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Yoongi took a deep breath and peeked outside, the rest of his body still backstage. A crew member tapped him on the shoulder and informed him he was due to go on stage in two minutes, so he nodded his head and closed the curtain again.
Seeing the size of the audience outside slightly helped him calm his nerves down. He’d been doing shows for a long while, and had had his fair share of bombed sets like every rookie comedian when he was at the start of his career, but nobody filmed those. He couldn’t afford ruining a set that was going on fucking Netflix, even if it was just an half hour included in a season that carried a way too big number of other comedians.
The public, however, wasn’t very large, as it was a medium sized comedy club; that gave him hope he wouldn’t stumble on his words, which is never a good look on a comic, but even more so when your signature style is deadpan delivery.
He swallowed and gave a curt nod of acknowledgement to the director pointing him to the stage, and followed his instructions.
Immediately the crowd erupted in applause – as they were instructed to do, though he hoped he at least had some fans in there – and his heartbeat slowed down marginally, his mind shifting into performance mode on the spot.
“What’s up, Seoul?” he asked out loud as he walked on stage and took hold of the microphone, taking it out of the stand.
Someone in the second row let out a yell, causing a hint of a smile to appear on his lips; however, he immediately dialed it back, going back to his usual unbothered poker face. God, he hoped there would be no hecklers. He’s fine at crowd work, but it made him nervous.
“Thank you,” he said quietly, staring directly at the audience as he spoke with no hesitation.
“That’s very kind of you. Uh – alright.” He licked his lips and moved the mic in his hands. “I’ll be honest with you... I don’t think this show will be that good.”
The audience offered him some sparse laughs.
“That was a really great applause and, you know. I think I’ll let you people down. I feel like we’ve peaked already. Let’s just uh, try to do something with my time here.”
The front row erupted in chuckles at the way his face stayed set in stone while he basically insulted himself, so he kept going without showing emotion.
“Anyway, my name is Yoongi, and uh, I’m not married. Generally that’s how people start, don’t they? Yeah, I’m married and stuff, tell a story, and then they change the subject, like we needed the detail. So, I’m telling y’all right now. To get it out of the way. Not married, very much single.”
“The idea of marriage I have is, um – kinda like what’s happening right now between me and you guys. Kinda like, it’s just one person talking, you know, and the other’s like, I’m gonna get out of here.” The crowd collectively laughed. “It’s, yeah... That’s how I see it. So that’s why I’m single. I’m the one who talks. Wouldn’t stand to be on the receiving end.”
He glanced at the first row right in front of him, attracted by a louder cackle than the rest of the noise.
“I, uh, I’ve lived in America for a while, and I used to write for Late Night with Seth Meyers,” he started again, nodding when someone in the audience yelled. “Yeah, you know Seth? Know how the show is right now?”
When he got another yell, he smacked his lips together and passed the mic to his other hand, his expression set in stone.
“That’s because I left.”
The cackle he’d heard before resounded in the club again, and this time he actually took a good look at the source of it while he waited for laughter to die down. It was a young looking boy, who couldn’t be older than twenty three. He didn’t seem to be very tall, however, so that estimation could very well be wrong.
“But yeah, no, I love Seth. Great guy,” he continued, glad the audience picked up on the reference. “He’s very funny.”
“Anyway, it’s great to be filming for Netflix,” he said, earning a cheer and a short applause of support. “I love what they're doing with Comedians of the World. It was about time they promoted international comics. I was anxious about this, not gonna lie. ‘Cause, you know, it’s one thing to suck on your own, but it’s another to do it in a way that will be available even to monks in Thailand.”
He heard more laughs. “Is Netflix available in Thailand? I don’t know.”
“It is!” he heard someone shout from the tables in the first row. When he looked, it was the same guy with the cackle he’d been staring at. “But that was funny.”
“Thank you,” he replied, pointing at him. “Laugh again, sir.”
The guy seemed taken aback by the fact Yoongi acknowledged him, so when his laughter resounded in the room again it was mostly out of surprise.
Yoongi cracked a half smirk and let out a chuckle so brief it sounded more like he just breathed heavily through his nose.
“What’s your name?” he asked, walking up to the edge of the stage. Crowd work wasn’t originally in his plans, but now it was.
“Jimin,” he replied, his voice slightly louder to get picked up by the microphones.
“Jimin,” Yoongi repeated for everyone to hear. “What do you do in life other than laugh like you’re being choked?”
The entire room burst out laughing. Jimin covered his mouth with one hand and slightly bent over on the table to hide the fact he was laughing too.
“I’m a photographer,” he said in the end, amusement still evident in his voice and the way he was smiling.
“You’re a photographer? Cool.” Yoongi looked directly at him, his expression neutral. “You really thought your job through. Nobody wants photographers to talk.”
The guy sitting with him at the table started laughing hysterically along with other sparse laughs from the rest of the room and Jimin groaned, leaning back in his chair.
“Keep laughing, Jimin,” Yoongi continued. “This is the only place where people will love you for it.”
Jimin hid his face in his hands as this time almost everyone in the audience burst out laughing. His friend kept doing this weird laugh that sounded like a spray bottle, so Yoongi looked at him.
“What’s your name?”
“Hoseok,” he replied between the laughs.
Yoongi turned to Jimin again, playing with the mic in his hands. “Do you keep Hoseok around just to feel less embarrassed when you laugh, or?”
Hoseok looked like he was about to dry a tear off his cheek with his finger with how much he was laughing and Jimin was having trouble breathing. The people in their close proximity were losing it too.
“I’ll check back with you two in a while, stay tuned,” Yoongi warned them.
It was taking all of his willpower to keep the resting bitch face on but it was working, and he was pretty sure that was half of the reason why the crowd was so into it. He was on automatic mode by now, and ruining the set was the last thing on his mind.
“Okay, so. I’m gonna tell y’all a story.” He cleared his throat and looked at the first row. “Jimin. Pay attention.”
Jimin laughed briefly, hiding behind his arm.
“So, uh. Little bit of a backstory. When I went to Starbucks, I used to order iced coffee with milk.” A girl snorted under the stage and Yoongi nodded. “Exactly.”
The audience laughed and he nodded a second time.
“All I kept getting was milk with ice. I thought I was saying it wrong, you know? I’m asking for coffee with milk. Not milk with ice. Iced coffee. And I kept getting milk with ice floating in it. I can guarantee I did not want milk with ice. I learned people do that, and they do it openly. I often get sent pictures of milk with ice because of this thing that happened to me. Like, they take pictures of their milk and ice before they’re even out of the shop, like ordering it is not something that should be illegal.”
The crowd was hanging by his every word, but he found the only reaction he was interested in during that exact moment was from the guy in the first row, who hadn’t taken his eyes off Yoongi’s face for one split second.
“I genuinely thought something was wrong with how I said it. Like, I practiced it in the mirror. I stared at myself, went, iced coffee with milk, in my underwear at eleven in the morning in my bathroom, thinking about the reason why I was alive.”
Some people kept laughing sporadically while he was speaking, so he went on.
“So now I don’t say that anymore. I tried a different approach: iced coffee with cream. Nobody would give me cream with ice, right? That’s just... not right.” He paused and looked around, then held out the hand that wasn’t holding the mic. “That would be like imagining Jimin with a normal laugh. Right?”
The audience started laughing again. Jimin went along with it, his eyes lighting up.
“So yeah, I thought, I’m gonna say cream. ‘Cause I’m not a coffee expert, you know? I’ve been going to Starbucks for like a couple of years, maybe. I get really nervous when I order coffee, ‘cause it’s like a whole world I don’t understand. It’s too much.”
He walked up to the side of the stage, moving his hands around a bit as he talked. “You go up, you ask, iced coffee with cream, and they go, half cream? Heavy cream? Grande? Decaf? Venti? I don’t know. I don’t know. Just – put cream on it. How about that? Give it to me, and if it’s wrong I won’t mention it to you, I will walk away, I will try again at a different Starbucks, and you’ll never see me again. How about that?”
Some laughs erupted. Jimin cackled again, and when Yoongi’s eyes immediately went on him, the crowd laughed harder.
“So anyway, I was at an airport in the US. I was at this airport in Chicago, because I had a show there, right? I was on tour. And I needed coffee. So I get in, go, iced coffee with cream. The lady at the register goes, with cream? So I go, with cream. She goes, iced coffee with cream? And I go, iced coffee with cream. Then she asked it one more time.“
“And at that point I probably should have stopped her and gone, I’m sorry, where are you at right now? Are we in two different places? Because I really feel like we are. But I didn’t. There were people behind me, I was nervous, so I was like, cream or no cream, I’ll give you thirty bucks if you let me leave right now. This is the most I can talk about this. I can’t take it anymore.”
“So I pay and get in line. Couple of minutes later, I see her make my coffee and put the cup with my name on the counter, and when I look at it, no cream. So I thought, well, that’s it. Gonna accept it. Will do it myself. I’m about to take it when she grabs it and starts putting whipped cream on it. So, at that point, I was about to take off and disappear. Everyone around me starts looking the other way, like they don’t want anyone to think it was them who ordered iced coffee with whipped cream. But I didn’t. I didn’t ask for whipped cream.”
He glanced at Jimin. When he saw he was dying trying to hold himself back from laughing, he almost let himself smile.
“But she thought I did. So she yells out, iced coffee with whipped cream! She yelled it out. Everyone keeps avoiding the sight of it, so I’m just left alone. Like, that’s what you thought I said over there? You don’t think I would have said iced coffee with whipped cream? You think I’m just some nut job?”
“And they didn’t have a top for it. So, whipped cream, it doesn’t sink and become less embarrassing. It moves. It’s like an elephant in an ocean that everybody sees. I’m walking through the crowd like, this is my favorite drink. I don’t know if you guys drink this at all. Does anybody... Nobody does this? I’m surprised. And I walked outside, threw it away, and tried again at a different Starbucks.”
Half of the audience wasn’t breathing by now, but all he could hear was Jimin’s loud and undisturbed cackle just looping.
He walked up to the edge of the stage again and lowered his body, as if he was talking to a child.
“I have an idea for you,” Yoongi said once the laughter died down.
Jimin crossed his arms on his chest and raised an eyebrow.
“So you know how this is going to Netflix, right?” Jimin said yes, so he nodded too. “Now, I don’t have connections to the folks up in post production, but I think this can be arranged.”
The room was quiet, while basically everyone was staring at the exchange. Hoseok was silent too, just watching his friend maintain a staring contest with Yoongi on stage.
“When you watch this, hoping you will, turn closed captions on.”
Someone laughed. Jimin licked his lips.
He stood up again, twirled the cord of the mic around his fingers, and cleared his throat.
“So, now that we’ve warmed up, we can get into the heavy stuff.” He scrutinized all the tables with his gaze, pretending to be thinking about it. “Everyone has a nice story for how they got into comedy. I’ll tell you how it went with me. When people ask me why I do this, I only have one answer, and it’s never changed during the years.”
His eyes stopped on Jimin as he held up his hand and counted up to three with his fingers.
“So I’m doing this for fame, free shit, and dick.”
Jimin almost choked on his own breath along with the rest of the room, so he finally allowed himself a smirk.
“Damn, what the fuck came over you?” Yoongi’s manager hugged him as soon as he got backstage again, a large grin on his face. “You fucking went crazy out there. Best set of yours I’ve seen in months.”
“Thanks, Joon.” Yoongi beamed at him. “Good crowd.”
“True,” Namjoon agreed, patting him on the shoulder. “You do crowd work so rarely it felt weird.”
“Yeah.” He nodded and shook his head to try and come back down to reality, before rubbing his face with his hands. “It was easy this time. But now I need a drink.”
“Go to the bar,” Namjoon said, scrolling through something on his phone. “I gotta see what I need to do for that shit you pulled with the subtitles.”
“I honestly don’t think you have to do anything. I kept talking to him throughout the set and the crowd reacted to it, they’ll add every time he laughed to the captions anyway.”
“I’m gonna check anyway. I’ll die before anyone sees me do a half assed job.”
Yoongi smiled amusedly. “Fine.”
“Yes,” he said, typing something and only half listening. “Now go away.”
Yoongi shook his head and headed to the bar, leaving Namjoon to deal with whatever it is he was doing. Everything went smooth, the new season of Comedians of the World would be live in a couple of months, maybe four if they had delays, and the check he was getting for it was nothing to disregard. It honestly felt refreshing, interacting so much, and for the first time it didn’t make him nervous as it usually did.
When the bartender came back with his drink and he tried to pay, his money got rejected, so he stared back at him.
“This is paid for already,” the bartender informed him, shrugging.
“By who?”
Before he could reply, another figure occupied the seat next to his and sat down, making Yoongi turn around, so the bartender shrugged again and left.
“Me,” Jimin said, holding up a hand in what looked like an attempt to wave at him. “Hi.”
“Oh.” A sly smirk appeared on his face, and Jimin seemed embarrassed at seeing him actually put on a different expression from his bored stare. “Why, thank you.”
The bartender placed another drink in front of him and Jimin took it, propping his elbow on the flat surface of the bar and resting his chin on his hand, his fingertips lightly drumming on his upper lip.
“You’re welcome.”
“Where’s spray bottle laugh?” Yoongi asked, referring to his friend.
Jimin snorted in his drink. “Watching the next set.”
“And why aren’t you there?”
“To get insulted some more by you,” Jimin deadpanned, and this time Yoongi was the one to laugh out loud for the first time since he got to the comedy club. “I wanna hear it.”
“I’m off duty now. I’m only funny when I have a mic in my hands.”
“So you’re the Iron Man of comedy.”
“Damn, I wouldn’t say that. Tony Stark is intelligent even without the suit.”
Jimin started laughing, hiding his face in the hand he was using to keep himself up. “I mean.”
Yoongi took a sip of his drink and shrugged.
“I love your work,” Jimin blurted out, looking extremely embarrassed once he’d said it. “Uh.”
“Oh, thanks.” Yoongi looked up and their eyes met. “You a fan?”
“Kinda?” Jimin replied, looking at his glass. “I caught one of your sets last year and liked it.”
“That simple?”
“Well,” he admitted after taking another sip. “There’s a story behind it but it’s boring.”
“Go ahead and entertain me,” Yoongi exclaimed, leaning towards him in, his body language interested. “I’m all yours.”
A flash of awkwardness passed by Jimin’s eyes but it was over before Yoongi could even begin to think of pointing it out.
“So I was with my boyfriend at the time, walking near the club you were at. I don’t remember which one it was.”
When he said the word boyfriend, Yoongi’s eyes shone in something he weakly realized was hope, but he let him talk.
“Keep in mind everything was normal, but then he decided it would be a good idea to break up with me. In the middle of the street.”
“Sounds like an asshole,” Yoongi commented with a grin. “Then?”
“Then I started crying like an idiot and people were staring at me.”
“Cute.”
“Not even close,” Jimin shot back, though he was amused. “Then I calmed down, but I felt like I was gonna do something really fucking stupid unless I found a distraction, and I walked past that comedy club. I wasn’t even into stand up comedy back then, like my knowledge amounted to zero.”
Yoongi frowned, one sentence in particular standing out to him, but he kept quiet.
“So I thought, well, might get a laugh out of it. So I got in and you were about to start. Keep in mind my eyes were like, still red and shit. Never laughed more in my life. So I went home and looked you up, and listened to a couple of your albums. Then Spotify recommended me other shit and I found out about specials and a shit ton of American comedians, and finished half of the catalogue on Netflix in two months. Then I heard you were taping your first half hour here, and here I am.”
“That’s actually not even boring in the slightest,” Yoongi commented once he was sure he was done speaking. “It’s fucking awesome.”
“It is?”
“Hell yeah it is,” Yoongi said, nodding his head. “I don’t even remember that show but I’m happy it impacted you that much.”
“It really did.” Jimin licked his lips and downed the rest of his drink. “You’re fucking funny. When you singled me out I was having a heart attack.”
“Sorry,” he apologized with a smirk, though he wasn’t sorry at all. “It went well.”
“That it did.” Jimin stared back at him, mirroring his smile. “I’m gonna be on Netflix.”
“You’re gonna be on Netflix,” he confirmed. “You’re basically famous now.”
“Shut up,” he said and laughed, proceeding to playfully shove his hand on his arm, a blush spreading from his neck up.
“Thanks for going with it back there,” Yoongi added after a while, both of them on their third drink. “I was kinda on edge about it being on tape and I didn’t even plan on interacting with the audience but your weird ass laugh made it so much easier.”
“You’re welcome,” he replied mockingly, rolling his eyes. “I do my best.”
Yoongi glanced at his phone and furrowed his eyebrows, a scowl appearing on his face as he checked the time.
“I should go back to my manager or he’s gonna think I drowned in alcohol,” he told him as an apology as he stood up from his stool. “But it was nice talking to you.”
The other man licked his lips and nodded, a weird look in his eyes. “I’ll catch you next time you’re in town for sure.”
“Oh, I’m always in town. I live here.”
Jimin raised an eyebrow. “You do?”
“Yeah,” Yoongi confirmed with a chuckle. “When I’m not on tour.”
“Huh.” He smiled a bit. “Looking forward to it then.”
Yoongi hesitated for a second, the grip on his phone getting slightly looser, until he decided to just put it in his pocket. At the last second though, he changed his mind and took it back out.
“I hope this isn’t weird,” he said, and Jimin looked at him with his head ducked to the side. “But I would love to see you again. Like, not at a show. If you want to.”
Jimin broke out in a huge grin and instantly took the phone Yoongi was handing him, open on the contacts app.
“I was literally about to risk it all and ask you. Thanks for saving me the embarrassment.”
Yoongi got the phone back and started laughing.
“I have another couple of shows scheduled and then it’s all sets here in town,” he explained while Jimin’s excitement only grew exponentially at his words. “I’ll text you?”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding to emphasize his enthusiasm, which Yoongi found extremely cute. “Text me.”
“Okay.”
They stared at each other for a couple of seconds, until Yoongi leaned in and left a peck on his cheek, feeling its warmth on his own lips. When he pulled back, Jimin was smiling.
“See you,” he said weakly, and Yoongi smiled too.
Once he got back and got yelled at by Namjoon, he still had that lingering smirk on his lips refusing to go away.
“Wake up, you little bitch.”
Yoongi opened his eyes, confused by the manhandling, until he saw his boyfriend straddling his lap and shaking his shoulder.
“Moron.” He yawned. “What is it?”
“It’s midnight!” Jimin yelled excitedly, and Yoongi finally realized. He wondered why they even went to bed in the first place. “The season is up.”
“Ohh, get my laptop, I want to see your stupid face on Netflix,” Yoongi exclaimed, instantly awake as he sat up on the mattress and Jimin ran to his desk.
“Look it up,” Jimin rushed in his ear, earning a shove in his ribs.
“I’m looking it up, stop screaming,” Yoongi shot back, typing the show name in the search bar. “Oh, here you go.”
“Skip to your episode.”
“The disrespect,” Yoongi muttered, but did it anyway. “Now shut up.”
“You’re so hot on stage,” Jimin sighed, watching Yoongi go up on stage on the screen. “With your poker face. You look like that Easter Island emoji.”
“Shut the fuck up.” He excitedly touched his shoulder. “Look! They put your name in the captions.”
Jimin started laughing when he saw the subtitles spell out [Jimin cackles] and Yoongi hugged him from behind.
“I fucking love this. I’m gonna print out this screenshot.”
“Yeah, but you’ll hang it at your house, not mine.”
Jimin smirked as Yoongi ranted about Starbucks on the screen. “We’ll see about that.”