Gabriel Fletcher (
overdrawing) wrote2015-05-30 01:18 am
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The Ace of Cups [Open to All]
It's Mira's mother, he thinks. She's left things in the guest room for him in the past. Little things, really, like a packet of cookies or a book he's never been allowed to read. Today it's a deck of cards with a sticky note explaining that shuffling them might help his nervous fidgeting. He'd been pleased, tentatively grateful, until realizing that these hadn't been normal playing cards.
They had been Tarot cards.
Shuffling them helps, certainly. Gabe cuts the deck, cascades it, shuffles the cards back and forth constantly in his little corner at Quill while he waits for his shift to start at Finn's. In all his shuffling, he's been avoiding actually looking at the cards or the booklet with them to explains their meanings. They're occult, pagan...Wrong. He shouldn't look.
Then a card falls out and Gabe's breath catches in surprise. A golden goblet crowned with a dove. It looks like something he'd see in church except that it's on a tarot card. His brain tries to reconcile the familiar symbolism and he can't help it, paging through the booklet to find the Ace of Cups.
Ace cards always mean new beginnings. The Ace of Cups are a new beginning in one's emotional life, finding love, trust, and blessings. This is a card of happiness.
Gabe is pretty sure it wrong to feel this way, but it's comforting that this is the card that's fallen out.
Curious, he spreads the cards on the table and starts reading through their meanings.
[[Find him at Quill all by his lonesome]]
They had been Tarot cards.
Shuffling them helps, certainly. Gabe cuts the deck, cascades it, shuffles the cards back and forth constantly in his little corner at Quill while he waits for his shift to start at Finn's. In all his shuffling, he's been avoiding actually looking at the cards or the booklet with them to explains their meanings. They're occult, pagan...Wrong. He shouldn't look.
Then a card falls out and Gabe's breath catches in surprise. A golden goblet crowned with a dove. It looks like something he'd see in church except that it's on a tarot card. His brain tries to reconcile the familiar symbolism and he can't help it, paging through the booklet to find the Ace of Cups.
Ace cards always mean new beginnings. The Ace of Cups are a new beginning in one's emotional life, finding love, trust, and blessings. This is a card of happiness.
Gabe is pretty sure it wrong to feel this way, but it's comforting that this is the card that's fallen out.
Curious, he spreads the cards on the table and starts reading through their meanings.
[[Find him at Quill all by his lonesome]]
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The image of the bewildered boy and the explosion of color in front of him was so striking that it stopped her in her tracks. If she'd get him to tilt his head back just a little, giving the light a chance to filter through his hair ..
Her camera was already out of her bag before opening her mouth to ask for his consent.
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She fumbles with her bag to get her camera back in, embarrassed about just going off into "artist" twilight zone like that. "I was staring. I'm sorry. Don't - carry on whatever you were doing?"
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Oh, of course, they're probably something he's not allowed to breathe around or something. Lena remembers the vibe. "Just shuffle them? For how long?"
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Nervously approaching, he spotted a spread of what he assumed were tarot cards. Oh great, he thought. I was here just for a coffee not for some pretend future prediction. Well, there was no choice, and glancing outside he realised there were no seats out there either, so it was this seat, or no seat.
"Is this seat taken?"
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"N-No. Please. Go ahead," he mumbles. Gabe stares at the table, at his now empty hands and his fraying watchband. Don't pick at it. Don't pick at it. "Sorry. I'm not always so...like this."
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Getting closer, she can see what he's looking at, and she blinks in surprise. "Are those my mom's deck or is she just slowly infiltrating your brain?" she jokes affectionately.
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If Mira's mother has noticed his various idiosyncrasies, he's sure that Mira herself must have noticed. "I'm not reading them," he adds. Doing so would just be another layer of hypocrisy.
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"You don't have to put them away," she says. "Here, let me see."
She snags the deck before he can tuck it away, splits it in half and riffle shuffles them, cards cascading together satisfyingly under her hands and surely reversing about half the deck. "I believe you," she says, though she doesn't, quite. "Tarot cards are just cards, you know. Ancestors of poker cards. Some people look at stars and see the zodiac. I look at them and see gases and minerals doing some really beautiful things together. Some people see other things, but they're still humbling." She shrugs, goodnaturedly.
Mira passes the deck back towards Gabe. "I don't really believe in divination," she says pragmatically, "but I think they can be really good ways of thinking about what's already in your life." She plucks the top card and turns it over.
The High Priestess.
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"I saw Heaven," he says. When he'd been a little child, Gabe had thought that the stars were angels holding up little lanterns so that the night wouldn't be so scary. Now he sees eyes looking down and judging him, perfectly aware of his transgression.
"What is the High Priestess then."
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"If there's an afterlife," she says, willing to entertain infinite possibilities, "or somewhere we go when our bodies die, I hope mine is full of stars." She knows that's not quite what he means, but it's still a lovely thought.
She looks at the card, letting the symbolism of the figure in her blue and white robes, the pomegranates behind her, the moon and the cross, stir her memory. "The card's about trusting intuition. How you feel, rather than what you've been told. Putting together the best of various influences, making your own path." She points to the black and white pillars. "Sometimes it comes up when you're torn between loyalties or out of your comfort zone. Between worlds, between the head and heart." She glances at Gabe, thoughtful.
"I like her a lot," Mira admits. Lily had a deck, a mythic tarot, where the High Priestess was portrayed as Persephone, and that's only enhanced her love for the card. She's also really, really bad at letting her heart lead, so it's usually useful no matter when she shows up.
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Staring down at the card, Gabe finds it uncomfortable how applicable the High Priestess is to his own situation. Torn between loyalties, between worlds, head and heart. Between what his church raised in him and what he'd felt that night with Caleb...
"It's just a card. How can it tell all that." He wants to dismiss it, but the idea that one card can know where he is in the universe and how lost. It's strangely comforting, as much as it is frightening.
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"Tarot cards, huh?" She asks, speaking softly so as to hopefully not startle him. But he does seem rather lost in thought. "I don't suppose you've got room for an overly pregnant lady, do you?"
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He almost can't remember a time when his mother hadn't been pregnant or holding a newborn in her arms.
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"Well, I've never heard anything about not being able to drink coffee while pregnant," she says with a shrug, bringing the cup to her mouth and taking a small sip of the still-hot liquid.
"So what's with the hiding of the cards? I'm not here to judge," she tells him.
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Suddenly referring to them as devilry, as his parents would have, sounds embarrassing and naive.
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She watches him with an encouraging smile, hoping she's not making him more nervous than he already seems to be.
"Either way, I like tarot cards," she says. "They're beautiful."
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Slowly, Gabe pushes the deck across the table. "Go ahead, if you like them."
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