The Broken Dancer

The Highest Bid

Yoongi chose a Tuesday.

Tuesdays were quieter; the regulars came to drink instead of celebrate, and the tourists were thin enough that the house lights felt less like a spotlight and more like a dim, watchful moon. If he was going to walk back into the club - with his pulse behaving like a snare drum and the edges of a plan stitched under his ribs - he wanted fewer eyes on him.

Fourteen days had pressed themselves into the shape of a decision. He'd spent them counting small, practical things: the length of the hallway behind the stage (thirty-one paces, give or take), the time between Jimin's final bow and when the curtains swallowed him (eleven, sometimes twelve seconds), the way the hidden doors sighed shut, soft as a secret. He didn't write any of it down; he walked his apartment in circles until the floorboards learned the route and his body remembered the lengths. He practiced leaving without slamming the door. He practiced breathing through anger that wanted to bloom into something reckless and unforgivable.

He told no one he was going back. Not his parents, who had pressed leftover banchan into his hands at the train station and patted his cheek as if they could smooth the worry right off it. Not Namjoon who'd asked - careful, curious - why Yoongi had requested a payout early. Yoongi didn't lie. He just said, "Cash flow," and let the world accept the answer it wanted.

Now the envelope sat flat and heavy inside his jacket, against his heartbeat. It wasn't courage. It was intent, measured and tangible. A symbol he could grip if his hands started to shake.

He parked two blocks away and walked the rest, cap pulled low, collar turned up against a wind that seemed determined to push him back the way he'd come. The club's neon sign flickered the way it always had - one tube consistently dull, like an eyelid that refused to open all the way. As he reached the door, the scent of smoke, sugar, and sweat rose up to meet him like a tide. He didn't hesitate. He stepped in.

The music held the room together. Low, lush bass rolled across velvet benches and chrome rails, pinned to a rhythm just under conversation. The lights bled in gradients - amber to wine, violet to indigo - washing faces into anonymity. Yoongi didn't go to his old corner. Corners comforted ghosts and watchers. He wasn't here to be either. He took a place along the bar with the cleanest view of the stage and the hallway beyond it. He placed his palms flat on the lacquered wood, grounding himself.

Seokjin clocked him almost immediately. Not with surprise - Jin never gave away more than he meant to - but with a subtle stilling, like a metronome paused between ticks. He approached with a cloth in one hand and a question tucked in the arch of an eyebrow.

"Whiskey?" Seokjin asked.

"Water," Yoongi said, voice low. "No ice."

Seokjin poured without comment, but the silence between them wore edges. "Been a while," he said finally, sliding the glass forward.

Yoongi lifted it, held the rim to his lip as if he might drink, and didn't. "Had to be," he said. The truth fit easily and left the room for the rest of it. "Busy."

Seokjin's gaze flicked to the stage, then to the hallway where curtains made of heavier darkness hung like a second night. Back to Yoongi. "You here for the music," he asked, "or the view?"

"The music," Yoongi said, and let it sit there, honest and insufficient.

Seokjin's mouth twitched - half a smile, half a warning. "If you need anything..." He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't have to. He moved away, but not far, orbiting close like a planet that had learned the law of someone else's gravity.

Yoongi rolled his shoulders back, slow, easing tension he hadn't asked into his bones. He let his eyes adjust to the room's familiar geography. New table near the left pillar; a chair missing a rubber foot; the right speaker buzzing faintly on low frequencies. The hidden doors at the back looked the same as ever - clean, innocuous, a cut in the wall that opened into a throat only certain people could pass through.