XV.

Jack can only snicker in response, head tilting once: touché. Then he settles back down at the table, shuffling cards back together. The next dish is put onto the rack; Fifteen's been designated to the mundane task of clean-up, as per usual. What's more predictable than routine?

"I've been meaning to ask you about your thoughts of your stay here, anyway," the green-haired copy says while reforming the deck. "Humor me, Fifteen. Tell me, what sense have you made from it all? You're not so forward-thinking that the past is entirely irrelevant."

(The past.) The first card Jack throws onto the table is the Fool, inverted. Card zero. Recklessness and wild abandon; no plan for the future, just sheer forward movement. The art of the card from this perspective only amplifies the fool's careless nature, so oblivious not to even realize his world has shifted bottom-up.

"The moment I was brought here, I was made toothless. The corpse of an old friend had hunted me down in public, trying to give me compassion he didn't have." It still makes Fifteen's skin crawl to think about it. All that wasted breath, wasted fury, wasted time. "I rejected it in every instance; I don't regret that. Every run-in we had after that was the same. Played out and cyclic. Exhausting, from start to finish. But everything comes to an end."

Spirale had deprived him of everything besides a pitiful fraction of the physical strength he used to have. Those days had been dark; not having any idea of possible futures, every word and action being too fast to anticipate, he was ignorant and slow and weak. Fifteen had resorted to bitter resignation during this miserable time; giving in to societal domestication for survival, he'd played the humiliating role he was never meant to recover. It was as close as he'd ever been to "playing house"; it fit him poorly, but it had kept him alive. In the moonlight he'd still managed to prove a lethal threat.

"And how are things currently? It's been a year and… Oh. Year and a half, or nearly that, at least. Isn't that right?"

(The present.) The second card Jack throws onto the table is the Devil, upright. Card fifteen. Fatality and obsession; to be bound by what has never been real, and being made a perpetual scapegoat. On the face of the card is the titular devil, towering over the lovers from card six (1 + 5) chained to him with limits of their own invention. Humanity held back from their own potential.

"Never better." Fifteen's onto the cutlery now, from the sound of it. "Life has quieted down significantly, and there is no shortage of work, if I want it. The Stars have let my body remember more of what I used to have. It's almost all there, again. I'm close; I know it."

It goes unspoken, but Zero's return has been surprisingly refreshing… Despite the idiotic mess he's apparently fated to be. He's different, still—he isn't Zero—but there's at least a fucking crumb of resilience and assertion about him, now. There isn't constant damage control and clean-up that this NULL needs to worry about due to Zero's loneliness and loose lips. If that ever changed, at least Fifteen had significantly more means to make due on his promises of pain and lethality.

"All that leaves is what's to come. Shall we?"

(The future.) The third and final card of the spread which Jack throws onto the table—

(whzzzz—THWACK!)

—is pinned to the surface, pierced dead-center by his favorite kitchen knife, thrown with deadly force. As Jack curses and flinches from the impact in front of him, his mind unhelpfully conjures the comparison of this attack to the strike of a serpent. The lone silver fang binding the future to the wood is sunk in deep. The human of the two knows just by looking that he's not going to be either strong or worthy enough to pull this sword back out of its stone.

"…You hit the card before I could turn it face-up," Jack remarks with awe and fear as he realizes it. Such a menace of a display is enough to overlook any outrage felt at ruining a card from his favorite tarot deck.