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Dream is here alone, he always comes alone, on occasion he leaves with somebody but that’s not what it’s about, he’s here to let sound and vibration and bass and voices and bodies and joy and violence wash over him and carry him and dissolve him. He’s here to be subsumed.
He doesn’t want to hurt. But this is the farthest thing from hurting, even when he’s knocked around, slammed by a shoulder, a hard elbow, bathed in someone else’s sweat until they could be one living thing made of many. There’s something like that in the ocean. Siphonophore? He sings, and yells, and the drum beat skips and layers and it gives him honest to god chills when it hits just right.
Dream knows, somehow, and he couldn’t tell you how but he knows with awful certainty that there’s a world out there where some version of him exists that does not dance.
Where he exists with no way to feel like this. The thought leaves a sickening chill in the pit of his stomach.
Fuck that. He throws himself into bodies all the harder, as kindly as they throw themselves back into him. They’re looking for the same thing. He’ll have bruises tomorrow.
He is probably too old for this.
But no one’s looking at him like that. Most of them don’t look at him at all. They’re part of a machine that thrashes and sings, and the cogs and gears within can get close, can lean against one another, the small comfort of touch in the lull between one song and the next, strangers with half-melted borders in the darkened space between the flashing lights.
He thinks he must be a familiar face to the regulars, the devotees who haunt the same shows he does. There’s a few who notice him, who smile at him warmly. Fewer who know his name.
And this one, who is yet a stranger to him. The one his eyes follow, who throws himself into the joy of it with a fervor that caught him by surprise the first time he watched him in the pit. Their eyes catch and snag when they meet, like a burr on a woolen sweater, an itch he can’t quite scratch.
He is here tonight.
For all of Dream’s focus on the music, on moving and feeling and letting go of holding himself together, a piece of his awareness knows when this man moves through the crowd. Loses him, finds him again, now closer. Close.
He stops to catch his breath, and leans back. Subtle enough that he could receive a gentle shove in response and move on, but he meets a body that is warm and still. Looks behind him to see that his eyes are deep brown pools. Soft. He’s dripping sweat. He smiles, crooked and sweet. His mouth moves, but any sound is lost in the roar.
Dream turns back to the stage but doesn’t shift away. He leans, insistent, and the man meets him where he is. One hand comes up to Dream’s hip, and he shivers, leans into it, a thrill of heat that doubles and redoubles against the frayed out vocals.
The next song is quiet. The melody is spare. The crowd sways, some of them singing quietly, and Dream feels his eyelids flutter shut as the intensity builds, as the hand on his hip moves upwards to find bare skin beneath his shirt, rubbing tiny circles that send blissful echoes up and down his spine, and heat between his legs.
Breath on the shell of his ear. “This alright?”
He only nods, because to be heard he’d have to twist around and things would shift. He reaches back with one hand, finds a thigh through fabric, enjoys the sharp rise of his chest in response.
But Dream is not here to be a person. He is being measured and at this moment he does not wish to be a particle but a wave.
Dream comes here alone, and he leaves here alone, and this man, who is less a stranger than he had been, he gets it. He lets the crowd pull them apart when the opening beat of the next song hits and oh, fuck, he’s been waiting for this one.
Their eyes catch one more time; Dream sees him boosted up and thrown to the pulsing sea of hands, grinning like a beautiful madman, and Dream knows it’s only a matter of time until they’ll meet again.