Work Text:
Deer Hunter made them all a little crazy.
It wasn’t just the unsubtle lyrics, or the sultry, unsettling instrumentals, or even the intoxicatingly seductive choreo. None of those on their own. It was emergent from the whole: tacit permission to explore a darker, hungrier region of their concept, and thereby darker, hungrier regions of themselves. Or, if those regions were already known, to express those facets more openly.
Some, like Fuma and Nicholas and K, were already quite comfortable with them, and had no trouble leaning in.
Others, like EJ and Harua and Taki, were less interested in overt sensuality, and chose to focus on other ways of communicating the story.
Maki and Yuma were both delighted to be let off the leash, at long last, and revelled in their freedom to get nasty.
Jo didn’t fall neatly into any of those camps. He wasn’t familiar with the territory, nor had he been champing at the bit to get into it, but he wasn’t disinterested, either. He just wasn’t quite sure how to approach it.
He didn’t think overt or aggressive sexuality would work for him. He could definitely pull off something less direct, along the lines of what EJ and Harua and Taki were going for, but it didn’t quite feel like enough, somehow.
Jo could always sense when there was a worthwhile challenge present, and there was definitely something here holding out a hand to him in invitation.
The piece would succeed regardless, it was clear. It didn’t need saving. It didn’t even need help. But if he could find whatever it was that was waiting for him here… there might still be a level higher he could push it to, perhaps.
It was Harua who helped him find it. Harua who had found his own angle of approach, and had become something that was fragile and fey but also clear-eyed and dangerous, wounded but undaunted.
Jo had tried it a few ways already, both the pull of beckoning seduction and the push of dominance, but none of them had settled into the shape of him very well. He couldn’t feel the yearning to pin down prey, or to be pinned down, not well enough to sell it.
“I think there’s a balance you might be able to pull off,” Harua said thoughtfully. “You’re probably the only one who could pull it off, actually.”
Jo inclined his head and leaned a little closer, listening.
Harua clasped his hands atop his knees and picked out words, lining them up carefully but not seeming fully confident in them. “So you can’t want to be the prey or the predator, really, right? But think about the audience. This isn’t just about us. It’s communication with them, and there are definitely people out there who want you, or want you to want them. If you play it like you know that, but you’re choosing not to respond… like you’re right there, looking them in the eyes, but untouchable, not giving them anything…”
Jo took that in and chewed it slowly, thoroughly. He closed his eyes and imagined it. He’d met many LUNÉ now. Mostly women, mostly within a certain range of his own age, mostly from the countries they’d toured in, but there were others, too. Some men. Some older people. Some foreigners. People he never would have imagined caring about the group.
He imagined himself facing a broad assortment of them, imagined how they might respond to each approach. It was a little embarrassing that he hadn’t already been doing that; he’d lost touch with the point of performance for a moment there, and was grateful to Harua for anchoring him back into what was important.
He could see it, he realized, as he went through the exercise.
Being arrestingly beautiful was the one talent he’d come into the audition already having a solid grasp on. He knew how to be looked at, how to be seen, and how to look back in such a way that it became hard to tear one’s eyes away from him. He’d never really introduced the element of desire into it before, but if he did… If he offered himself to the lens with the intent of inviting desire — to touch him, to be touched by him — but without any intent to return it, something interesting might happen.
It did. Everyone remarked upon it immediately. Harua first, because it had been his idea, and he was pleased as punch to see how well it had worked.
It took Jo a while longer to really pin it down, but he knew when he had it. He always knew, and that was always the moment when he lost all performance anxiety and simply showed up and did the work.
He was beautiful. He was intense. The onlooker could neither look away nor reach him. The tension of that uncrossable magnetic chasm between them held the viewer fast in place without touching them. And all around him, the others came from their own angles, beguiling and threatening and offering deceptive safety.
It came together. They came together, and the audience met them there.
—