The economy is coming crashing down around everyone's collective ears, the Tories have won again, and it's about to be another bitching Canadian winter in Bayfield. Mark Illsley is in the wrong country, employed in a fairly below board way, more or less homeless and teetering on the verge of being broke. He got some Scottish girl knocked up and she actually stalked him to Canada and now he's stuck here with her, her pyromaniac brother and some kid that seems to be his. Yes, the only way things could be worse would be if his mother showed up.

As things stand, the only solution he can see is to go out and get fairly sloshed. Which might be tricky on his limited budget but he figures he's pretty enough that someone will have mercy.

So there he is tramping it up in the Warehouse, sometime on Sunday night. It's one of the few places that he doesn't look completely out of place. Even though he's wearing a dress. A tight, low backed shiny shimmery purple silver dress with a skirt that swings. He's also wearing silver tights, butterfly face paint and giant hoop earrings. How this came about, it's probably better not to ask. The lights are shining off his hair (a lurid lavender that matches his gown) and the fact that he can actually dance in kitten heels is in itself impressive.

It's the point in the evening where he's expended all the money on drinks that he's willing to expend, he's still not tipsy, and he's hoping someone will have mercy on him. Hence the seductive swaying of the hips, but you'd have to be crazy to take him up on whatever offer they're making.

Dionis isn't crazy, and he isn't Mark's mother. Anything else just might be fair game.

There's something not quite right with the music, something a little too emphatic about the bass, something a little too sharp in the brief spurts of electric violin. It's loud and it's fast and it's techno and anyone not listening might not feel how it's also falling apart, just a little. Whatever the center is, it isn't holding.

If you knew about the gods, if you knew about the world that exists above and below and through this place, the Warehouse, the history underneath its skin, you might think that Pan was having a bad night. If you didn't know, you might think the DJ's equipment had taken one too many drunk revelers stumbling over its wires.

Either way you'd be wrong.

There's a man at the corner of a throng of people, green hair flung out in a sweat-damp aurora, arms out like jerking, broken wings. He isn't moving to the beat of the music, or the flash of the strobe lights - he might well be moving to the heartbeats of the men and women around him, and there's something in the pills palmed one person to another that isn't quite right tonight. Every person Dionis touches feels the effects of whatever they've taken a little harder and a little worse and is that much more likely to spend the night drinking until they puke, but they're also less likely to grind and push and pull and take until their heart explodes in their chest.

He's doing what he can, but not everyone's idea of escapism here falls under his jurisdiction.

Tatters is grinding up against someone, fairly oblivious to their gender or even what they look like, and is wondering if he has perhaps had more to drink than he realised. He's putting it down to the lights which are bright if not brighter than usual and the bass which is perhaps a touch wonky but what would he know about that and the supressed storm of emotions that he's beginning to suspect if brewing under the surface of his thoughts.

So his main idea is to dance, dance to a rhythm that's not quite holding together. That doesn't really matter, about whether the beat is quite right or not. The point is that the beat, metaphorically speaking, is a bit off. That's why people come here, isn't it? Instead of going somewhere sane, somewhere where there's less drugs and less lights and less lunatics. Because they want to get away, and after the chaos of their lives who really cares if the sound system's a bit off?

Someone's hair is in Tatters mouth, another texture and another taste to add to a swirling mass of sensations. He's not particularly bothered as to whose hair it is, whose body he's pushing his own up against. Unless they happen to want to buy him another drink, of course. That would be good. But he's content to just dance.

Every body is a construct, if it isn't taken. They have to be built, carefully, bones and meat and gristle, long lines of nerves snaking under skin, glands and blood vessels and pores. And hair.

You don't need these things if you don't want to feel the heat pressure slide of a human body behind you. You don't need to build up fingernails (real fingernails, or almost real - something like keratin in hard, ridged lines, coated in chipped silver polish) or eyelashes (protein and paint, his black eyeliner smudging up) or hair (penicillin green and tangling in front of his eyes) if you don't want to dig them in to hips pressing in behind you or close them against the light or feel lips close and stick to the tips.

He wants to.

This body, like all of Dionis's bodies, smells like myrrh. It tastes like apothecary sweat and ashes and body paint, even though he isn't wearing any. The fact that the body behind him is - the boy, the man, the mage and Dionis grins at nothing, brief flash of (sharp) teeth and green-glitter lipstick - makes the lights stick and flicker briefly, makes the bass just that much harder.

"I like your dress."

Yelled over the music, voice rough-edged but honestly appreciative, and he could be talking to anyone if his palm wasn't curved around the edge of a lavender-clad hip. It's easily, thoughtlessly possessive, because every body in here, every body like Tatters', is his.

At this rate, it's a good thing that Dionis isn't Tat's mum.

Not that she wouldn't like his dress, she just wouldn't like it on him.

Tatters inhales deeply, the sweetly cloying smell of the man mixing with the aura of cigarettes and weed that tends to hover around Tatters. Tatters thinks the man he's dancing with is just that. He either doesn't have the knowledge and intuition to tell otherwise, or the booze and the bass are dulling his senses. Probably both. Anyway, he doesn't know what he's got on his hands (or rather, on his hip).

"Thanks," he says, sounding all warm and Southern and out of place, even over the background noise. "I like you..." The word, meant to be a 'your', trails off midway. Tatters would be hard pressed to place or point out at this point what exactly he likes about this guy. Maybe the way the smell of him cuts through everything and it totally different to anything else there. Or maybe it's just that lipstick, so tempting to taste or touch, to put your fingers through and smear.

"...your hair."

Lavender and that particular shade of green aren't exactly meant for each other, but they do at least look striking together.

Another grin, brighter and faster. Dionis is moving just a little like he's underwater, like his hips and spine are following different rules even as he shifts to slide both palms up the boy's hips, sides, silver fingernails blunt and scratching against the fabric.

Either Tatters was too obvious in looking or Dionis would have done it anyway, ducking his head to the low curve of his neck and laughing a little too slowly against the skin, breath hot and just a little fast. He does something with his hips or with the music (because he isn't Pan and it isn't his but this place, this club is, even with the low note of something sluggish and too bitterstrong still making its way through blood and bodies and the bass) and the strobes catch against his hair, against Tatters' skin.

"You can have it."

He might mean the hair or he might mean a lot of other things, moving his mouth to drag a quick, glittering slide against Tatters' neck. The lipstick is exactly as prone to smearing as it looks.

Electrified by his partner's smile, Tatters suppresses a shiver. It's not like he hasn't felt a million other hands sliding up his hips just so, but this is fairly epic. And now he has that beautiful lipstick smeared across his skin, now it's thinner on Dionis's lips, more of a stain.

And he can have it. Whatever it is. The hair, the man (the god, even), the night. Pushing their bodies closer together, insofar as this is possible, Tatters runs his hands through the luxurious green hair. Under the lights it's positively lurid, glowing and shining like some potion, a toxic shade of green that Tatters associates with hangovers.

Hangovers, but good things before hand, even if you don't remember them after.

For someone who has pretty much never wanted anything before in his life (except possibly to escape), he wants this. More than the usual craving for a chemically induced flight of fancy, he wants this touchable, taste-able, smear-able thing that's right under his hands, right there, making promises.

"Buy me a drink," he commands, not even stopping to wonder if that's really a clever thing to do. The bass has gone to his head.

Another low breath of laughter, but there's nothing mocking in it, nothing calculated. A girl who brushes against Dionis's side (Tatter's side, too, Dionis's body moving fluidly recklessly easily against his) sucks in a breath of smoke-sweet air and becomes all at once less likely to go into renal failure. Dionis pushes his head back into Tatter's hands, arching his neck, throat, baring barely-luminescent skin and a smudge of someone else's body glitter and his teeth in what is almost a grin.

"All right."

Spoken just loudly enough to carry over the music and Dionis doesn't step back, tracing the edge of Tatter's dress and catching one fingernail against the skin of his back. His eyes are tornado warning gray but any power, any danger there is muted underneath a pliable, warm enjoyment.

"What do you like?"

A little louder, a little less subtle, raking his eyes over Tatter's body as he arches back again just a half-beat behind the bass.

Threading his fingers through the man's hair, running them down his neck, across his shoulders, Tatter's hands are touching him lightly, just heavy enough that he can feel it and nothing more. It leaves a trail of silver and gold glitter across Dionis' skin and clothes.

Tatters leans close into the man, so that their lips are briefly only a whisper away, but then he turns his head to murmur into Dionis' ear. "I'll have whatever you're drinking," he says. Because he's flexible like that. And because the smell of the myrrh and the sweat of this guy are so intoxicating that they could drink water and the room would still end up spinning.

"Come on, then," he adds, snaking an arm around Dionis' waist and steering him, firmly, in the direction of the bar. "You can provide the alcohol and I'll provide the company."