Sometimes - only sometimes, when he was sure he was alone, he would dance. Eyes shut, brow furrowed as he poured all of his concentration into feeling the dance, sensing the space around him only as he moved through it. He didn't need the mirrors in front of him in order to make out the movements; they were already patterned out for him in the music, gestures moving into and out from one another with deceptive simplicity.

  He didn't always need the music on to see the steps. Sometimes they just came to him when his eyes were closed, as though noted on the blank canvas of his thoughts, brightly numbered to a beat only he felt. It was a fiercely personal act, a total absorption that would feel violated, should someone else witness it. No-one asked where he went.

  But recently, more often than not there was a spectator. He only came on days when Ohno danced to no music, slipping in long after the doors had been carefully shut against the prying eyes of the few who might stray here after hours. Ohno never looked to see who it was. The spectator sat just out of range, where the mirrors didn't pick up his image - the one time Ohno had let himself wonder, peeking from under lowered lashes, he'd missed a step in the mental choreography. He'd stumbled, tripped up the movements, broken his concentration.

That day, he'd gone home without even looking behind him. The dance was ruined.

  From then on, he'd tolerated the spectator without allowing them to compromise the dance. He'd even grown used to the familiar presence, the curious blank area in his sense of the room's layout, the one area he couldn't enter with when dancing.

  He'd started going more and more often. The dance cleared his mind, emptied it of everything but the bright dots mapping out where he next moved to, how he moved, taking up his being so completely that there was no room for troubles, no room for sadness or loneliness or conflict.  He'd know when the spectator was there, watching. It was subtle, and it had only come to him when weeks built upon weeks, the faint tang in the air on those days he had an audience.

  He liked the scent of lemons. It smelled fresh, clean. The taste had an edge of decadence to it, a suggestion of intoxication mingled with the sharpness. On those days he'd dance like he had an audience, like he had no audience, with as much abandon as if no-one would see and with as much control as if the dance determined his very fate itself.

  But it was getting harder, harder all the time to find that same sense of clarity as he used to. The pressure of performing - even to his one silent, forgiving spectator - muddled the mental outline, confused it. He found it harder to make himself the blank page onto which the dance was written, his heart thudding in his chest at that first cloying scent of lemon. Would today be the day he grew tired, the day he didn't want to watch any more?

  They'd all begun to notice it - a level of distraction above and beyond the one he normally displayed, eyes focused somewhere in the middle-distance during conversation, leaving food to grow cold as he mindlessly sketched pointless, endless interweaving lines on a napkin, some indecipherable dance-step no-one could make sense of. The pressure to make the dance perfect was creeping out of his private room and into the rest of his life, consuming his thoughts where before it had been a means of erasing them for half an hour.

  So he went, day after day, to that little room. And he danced, day after day, thinking next time I'll get it perfect, next time I won't miss that beat, next time I'll make better use of the space, next time... And every time it failed to live up to his expectations he'd dance until the point of exhaustion, stumbling home unsatisfied.

  Today he knew it would be different. Today would be the perfect run-through, today there would be no hitches. He knew it. So he danced steps that had by now become second nature, the dance a language he was fluent in, a language he spoke with eloquence and flair. And before he realised, a tear was halfway down his cheek, a pinprick point of moisture on his flushed skin. More joined it, unbidden, and from somewhere distant he imagined them glistening from his reflection in the mirror.

  It wasn't finished - his perfect run-through wasn't finished, but still there was the hand resting heavily on his shoulder, stilling his movements. He felt the arms come up around him from behind as though he were a thousand miles away, not really part of what was going on in their quiet, private room.

"Shh. Stop." He hadn't realised the tears were still falling until he opened his eyes, vision blurred. "Just stop."

  When he opened his eyes the room seemed smaller than it ever had with them shut - and there was the reflection of his spectator, together with his in the mirror, head bowed into the crook of Ohno's neck, arms encircling him. Shutting his eyes again, he let out the breath he hadn't realised he was holding, trying to find that place where his mind was blank, where he could feel the space around him. But the music was gone, and all he could feel was Jun's lips at his neck, and all he could smell was the pervasive, heady lemon scent.

"Just stop."

The dance didn't belong to him, any more.