in orbit (or, butterflies) (Chris/Mark)
one-sided Chris/Mark (SYTYCD4)
PG for general/slight angst.
The day Chris made it into the top twenty, he must have been sweating buckets. He was so nervous he thought he was going to throw up, and tried to fight the urge to do so as he stood before the judges, waiting for them to just say yes, you’re in our top twenty or sorry, it ends here for you. When Nigel told him that he had the personality of a tree, he felt his stomach drop to his toes, wishing that a dark crevasse would open up under his feet and swallow him whole.
He knows that he’s got personality; it’s just so completely nerve-wracking when he’s dancing or even just standing in front of that panel of judges, all of their eyes focused on him. Even though he loves to dance, loves to get lost in the flow of movement and the nuances of music, he can’t find a way to make his movements convey personality that he feels but they, for some reason, can’t see. He dances contemporary, and when he dances it’s all turns and leaps and big movement. That’s just the way he dances. When they said yes, he almost passed out in relief.
Now he’s wishing he took some hip-hop classes just so that he could be just the slightest bit more interesting, like Comfort, who’s so out there and crazy and almost completely personality, or Josh, who, it seems, can do pretty much anything anyone asks of him with a grin plastered on his face, or -
Or Mark.
They’ve been on the show for more than two weeks now, and he watches Mark dance whenever he gets the chance to. He can’t get enough of how effortlessly cool he makes dancing look, masculine and clever and quirky. Nigel’s always saying how interesting and what a character he is, and that just makes Chris want more.
The thing is… sometimes he can’t tell what it is that he wants more of.
He wishes with this weird, profound ache that he was cool enough, or crazy enough, or fascinating enough to dance like Mark, who captivates everyone no matter what he’s doing because he’s just so interesting. The fact that he’s just so unique is always transferred onto the stage; the world seems to stop and spin on its axis whenever he takes to the dance floor.
Chris knows that he’s a good dancer himself, but God, when Mark dances, he feels like a forgotten benchwarmer at a high school football game, watching enviously as the school quarterback scores a touchdown.
Or something. He played soccer when he was a kid, so he’s actually not too sure about the specifics of football. Maybe that wasn’t the best analogy.
Mark is more like this… giant, blazing sun. And Chris is this planetary body, maybe the size of Mars, or Pluto (he’s forgotten if Pluto’s still a planet), magnetized by Mark-the-sun, the heat and the light barely warming his skin. He is constantly being pulled towards the center of this bizarre solar system, but he knows that if he ever gets close enough to touch, in the space of a millisecond he’ll be consumed entirely by the fire and the gas that fuels this immense star.
…Which kind of makes it sound like Mark farts a lot. Chris doesn’t know how often Mark farts - if he did know, that would be creepy, and moreover, pretty gross - but that doesn’t really explain what it feels like to be around Mark, to watch him dance, to listen to him talk…
Maybe he feels more like a caterpillar. A fuzzy, ugly, green thing that’s kind of cool in its own buggy sort of way, but really just wants to be that beautiful soaring butterfly with colourful spots on his wings. He feels like a caterpillar, with his eyes (Do caterpillars even have eyes? He’ll Google that later) trained on a butterfly that, with a feather-light beat of its dusty-bright wings, flutters up and away into the blue, blue sky. His admiration for the dizzying flight grounds him in his soft, squishy caterpillar body.
While his embarrassing admiration for Mark is, well, embarrassing, it’s a much more comforting explanation than the alternative, which he doesn’t like to think about. He knows it’s there, in the far recesses of his mind, but he steadfastly ignores it, won’t let his mind stray that far just in case he stumbles across the far more frightening reason why Mark so fascinates him.
It’s mostly subconscious, anyway. He doesn’t know why, whenever Mark grins at him goofily with his eyes crossed, he feels awkward and out of place and yet, strangely, giddy. The same feeling recurs when he steals food from Thayne and as Thayne’s looking at him with the most incredulous look on his face, Chris can hear Mark’s telltale laugh in the background.
It makes him want to dance.
Or explode.
Or both, at the same time, in a bright, crackling fire leaping with sparks.
Sometimes he doesn’t want to listen to his own thoughts, because he knows, only in the vaguest of ways, what he’ll find. Chris knows that he can’t tell whether the reason he’s so affected by Mark is because he wants him, or wants to be him - wants the attention that he commands. It’s most likely a combination of the two. Either way, it’s just weird.
So he tries glossing over the entire thing - the weird feelings, the burning and inexplicable embarrassment. It’s just so hard to ignore it all. It’s not that he thinks guys can’t be together; he doesn’t really care what people do with their personal business, and he’s got gay friends, so it’s not that he’s a bigot or anything.
It’s just that… he likes women, he really does. He’s had a couple of girlfriends before, and they’re cute and smell good and they have nice bodies. He likes boobs, and butts, and other female bits. He likes long, shiny hair and soft sloping shoulders, the dip of a waist and the curve of a woman’s hips.
Mark is so very male, all hard lines and tight muscle and his body has no curves whatsoever. Even his hair is distinctly masculine, angles and sharpness, the complete antithesis of femininity. When he wakes up in the morning he has stubble across his chin, his legs are hairy, and he picks his nose with his crooked pinkies. There’s no way that that should be attractive at all.
But whenever he watches Mark and Chelsie dance together, practice together, joke together -
At first he thinks he has a thing for Chelsie, because she’s such a cool girl, so completely unafraid to speak her mind about anything, a total tomboy and yet really sexy when she dances… but the more he watches them together, the more he finds his eyes being drawn to the quirk of Mark’s smile, the line of his jaw, the precise gesticulation of his hands… and the more he wishes it were him dancing with Mark, him laughing with Mark, him sharing an inside joke with sparkling eyes.
He feels like - and suddenly now he understands his metaphor - he’s a planet in a slow, steady orbit around a sun, and God, he does want him, and it makes him feel sick.
Sometimes he thinks Matt knows, or he’s figured something out. Sometimes he’ll catch Matt looking at him with a strange expression on his face, the faint traces of a question between his eyebrows… but he never mentions anything to Chris, and for that Chris is glad. Matt’s the closest friend he has in the competition, and he doesn’t know what he’d say if he came up to him and asked him, his voice hushed and low, what’s going on with you? He doesn’t know what Matt would say, either, if he managed to come up with a reply. He wouldn’t want to lose him just because of this… infatuation that he has with Mark.
In a way, he’s almost glad when he’s eliminated the third week, because that means that he can go back to being Chris-the-crazy-dancer instead of Chris-the-caterpillar, and he can forget about his mind’s wanderings to dark hair and cheeky grins and the movement of another man’s body. He can forget the weird, nonsensical dreams that leave him gasping for air in the middle of the night, the ache that he feels watching Mark do… anything, the difficult-to-explain reaction he gets to the accidental brush of Mark’s long arm against his own.
But when Mark crushes him into a huge, friendly hug before he leaves their apartments, his arms wrapped tight around Chris’ body, Chris closes his eyes and just lets himself feel. For the briefest of moments, he lets go of all the things he has to forget or keep in check around Mark and hugs him back just as tightly, allowing himself to bask completely in Mark’s light, even if he can only ever be a flame in the presence of the sun.
PG for general/slight angst.
The day Chris made it into the top twenty, he must have been sweating buckets. He was so nervous he thought he was going to throw up, and tried to fight the urge to do so as he stood before the judges, waiting for them to just say yes, you’re in our top twenty or sorry, it ends here for you. When Nigel told him that he had the personality of a tree, he felt his stomach drop to his toes, wishing that a dark crevasse would open up under his feet and swallow him whole.
He knows that he’s got personality; it’s just so completely nerve-wracking when he’s dancing or even just standing in front of that panel of judges, all of their eyes focused on him. Even though he loves to dance, loves to get lost in the flow of movement and the nuances of music, he can’t find a way to make his movements convey personality that he feels but they, for some reason, can’t see. He dances contemporary, and when he dances it’s all turns and leaps and big movement. That’s just the way he dances. When they said yes, he almost passed out in relief.
Now he’s wishing he took some hip-hop classes just so that he could be just the slightest bit more interesting, like Comfort, who’s so out there and crazy and almost completely personality, or Josh, who, it seems, can do pretty much anything anyone asks of him with a grin plastered on his face, or -
Or Mark.
They’ve been on the show for more than two weeks now, and he watches Mark dance whenever he gets the chance to. He can’t get enough of how effortlessly cool he makes dancing look, masculine and clever and quirky. Nigel’s always saying how interesting and what a character he is, and that just makes Chris want more.
The thing is… sometimes he can’t tell what it is that he wants more of.
He wishes with this weird, profound ache that he was cool enough, or crazy enough, or fascinating enough to dance like Mark, who captivates everyone no matter what he’s doing because he’s just so interesting. The fact that he’s just so unique is always transferred onto the stage; the world seems to stop and spin on its axis whenever he takes to the dance floor.
Chris knows that he’s a good dancer himself, but God, when Mark dances, he feels like a forgotten benchwarmer at a high school football game, watching enviously as the school quarterback scores a touchdown.
Or something. He played soccer when he was a kid, so he’s actually not too sure about the specifics of football. Maybe that wasn’t the best analogy.
Mark is more like this… giant, blazing sun. And Chris is this planetary body, maybe the size of Mars, or Pluto (he’s forgotten if Pluto’s still a planet), magnetized by Mark-the-sun, the heat and the light barely warming his skin. He is constantly being pulled towards the center of this bizarre solar system, but he knows that if he ever gets close enough to touch, in the space of a millisecond he’ll be consumed entirely by the fire and the gas that fuels this immense star.
…Which kind of makes it sound like Mark farts a lot. Chris doesn’t know how often Mark farts - if he did know, that would be creepy, and moreover, pretty gross - but that doesn’t really explain what it feels like to be around Mark, to watch him dance, to listen to him talk…
Maybe he feels more like a caterpillar. A fuzzy, ugly, green thing that’s kind of cool in its own buggy sort of way, but really just wants to be that beautiful soaring butterfly with colourful spots on his wings. He feels like a caterpillar, with his eyes (Do caterpillars even have eyes? He’ll Google that later) trained on a butterfly that, with a feather-light beat of its dusty-bright wings, flutters up and away into the blue, blue sky. His admiration for the dizzying flight grounds him in his soft, squishy caterpillar body.
While his embarrassing admiration for Mark is, well, embarrassing, it’s a much more comforting explanation than the alternative, which he doesn’t like to think about. He knows it’s there, in the far recesses of his mind, but he steadfastly ignores it, won’t let his mind stray that far just in case he stumbles across the far more frightening reason why Mark so fascinates him.
It’s mostly subconscious, anyway. He doesn’t know why, whenever Mark grins at him goofily with his eyes crossed, he feels awkward and out of place and yet, strangely, giddy. The same feeling recurs when he steals food from Thayne and as Thayne’s looking at him with the most incredulous look on his face, Chris can hear Mark’s telltale laugh in the background.
It makes him want to dance.
Or explode.
Or both, at the same time, in a bright, crackling fire leaping with sparks.
Sometimes he doesn’t want to listen to his own thoughts, because he knows, only in the vaguest of ways, what he’ll find. Chris knows that he can’t tell whether the reason he’s so affected by Mark is because he wants him, or wants to be him - wants the attention that he commands. It’s most likely a combination of the two. Either way, it’s just weird.
So he tries glossing over the entire thing - the weird feelings, the burning and inexplicable embarrassment. It’s just so hard to ignore it all. It’s not that he thinks guys can’t be together; he doesn’t really care what people do with their personal business, and he’s got gay friends, so it’s not that he’s a bigot or anything.
It’s just that… he likes women, he really does. He’s had a couple of girlfriends before, and they’re cute and smell good and they have nice bodies. He likes boobs, and butts, and other female bits. He likes long, shiny hair and soft sloping shoulders, the dip of a waist and the curve of a woman’s hips.
Mark is so very male, all hard lines and tight muscle and his body has no curves whatsoever. Even his hair is distinctly masculine, angles and sharpness, the complete antithesis of femininity. When he wakes up in the morning he has stubble across his chin, his legs are hairy, and he picks his nose with his crooked pinkies. There’s no way that that should be attractive at all.
But whenever he watches Mark and Chelsie dance together, practice together, joke together -
At first he thinks he has a thing for Chelsie, because she’s such a cool girl, so completely unafraid to speak her mind about anything, a total tomboy and yet really sexy when she dances… but the more he watches them together, the more he finds his eyes being drawn to the quirk of Mark’s smile, the line of his jaw, the precise gesticulation of his hands… and the more he wishes it were him dancing with Mark, him laughing with Mark, him sharing an inside joke with sparkling eyes.
He feels like - and suddenly now he understands his metaphor - he’s a planet in a slow, steady orbit around a sun, and God, he does want him, and it makes him feel sick.
Sometimes he thinks Matt knows, or he’s figured something out. Sometimes he’ll catch Matt looking at him with a strange expression on his face, the faint traces of a question between his eyebrows… but he never mentions anything to Chris, and for that Chris is glad. Matt’s the closest friend he has in the competition, and he doesn’t know what he’d say if he came up to him and asked him, his voice hushed and low, what’s going on with you? He doesn’t know what Matt would say, either, if he managed to come up with a reply. He wouldn’t want to lose him just because of this… infatuation that he has with Mark.
In a way, he’s almost glad when he’s eliminated the third week, because that means that he can go back to being Chris-the-crazy-dancer instead of Chris-the-caterpillar, and he can forget about his mind’s wanderings to dark hair and cheeky grins and the movement of another man’s body. He can forget the weird, nonsensical dreams that leave him gasping for air in the middle of the night, the ache that he feels watching Mark do… anything, the difficult-to-explain reaction he gets to the accidental brush of Mark’s long arm against his own.
But when Mark crushes him into a huge, friendly hug before he leaves their apartments, his arms wrapped tight around Chris’ body, Chris closes his eyes and just lets himself feel. For the briefest of moments, he lets go of all the things he has to forget or keep in check around Mark and hugs him back just as tightly, allowing himself to bask completely in Mark’s light, even if he can only ever be a flame in the presence of the sun.