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“This feels wrong, man,” Dorian complains, but he takes the small stage upon his partner’s gleeful insistence. “I’m not your personal entertainment system.”
“Nah, you’re better than that.” John waves his bottle of juice agreeably, wondering if he’s maybe had one too many but not really caring. The stuff isn’t supposed to be alcoholic, but damn-
“C’mon, big D.” John pauses, ponders his own words, then falls over onto his side on the padded bench with a helpless snort of laughter. “Big…”
Dorian fixes him with his inscrutable stare, the one that saw through John’s bullshit at the most inconvenient of times. “I hope that you have a perfect recollection of this in the morning,” he says, with the air of delivering some grave sentiment, before he begins flicking through the holo display of song lists before him. “Any requests?”
“Oh God,” John chokes out through his wheezing, then rolls onto his back and stares up at the dim ceiling. He can distantly hear the music from the next room over and wonders briefly how he came to be in a dingy karaoke booth with Dorian. It started out with a typical invitation to a normal bar, he’s almost sure, but a series of events unfolded that led them here instead, stuffed inside a tiny room with a lighted platform and an abysmal selection of what passes for music these days.
Whatever happened to the good old days? He ponders the ceiling again solemnly, then realizes that Dorian’s speaking to him.
"Wha?"
Dorian blinks at him, blue lights travelling slowly up his face. The dancing lights in the room are pink and purple, making his eyes something completely out of this world, and John squints at him wordlessly as he picks up the mic and clears his throat. “I said I’m going to start now.”
John waves his hand in a “get on with it” gesture, but doesn’t sit up. He likes it down here; it gives him an interesting world perspective. He thinks about chugging down more juice and giggles feebly. Whatever the tiny green-haired girl behind the counter handed him before they walked in, it sure isn’t any damn juice.
He closes his eyes and listens as the first notes of the song pulse through the speakers. “I’m a little nervous,” he hears Dorian say, the mic catching and reverberating his voice off the walls.
"You’ll do great," John hears himself say, then wonders why he says it. It’s hardly like Dorian needs the morale boost. He feels almost dizzy even though he’s lying down, like the room’s rocking around him or he’s bobbing on waves.
Then he hears Dorian sing.
It’s a few seconds before he can do more than listen in stunned silence, then his eyes fly open and he rolls onto his side, pushing himself up on an elbow to stare over the tabletop in disbelief.
“Now you’ve been talking in your sleep," Dorian’s belting out, in an exact reproduction of the original female singer, whose stage name John couldn’t remember for the life of him at the moment. "Oh, oh, things you never say to me-”
"What," John mouths, too shocked to give voice to any of the thoughts stumbling cheerfully around his skull.
"That’s cheating," is what he eventually says, and Dorian has the audacity to cock an eyebrow at him. He’s well into the second verse now, dropping into his normal tone for the male part of the duet, "You’ve been having real bad dreams, oh oh-“
"What the hell," John mutters, flopping back onto the bench with a sigh. At least he sounds good, for once. It gets a bit crazy in the chorus when Dorian somehow manages to synth the female harmony along with his own voice, but John has to grudgingly admit that, well……it works.
“We’re not broken, just bent, we can learn to love again-“
He feels himself smile reluctantly as he closes his eyes again. It’s not a bad song, really.
He only wakes when a finger prods at his forehead, and he splutters back to coherence, eyes snapping open to find Dorian’s face inches from his own.
"I think I’ll take it as a compliment," Dorian told him wryly. "My dulcet tones sweeping you off into slumber and all that."
"Mmmgh?" John says intelligently. The music’s stopped, he realizes, and the inside of his mouth tastes sticky sweet from the not-juice. Their two hours will probably be up soon, and he can’t remember if he paid for an extension already. "How long…?"
"Not long," Dorian says cryptically. He hasn’t moved his hand from John’s forehead, or leaned away, but John feels pleasantly fuzzy at the moment and can’t really bring himself to care.
"Oh." He relaxes deeper into the bench, yawning, and when he opens his watering eyes again, Dorian’s somehow even closer than he was before.
"What’re you doing?" he mumbles, briefly fascinated by the way Dorian’s eyes glint in the half light.
"Something crazy, no doubt," Dorian says, and he kisses John. It’s soft and careful, a little clumsy in the way he attempts to execute it, like he’s seen it many times before but never tried it out, and John snorts a little when Dorian nuzzles curiously beneath his jaw.
"Idiot," he mutters, fumbling for the back of Dorian’s neck to pull him closer again. "Took you long enough."
It takes John a second to realize Dorian’s humming against his mouth, but he can’t quite make out the tune. “What’s that?” he murmurs, pulling back enough to lick absently at his lips. The corner of his mouth tastes cloyingly sweet, and he lingers there for a moment, unable to help but like the way Dorian’s eyes track the movement.
"Doesn’t matter now," Dorian tells him, leaning forward to brace his elbows on either side of John’s head. His eyes seem darker, less inhuman, more……something, John decides dizzily. "I’ll sing it for you later."