30 Day OTP Challenge, day 4: On a date

[dianeduane]

If (as some characters at the heart of other fandoms have been heard to suggest) a date is when two people who like each other go out together to have fun, then Nita and Kit have probably been dating for years. In fact, you could make a case that quite a lot of the elective type of wizardry could fall into this category. Human wizards have been getting together to do paired and grouped wizardly interventions for as long as humans have practiced the Art, and they haven’t always done it simply because a group would produce the best results in an intervention. They do it because (like so many other things) wizardry gains in value when it’s shared: or because they like the people they do it with, and want to do more of the same kind of thing.

But normally the concept of the date suggests something besides just going out to have fun. About the word, in English anyway, there hovers a sense that the fun itself is almost secondary. The real business of the evening is seeing the other person (or people) involved in the equation having that fun in company with you, and being in a position to share some of the overspill of their pleasure — but also, most importantly, to have the other person know that their happiness is making you happy too. And in the truly perfect date, this whole set of conditions is duplicated in the other person (or people), so that the exterior delight in the event itself, and the interior delight in the other person’s enjoyment of what’s going on, reflect back and forth as in a hall of virtual mirrors — seemingly increasing one another the way light, so remirrored, seems to increase light even when there’s been no net addition to the energy input. No one who’s ever been on such a date is likely to forget it...whether they're a wizard or not.


When you ask Kit and Nita about memorable dates, depending on when in the flow of local time you catch them, you’re likely to get very different answers depending on which of them you’re talking to. The Crossings will come up at least once or twice, which is more or less unavoidable: there are some great eating and entertainment venues there, as you might expect from any facility which is both so venerable and so cutting-edge. Nita (who at first tends to fight a little shy of discussing the concept of dating as it applies to them at all) will probably mention a planet called Alimat, where they went for a take-some-time-off visit after a very trying group intervention that Mamvish got them involved in; swimming in deep-forest lakes was involved, as was a picnic. Kit, if asked while on his own, will mention an evening spent on the slopes of one of the Himalayas (secondary to something Dairine hornswoggled them into: don’t ask for more details or he’ll really start stewing). But if you ask them both at once, and ask what’s the first date that comes to mind as a really good one, both of them will look at each other and immediately say, in chorus, “Munich.”

Getting them to explain what actually happened may not at first throw much light on what made this date so memorable. Well, Oktoberfest is always memorable on some level. The sheer size of this huge, glossy, beery folk festival, placed as it is smack in the middle of a great European city, can hardly fail to make some kind of impression.

But over a little discussion of the event, and some teasing-out, various factors start to emerge that explain at least some of what contributed to such a notable single day. For one thing, the loose ends of the business on Mars (now usually referred to in the Manual as the Martian Master Completion and Loop Closure) had finally been tied up a few days previously. Though the intervention itself was almost two months gone, and both Nita and Kit had had time to get over their initial intense relief at not being dead or exiled from their normal lives in a number of different ways, the debriefing had been unusually intensive — as might be expected when the backtime fate and realtime disposition of a whole planet was at issue. But all of that (including a truly shattering and unexpected interview with Jupiter’s Planetary wizard) was done now, just in time to coincide with an administrative holiday at school that left them with a long weekend at their disposal.

Nita had been dead tired after her solo debrief, and had said to Kit, “I just want to vegetate for a few days… do normal things.” And Kit had completely understood. But he’d also gotten into a conversation with one of the original Martian assessment and investigation team, their buddy Markus, who drove not-tanks-but-armored-personnel-carriers for the German Army. Markus had casually mentioned Oktoberfest to them after they were done in (as opposed to on) Jupiter: and when Kit had said, in some surprise, “I thought it was all about beer?” Markus had just laughed and said, “Not all! Come on by and see. It goes for three weeks, lots of time…”

Then Kit and Nita got back home and had some rest, and the next day Kit said to her, “I was thinking I’d go take a look at it. Want to come? We can always come straight back if we don’t like it.” And somewhat to her own surprise, Nita said yes.

So they went, and for no reason that was instantly apparent, everything just seemed to fall together perfectly. Maybe it was because they did wind up doing normal things: but they did them splendidly abnormally. Just getting there was part of it: an unusual pleasure, since both of them were still on subsidized transport secondary to their debriefs, and so could just roll straight into Grand Central and do a gating without paying for it in personal energy. They went without fuss or bother from there to the worldgate facility at Chur SBB, and then from Chur to the dedicated portal area in München Hauptbahnhof (downstairs on the S-bahn level, down the service corridor between the luggage store and the sandwich stand as you head toward the Stachus underpass). After that it was just a matter of catching an underground S-bahn train to the Theresienwiese, Queen Theresa’s Meadow as it had been once upon a time…and then up and out into the Fest.

Both of them had had some confused image from TV travel shows of vast tents full of people, and ladies bustling around holding gigantic beer steins, and crowds of folks singing and getting drunk and falling down. Neither of them had realized that the Oktoberfest was also very much like a really large state fair. There was a half-mile long midway with rides and a London Eye-type giant ferris wheel: there was every kind of food imaginable, from charcoal-roasted fish to grilled sausages to the best possible French fries (Belgian style, actually) to whole roast ox: there was entirely too much sweet stuff — painted gingerbread and cotton candy and candied nuts (which Nita could never get enough of, a fact she had never admitted to anyone but Kit), along with pastries and cakes and way too much chocolate of a quality that even Carmela would have approved. There was plenty to drink that wasn’t beer. There were tacky carnival games of the kind that Kit loved (a fact he had never admitted to anyone but Nita). And there were just thousands and thousands of people, mostly speaking German of course, but for two wizards well along in their expertise in the Speech, this was hardly an issue: to the locals they simply sounded like people speaking perfect German but with a broad New York accent.

So Nita and Kit spent all of a long afternoon-heading-into-evening riding the rides, and eating and drinking everything their hearts desired (as they both had some spending money piled up), and wandering around just looking at strange and interesting stuff in the souvenir and craft stalls (which were extensive). And finally Kit actually did the cliché carnival-date thing and won Nita a stuffed toy in a shooting game (it was a large pink counterfeit Totoro). And they just revelled in hanging out together while not saving the world, and in having a really good time: and it was all absolutely comfortable and relaxed and perfect.

And after a while the sun went down, and the whole place lit up in a blaze of colored neon and decorative light around the time the singing from the big beer tents started getting really raucous. Presently Nita and Kit looked at each other and realized in relaxed and unhurried unison that they were both about ready to go back home. So they each acquired one last sausage (Nita a spicy lamb-and-beef one, Kit one of the city’s trademark pale veal sausages with hot mustard) and ate them while they walked back to the train station, with the city’s blue and white trams humming up and down their route back, and hundreds of people laughing and talking around them, coming from the Oktoberfest and going to it. Then the two of them made their way back down to the main-station worldgate on the S-bahn level. Thirty seconds later they were in the Alps (and Nita, looking up, saw the International Space Station go overhead and down behind the Calanda mountain in a blaze of white fire). Three minutes later they were in Manhattan. Half an hour later they were home.

Trying to get them to reveal anything further about that perfect evening is fruitless: they just both snicker and roll their eyes. But the pink counterfeit Totoro now resides permanently under Nita’s pillow, propping it up into what she describes as perfect late-night reading configuration. And hidden in one of his desk drawers, safe from Carmela "accidentally" eating it, Kit still has the painted gingerbread heart that Nita bought him, the one that says “Ich bin total verrückt nach Dir”.

And there it’s probably best to let matters lie: because, at the end of the day, the best thing about a date, and especially about a perfect one, is that the only one who should really know its whole story is the other who’s involved. And in this regard, even the Powers that Be will turn Their eyes away and smile.

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(To the master post with links to the other days of the challenge)

Comments

[carbonel]

Technical note: For some reason, the link to uncollapse the post isn't working properly -- it doesn't uncollapse. I had to click into the actual post to view the entire thing. That, thankfully, worked.

ETA: And now that I posted something, it is of course working properly. Sorry!

I'm enjoying this series, so it's worth a bit of fussing!

[nelka35.livejournal.com]

thanks...

[omimouse.livejournal.com]

YES. Belgian fries are the absolute best.

-still misses the little Belgian patat stall back at the Grote Markt in Grongingen-

[marlex.livejournal.com]

I love the different styles of each story so far. They have been a smile a day. Something to look forward to.

[azurelunatic]

^_^

So enjoyable!

[estara.livejournal.com]

First of all, just nice. And 2nd thanks for having something positive about Germany in the story. I don't get it much in casual non-German literature, if Germany comes up at all. The only thing I was missing in the description was Nita's impressions of dirndls ^^ *grin*

[dduane.livejournal.com]

Hey, a pleasure. I really like Munich: always have. (But then I've always been a little slanted toward the southern side of the country: it's either Bayern or Ba-Wu for me. Good food, nice people, super climate, lovely wine....)

...I was tempted, just barely tempted, to get into dealing with tracht... Maybe another time. :)

[estara.livejournal.com]

*grin* maybe when they're a bit older and visit there again and Nita wants to show off. Kit in lederhosen ought to be fun, too.

It was on my mind here because when I visited my niece for a weekend this year I had managed to pick the beginning weekend of Oktoberfest - and even in Donauwörth as I got into the train (and all along, when I changed into the S-Bahn at the Hauptbahnhof to get to Deisenhofen - for some reason it didn't stop in Pasing this time - there were LOADS of trachten-clad young men and women from their 20s to their mid-30s on their way to be there at the Anstich.

[nightskywarlock.livejournal.com]

Beautiful. Perfect.