Chapter Notes: Bullet Catch

Notes for Chapter 1: Bullet Catch

Okay, so.  I know I said at the end of the other one that I had no intention of ever writing a sequel.  At the time, that was true.  Partly because I liked the ambiguous, open ending of vol 1, and partly because there is no way to fix this relationship in a single fic.

There's a joke with the title that unfortunately few people seemed to get.  The "vol 1" in the title was going to have to be all or nothing.  Either I do what most people do with the book series this fic takes its name from, and stop at volume one, or I commit and do all eight.  The Tarbell Course in Magic is a real thing, and I gave it some real significance to Darcy.  She got a new book every year for her birthday, and when she started preparing to liquidate, Tarbell was the only thing she intended to keep.  Darcy has all eight volumes.  So basically, doing a sequel means I might have to commit to eight volumes.  Which honestly, is what it would probably take for the happily ever after people probably want and deserve.

If you haven't read the first fic, I recommend doing so.  It's one of my favourites I've ever written, even if it's one of my least-popular.  Originally, this was going to be written for a big bang, but some stuff went down and I wound up pulling this fic out of the event.  Since it's mostly written anyway, I figured why not?  Let's go ahead and start posting it now.

And with that out of the way, let's talk about the chapter itself.

There is some weirdness here, and Loki has noticed it. 

This picks up about ten minutes after vol 1.  Loki has asked her to dinner, she isn't sure about it, but she's gone anyway.  Originally, Loki asking her to dinner was very open-ended, and deliberately so.  That scene was from Darcy's POV, so I wanted to continue it from her POV, having her still not quite knowing what was going on.

At this point, it's like, mid-November.  There was a decent time jump between Darcy taking her job back, and them getting to a point where Loki thought he could get away with asking her to dinner.

Because she's right.  There's an ulterior motive.  There always is.  And that's where the two different conversations they have in this chapter come from.

Loki would very much like to apologise and try to move on.  He doesn't like having a permanent residence in the doghouse, however much he may deserve it.  But Darcy is not ready to hear his apology.  Because if she hears it, she might have to accept it.  And she is not ready to accept his apology.  She's built a lot of defenses against him, and set a lot of rules, which he does seem to be mostly following.  But she's also right.  If he's going to try to put her in a position where she is forced to listen and be nice while he has a conversation she does not want to have, she still can't trust him.

At the same time, she wants to do the bullet catch, a routine which requires you to trust your partner 110%.  That's what Loki wasn't commenting on, because they're having two very contradictory conversations on trust.  On one hand, Darcy refuses to trust him, and comes very close to admitting that she's kind of punishing him over how badly he has messed up her ability to trust him.  On the other hand, she wants to do the fucking bullet catch.

When Loki says he does not want to be "unlucky 13," he's referring to the twelve magicians who have died on stage doing this act.  When he makes reference to someone else pretending to be someone he wasn't, he's talking about Chung Ling Soo, an American in brownface, who pretended to be Chinese on stage.  His gun misfired—or more accurately, failed to misfire, and fired properly—and he was shot on stage in front of the audience in 1918.

Loki's therefore built up a good amount of superstition about this routine.  It kills people, and he's up there on stage playing a character so confusing, he's not even sure if it's real or not.  In vol 1, he talked about his routine in Reykjavík, where he pretended to be English, and now after ten years of this, his fake accent feels more natural to him than his natural one.  And now, he's built this weird character that reverses that, and it's just a big confusing mess for everyone to the point that not even Loki knows who the real Loki is anymore.

And in a parallel to that, what Darcy has done is created two different people in her mind.  There's the Loki she works with, and the Loki she slept with.  The Loki she slept with is the one she can't trust.  And even that Loki, there's not a total lack of trust.  She has no reason to believe he would ever harm her.  He hurts you in other ways.  He manipulates and gaslights you, and Darcy even said she came out of it so fucked up, she can't tell if what she remembers happening is true or not.

The Loki she works with, meanwhile, is sharing trade secrets.  He's been teaching her new things, and has given her an opportunity to do what she wants with her life.  They're also talking about a fish tank, which is a modern play on Houdini's milk can routine.  Which is famous for killing him, even though it didn't.  He died of a ruptured appendix.  By using a fish tank, instead of something opaque, Loki's routine is closer to Penn & Teller's bizarre version.  Which famously went wrong on live TV in the 80s and came close to killing Teller on Saturday Night Live.

The difference here is the fish tank is Loki's idea, and the bullet catch is Darcy's.  They're both hideously dangerous stunts, which require the performer to have complete and total trust in his collaborators.  And yet Loki is massively more comfortable with one over the other.  Part of it is that superstition of being Unlucky Number 13.  But part of it is Darcy's complete contradiction in what she's saying. 

But at the same time, he knows she's right.  They don't have to do the bullet catch, necessarily, but they are not competing.  Lance Burton got away with a deadass boring show for years because he's Lance Burton.  People went for the name.  It didn't matter that he only did three entire tricks for the entire thing.  At least, when I lived there ten years ago, the shows you wanted to see were Penn & Teller, Mac King, and Amazing Jonathan.  The punk rock, I do what I want magic where tricks going wrong had real stakes.  Those were the shows you'd go home and talk about.

That's very much the flavour I've given Loki.  He could definitely pull off the elegance of Burton or Tomsoni, but there's no chaos in it.  He's not into the big spectacle like Angel or Blaine either.  Those are too produced.  Loki wants to throw a deck of cards at a spectator and call it a magic trick.  He wants to juggle knives and eat fire.  And he does all this, and then ends his show with a routine that's pretty, but has absolutely no substance.  If he wants to actually sell out every night, he's going to need to do something unique.  Something people will talk about on the bus back to Caesar's Palace, and on the flight home.  As Darcy phrases it, it needs to be a show stopper.  Something so big and shocking that you cannot possibly continue from there.

And getting shot in the face is kind of it.  That's why Penn & Teller did it for over 20 years.

So.  In short.  This is a sequel I never intended to write, and now I've done it and will probably have to commit.  Like the first one, it's also not-so-secretly a love letter to one of my own past lives, will spoil quite a lot of magic secrets, and will probably be quite maddening to some in its obstinate refusal to play the genre straight.  But if you're into close to 100,000 words of two idiots who just cannot get on the same page about one another, then you might actually like this.

Or hate it.  idk.