six card spread "what is next?"



“What is next?”

It is such a general question, vague, but ever-growing in importance as he attempts to reconcile what he remembers and what he doesn’t and the feeling that something is missing after the events on Krakoa. It pangs his mind to think about, no amount of focus bringing on any resolution or answer to the questions he has - he knows something happened, he knows people died, he knows he fought someone, but he doesn’t know enough; and though there is room to ask, perhaps, he doesn’t turn his confusion or his questions on anyone or anything but the cards in front of him. It isn’t a particularly known practice of magic - not to Henry who has considered every run at it a little bit of practice versus anything meaningful - but there is little harm in maybe giving it some meaning and trusting it, in some measure, to put him on the right path.

Because, of course, they don’t give him an answer outright. The cards don’t tell him that he, The Goblin Queen, and Mystique had led an all out siege on the mutants. They don’t tell him that he, in his power blind and Darkforce crazy, had carved a path to Bar Sinister. They don’t explain to him that, in a realm of far stronger telepathic forces than he could have fathomed, his rampage had come to an end with what could only be a diamond lobotomy - and then some; and they don’t focus on the past so much as they do the future, and his planned sojourn from San Francisco, escape veiled under a loosely-claimed holiday season and family he can’t say he had seen in years, and certainly far too many to drop in on Chuseok celebrations without forewarning.

They just confirm a course of action - a vacation, a chance to remove himself from the surroundings that seem to close in on him at times without warning and the odd notion that things just aren’t quite right in the world; or have they been wrong for so long that right feels foreign and he can’t quite comprehend it? The lack of shadowy voices from the other side is unfamiliar. The missing deep cold in his bones is strange. The mental peace to come of the silencing of outside factors and personified moral compass found in a little slice of home finds him feeling unadjusted and restless though he feels it welcome.

It takes him almost as long to read through the cards as it does pack up his bags, consideration given to not only what he’ll need and what he might not - and given the lighter implications found in the cards, there is some time spent reviewing what travel accommodations have been made as to ensure there were no mistakes - but removal of the tomes in his possession, returned to the library of the Hargreeves Mansion where they could be more readily hid away once more, set up high on the shelves and stuffed between all matters of texts that span the study of intergalactic space travel and planets beyond the known solar system to various volumes of encyclopedias spanning perhaps all of time itself - anything to keep the children well-informed.

All he leaves is a note, something for Mom to find in hopes her preprogramming doesn’t include a function for considerable worry, but he knows The Monocle had thought of everything.

“Be back in three days. Don't let Klaus eat all the birthday cake."