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Alma runs.
Her feet pound on the pavement and her heart pounds with them, breath short and each stride sending pain shooting up her legs with the force of it—she pushes through the crowd, the figure of Atlas just ahead, dark and indistinct in the movement of the people around him.
She still catches him, though, in flashes: that mop of curls, scrawny limbs, the suit, now somewhat disheveled and undone. He pushes people aside and darts between them, and then he rounds a corner—glancing back at her quickly as he does—into an open alley, suddenly the only silhouette in front of her, and she’s so close, it feels as though she could just grab him—
He scrambles up a wall, and she faintly hears the crackle of the radio, the distant warble of sirens. Doesn’t register it.
“Stop!” Alma shouts, and on top of the wall, Atlas freezes. Rises slightly in a more stable standing position. Raises his hands in surrender, open palms that say look, I’m not armed, please don’t hurt me.
That moment seems to go on forever. She’s pointing a gun at him. A gun that rip through that suit and into his flesh, that could destroy his magician’s hands or soak those curls in blood. It’s not that she has never faced the violence of her job before, from behind a desk or even in training, but she’s never pointed her loaded gun at another human being before.
Alma’s pointing a gun at him, staring at him with wide eyes, and he stares right back—eyes not as wide as hers, but not certain, not confident like he was on stage. His lips part slightly as he trembles out an uncertain breath, and his hands shake just a little, too—not scared, exactly, but maybe close. Maybe it’s Atlas’s first time having a loaded gun pointed at him, too.
(He’d been so cocky and arrogant in that interrogation room, on the stage, and this is just—a glimpse, the tiniest of glimpses, into the human being beneath. Even J. Daniel Atlas can be shot, can die, can be afraid to die.)
Still, when that long, long moment—only a second or less—is over, he seems to realize what she had realized the moment she’d lifted the gun. She can’t shoot him. She won’t.
He’s dangerous, sure, but he’s unarmed, and he hasn’t hurt anyone. Not really. He helped rob a bank without so much as doing what she’s doing now: pointing a gun.
She adjusts her grip on her gun, uselessly, and as if in response, his fingers twitch a little, almost a wave. It’d be cheeky if not for how hesitant it is.
And then he turns and jumps, vanishes into the night, and she doesn’t fire after him.
One moment and the next, and he’s gone, and Dylan is running up behind her and shouting and puffing hot air, but it’s too late. Even as he scrambles up the wall after Atlas, she stays behind.
Alma’s never aimed a loaded gun at someone before. And she knows, she knows she can do this job, knows she is more than competent, knows she is being watched twice as closely as her male counterparts… and yet still, she doesn’t really want to do it again.
Dylan had rounded that corner and seen, just in time, Atlas disappear over the edge. Alma Dray, with her gun still drawn, stares after him, and he has to force himself to shout at her.
He is very, very good at planning, and very, very good at staying in character. So good he’s almost an automaton, dialogue spilling out of his mouth as if pre-recorded, and yet in that moment, he has to try. Has to stay in-character on purpose.
He’s only watched the Horsemen from afar, but they’ve been at the center of such long-held plans, and he’s so carefully chosen and guided each of them, that still, he can’t help but hold affection for them.
They’re all difficult and strange in their own ways, but those are two words that can describe Dylan to a T, so it’s not as if he’s complaining. He likes them, despite never having truly spent time with them—outside of an FBI interrogation room and through the veil of his own magic tricks—and he cares about them.
He isn’t sure what he would do if one of the small ways his plans could go wrong—the little leeways of fate—had ended in one of them being shot.
It could have ended right there, with Atlas bleeding—or worse, shot dead—on the pavement, some overeager officer standing over him with their gun.
But it wasn’t just anyone, it was the only person other than him that could possibly have caught up—by design—which meant it was Alma Dray. And although he hadn’t planned for her at all, she was good—strikingly, impossibly good—and therefore things had still managed to go smoothly.
After a moment of heart-stopping, gut-wrenching fear, swallowed by his pretending, he soothes it over. Of course his plans were all falling perfectly into place. That was what his plans did. Everything was fine, and would continue to be so, and it would also come to that perfect, soaring close soon enough.
(And in the meantime, he wouldn’t think of how J. Daniel Atlas—or any of them, for that matter—could have died, and could still die, if just one accident of fate interfered. He wouldn’t think of the wonderful conundrum of Alma Dray, either, even as he forced himself not to thank her for lowering her gun.)