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They sat back to back in the borrowed practice room, almost all the lights off, listening to the midnight quiet of the mostly empty building all around them.
It was too late and too quiet for music. They were too exhausted, the world too sharp, senses too abraded.
But they didn’t need music to dance.
Jo was so close. He could feel the shape of the thing he needed through the dark veil, obscured but palpable against his palms. It wasn’t a question of finding it anymore, but of figuring out how to let it in, make space within himself for it to come in and change him from the inside out. Remake him. Reforge him into whatever he needed to be to pull this off.
K tilted his head back until it thunked softly against the back of Jo’s. His back, flexible and whipcord strong, was a comfort to Jo. He liked the way their spines lined up, each vertebrae just touching its partner across the gap, held mostly apart by the firm rolling ridges of muscle to either side.
“I think,” said Jo, very softly so as not to disturb the soft dark silence, “I might know what I’m doing wrong.”
K said nothing, just made room for more in their shared space.
Jo took a moment before continuing, weighing words and choosing the best ones he could from the options he had to draw on while this tired. “I don’t need to learn how to dance from you, anymore. At least not just that. I think I need to understand how to love it like you do.”
“You don’t love it already?” K said quietly, unhappy.
“No, I do,” Jo reassured him. “I really do. But it doesn’t… push on me from the inside the way it seems to do for you. Like you have to move or you’ll burst.”
“Oh,” said K. “Oh, I think I get it, maybe.”
Abruptly thrumming with energy, he rocked up to his feet, then extended a hand down to Jo to help him up, too. Jo stumbled and came a little closer than he’d meant to, chest to chest and cheek to cheek for just a moment before he found his balance and stepped back.
K was nearly bouncing, driven to do something, exactly the way Jo had described.
“You don’t need to learn how to dance, or even how to love it. You’re already there. You need to learn to love music.”
Jo frowned. “I do love music, though.”
“Not like this. Not the way you need to. The way where it fills you up and moves you from the inside. So that it hurts to hold still. You need to learn to choreograph. Not for a whole group, not even anything you have to remember, just for the moment and just for you. How to let the music tell your body what to do with it.”
Jo’s view of the problem tilted a few degrees, slid around the side of the problem until something clicked over and what had been obscure was now an open door into a promising space full of indistinct and restless possibilities.
“You’re right,” he said. “I think that’s it. Will you teach me?”
K laughed, and there was music there, too. In his eyes, in his smile, in his voice, in everything he did.
“Not tonight,” he said. “We’ve been working hard, we need rest, and it’s too late to play any music anyway. But yes, I want to teach you. I want to find out what you’re like when it moves you. It’ll be different from me, because it’s different for everyone, but I bet it’ll be beautiful.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Jo. “Thank you, K-kun.”
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