Helping at the farmers market tended to be hit or miss for Adam. He was friendlier when handling money and making change because numbers were easy. It was the question about which was the better cheese (in his opinion, they were all good) or when they would start dabbling in fiber arts (he glanced over to make sure Ronan had heard that) that made his brain blank out. Adam could put on a pleasant face, but he truly had no idea how to be congenial and marketable like Gansey was.
At some point this forced extroversion drained him, and while he was normally stubborn enough to work through exhaustion, Adam didn’t want his mood to affect Ronan’s sales. Adam excused himself for getting water and change (both lies but both totally valid) before slipping away from the tables.
To say he wasn’t already distracted by other things, not pertaining to help run this market, was an understatement. He started carrying the tarot deck from Bonnie in his pocket whenever he could. A heavy, tangible reminder to not give up on what the psychics of Fox Way told him: he was just as much a psychic before and after Cabeswater.
He was only a couple of yards away from the tent set up, wandering near the currently disengaged security system for market days, when he saw Dan approaching. Normally Adam would worry over interrupting someone who clearly was here for different reasons than talking to Adam about communing with sentient energies, but he was already on him.
"Hey, hi. Do you have a minute?" Adam asked, before shooting a quick glance to market. "Our stock is still good, nothing should run out just yet, if you're worried about missing something."
Farmer’s markets, they were pretty great. Dan liked them - he liked fresh food in general, and produce, and he didn’t know what the fuck fiber arts were, but he was glad that this market was an option in Vallo. Especially because, after he’d moved into Sabrina’s place, he was determined to stock the kitchen with mostly-healthy stuff.
He was one of those weird people who loved vegetables - just give him a big, icy cold salad and he’d eat it all. Maybe because, as a kid, he had these flashbulb memories of what it was like growing up poor. After the Overlook, after his mother had to support them both because his dad was an ice sculpture in a hedge maze now, after the move to Florida - there wasn’t really fresh anything. But there were tricks he’d learned, like adding water to milk to make it last longer, or .49 cent hamburger day at McDondald’s turning into days. Ketchup sandwiches and canned soup. Tuna casserole until it was coming out his ears.
Those days were gone, thankfully. Today, he had a reusable grocery bag and was planning to definitely get cheese - and eggs too, he was all about farm fresh eggs. But he didn’t mind when Adam stopped him either. “Yeah, of course,” he nodded. “What’s up?”
Adam almost chickened out. It felt wrong to pull someone into something even he wasn't sure about. It felt dangerous too, like taking someone white water rafting after only being in a boat once. Granted, Adam was not so green when it came to scrying, but his mentor was dead, and his other trusted teachers weren't in Vallo, and the last time—the last time he nearly tasted death because he wandered too far. He saw something he wasn't supposed to. Scared Ronan into hurting him to pull him back.
And yet, he found himself saying, "I wanted to know if you were still in for this thing." He shoved a hand in his pocket, feeling the shape of the deck between his fingers, like a safety blanket. "With what might possibly be within the magic of Vallo. Sentience, talking to it, if it's even possible."
The honesty wore off days ago, but there was a part of him that had kept his psychicness, his magician title, buried for so long that it was almost freeing to have spoken about it to strangers. And Dan had seemed not to write him off initially. "I understand if you changed your mind."
“Haven’t changed my mind,” Dan assured right away. He meant that. On his end, there was no interest in leaving Vallo - since he was somehow alive here, flesh and bone and beating heart; sure, he missed Abra something fierce, but she was going to be fine with her mother, living as normal of a life a kid with such powerful Shine even could, and he was already dead where she was. He didn’t need to be greedy and wish for his only family to appear here.
Maybe he could even build something of a new family. But yeah, point was, he was here but he wasn’t about to just sit around and not try to learn anything about his surroundings. He was never the type to make waves, but he was curious.
“I’ll follow you,” he told Adam. “Wherever you think is best to try. I can sense and speak with spirits, but I’ve never used any sort of tool to call them forth before.” They were just always there, drawn to him like he was some kinda homing beacon. Dick, and the ghosts of the Overlook - hungry for steam, starving in those lockboxes.
Adam offered a tight smile when Dan said he was still in. He sort of canted his head to one side, gesturing away from the market, away from people. He wasn't trying to be sketchy, only that he didn't want anyone cutting in or getting the wrong idea about what Adam could do.
"It's different for everyone," Adam said after he felt out of earshot for the mingling crowds. "The people I learned from were clairvoyant, and their interpretations of the world around them and its spirits came in other ways. It was stronger on the ley lines." That same crackling energy was everywhere in Vallo, which made it harder to pinpoint those corpse roads for what they needed to do. Adam hoped that just the magic would be enough.
"But I've never called upon actual spirits before. My communication was always through the forest and what it wanted." The one Adam had sacrificed himself to. Their relationship had been protective and tumultuous, which sounded strange when Adam realized the other "person" in this scenario were sentient ancient trees.
"You can sense them, though? Is that how you sensed the magic here, or I guess, tried to talk to it?"
“Pretty much,” Dan replied, grocery bag slung over his wrists, his hands stuffed in his pockets - he was perfectly fine with vacating, going somewhere else. Somewhere safer, probably. Trying to commune with anything supernatural seemed to be best not in a crowd - unless it was a séance, but even then. “With the city here, it’s like - I can hone in on energy, and other sentient thought processes. It’s what I’ve been trained to do. So if the city wasn’t alive, in a sense, I probably wouldn’t be able to feel anything.”
Like he didn’t with non-sentient things. A brick, for example. Structural foundations - but it was apparent that Vallo was more than just the materials put in toward building it. If he concentrated, maybe he’d even feel a pulse point.
He glanced at Adam. “Do the ley lines here feel like the ones in your home?” He’d never done much work with those, but he always found it an interesting concept.
Magic that was alive was not such a foreign concept. It comforted Adam to know that no matter the universe or dimension or whatever the outlanders had collectively decided on, there were threads of familiarity between them. That also meant the darker parts also existed. He wasn't about to ask Dan though.
He smiled wryly, almost like his own private joke. "Ley lines," Adam said with a shake of his head. "At home there was always some kind of supernatural sign or natural direction where they ran, a sense of where and how they moved. I spent a lot of time fixing them, so you'd think I could tell if they were frayed or not in Vallo but—" Adam made a vague gesture in the air. "There's so much magic here, everything feels charged. It's overwhelming, they're not as easy to find. But I probably could?"
Adam paused at a small patch of grass near a large beech tree. The spot was close enough to the property waypoint, where he could feel the greater magic, but not so obvious to distract anyone coming to the Barns. "Have you ever done this before? I mean, with tarot cards or even scrying bowls?" Adam asked, slipping the deck out of his pocket.
Dan settled in the grass, the breeze comforting, and it was always a little salty - or at least, the closer you got to the water it was. It seemed like winter in Vallo was more mild than anything he was used to, and he considered that a win - because if he never saw snow again, it’d be too soon (funny that he picked New Hampshire to settle in, but sometimes he was an idiot, what could he say).
“Ley lines could be frayed,” he agreed. “I wonder how far they go - like if Vallo is its own separate world or if it’s just a drop in the bucket the way Earth is among the galaxies.” However, that seemed a whole separate issue - if they couldn’t get beyond Vallo, they’d probably never know. “But no, I’ve never done this before. I can feel that - “ He looked at Adam, blue jean eyes squinting. “You have the Shining - it’s strong. Overwhelming sometimes, like it was when I was your age.” When he’d tried to blot it out with alcohol, which he wouldn’t recommend.
"You never know. The leylines at home intersected across the entire planet, some stronger than others. And used for travel, for people and magic or otherwise. There's nothing saying they couldn't extend into other places connected to Vallo," Adam mused, though he too had the same thoughts as Dan—if they couldn't leave Vallo then there was no reason to push the idea just now. He let it drop.
He kept his eyes downcast, as he settled down in front of Dan. The only thing that seemed to cause his eyebrows to raise was the mention of the Shining and it being overwhelming. What an understatement. "The psychics, from where I'm from, would say my aura is loud. I wonder if they are seeing what you see. I've never heard it called the Shining though."
Adam cut the deck with economical proficiency as he spoke. "How did you manage it? Sometimes I—" Pretend to be normal. He had lied to so many people at Harvard to hide this, but he always felt more himself at the Barns, dreaming and scrying with Ronan. Being the magician, maybe that was normal. "It used to control my whole life, I still don't always feel like I have a handle on it."
“I didn’t, at first,” Dan admitted, watching Adam cut the deck of tarot cards. “I - drank a lot. Because the Shine was dulled when I did, and I wouldn’t have to deal with it. Only that made things worse so eventually I got my act together. A friend got me a job at a hospice, just as an orderly, but I started...helping people. Using the Shine to help, I mean. I’d comfort them when they were scared and calmed them so they passed on peacefully. Worked there for awhile, and I’d just hear so many things - the thoughts of the dying, and all their good memories and their regrets too.”
He realized then that he was kind of rambling, so he stopped, fingers brushing over the blades of green grass. “Honestly, you’ll probably never feel like you have a complete handle on it - especially if you look into the future, because the future can’t be held. But that doesn’t mean that you too can’t use it for good. Because you can. The best people like us can do is work with it, not against it.”
Adam shifted on the ground, the talk of drinking, hearing about dying and regret made him uneasy in ways that felt too complicated to explain to Dan. Adam was quiet as Dan explained, because the story did get better—his abilities being used for good, or the best way he could use them, given the situation. It was a cautionary tale, and Adam nodded in agreement.
"Work with it, not against it," Adam echoed. "It seems so easy when you put it like that." He shot Dan a wry smile, setting the deck between them. It gave Adam new incentive, that he could do this. He had the ability to, it was only his self-doubt was standing in his way, as always.
"Keep an open mind? Everything is interpretative. Sometimes it can be obvious and sometimes it's like wading through fog." Adam expected more of the latter, since he was not directly connected to Vallo's magic in the same way he was for Cabeswater.
He flipped the first card: The Magician, his own. He tapped it once for confirmation. "This is me, which means—" The next card he flipped was the Six of Swords. "This is you. In a state of transition, personal and spiritual." When he flipped the last one, Temperance, Adam made a strange face. This was Vallo, this card was telling them: "Balance, patience. The middle path to accommodate all perspectives."
Dan’s smile was also a bit rueful. “Clear as mud,” he concurred, though he supposed the Six of Swords and its meaning made sense for him. He was freshly resurrected, after all, and Vallo was so different than what he’d been dealing with prior - there was no Abra, but there also wasn’t the True Knot.
However, if Rose wasn’t just bullshitting him, there were more psychic vampires out there. She wasn’t the last of her kind. He didn’t want to think about that becoming a thing here.
Accommodate all perspectives. He turned that over in his head and hell, maybe that made sense too. “So basically - it’s just too much of a cat’s cradle to parse out, and those who do have the answers either won’t share at all or we have to have patience in finding them?”
That was his guess, anyway. Seemed a lot like wading through fog, thick fog that was a giant eraser to everything or a vast blanket.
"Basically," Adam said, with a half shrug. There was no way to be wrong; Adam's only bonus here was that with his abilities, the cards were just more right. "Temperance can be so many things. Avoiding extremes, blending elements to make something new, waiting out answers. Temperance rewards patience. There's a lot of 'greater together rather than separate parts' metaphors in this card. But I think I would be more concerned for us if it was reversed?"
Adam flipped the card to show Dan, the angel was now upside down, tipped on its head, looking unbalanced. "It's another view, but it usually sensing something is off, the inability to carry yourself in a state of moderation. If this is Vallo's card, whether the sentient magic itself or the general place, this might give me pause."
There was something oddly freeing about having this card show up. Confirming that everything was okay, and that Vallo—though strange and unusual in its magic and how they came to be here—wasn't against them. It was a good card.
"But this," Adam traced the image on the card: a path cutting through a mountain range, ending at a gold crown. "Life's journey. We're all on it. Vallo is just another stop. Maybe Vallo's magic knows its another stop."
Dan blinked a few times. “Huh.” He was kind of at a loss for words there, but not in a bad way. He knew temperance though - it had been his credo for a really long time. Restraint. Holding back and keeping away from the vices he knew could kill him (or by association, bring out enough rage so that he caused harm), keeping away from other people. He went to bed alone every night, and had for the past eight years. Temperance rewards patience. Well, he hoped so.
“That’s actually - sort of comforting?” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I know a lot of people are worried that the other shoe will drop here. Maybe having the reassurance will help ease the paranoia.” Not entirely, of course, but it was another piece that encouraged something positive rather than finding something to punch, or otherwise fight.
"I am one of those people," Adam admitted, shuffling the cards back into the deck. He wasn't always pessimistic, but Adam never accepted things at face value. Science and fact ruled him—a strange combination for a psychic who had to rely on feelings and the intangible. He had to learn his own lesson, through confirmation or failure; the onus was on him. Getting out of Vallo fell roughly into the same category.
"That's not to say that we are going to be free of bad things happening, there's another shoe like there is in any life, but it's not going to be one as big as the one coming here did." Adam paused, before correcting himself. "Maybe. The cards are a guideline, not a fact. But I don't want to agitate the magic anymore than it already has by scrying."
He wanted to be sure, so he flipped three cards again from the top: The Magician, the Six of Swords, Temperance. Adam, Dan, Vallo. "If we need more validation I can try another time," Adam offered. He glanced over his shoulder to the market. He'd have to tell Ronan first, not because he needed his permission, but out of consideration.
“True. I don’t think we’d ever be free of bad things,” Dan sighed. “That’s not the way life works.” Not any life - still, there was a difference between being compelled to tell the truth for a few days, or something particularly nasty coming through the waypoints that they’d have to work together and battle, and then complete and utter despair constantly.
Still, looking into it a little more might be a good idea - just to glean as much as they could. “As long as I’m here - and you’re careful,” he said, because he didn’t want Adam to do it alone. He didn’t have to do it alone.
He nodded. Careful was the operative word. "We can plan for another day. I'll need some set up time. I can scry into something bright, headlights, flashlights—all of which are shit for my eyes, probably." The last time he had done it into one of Ronan's dreamed suns, but he wasn't about to explain that. "And it can be on a day where you're not trying to run an errand."
He'd ask Bonnie, maybe, to use her back room again. He'd bring Ronan. He'd have Dan there. Adam would do it somewhere safe. It felt like a production but he couldn't risk stumbling away from his body again.
Adam pushed himself up off the ground, and offered a hand to Dan. "Not as flashy as other magic, but it's solid. I promise."
Dan chuckled a little, taking the offered hand and standing up (he was older and more decrepit than Adam, who was still young and spry - ah, the good old days when his knees didn’t creak while going up stairs), brushing the grass off himself. “I don’t think magic needs to be flashy to be effective,” he pointed out. “But yeah, sounds good.” Since he’d never really tried tarot before, it was interesting to sit and learn - scrying too, that would be something else entirely.
He wouldn’t let anything happen to Adam - if he had to pull him back, from wherever he was, well, Dan could do that. Even if it would hurt a little.
“And hey, as a bonus, now that I’m here maybe you can help me pick out some flowers?” he added, since he thought he should get something nice for Allison. It was better than asking Adam which cheese he recommended (all of them really were good). “So all in all, a pretty successful market trip. I’m not complaining.”
"I think I can manage that," Adam said with a pleasant smile. He knew he wouldn't be able to stop thinking about it for the rest of the day. Somehow getting something from flipping three cards was vindication against his self-doubt. Every day he realized he needed to stop trying to hide the magic inside of him.
Mostly, Adam couldn't wait to tell Ronan and Gansey. But he would have to, business just started. He tucked his deck back into his pocket as they walked back toward the market.
"I just hope you're not expecting a bouquet of carnations. Pretty sure they're banned from the property."