A/N: I do not own Marvel.

Act One

Watch closely. This is a trick.

There is a woman lying in a box. The blade comes down and saws her in two. The two halves are pushed apart, twirled around, and then pushed back together. The woman rises from the box, unharmed. The audience applauds.

Natasha doesn't act nearly as often as people thinks she does. She just presents her truths carefully and at opportune moments.

I am nothing but a beautiful doll, she tries to tell Tony with every action she takes as Natalie Rushman. She knows she is beautiful. She has never been able to entirely shake the feeling that she is as hollow as a doll and as tied by strings as a marionette.

She looks down in fear at the gap behind her when the men interrogating her push her chair back. She is in control, she can get out at any time, but she can't help but remember her training. How she had hung over a gap much like this one with nothing but her hands to hold her. How some of the girls had not been able to hold on.

There is red in my ledger, she tells Loki, and she isn't lying at all. She burns with the need to wipe it out.

She bares her soul to them, time after time, rips out her heart, and then she -

Reveals the warrior under the pretty face. Breaks their bones without breaking a sweat. Thanks them for their cooperation.

She lets them know they've been played, and they dismiss everything they've just heard as an illusion.

The first thing she ever learned was to always believe your own lies, and to never lie when the truth would work just as well.

She's not sure what the truth is anymore.

There is a woman who has just emerged from a box. Her dress covers her torso. The fabric is dark.

If there is a bloodstain there, no one will know. Not so long as her pretty face keeps smiling.

The audience applauds because even though they are familiar with this trick, they are not sure how it is done.

(The trick is not to never be torn open. The trick is not to let them see you bleed once you've been put together again.)

Watch closely. This is a trick.

There is a hat. The man pulls things out of it in an endless stream. Doves. Rabbits. Handkerchiefs that never end. Wonderful things. Beautiful things. Valuable things. More things than it could possibly hide in its lining. The audience applauds. A little boy in the front row thinks that he wants that hat.

Tony makes things.

That's what Starks do, along with disappointing the women in their lives, drinking too much, and waking up in the middle of their lives to realize that this is not where they wanted to be. They make things.

Tony makes things as a child and delights his father, even if Howard doesn't show it enough. Obadiah watches and thinks, Good.

Tony makes weapons in an endless stream, and the reporters are harsh, but his stockholders think him golden.

Tony makes things for SHIELD and the Avengers, and everything he touches is gold, right up until Ultron, and then everything he touches is just blood and bone. Ash and dust.

He is Iron Man. His suit is a titanium alloy, but there is iron in blood.

There is a man who pulls things from a hat. Or, to be precise, there are things in his hands after he puts his hands into the hat.

The audience applauds. The little boy stares greedily.

(There is nothing special about the hat. Any hat will do. What is special is the man, whose fingers are as clever as his mind. He is clever, endlessly clever, but he is beginning to think he is not quite clever enough.)

Watch closely. This is a trick.

There are two tanks. In each, a man is lowered into a tank of water in chains. There is no way that they could possibly escape and survive.

They do. Over and over again.

The audience gasps and applauds.

The boys from Brooklyn survive.

When Steve is small and catching every disease under the sun, he survives. When he is picking fights, before and after, he survives. When he hits the water and comes back up into an unfamiliar world, he survives.

When Bucky is half-starved as a child, he survives. When he is captured twice by Hydra, he survives. When he has to make his way as a person again, he survives.

They survive.

Steve sits outside the tank where Bucky is frozen once more, and he wonders when the last time was that either of them actually lived.

The audience applauds, sure now that there was never any other outcome. They are far from the stage. They do not see the men gasping. The lights are bright, and the makeup is thick. They do not see their blue tinged skin.

(There is a trick to convincing people that you're fine. One of them has it mastered. The other one is always quick to leave the stage. The audience is too caught up with the next act to ask why. The other performers are so busy with their own acts to see the ice that lingers for far too long in their hair. No one ever asks if the water is cold.)

Watch closely. This is a trick.

There is a man who plays with fire. He swallows it. Lets it lick his arms. Lets it surround him. Passes through it.

Then he bares his arms to the audience to show he is unharmed.

He winks when he tells the children not to try this at home.

Clint has a bad habit of playing with fire.

He joins SHIELD, even after hearing the life expectancy for employees. He brings in the Black Widow. He has a family even after hearing the risks. He joins a team of superheroes based on nothing but good aim and grit.

He encourages his children to be farmers or accountants.

There will come a point where he is more scar tissue and Dr. Cho's synthetic blend than skin. He is already at the point where only the pills first SHIELD, then Dr. Cho prescribes him can manage the pain in his muscles and joints. There will come a point when his eyesight fails past what Tony's tech can fix, and he does not know what he will do then.

Laura rubs his aching back with the ease of long practice. She knows him better than to ask why.

There are no burns anywhere on him. There are scars from past burns, invisible on the stage, but no one ever sees him with a fresh wound.

(He knows of performers who were murdered with their own flames. He knows of performers who made mistakes and paid the price. He knows exactly what fire can do when it is unleashed. The trick is not that he thinks he is different. He knows that he is not. The trick is that he doesn't just do it anyway, he does it with a smile.)

Watch closely. This is a trick.

There is a man who lifts weights. At first this is not very impressive.

Then he lifts more and more. Countless more. Enough to put Olympic athletes to shame. The audience assumes that the weights are secretly foam.

They are invited to come onstage. When he begins picking dozens of them on a platform up at one time, they know the weights are real.

Thor is all to familiar with tricks. He would hold that he does not do them.

Managing things is a different matter. That is a skill, not a trick.

So he holds up the expectations of his parents, of his friends, of his warriors, of Asgard, of all nine realms.

So he holds his aching love for his brother and his grief and his guilt and his rage.

He holds the weight of the responsibilities, the doubts, and the fears of a whole realm.

He holds it all, and his back is perfectly straight.

There is a man who lifts weights. Real weights. Weights enough to crush an ordinary man.

(This is not a trick. This is training. The trick is making it look easy.)

Watch closely. This is a trick.

There is a man who can turn one thing into another, as easy as breathing. It is alchemy, of a sort. The audience loves it.

The man doing it does not.

Bruce turns into the Hulk. The Hulk turns into Bruce.

These days it seems like the only defense he has, and it's easy. Too easy. It's the not changing that's the hard part.

Bruce wakes up in more ruins and wishes wearily that he was young enough to learn another trick.

The man changes the nature of things and then changes them back. The audience cheers.

(Changing them the first time is easy. It is the time between the first change and returning them to their original state that makes him sweat.)

Watch closely. This is a trick.

(You will never watch closely enough.)

Act Two

Look closely, and you will see the raw edges.

The announcer is never seen in the first act. His voice comes on over the speakers. He is glimpsed right before the second act begins. He stands in shadow, but the audience sees movement.

Then a spotlight hits the podium to reveal a mannequin, and the audience wonders if there was ever really anyone there at all.

Jarvis was real. That much is clear. His sentience was never tested by the scientific community, largely because Tony kept him private.

Vision is real. That much is clear. His sentience is constantly under debate.

Does he think or is it programmed? Is there a soul rattling around in there, or just false flesh and wires?

Everyone has an opinion.

Vision does not weigh in on the matter.

The performers are frequently asked about the announcer. They all say that of course he is real. Of course he is present. He is simply unavailable at the moment.

(Those that ask don't know the performers well enough to realize that some of them believe these statements more than others.)

There is a girl that performs beautiful illusions. Her act is never announced quite right. It is always her name and then a pause where an "and" should follow.

The audience is too caught up in the wonder to notice.

Wanda and Pietro. Pietro and Wanda.

It was never supposed to be just one alone.

She does her part and does it well.

But she always has to bite back a protest when someone sits in the seat that she has saved for him.

There was a team for this part of the show once, but it is bad luck to speak of it. The performers never do. They just let it linger in silences and in one too many shadows on stage.

(Two shadows trail her always. Twice the darkness, half the light.)

There is one man who levitates. He always lands light as a feather.

There are two sets of equipment in the storage room. There is a dent in the stage.

The audience doesn't notice. The audience doesn't care.

Riley fell. Barnes fell. Steve fell.

Sam doesn't think it's a surprise that as much as he loves flying, he dreams of falling. He just keeps flying anyway.

He's not the one that falls.

Or, rather, it's not his turn yet.

He never touches the dent in the stage. He never comments on it.

(His eyes never leave it when he practices. The stage is covered in dents in his dreams.)

There is a performer that left for a while. He's back now with an updated act.

If his movements are stiff and his act more cautious, it is a matter for the critics to determine. The audience at large just cheers him on until they forget that they once heard him scream.

Rhodey falls.

He is prepared for this. He has been for a long time. He does not regret the actions leading up to the fall. He does not resent his friends for the fall.

That last, admittedly, is more of a goal to aim for than a fact.

There is a performer who was injured on stage.

Sales to the next show skyrocketed.

(The performer in question cracked jokes about how if he was still selling tickets, they couldn't kick him out. The others didn't find that very funny. To be honest, neither did he.)

Look closely, and you can see the raw edges.

(No one ever looks closely enough.)

Act Three

Listen closely. This is a lie.

There is a man who cracks jokes as he performs. Most change by the day, but one is constant when they are on tour. He always tells the audience that he's so glad to be there, that there's nowhere he'd rather be. He always gets the name of the city wrong.

It's never hard for Scott to think of somewhere he'd rather be. Out of prison. With Cassie. Out of a top secret government facility. With Cassie.

He doesn't brood. He's not that sort of guy.

But in addition to dreams of being crushed or fading until he's infinitely small, he dreams of someday going home to find a grown woman in Cassie's place. A grown woman who wants nothing to do with him.

Those dreams scare him the worst.

His partner always corrects him, and the jokes roll on. No one ever notices the sympathetic look she shoots him.

(He wants to be here because here is where the money is. Money means he can pay child support. Paying child support means he can see the little girl he left behind. He wants to be here.

But he'd rather be there. Always, he'd rather be there.)

There is a woman that's part of his act. The program calls her his lovely assistant. The audience believes it. What else would she be?

Hope finishes the suit as soon as she can. This is what she's wanted for years, and it's more important than ever now that Scott is on the run.

When that all gets straightened out, they start fighting together. It's good.

But she resents the way the newspapers all assign her the name of 'sidekick.' She is no one's sidekick, and especially not Scott's.

Sidekick implies someone of secondary importance. She has been second to too many things in other people's lives.

She does as much work as him in the act. Her wit is just as sharp. No one thinks too deeply about how barbed her smile gets when she gives out her job title.

(It had started as a joke. These days, only the two of them know it was a joke. Everyone else is too eager to buy the fiction.)

When they announce his title, they say he is the latest in a long family line. They say his skills go back countless generations. They say he comes somewhere from the wilds of Africa.

Few people know much about Wakanda. T'Challa does not blame them for that. Wakanda is a secretive country. It would concern him if others did know much about it.

He is not offended when people do not Wakandan customs or protocols before being told.

But he is quietly, deeply offended by some of the assumptions that are made.

The audience accepts this at face value. It sounds mysterious and exotic.

(He knows exactly how far back this knowledge goes. He knows the names of all those who used it. He knows exactly where he came from in Africa, and he knows that it is not a place that is accurately described by the word 'wilds.' He also knows that this is not what audiences want to hear.)

Someday he wants to be on that stage while the lights shine on it. Right now, he is just fixing the lights. It takes long hours to make them run the way they should.

He is grateful for the hours. He is well paid for them, and he desperately needs the money.

He works longer than a minor would be allowed to work. Luckily, his ID assures people that he is not a minor. He is eighteen.

Peter skims through the first few weeks after the airport fight in a jittery joy and desperation for more. It's only when the articles keep pouring in to his news app that the sick feeling in his stomach starts to grow.

News is leaked that most of the Avengers have been taken into custody. Their families campaign to know where they were. The information is withheld.

Campaigns are started. Some of the kids at school join in.

Peter goes to the bathroom and throws up. He spends the rest of the period trying to convince himself that Mr. Stark knew what he was doing. He wouldn't have let anything bad happen.

He sees Mrs. Wilson crying on TV, and part of him wants to swing over to the tower immediately.

The rest of him remembers that he is unregistered to.

He obsesses over the news. His grades start to slip. He avoids Mr. Stark's calls.

He needs to talk to Aunt May, but he can't.

Great power. Great responsibility.

For the first time, he miserably thinks that he's not ready for this.

The man who recommended him promised he was eighteen, and promised the boy not to tell his aunt where the money came from as long as the lights stayed in working order.

(He is not eighteen. It is dangerous work. He is terrified of his aunt finding out and forcing him to stop, despite the fact that she's killing herself on two jobs and it's still not enough. He makes sure that the lights are always, always in working order, whether he gets paid overtime for the hours or not.)

There is a street magician just outside the door to the theater. His smile is brittle. His hands shake.

Pick a card, any card, he says.

Most people hurry by without looking at him. When people do stop, they look at him with pity or with sharp smiles that say they think they can win.

Go ahead, he says, I was the best in the world once.

Stephen Strange has a purpose now. There is a joy in learning magic. There is satisfaction in being so good at what he does.

But his hands still shake, a friend's still left him, and every time he doesn't use astral projection to study and actually lets himself sleep, he has nightmares that put his old ones to shame.

Every time he tries his card trick, they always fall through his shaking hands.

Before his audience can wince or triumph, he waves his hands and the cards rise up and float through the air, twisting into shapes before shuffling themselves and landing back in his hands.

Sorry, he says, let's try that again.

(He was the best in the world at card tricks, once. He cannot do them anymore.

But real magic has never needed hands, and he was not the best in the world at that once. He is the best in the world at that now.

He's still genuinely trying to do that card trick, though.)

Listen closely. This is a lie.

(Just because you catch the lie doesn't mean you'll guess the truth.)