***

THE CARD IS in the breast pocket of his jacket, right above his heart.

Duchess let him take it. He didn't ask why. He didn't ask why she looked at him with so much pity when he gently tucked it inside. He didn't ask why Salome gave him a hug as he left their little house. He didn't ask why David didn't even bother questioning Hadley about the tarot reading, and instead, led him outside of Molly and onto the curb, and started telling Hadley what was going to happen.

Betrayal, Hadley says, to himself. The word is heavy and bitter and it sits in his mouth like a burden. It sticks to his throat like glue.

He's supposed to be paying attention to whatever David's telling him, but he can't. He keeps reciting the word to himself like it's a mantra, like if he keeps repeating it long enough, it ceases to become a word at all, it ceases to lose meaning.

Betrayal, Hadley says to himself. Betrayal, betrayal, betrayal.

"—so there isn't much I can do," David is saying, "except watch how it pans out." He takes one last drag of cigarette and drops it onto the pavement, crushing it underfoot. He takes out a pack from his pocket, and plucks a fresh cigarette from it. "It'll get worse."

"At the rate you're smoking those things," Hadley says, "you might just kill yourself."

"What?" David says, absentmindedly.

"Those cigarettes. Are you trying to give yourself cancer?"

David smiles around the cigarette. "I thought you said you used to smoke."

"I smoked in the past," Hadley says. "I did it to impress girls."

David's smile grows wider. "Did it work?"

"Not really. Became sort of pretentious, after a while."

"Enjoy whatever you can, while you can," David says, offering a cigarette to Hadley. "Who knows what'll happen to you next?"

It sounds like a warning, despite the lighthearted manner in which he says it.

"Thanks," Hadley says, "but I'll pass."

"What kind of a white boy passes up on a chance to look like a pretentious jerk?"

A moment passes in comfortable silence. David watches cars and people pass by. Hadley watches the myriad of colorful signs made of cloth, fluttering in the breeze.

A couple of college students walk by, and David and Hadley both turn to look. They're tired, the college students, but they're loud, too. They're laughing and they're talking with each other at a hundred miles per hour and they pay no attention to anything else. It's like a vision of a future—a vision Hadley might not live to see, he realizes, if Duchess's cards are anything to go by.

They grow distant, and with them, their voices. David stares after them.

"Do you have any plans for Christmas Eve?"

Hadley blinks.

"Why?" Hadley asks.

"Me and some other people are throwing a little thing for Christmas. Eggnog. Christmas carols. What not." David says this all too casually, too easily. "Vic's gonna be there."

Christmas Eve is when Gregory's flight lands, when Gregory comes back. It's only been a week, and it feels like a year. Too much happened in too little time. The fact that Gregory's coming back feels like an anchor, to the real world, to Hadley's world.

"I'll think about it," Hadley lies. And because he doesn't want to make David feel bad, he asks, "Where's it going to be?"

"Right here," David says. "Molly. There'll be Christmas lights and everything. Mistletoes, too." David nudges Hadley's rib with his elbow. "Perfect excuse to kiss someone you like, right?"

"I'll think about it," Hadley says. "What about you? Kissing anybody special?"

"Sure," David says. "I have a date."

Hadley lets out a half-laugh. "Really? Lucky girl."

"Lucky girl," David repeats.

Another moment of comfortable silence—or awkward. Hadley doesn't know. It feels comfortable. Silence always feels comfortable, he thinks. David puffs on his cigarette.

"I don't know anything about you," Hadley says, after a while.

"What's there to know?"

"I don't know. What do you like?"

"Is that how you make small talk?" David asks. "What do you mean what do I like? I like a lot of things. Dogs. Cats. Burgers. Sushi. I could go on."

"No, I meant, as in—" Hadley takes in a breath, rewords the question—"what keeps you up at night?"

This is a lazy, half-assed attempt at conversation. Hadley knows this. He doesn't expect David to give him an answer. But David looks off into the distance, contemplatively. Ash falls off the end of his cigarette.

David takes the cigarette out of his mouth. "This."

"This?"

"Curse club," David says. "This city. Magic. Everything in my life."

"That's a loaded answer," Hadley says.

"You asked a loaded question," David replies. "What about you? What keeps you up at night?"

"Girls, mostly," Hadley says and David lets out a snort.

"Seriously, though. We're having a heart-to-heart thing, right now. Tell me, Hadley, what are you passionate about?"

Hadley thinks for a moment. There are his friends, but his friends aren't an activity, or a hobby. Are they? Is he passionate about reading? No, not really. Studying? Partying? Getting drunk? Being a loner? Being somebody, in the grander scheme of life? What does Hadley have that other people don't? A shit of load money, a car, good genes, Hungarian blood and a family dynamic that's impossible to explain to strangers. But he's not passionate about any of this. He doesn't lose sleep over any of this. Take out the friends, the fucked up family, the money and the house and the winning smile and the soccer team and the swimming team and the 4.0 GPA, what's there?

"Nothing," Hadley says. As a joke, he adds, "Girls. I'm passionate about girls."

"Ha-ha. Funny." David doesn't laugh. "My turn to ask you a question."

David lets the cigarette drop out of his hand. He crushes it with the heel of his sneaker—Adidas, white and grey, Hadley doesn't know why he's noticing this only now—and turns to look at Hadley again.

David lifts his chin up, and then, Hadley sees it. A mole—or is it a beauty spot?—in the crook of David's neck. It's almost imperceptible on the dark brown of David's skin, but it's definitely there—a small and barely visible dot the size of a freckle.

"You don't treat women as badly as I think you do, right?" David asks.

"What?"

"C'mon. You look like a jackass, you talk like a jackass, so I'm guessing—" he brings his chin down, and the mole disappears under the collar of David's jacket—"you must be a jackass, especially when it comes to girls. So, I need to know if you actually give a shit about Vic, or this is all some game to you."

"This isn't a game to me," Hadley says, in what he hopes is a firm voice. He forces himself to look into David's eyes. "I don't know why you'd think that."

David turns away from Hadley, and shrugs his shoulders. "Call it a hunch," he says.

"Right. I just remembered I had a question to ask," Hadley says, and takes a breath. "How did you know?"

"Know what?" David asks.

"How did you know about my curse?" Hadley asks.

"Oh," David says. He glances at Hadley. "I sensed it."

"Sensed it?" Hadley repeats, incredulous. "Come on, that's a pile of bull—"

"You heard me before, didn't you? I sensed it, and I found you. That's it."

"Alright, but how?" Hadley asks, irritated.

"I sensed it," David repeats. "It's like a sixth sense thing, alright?"

"How did you sense it?" Hadley asks. "How did you figure out it was me? Out of the thousands of people who live here—" he leans a little towards David—"why me?"

David doesn't answer immediately. He lowers his eyes, down till Hadley can see his eyelids, then drags his gaze up the length of Hadley's entire body, as if silently appraising the boy before him. It's unsettling, even more so when David's looking straight into Hadley. In the shade of the alleyway, David's eyes are the impenetrable black of a limousine tint.

"It's not my job to question fate," David says. "It's my job to change it."

"Not really a job, considering what I've heard."

"Oh?" David raises an eyebrow. "And what have you heard? Do enlighten me."

"You're not a professional—"

"You don't even know what a professional breaker is."

"—and you're not entirely qualified—"

"But I'm better than most."

"—and you're trying to impress someone. Or you're doing this for someone else. Not for me."

"What? Who am I trying to impress? Who am I doing this for, if not for you?" David's tone is—for the first time since Hadley's met him—angry. Just a spark away from full-blown rage. "It's your life, man. I'm trying to save you."

"Then who the fuck is Charlie?"

David goes very, very still. As if someone's slapped him.

"What does Charlie," David says, very slowly, "have to do with any of this?"

"I don't know, alright? I just heard Shani mention him once. Remember? First time I showed up at curse club and—god, I don't know. You got pissed." Hadley looks away from David's burning gaze. "Forget I said anything."

David doesn't say anything. Hadley feels a twinge of—what, fear? Regret? Anger?

"You know, I think you should get going," David says. His voice is brittle and tense, ready to snap. "I bet you have a lot of things to do, right?"

"Yeah."

"Call me if you need anything."

Hadley recognizes a dismissal when he hears one. There are no goodbyes, no 'take cares', nothing like the few times David bid Hadley farewell. When he walks up to his car, shoulders hunched against the wind, he can feel David's gaze burning into his back.

He won't call David.

***

"Switzerland is overrated," Sebastian says, half-way through the four-way call between him, Morgan, Gregory and Hadley. "It's all just snow and chocolate and pretty buildings."

"At least you have chocolate," Gregory says. "All I have is snow and pretty buildings."

"Don't forget the cheese," Morgan chimes in.

"Oh, the cheese. How could I forget the cheese?" Hadley can practically hear the sadness in Gregory's voice. "Enough cheese to last me a lifetime."

"Are you aware of how whiny you all sound?" Hadley says, laughing.

"Jimmy, my sole purpose in life is to whine about things," Sebastian says, and that makes Hadley laugh harder.

"I think whining about something is an art in itself," Morgan muses. "An incredible practise that requires you to see the bad in anything, no matter how good it is."

"An art," Gregory repeats. "That's most pretentious thing I've ever heard Morgan say."

"You're clearly suffering from memory loss," says Sebastian.

"Go masturbate to your big-breasted cartoon women," says Morgan, cheerily.

"They're not cartoons," Sebastian counters. "They're anime."

"If whining is an art," Hadley says, in an attempt to steer the conversation away from a topic he does not want to hear being discussed, "what does that make us?"

"Artists," Sebastian says.

"Losers," Morgan says.

"Poets," Gregory says.

Hadley laughs again, and he hasn't felt this airy and light in what feels like ages. He wants to bask in this feeling, in safety, in the warmth that comes with hearing his friends say stupid shit and whine about stupid shit and talk about stupid shit.

"We can rent a little apartment in Paris," Gregory says, "and start our own movement."

"A new art movement in the twenty first century? What a joke," Sebastian says. "Originality is so gauche, Greg."

"C'mon, it'll be exciting," Gregory says. "All four of us, living in the middle of Paris, looking broody and serious."

"I think Jimmy can help us out on that front," Sebastian says, and Hadley snorts.

"Les enfants terribles," Morgan says, sounding half-amused, "in France's capital, with nothing but each other."

"And cheese," Hadley says. "Don't forget the cheese."

"Exactly. The four artists, losers, poets, what-have-you, living in the midst of squalor and beauty, whining and complaining about everything," Gregory says. "What better way to waste away your life, right?"

They all think about it, for a little while.

"I'm in," Sebastian says, "so long as I get laid."

Sebastian laughs at his own joke, Gregory lets out a huff, and Morgan snickers. They move on to other things, and Hadley wants nothing more than to laugh and talk with them, till his voice is hoarse and his sides ache.

It's only after he hangs up, still dizzy and light-headed with laughter, that he realizes that none of them know what's happening to him. Gregory, Morgan, Sebastian—none of them know about David. They don't even know about Vic. They're all an ocean away, spending their holidays while Hadley's here, alone and confused, not having any idea of what he's doing nor what he's going to do.

How empty everything feels, without a friend's voice to fill it up.

How could he have mentioned it, anyway, over the phone? How could he have told them that he was seeing things and hearing things and going places that didn't even exist? How do you bring that up in a conversation about cheese? And would they even believe him? It sounds unbelievable, even to his own ears.

Hey, I'm hallucinating shadow things and went to some weird alternate dimension and I think I'm going to die and I'm terrified and this is all because of a curse that I don't understand and nobody's telling me anything—not even the person who's supposed to be saving my life.

Yeah, right.

He pulls the card out of his jacket and lays it on the table. He traces a finger on the sides of the card, feeling the slightly too-soft texture of it, the texture of paper that's been aged too long.

He pretends, for a second, that the man on the card looks like him. He pretends that the slope of the man's nose, the chiseled jaw, the high cheekbones—that these are all his own features, refracted onto paper. Then he sees that there are no high cheekbones or a chiseled jaw, nor a straight nose. Only the faded out suggestion of a man's face, and the seven swords that impale him.

Hadley sighs, and turns over the card. He should call Vic. It's nearly eight. He's not sure if he's up to it. Vic is pretty—unbelievably so, in fact—and she has a way of reducing him to a fourteen-year-old version of him, when his palms would sweat and his knees would shake at the very thought of taking to a pretty girl that wasn't Morgan.

He could be confident, slightly charming, slightly flirtatious, if he wanted to. But he has a hunch that Vic wouldn't fall for that. Would she? She doesn't seem the type.

What would they even talk about, anyway? His stomach churns at the thought of him stammering through a conversation with her, blundering through like a moron. Maybe he should chug a can of beer. Or two.

Idly, Hadley flips over the tarot card again, expecting to see the man, the seven swords stuck through him.

It's not. It's Death.

He blinks. It's the Seven of Swords again, already familiar in its lines and shapes. He turns over the card, waits for five seconds, and turns it over again, face up. It's still the Seven of Swords. He waits for it to change before his very eyes, but it doesn't. It remains the same.

But he didn't imagine it, he's sure. He saw it, he saw Death, grim and simple and old and faded out, but still Death. He puts a hand onto the card, and covers it up. He half expects it to bite at his palm. He didn't imagine it. He didn't hallucinate it. It was Death, and then it was not. He can't quite breathe.

A knock on the door. Hadley nearly topples back in his chair. The knocking comes again, gently. It can't be his mother—she never knocks. She just barges in. It can't be Philippa—she never comes to his room. His father rarely talks to him. A third knock, slightly more impatient, but just as gentle.

"Are you in there, James?" It's Marzia. Just Marzia.

"It's open," Hadley says, with relief, his heart still thumping wildly.

"Dinner's ready," Marzia says, as she opens the door. Her dark eyebrows raise into her hair when she looks at Hadley. "You haven't changed?"

"No, sorry," Hadley says. He's never been gladder to see Marzia. "I'll be down in a while."

"Okay," Marzia says. "Your mother's asking after you."

"Tell her I'll be down in a minute."

Marzia gives him a quick smile and shuts the door. Hadley lets out a breath. He glances at the card on his table again, and with a remarkable amount of will, pushes the incident out of his mind. He shrugs out of his jacket. He changes his clothes. He doesn't think about the card, not Duchess, not David. He thinks of his friends, of taking the steps down the stairs one at a time, of things that are real and definite.

And he won't call Vic.

***

a/n: bet you were expecting actual quality given the fact that i took like a fuckin month to update this

but guess what? im back at it again. disappointing people. you're welcome