Author's Note: So heyystiles and I spend an obscene amount of time on Tumblr talking about this show and our head canons for what it must've been like growing up as the Black brothers, and this came from it (and that we need more fics in this fandom, because damn, ya'll are the nicest bunch already). Anyway, Mirrors will likely become its own fic, but this is a 'in the meantime' excuse to beat the hell out of my favorite brothers. She's doing her own 5+1 that's Cameron vs Jonathan, so this is collaboration/challenge/gifting back and forth to one another. ish.
Some days, Jonathan got really sick of his father's shit.
Okay, most days.
Edging towards every day.
Didn't that man need sleep? How could he just go and go and go and live off coffee and adrenaline?
Probably because he didn't have to do all the planning. The never ending amount of safety checks to make sure that no one was going to get hurt this go around.
It might not have been so bad if Cameron was at least marginally interested in his own self-preservation, but noooo. Always "higher, Johnny!" or "faster, Johnny!" because his brother was an adrenaline junkie of the worst order when it came to illusions. Death defying? Ha! More like coronary inducing for your poor family members watching from the wings. And he was fast. Blink, and he'd already done the thing that Jonathan was in the middle of explaining was dangerous and possibly deadly and still needed a few tweaks before they could try it.
Fortunately, one of Cameron's many talents included being stupid lucky. Like he was fast enough, not even the cosmos could catch up to him.
In fairness, only half of his rash behavior could be pinned on himself. The rest of it was some insane desire to please Sebastian, which, honestly, Jonathan never truly understood. Unless he needed a kidney, he wasn't interested in anything from their father. That man locked Cam in a metal coffin starting at 7 years old to teach him a lesson.
To teach them a lesson.
And Jonathan learned it so well, he had never, and would never, forgive him. He would leave him in a heartbeat if it wasn't for Cameron. Because Sebastian was never going to let him go. Cameron was his great opus – his heir to the throne of Master of Deception. And Cameron would never leave – he loved magic. Even if their father wasn't there, Cameron wouldn't have left the stage behind, and Jonathan couldn't really fault him for it. He was good. So good. He loved seeing the reactions in the audience, he loved being the one to help them escape their mundane lives, to see that spark of child-like awe and wonder at what they were seeing on stage.
Jonathan couldn't keep the look of contempt off his face long enough to do a show. Even Jordan pointed out how he was obviously not Cameron when he was in front of an audience. His smile was a little too sharp, his eyes a little too dark, and while he was just as good at the illusions themselves (sometimes even better) as Cameron – he hated the crowd, and it showed on his face every second he was up there.
Because all of it was so easy and obvious to him, why couldn't they see it? How stupid could they be?
And now his dad wanted newer, flashier, fancier illusions, with things that had nothing to do with slight of hand but made the stage look like Fourth of July indoors. Which was fine and dandy for Sebastian, because Sebastian wasn't the one who was going to be performing the new illusions, it was going to be Cameron, which meant that he had glossed over half a dozen safety checks (and so had Cameron) in a rush to have the special effects rigged in time for tomorrow night's show in Vienna.
And of course, Cameron thought they were cool, so he didn't disagree with the impossible deadline.
"Hey, stop that!"
Jonathan hadn't even been paying attention to the people around him until someone reached up and grabbed his arm, pulling it away from the electrical box.
"Let go," he snapped, ripping his hand out of their grip before registering who it was.
Gunter looked at him, frowning. "You were giving that all the tender loving care you give a steak when you're tenderizing it."
Jonathan hadn't even noticed. He was still fuming about the electrical props master having no backbone to stand up to Sebastian when the latter forced him to approve the safety check when it was only half finished, which meant he had to.
He shrugged. "It's a mess. Nothing is labelled. I turned the power off at the box backstage so I wouldn't electrocute myself, but damn. Where does Sebastian even get these people?"
Despite being a top selling magician, invited to perform in front of royalty on more than one occasion in more than one country, Sebastian Black tended to hire less scrupulous people for behind the scenes because his paranoia won out over practicality. In the off chance someone realized that there were two of them, it was easier to persuade them to keep their mouths shut if they had to worry about going to prison over OSHA violations.
Gunter grunted. He appreciated the workmanship about as much as Jonathan did, and that was one of the many, many reasons Jonathan was happy to have him on set. One, because he was good at his job. And two – because he could stand up to Sebastian with nothing more than a scowl and a vague threat involving body parts as jewelry accessories.
"Your dad was pushing to have it set up for a trial run," Gunter warned. "Thought you ought to know, if you're going to be digging around elbow deep in wires."
"I told the stage manager not to energize anything until I got back."
"Yeah. And we know your dad doesn't like it when people tell him no."
Jonathan snorted. Did he ever.
He glanced back at the wiring, fairly confident he'd managed to get it into semi working order without risking life and limb, but his obsessive nature didn't allow for assumptions. He raised the screwdriver in his hand to adjust one last grounding wire and then suddenly he was looking straight up and back, his vision spotty and whited out like the color of the world had suddenly drained away. His mouth tasted like copper, and his entire jaw ached so bad he wondered who he'd gotten into a fight with this time.
His ears were ringing. Not ringing. Ringing made him think of bells, and it wasn't bells he could hear. More like a whistle – like someone had left a teapot on to boil too long, except higher pitched. He reached his hands up to block out the noise, but his arms were stuck – frozen – skin pulled taught across whitened knuckles as every muscle in his body seized and locked tight.
Someone was yelling at him.
Someone was screaming at him.
He couldn't even turn his head to look.
"Breathe!"
Something hit him hard in the chest and it wasn't until he managed to suck in a shuddering breath that he realized he hadn't been breathing.
The thought should've disturbed him more, but everything felt…detached. Distant. Except…except now that he was trying to concentrate, the detachment started to fade, and the world came back in screeching full-technicolor detail and surround sound and it hurt hurthurthurt.
Everything except the hand that last he knew held the screwdriver.
Which he couldn't feel at all.
"Johnny? Johnny?"
Someone cautiously put a hand on his shoulder and he couldn't help the groan of protest because it didn't feel feather light and his skin still tingled like fire ants were crawling just beneath the surface. His brain usually wouldn't shut up, giving him every possible scenario and a wealth of information he didn't necessarily want was now painfully blank.
"What happened?" he tried to ask, except his mouth didn't quite work the way he intended and it came out less like words, more like gibberish.
Even his teeth hurt.
"Johnny, blink if you hear me," someone demanded.
That was easy enough. Except once his eyes were closed he didn't really want to open them again until he heard his brother, and he did not sound okay.
He sounded like he did when their dad was making them practice something that involved a small, dark, locked space.
If he was down, there was a good chance Cameron was down, too, and he fought to sit back up before his eyes even opened because if Cameron was panicking, he needed to go.
"Cam-?"
Someone pushed him back down with frightening ease.
"He's fine. He wasn't even on stage. He's worried about you."
Then Cam would be here. Something was wrong.
He fought against the hands keeping him down.
"Stay still," the voice demanded, and before he could protest, the voice had turned away and was calling to someone else. "Let him through, already!"
"Mr. Black said - "
"I don't care what the old bastard said, let him through."
And suddenly Cameron was there, filling his entire field of vision, looking panicked but…fine. No blood. No bruises. No suddenly oddly curved shape of an occipital bone.
"Why's there blood on his mouth? He's not…?"
Was there? Huh. That explained the copper.
"He bit the inside of his mouth. But that's over 500 volts, so Cameron, listen to me – you can see him, you can go to the hospital, but you can't be here when the ambulance gets here. Alright?"
Ahhh…Gunter, his brain supplied belatedly. Always the voice of reason in an emergency.
"Johnny?"
Cameron was asking permission for him to go. And Johnny knew if he said no, Cameron would listen. Even if it meant the wrath of their father.
But as much as Jonathan desperately wanted his brother to be there, to not let go of the hand that had wormed its way into his and get to be real brothers for once in their lives, he couldn't let Cameron face Sebastian alone.
" 'm f'ne," he mumbled.
Go, Cameron.
There was a pause, a beat, and Cameron squeezed his hand. "I'll be right there, okay?"
And then he was gone, and Jonathan's brain unhelpfully conjured up a ta da – Cameron was finally the Disappearing Boy before he passed out.
Fun fact about electrocuting yourself by accident because someone energizes a circuit clearly tagged out – over 500 volts? You win an automatic overnight in the hospital to monitor your heart.
Also fun fact – you could accidentally break your bones from seizing up violently from all that extra voltage. You could even get permanent nerve damage – or, even better – heart damage. Electric shock had after effects that could present up to twenty four hours later, so the show was cancelled because it was a fairly publicized accident.
Jonathan was strangely grateful about that. It meant Cam could and did stay at the hospital with him, albeit with enough stage makeup it took even him a minute to recognize him when he woke up.
Cam informed him that he so far hadn't had any of the side effects they were worried about. His hand was burned pretty bad though, but it wasn't third degree – the numbness after the accident was shock (not the electrical kind, Cam pointed out). So no permanent damage.
Sharing the hospital bed was cramped, but neither of them really minded. Despite being forced to live publicly as one person, they had very little time with just each other that wasn't practice, or being holed up in a hotel room where no one could see them, and Cameron wasn't about to trust medical equipment to monitor his brother's health. Besides. It was the only way both of them could watch TV.
In the middle of a commercial for Double Mint gum featuring eight sets of twins to reinforce the idea of 'double the pleasure, double the fun' which as far as Jonathan was concerned sounded like a fetish porn title instead of a gum brand tagline, Cameron spoke.
"No more risks, Johnny."
Easier said than done.
"You first," he said.
Author's Note: So a lot of this is directly from personal experience. I have no idea the medical accuracy behind it, but Jonathan's point of view was *my* point of view from the incident. Except, you know, no brother. Anyway. Whump trumps medical accuracy anyway - it is the unwritten law. (sort of - I'm just not a medical professional, just a professional unlucky klutz). Read and review if so inclined, but they definitely help posting faster! ::wink wink, nudge nudge::. Anyway, come find me on tumblr as disappearinginq if you want to chat about it!