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xp_logs2012-05-12 05:01 pm
x-cypher.livejournal.com) wrote in xp_logs2012-05-12 05:01 pm
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Doug and Marie-Ange: Everyday we're shufflin...
Doug and Marie-Ange meet for a monthly reading on the various threats that X-Force faces. It ends...very unexpectedly.
The blinds of the conference room were drawn, and the light level had been turned low - not so low that it would cause eye strain trying to see things, but definitely dim so as to not trigger light sensitivity. Because headaches were likely as a result of this particular monthly X-Force 'meeting'. Though it wasn't a meeting so much as two particular members of the team doing their best to gather information from a very fluid, tenuous source - Marie-Ange's precognition. Doug was early, and had done the work of preparing the room before sitting in a chair with a notepad, pen, and the control for the projection screen.
Marie-Ange was not early, but she did have a carafe of coffee and two mugs when she came into the room, along with a leather satchel bag that held several of her tarot decks. For this, sometimes she shuffled three or four together to see what the added elements from different decks could suggest. Tucked under one arm, she had a sheaf of papers, some from her sketchpads, printouts from their reports, and a few carry-out menus. She set the entire mass down on the table before sitting down, practically sprawling in another chair, entirely unlike her normal poised posture, and only then began unpacking the cards from the bag.
Doug had noticed that Marie-Ange had been uncharacteristically...loose in the past few months' readings, but it was only now that he felt any sort of comfort level drawing attention to it. For quite a while after her return from New Orleans, the readings had been businesslike, with no extraneous conversation. Still, the 'truce' between them was new enough that Doug was rather diffident in his approach. "Hungry?" he asked with a raised eyebrow, inclining his head towards the diverse menus she had spread out before unpacking cards.
"No, not just yet." Marie-Ange said, with a little lopsided smile. "I anticipated that I might be quite hungry later, if I can manage to put off my headache long enough." She pushed the menus in Doug's direction. "And I thought you would have good recommendations, since you usually do, no?"
Well, that could have meant she hadn't eaten much so far, but the lopsided smile and somewhat languid movements made Doug think he was on the right track. Smiles and casual conversation - it was almost like things between them might be heading back to something like normal. But maybe he'd chance a slightly more direct question for confirmation. "I'm guessing you used the usual guy?" he asked as he shuffled through the menus, trying to come to a decision.
Marie-Ange nodded with an affirmative "Mmhrm." and started organizing the decks of cards carefully after checking each one to be sure she'd selected the decks she wanted for this set of readings. "Much easier to be discreet that way, and I know I will not get reported to the police."
Doug nodded. In that case, they were going to need quite a lot of food. He remembered just how hard Marie-Ange had gotten the munchies after their partaking during the Christmas they'd spent trapped in the brownstone. He set aside several menus, and made a few quick calls on his phone. "Food's on its way," he reported when he'd finished. "Should be here in a little while. Shall we begin?"
Another "Mmhrm." and Marie-Ange began shuffling the cards, setting each pile back very carefully and neatly right back where it had been placed. "I think random shuffle on your power point slides, yes? Or did you make an iTunes playlist? Can you do that with pictures?" She vaguely remembered perhaps that you could, or was that putting music into the slides?
"I'm still coming up with appropriately mocking music selections for some of these," Doug noted. While he absolutely understood the need to not underestimate threats, he also didn't believe in taking them so seriously that they took on inordinate status beyond what they deserved. So a little poking fun helped to maintain the balance, at least for him. He pulled up the slide presentation, then opened a drop down menu and hit 'shuffle'. A small stick figure with a box for a head moved from side to side, and Doug quipped "Wheel of Bad Guys, turn turn turn..."
After a few seconds, the stick figure vanished and a slide came up with a headshot that had clearly come from corporate literature on a website: a man in a dark charcoal suit, white shirt, and 'power tie', seated, with the corporate logo on a backdrop. "First customer, everyone's favorite ex-KGB, ex-mafiya, writes surplus Red Army helicopters off on his tax return and uses brainwashed American agents to do his corporate wetwork..." Doug intoned in the manner of a television announcer introducing the next contestant on a gameshow. "Aleksandr Dmitrovich Lukin."
Marie-Ange picked up one of the decks, this one with a backing in heavy dark colors and broad lines, and shuffled it again. After a few cuts, she drew out three cards, and turned them over. A winged angel, in gold and red colors with a huge steel sword - Temperance, a man in the uniform of the Red Army, hanging head-down by his leg from a snow-covered tree - The Hanged Man, and a grey-haired mustached man in uniform seated on a imposing looking chair - the King of Wands.
Doug was familiar with Marie-Ange's tendency to have particular decks with thematic art for certain groups and situations, so the Soviet-era propaganda look of the deck she was using wasn't a surprise to him. What was, though... "Wait, is that supposed to be Stalin?" he asked with a raised eyebrow. "What are the other suit kings? Do you have Khrushchev pounding a shoe on a desk in there?" He shook his head, bringing himself off of the side track his brain had gotten on.
"Okay, so." Doug was as familiar with the widely held significance of the various cards as Marie-Ange at this point, so for readings like this he sometimes tended to put forth his own tentative interpretation and then see what the actual precognitive thought. "King of Wands - the charismatic leader. He wants to be the next Chancellor of the Supreme Soviet, the next Tsar of All the Russias. Not exactly a surprise." He looked at the other two cards. "Temperance and the Hanged Man - both implying transformation, a sense of the lull between things. We took away his soldier and trashed his offices, he wants to get them back. Or replace them, build them up better than before."
He paused and tapped his lips. "Does it bother you when readings tell you things you feel like you already know? Or does that make you distrust the obvious interpretation?" he asked Marie-Ange.
"Yes, to both." Marie-Ange said. "But I am not sure what else can be interpreted about this. He is waiting for the next move, and wants to be a leader. That is not unexpected, but it is good to know he is not actively plotting against us. As of yet." She tapped the Hanged Man card and made a face. "This, he could also be making a sea change. Changing his plans, trying to adapt. He could want his soldier back, or he could be changing his plans and trying to transform himself. But I do not think he is the self-experimental type, so perhaps not literally."
While speaking, she'd been flipping through cards in the deck, and brought up one more, another card, a bald man in glasses, kneeling by a pool of water, holding a shoe, and an urn that looked more like a rocket than a water vessel. "The other kings are Lenin, Putin and Gorbachev. Khrushchev got the star." She shrugged at the card, and set it on top oif the rest of the cards. "He started the Russian space program, yes? It seems appropriate."
Marie-Ange's choices of theme for cards always made sense, once you understood her thought process. Doug sometimes wondered how much of her choice of themes and signifier cards was her own logic, and how much might be subconscious from her precognition. But when he started wondering, he inevitably came to the conclusion that, like the question of where his own power ended and he began, that it was a complex question that would probably never be answered.
He raised the remote to advance the slide, but then paused as a thought hit him. "What about the Soldier herself?" She'd been at large for a while now, but seemed to have completely dropped off the map. There was no indication she'd gone back to Lukin, but she'd broken out of a high security mental facility, and there was no telling what she might have been thinking.
"You do not have an appropriate slide and musical selection for her yet?" Marie-Ange asked. "I know you have a copy of Orange Crush." She ran her fingers over the pile of cards several times, eyes closed and picked up an older one with worn edges, set it on top of the Soviet-themed deck and shuffled it a few times. "This could be difficult if she is recovering her memories, or has succeumed to the brainwashing entirely. I am not sure who I am doing this reading for, Rebecca Barnes, or the Winter Soldier."
"Well, I wanted to have the whole playlist done before I set the music with all of this." Doug grinned. "And I was thinking of using 'Oh, Rikki, you're so fine'. Or maybe In Your Eyes." It was one of the better memories of that mission, the ridiculousness of Wade using his smartphone to distract Mr. Barnes' daughter. He certainly didn't like to think about Mr. Barnes' insistence that he shoot her.
"I'm not sure either," he said in reply to Marie-Ange's last observation. "The files from her shrink are pretty inconclusive, like maybe even -she- doesn't know who's in charge."
"Not the second one. Wade will actually preen himself like an overlarge parrot. I do not even know how that got into the report, unless it was Sarah, because I did not add it in." Even though Wade had talked about it non-stop for at least ten minutes. Marie-Ange shuffled the cards one last time and set a four-card spread on the table, face down, the two cards in the middle making a cross.
As Marie-Ange set aside and flipped the cards two at a time, the 'arms' of the cross showed as the same card - the Two of Swords. One from the Soviet deck, the other from the older Rider-Waite deck she had shuffled in with it. "Are we doing a reading for the Soldier, or Harvey Dent?" Doug muttered to himself. Similarly, the other two cards Marie-Ange turned came one from each deck, though not the same card this time. The World, reversed, from the Rider-Waite, opposite the Nine of Swords, or maybe sickles was more appropriate coming from the Soviet deck.
"That is perhaps more appropriate than you may have intended." Marie-Ange tapped the pair of matching cards. "The Twos all represent duality, and the swords mean conflict. In this case, perhaps she is fighting herself, or fighting the brainwashing, and as of yet, neither the Winter Soldier nor Rikki Barnes has come out a winner. It would explain why she has not resurfaced yet."
At least the cybernetic arm the KGB had fitted her with was still sitting under the desk in Marie-Ange's office. It wasn't as though Rikki couldn't be a threat without the arm, but it did leave her limited to her own natural strength.
"Well, at least judging from that and the reading for Lukin, we can probably infer that she's not back to working for him right now. So that's something."
"And as we suspected, wandering and perhaps seeking revenge." Marie-Ange tapped the Nine worriedly. "What troubles me is I do not know if she is seeking revenge on us, or on the Russians who took her. The card suggests perhaps the Russians, but since we are guessing she is still fighting the brainwashing, could she be after us?"
"Anything's possible." If Doug had learned anything from his life, and the job he had, it was that. "We do still have her arm," he observed, since he had just been thinking about it. "That would give her plenty of reason to be after us. And hell, given all the other dualities, she could be after us -and- the Russians."
"If I was her, I would certainly want my arm back." Marie-Ange had ended up locking it in a steel box and shoving it under her desk, under a box of art supplies, card blanks and blueprint rolls. It was -creepy-. "I was honestly surprised Mister Barnes did not request we turn it over to anyone." Not that she'd have said yes. "Now who? I am not sure there is anything more we can get from Russia."
Doug leaned back in his chair and turned back to the screen, clearly ready to move on to the next subject. He advanced the slide, which showed a grainy black-and-white photograph that had probably come from a file that Christian Kane had let X-Force and the X-Men see when he had engaged their assistance. If the picture had been in color, the cloth covering the man's face would have been a bright purple. "Baron My Bag Is Pastede On Yey," Doug named the man.
Marie-Ange failed to cover her amusement, and waved a hand in the air just a bit trying to choke it back before just letting the giggle come out. "You have been saving that all week, yes?"
Doug tried a 'who me?' expression, but couldn't hold it in the face of Marie-Ange's giggles. "Yeah, maybe. Maybe even longer than that." There was something fundamentally ridiculous about the man, even if he was given to huge, almost James Bond levels of villainy.
Marie-Ange was still giggling a little as she sorted through the decks of cards a few times until she found one with old movie-poster style imagery. "Not quite the right era, but I am not sure I have much else that fits." She showed a few of the cards to Doug, and shrugged a little. "And I have not found enough images to complete one myself, and I am not calling Garrison to ask him to have his father and his friends to sit for portraits." Though now that she thought about it, that might not be a entirely bad idea.
"Well, it'd certainly appeal to his vanity." And the elder Kane certainly seemed to have some, even if it was entirely justified by his abilities and having grown old in a profession that tended to significantly shorten one's life expectancy. He waved at the cards Marie-Ange had completed. "Well, show me what you have," he told her, trusting her instincts as to whether the incomplete set should be put in with a deck, or whatever she thought appropriate.
The deck was clearly in-progress, with some cards that Marie-Ange had made herself, some from the original deck that had apparently been themed around James Bond and the like, and a few that were original cards with paper sketches taped over them. "You can see my problem, yes? For all that I can designate Zemo as The Devil, or Garrison as The Fool." Marie-Ange actually looked sheepish at that, as she showed the card to Doug, one of the ones she had finished drawing. "Do not tell him. It is not about foolishness but a journey, but I am not certain he would take it well." She tucked the card back into the pile and continued. "I am not even sure who would represent some of these.
"I think if you explained the -actual- significance and not just the name, he might..." Not that Special Inspector Garrison Kane of the Royal Canadian Blah Blah Blah was Doug's favorite person ever, but he at least tried not to badmouth the man. He waved a hand. "So put the partial in with a full deck, or whatever." He trusted Marie-Ange's instincts when it came to this sort of thing. Implicitly. "It's a work in progress, no big."
Marie-Ange shrugged diffidently, and shuffled the cards, taking much more care than usual, as some of them were still just images taped over card backs. She cut a few times, let Doug cut the cards once, and then repeated the four-card spread from earlier.
It was ... probably inappropriate that she started giggling as she turned over The World, and then The Sun, and then The Star, and finally just simply put her hand over her mouth and laughed out loud as the last card came up as The Moon. Possibly because it was ... not... from the same deck as the others, not even taking into account that it was a half-assembled tarot deck.
Doug grinned at the sight of the comically thin-legged character on the card, not even questioning how it had gotten in. Weirder things had happened with Marie-Ange's decks in the name of her readings. "We are going to steal..." he declaimed in a terrible fake Eastern European accent that was spot on with the character he was quoting. "Pause for effect..." he stage whispered before jumping up from his chair to strike a bodybuilding-like pose. "THE MOOOOOOOOOOOOOON!"
The really frightening part was that he wouldn't put that past Zemo.
"Doug, I need a twinkie now." Marie-Ange was uncharacteristically laughing full-out for several seconds before she could take a breath and manage to get down to just occasional giggling. "I do not even know how that got into this deck. I was going to make one that was a little ridiculous and see what it got me but I never got past a few cards. It was in the box under my desk. I need a twinkie because the minions look like twinkies." And she was starting to get the munchies.
"You have minions, get one of them to go get you a twinkie," Doug suggested with a grin. The kitchenette was in view across the hallway from the conference room. And he knew there was always a stock of Twinkies in there, given the number of people in the office who liked their sugar buzz. These days Marie-Ange favored her imps, but he would bet she had an image of the minions from Despicable Me that she could use. He made a thoughtful noise. "Whatever happened to Blinky the Umlaut, anyway?" he asked.
"Retired." Marie-Ange said, somewhat bitterly. "Until certain people who are living on the west coast stop being, let me see how to put this, I think, stop being assholes, I am not going to remind myself of a time when they were not."
"...damn." Doug couldn't really argue with that reasoning. And in fact, he felt pretty much the same way, now that he thought about it. The hangup when he'd thought he was sixteen still burned. "Maybe we should reclaim it. Do something to wash that bad taste out." He pondered. "I know, I'll write a webcomic. The Adventures of Blinky the Umlaut and His Androgynous Spanish Companion Tilde Swinton."
"Yes, we should do that just a soon as both of us have free time." Marie-Ange said, nose crinkled up with suppressed laughter. "But for now, perhaps back to Zemo? All of those cards are about power of some kind, or leadership, which I imagine means he is simply up to his usual antics? Sitting in his lair and waiting so he can steal... " A giggle. "the moon." Another giggle.
Doug nodded. They weren't exactly blessed with a surfeit of free time. But the idea was pretty funny. "Yeah, that seems pretty much his style. Brood in a ridiculously ornate chair in his mountain fortress that has sharks with frickin' laser beams, et cetera. So, planning, not active. I'll take relative good news where we can find it."
The next slide featured a photo of a man who might as well have had 'mafia' stamped on his forehead - a very handsome man with chiseled features, but a very hard glint to his eyes. "Our new 'special friend' and Kick distributor, Billy Russo." The last he'd checked, Russo was in traction at a prestigious hospital under an assumed name. Remy's throwing the man out a window apparently hadn't killed him.
They did not know much about Russo, and so Marie-Ange turned to her 'regular' deck, a worn Rider-Waite standard deck. A quick shuffle and cut, and she dealt out two cards, flipping them over easily, only to cock her head at the reading. "Well, I suppose that is unerringly clear." She tapped the first card, a young man in bright tunic and pants, and frowned. "Reversed, I think the Fool means he is ... waiting to start a journey, or has ended one? Perhaps check to see he is not dead or in some sort of coma?" She nudged the other, this one facing her. "I think something is preventing him from moving on, or preventing him from achieving some goal of his? This usually means pain or fear keeping you in place."
"The last report I read said he was immobilized for some operations and to aid healing," Doug observed. "Maybe that's what it means. He's stuck until they let him out. And it's almost certainly painful." His heart bled for the gangster. Really it did. Not. He doubted any member of X-Force would shed a tear if he could find some way past all the flunkies protecting Russo and loaded the man's IV up with something lethal. But unfortunately the man was practically surrounded by people he trusted.
"Well, Remy did throw him out a window." Marie-Ange said, with a almost too cheerful expression. "He has plans and is waiting to move forward on them, not unexpected, no? Nothing we can do, I suppose unless he makes a move. Who is next?"
The next image was a blurry picture of a large form, a blend of flesh and electronics, one that Doug would probably never be able to see or remember without his blood running cold. This time there was no flippant remark, no joking, just a flat "Her."
"Oh." Marie-Ange sobered almost immediately. Even the doctored brownies she'd eaten earlier could not prevent the dark mood that even a mention of Natalia Ignatova put her in. "Yes, probably wise."
She took quite a bit of care in selecting the deck, shuffling the Russian themed one in with one of her older hand-drawn decks, and had to stop once because her fingers just could not seem to grip the cards without denting the edges. "Are you certain? I can read this in private."
Despite the fact that they had come to something of an uneasy truce, it was somewhat startling to Doug, the softness of Marie-Ange's voice, the offer she made. There was almost...a protectiveness to it. That was uncharacteristic of her, really, even from his memories of their dating. "No," he said resolutely. "Just because it's my personal..." he trailed off. two years of armor and defensiveness stripped away. Oh, he thought to himself. "Excuse me," he said hoarsely, standing up and walking out of the room into the kitchenette, unable to even look at Marie-Ange.
Marie-Ange waited a few moments, idly tidying her cards into suits - Wands, Swords, and so on, to see if Doug would return. She suspected not, but he was sometimes unpredictable, working new patterns into his reactions that she could not discern, especially now that they did not live together. She was tidying the last pile when she heard the retching from the kitchenette, and was up without consideration for the clutter in the room, or the cards she'd just strewn all over the floor.
In her haste to check on Doug and make sure he did not sick up on the floor, but in the trash can, she did not see the cards slide to the floor and land in two perfect crosses, Knight of Cups crossed with the Four, and the Five crossed with the Ten, nor did she even realize that she'd knocked over her bottle of water, soaking the cards on the floor until several hours later when she returned to pick up their mess.
The blinds of the conference room were drawn, and the light level had been turned low - not so low that it would cause eye strain trying to see things, but definitely dim so as to not trigger light sensitivity. Because headaches were likely as a result of this particular monthly X-Force 'meeting'. Though it wasn't a meeting so much as two particular members of the team doing their best to gather information from a very fluid, tenuous source - Marie-Ange's precognition. Doug was early, and had done the work of preparing the room before sitting in a chair with a notepad, pen, and the control for the projection screen.
Marie-Ange was not early, but she did have a carafe of coffee and two mugs when she came into the room, along with a leather satchel bag that held several of her tarot decks. For this, sometimes she shuffled three or four together to see what the added elements from different decks could suggest. Tucked under one arm, she had a sheaf of papers, some from her sketchpads, printouts from their reports, and a few carry-out menus. She set the entire mass down on the table before sitting down, practically sprawling in another chair, entirely unlike her normal poised posture, and only then began unpacking the cards from the bag.
Doug had noticed that Marie-Ange had been uncharacteristically...loose in the past few months' readings, but it was only now that he felt any sort of comfort level drawing attention to it. For quite a while after her return from New Orleans, the readings had been businesslike, with no extraneous conversation. Still, the 'truce' between them was new enough that Doug was rather diffident in his approach. "Hungry?" he asked with a raised eyebrow, inclining his head towards the diverse menus she had spread out before unpacking cards.
"No, not just yet." Marie-Ange said, with a little lopsided smile. "I anticipated that I might be quite hungry later, if I can manage to put off my headache long enough." She pushed the menus in Doug's direction. "And I thought you would have good recommendations, since you usually do, no?"
Well, that could have meant she hadn't eaten much so far, but the lopsided smile and somewhat languid movements made Doug think he was on the right track. Smiles and casual conversation - it was almost like things between them might be heading back to something like normal. But maybe he'd chance a slightly more direct question for confirmation. "I'm guessing you used the usual guy?" he asked as he shuffled through the menus, trying to come to a decision.
Marie-Ange nodded with an affirmative "Mmhrm." and started organizing the decks of cards carefully after checking each one to be sure she'd selected the decks she wanted for this set of readings. "Much easier to be discreet that way, and I know I will not get reported to the police."
Doug nodded. In that case, they were going to need quite a lot of food. He remembered just how hard Marie-Ange had gotten the munchies after their partaking during the Christmas they'd spent trapped in the brownstone. He set aside several menus, and made a few quick calls on his phone. "Food's on its way," he reported when he'd finished. "Should be here in a little while. Shall we begin?"
Another "Mmhrm." and Marie-Ange began shuffling the cards, setting each pile back very carefully and neatly right back where it had been placed. "I think random shuffle on your power point slides, yes? Or did you make an iTunes playlist? Can you do that with pictures?" She vaguely remembered perhaps that you could, or was that putting music into the slides?
"I'm still coming up with appropriately mocking music selections for some of these," Doug noted. While he absolutely understood the need to not underestimate threats, he also didn't believe in taking them so seriously that they took on inordinate status beyond what they deserved. So a little poking fun helped to maintain the balance, at least for him. He pulled up the slide presentation, then opened a drop down menu and hit 'shuffle'. A small stick figure with a box for a head moved from side to side, and Doug quipped "Wheel of Bad Guys, turn turn turn..."
After a few seconds, the stick figure vanished and a slide came up with a headshot that had clearly come from corporate literature on a website: a man in a dark charcoal suit, white shirt, and 'power tie', seated, with the corporate logo on a backdrop. "First customer, everyone's favorite ex-KGB, ex-mafiya, writes surplus Red Army helicopters off on his tax return and uses brainwashed American agents to do his corporate wetwork..." Doug intoned in the manner of a television announcer introducing the next contestant on a gameshow. "Aleksandr Dmitrovich Lukin."
Marie-Ange picked up one of the decks, this one with a backing in heavy dark colors and broad lines, and shuffled it again. After a few cuts, she drew out three cards, and turned them over. A winged angel, in gold and red colors with a huge steel sword - Temperance, a man in the uniform of the Red Army, hanging head-down by his leg from a snow-covered tree - The Hanged Man, and a grey-haired mustached man in uniform seated on a imposing looking chair - the King of Wands.
Doug was familiar with Marie-Ange's tendency to have particular decks with thematic art for certain groups and situations, so the Soviet-era propaganda look of the deck she was using wasn't a surprise to him. What was, though... "Wait, is that supposed to be Stalin?" he asked with a raised eyebrow. "What are the other suit kings? Do you have Khrushchev pounding a shoe on a desk in there?" He shook his head, bringing himself off of the side track his brain had gotten on.
"Okay, so." Doug was as familiar with the widely held significance of the various cards as Marie-Ange at this point, so for readings like this he sometimes tended to put forth his own tentative interpretation and then see what the actual precognitive thought. "King of Wands - the charismatic leader. He wants to be the next Chancellor of the Supreme Soviet, the next Tsar of All the Russias. Not exactly a surprise." He looked at the other two cards. "Temperance and the Hanged Man - both implying transformation, a sense of the lull between things. We took away his soldier and trashed his offices, he wants to get them back. Or replace them, build them up better than before."
He paused and tapped his lips. "Does it bother you when readings tell you things you feel like you already know? Or does that make you distrust the obvious interpretation?" he asked Marie-Ange.
"Yes, to both." Marie-Ange said. "But I am not sure what else can be interpreted about this. He is waiting for the next move, and wants to be a leader. That is not unexpected, but it is good to know he is not actively plotting against us. As of yet." She tapped the Hanged Man card and made a face. "This, he could also be making a sea change. Changing his plans, trying to adapt. He could want his soldier back, or he could be changing his plans and trying to transform himself. But I do not think he is the self-experimental type, so perhaps not literally."
While speaking, she'd been flipping through cards in the deck, and brought up one more, another card, a bald man in glasses, kneeling by a pool of water, holding a shoe, and an urn that looked more like a rocket than a water vessel. "The other kings are Lenin, Putin and Gorbachev. Khrushchev got the star." She shrugged at the card, and set it on top oif the rest of the cards. "He started the Russian space program, yes? It seems appropriate."
Marie-Ange's choices of theme for cards always made sense, once you understood her thought process. Doug sometimes wondered how much of her choice of themes and signifier cards was her own logic, and how much might be subconscious from her precognition. But when he started wondering, he inevitably came to the conclusion that, like the question of where his own power ended and he began, that it was a complex question that would probably never be answered.
He raised the remote to advance the slide, but then paused as a thought hit him. "What about the Soldier herself?" She'd been at large for a while now, but seemed to have completely dropped off the map. There was no indication she'd gone back to Lukin, but she'd broken out of a high security mental facility, and there was no telling what she might have been thinking.
"You do not have an appropriate slide and musical selection for her yet?" Marie-Ange asked. "I know you have a copy of Orange Crush." She ran her fingers over the pile of cards several times, eyes closed and picked up an older one with worn edges, set it on top of the Soviet-themed deck and shuffled it a few times. "This could be difficult if she is recovering her memories, or has succeumed to the brainwashing entirely. I am not sure who I am doing this reading for, Rebecca Barnes, or the Winter Soldier."
"Well, I wanted to have the whole playlist done before I set the music with all of this." Doug grinned. "And I was thinking of using 'Oh, Rikki, you're so fine'. Or maybe In Your Eyes." It was one of the better memories of that mission, the ridiculousness of Wade using his smartphone to distract Mr. Barnes' daughter. He certainly didn't like to think about Mr. Barnes' insistence that he shoot her.
"I'm not sure either," he said in reply to Marie-Ange's last observation. "The files from her shrink are pretty inconclusive, like maybe even -she- doesn't know who's in charge."
"Not the second one. Wade will actually preen himself like an overlarge parrot. I do not even know how that got into the report, unless it was Sarah, because I did not add it in." Even though Wade had talked about it non-stop for at least ten minutes. Marie-Ange shuffled the cards one last time and set a four-card spread on the table, face down, the two cards in the middle making a cross.
As Marie-Ange set aside and flipped the cards two at a time, the 'arms' of the cross showed as the same card - the Two of Swords. One from the Soviet deck, the other from the older Rider-Waite deck she had shuffled in with it. "Are we doing a reading for the Soldier, or Harvey Dent?" Doug muttered to himself. Similarly, the other two cards Marie-Ange turned came one from each deck, though not the same card this time. The World, reversed, from the Rider-Waite, opposite the Nine of Swords, or maybe sickles was more appropriate coming from the Soviet deck.
"That is perhaps more appropriate than you may have intended." Marie-Ange tapped the pair of matching cards. "The Twos all represent duality, and the swords mean conflict. In this case, perhaps she is fighting herself, or fighting the brainwashing, and as of yet, neither the Winter Soldier nor Rikki Barnes has come out a winner. It would explain why she has not resurfaced yet."
At least the cybernetic arm the KGB had fitted her with was still sitting under the desk in Marie-Ange's office. It wasn't as though Rikki couldn't be a threat without the arm, but it did leave her limited to her own natural strength.
"Well, at least judging from that and the reading for Lukin, we can probably infer that she's not back to working for him right now. So that's something."
"And as we suspected, wandering and perhaps seeking revenge." Marie-Ange tapped the Nine worriedly. "What troubles me is I do not know if she is seeking revenge on us, or on the Russians who took her. The card suggests perhaps the Russians, but since we are guessing she is still fighting the brainwashing, could she be after us?"
"Anything's possible." If Doug had learned anything from his life, and the job he had, it was that. "We do still have her arm," he observed, since he had just been thinking about it. "That would give her plenty of reason to be after us. And hell, given all the other dualities, she could be after us -and- the Russians."
"If I was her, I would certainly want my arm back." Marie-Ange had ended up locking it in a steel box and shoving it under her desk, under a box of art supplies, card blanks and blueprint rolls. It was -creepy-. "I was honestly surprised Mister Barnes did not request we turn it over to anyone." Not that she'd have said yes. "Now who? I am not sure there is anything more we can get from Russia."
Doug leaned back in his chair and turned back to the screen, clearly ready to move on to the next subject. He advanced the slide, which showed a grainy black-and-white photograph that had probably come from a file that Christian Kane had let X-Force and the X-Men see when he had engaged their assistance. If the picture had been in color, the cloth covering the man's face would have been a bright purple. "Baron My Bag Is Pastede On Yey," Doug named the man.
Marie-Ange failed to cover her amusement, and waved a hand in the air just a bit trying to choke it back before just letting the giggle come out. "You have been saving that all week, yes?"
Doug tried a 'who me?' expression, but couldn't hold it in the face of Marie-Ange's giggles. "Yeah, maybe. Maybe even longer than that." There was something fundamentally ridiculous about the man, even if he was given to huge, almost James Bond levels of villainy.
Marie-Ange was still giggling a little as she sorted through the decks of cards a few times until she found one with old movie-poster style imagery. "Not quite the right era, but I am not sure I have much else that fits." She showed a few of the cards to Doug, and shrugged a little. "And I have not found enough images to complete one myself, and I am not calling Garrison to ask him to have his father and his friends to sit for portraits." Though now that she thought about it, that might not be a entirely bad idea.
"Well, it'd certainly appeal to his vanity." And the elder Kane certainly seemed to have some, even if it was entirely justified by his abilities and having grown old in a profession that tended to significantly shorten one's life expectancy. He waved at the cards Marie-Ange had completed. "Well, show me what you have," he told her, trusting her instincts as to whether the incomplete set should be put in with a deck, or whatever she thought appropriate.
The deck was clearly in-progress, with some cards that Marie-Ange had made herself, some from the original deck that had apparently been themed around James Bond and the like, and a few that were original cards with paper sketches taped over them. "You can see my problem, yes? For all that I can designate Zemo as The Devil, or Garrison as The Fool." Marie-Ange actually looked sheepish at that, as she showed the card to Doug, one of the ones she had finished drawing. "Do not tell him. It is not about foolishness but a journey, but I am not certain he would take it well." She tucked the card back into the pile and continued. "I am not even sure who would represent some of these.
"I think if you explained the -actual- significance and not just the name, he might..." Not that Special Inspector Garrison Kane of the Royal Canadian Blah Blah Blah was Doug's favorite person ever, but he at least tried not to badmouth the man. He waved a hand. "So put the partial in with a full deck, or whatever." He trusted Marie-Ange's instincts when it came to this sort of thing. Implicitly. "It's a work in progress, no big."
Marie-Ange shrugged diffidently, and shuffled the cards, taking much more care than usual, as some of them were still just images taped over card backs. She cut a few times, let Doug cut the cards once, and then repeated the four-card spread from earlier.
It was ... probably inappropriate that she started giggling as she turned over The World, and then The Sun, and then The Star, and finally just simply put her hand over her mouth and laughed out loud as the last card came up as The Moon. Possibly because it was ... not... from the same deck as the others, not even taking into account that it was a half-assembled tarot deck.
Doug grinned at the sight of the comically thin-legged character on the card, not even questioning how it had gotten in. Weirder things had happened with Marie-Ange's decks in the name of her readings. "We are going to steal..." he declaimed in a terrible fake Eastern European accent that was spot on with the character he was quoting. "Pause for effect..." he stage whispered before jumping up from his chair to strike a bodybuilding-like pose. "THE MOOOOOOOOOOOOOON!"
The really frightening part was that he wouldn't put that past Zemo.
"Doug, I need a twinkie now." Marie-Ange was uncharacteristically laughing full-out for several seconds before she could take a breath and manage to get down to just occasional giggling. "I do not even know how that got into this deck. I was going to make one that was a little ridiculous and see what it got me but I never got past a few cards. It was in the box under my desk. I need a twinkie because the minions look like twinkies." And she was starting to get the munchies.
"You have minions, get one of them to go get you a twinkie," Doug suggested with a grin. The kitchenette was in view across the hallway from the conference room. And he knew there was always a stock of Twinkies in there, given the number of people in the office who liked their sugar buzz. These days Marie-Ange favored her imps, but he would bet she had an image of the minions from Despicable Me that she could use. He made a thoughtful noise. "Whatever happened to Blinky the Umlaut, anyway?" he asked.
"Retired." Marie-Ange said, somewhat bitterly. "Until certain people who are living on the west coast stop being, let me see how to put this, I think, stop being assholes, I am not going to remind myself of a time when they were not."
"...damn." Doug couldn't really argue with that reasoning. And in fact, he felt pretty much the same way, now that he thought about it. The hangup when he'd thought he was sixteen still burned. "Maybe we should reclaim it. Do something to wash that bad taste out." He pondered. "I know, I'll write a webcomic. The Adventures of Blinky the Umlaut and His Androgynous Spanish Companion Tilde Swinton."
"Yes, we should do that just a soon as both of us have free time." Marie-Ange said, nose crinkled up with suppressed laughter. "But for now, perhaps back to Zemo? All of those cards are about power of some kind, or leadership, which I imagine means he is simply up to his usual antics? Sitting in his lair and waiting so he can steal... " A giggle. "the moon." Another giggle.
Doug nodded. They weren't exactly blessed with a surfeit of free time. But the idea was pretty funny. "Yeah, that seems pretty much his style. Brood in a ridiculously ornate chair in his mountain fortress that has sharks with frickin' laser beams, et cetera. So, planning, not active. I'll take relative good news where we can find it."
The next slide featured a photo of a man who might as well have had 'mafia' stamped on his forehead - a very handsome man with chiseled features, but a very hard glint to his eyes. "Our new 'special friend' and Kick distributor, Billy Russo." The last he'd checked, Russo was in traction at a prestigious hospital under an assumed name. Remy's throwing the man out a window apparently hadn't killed him.
They did not know much about Russo, and so Marie-Ange turned to her 'regular' deck, a worn Rider-Waite standard deck. A quick shuffle and cut, and she dealt out two cards, flipping them over easily, only to cock her head at the reading. "Well, I suppose that is unerringly clear." She tapped the first card, a young man in bright tunic and pants, and frowned. "Reversed, I think the Fool means he is ... waiting to start a journey, or has ended one? Perhaps check to see he is not dead or in some sort of coma?" She nudged the other, this one facing her. "I think something is preventing him from moving on, or preventing him from achieving some goal of his? This usually means pain or fear keeping you in place."
"The last report I read said he was immobilized for some operations and to aid healing," Doug observed. "Maybe that's what it means. He's stuck until they let him out. And it's almost certainly painful." His heart bled for the gangster. Really it did. Not. He doubted any member of X-Force would shed a tear if he could find some way past all the flunkies protecting Russo and loaded the man's IV up with something lethal. But unfortunately the man was practically surrounded by people he trusted.
"Well, Remy did throw him out a window." Marie-Ange said, with a almost too cheerful expression. "He has plans and is waiting to move forward on them, not unexpected, no? Nothing we can do, I suppose unless he makes a move. Who is next?"
The next image was a blurry picture of a large form, a blend of flesh and electronics, one that Doug would probably never be able to see or remember without his blood running cold. This time there was no flippant remark, no joking, just a flat "Her."
"Oh." Marie-Ange sobered almost immediately. Even the doctored brownies she'd eaten earlier could not prevent the dark mood that even a mention of Natalia Ignatova put her in. "Yes, probably wise."
She took quite a bit of care in selecting the deck, shuffling the Russian themed one in with one of her older hand-drawn decks, and had to stop once because her fingers just could not seem to grip the cards without denting the edges. "Are you certain? I can read this in private."
Despite the fact that they had come to something of an uneasy truce, it was somewhat startling to Doug, the softness of Marie-Ange's voice, the offer she made. There was almost...a protectiveness to it. That was uncharacteristic of her, really, even from his memories of their dating. "No," he said resolutely. "Just because it's my personal..." he trailed off. two years of armor and defensiveness stripped away. Oh, he thought to himself. "Excuse me," he said hoarsely, standing up and walking out of the room into the kitchenette, unable to even look at Marie-Ange.
Marie-Ange waited a few moments, idly tidying her cards into suits - Wands, Swords, and so on, to see if Doug would return. She suspected not, but he was sometimes unpredictable, working new patterns into his reactions that she could not discern, especially now that they did not live together. She was tidying the last pile when she heard the retching from the kitchenette, and was up without consideration for the clutter in the room, or the cards she'd just strewn all over the floor.
In her haste to check on Doug and make sure he did not sick up on the floor, but in the trash can, she did not see the cards slide to the floor and land in two perfect crosses, Knight of Cups crossed with the Four, and the Five crossed with the Ten, nor did she even realize that she'd knocked over her bottle of water, soaking the cards on the floor until several hours later when she returned to pick up their mess.