a/n: a Now You See Me marathon on TV a few days ago and wow i have completely lost my mind remembering just how utterly in love i was with these magical films, falling hard again right down the rabbit hole
the second movie especially did things to me. listen folks i'm so mad they robbed us of a precious apology/comfort moment between Atlas and Dylan so...i'm gonna write 'bout it.
. . .
keep your helmet; keep your life son
And I was catching my breath
Barefoot in the wildest winter
catching my death
And I couldn't be sure
I had a feeling so peculiar
That this pain would be for
evermore
Drowning to death is terrifying. He had only been remotely aware of the factuality from tasted terrors plaguing his nights in contemporised rotation, and still they're but a second-hand comparison to the hard hand reality deals him.
I won't die for love like you did; Dylan slogs through ripples of undiluted fear, crumpled at the bottom of a lethal tin box that stole his father's last breath.
He manages to dig himself out of his father's grave, doesn't fight against the pull out of the waterbed, flaunting the souvenirs he gets to keep: a plethora of hurts, his dad's precious watch, his own life at last.
He knows to be alive when the water he swallowed climbs from the depths of his guts to stain the shingly bank between his knees, hears the toss of waves eddying behind his drenched back.
The harsh print of fingers bleeds heat back into his frozen extremities, pressing warmth and touch into the blade of his shoulder, the hollow of his elbow.
He knows he's saved when, above the gruelling hitch that stings his breath, caves wide his chest, he catches the overfamiliar tone color, the softest scrape of, "You're okay."
He's spoiled in hues, bruised with crimsons and blues. And still he is all he sees.
Dylan now sits in a long split-cane chair, aching slowly into his flesh, enwrapped in a wool blanket thick enough to withstand the last of the chilling tremors, thawing before a constrained flame.
He's contemplating an epiphany.
Just an easy click reverberating inside his skull to shift a lifetime's worth of reckoning, a solitary glimpse of relief to make sense of the last three decades imbued to the brim in grief, the universal disappointment laying at the foot of his own expectations, pitfalls in the marrow of bones he has grown inside of. Before his very eyes, he finds they're quietly dissolving as a peculiar and unwonted warmth begins uncurling from knots in his chest.
And he's catching his breath, his father's watch safely shrouded in his fist.
He was wrong, he was right; either way he doesn't think it matters much now that—
He's abruptly pulled, in much the same vein he was breaths, eons ago, out of the glaze of his reflection.
Due to lack of a proper door, against the eclectic bookshelf looming to his left into an amber darkness set aglow, there's a (nervous) tap of knuckles in lieu of a knock.
As if Dylan wouldn't think to grant him permission after—well.
So his unlikely savior breaches right past (a line drawn in the sand they've deliberated over smoothing out at length now), the opaque contour of a halved grin casts stilted intentions like shadows across his face.
Atlas unambiguously asks him, for once. "Do you have a moment?"