askandanswer | (no subject)

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[ A handmade cardboard sign goes on the podium: 3 CARD TAROT READING: FINAL CHANCE. The wobbly card table with a Tarot pack waiting goes in front. The Boy Detective himself, pasty white and raccoonishly hollow-eyed as ever, stands beside both table and podium. ]

What do you consider a rite of adulthood?

If you want a reading, an answer is my final price. But —

[ So generous a tone here. ]

— if you only want to answer, I won't force one on you. I mean, I'm practically dying and it might be the best reading of the rest of my life and you'd be wasting the special spiritual insight my hovering on the precipice between worlds grants me, but I won't make you.

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What I would have guessed. [ His thoughtful echo is not unlike the way he mirrored Fabian's earlier construction of pain and growth. ] The Tower, maybe. Six of Swords reversed. I don't know. I think I'm just not very good at understanding the Lovers card.

[ So he's not the hundreds of years older that Fabian is. Just a scrape older, hardly more than an accumulation of dirt. ]

Of course, in this case, it's not all that literal. It almost feels like an accusation. That you haven't taken responsibility for your actions, whatever they were, and that you did nothing about imbalances in a past relationship. That you made the wrong decisions for the wrong reasons.

I've spent many years reflecting on such matters. [ He leans lightly on the podium and slides the card between his fingers. If not for the blood spilled, Fabian would be among the bodies that now occupy the ground. Alas, still he lives to endure those counts. Such is his punishment. To endure. ]

And of these decisions I once made I can solemnly say so few were right. [ He sets the card down ] Suiting indeed, but fret not. I pay a great price of long endurance. Love is the greatest form of evil. The greater the crime the heavier the repercussion.

[ He tries. Well, he has recently begun trying. ]

[ He returns the gesture of observation and minimal commentary. This is useful feedback, or it would be if he had any plans to continue offering Tarot readings after he dies. The Boy Detective accepts all manner of information right up until the end, however. He can safely say he's never personally found love to be the greatest form of evil, and the knowledge that someone else has is probably meaningful. ]

That seems to be what the card indicating your present indicates.

[ This deck seems to interpret the World card as Yggdrasil rather than the Rider-Waite association of a naked woman wreathed in the sky. Upside down, like his first card. ]

The World, reversed. You linger on, things left unsaid, people left hanging. Your cycle persists in stagnation.

[ And now we come to see why his answer was pain and the realization of pain. Fabian was never an evil person although his past doings were certainly exactly that. In those times, murder and torture was family activities but there's a line in which such things transition from a right to a sin.

There will never be a pain greater to him than knowing those years long ago. A love so consuming and poisonous it swallowed him whole. Like the serpent, he is devoured slow and sure. He can continue and endure but he is aware what lays for him at the end of his journey. He makes no attempt to beg for mercy, only an attempt to be the best he can be with what he has. ]

How quickly you find me in a state of profound vulnerability. [ It is said after a long pause. Even toned as he has been from the start. If something could be said about Fabian it would be that still waters run deep. ]

Dare we unearth the last?

[ A statement like that, which he considers a compliment in this context, would get a laugh out of the Boy Detective if it had come from someone else. Here and now, though, and not just because of Fabian's demeanor, he feels like a little paper boat fishing at sea. He is too small to understand what he catches, and in any case, understands innately that he probably doesn't want to look too close. ]

If that's how you see it. But yes, I'm sure fate decrees we must.

[ Weak levity to divorce himself from whatever they've already unearthed. The Boy inhales, staring down at the back of the last card. Turned over, it will reveal a crowned man on a throne, scepter in hand. Unusually, he is beardless. Like the other cards, it's upside down. ]

For your future, the Emperor reversed. A loss not only of control, but of your rules, your own foundation. The inequalities of your past becoming the inequalities of your future — but with you in the other role, maybe. I —

[ He has genuinely never been this uncomfortable in a reading before, but the only outward indication of that is that hesitation. It's silly to feel that way, in any case. "Special mystical awareness" isn't something he was serious about and this can't possibly be any more or less accurate than every other reading he's done. ]

— suppose if one card was an accusation, this would be a warning.

[ In this context is it certainly a compliment. It's not to say he has never been matched by those of equal or even greater insight than himself. It's been some time, though. But he believes what you give to the universe you get and so he believes this meeting was so random act of chance.

And soberly, after time, he speaks. ] A fair assessment. I hold no doubt that it is.

[ The question is, when repayment is asked will he bow to it's just hand or will he stand? His name has long since left the papers of men who sought Strand's infamous accomplice but the earth never forgets. ]

Your own situation, as you mention, seems grim.

[ The Boy considers first Fabian, then the deck, returning the cards to the others and squeezing them until the design on the back returns to something more neutral.

(A labyrinth pattern, silver on dark blue, but he takes one look at that and keeps it covered with his hand.) ]

It's not. Everybody has to grow up some day.

[ How interesting the art. He'd be curious to know the story behind his cards, but such a thing is often personal to the one who holds them. He will remain, instead, merely appreciative. As far too many readers who use tarot are as if children playing with rocks. ]

Should. Everyone should, but not many do. People grow old more often than up.

[ Eventually the Boy puts them away into a small bag, with a hint of formality. The final time. ]

Only growing old, and not up, is still better than not growing at all. It means they have the chance to do it. Right up until time runs out.

A conflict in histories, I feel. [ He pulls up the lapels of his jacket and hides the smallest smile. ]

A question before we part: now on the precipice of death, where do you see yourself landing?

I don't.

[ He tucks his bag of cards into an inner pocket of his jacket. Perhaps it's an evasion of the question, but he sounds very certain. ]

Everything lands.

I think that's your lesson, not mine.

[ this had become so haunting. He gently lifts his hand to tug on his coat near his heart. Ah, sweet misery. ]

I think you're right.

[ The look the Boy Detective gives him is full of apology, but if there's anything else — compassion, for example — he holds it back. This guy is a slightly ominous stranger, and the Boy is on his way out. Nothing more can be done for either of them. ]

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