Doing the reading for Melody a few days ago had put Lawrence in the mood for a reading of his own, simply out of curiosity. He used the cards more as a means of reorienting himself in a human mindset than of telling the future. They had been borne out of a human need for introspection and a desire to understand why things were one way or another. Even the negative cards sought improvement of a sort and the warnings in the good ones seemed general enough as to be constructive. He did not believe in the same way many of his clients once had but they were something which had existed as a major part of his post-Maja life regardless.

He set the cards out on the table, having let nothing more than his gut instincts and perhaps Butch's emotions guide his hand. He always chose with his eyes closed, trying to negate logical bias and to push it into something else beyond the normal bounds of concious choice, something more random. Today he was doing a simple three card triangle spread, he didn't have much patience for anything else, not expecting anything particularly kind or heartening from any of the spreads which he knew how to draw.

The first card when he flipped it represented his past and turned out to be inverse Temperance. He wasn't all that surprised, the breakdown of balance was what had ultimately led him to this place on the island and as a larger metaphor for his very self. It was and had always been the very essence of his problems, extending to his own lack of long term vision and any and all sense of purpose. They were balance incarnate and in this position encouraged nothing so much as experimentation. The natural follow up to Temperance in this form was Death, the renewal of all things, new beginnings, surrender to what had happened before. His entire life had been about escaping that breakdown of order and balance and beginning again like a skipping record. Maja had been a breakdown of balance, he'd given her what he could only to find that it had never been enough, that there were so many unresolved conflicts he had never so much as witnessed.

He sighed at the strange card, slightly irritated that it had had the gall to show up in his hand. He knew what the major arcana typically showed for this card, a winged angel neither male nor female, between material and subconscious. Of course they'd be inverse, of course they would where he had no bridge between those worlds, severed like a brain injury from the world outside his mind and the world within. He could not restore balance to his life or his relationships without the capacity to return what the other side offered to him.

Present, he thought, pressing onwards to the next card with a cold sort of irritation, turning over the next card and almost laughing as the knight of cups presented himself. A messenger of peace on a white horse. He was almost incredulous at the pointedness of the imagery, direct from the knight in shining armour metaphor and laden with implications even as specific as age and youth. The knight of cups. The artist, the messenger, the feminine poetic youth. The card did not even have the good grace to be reversed but instead was stubbornly upright, challenging him very firmly to equate the card with a person. He refused, knowing all to well that the card was heavy with metaphors about messengers, about someone bringing imagination and wisdom, change and great things. All imagination and gentle passion. He almost turned it over again so he didn't have to look at it.

He was too embarrassed to dwell on it for any longer than he had to and moved briskly on instead to the future, almost relieved in the wake of that card to see an inverse card again, this time the eight of pentacles. His future was predictably laden with the issues that his fixed talents and skills would present. Disappointment and failure borne of developing the wrong things in his life. It spoke of a future where stagnation and short term pursuits would ruin his plans. None of it surprised him but unlike most cards, it represented something which he did not begin to know how to change. How was it ever possible to change direction when you were so rigidly shackled to one mindset and place?

Done with the reading he grimly set the cards aside, not surprised by what he had drawn and slightly rattled and flustered by how ridiculously sappy they had turned out to be. There would be other readings, there would be other results and with any luck they would not be as frankly awful as that one had turned out to be. It was the first time the cards had managed to leave him feeling avoidant and slightly too challenged by what they had to say.

He didn't like it.