The Ace of Cups [Open to All]

[overdrawing]

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]]

Comments

[meowhistory]

Maybe Lena was going to be the kind of twenty something that drank coffee outdoors all the time. Mam found it a waste of money, but only murmured a small protest whenever Lena said that she was going to get a coffee.

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.

[overdrawing]

Gabe blinks at Lena and freezes as if caught. Quickly, his scoots the cards back into a messy stack and pushes them to the side. "I was just...I was just looking," he mumbles, losing the nerve for eye contact.

[meowhistory]

"Eh."

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?"

[overdrawing]

"No, I shouldn't have looked at them anyway. They're..." he trails off and shrugs, ignoring the cards that had kept his hands steady in favor of picking at his already-fragmented watch band. "I'm just supposed to shuffle them."

[meowhistory]

"Are those tarot cards? They're beautiful."

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?"

[overdrawing]

"Until I stop fidgeting and biting my nails and...all my other bad habits. Mira's mother thought that shuffling cards would help," Gabe says. "But I don't know why she chose tarot cards."

[meowhistory]

"Aha." Her camera is finally in its place again, and she flips her bag closed. "I was going to get some cof- you're not staying in the motel anymore?"

[tothelighthouse]

Dylan was just going to have a quick coffee then take his painting supplies down to the boardwalk and work for a little bit. As he scanned the room for a seat on its own he realised that there were none; well, except for one seat next to someone he'd never seen before.

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?"

[overdrawing]

When he's approached, Gabe startles and sends a handful of cards flying off the table. Eyes set firmly down, he hurriedly gathers them all up into a stack and shoves them roughly into his pocket like a child caught doing something naughty.

"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."

[tothelighthouse]

"Oh don't worry about it, I'm always dropping things!" Dylan sits down. He takes a sip of a coffee. I should probably say something, he thinks. "I haven't see you around before, are you new to the area?"

[overdrawing]

"Very," he admits, voice dropping down to barely audible. "I got here a couple of weeks ago and I just..." Gabe shrugs, still a little uncertain of what story to tell.

[tothelighthouse]

Dylan smiles kindly. He can feel the nerves almost emanating from this new person. He's not sure what to say. "I'm Dylan." He offers a hand for shaking, and realises once he's done it that that's probably a bit weird.

[overdrawing]

Because it's polite, Gabriel takes Dylan's hand and shakes it very quickly before withdrawing, nervous of touch. "Gabriel. I'm...not very good at any of this. I'm sorry."

[astra_inclinant]

Mira's just in to grab her usual - dirty chai, three shots - but when she sees Gabe in the corner, she smiles. He's looking at something on the table and she goes for the seat across from him without really asking. She'd been tiny and barely-speaking-around-others at one point in her life too. She's not trying to traumatize the kid, but she'd really only been coaxed out of her shell by friends who hadn't allowed her to disappear.

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.

[overdrawing]

"I think she left them for me but..they're not hers." Even as Mira asks, Gabe is hurriedly gathering the cards up to put back away. "They're for me to shuffle, that's all."

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.

[astra_inclinant]

"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.

[overdrawing]

The cards are a taboo for him but when Mira takes them, his own hands feel bereft. Gabe's first instinct is to pick at his watch band, but he knows it's on the verge of going to pieces and his wages won't quite yet cover the cost of replacing it. Instead, he grips the edge of the table and tries to get his fingertips to line up as evenly as possible.

"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."

[astra_inclinant]

He definitely does need something to busy his hands. If Gabe had any more frantic energy waiting to get out, he'd be a space heater.

"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.

[overdrawing]

Well of course there's an afterlife, is what he should say. There's a Heaven and a Hell and a strict set of rules to avoid the latter and earn favor from the latter. But he can't quite manage to say it, can't quite proselytize like he's been raised to do. Some warrior for God he is.

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.

[chasingtwisters]

Moira is ordering a vanilla latte when she catches sight of a familiar mop of dark hair leaning over one of the tables. She waits for her drink, pays and tips handsomely, before making her way over to where Gabe sits, appearing to concentrate on something he has spread across the table.

"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?"

[overdrawing]

Immediately, Gabe sweeps the cards back into a stack and set them nervously aside. "Yes, please, go ahead and sit," he says. "Are you still okay to drink coffee?" he asks, genuinely curious and concerned. "My mom stopped drinking coffee in the third trimester of all her pregnancies."

He almost can't remember a time when his mother hadn't been pregnant or holding a newborn in her arms.

[chasingtwisters]

She raises an eyebrow at the way he hurriedly sweeps the cards away, as though they were a secret to be ashamed of. But when she considers how she found him praying desperately in a church, she realizes she shouldn't be so surprised.

"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.

[overdrawing]

"They're not Christian," he says, deliberately looking away from the cards now. Bereft of the shuffling, Gabe tries not to pick at his watch or the hangnails that torment his bitten, ruined nails. "They're...I mean..."

Suddenly referring to them as devilry, as his parents would have, sounds embarrassing and naive.

[chasingtwisters]

"I think that they make tarot cards specifically with Christian images, if that's what has you worried," she points out. "I think I've seen angel tarot cards in bookstores before. And I've met Christians who use stuff like these cards and healing stones. Stuff that wouldn't necessarily be considered 'Christian' in nature."

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."

[overdrawing]

Not all Christians are righteous enough, Gabe doesn't say. Some of them rely on saints and superstition without even really following the law of the Bible. Just because some Christians used them didn't make them acceptable.

Slowly, Gabe pushes the deck across the table. "Go ahead, if you like them."