Secrets
A tale of the Common People

By Kielle

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This one's a bit of a departure for me. I usually strive to NOT write about mutant bigotry, which in my opinion is SO overdone that it's not even interesting any more. But I've had this particular idea kicking around in my head for a while, and it finally just HAD to be written... Thanks to the real guy whose really cool last name I swiped, and who'll probably never know because he's not into fanfic. ;) Rated G except for a tiny touch of bad language.

At least this time the bastards waited until after closing time before setting off this second...accident.

He had no right to complain, of course. He was lucky to be able to find any work at all in the modern job market. His resume was pitifully slim: average typing speed, enough computer knowledge to set up his screensaver, a little Internet experience if cruising through AOL counted. Which it usually didn't. The resume was an embarrassment, a pitiful expanse of white which practically trumpeted the yawning gulf between the retail jobs of his teen years and the night watchman post he'd held for the last few months.

It wasn't as if he'd been doing nothing for almost a decade. Far from it. But when employers asked what how he'd been supporting himself for the last eight years...

It was ironic that the sordid secret he'd stricken from his resume was the very source of his ability to skillfully circumvent the question, to weave a charming skein of half-truths and humorous misdirection around the fact that he was a...

Theodore Charlebois gritted his teeth as if to clamp down on the still-painful memory, and bent his attention back to his diary.

I don't think poor Isaac has the heart or the funds to finance the place a third time. He's right, you know. Let's face it: the idea was good while it lasted, but it's a lost cause. Too many people know where we meet, now.

Suddenly no longer in the mood to write, he nestled the pen into the little journal's crease and leaned back in his chair, letting his eyes roam around his small apartment. The walls were pitifully bare, with the slightly scarred and discolored appearance which indicated that they had not always been devoid of decoration. The shelves were a clutter of junk just a step above actual trash: Reader's Digests, packets of taco-sauce and ketchup, unopened envelopes stuffed with coupons, and cheaply-photocopied fliers from the apartment management warning of upcoming construction.

Everything that actually meant anything to him was now packed away in a cardboard box labelled "Old Clothes/Rags" and tucked into the back of his closet.

Even under those precautions, that box was a dangerous thing to possess. He shouldn't have kept any of it, of course. He'd gotten rid of most of it; all of the big equipment, the stage devices, were long gone, taken apart by investigators and probably destroyed after he'd failed to collect them after the hearings. He'd wanted to retrieve them, truly he did, but he was a realistic man at heart. He'd known that it was time to start a real life...time to join the real world.

He'd known that it was all over.

Without really thinking about it, Theo Charlebois reached into the drawer to his right and pulled out one of the few innocuous pieces of his old life that he could still safely handle in public without triggering whispers and stares: 52 battered Bicycles.

The rubbed-gray seams of the worn cardboard case felt like cloth as he lifted the tattered flap and tapped the deck of cards into his crooked palm. In his hands, the glossy little bits of paper came alive. They flickered between his fingers, slithered behind his wrist, vanished and reappeared under his touch like magic.

Just like magic...

Hey presto, nothing up my sleeve, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat, he thought bitterly, abruptly jamming the cards together and stuffing them back into their cheap case. One rogue card escaped and fluttered to the floor, fetching face-up against his socked foot. The ten of spades. The end of a dark road, if he remembered his card lore properly. Appropriate. He left it where it was.

He was getting maudlin again, he knew. At times like this he had to sharply remind himself that his life was NOT over. He was picking up the pieces, moving into the mainstream, working towards a real job like normal people...

"Normal"...? He broke into an ironic chuckle, poking grim fun at himself to put a non-nonsense halt to that way of thinking. The last thing he needed to do was to start believing the very propaganda which had transformed his last eight years into a monstrous black stain on his life.

Funny...he didn't feel stained. He just missed the Art, missed it like an actor misses the crowd's rustle of suspense, like a celebrity misses the admiration, like a storyteller misses the wonder.

Because the Art had been all three.

Unable or unwilling to completely let go of it, he and others in the formerly glamorous trade had found a place to call their own, a place to gather away from the prying eyes and the pointing fingers, a place to reveal mysteries or to withhold them.

That safe haven was now nothing but a heap of charred timbers and melted plaster.

Theo automatically started to derail that particularly depressing train of thought, but then he realized that it was an inevitable path for his mind to take, here on the eve of his assuming the dull gray mantle of "data entry clerk." There was really no point in fighting it. Perhaps it would be better to just get the impending "mood" out of his system by letting it run its course.

With that rueful realization, he sighed and finally allowed himself remember, let himself dwell upon his lot for a carefully rationed moment. To tell the truth, he had a right to be resentful and nostalgic. He'd been good, very good...he'd been on his way up, striding towards the spotlight. Right on cue, the whispers had begun...

Then, in a third-string sideshow in a second-rate city way out in the midwestern United States, a certain giggling farmgirl had stepped out of the audience and into a cheaply-built disappearing cabinet.

She had not reappeared for three days.

A full day before the missing Vanessa O'Brady blinked back into existence in her own kitchen, confused but unharmed, the witchhunt was on. Even pro-mutant advocates were forced to agree that the possibility of mutant powers in the hands of men and women who regularly sawed volunteers in half was not something to be taken lightly. No one would attend a show; even the open-minded guiltily admitted to being a little afraid for their safety. Rumors flew. Accusations of public endangerment and willfully withholding information of hazardous practices began to run wild

When all was said and done, no one had ever been able to prove a thing save for in the cases of an unfortunate "lovely assistant" in New York and a stage manager in Dallas, neither of whom had "special abilities" which were of any use in terms of fooling an audience. But the damage had been done. The glamour had been stripped away, the mystique soiled behind suspicious eyes which were too modern to see magic in the flick of a wrist.

Hearings were convened. Tests were demanded. Reputations were destroyed. If you refused to comply, you were branded "guilty" in the eyes of the public...if you cooperated, the ensuing media circus destroyed any credibility you had left. The big names had been the first to fall: Copperfield, Dietrich, Burton, Brooks, Marshall. The dignified Society of American Magicians had gone underground to avoid the heat from the prying press. Siegfried & Roy had survived by the skin of their teeth, hastily toning their act down into a glorified wild-animal show and steering the world's distrustful focus towards their oh-so-politically-correct tiger breeding program.

Of course, no one ever thought to test cute li'l "Vanishing Vanessa" for mutant genes, Theo mused. He'd harbored that thought so many times over the last eight months that it had lost its original bitter edge -- it was merely rote, an empty mantra whispered in the name of failed justice. It didn't matter any more, anyhow. There was no going back...no changing society's mind

Not for the first time since the fall, Theo fervently wished that he WAS a mutant. Then maybe he could have guarded the Club, that secluded little Los Angeles hole-in-the-wall where former stage magicians gathered in secret to trade stories, to work out new twists, to share ideas for grand performances which would now never come to be. If any of them HAD truly been mutants, they could have protected the place...kept it safe from arsonists who'd believed every word of the vicious propaganda which had enveloped the hearings.

Theodore Charlebois had been lucky. He'd sensed the shift in the wind and had immediately left the stage; he'd skimmed through the cursory court interest in his affairs, meekly submitted to every test requested of him. He'd been able to sidestep the glare of the cameras, which were far more interested in digging up dirt on more famous suspects than in the almost-stardom of "the Amazing T.C. LeBois." Unlike the doomed big-names whom the media had gleefully dubbed "the Sorcerous Seven," Theo had been able to pick up what was left of his life -- to step back into the world of the mundane, where the only things that mattered were your degree, your resume, and how fashionable you looked when you arrived for an interview.

He'd heard that there was still magic in the world: true sorcery, practiced by the occasional member of that distant strata of society composed of "heroes" and "villains." But that was far, far beyond Theo's world; it had nothing to do with what HE knew as magic. His magic had absolutely nothing to do with Defeating Menaces From Beyond or Guarding The City's Dreams or whatever it was that "real" sorcerors did for a living. To Theodore Charlebois, "magic" was a lot simpler, a matter of skill and love rather than of power and strength. Thus, in his opinion and that of everyone who shared his passion, his brand of magic was a lot more complex. It just..._meant_ more. It had once made people laugh and gasp and cheer -- someday, it would do so again.

As far as Theodore Charlebois was concerned, the only magic left in the world was taped up inside an ugly cardboard box in the back of his closet. And no one could ever take that away from him.

He was still young. He could wait.

With a far-away smile, he closed his diary and went to bed.