Marie-Ange & Arthur | Kaleidoscope
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xp_logsBackdated to January. Arthur, who has been suffering from psychometric sensitivity, runs into Marie-Ange in the solarium and the two share a strange power interaction that crosses into the abstraction of possible futures.
His state of mind felt like throwing the dice.
That was the sort of mental gymnastics Arthur Centino was up to these days. Ever since the turn of the year, his own perception had blurred — psychometry and memory all fuzzed at the edges. A small giggle escaped as he considered that he'd thought he had a handle on things in December. Choice, luck, chance, intent, past, present. A gamble down the chain.
So Arthur wandered the mansion this evening, letting the roll of dice guide him.
A blink. The solarium. The stars above were just beginning to shine in the approaching twilight as the remnants of the golden hour faded, and he wasn’t the only one there.
"So," Arthur mumbled to no one, "snake eyes."
Marie-Ange was seated on the window seat, back against the inset frame, knees bent up to almost work as an easel for the large sketchpad she was poking with the eraser end of a pencil. "Arthur, favourite fake husband, I was just considering you." Anyone else and she'd have blamed her own powers. With Arthur, who could tell. "In truth, you in an artistic sense, I was going to re-draw a card for you but none of my ideas will settle down, so all I have is two pages of game show hosts, cartoon marsupials and a phone full of research into the Los Angeles light and space art movement. Your old card was art deco, but I thought to work on a new update for the new year.'
"Ah, like Wheel of Fortune?" He had moved behind her, taking her words as an open invitation to look at the sketchpad. "Life feels more like Concentration lately. You know, the one with the picture puzzles?"
Luckily there was enough room on the bench for two. The blonde took the space opposite her, performing a careful dance to not accidentally touch anything unnecessary. He moved like a man afraid of his own limbs.
"Draw me like one of your french girls." He did not do the pose, but his smile revealed the fact he knew exactly how bad of a bad joke this was.
"Would you be horrified to know Warren requested of me the same thing?" Marie-Ange said, with a small laugh. "The card I use for you is Wheel of Fortune, you, Felicia, Wanda sometimes, but it has not quite felt right since you came to me to ask about precognition advice. New powers, new card I suppose, even if they are not quite new powers. Maybe you will end up like Wanda, with two or three different cards that represent who you are." She flipped the sketchpad page to show a few sketches of Arthur, of his dog, of architecture from Los Angeles, the lines all minimal, firm and unlike Marie-Ange's usual work, solid colors - none of the watercolour blending she was usually fond of.
Arthur gasped, "Well, now I'm going to have to try harder. No one likes a stale routine." Despite the jibes in his tone, however, it was clear that he was tried.
Still, an effort. He looked over at the sketches.
"Oh, hey. Like that Drake video. I'm not going to do the dance for you."
Marie-Ange laughed. "That was the very first thing I got when I searched!" She flipped a page, and showed Arthur a few very rough sketches of the white stairs from the video, but instead of Drake, it was Arthur in one sketch and four versions of Felix in the other. "It has been one of those sorts of art days, jumping from idea to idea to see what sticks, and so far nothing has been sticky."
"Like character building," Arthur offered as the closest comparison he had on hand, "only . . . well, there was a reason I went with the stunts and reality television. I was never a good method actor, but that's really just an excuse in the industry for being a jerk." He studied the details of the drawings as if he were still trying to uncover every angle, every possible meaning.
"You mentioned picking cards," he admitted, "but how do you decide who means what? That's a big ask."
"Do you know." Marie-Ange started to say, and then rummaged around in a pocket for a deck of cards. "Do you know almost no one ever asks me that, despite that I probably have drawn almost everyone." She shuffled the cards lazily, an automatic habit, but then flipped through them one by one. "Sometimes people make requests, I asked Warren if I could draw him, and he had so very many suggestions. We agreed on The Sun, because he gets to be naked and riding a horse and surrounded by flowers." That card was upside down in her deck, but certainly had Warren, a horse, flowers, and the only thing standing between Warren Worthington The Third and the modesty of others was the drape of a red flag conveniently censoring his nudity.
"Sometimes it is just a guess, and I work in reverse. You change fate, so I started with the Wheel of Fortune. I know what most of the cards mean from the commonmost Tarot decks. I do not know Scott very well, but his card is The Knight of Pentacles for this deck. A hardworking and reliable leader, who forgets to come up for air when he is sunk into his work." She showed Arthur a card of a knight, but in black armor, with one of Scott's old visors instead of a helmet, and rather than a horse, seated in a bi-plane. "Most of the time it is — how do you call it, vibes of a person? I start drawing and do a lot of sketching until it feels right. Topaz worries the next shoe will always drop, so she has a card that represents that anxiety." She showed Arthur another card, Topaz in a field of rough-hewn staves, all sparking with multi-coloured magic. "But I probably have five or six other sketches that I did first, they never felt right. I do that for most people, I draw until it feels right."
Arthur's attention was attentive as each explanation unfolded, and his eyes eagerly took in each example one to the next. "We work in entirely different ways," he concluded with a sense of wonder, "I tried to think that way once, back early in my career. I'd practice every scene a hundred different ways. Copy the greats. Find new meaning that hadn't been teased out already."
He shrugged.
"For me, though," and Arthur broke contact as he rolled his fingers like he was balancing some imaginary knife, "it was the physical work that came easy. Swift, clean action. Like a dance. Too many thoughts always got in the way. I still had to put in the work day to day, of course, but that was just building muscle memory. Making it look effortless for that one, best take."
"I can do a balance trick with coins! Remy taught me." Marie-Ange was briefly distracted by the rolling fingers, and showed off her own with the stub of an oil pastel. "Or crayons, or dice. It is a parlour trick I learned just for fun. It looks easy now but I spent a whole day flying home from Russia learning. I think that airplane must still have pennies on the floor, I dropped so many."
The light in Arthur's eyes danced, snapped easily from that introspection as he pictured the scene. "Wait — so you left your two cents on that plane? Imagine what folks must have thought.” A pause. “Remy, though. I haven't," and he stopped right there. A pivot. "I don't think I've ever tried it with cards, but I bet he could."
His eyes drifted over to the discarded deck between them. Curious. "Do you mind if I try?"
It was a lightning decision to tidy up the stack of cards, tuck the few she had pulled as examples back in and do a quick one-handed cut and then push it towards Arthur. "I can do sleight of hand with them, but not roll them." Marie-Ange explained. "I would love to see it."
Unthinking, Arthur drew a card.
He was met by a lone figure with a single white rose standing on a cliff face above the sea, dog in tow, as a sun bloomed in the sky overhead. Open possibility.
There was a flash as Arthur’s power answered in kind, but no vision struck. Nothing of the past. No astral plane. Yet his eye blazed, a match for the sun in the card, and his power lit the space between himself and Marie-Ange.
The solarium vanished completely.
The world dissolved into darkness.
Marie-Ange stood alone on a featureless plane that's only defining feature was a single plane of mirrored glass that split the distance. Perfect, frosted glass that, despite stretching forever, seemed to bend in upon its own weight, fracturing the nothing through a fisheye lens. An impossible wall.
A spear, honey-gold and night-black was in her hand, and then gone, replaced with a scythe sharp as the dividing line between sea and sky, then a long knife, and then a pencil, and Marie-Ange turned around, calling for Arthur and plucking away her eyepatch to reveal an empty socket, featureless perfect skin over the place where her eye had once been. She walked to the mirror, and touched it with her finger.
Nothing happened.
She sighed, put upon, and flipped the pencil over and over between her fingers, until finally she drew a line down the surface with the thick graphite end and the line reflected twice, then four times, then eight and sixteen and two-hundred fifty-six and then hundreds, and thousands, until she couldn't begin to guess how many.
Each one reflected her, her comfortable yoga pants and soft sweater, messy bun and pen smudges on her right hand, but when she approached, they split. A Marie-Ange in a white suit, sword at the ready. One in assassin grey, in olive fatigues, in black corset and stockings, in pearl grey armor astride a mechanical horse, in black leathers trimmed with basil green, in rags, in hospital scrubs.
The other side of the wall was less literal of a mirror: an illuminated, endless desert. There was no true horizon, and each blink revealed the suggestion of bleached landmarks in the distance. A skeletal tree, a fractal of light, ancient ruins. Wafts of misty radiance hung in the air like released breath, and the only blemish in the landscape was a solitary male figure and that same, shimmering wall.
Arthur studied at the frosted glass as he idly moved the Fool over his knuckles. The card danced delicately in between his fingers — a spin, a switch, a flourish. Fingers crossed and a flip of the wrist sent the Fool along its journey before being returned back.
His own hand traced a finger across the wall's surface. Nothing.
His face scrunched as he tried to focus his power. Nothing, again.
Arthur sighed, put upon, and tapped the edge of the tarot card against the mirror's surface in defeat. Instead of nothing, there was the smallest starburst of light. He almost missed it, too, set against the brightness of this space. But, again. Tap, tap, flash, flash.
The man cocked his head, and set the full edge of the card against the surface. Two, four, eight, sixteen, and then more versions. Arthur in black leather with a starburst painted on his face, a fashionable Arthur in sunglasses, another in beach wear, one with a mullet and knives, some wearing the faces of familiar past roles, and some of his more current faces. The detective. The friend. Many of these faces were beaten, and one held the limp body of a red headed girl.
He straightened his posture, inquisitive, and all of the Arthurs followed his lead. Some disappeared into nothing, replaced with new possibilities. More curious, he set the full face of the card against the scorched surface of the wall with the upright face of the card facing him.
The world shifted around the card.
Back in the dark, the mirror that reflected Marie-Ange rippled when she touched it, a slow and gelatinous movement. It bounced off the edge of the silvered glass, and intersected and crossed itself until she couldn't make out her own features. They split, and the mirror fell in irregular chunks that bounced around her ankles.
All that was left was the floating image of the Fool, inversed. An image suspended in the air. Her copies stared up at her from the discarded pieces, each a slightly different face from a thousand shattered mirrors.
Here, in whatever strange space this was, Marie-Ange's grasp of her power felt like static cling, pulling her towards the Fool and the broken mirror and drawing them in towards her as well. She reached for the floating Fool, and expected the hair on her arms to stand up or a crackle to race across her fingers, and neither happened. But she felt it nonetheless under her skin. A spark did not form when she touched the image, no lightening appeared, nothing to show her power, it was just a solid image, cool and smooth and strange.
Then the stars began to bloom.
In the space in front of Marie-Ange, constellations burst to life as the lightless moonscape shifted, melding with Arthur's sunlit desert. Dark and light intertwined, revealing that each star belonged to a different version of lucky man. They all turned their many eyes on her.
Much much more closely, the image of one hand, backlit, grasped the card that floated in mid air. This Arthur, much more real and more familiar, stumbled forward as his card vanished in a puff of light. The sudden action caused the crowd of blonds to shift and fracture, their images becoming more unlikely and more indistinct.
The hundreds of blue eyes widened, and they all had the same question: "Marie-Ange?"
Marie-Ange's image of The Fool erupted into a fractal fern of feathers, jet black that reflected iridescent green at the edges, and she stepped through the cloud, parting it briefly. The feathers stuck to her hair until she shook herself and they fell across her shoulders and back and in a scattered pile around her feet. "Arthur!"
The eruption fully engulfed the co-mingling landscape like ink in water, consuming all of the alternate reflections. Feathers to tendrils to darkness. Soon, the two figures were alone in their space between — one momentarily cloaked in feathers, and the other a man knocked off balance to land where she had met him.
And then, it was just the solarium. Again.
Marie-Ange shook herself head to toe. Bursts of mist and astral spun sugar shed off her shoulders and into nothingness. She stood stunned after, blinkingly looking around the room as thought it was another vision. "Are you your reality now?" Except it came out in French and she had to start again, "Are you really here, as yourself?"
It took a minute for the blond to answer. He was obviously dazed, but not dazzling — his eye was no longer shining in a thousand refracted points. "So what you're saying," was what he could come up with, "is that I could be someone else with laser powers? Or someone with a cool catchphrase."
"I did ... " The laugh that bubbled out of Marie-Ange was unexpected to her, sharp and bubbly like spring water. "No. Yes. I saw you as a pop star, so yes, but also no. Are you the Arthur I know, and not David Bowie, or a pirate, or a war hero?"
Cogs moved slowly behind those blue eyes as he considered. "I've . . . played a pirate. And a war hero. Except he was also a terrorist werewolf. Wolfgang had a very complex backstory, you see." Arthur managed a smile — it was thin and stretched, but it was the one she knew. "So. Any chance you know what that," and he gestured to nothing, and everything, doubtfully, "was?"
"Do you know when you have the microphone setup and it makes a loud noise because of frequency?" Marie-Ange asked, cautiously. "I think we did that, but with powers. Perhaps my fault, it is not the first time for me to have this."
Arthur’s head cocked by five degrees in consideration, and his thin smile bloomed as he sloughed away any over thinking with that explanation. The cogs had paused. “Well then,” the man took a relieved sigh as brought his hands together behind his head and leaned back on his heels, “that’s honestly a relief. We have an easy explanation, no one was hurt, we didn't break reality. Good for us. As . . . long as you’re still you, of course.”
"I am not a clone, android or secret replacement." Marie-Ange said. "but if I was I would say that, so I hope you trust me."
The laugh that escaped the other man's lips was equal parts tired and desperate, and that was only matched by the sudden flash of madness in his eyes. "Hey now, I'll take it. Gladly. Let whatever just happened be and pretend it meant nothing until we can't. A classic plotline."
"Chekov's powers incident, our brains are both odd and wanted to visit." Marie-Ange said, with a firm nod. "Clearly we are compatible and should be fake married again."
Arthur grinned, and suddenly the world was bright and free again, and everything was easy. "As long as next time I get to be the blushing bride. Gotta give the audience something new."
His state of mind felt like throwing the dice.
That was the sort of mental gymnastics Arthur Centino was up to these days. Ever since the turn of the year, his own perception had blurred — psychometry and memory all fuzzed at the edges. A small giggle escaped as he considered that he'd thought he had a handle on things in December. Choice, luck, chance, intent, past, present. A gamble down the chain.
So Arthur wandered the mansion this evening, letting the roll of dice guide him.
A blink. The solarium. The stars above were just beginning to shine in the approaching twilight as the remnants of the golden hour faded, and he wasn’t the only one there.
"So," Arthur mumbled to no one, "snake eyes."
Marie-Ange was seated on the window seat, back against the inset frame, knees bent up to almost work as an easel for the large sketchpad she was poking with the eraser end of a pencil. "Arthur, favourite fake husband, I was just considering you." Anyone else and she'd have blamed her own powers. With Arthur, who could tell. "In truth, you in an artistic sense, I was going to re-draw a card for you but none of my ideas will settle down, so all I have is two pages of game show hosts, cartoon marsupials and a phone full of research into the Los Angeles light and space art movement. Your old card was art deco, but I thought to work on a new update for the new year.'
"Ah, like Wheel of Fortune?" He had moved behind her, taking her words as an open invitation to look at the sketchpad. "Life feels more like Concentration lately. You know, the one with the picture puzzles?"
Luckily there was enough room on the bench for two. The blonde took the space opposite her, performing a careful dance to not accidentally touch anything unnecessary. He moved like a man afraid of his own limbs.
"Draw me like one of your french girls." He did not do the pose, but his smile revealed the fact he knew exactly how bad of a bad joke this was.
"Would you be horrified to know Warren requested of me the same thing?" Marie-Ange said, with a small laugh. "The card I use for you is Wheel of Fortune, you, Felicia, Wanda sometimes, but it has not quite felt right since you came to me to ask about precognition advice. New powers, new card I suppose, even if they are not quite new powers. Maybe you will end up like Wanda, with two or three different cards that represent who you are." She flipped the sketchpad page to show a few sketches of Arthur, of his dog, of architecture from Los Angeles, the lines all minimal, firm and unlike Marie-Ange's usual work, solid colors - none of the watercolour blending she was usually fond of.
Arthur gasped, "Well, now I'm going to have to try harder. No one likes a stale routine." Despite the jibes in his tone, however, it was clear that he was tried.
Still, an effort. He looked over at the sketches.
"Oh, hey. Like that Drake video. I'm not going to do the dance for you."
Marie-Ange laughed. "That was the very first thing I got when I searched!" She flipped a page, and showed Arthur a few very rough sketches of the white stairs from the video, but instead of Drake, it was Arthur in one sketch and four versions of Felix in the other. "It has been one of those sorts of art days, jumping from idea to idea to see what sticks, and so far nothing has been sticky."
"Like character building," Arthur offered as the closest comparison he had on hand, "only . . . well, there was a reason I went with the stunts and reality television. I was never a good method actor, but that's really just an excuse in the industry for being a jerk." He studied the details of the drawings as if he were still trying to uncover every angle, every possible meaning.
"You mentioned picking cards," he admitted, "but how do you decide who means what? That's a big ask."
"Do you know." Marie-Ange started to say, and then rummaged around in a pocket for a deck of cards. "Do you know almost no one ever asks me that, despite that I probably have drawn almost everyone." She shuffled the cards lazily, an automatic habit, but then flipped through them one by one. "Sometimes people make requests, I asked Warren if I could draw him, and he had so very many suggestions. We agreed on The Sun, because he gets to be naked and riding a horse and surrounded by flowers." That card was upside down in her deck, but certainly had Warren, a horse, flowers, and the only thing standing between Warren Worthington The Third and the modesty of others was the drape of a red flag conveniently censoring his nudity.
"Sometimes it is just a guess, and I work in reverse. You change fate, so I started with the Wheel of Fortune. I know what most of the cards mean from the commonmost Tarot decks. I do not know Scott very well, but his card is The Knight of Pentacles for this deck. A hardworking and reliable leader, who forgets to come up for air when he is sunk into his work." She showed Arthur a card of a knight, but in black armor, with one of Scott's old visors instead of a helmet, and rather than a horse, seated in a bi-plane. "Most of the time it is — how do you call it, vibes of a person? I start drawing and do a lot of sketching until it feels right. Topaz worries the next shoe will always drop, so she has a card that represents that anxiety." She showed Arthur another card, Topaz in a field of rough-hewn staves, all sparking with multi-coloured magic. "But I probably have five or six other sketches that I did first, they never felt right. I do that for most people, I draw until it feels right."
Arthur's attention was attentive as each explanation unfolded, and his eyes eagerly took in each example one to the next. "We work in entirely different ways," he concluded with a sense of wonder, "I tried to think that way once, back early in my career. I'd practice every scene a hundred different ways. Copy the greats. Find new meaning that hadn't been teased out already."
He shrugged.
"For me, though," and Arthur broke contact as he rolled his fingers like he was balancing some imaginary knife, "it was the physical work that came easy. Swift, clean action. Like a dance. Too many thoughts always got in the way. I still had to put in the work day to day, of course, but that was just building muscle memory. Making it look effortless for that one, best take."
"I can do a balance trick with coins! Remy taught me." Marie-Ange was briefly distracted by the rolling fingers, and showed off her own with the stub of an oil pastel. "Or crayons, or dice. It is a parlour trick I learned just for fun. It looks easy now but I spent a whole day flying home from Russia learning. I think that airplane must still have pennies on the floor, I dropped so many."
The light in Arthur's eyes danced, snapped easily from that introspection as he pictured the scene. "Wait — so you left your two cents on that plane? Imagine what folks must have thought.” A pause. “Remy, though. I haven't," and he stopped right there. A pivot. "I don't think I've ever tried it with cards, but I bet he could."
His eyes drifted over to the discarded deck between them. Curious. "Do you mind if I try?"
It was a lightning decision to tidy up the stack of cards, tuck the few she had pulled as examples back in and do a quick one-handed cut and then push it towards Arthur. "I can do sleight of hand with them, but not roll them." Marie-Ange explained. "I would love to see it."
Unthinking, Arthur drew a card.
He was met by a lone figure with a single white rose standing on a cliff face above the sea, dog in tow, as a sun bloomed in the sky overhead. Open possibility.
There was a flash as Arthur’s power answered in kind, but no vision struck. Nothing of the past. No astral plane. Yet his eye blazed, a match for the sun in the card, and his power lit the space between himself and Marie-Ange.
The solarium vanished completely.
The world dissolved into darkness.
Marie-Ange stood alone on a featureless plane that's only defining feature was a single plane of mirrored glass that split the distance. Perfect, frosted glass that, despite stretching forever, seemed to bend in upon its own weight, fracturing the nothing through a fisheye lens. An impossible wall.
A spear, honey-gold and night-black was in her hand, and then gone, replaced with a scythe sharp as the dividing line between sea and sky, then a long knife, and then a pencil, and Marie-Ange turned around, calling for Arthur and plucking away her eyepatch to reveal an empty socket, featureless perfect skin over the place where her eye had once been. She walked to the mirror, and touched it with her finger.
Nothing happened.
She sighed, put upon, and flipped the pencil over and over between her fingers, until finally she drew a line down the surface with the thick graphite end and the line reflected twice, then four times, then eight and sixteen and two-hundred fifty-six and then hundreds, and thousands, until she couldn't begin to guess how many.
Each one reflected her, her comfortable yoga pants and soft sweater, messy bun and pen smudges on her right hand, but when she approached, they split. A Marie-Ange in a white suit, sword at the ready. One in assassin grey, in olive fatigues, in black corset and stockings, in pearl grey armor astride a mechanical horse, in black leathers trimmed with basil green, in rags, in hospital scrubs.
The other side of the wall was less literal of a mirror: an illuminated, endless desert. There was no true horizon, and each blink revealed the suggestion of bleached landmarks in the distance. A skeletal tree, a fractal of light, ancient ruins. Wafts of misty radiance hung in the air like released breath, and the only blemish in the landscape was a solitary male figure and that same, shimmering wall.
Arthur studied at the frosted glass as he idly moved the Fool over his knuckles. The card danced delicately in between his fingers — a spin, a switch, a flourish. Fingers crossed and a flip of the wrist sent the Fool along its journey before being returned back.
His own hand traced a finger across the wall's surface. Nothing.
His face scrunched as he tried to focus his power. Nothing, again.
Arthur sighed, put upon, and tapped the edge of the tarot card against the mirror's surface in defeat. Instead of nothing, there was the smallest starburst of light. He almost missed it, too, set against the brightness of this space. But, again. Tap, tap, flash, flash.
The man cocked his head, and set the full edge of the card against the surface. Two, four, eight, sixteen, and then more versions. Arthur in black leather with a starburst painted on his face, a fashionable Arthur in sunglasses, another in beach wear, one with a mullet and knives, some wearing the faces of familiar past roles, and some of his more current faces. The detective. The friend. Many of these faces were beaten, and one held the limp body of a red headed girl.
He straightened his posture, inquisitive, and all of the Arthurs followed his lead. Some disappeared into nothing, replaced with new possibilities. More curious, he set the full face of the card against the scorched surface of the wall with the upright face of the card facing him.
The world shifted around the card.
Back in the dark, the mirror that reflected Marie-Ange rippled when she touched it, a slow and gelatinous movement. It bounced off the edge of the silvered glass, and intersected and crossed itself until she couldn't make out her own features. They split, and the mirror fell in irregular chunks that bounced around her ankles.
All that was left was the floating image of the Fool, inversed. An image suspended in the air. Her copies stared up at her from the discarded pieces, each a slightly different face from a thousand shattered mirrors.
Here, in whatever strange space this was, Marie-Ange's grasp of her power felt like static cling, pulling her towards the Fool and the broken mirror and drawing them in towards her as well. She reached for the floating Fool, and expected the hair on her arms to stand up or a crackle to race across her fingers, and neither happened. But she felt it nonetheless under her skin. A spark did not form when she touched the image, no lightening appeared, nothing to show her power, it was just a solid image, cool and smooth and strange.
Then the stars began to bloom.
In the space in front of Marie-Ange, constellations burst to life as the lightless moonscape shifted, melding with Arthur's sunlit desert. Dark and light intertwined, revealing that each star belonged to a different version of lucky man. They all turned their many eyes on her.
Much much more closely, the image of one hand, backlit, grasped the card that floated in mid air. This Arthur, much more real and more familiar, stumbled forward as his card vanished in a puff of light. The sudden action caused the crowd of blonds to shift and fracture, their images becoming more unlikely and more indistinct.
The hundreds of blue eyes widened, and they all had the same question: "Marie-Ange?"
Marie-Ange's image of The Fool erupted into a fractal fern of feathers, jet black that reflected iridescent green at the edges, and she stepped through the cloud, parting it briefly. The feathers stuck to her hair until she shook herself and they fell across her shoulders and back and in a scattered pile around her feet. "Arthur!"
The eruption fully engulfed the co-mingling landscape like ink in water, consuming all of the alternate reflections. Feathers to tendrils to darkness. Soon, the two figures were alone in their space between — one momentarily cloaked in feathers, and the other a man knocked off balance to land where she had met him.
And then, it was just the solarium. Again.
Marie-Ange shook herself head to toe. Bursts of mist and astral spun sugar shed off her shoulders and into nothingness. She stood stunned after, blinkingly looking around the room as thought it was another vision. "Are you your reality now?" Except it came out in French and she had to start again, "Are you really here, as yourself?"
It took a minute for the blond to answer. He was obviously dazed, but not dazzling — his eye was no longer shining in a thousand refracted points. "So what you're saying," was what he could come up with, "is that I could be someone else with laser powers? Or someone with a cool catchphrase."
"I did ... " The laugh that bubbled out of Marie-Ange was unexpected to her, sharp and bubbly like spring water. "No. Yes. I saw you as a pop star, so yes, but also no. Are you the Arthur I know, and not David Bowie, or a pirate, or a war hero?"
Cogs moved slowly behind those blue eyes as he considered. "I've . . . played a pirate. And a war hero. Except he was also a terrorist werewolf. Wolfgang had a very complex backstory, you see." Arthur managed a smile — it was thin and stretched, but it was the one she knew. "So. Any chance you know what that," and he gestured to nothing, and everything, doubtfully, "was?"
"Do you know when you have the microphone setup and it makes a loud noise because of frequency?" Marie-Ange asked, cautiously. "I think we did that, but with powers. Perhaps my fault, it is not the first time for me to have this."
Arthur’s head cocked by five degrees in consideration, and his thin smile bloomed as he sloughed away any over thinking with that explanation. The cogs had paused. “Well then,” the man took a relieved sigh as brought his hands together behind his head and leaned back on his heels, “that’s honestly a relief. We have an easy explanation, no one was hurt, we didn't break reality. Good for us. As . . . long as you’re still you, of course.”
"I am not a clone, android or secret replacement." Marie-Ange said. "but if I was I would say that, so I hope you trust me."
The laugh that escaped the other man's lips was equal parts tired and desperate, and that was only matched by the sudden flash of madness in his eyes. "Hey now, I'll take it. Gladly. Let whatever just happened be and pretend it meant nothing until we can't. A classic plotline."
"Chekov's powers incident, our brains are both odd and wanted to visit." Marie-Ange said, with a firm nod. "Clearly we are compatible and should be fake married again."
Arthur grinned, and suddenly the world was bright and free again, and everything was easy. "As long as next time I get to be the blushing bride. Gotta give the audience something new."
