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The nights where he had to work doubles were the hardest. Levi had been busting his a** since well before the music festival begun, gearing up for the event that had put his company on the charts with every intention to ride out the wave - until he realized the wave wasn't stopping. Somehow, he'd gotten exactly what he'd wanted but now he had all the work of a promotion with all of the Negaverse s**t he still had to do.

Two beeps and a double flash of his headlights told Levi his car was locked and he started the long walk down the sidewalk, heading for downtown club and bar district. It was small and not much to boast of, in his opinion, but it had pretty low crime rates when one didn't count all of the Negaverse attacks. For him, it was pretty safe. For Domey, it was perfect. With one last glance down at his watch (12:19), the tall, lean man buried his hand in his pocket and returned with a starseed. It was one of the dimmer ones he had collected over the last several nights which meant it was at risk of fading out - bummer. There was barely a flinch as he popped it into his mouth and swallowed the soul piece, feeling it sink down into him like a solar flare swallowed whole. It was getting easier and easier to take, especially as he found himself growing more and more dependent to that buzzing euphoria.

He didn't want to call himself addicted. This was necessary. His entire life was at risk.

With a roll of his shoulders, he rounded the last corner and found himself staring down the long street that bisected the little social district. Ditzy women were already stumbling out into the street in peals of laughter and there were grunts and groans among the milling, lazy crowd that he thought were drunken idiots in the midst of brazen acts of tom foolery. Sometimes it was worth the single cat easy to lead astray but there was also something to be found in draining unknowing dancers and letting them work themselves into an exhausted, pleased stupor.

The only issue was that he hadn't made up his mind what his target was tonight. He always felt a twinge of resistance and the little whispering voice of rebellion but tonight, as drained as he was, he couldn't even muster up the heart to enjoy the game if he had to. That was the trouble with being burned out on life.

The moment he walked into the club, he saw her.

It was hard not to, the same way it was hard not to notice Jade. The people in the room gravitated towards them, the lucky celebrity faces of their strange little city. Porsha had flown under the radar for a while, bubbling at the verge of being recognizable outside of the ring, but after a few ad campaigns and a couple of billboards there was no way people didn't know her. Marketing her had been different than marketing Jade, completely, and he'd enjoyed the change of pace.

Even if it meant working with her.

Levi moved along the outside of the bar, avoiding a patch of sticky something he felt beneath his chucks and onto the bar top itself, where he got an Old Fashioned in no time. The entire time his bright eyes followed her, watching her writhe to the rhythm of the music. It always brightened his mood to watch a woman that loved to dance and his mind brought up the image of Jade, not so long ago, swaying unfairly to the music when he was doing his damnedest to make a deal. It made him smile around a small sip of his sugared whiskey. Jade would want him to start treating Po better, he knew it, and it was the only reason he pushed his feet toward the dance floor.

With his drink held tightly in one hand, he wove through the group of people dancing around her until he managed to break into the small space she had created for herself. As she spun, he caught her eye and fell into motion in the same step, catching her hip in his free hand as her back turned to him and forcing her back into the line of his body. He wasn't a confident dancer but Jade had been teaching him (by forcing him to do it) and there was enough knowledge in him that he felt like he could like he could at least fake the confidence now. He kept a smirk on his lips as he fell into a sway with her, using his bigger form to dampen some of the momentum she'd built up alone.

"Are you enjoying all the new fans?" His words were close to her ear as he leaned in over her shoulder, speaking to her above the drum of music overhead. "I didn't realize we were doing this well."

Levi would have liked to say that his confidence was due to a buzz but, truth be told, his glass was nearly full as she pulled it to her lips. He held it there and watched her sip it down with the grace of a woman that knew how to do it without breaking her stride, honestly impressed. But no, most of his confidence came from the knowledge that it was just might damn hard for Xe to slit his throat in the middle of a club. There were too many witnesses and it wasn't her style. Coupled with that annoying, buzzing reminder that he wanted Jade to stay in his life - well. He had to choose some time to start building bridges.

"Quotas brought me in the door," he retorted, first, as he brought his drink back to his own lips and down another sip. When his lime eyes fell again, it was to meet hers where her head cradled against his chest, the angle such that he could see down the line of her neck to the hollow of her throat, then the slope of her chest beyond it all in the same frame of view. Maybe it was the first heat of his drink that made him realize how much more pleasant she was with her danger removed.

"I also just figure that at some point, Jade's going to get mad at me if I keep avoiding you and making her split her life in half." Completely out of context, he caught his mind wandering to how much Jade must actually enjoy dancing with Porsha (and how much, he was sure, everyone enjoyed to watch). He knew she wasn't free to night but, had she been, who would she have chosen to spend her time with? No, he was a boyfriend that felt guilty enough to challenge his fears.

The hand on her hip tightened as he held her close to him, swaying mindlessly for a moment and letting her hips rock to guide his. With her leaning back into him like she was, it forced him to support her and, maybe intentionally, forced them to stay close if he didn't her to fall. It wasn't an unpleasant trap, if he were being honest.

"You just happened to be where I was heading, tonight. A dance probably won't kill me."

When her arms lifted to drape along his neck and shoulders, his own hand shifted from her hip so that his arm could catch her around the waist. It put his hand flat against the slope of her stomach but, too, held her closer to him. While she spoke, he listened, and his eyes lidded from a combination of their swaying and the sensory-jamming music and lights swirling around them. It trapped them in a little, surreal bubble that Levi was enjoying. For just a moment it was a dance between two people, not a General and a man she had scarred too deeply.

“Mmmm,” was his only answer, a thoughtless sound of agreement drowned beneath a draw of his whiskey and the contentment currently making his thoughts thicker.

“I know that,” he mumbled at last in response to them getting along, “even if she’s not very pushy about it.”

Levi’s ability to dance wasn’t anything to brag over, even if he’d gotten better with Jade’s careful guidance, but it seemed hampered further by his decision to bring his drink with him to the dance floor. That meant it needed to disappear, quickly, and he followed the thought with a deep sip that left his ice rattling in the last remnants.

“But considering most of that’s on my shoulders, I’m trying to make an effort. Normal relationships are hard enough without death threats and sulking.”

His words were a ghost along the shell of her ear just before a flash of light out of the crowd made his head whip up - it hadn’t been a strobe light, he knew that sequence too well. A few people averted their eyes under his gaze but no one seemed more suspicious than the last. With no one to blame for the oddity, his eyes fell back to her face.

“You’ll have to excuse me, though. I need to find a place to abandon this glass.” And maybe find a quick vantage point to see who was spying on them.

As the feline woman pressed herself back against him firmly, drawing his attention away from their conversation and instead to the way she felt pressed into the curve of his body, Levi couldn’t help but falter. A rigidity crawled the length of spine so quickly that it drew his muscles tense and made him pause mid step where he had been following her lead through the beat. If she had been trying to keep him from moving, it had certainly worked, though his free hand immediately pressed harder against her hips to keep her against him. He fell back into the beat and matched her sway with a renewed vigor, allowing his fingers to splay slowly across across the dip of her hip where he held her.

“I wasn’t planning to go anywhere,” the words fell from his lips and he dipped lower so that she might hear him better without his needing to yell above the music. Rational Levi quieted and he forgot about the cameras for just a moment, concerned only with her. “Dancing would just be a lot easier with both hands..”

A smirk spread across his lips slowly and his lids drew down partially over his bright, lime eyes. Wrapped up in her body, it was easy for his attention to drawn inward from the pulsing music and gyrating forms around them to only her. The long fingers splayed over her hip bone sunk in their fingertips, applying five points of pressure against the hollow. It pulled her into him and back a little as he took small steps behind them, further into the crowd and hopefully surrounded enough that it would be much harder to grab a snapshot.

The moment he was sure he had her secluded among the thickest of the crowd, he used the grip on her hip to slip around her, pulling her against him with a hand against the small of her back instead. It forced his leg between hers and melded the line of their bodies together so that dancing was suddenly a lot more personal - and it gave him the chance to look down at her eyes, too. With his own still lidded, lulled by whatever hormone she had sent raging through his veins, he offered her that same, wicked smirk.

“What game is this now, hm?”

The look that the lanky man leveled on the smaller woman was one of smug pride and a little disbelief. It wasn’t a new thing, lulling a woman with a few husky words and the right amount of pressure, but Levi was a man prone to disconnects. With as much fear of Xenotime as he had, the sight of Porscha had never caused anything other than a creeping chill up his spine and uneasy dread. Yet, now, with his limbs tangled in hers and her lidded eyes staring up at him beneath a frame of lashes, she was much more the lamb than he felt. A different feeling altogether was blossoming over him but it was certainly nothing akin to fear or panic.

For the first time since he’d encountered her (or, rather, that she had cornered him) so many years ago, Levi felt in control. They were wrapped up in a moment of liminality, poised between something they had been and about to, he was sure, take the leap into something new.

“I’m definitely winning,” he bent lower so that he could speak softer, closer to her ear, and kept pressure in the hand that she was bracing against. The other, now freed from grasping his drink, slid up along her side until he could cup his palm at the base of her skull and bury his ice-chilled fingers against the soft tufts of her vibrant hair. It let him hold her closer as he swayed into the music, forcing her to feel the line of his body while their dance drifted from playful to something else.

He drew away enough that he could look back down at her face, lulled gaze meeting lulled gaze.

“You’re really not what I was expecting.” It was said in seriousness, less playful than his tone had been in the few moments it took to invade her personal space. One corner of his lips turned up with his admission and the hand at the back of her skull shifted just enough to let him draw a thumb along the line of her jaw. “Underneath it all.”