Chapter 94 – Unresolved Entanglements
Around the corner, the five of them scrambled back into Monica's room like startled cats the second Ross turned away. The door clicked shut behind them.
Monica pressed her back flat against it, hand over her heart. "Oh. My. God."
Phoebe bounced on her toes. "I knew it. I have literally been saying this since the Jurassic period."
Chandler stood with his arms crossed, wearing the expression of a man who had seen this coming from approximately 1987. "Well. That happened."
Grace looked at Bruce. He simply shrugged and mouthed: patience.
They gave it a few minutes — enough time, they figured, for Rachel to make it back to her room and stop actively hyperventilating — before Monica squared her shoulders and nodded at the group.
"Okay. We go check on her. And we saw absolutely nothing. We are blank slates. Emotional Switzerland."
Everyone nodded with varying degrees of convincingness and filed out into the hall.
Rachel was sitting on the edge of the bed, completely still, staring at a fixed point on the carpet, when they appeared in her doorway.
"Rach." Monica crossed to her immediately. "Hey. Are you okay? Ross was here and now he's just... gone?"
Rachel blinked, like she was resurfacing from somewhere deep. She pulled together a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. "He went back to New York. He asked me to say goodbye to everyone." She glanced at Bruce. "And he's really sorry he couldn't stay for more of the festival."
"He dragged me onto a six a.m. flight," Chandler said, baffled, "and now he just... turns around and goes home? That's it?"
Phoebe studied Rachel's face with the careful attention of someone reading a very complicated weather map. Something had clearly happened in that room. She filed it away and said nothing.
Rachel pressed her fingers to her temples. "Guys, my head is pounding. Can we just — I can't do this right now. I just need a minute to breathe."
"Of course, sweetie." Monica wrapped an arm around her.
Grace offered quietly, "Food helps. Trust me."
Phoebe's eyes lit up. "YES. Okay — here is what we're doing. Maple syrup pancakes, and then Kensington Market. Vintage stores, street food, fresh air, and I may or may not have already found a tarot reader online who has exceptional Yelp reviews."
Rachel looked around at the circle of worried faces all carefully pretending not to be worried. She couldn't stay in this room another second — it still smelled like Ross's jacket.
"...Fine," she said quietly. "Give me five minutes to change."
"We'll be in the hall!" Monica chirped, already herding people out.
They'd barely congregated in the corridor when a massive yawn announced itself, and Joey materialized from his room in a rumpled t-shirt, hair doing something structurally impressive.
He stopped dead at the sight of Chandler.
"Chandler?" He looked genuinely uncertain about reality. "Wait — are you in my dream? You weren't supposed to be here until tomorrow."
"I flew in early with Ross."
Joey processed this. "Okay... where's Ross?"
Bruce nodded vaguely toward the direction of the airport. "He had to head back to New York. Wrapped up what he came for."
Joey stared at the wall for a moment, absorbing it. Then: "Wow. Okay." A beat. "So... breakfast?"
The Toronto sun had burned off the morning haze by the time they hit Kensington Market, and the neighborhood delivered exactly what Rachel needed: noise, color, and enough sensory distraction to crowd out her own thoughts.
The streets were a patchwork of vintage clothing racks spilling onto sidewalks, record shops with hand-lettered signs, spice stalls that smelled like every country at once, and food carts doing serious business. A guy with a drum kit set up on a corner was absolutely wailing.
Phoebe had, naturally, located the tarot shop from half a block away by some form of personal radar. It was tucked between a secondhand bookstore and a place selling aggressively decorative hats — beaded curtain in the doorway, incense smoke curling out into the street.
"This is it," Phoebe breathed, reverently. "I can feel the energy from here. Rachel, don't you feel that?"
"I feel like I need more coffee," Rachel said.
They went in anyway.
Inside, candles on every surface, star charts pinned to the walls, a woman in a floral wrap skirt waiting serenely behind a table draped in deep purple velvet. Phoebe was practically vibrating.
She went first. For the next ten minutes she and the reader had a conversation about karmic resonance and past-life entanglements that the rest of the group could not follow on any level. Every card that came up got a gasp of pure spiritual recognition.
Monica, skeptical to her core, nonetheless found herself drifting toward a display of exotic spice blends in the corner and picking up jars with the focused intensity of a professional.
Joey shuffled the deck with deep, ceremonial seriousness, flipped a card — The Hanged Man — and leaned in while the reader explained sacrifice, suspension, and the gaining of new perspective.
"—and soon," the reader added, "you will mount a powerful steed of steel."
Joey sat up straight. "A steel steed." He pointed. "So like — a motorcycle? Am I about to get cast as a biker? Or wait — could it be a tank? Because I have been telling my agent for two years that I have a very strong military energy and nobody is listening—"
The reader smiled. "You're an optimist. The universe rewards optimists."
"Yeah it does," Joey agreed, completely satisfied.
She turned to Chandler.
Monica perked up immediately. "Oh yes. Chandler, absolutely. Your turn."
Chandler recoiled like she'd suggested he eat something from the ground. "I'm good. I'll just stand here and support everyone else's mystical journeys from a safe emotional distance."
"Chandler."
"Monica."
"Draw a card."
With the energy of a man defusing something, he reached out with two fingers, selected a card without looking, and dropped it on the velvet like it was mildly contagious.
The Lovers. Reversed.
The reader turned it over, studied it, and her expression shifted — carefully neutral. "The Lovers, reversed. This often points to a disconnection in relationship — blocked communication, difficulty making a choice. Sometimes... a fear of real intimacy. A wall that keeps people at arm's length even when they don't want it to."
Chandler was on his feet before she finished the sentence.
"Wow, great, fantastic, love that." He clapped twice — sharp, sarcastic. "A card that says I'm afraid of intimacy. What a completely earth-shattering prediction that required absolutely no guesswork whatsoever. Tell you what—" he grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair, "—I'm going to go stand outside and have a very healthy relationship with some fresh air, which has never once asked me how I'm feeling." He walked out. The bead curtain swung behind him.
The room was quiet for a moment.
The reader shook her head slowly, the faintest smile on her face. "He'll be all right."
"He really will," Monica said, sounding more hopeful than certain.
Bruce went last, mostly to humor Grace, who was watching the whole thing with quiet amusement. He pulled a card — The Magician — and listened politely while the reader talked about new beginnings and creative energy and the power to shape your own path.
He thanked her, genuinely. But his mind was already at the festival.
Outside, he caught Grace's hand and leaned close. "I've got one more thing at the venue tonight." He held her gaze. "Wait for the surprise."
She raised an eyebrow. He just smiled — the kind that didn't give anything away — and headed off into the city.
The festival hall was a living thing — applause bleeding through closed screening-room doors, journalists moving in packs, the particular electricity of a few hundred people who all cared about film more than was probably sensible.
Bruce found his way to the New Directors Roundtable and settled in among the other first-timers: a guy who'd shot a regional horror film entirely on weekends with money from his uncle; a visual experimenter who'd spent three years building a single forty-minute piece from archival footage; a documentary filmmaker who'd embedded herself with a fringe religious community for eighteen months and come out with something nobody quite knew how to categorize.
No one in the room had a development deal. Everyone in the room had a story about maxing out a credit card.
Bruce felt immediately at home.
When the session broke, he was threading through the crowd when he spotted a guy in a black leather jacket moving through the lobby at a speed that suggested he was operating on about four hours of sleep and enjoyed it — talking fast, gesturing hard, the kind of focused restless energy that radiated I have seventeen ideas and I'm going to tell you all of them.
Bruce recognized him from the festival program. "Rodriguez?"
Robert Rodriguez turned, clocked him, broke into a grin. "Bruce! Lock, Stock — saw the trailer last night, man. That's a hell of a thing."
They fell into it immediately: shoestring budgets, improvised solutions, the particular creative problem-solving that happens when you have no money and no room for mistakes. Robert had just finished El Mariachi — shot for next to nothing, already generating serious buzz — and he talked about it the way a mechanic talks about a car he built himself in the driveway.
"Natural light as much as possible," Robert said. "Friends as actors. Locations that work in your favor instead of against you. You stop fighting the constraints and start using them."
Bruce nodded. He'd learned the same lessons the hard way.
They exchanged numbers before parting ways. Bruce had a feeling he'd be seeing a lot more of Robert Rodriguez.
He was about to head out when a tall, composed figure caught his eye across the lobby — standing with a small group of critics, holding a glass of water, listening more than talking. Kathryn Bigelow. She was here with Strange Days, a film that had people talking in terms usually reserved for directors twice her age.
Bruce introduced himself. She listened to his description of the film — the interlocking storylines, the texture of the locations, the deliberate handheld restlessness of it — and nodded with the measured attention of someone who didn't give it away cheaply.
"Don't let them sand you down," she said, when he finished. "Whatever makes your film feel like yours — protect it. The industry will spend a lot of energy trying to make your second film look like someone else's first."
Brief. Direct. Worth more than an hour of any panel discussion.
Sunset spread out orange and pink across the Toronto skyline as Bruce jogged back toward the hotel, already thinking about Grace, and the promise he'd made her, and whatever the night still had left in it.
[500 Power Stones → +1 Bonus Chapter]
[10 Reviews → +1 Bonus Chapter]
Enjoyed the chapter? A review helps a lot.
P1treon: Soulforger (20+advance chapters)