The Broken Dancer

The Small Hours

The first thing Jimin notices is light. Not harsh, not interrogative - just sunlight, slipping through the thin curtains and laying across the sheets like a quiet invitation. For a moment, he doesn't move. He listens. The silence is alive with small, harmless sounds: the refrigerator hum, the low creak of wood settling, a bird outside tracing a lazy song.

It takes him a few seconds to remember where he is. The safehouse. The borrowed walls. The freedom that still doesn't sit right in his body. He exhales shakily, as if testing the air - and the air, for once, doesn't belong to anyone else.

He sits up slowly. The sheets are tangled, warm. Beside the bed, Yoongi's half-finished coffee sits cold on the nightstand - evidence that he'd been awake for hours and then fallen back asleep somewhere else. On the table by the window: an open notebook, a pen resting diagonally across a page of lyrics. A jacket thrown over the back of a chair. The faint scent of detergent and pine from the night before.

All of it feels foreign, impossibly gentle. Normal.

Jimin pads barefoot across the floor, hesitant at first - like he might disturb something fragile. In the small kitchen, light floods through the single window over the sink, turning the countertop gold. There's a plate with crumbs, a mug rinsed halfway. No one's watching. No one's timing his steps. He realises he doesn't know what to do with a morning that isn't already scripted.

He touches the edge of the table, feeling its smooth grain under his fingertips. Ownership is still a strange concept - the idea that a place could hold traces of him with consequence. That he could leave a mug unwashed and not be punished for it. That sunlight could just... exist on his skin, unmeasured.

He leans against the counter, breathing it in. It's too much and enough all at once.

The sound of soft footsteps interrupts him - uneven, half-asleep. Yoongi appears in the doorway, hair an affectionate disaster, eyes heavy-lidded. He blinks at Jimin, takes in the scene - the way Jimin's standing there in the light, small and quiet and alive.

"Couldn't sleep?" Yoongi asks, voice rough with morning.

Jimin shakes his head. "Too bright."

Yoongi huffs out a little laugh, moving toward the coffee maker with the resigned patience of someone who's about to commit culinary sin. "You mean the sunlight or the world?"

Jimin thinks about it, then shrugs. "Both, maybe."

Yoongi spoons coffee grounds into the machine, misjudging the amount completely. He's always been terrible at it, but Jimin finds himself watching the clumsy precision of his hands, the domestic rhythm of it all. It's disarming - seeing Yoongi like this, unguarded, sleepy, here.

When Yoongi finally slides a mug across the table toward him, it's burnt and too strong, but Jimin takes it anyway. He wraps his hands around the warmth, feeling the small tremor in his fingers settle.

Yoongi leans against the counter opposite him, watching him with soft amusement. "You make mornings look survivable," he says.

Jimin blinks at him, startled, and then the smallest smile flickers at the corner of his mouth - uncertain but real. "That's a low bar," he murmurs, but the warmth in his tone betrays him.

Yoongi grins faintly. "Still counts."

They drink in silence for a while, the kind of silence that isn't heavy anymore - the kind that's earned. The kind that lets their breathing sync naturally. Jimin finds himself tracing the rim of the mug, eyes drifting to Yoongi's bare wrist, the faint scar along his knuckle, the way his hair curls when it dries unevenly. All the details that used to feel like impossible dreams.