maskormenacelogs | Go ahead and read my fortune [Closed]

Entry tags:

Go ahead and read my fortune [Closed]

WHO: Anathema and Adam
WHERE: Small Mediums at Large | Jeopardy, Nevada
WHEN: A few days after this thread.
WHAT: A Job Interview
WARNINGS: N/A, will updated if needed.

The fact that they can never seem to catch each other at the flat means that the scheduled meeting at the shop was just meant to be. Adam manages to not fall off the motorcycle as he makes sure the kickstand is down as he parks in front of the shop. He pulls off his helmet, running his fingers through his hair as he takes a deep breath. What would she be like, he thinks as he digs out his messenger bag from the small compartment under the seat. He does one more last minute check of what he brought so he doesn't have to go back.

Tarot cards? Check.

Scrying Light? Check.

Notebook? Check.

Another deep breath, and he takes his first steps across the threshold, listening to the quiet chime of the door opening and closing.

"Hello?"

It felt like the first time he stood in the door at 300 Fox Way. Daunting, familiar, home. The only difference is the lack of movement, lack of people darting around the house in a careful dance to keep out of each other's path. For the first time since he's arrived he relaxes, hands loosening their grip on the strap of his bag.

He checks his watch.

"I hope I'm not late..."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

She’s precise, almost obsessively punctual — chalk it down to a lifetime of waiting for the future — but Adam’s not all that late. “You’re just about on time,” a voice calls, and then a young woman appears, wiping off her hands from doing some dishes in the back, where she’d been boiling up some water for tea (it was, frankly, obligatory).

They’ve been ships in the night for a little while, in part because Anathema hasn’t been home much lately — she’s been spending some nights at Sal’s, or even at the shop, and other hours with Adam Young now that the kid’s essentially re-orphaned. But once she’s joined him in the entryway, she sizes up this particular Adam: late teens or early twenties, maybe a little younger than her. Fine-boned. Wary. There had been the hum of a motorcycle outside, she thought. He didn’t look much like the motorcycle type.

Anathema herself looks bookish, with those glasses and an oddly antiquated dress, but she flashes him a warm, welcoming smile. “Welcome to my home away from home,” she says breezily, with a wave at the shop. It’s quiet compared to the psychics he’s used to, but it’s as cozy and homey and hospitable as she’d been able to make it over the last few months.

“The owner lets me pretty much have free rein. For all my irritations with the government, I have to admit I’m glad that they put me here.”

"It's almost like coming home." He remarks, letting the cozy feeling settle against him. "A friend of mine, her whole family is psychic so it's almost like going to her house."

Adam lets the cozy feeling wash over him, closing his eyes as he inhales slowly. It's nice to have something so familiar to return to. Working at a shoe store (retail! Something he didn't think he'd be out of his depth with but here we are), living in a desert -- everything took time to get used to and he's not certain he'll ever get there. He takes a step forward offering his hand, giving her a smile.

"Adam Parrish. Thank you for the opportunity. I'm glad I'm not the only psychic around."

The statistical probability that they would be the only two psychics among the imPort population was honestly laughable.

"Anathema Device, and it's a pleasure. I'm not actually psychic as such — my ancestor was the one who saw the future — so I'm more of an occultist." Aw, he's polite. She shakes Adam's hand firmly, noting the strong well-mannered grip. She can already tell this kid's going to be pretty different from her last helper.

Waving him past the foyer and into the parlour itself, she adds, "I get it. One of the first things I did was seek out other magic-users, witches, occultists, demonologists. What's your friend like?" Surrounding herself with that sort of thing might have been unnerving for other people, but she thrived in the unusual, felt more at home amongst the uncanny. She sought out people like Adam here, collected them like others might collect baubles.

"And there's a bit of selfishness at play: the opportunity really does help me too, to be honest. I just lost my coworker this month, he Ported out, so I'm stuck running this place by myself. Having some company again would be nice."

"Nothing wrong with that. I honestly don't know many occultists." He offers her a kind smile.

Adam follows her, taking in the decor, the feeling, grateful that it was a welcoming presence. He shifts the weight of his bag on his shoulder, adjusting the strap, nerves bubbling up through his spine at the idea of performing the reading for her. She knows what she's talking about, she'll know the cards, what they mean: what could he tell her she didn't already know?

"Blue is stubborn. Funny. Fiercely independent." Pretty like a heart attack, he thought once. "She wasn't psychic herself but her mother was. Always pulled the Page of Cups for her."

Look at all the potential you have.

"I hope I live up to your expectations." He says, taking a slow breath to settle his nerves. "I'm sorry you lost your coworker. I imagine the idea of being ported out at any moment doesn't help for turnover rates."

A click of her tongue, thinking of her own fussing mother, with her stronger magic and tendency to backseat drive Anathema's spellwork. "Blue, huh? I feel like I probably would've liked her. And yeah, the turnover's... a pain. I think it's part of the reason the owner's happy to let me do my own thing: she's just glad that I haven't vanished on her yet. Come on in, make yourself comfortable, I'll pour you some tea."

Anathema hasn't missed the tension Adam's carrying in his shoulders, the way he slunk in through those doors, with an understandable amount of nerves. A job interview's a job interview, even if this particular interviewer sounds loose and friendly. But she gestures him to one of the overstuffed armchairs (there's a white-clothed endtable right beside it, ideal for tarot readings) while she goes to fetch the bright cerulean-coloured pot, two mismatched chipped cups. She settles in the other armchair and pours them the tea.

"I know telling you to relax is probably easier said than done, but just think of this as a conversation. I just want to see what you're like. How long have you been doing this sort of thing?"

Adam takes a moment to run his fingers over the armchair, almost admiring it. This would be a good place for her reading, she was right to bring him here instead of doing it in their shared kitchen. He smiles as he takes a seat, takes a deep breath, and he digs out his deck of cards.

"Not long. About a year or so. I honestly didn't think I was psychic until more recently." He takes his time, shuffling old, worn cards that hardly belonged to him. A gift from a woman he wishes he had more time with. "I suppose I always was, just didn't know. Everything I know was logic and science. Magic seemed fantastical."

And then he met Gansey, Ronan, Noah, and Blue. A summer filled with magic, the unknowable, the painful, and the dangerous -- something he likely would never forget even as he studied the normal and mundane.

"So," he offers her the cards with a smile. "What would you like to know?"

"Logic, science, and magic can all live together shoulder-by-shoulder. Just because magic's real doesn't mean all logic goes right out the window: I've found that this sort of thing still makes sense, even if it might sometimes be a complicated kind of sense."

There's a smile tugging at the corner of Anathema's mouth. With her books and lists and tablet and smartphone, people often just assumed she was an academic, and not something so ethereal as a witch. She lives right in the center of that intersection.

And here, she's ready to see what Adam can do with it. "Tell me about... my past and what you can see of it," she says, because that's one of the most reliable ways to test someone's sensitivity and know whether or not they're accurate. The future is too nebulous, too easy to say something vague and then twist the facts later to fit the interpretation. There's a reason so many con artists flourish in this industry. "And then for good measure, if you can manage it, a touch of my future or one of my future decisions."

When he splays out the cards for her, Anathema goes about selecting the cards for her draw, quickly and efficiently: fingers neatly tapping the cards he should pull for her.

"So I'm starting to find."

He nods, slowly pulling the three cards she chose and laying them face down before her. He carefully gathers the rest of the cards, setting them to his left as he focuses on her question. Tell her about the past, tell her about the future, she already knows the present but three cards anyway. He takes his cup of tea, slowly sipping it as he glances up at her.

"I don't have to tell you what the cards mean." He smiles. "You already know with your knowledge of the occult."

He flips the first card.

"Ten of Swords." He taps the card, running his fingers along the edge. "You hit rock bottom. Ignored warning signs until the final sword ran you through. However, this is in the past. The only way from here is up." He points to the second card.

"Ace of Wands, but reversed." He rubs at his chin. "You lost some of your spark, your creativity. Your passion. A loss of friends has drained you of some of your energy, like a piece of you is missing. You're trying to find solid ground again."

He flips the second card over, and he's right. Ace of Wands reversed in front of him.

"Are you ready for the future?"

The prediction is a nice touch and she nods appraisingly, impressed. This part, Klaus couldn't do. He specialised in the seances, talking to ghosts, resolving unfinished business — not divination about the people themselves.

The interpretations are still somewhat vague, but she feels the rightness of them like a blow to her chest, and she takes a deep breath. Aziraphale and Crowley are gone. The other Adam's guardians are gone. Klaus is gone. Not her closest friends, but still a lodestone, a solid foundation that she'd relied on. The City, it was rock-bottom. He's right and he's right and he's right.

While Adam talks, Anathema lets her attention meander slightly, her gaze gone distant. Like looking at a magic-eye picture. Until she can see the colour of his aura thrumming around him, her own little check-up: it's deep red, survival-oriented like a scrappy stray animal. He's realistic. Pragmatic. (Good, she thinks.)

A slight trace of anger buzzing beneath the surface — that surprises her, she wouldn't have been able to spot it normally, he's in such tightly-reined polite control of himself — and then there's... green? That clash almost makes it look Christmassy, a candy-cane disjoint that doesn't match at first. That second slight ethereal hue feels less like Adam and more like something he dragged in with him. Or that he's connected to—

She can't follow those threads without getting too lost in it, so she shakes herself back to the present. Staring at someone's aura is fairly impressionistic as a judge of character, but always she uses it anyway. And there was no swallowing black void, no deep-rooted hatred and malevolence. He's probably a good egg.

"Yes," Anathema says.

Treads upon threads -- you go too deep you may miss something. He knows this well and something tells him that leaving himself vulnerable with her won't eventually haunt him. He takes another slow sip of tea, savoring it on his tongue as he stares at the last card.

"It's a little worrying, this last one." He says slowly, not meeting her gaze. "Maybe it's a little of both your time here and your time back home. There's some... fuzziness. Difficulty in trusting your intuition. You have a lot of questions, not enough answers, and sometimes there's some dissonance between the you here and the you back in your world."

He pauses. flipping over the card. "You need to trust your intuition," he says as the High Priestess card lay reversed. "Trust yourself, and know you will rise above it, but you won't if you don't listen. This is a warning."

He stops, something else is here. "Listen to your heart and take a chance. It might surprise you as you move forward here. You can't always know where the answers will come from."

Anathema stares down at that third card. It's not until a second later that she realises she's biting slightly at the edge of her thumbnail — a fidgety habit that she thought she'd exorcised years ago, in the final stages of her PhD, when she'd been kicking herself for even getting so worked up over a thesis defense when she had a whole apocalypse on the eventual horizon.

The veiled figure in Adam's card has long blonde hair. She knows tarot isn't as straightforward and literal as that, but it still comes to mind.

Listen to your heart and take a chance.

It's been something that has, actually, been bothering her for a while. A smudged letter on Valentine's day. The increasing knowledge that people Port out and don't come back. The awareness that, maybe, the time you have right now is the only time you'll ever have with these people.

She runs through her own knowledge of the meanings and layers embedded in the High Priestess: intuition, desirability, unattainability.

Anathema is normally so cool and collected, but right now she feels hopelessly seen in front of this near-stranger, her own heart on bleeding display. She drags her hand away from her mouth, flattens her palms against the fabric of her skirt instead. Then shifts, takes a sip of her tea. It was meant to soothe and calm Adam, but instead Anathema's using it to settle her nerves. She wonders if her thoughts are all over her face.

"Thank you," she says, after a too-long pause. Then she looks up from the spread, meets his eye. "I think— So I don't actually know how much I expected, but— you're the real deal. The job's yours, if you want it."

He lets her stare at the cards, doesn't move to put them away. It would seem rude to give her a reading and not let her look at the cards herself. He taps his finger on the chipped mug, wondering if he went too far. Sometimes, something he does and pulls on threads that one isn't ready for, following down a path that he shouldn't until it's nearly too late. It's why he exercises a lot more caution with scrying as of late.

(Scrying in the Harvard dormitory was not necessarily the brightest idea when he's surrounded by people he's no now longer sure he can trust.

Not that he trusted them anyway. Keeping secrets, not explaining the truth. Maybe Ronan was right to be angry. )

"I'd like the job." He smiles. "Thank you. I really appreciate it. I don't think I'm quite cut out for retail."

He chuckles a little. "But honestly you don't have to thank me for that. I didn't expect you to just believe me when it came to being psychic."

"No, I'm thanking you for the advice, and the insight. More than just confirming your abilities, it was... helpful, actually." It's pretty clear that Adam caught her off-guard: she'd been expecting something paint-by-numbers, more just standard confirmation that he could see something true. But more than that, Adam's struck to the quick of... something. Something Anathema had been tiptoeing around for a little while.

She lets herself sag backwards, loosening her rigid spine and relaxing back into the armchair. In that motion alone, it's clear she's no longer in interview mode. Instead, she fills him in on the shop itself:

"My last coworker spoke to the dead; I can too, but not to the extent he could. I mostly read tarot, or scry for lost people or objects. But as you can see, it's a small operation here. We can set our own schedules, open at idiosyncratic hours if we feel like it. There's not a lot of foot traffic, but thanks to the government stipend, it pays enough regardless. And there's a kitchen in the back and a cot if you ever need to crash here."

It's not a standard invitation for a standard job, but from her past experience in this world, a safe haven can be desperately needed sometimes.

Her voice softening, she adds, "A lot of the time, I've found that you don't even need to use your powers, and people just want someone to listen to them. It's an alright gig."

It's nice to have a place where she can help people, without the suffocating weight of an apocalypse on her shoulders.

"I'm glad I could help."

Now it was Adam's turn to be taken off guard. He hadn't used his abilities with other people outside of his immediate friends group (a friend group that didn't exist here as it stood back home). He glances towards the cards before he carefully lifts them off the table to shuffle them back into the deck.

"I can also assist in scrying." He offers. "Whatever I can do to help you, let me know."

Give him something to do, something to work on and focus as he finds his feet in this new place. He taps his foot, in thought, in wonder at how ease it was to settle into this role than it had been when he took his first steps onto Harvard's campus. Hide who he was, smile and pretend that the worst of Henrietta still dug in his bones. He sighs.

"Does it get easier?"

It's a serious question; more than just about starting a new job, or the logistics of their housing or how this all ticks, and she can tell. She can tell because it's one she's been asking herself, too.

"Yes," Anathema says, her voice quick but kindly. "I mean, everything does eventually get easier in time. What's that quote? Comedy is simply tragedy plus time. Or time heals all wounds. Insert whichever aphorism helps you sleep better at night, but I do think they're true."

She leans forward in her seat, pats his knee in what she hopes is a reassuring manner. "Don't get me wrong, everything here will still be very weird. Bizarre shit will happen. It'll throw you askew whenever you think you've gotten comfortable. But it likely won't be as new and disorienting as the scale of change you're experiencing right now, and other people will help you through it, and we're all in this together. That's what I keep telling myself, at least."

"I appreciate your confidence."

Especially in regards to the populace of the imPort community. He's still getting used to living in the desert, the fact that he's been pulled from his own universe to this one -- but she's right. Everything gets easier with time. He'll get through this, and he'll thrive.

"Well, we're in this together now, aren't we?" He smiles at her, holding the cup of tea. "Anything I can do to help? I'll be here."

They were both thrown into this circumstance, so he might as well make sure he's available.

"And I'm here for you too, of course." A beat. "Except for when I'm not, and whisked off to another universe instead." Anathema rolls her eyes, removes her glasses to clean them as if on autopilot, looking more exasperated with the world rather than seriously upset by it: she's accustomed to adapting on the fly, rolling with the punches, grateful for all the new experiences and second chances it's given her, but that doesn't mean she has to enjoy the Porter's chaos.

"You can shadow for a bit, if you're not comfortable taking point with customers right off the bat — just having someone around to open and close, manage appointments, tidy up, and restock will be useful. And here, I think I've still got some schedule printouts we can sort out together..."

She rummages for paperwork in a side drawer; crosses out a name at the top; writes in Adam Parrish instead.

People come and go. Versions of people come and go, too. And in the end, life keeps moving.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Go ahead and read my fortune [Closed]

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

maybeee a wrap or yours to close?