The rest of dinner had gone well. After viewing each other's auras and discussing weightier things earlier - the nature of magic, the possibility of them getting a place together - they went for fairly light discussion through the main course and dessert. The appetizers had been large enough, and the main courses more than ample enough, that even with taking leftovers home, they barely had room to finish the small dish of mango ice cream they'd ordered to split for dessert. Orphan gave the waiter a good tip and reminded himself to thank his co-workers about the tip... this was definitely a good restaurant.

Afterward, they drove for a bit, continuing with light conversation, including Orphan's rather eclectic taste in music. The mix of CDs currently in his car includes the recent remaster of the Beatles' REVOLVER,, the live album Metallica had done with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, a CD with selections by various Celtic artists someone had burnt for him a year or so ago, before he'd come to Sacramento, a Queen 'greatest hits' compilation, a two-disc Billie Holiday collection, LONDON CALLING by the Clash and a CD of Tibetan instrumental pieces, heavy on drums, bells and flutes.

As they drive by a park, Orphan does a U-turn and parks on a whim.

"I think a pretty Irish girl mentioned something about holding hands and walks in a park?"

"That sounds like a good warm up for desert," says Tam absently. She if feeling a little light headed, but for good reasons.

Okay, so the romantic gentleman does have his moments.

"A park with trees. I like trees." Tam pauses a moment, then says, "Actually, I miss trees. There were forests back east."

The park in question doesn't have anything approaching a forest, but it does have trees, and shrubs, and even some plants that flower in season. Once again Orphan gets out to open Tam's door and to extend a hand to her, but this time when she steps out of the car, he moves in, puts an arm around her and looks into her eyes.

He then leans in for a kiss.

Tam closes her eyes, wraps her arms around Orphan's neck, and returns the kiss, not rough, but quite passionate. She doesn't back out of the kiss until Orphan does, letting herself get lost in the smell and feel of him, using him for balance, for surely she would have fallen over if he wasn't holding on.

Orphan is no hurry to pull away from the kiss, returning it with equal passion, immersing himself in her scent and her warmth and softness. He holds Tam close and touches her, in a sensual way, not a sexual one... stroking her hair as they kiss, caressing her face. That's not to say there isn't any sexual response on his part - there certainly is, as Tam would no doubt notice, given how closely he holds her - but the moment is more a sensual one, about bonding on levels other than the carnal, albeit some of them physical.

When he finally does break the kiss, he says nothing, merely looks into Tam's eyes and smiles, taking one of her hands in his as he continues to stroke her face.

Once Orphan withdraws, Tam's eyes flutter open, as if from an amazing dream. She steps in, leaning her head on his chest, placing her free hand over his heart. After a few moments of silence, she says, "I bet they don't serve that at the restaurant."

Slowly, she pulls back, still holding Orphan's hand and leads the way into the park. It was no forest, but it had trees to look up at, reaching into the night, and the scent of nature could be detected amid the dominant city smells.

Orphan is content to just hold Tam's smaller hand in his, and to let her guide their walk. He pays attention to where she looks, wanting to learn to look at the world as she does, as a way of getting to know her better, but most of the time his focus is on her. He smiles to see her joy at catching the feel of a cool night breeze on her face or hearing the rustle of a tree's branches in the same breeze, and sometimes just smiles to look at her.

At some point when she stops to look at something, he steps behind her and wraps his arms around her from behind while nuzzling himself in her hair, enjoying the scent of her, the feel of her in his arms.

"Tell me what you see when you look at trees, or at the stars... what they mean to you," he says.

Tam leaned into Orphan and thought about his question.

"When I see trees, I see sleeping people that have helped me in the past, hiding me from dangers, teaching me about ... things." She kept silent for a few moments as tension sweeps through her. When it is gone, she continues, once again calm. "They lead dynamic lives, but in slow motion. They sprout, they communicate, they wage wars with long, drawn out strategies, fending off rival seeds and raiding insects."

Tam cranes her neck to look at Orphan's face, then she looks past, up into the sky.

"The stars ... they are so far beyond us in ways we really don't understand. Their lives encompass the power to destroy worlds in seconds, but the endurance to outlast any mortal. And we are all mortal. Even the immortals. If a star lashes out, the most durable is scattered into oblivion. In the mean time, they unwittingly seed the universe with life, sustaining us on every level."

She looks back at Orphan before returning to a more relaxed posture.

"Why? What do you see?"

She looks out into the park, smiling, waiting for him to speak.

"That's neat, the thing you mention about trees waging war. That's an Arrow way of looking at things, you know? Existence is War. "

Orphan is quiet for a time, trying to find the words to express his thoughts. When he finally speaks, he does so quietly, and slowly.

"When I look at trees, I think about what trees look like through the lenses of Life and Time - how old they are, and how vibrant, and teeming with and connected to other pulses of life. That awareness reminds me that no matter how important people are - and they are important, any awareness of Fate demonstrates that - there is so much more to things than most people, and even a lot of us, realize. With the stars... when I've studied the stars using the Sight, I've been blinded. They represent Time on a scale where humans barely even register, and they are connected to Fate in ways I can't even untangle yet."

After a bit, he says "I also see the trees and the stars from the point of view of an artist... I think about how to effectively convey something like starlight, or the movement of a tree's limbs in the wind. And I guess looking at things like trees and stars also reminds me that even through the Lie that is the Fallen World, so much magic still shines through, if one just bothers to look. Even Sleepers know this on some level. That's why the Seers so often try to silence or subvert skilled artists and people of a spiritual bent, you know... to keep them from reminding people of the true magic of the world."

He kisses Tam's neck, high up, under her right ear. "I don't know how much sense any of that makes, but that's what I see, best I can say it, anyhow."

Tam listens to Orphan, feeling the vibrations of his voice in his chest against her back. She tries to imagine looking through Time, but can't even begin to grasp it. It warms her heart to hear Orphan speak of the humility of humanity, rather than blather on about how great humans, or more specifically, mages, are.

We are merely animals looking up at the bright lights.

It surprised Tam to hear Orphan speak as an artist. Most often, he saw him as a warrior, albeit, off duty in her presence, but the feel of a warrior was always there. To think of him as an artist made her think of the passion that could connect art and war.

Then he said it, the trigger, the words that spark the tiny flame of rebellion within her.

"I don't think we are Fallen ... not really."

She speaks tentatively. She has brought this up before, back East, and was shouted down, scolded for such blasphemy.

"Are we so different from the mages of Atlantis? So we got kicked out of our playhouse. Was it really our fault? Isn't that the greatest pile of hubris possible?"

Tam turns to face Orphan without creating any distance between them.

"All the stories sound like a load of finger pointing and pity parties, but the universe is SO much bigger than us. What if we are just riding aboard a galactic spirit ship that scraped along some galactic iceberg. The galactic spirits are all slapping their foreheads, not a single one caring or even noticing our predicament We are like rats on a sinking ship, with the rats blaming themselves for the rising waters."

Tam stopped to take a breath.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to turn a romantic moment into my soapbox rant. In the end, it really doesn't matter. It is all theory and conjecture. The effects are very real, but who really knows what happened in the beginning. We have to be responsible for our own actions, but it is the height of arrogance to think we poked such massive holes in the universe."

Tam lays her head on Orphan's chest, hoping to recapture 'the moment' again.

"It's good to be passionate about what you believe," Orphan says, hugging Tam from behind. "But I think you're maybe looking at the whole 'Fallen World' thing from the wrong perspective. I don't think it's people that are fallen, at least not like how Christian beliefs talk about humans being separated from God by sin. I think it's really the world itself that has fallen... not into sin, but away from the Supernal, from what it should be. It's broken away from that, pushed away by the Abyss.

"There are times I can do a spell, it works perfectly, and then there are other times when I do it exactly the same way, the same imago, and it doesn't work... the Abyss gets in the way. You and me, and all of us, the magi... we know the world can be and should be more directly connected to magic than it is. We saw that, at the Watchtowers, when we Awakened. We connected to how things are at a level beyond what we experience in this world.

"We aren't the only ones that know it, either. Like I said earlier, really good artists get it. Probably really, really cutting-edge scientists do, too. That's what the Free Council thinks, anyhow. And Sleeper mystics, they figure out parts of the truth. Even just everyday people, on some level, they know there's more to things, and should be more to things, than they see. But if you show them the truth, they can't see it, and not just because of the lies of the Seers, or the Guardians hiding the truth from people not ready for it. There's an illusion - the Lie - that keeps them from seeing how things really are. And in not seeing it, they can even dispel the truth you show them, by disbelief. That's not the way things should be, and if you believe the old histories, that's not how they used to be.

"I don't think people are innately sinners, or that the world's a place of sin and evil. I think that idea is part of the lies spread by the Seers, a false way people are taught to think that blinds them from the truth. But I think the world isn't the way its should be."

He kisses Tam's neck again. "How's that for a soapbox rant?"

Tam pulls away from Orphan, but drags him along, still holding his hand.

"Why did people ever stand on soapboxes? I mean, didn't anyone ever stand on a tomato crate?"

She turns, walking backwards, so that she can look at Orphan.

"I get how things work, but who is to say that is just how things are supposed to be? Let's say a volcano splits an island in two. Some of the monkeys on one side of the island remember the yummy bananas and big leafed trees, but now, on the barren side of the island, all they can grasp are berries and ferns. What I am saying is, it DID happen, but we really don't know why."

She shrugs, happy that Orphan didn't ridicule her thoughts.

"Can you pull a fruit smoothie out of the air with that little trick of yours?"

"I could," he says, grinning. "But first I'd have to scry some smoothie stand and wait until someone was making one, and then I'd have to reach out through Space and grab it up. That would be Vulgar, and invite disbelief, so it probably wouldn't work. Plus it would be stealing. Easier to just go buy you a smoothie, and I'm glad to do that."

He pulls Tam back to him and looks into her eyes. "I think it's fine to question how accurate the stories are. Heck, it's smart. We know historical accounts aren't always accurate, and the further back one goes, the more likely that is to be true. Even Time only lets us look back just so far with any accuracy, and I don't think any mage alive today can claim to have actually seen Atlantis, even with Postcognition. So, long as we agree something happened, and how things work now, that's good enough for me."

And then he kisses her again. Another long, slow, deep kiss. Orphan doesn't really want to talk any more about myth vs history right now, and his hunger obviously trends toward things other than fruit smoothies.

Tam looses herself in Orphans sensual kiss. She never understood the phrase, 'swept off your feet.' It always felt like falling, instead, except there was never a sudden stop at the end. It was like falling upwards, towards a cloudless sky.

Tam forgot all the short lived flings of her past, passionate and greedy, ending in boredom or grief. The people she lusted after returned her feelings, but when the desire burned out, there was nothing left of those relationships beyond a dry husk of irritation and frustration.

Tam felt Orphan's desires, but she also felt them rooted in a need for stability. He had his own past, something that gave his current maturity tangible credibility. He wasn't a naive dreamer looking for a soulmate, or a wandering artist claiming to find his true love of the week. He was walking away from a bad boy past towards a responsible manhood.

And Tam found herself a part of his life.

After a long while, he finally breaks the kiss, but he doesn't let go of her, and he focuses his gaze on her eyes, the connection just as strong and real as that between their mouths moments ago.

"Are ready to go now, Tam?" he asks. "Back to your place?"

"Always back to my place," says Tam. "I left it a mess when I rushed off to meet my boyfriend. I hope you don't mind the clutter."

Orphan smiles at being called her boyfriend. "I don't think I'm going to notice any clutter," he says.

As they turn back towards the car, Tam looks at Orphan and declares, "You really don't have to open the door for me. While it is romantic and gentlemanly, and I appreciate your intent, I believe it is a silly tradition. In fact, I am going to open the door for you and show you just how silly it feels."

Orphan laughs at that. "Alright, fair enough," he says. "But how about later when I pick you up and carry you into the bedroom?"

Tam frowns a little. "Only if help me with some strength training. I got wimpy arms and I want to carry you some day."

As they reach the car, Tam skips ahead and pulls the driver's door open and stands waiting for Orphan to get in. Her frown is gone with nary a trace.

Orphan walks to the driver's side, bends and kisses Tam's nose, and says "Let's go."

Tam runs around to her side of the car and gets in, forgetting to close Orphan's door for him. He laughs, shuts the door and starts the car.