There's a certain looseness in Henley's body after a show. She's not prone to stage fright, not prone to any sort of fright, really, but after a show, her body seems to lose all of its perfect posture: her feet are kicked up on the gilded railing of the box, her body slouched low in the seat.
She takes her time in responding to Vera. "But right now, I'm just Henley. And, please, for everyone's sake, call Daniel 'Daniel' or 'Danny' - he does not need the ego-boost from being 'Mr. Atlas.'" Her hands accentuate her words lazily; she throws up finger quotes and everything.
"Okay," Vera says, smiling uncertainly.
"Okay?" Henley drops her feet back to the ground. Even in her boots - a bit impractical, but she's shorter than the boys; short enough for it to be a distraction, so she always has to have a bit of a heel - the sound is muffled in the thick, bloodred carpeting. "Come with me."
Vera hesitates. She has a curfew - all of the dancers do. They have to be safely back on the premises before midnight, and she'd wanted to do some stretching before bed; now, the thought doesn't stop her from standing and following Henley out of the box, down the narrow hallway, and down several flights of steps.
"Watch your step," Henley says.
It's the type of misdirection that made the Four Horsemen famous - that is, it works. Vera looks down, notes a few steps that lead into a sunken lounge, missing the blueprint thumb tacked to the wall, missing the mechanics diagrams and the potential (because magic is fluid, of course, and if the audience doesn't seem interested in Jack putting a card through a sheet of glass then they won't do it, because there's nothing more important than pleasing the audience, right?) set list.
(No one wants to see behind the curtain, not really, not even when they think they want to.)
"Is that her?"
The voice seems to bloom from the darkness. They're underneath the stage, now, and the lighting isn't the greatest; the room is mostly shadows, but the antique lamps and cracked chandelier cast enough yellowed-light that, when Vera looks up, she catches a glance of Jack Wilder, casually cutting a deck of cards, again and again and again, until he has four separate sections spinning between his hands.
"Is that her?" he asks again, looking at Henley.
"She sat in box 17," Merritt says to Jack. To Vera, he says, "You liked the silks the best, didn't you? Not a big fan of the - oh, well, we'll just keep that our little secret." He winks, takes her hand, and kisses her knuckles. "Merritt McKinney, pleasure to meet you, Vera Volkava. This uncultured, uncouth brat is Jack Wilder."
Jack grins, gives the deck another cut.
"Hello," Vera says.
"Champagne?" Henley asks. She'd gone and returned to stand at Vera's shoulder without attention. Now, she holds two flutes of champagne. "It's the real thing, from the region in France. Not just sparkling wine." She pulls a face at the thought.
Vera takes the glass, holds it a bit away from her body in what she hopes is a semi-casual position.
It's difficult. Nothing about this feels casual. Even as Jack toys with his cards and Merritt spins his hat in his hands and Henley pulls a pin out of her hair, letting it fall to her shoulders, Vera can't help feeling like they're building up to something.
And maybe it's J. Daniel Atlas appearing. He leans back against the table, hands curled around the table's edges at his sides (nothing to hide, nothing to see), and looks at her, looks through her, just like that day at the studio -
"The confidence needs work. But you'll do."