❛ I swear I’m here in an unofficial way. ❜ she was sincere, but she would have understood if he remained suspicious of her true intentions. After all, she always gave to everyone in the FBI the impression of being a WORKAHOLIC, perennially in search of the next big exclusive. But that day she was off duty. ❛ So, The Horsemen—- bad story, uh?❜
the pretence frustration is easy enough to coax out—in part because he got enough questions about it on the day to day that he could easily mix that into the reaction—and dylan rubs the bridge of his nose with a bit more drama than entirely necessary. “ yeah, THANKS. ” hand falls, lands on his hip. “ it had been almost thirty minutes without anyone mentioning it. ”
“ dylan, before you say anything, i need to know. ” he forces his voice to harden, swallowing past what feels like a razor in his throat as he cuts his voice over any greeting dylan has to offer. this, sam thinks, is what he’s spent the past two days leading up to — from the moment the relief at his saved job ( and a case as closed as he thinks the horsemen will ever be ) gave way to the realization that he partner had known the entire time exactly what was happening. he thinks, almost dimly at the back of his mind, that he should be angrier than he is, should feel BETRAYED and far more conflicted about keeping quiet — AND YET
wilder has been the only thing rolling through his mind on a loop. the kid whose corpse he’d had to bodily force his struggling partner away from, only a few years older than his own boy at home. the rest of the horsemen’s plans had gone smoothly enough, so had his death been part of the design? had he been nothing but a planned martyr meant for nothing more than livening up the show? had dylan allowed him to be so? that’s the thought that works an ache into his chest, mingling anger and the prayer that maybe the entirety of the man he thought he knew wasn’t all false, lodging in the core of himself.
he doesn’t let his voice weaken, doesn’t let the near-desperation he feels color his tone, instead crossing his arms over his chest and holding himself with the air of a man who knows he holds the lion’s share of the power — the picture of an interrogating fbi agent.
“ did you know the wilder kid was gonna die? ”because i can look past everything else, but not that.
at fuller’s preface, dylan expects the worst: he’s held onto cautious optimism as he’s thought about this meeting, knowing full well there’s just as much of a chance of walking away with a hug, a bridge burnt, or a broken nose, and the way sam begins his sentence makes one of the last two more likely than the first. it has not been enough time for him to think about the impact of all of this to the everyday lives of people not directly involved. even with fuller, the priority had been trying to save his job, figuring out how the deal with the topic of himself a close second — anything beyond that has yet to cross his mind. only when the man mentions it does dylan understand that fuller, too, saw jack die on the bridge but has not had the resolution to it the way he has.
the second he realises what this is about, he understands the strain in his partner’s voice. you think i’m capable of having someone killed to reach my goals.
“ no, i didn’t. ” a mix of emotions rushes through him, too fast to read between the lines: it’s guilt and regret and insult all at once, the hurt of a man he cares about believing him to be a sociopath of some kind finally putting him on defence, paralleling too close to the plead of a man who knows he’s guilty and can only try to lessen his sentence. “ sam, i’m not LIKE THAT. ” he can’t add ‘ you know that ’ before or after his claim — dylan’s fabrication of his past has made it too sure fuller can’t know for sure — but he still appeals to their bond: the fact that they’re both here and neither in handcuffs is enough to show the mutual trust is not all gone.
She notices the movement out of the corner of her eye but says nothing, merely twitches her lips in the semblance of a smile. In the grand scheme of things if a few were to go MISSING it wouldn’t really matter. Besides, it wasn’t as if they’d ever track them all back down again, not with the way the audience was scooping as much of it up as possible. The contraption shown by Bradley earlier is examined once again in the off chance that fresh eyes would reveal something different. To no avail it seemed though. “So are we REALLY labeling this as ‘magic’? They seem more like a bunch of con artists to me.”
“ no, we’re NOT. ” the tone is slightly stricter than necessary, and dylan makes a mental note to ease with it a little: irritation, is more believable at this point than actual hatred. “ the papers are already making this magic mumbo-jumbo thing bigger than it is, we don’t need to feed it. —NO ONE is gonna get quoted for saying the word ‘magic’ to a reporter, alright? ” he adds volume to the last sentence to address the surrounding agents as well and gets a few somewhat agreeing noises as a response. with that, he drops the boss posture and takes a step closer to shepard. “ i don’t have good chances on keeping this CONTAINED, do i? ”
“MAGIC, HUH? Call me crazy but I thought it was all rabbits out of hats and making large mammals disappear and things along those lines.” She walks around the stage taking it all in with a careful eye, surprised by just how much was involved with it all on the technological side. “Am I just behind the times? Can’t say I’ve ever actually seen a magic show since I was….well, NEVER.”
it takes him great concentration to not smile upon investigating the stage, watching his own blueprints come to life in such vivid detail. he steals a moment to himself as he looks under the stage, pretending to be pulling a hundred euro bill stuck under there out when her voice reminds him he’s still not alone. “ yeah, i’m not used to magic tricks involving a MULTIMILLION ROBBERY either. ” he gets back up and checks the serial number before visibly pocketing the money to amuse her. “ you haven’t lost much, just two hours of feeling frustrated and being ridiculed by people who think they’re smarter than you because they have fake pockets. ”
Hello, my name is Aurora, I’m 21 years old and Finnish. EET time zone, naturally not a native speaker — if my replies make no sense, please let me know, it’s either because of me being tired or fucking up grammar. Please tag choking, somnophilia, eating disorders, suicide and bluespace, including screenshots of the dash: essentially, if the sides of the picture are the same colour as the dash, tag it.
selectivity
I am open to ocs and crossovers. This blog is mutuals only: threads, plotting and im are only for people who I have followed back. However, non-mutuals can send me asks and memes and reply to opens. I do tend to form mains and practice exclusivity, especially shipping exclusivity: the list can be found here. Note that I fully admit to being a lazy ass about checking my followers: I am currently using an extension that hides my follower count, so it is up to my own memory to remember to check the list: thus, it can take up to anything from a week to a month to check out a blog — more, if it’s a muse from something I haven’t seen yet.
pre-established relationships
If you have a non-romantic relationship idea (friends, colleagues, even family) between our muses, chances are I’ll be up for that, but do please run it through me first. This is twice as important for Horsemen ocs. The Horsemen and the dynamic between them form a large part of Dylan’s life, so I am more hesitant than most about writing with them because I need to understand why Dylan would have chosen them. I hope you can understand this.
shipping
Shipping-wise, Dylan is free game, but only if it happens with chemistry. This is even more highlighted by the fact that I play Dylan as demisexual, meaning that he doesn’t feel sexual attraction to anyone until he has a strong relationship with them, platonic or romantic.
Statistics
FULL NAME: Dylan Caspian Shrike
ALIAS: Dylan Rhodes (active from 1990 to 2015)
AGE: 44
BIRTH DATE: December 21, 1971
GENDER: Cis male
ROMANTIC ORIENTATION: Panromantic
SEXUAL ORIENTATION: Demisexual
RELIGION: Atheist
SPOKEN LANGUAGES: English (native), Mandarin, Cantonese, French, Italian, some Greek
CURRENT HOUSING: Apartment connecting to The Eye’s headquarters in London
OCCUPATION: The “fifth” Horseman, leader of The Eye’s western base. Worked as a mole in the FBI until being exposed publicly at the end of 2015
relationships
PARENTS: Lionel Shrike (deceased in March 6, 1984), Henriette Shrike (deceased in October 20, 1988)
SIBLINGS: None
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: Currently, none
CHILDREN: Unable to have
physical traits
EYE COLOUR: Brown
HAIR COLOUR: Dark brown, greying
HEIGHT: 5'7½
BODY TYPE: Short, square, somewhere between builtfat and chubbyfat.
personality
INTELLIGENCE: Book-smarts: studied engineering in college, degree in Criminology, mathematical brain. Strategist by nature.
DISPOSITION: Intelligent and calculating. Extroverted, but prefers a small social circle. Needs to feel in control, tends to take a leadership position very easily, as well as responsibility over others. Strong moral compass and need to see justice served.
Biography
Dylan Caspian Shrike was the first and only child born to Henriette Wilson, a former actress, and Lionel Shrike, a famous magician and a member of The Eye. The family lived in an apartment New York they owned, greatly relying on Lionel’s profession to supply for them. Partly to this, Lionel was largely absent at home, always performing, practicing, or travelling to China to buy equipment for his tricks. Dylan always knew his father first as a magician, and only then as a father.
This not-ideal but functioning life came to a stop when Thaddeus Bradley revealed how all of Lionel’s magic tricks were done in the pilot of his show, leaving the family unsure how Lionel’s career would handle such a blow. In an attempt to regain spotlight, Lionel insisted on doing a trick Thaddeus had called impossible: to break out from being handcuffed in a safe in the middle of a river. Dylan watched his father go down in the safe but the metal the safe was made of warped, making the escape impossible and causing Lionel to drown. Because his body nor the safe was ever found, his life insurance claim was denied, and the family was left without a penny.
Dylan always blamed the death of his father above all on Thaddeus Bradley, and after his mother had to give him up for adoption at the age of 12, Dylan started to plan for revenge. He spent most of his teenage years in a group home and two foster families, copying his father’s tricks and practicing some of his own, never specialising in anything in particular, finding himself more interested in the behind-the-scenes work that went into the larger tricks.
He started to study engineering in college, but The Eye gave him another task: take a new identity — that of Dylan Rhodes — and move to study Criminology in order to become a mole in the FBI. This alias gave him a possibility to start working on his plan to bring those responsible for his father’s death and the hardships that followed: a group of magicians that would bring the art back to a global spotlight whilst using their abilities to deceive for a greater cause. Gathering resources, perfecting his plan, and making it possible to do without known help from The Eye — as is required from applicants — was a long process, but he finally got it to motion in February 2013.
