The thing about grief, Taemin had learned, was that it didn't stay still.
In the beginning — in those first weeks, those first months — it had been enormous and obvious, a thing with weight and edges, something you could point at. There, you could say. That's where it lives. It had lived in the silence of his phone, which had stopped receiving a particular kind of message. It had lived in the muscle memory of his hands, which still occasionally moved to type a name into a search bar before his brain caught up. It had lived, most inconveniently, in the smell of certain things. A specific brand of hand cream, the particular sweetness of banana milk, a cologne that he had once, in a moment of spectacular self-destruction, spritzed on his own wrist in a department store and then stood very still in the middle of the aisle for approximately four minutes while a sales assistant watched him with polite concern.
That had been years ago now.
The grief had not disappeared. He was not naive enough, or perhaps not optimistic enough, to believe it ever would. But it had changed shape. It had learned to be subtle. It had gotten very good at hiding inside ordinary things. The specific quality of afternoon light in late autumn, the opening bars of certain songs, the way some people laughed. It ambushed him less frequently now, but when it did, it was still total.
He had developed, over the years, a very effective system for not letting it get that far.
Keep moving, was the first rule. Tours helped. Recording helped. The relentless machinery of a career that demanded his body and his attention and left very little room for the quieter, more dangerous work of feeling things. That helped most of all. He was, by most objective measures, extraordinarily good at his job. He suspected this was at least partially because he had poured everything else into it.
The second rule was simpler and less respectable: don't be alone and sober at the same time.
It was a Friday night in Seoul, late October, and Taemin was currently in violation of the first rule. He had four days off. Genuinely, unusually, almost suspiciously off, no schedules, no studio bookings, no obligatory appearances and he had spent the first two of them sleeping and watching television and being very careful not to think too hard about anything. By the third evening, the careful not-thinking had started to feel like effort, which meant it was no longer working, which meant it was time for rule two.
He had started at a bar in Itaewon that he knew well enough. Comfortable, dark, populated by people who were either industry-adjacent or foreign enough not to care who he was, and had two drinks that became three, and somewhere in the middle of the third had ended up in conversation with a group of people he vaguely recognised from the periphery of the entertainment world, dancers or stylists or someone's management, he wasn't entirely sure. They were going on somewhere. He was welcome to come.
He had said yes, because saying yes to things was easier than going home.
That was how he found himself, somewhere past midnight, on a street he didn't recognise.
He wasn't drunk. He wanted to be precise about this, at least in his own mind. There was a version of tonight where he was stumbling, incapable, embarrassing, and this was not that version. He was pleasantly, usefully not-quite-sober: the city's edges had softened slightly, the persistent low-level hum of anxiety that lived behind his sternum had quieted, and he felt, in the way that he only ever felt after two or three drinks, almost comfortable inside his own skin. It was a sensation he used to feel naturally, once.
The group he'd been with had dissolved at some point. Absorbed into a queue outside somewhere with a long waiting list, a place he didn't want to go and he had kept walking, which was also fine. He was good at walking in cities at night. There was something meditative about it, the rhythm of it, the anonymity. Nobody looked at him. He was just a man in a dark jacket, hands in pockets, navigating by instinct.
He had been walking for perhaps ten minutes when he heard it.
Music. Not the muffled, bassy throb of the club district he'd left behind, but something cleaner and more immediate, coming from somewhere below street level. He looked down a set of narrow stairs. The kind that existed all over Seoul, tucked between buildings, leading to basements that could contain anything and saw a door, heavy and unmarked, with light bleeding out around its edges and a sound system doing something genuinely interesting to a track he almost but didn't quite recognise.
There was no queue. No doorman. The door was simply there, slightly ajar, as though it had been left open specifically for him.
The club was small and warm and absolutely, unmistakably queer.
