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There's a tarot card in a chair. She's comfortable there, playing Cat's Cradle with sparkly purple string.

She's playing it by herself, and she's doing rather well.

Her bare feet bop to a song only she hears, and her bright eyes are very intent on the string, her fingers rearranging it until it form a pretty pattern.

Well, it's pretty to her.

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Her smile widens.

"Good. I was hoping you would."

Damian can't help but smile at her. He feels wanted, and it brings him a sense of contentment that he savours.

"Please, continue," he says, motioning to her slipper-clad feet.

Moon slides from his lap, but shakes her head.

"I will dance again, but not yet. Soon, but not yet. The floor isn't ideal here."

Damian bows his head, accepting that with a glance around the floor. As she says, it really isn't ideal for dancing. His eyes return to hers questioningly.

"What do you propose we do this evening, now that you have me all to yourself?"

"Why don't you choose, Damian."

Damian so rarely gets to make choices that are all his own, Moon encourages him to do so now.

Rarely, indeed. It takes him a couple minutes thinking to decide.

"I've noticed you usually walk barefoot. I'd like to walk barefoot with you outside."

It's simple, but something he doesn't normally get to indulge in.

Moon squirms about, removing the pointe shoes, and she puts them on the chair. She knows they will be there when she returns. A hop off his lap and Moon holds out her hand.

"I like touching the ground. I used to never touch the ground, like Star and Sun, but then I forgot how to float, and now I like touching the earth. I can feel it breathing."

Damian takes her hand and stands, following her. He knows that Sun and Star are others of the Tarot, but he isn't sure how one would forget to float if they had started out floating.

"You can hear the earth breathe?" he asks as they near the door of the bar.

Moon looks over her shoulder as she opens the door.

"I can hear the multiverse breathe."

She leads him out into the artificial night, the coolness of autumn already kissing the air.

It's a refreshing coolness, though, and still feels warm to the former Viking. Passing through the door with Moon, he pauses past the threshold in order to remove his shoes and socks.

"What does it sound like?" Because he can't truly fathom such a thing.

She pauses there in the moonlight, her eyes shut, and focuses.

"Like butterfly wings," she says after a quiet pause. "The beating of thousands of butterfly wings."

The description is poetic, though Damian can't completely imagine the sound. Soft, perhaps, a soft, unrushed thrumming.

"It sounds soothing," he says thoughtfully, stuffing his socks into his shoes and rising again. He resumes his former posture, his hand in hers. He hopes she doesn't mind.

She doesn't.

Not one bit.

"It is. The sound of life and choices and chance."

He steps out with her, sighing softly at the feel of the dirt and grass on his feet. Not all of it is soft, but all the sensations are appreciated.

"Does it reassure you when the hard choices come?"

"All choices are hard."

She watches him as they walk.

"Every choice is weighed and fretted over, even if you don't realize it's happening."

Damian thinks on that. Some choices seem very easy to him, but it might just be his perception. He is seeing from his place tangled in the strings, which Moon is on the outside, seeing the pattern before it is fully formed. Maybe that's the difference.

"So true spontaneity doesn't exist? I would think some choices are unweighed. Some choices come naturally and without thought to some people."

"Would you? Such as?" she asks, curious.

It always interests her how the sentients view choice.

Damian hums thoughtfully. "Routine. What is routine if not a series of choices you make without much thought? Routine can be broken by circumstance or conscious choice, but habit takes care of the little choices, consolidating them into a more broad choice of following the routine as usual or not."

It's an interesting thing to think about. There are choices in his past that he made without much thought. "She Who Made Me took pleasure in breaking and forming habits and routines. Training... conditioning... They make choices into reflexes, something visceral that takes no conscious thought. You learn not to hesitate on the battlefield. You can be taught not to argue. You can be conditioned to do precisely what another tells you, because you start believing there isn't a choice to make, so it is made without being weighed."

Moon looks up at him, pausing in their walk.

"Then you choose not to choose, Damian. You give that up to the other people."

"And that in itself is a choice... the choice that trumps the others."

He doesn't like that thought. It causes a small frown to bloom on his face.

"You made that choice several times, giving up the right to decide things over and over."

She tilts her head.

"Much like the kitten does."

Damian looks out into the forest.

"We are much alike, despite our differences," he agrees. It might be part of the reason they share a certain kinship.

They both had protected themselves by giving up the choice to others. He doesn't like the thought that he and Nathaniel had dug their own figurative graves and caused their own suffering, but there is truth to it, nonetheless. The choice had been there. It was just that the alternative had been too terrible, too much for the mind to handle.

Did it make him weak? Did it make Nathaniel weak? How did the choices of others figure in to it all? Did that change anything?

His head begins to hurt.

Moon's fingers move over Damian's brow.

"It is not weak to survive," she murmurs.

Green eyes meet.

"Is that the choice we both made?"

"To survive."

It is the most basic of choices, made by the most primal of parts within the heart of a sentient.