The Broken Dancer

Cracks Widening

The door closed with its usual thud, sealing them into the little pocket of space that had become something else entirely. Jimin didn't flinch this time. The sound no longer carried the sharp edge of finality; it felt... muted, almost familiar.

Yoongi noticed immediately. For weeks, he had studied every flicker of Jimin's body like a man memorising constellations - the way his shoulders curled tight, the way his eyes darted anywhere but toward him, the way silence sat like a wall of barbed wire between them. Tonight, the air shifted.

Jimin crossed the room without hesitation. Not rushed, not stiff. He didn't hover by the wall or hesitate at the chair like he was bracing for invisible shackles. Instead, he sat - fluidly, naturally - as though this was routine now, as though his body had accepted Yoongi's presence as something that did not threaten.

And when Yoongi's gaze lifted, their eyes caught. Not for long - just a few seconds before Jimin's lashes dipped, before his fingers found the edge of his sleeve to twist. But it was longer than before. And in those seconds, Yoongi felt it: the tiniest crack of trust widening.

The silence between them wasn't jagged anymore. It didn't claw or suffocate. It breathed. It had room.

Yoongi leaned back in his chair, letting the weight of this change settle over him. He didn't want to break it by rushing in. But Jimin - astonishingly - spoke first.

"You're late tonight."

The words weren't sharp, not really. More observation than accusation. His tone still carried the practiced coolness, but underneath it there was a tremor of something else - awareness.

Yoongi blinked, caught off guard by the sound of Jimin's voice cutting through the stillness so quickly. "Traffic," he said simply. A lie, maybe, but harmless. What mattered was the exchange itself.

Jimin hummed, looking down at his hands. The edge of his sleeve was already fraying from weeks of nervous picking. He stilled his fingers, forcing them flat against his thighs.

They let the moment linger. It didn't close back up like it used to, didn't harden into silence again. Instead, the pause felt like an open door waiting to be walked through.

"You... always sit like that," Jimin murmured after a while.

"Like what?"

"Like you're not really here." His eyes flickered up again, holding for a fraction longer this time. "Like you're somewhere else."

Yoongi tilted his head, considering. The boy wasn't wrong. In the early nights, he'd sat half-hidden in his own thoughts, fighting not to act, fighting not to reach out. Jimin had read him with terrifying clarity.

"I suppose I am," Yoongi admitted. His voice was quiet, but not evasive. "Thinking too much. It's a bad habit."

That earned him the ghost of something - not a smile, but the faintest softening around Jimin's mouth. A twitch, a shadow of what might one day grow into one.

For Yoongi, it was enough to steal his breath.

For a while, the room felt balanced in a way it hadn't before. Neither of them scrambling to fill the silence, neither shrinking from it. Just letting it exist between them.

Jimin leaned back slightly in the chair, his body no longer wound so tightly around itself. His fingers tapped a faint rhythm against his thigh - not enough to be called fidgeting, more like a nervous current finding an outlet. Yoongi tracked the sound, a quiet pattern in the otherwise still room. It was music, in its own fractured way.

Yoongi cleared his throat, surprising himself with the impulse to speak again. "You do that a lot," he said.

Jimin blinked. "Do what?"