Chapter 2: Vexed and Confused
The bass hit them a full block before the club. It came up through the pavement, up through Kyle's sneakers, up through his whole body until his teeth were vibrating in harmony with it. The line outside Vex snaked halfway down the block, a living ribbon of glitter and crop tops and people who had clearly been pregaming since nine.
Kyle stopped dead, spread his arms wide, and beamed at the marquee like it was an old friend. "We made it. We actually made it, bro."
Roha stood beside him, scanning the crowd with the wary expression of a man who had survived three sieges and was now facing something worse. "This establishment appears to be at maximum capacity."
"Exactly," Kyle said. "That's how you know it's good."
He didn't wait for a response. He grabbed Roha's wrist again, the gold band cool against his palm, and plowed into the line with the confidence of someone who had never been told no in his life. A bouncer the size of a refrigerator took one look at Kyle's relentless grin and waved them through.
The interior of Vex was a fever dream. Purple and pink lasers cut through artificial fog. The dance floor was a seething mass of bodies that moved as one organism under a strobe light that pulsed like a panicked heart. The DJ was perched on a platform at the back, both hands in the air like he was summoning something unholy.
Kyle whooped. The sound disappeared instantly, swallowed whole by the wall of sound that hit them from all directions.
"I'll get us drinks!" he shouted, or tried to. The words came out as a vague vibration. Roha opened his mouth, probably to object, and Kyle was already gone, weaving through the crowd with the practiced ease of a salmon swimming upstream.
Roha stood at the edge of the dance floor, utterly still. The light made his dark skin look like polished bronze. He watched Kyle reach the bar, watched him gesture at the bartender with the kind of enthusiasm that suggested he'd known the guy for years instead of seconds.
Three centuries. Three centuries of darkness and silence, and this was his reward.
A drink appeared in his hand before he could process it. Kyle was back, grinning, holding two glasses of something radioactive blue. He shoved one at Roha and raised the other.
"To GPS!" Kyle yelled.
A woman beside them turned and cheered, clearly assuming this was some kind of toast to the night. Roha stared into his glass. It smelled like chemicals and regret.
He drank. It burned. He did not understand why anyone would do this voluntarily.
Kyle was saying something. Roha watched his lips move, watched the words get torn apart by the bass before they could reach him. Kyle leaned in closer, practically yelling into Roha's ear.
"-ever tasted? I think it's-"
"What?" Roha shouted back.
"-coconut or something. Or maybe it's blueberry. Do they make blueberry vodka?"
"I have no idea what you're saying!"
Kyle nodded enthusiastically, like Roha had just confirmed something profound. "Right? It's crazy. Joaquin said they do this thing called the strobe drop and it's supposed to-"
A blast of synth drowned out the rest. Roha felt the noise in his chest, a physical pressure that made his teeth ache. Kyle didn't seem bothered. He was nodding along, his whole body already moving to the beat, the drink forgotten in his hand.
"-and then the lights go all like this," Kyle continued, gesturing wildly with his glass. A splash of blue liquid arced through the air and landed on some stranger's shoulder. She didn't notice. Nobody noticed anything.
Roha opened his mouth to respond, to explain that he genuinely couldn't hear a single word Kyle was saying, but Kyle was already grabbing his arm again, pulling him toward the dance floor.
"C'mon, we're missing the drop!"
"Dancing is not a requirement of our-"
"I can't hear you!"
Roha's feet refused to cooperate at first. The magic hummed in his chest, warm and insistent. He felt it tug at him, not physically, but somewhere deeper. Like a memory of a friend slapping him on the back and telling him not to be a coward.
You're being a bad friend, the magic seemed to say. Your friend wants to dance. Dance with him.
"I am not dancing," Roha said to no one, because Kyle was already lost in the crowd.
His body moved anyway. One step. Then another. His arms, unbidden, lifted to approximate a rhythm he did not feel. His hips, traitors that they were, began to sway.
He would have groaned, but the music was too loud to hear himself anyway.
The dance floor swallowed them whole.
Kyle moved like he'd been born there. His body found the beat instantly, hips rolling, arms up, that brilliant grin splitting his face under the strobe lights. He was a pink-haired comet cutting through the crowd, and people were actually moving aside to give him room, like they sensed they were in the presence of someone having the time of his life.
Roha, meanwhile, was a statue having a seizure.
His arms twitched. His feet shuffled. Every few seconds, a muscle in his back would spasm in what he could only assume was an attempt at rhythm. He looked like a man being electrocuted by a very polite, very persistent ghost.
"Loosen up, bro!" Kyle shouted, appearing at his side like a mischievous sprite.
"I am loose," Roha shouted back. His voice came out strangled.
"No, like, actually loose! You're doing the robot but, like, sad."
Kyle's hands closed around Roha's wrists before he could retreat. "No, like this!"
He wiggled Roha's arms back and forth like he was operating a very tall, very reluctant puppet. Roha's biceps tensed. His jaw clenched. He tried to pull away, but the magic hummed in his chest, warm and smug, and his arms kept moving.
"That's it!" Kyle laughed, bright and loud. "Loosen up and feel the rhythm!"
"I am a timeless being," Roha managed, his voice vibrating with the effort of resisting. "I have witnessed empires rise. I have-"
"Now you're loosening up!" Kyle wiggled his arms faster, clearly not hearing a single word. "Feel the rhythm, bro! Let it in!"
A woman in a sequined top bumped into Roha's back and shrieked an apology. He couldn't hear half of what she said, just the general shape of it. The bass was a living thing now, pulsing through the floor, through his feet, through his very bones.
Kyle let go of his wrists.
Roha's arms stayed up. His hips kept moving. His feet, traitors, found the beat and started working it all on their own. It wasn't the stiff, startled shuffling from before. It was real movement. Fluid. Almost natural.
He was dancing. Actually dancing.
"Hell yeah!" Kyle threw his arms in the air. "There ya go! That's it!"
"You have bewitched me," Roha shouted.
"No man, I'm just that good!"
Something cracked inside Roha. Not the magic, not the binding. Something deeper, some ancient armor he'd been wearing for centuries. It crumbled at the edges, just a little, letting in the neon light and the pounding bass and Kyle's ridiculous, unshakeable grin.
A laugh bubbled up. It came out rusty, unpracticed, like a door that hadn't been opened in a millennium. But it was real.
Kyle's laugh burst out of him like a firework. High and loud and completely without reason. There was no joke, no punchline, just the sight of Roha's rusty, unpracticed laugh cracking through that ancient stone facade. And Kyle felt it in his chest, that warmth that only came from being exactly where he was supposed to be with exactly who he was supposed to be with.
"That's it, bro!" Kyle shouted over the bass. "Good energy!"
Roha's laugh died in his throat, replaced by a look of horror, like he'd just realized he'd been caught smiling at a funeral. "That was a temporary malfunction."
"It was beautiful!"
They danced through three more songs. Kyle lost count after the first one, because he didn't need a count. The music moved through him, the lights painted his skin in shifting colors, and Roha's awkward, increasingly less robotic dancing kept making him grin like an idiot. At some point, Roha's arms stopped spasming and started actually moving. Not well, not even close to well. But it was movement.
"Want another drink?" Kyle yelled, already heading toward the bar without waiting for an answer.
Roha followed. Of course he did. The magic nudged him forward like a friendly shove from an invisible companion, and he found himself standing at the sticky bar counter before his brain caught up with his feet.
Kyle waved the bartender down with practiced ease. "Two of whatever's strong and two shots of your choice, my guy!"
The bartender slapped two glasses of amber liquid and two tiny glasses of something clear onto the bar. Kyle slid one of the small glasses toward Roha and picked up the other.
"Cheers!"
He raised his glass. The magic hummed in Roha's chest, warm and insistent, and his hand moved on its own. The glass came up. The word came out.
"Cheers."
They clinked. Kyle threw his shot back like it was water. Roha did the same, because the magic gave him no other option.
It tasted like gasoline and betrayal.
Roha's face crinkled. His throat seized. A cough racked through him, and he slammed the glass down with the force of a man surviving a near-death experience. "What was that?"
"Don't know," Kyle said cheerfully, already sipping his drink. "Told him to pick his choice!"
Roha stared at the empty shot glass with the same expression a soldier might give a battlefield. "It tasted like it was distilled from despair."
"Yeah, but do you feel it? That warm thing in your chest?"
Roha did feel it. But it wasn't the alcohol. It was the magic, humming its quiet approval at the back of his consciousness, satisfied with a job well done.
"Perhaps," he said, careful and guarded.
"That's the good stuff," Kyle said. "Snake oil or whatever. Wait till the second one hits you."
"There's a second one?"
"Sure. Comes in a minute or two. Then you really start feeling the music."
Roha took a slow drink of the amber liquid to wash the taste out. It was marginally better than the shot. Marginally.
Kyle was still talking. Roha could see his lips moving, could see the enthusiasm radiating off him like heat from a grill, but the bass had eaten every syllable before it could reach Roha's ears. He nodded anyway. It seemed to count as conversation.
"...and then Joaquin says, bro, you gotta see the strobe room, it's like being inside a rave inside a rave," Kyle said, or something like that, maybe. Roha nodded again, deeper this time, like he was really considering the implications of a rave inside a rave.
Kyle beamed at him, clearly satisfied with whatever he thought Roha had agreed to. He tipped his glass back and drained the last of his drink in one long pull, then set it on the bar with a triumphant clack.
"Alright," he announced, grabbing Roha's wrist. "Moment of truth."
Roha barely had time to set his own glass down before he was being towed through the crowd again. He'd gotten used to the tug of Kyle's hand, the way it cut through the maze of bodies like he had a sixth sense for openings. It was almost impressive, if it weren't so alarming.
The dance floor hit them like a wave. Kyle dove in, his body picking up the rhythm instantly, hips already rolling, arms up, head thrown back. The strobe lights turned him into a sequence of freeze frames, pink hair flashing, grin split wide, completely, utterly in his element.
Roha stood at the edge of it all, bracing himself for the awkward resistance, the puppet limbs, the humiliating shuffle.
Except. He moved.
His foot stepped forward. His hips swayed. His shoulders rolled, not stiffly, not mechanically, but with something close to actual rhythm. He wasn't being electrocuted anymore. He was moving like a person who had, at some point in the last hour, discovered what a good time was supposed to feel like.
He stopped. His eyes narrowed. "What did you do to me?"
Kyle spun around, still dancing, somehow also carrying a full conversation while doing it. "What? I didn't do anything."
"I'm moving without thinking."
"That's called dancing, bro! That's the whole point!"
Roha tried to stop. Actually tried. His body kept moving. The bass was in his feet, in his ribs, in the back of his throat. It had a pulse that matched his own, or maybe his heart had just given up and synced to the song.
"Enjoy it," Kyle said, not a question, just a fact, like he knew exactly what was happening and approved of it immensely.
Roha wanted to argue. He opened his mouth to argue.
Then the beat dropped. It wasn't the strobe drop Kyle had been talking about, just a regular verse-to-chorus drop, but it hit Roha like a physical thing. The lights flared. The crowd surged. And Roha felt something loosen in his chest, something he'd been holding tight for centuries.
His head tilted. His arms rose. And he let the music take him.
It wasn't good dancing. It wasn't even decent dancing. But it was real. His body moved in a way it never had before, not in royal courts, not in desert temples, not in the silent dark of the lamp. He was moving because it felt good. Because the bass was loud and the lights were bright and Kyle was laughing, actually laughing, at the sight of an ancient genie finally letting go.
"You're getting it!" Kyle shouted, grabbing Roha's hands and spinning him in a circle.
Roha stumbled. Caught himself. Spun back.
Okay. Maybe he had gotten it.
The music kept thrumming through him, and for the first time in a very long time, he let himself go along with it.