Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When Yoongi first hears about the robbery at the Seoul Museum of Contemporary Art, he’s not impressed. Fake police uniforms to talk their way into the building late at night, threats to the guards to keep them from hitting the alarms, a camera system that turned out to not have been recording correctly for six weeks, and, to top it off, a couple of statuettes grabbed on the way out - shiny, sure, but nothing like the value of the other stolen goods - that all lines up to being an amateur job. Museums have much worse security than most people think (not people like Yoongi), constantly trying to stretch their budgets and whatever funds they can scratch up from donors between acquiring new art, preserving what they’ve already got, and protecting it all. Mostly they cover the basics and buy insurance for the rest. What really keeps museums safe is that most people aren’t that interested in robbery. (Again, not people like Yoongi.)

The problem with art is turning it into cash - sooner or later you’re going to show it to someone who knows what they’re seeing, or some rich kid is going to brag to the wrong person while trying to sound tough, and then it’s over. Yoongi gives these amateurs a week before the police catch up with them. At best.

Namjoon’s got the same news story open on his tablet in the kitchen. Yoongi watches him scroll through the list of missing items as he waits for his coffee to be ready.

“You hear anything about that?” Yoongi asks. Namjoon’s better networked than he is - if it actually was the worst professional job ever committed, Namjoon probably knows someone who knows something who knows something.

“No, and I don’t think I will. This whole thing feels like theft for hire, somebody wanted that art badly enough to take it.” He shakes his head. “It’s a crime.”

“You’re a criminal,” Yoongi points out.

“Not art like this.”

Yoongi gives him the blank stare of someone who’s not only seen Namjoon’s private office with the serious lock, but also the climate controlled storage unit he keeps so he can rotate pieces in and out on a monthly basis.

“Not from a museum,” Namjoon says, and that’s true. For all the crimes that master criminals RM and Suga have (allegedly) committed, over eight years and three continents, they’ve never robbed a museum. A museum gala, yes, but only the donors, never the museum itself.

“Bet it turns up within a week,” Yoongi says confidently. “I just hope whoever did it had the skill not to damage anything on the way.”

“Yeah,” Namjoon says distractedly, and when Yoongi turns around from his coffee he sees that Namjoon is texting. “I told you I was going to be out of town for a few days, right? With Minsoo?”

“You gave me the watering schedule for your bonsai three times, I promise it’ll be fine with me until Saturday. A date? Or a job?”

“Just a little job, nothing to worry about.”

“I wasn’t worried. I’m sure it’ll be fine. A little bit of robbery, no big deal.” Yoongi’s lying - he doesn’t trust Minsoo to run a job of any size, even if Namjoon does. He thinks Namjoon can probably tell. Yoongi always gets chatty when he’s lying, and Namjoon knows it.

“Sure you weren’t. Anyway, I’ll be back on Saturday, and we can go out and celebrate the return of the Seoul Museum stuff, okay?”

A car honks from outside. “Better not make him wait for you,” Yoongi says instead.

Except Namjoon isn’t back on Saturday, because his job on Friday goes wrong and he’s arrested red handed (literally - from the dye packets with the cash) and ends up with three years in prison.

I didn’t sign up for this much bonsai care, Yoongi thinks, a little hysterically, when he first hears the news.

He quickly loses track of the Seoul Museum of Contemporary Art heist, too busy with the way his professional life is falling apart around him. It’s been six years since he last planned a crime with Namjoon next to him.

On the first of every month, Yoongi goes out and buys a physical copy of the newspaper, so he can take a picture of the bonsai with today’s date and send it to Namjoon. The first time he does it, it’s because he’s too angry to write a letter, even if he could figure out how to write a letter that wouldn’t implicate both of them in major crimes. At least this way Namjoon doesn’t have to worry about the bonsai.

On the first anniversary of the robbery, the museum announces a no questions asked reward for any information that leads to return of their stolen art. Yoongi sends another generic newspaper picture to Namjoon.

On the third anniversary - six months before Namjoon gets out of prison - it’s tripled by an anonymous donor, resulting in a sum that even Yoongi finds impressive.

Yoongi had thought eventually he’d be able to figure out what to say to go along with the bonsai hostage photos that wasn’t just ranting at Namjoon for trusting Minsoo, for cutting him out of the job, for thinking that they could work without each other. By the end of the third year, he still hasn’t figured it out. Namjoon has never written back.

Chapter Text

Yoongi isn’t really sure who he’s teaching to play poker in his series of underground games. There’s some chaebol heirs who can’t be bothered with the laws against gambling, rich Mainlanders, an up and coming pop star from Hong Kong, some tech millionaires from San Francisco. Seokjin sends them to him, mostly, or someone comes along as a friend of a friend. They pay in cash, and he insists that all their games are for real money, wins often enough to mean something.

It’s not the best money he’s ever made. It’s pretty far from the best money he’s ever made, actually, but it’s enough for him these days. It’s a steady gig, twice a week for a few hazy hours in the back room of a series of bars all over Macau, classy joints pretending to be dives and dives pretending to be classy. It’s been a long time since Yoongi had a steady gig that wasn’t just a setup for some bigger payoff. He finds it a little disconcerting. There always feels like something more he should be doing beyond just his job to be getting ready for the con.

He thinks to himself sometimes that he’s got enough spare time that he could be planning something in his off hours. He’s done it too - he’s got half a dozen unfinished sketches of jobs he could pull off, research he’s done, notes on who he’d have to partner with. None of them are finished, though. For some reason, his heart’s not quite in it.

None of them would work, anyway. He knows that. He’s great with details, with all the tiny little clockwork pieces that need to happen just so on the job, but the true beating heart of a great con is the mark’s flaw. A truly great conman can figure out what you want, deep down in your soul, and then he uses that to hurt you, to ask you to hurt yourself, to take what you want and make you betray yourself. That’s when the con really gets you, just as you think you’re about to win.

Namjoon was always better at people. Namjoon always found the heart of the marks and broke it.

So all of Yoongi’s plans stay half finished and locked in a drawer, and Yoongi teaches poker instead. Cards were the very first scam he ever ran, back when he wasn’t even old enough to get into the bars where he ran games, cheated, counted cards, let his fingers work the game. None of what he’s doing now takes any planning at all.

Instead, he has monotony, broken up only by Seokjin’s regular visits. Seokjin’s mostly living in Singapore these days, courtesy of an extremely wealthy elderly couple, but he comes to Macau every six weeks or so to crash in Yoongi’s spare room. They both pretend it isn’t him checking up on Yoongi to make sure he’s still doing okay. Seokjin, always ready to commit to a bit, cooks and complains dramatically about it the whole time.

“Such a poor host! You know, in Singapore I have a whole kitchen staff and never have to cook for myself!” he says, as he shoos Yoongi away from the kimchi stew and out of the kitchen for the third time that evening.

“At your guest house with a pool?” Yoongi’s heard this story before.

“Well, really the staff belongs to the main house, but they feed me too. They don’t want me to starve, unlike you.” He’s laughing as he says it.

“Is it a sex thing, hyung? You could tell me if it was a sex thing,” Yoongi says.

“Yoongi-yah,” Seokjin says, “this may be hard for you to believe, but many people find me so handsome and charming that they just give me money.”

“And a pool house?”

“A guest house! Don’t make it gross, it’s not a sex thing.”

“But seriously, what’s the angle? Where’s the trick?”

Seokjin shrugs. “I show up to be handsome, they give me a house and jewelry and a monthly budget. It’s the purest form of con because there’s no trick.”

“Isn’t it boring?”

“Ay, Yoongi-yah, we’re not all made to be solving puzzles all the time. Here, eat your stew.”

After dinner, Seokjin refuses to let Yoongi help with the dishes either, instead handing him soju and sending him into the living room with instructions to pick a movie. Yoongi flips through his streaming services and picks some action movie. He’s pretty sure he hasn’t seen it, but he also knows he’s going to forget it as soon as it’s over.

“Good choice,” Seokjin says. “I hope this means your next job will have a higher standard for explosions.”

“It’s not a con if it’s just smash and grab.”

“Such strong opinions of what makes a good con!”

“That’s why I’m a con artist,” Yoongi says flatly, and Seokjin laughs at him just like he was hoping.

Halfway through the movie, Yoongi wakes up to find that he’s tipped over into Seokjin’s lap and Seokjin is gently patting his hair. It’s nice - he’s a little drunk and Seokjin is warm.

He must move as he wakes, because Seokjin scratches at the nape of his neck a little. “See, Yoongi-yah? I’m so handsome, not even you can keep yourself from throwing yourself at me.”

“Not that handsome,” Yoongi mumbles. “I’ve seen you drunk and crying about a breakup, it was not attractive at all.”

“Then why are you in my lap?”

“It was the pink sweatsuit,” Yoongi says. “It’s soft.”

Seokjin pats his head again. “Go back to sleep,” he says. “I’ll get you to bed when the movie’s over.”

Yoongi doesn’t remember being woken up when the movie’s over, but he wakes late the next morning, curled into Seokjin’s chest. Seokjin’s awake, playing some game on his phone.

“Rise and shine, morning bird,” Seokjin says.

“Blargh,” Yoongi says, still mostly asleep, but resigned to the fact he won’t be able to fall back asleep. Instead, he pats Seokjin vaguely around the face and stumbles out of bed and towards his bathroom.

When he emerges, teeth brushed and hair doing something he doesn’t want to think too hard about, Seokjin has relocated to the kitchen and started the coffee. Yoongi detours to the living room to give the bonsai its daily three spritzes of water, then leans against the counter next to Seokjin to wait for the coffee.

“Still alive, I see,” Seokjin says.

“I didn’t drink that much, hyung,” Yoongi says.

“I meant the tree.”

Yoongi shrugs. “Just a couple more weeks. I don’t know, I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“About the tree, or about Namjoon?”

“Both. Either.” The coffee maker dings, and Yoongi turns away gratefully, busying himself fixing a cup for Seokjin and then for himself. He slides the first cup down the counter to Seokjin and sips his own. Still looking at the coffee maker, he asks, “has he written to you? Or called you?”

“No,” Seokjin says gently, “but I haven’t really written to him either, except for once or twice right at the beginning. You have been, right?”

“No,” Yoongi says. “Well, not really. Kind of. It’s complicated. But I haven’t heard anything back.”

“Yeah,” Seokjin says, and drinks his coffee slowly. “Come on,” he says finally, “go shower, I heard about a new place I want to try for lunch.”

***

After Seokjin leaves, Yoongi settles back into his card playing routine - sleeping in late, getting up late, spending his nights making shitty conversation in shitty bars with shitty people.

“Are you from around here?” one of the Americans asks as Yoongi shuffles, and Yoongi doesn’t know if he means Macau, China, or just Asia generally.

“Not really,” he settles for. He doesn’t really want to get into it. “Tonight we’re going to cover the basics of betting agin. Who remembers what we learned last time?”

At the halfway point of the session, Yoongi pauses for a smoke break. He quit once before, but found himself taking it back up just to have an excuse to get out halfway through his classes. His head hurts - neither his English nor his Mandarin are as good as they really should be for this kind of work. There’s not enough demand among Korean-speakers for him to limit himself to just that (not enough who are willing to risk the worldwide ban on gambling), though, so it’s stumbling along in a language he doesn’t like, counting down the minutes until the session is over.

Yoongi finishes his cigarette and checks the time on his phone. Time to go back. He shakes himself out a little, rolling his neck and flexing his fingers. It’s not hard enough work to really make him stiff, but he always feels like it should. Even this late at night, it’s hot and muggy here, and the weather settles into his hands in a way he’s never liked. He takes one last deep breath and then he’s cutting through the bar to his back room.

There’s an unfamiliar set of shoulders at the table, back to the door, sitting at another chair conjured up from who knows where. A small duffle has been tossed in the corner next to Yoongi’s bag, presumably from this new arrival. Yoongi braces his face - this happens sometimes, one of his students texting a friend to stop by, and he hates it every time. It’s bad enough that he has to scramble to catch a new arrival up, but half the time they think they can skip the fee, too.

He’s got barely more than a second to think nice shoulders in sort of an abstract way before the new arrival is turning around and, oh, now he’s glad he braced himself. It’s Namjoon, shoulders wider than Yoongi last saw him, but unmistakably Namjoon. His hair is longer, and black again - Yoongi can’t remember the last time he saw Namjoon with black hair.

“Kim Namjoon,” he introduces himself, carefully, with just a quick look at Yoongi. “Do you mind if I join in, seonsaeng-nim?”

“The more the merrier,” Yoongi says in English as he slides back into his seat across the table. He thinks he learned that idiom from Namjoon, wonders if Namjoon remembers teaching it to him. “Have you played much poker?” He fiddles with the cards, running through half a dozen trick shuffles without thinking about it. Namjoon watches his hands the whole time.

“Some,” he says easily. “We played it when I was in prison.”

“You were in prison?” asks the starlet to his left.

“For a while,” Namjoon says, with a smile, one of the ones with dimples. Yoongi looks at the smile, categorizes it, lets the whole persona spin out in his head as he watches what Namjoon is doing. I’m not really dangerous, the smile says, but won’t this make such a good story when you tell it later? Isn’t this just what you were looking for?

“Can I ask why?” one of the Americans asks.

“Bank robbery,” Namjoon says, easy, like he’s practiced the story. He probably did - he’s not a good liar when he has to be spontaneous. “We got caught. It happens sometimes.”

“I can’t really recommend it as a hobby,” Yoongi says, more acidly than he meant to. “Especially if you don’t have a plan that lets you do it without getting caught.”

“We thought it was good enough.”

“Clearly, it wasn’t,” Yoongi snaps. He pauses and forces himself to take a deep breath. “Whose turn is it to deal?”

The chaebol kid next to him has to be reminded twice which way he’s supposed to deal, but eventually everyone gets a hand of cards, with the flop laid out in the middle. Most of the table seems to remember the lesson about taking one look at the cards and putting them back on the table rather than fiddling with them.

He goes through his standard patter about how poker isn’t just about beating the cards, but about beating your opponents. Half the table can’t disguise their tells as they think about that. Namjoon probably looks impassive to anyone else, but Yoongi’s always been able to read Namjoon.

They go around the table to place the first set of bets. Yoongi barely notices what he throws into the center. Namjoon is nearly last, and he pushes two big stacks of chips into the center.

“Someone’s confident,” one of the pop stars says.

“Or over confident,” Yoongi says, meeting Namjoon’s eyes. “That’s an unusually big bet this early in the game. I think he’s bluffing.”

The flop cards are flipped face up. Between what they see here and Namjoon’s bluff, half the table folds, but the rest take encouragement from the way Yoongi matches Namjoon’s bet easily. The pot grows.

When the hands are revealed, Namjoon wins. It earns him disgusted groans from the rest of the players, especially the two who had stayed in with Yoongi until the end.

“Jesus, some bluff,” one of the Americans complains. He lost a lot of money to Namjoon.

“Sometimes that’s how it goes,” Yoongi says, but he can see he’s lost the room. He doesn’t really care.

The energy is gone after that, and it’s not long before Namjoon is neatly stacking his chips, politely waiting until everyone else has finished collecting their winnings, or what’s left of them. He hands his stack to Yoongi, and Yoongi counts out some cash for him. Namjoon stuffs it into his inside jacket pocket without looking at it, then lets Yoongi usher him out of the back room, through the bar and towards the bus stop.

Namjoon raises an eyebrow. “Not worried about being seen together?”

Yoongi shrugs. “It was obvious we knew each other.”

“You don’t think any of them picked up on that bluff?” Namjoon always wants to debrief after a con, even a two bit scam like the one they just pulled.

“Maybe they just think I’m a shitty poker player.”

“Either way, not good for your gig.”

“I don’t need it anymore,” Yoongi says. “Not if you’re back.”

“I thought you were angry with me.”

“I am fucking furious with you,” Yoongi says, enunciating each word clearly. “I have been furious with you every day for three and a half years.”

“So....”

“So, what’s the plan? What are we up to next?”

“I’m sort of getting mixed signals here,” Namjoon says.

Yoongi shrugs. “Are you saying you didn’t leave the country - probably in violation of the terms of your release, I hope you used a good fake identity - and track me down first thing after getting out of prison because you didn’t have a plan for me?”

“It was a good fake!” Namjoon squawks, indignant, drawing looks from the other people waiting for the bus.

“Focus,” Yoongi says. “Plan.”

“Uh, right.” Namjoon says. “Maybe I should save this for back at your place?”

Macau’s not that big, but Yoongi doesn’t live particularly close to where the dive bars are, so it’s nearly 45 minutes before they make it across town to Yoongi’s apartment.

“It’s not very big,” he says. “Living room, obviously, kitchen there, your room off the right down that hall, bathroom next to it, my room is on the left.”

Namjoon’s not paying attention. “You kept it,” he says instead. It’s - oh, he found the bonsai.

“I said I would,” Yoongi says irritably. “I sent you pictures for proof! And I smuggled it into the country when I moved here, it was not easy, it’s your problem to get home now.”

“Yeah,” Namjoon says distantly, not at all like he’s thinking of the challenges of international play smuggling. “Yeah, of course.”

“Fine. Whatever. Look, I’m tired, I’m going to bed. You can tell me your plan tomorrow.”

Yoongi lies awake in bed for a long time after that. He should have known it was too early for him to go to sleep, but he needed some space away from Namjoon, and he panicked. He wonders, briefly, if he’s forgotten how to lie in the last four years.

***

Namjoon is gone when Yoongi wakes up the next morning, which isn’t that weird. He’d always liked working in cafes if what he was working on wasn’t obviously illegal; Yoongi used to tease him about how if he’s not careful, he’s going to turn into a frustrated novelist like everyone else who haunts the coffee shops. There’s a note on the coffee maker, right where Yoongi is sure to see it, saying he plans to be back in the early afternoon.

“ps,” it ends, “I watered the tree - don’t water it again!”

That’s fine. Yoongi can amuse himself in his own apartment. In practice, what that means is he spends a half hour organizing some of his old plans and tossing out the ones that are too obviously out of date before spending the rest of the time gaming.

As promised, Namjoon is back mid afternoon.

“Well?” Yoongi says expectantly, looking up from his game in the living room.

“It’s ... not quite done,” Namjoon admits. “I need to catch up on some stuff I missed while, you know. Give me a couple more days.”

“Fine,” Yoongi says.

“You look like you’ve been doing well,” Namjoon says. He’s got his polite face on. It looks terrible on him.

Yoongi snorts.

“Well, okay, you actually look like you’ve spent the entire three years smoking in a shitty bar,” Namjoon says.

“Three and a half,” Yoongi corrects.

“You moved here right away?”

“Pretty much.” It was too weird being in their old apartment without Namjoon. He kept the lease, though. Hoseok checks on it for him once a month to make sure it hasn’t flooded or burned down or something.

There’s a long pause. “I hadn’t realized,” Namjoon says finally. “This building has a gym, right? I’m going to go work out before dinner.”

“I’ve never used it,” Yoongi says.

“Yeah, well. I needed something to keep busy, you know, and I wasn’t any good at basketball.”

He gets a text from Namjoon a half hour later. ordered dinner, please let it in if it comes before I’m back

As it turns out, Namjoon’s back from the gym but in the shower when the buzzer sounds for the front door downstairs. Yoongi taps the button to let the delivery guy in without bothering to say anything, just as he hears the shower turns off.

There’s a knock at the door a minute later, and Yoongi opens it to collect their food. Except, the kid standing there doesn’t have a bag, and Yoongi briefly wonders if he buzzed in someone else’s visitor instead. Hazards of apartment life.

The kid - he can’t be older than 20, with long hair tied back messily and tattoos peaking out from under his jacket sleeves - lets out a surprised gasp.

“Suga-nim!” the kid says excitedly, in Korean, and then he actually bows right there in the hallway.

For a moment Yoongi wonders if this is someone he played poker with, before remembering he hasn’t used that name in Macau. Which means this is someone from before, someone he doesn’t remember, and he absolutely cannot deal with that. He closes the door in the kid’s face, more out of shock than any deliberate desire to be rude.

Namjoon chooses that moment to emerge from the bathroom. His hair’s still a little wet and he’s wearing an old T-shirt that Yoongi recognizes. It’s too small for him now, pulling right across his chest in a way that it didn’t before, and Yoongi hates that he notices.

“Yoongi! Was that our hacker?”

“That was clearly muscle,” Yoongi mutters. He didn’t see very much but he definitely saw that.

It’s too late, though - Namjoon is opening the door and grinning at the kid. “Sorry, sorry,” Namjoon says. “I think you surprised Yoongi, I forgot to tell him you were coming over. Yoongi, this is Jungkook. He’s a hacker.”

“Honored to meet you, Suga-nim!” Jungkook says, polite like he didn’t just have a door slammed in his face.

Yoongi is saved from having to figure out how to respond to that by the buzzer ringing again. He gives Namjoon a look, one that says , before hitting the intercom. “Yes?”

“Delivery for 760!”

“Great, thanks, come on up,” Yoongi buzzes the actual delivery in.

“Do you want something to drink, Jungkook-ah?” Namjoon asks. “Here, come look at the fridge, see what we’ve got.”

When it arrives, the takeout is enough for three - or, more than three really, but Yoongi thinks about the athletic-looking teenager in their kitchen and mentally revises the portion sizes up - so Namjoon at least wasn’t surprised by this visit. He sets the dishes out on the kitchen table while Namjoon rummages around in the fridge for beer.

“So,” Yoongi says finally, after everyone has sat down and started serving themselves, “how do you know Namjoon?”

“I just met him this morning!” Jungkook says brightly. “But I’ve been a fan for a long time.”

“And you just ran into him at a coffee shop?”

Inexplicably, both Jungkook and Namjoon blush.

“Uh, not really,” Jungkook says. “I mean, I know when he was being released, I got that from the prison’s systems, and so I was able to use the police’s CCTV to track him that day, and from there I correlated all his movements with cell phone data - that was a little tricky, I didn’t know which carrier so I had to check three of them - and from there I followed his phone to Macau. Sorry, that’s creepy, I know. But I cleaned up all the CCTV after I was done, so at least no one else would be able to do it.”

Namjoon gives Yoongi a proud look, like he personally raised Jungkook. “Hacker,” he whispers to Yoongi, as if the kid can’t hear it. He’s not wrong, Yoongi thinks. And the part about erasing the CCTV is kind of sweet, maybe. He’s lost track of how normal people interpret these gestures.

“And then you just came to visit?” Yoongi asks. “Are you even old enough to fly by yourself?”

“I’m 22,” Jungkook says in protest. “Korean Air really needs to do something about its website, half the people I know are flying for free.”

“First class, I assume?”

“Oh no, way too memorable, especially for someone my age! Premium economy. Maybe business if it’s a really long flight.”

“Very reasonable,” Namjoon says, and Yoongi would swear that Jungkook is blushing again.

Yoongi sort of wants to hear more about Jungkook’s teenage life of crime, but he lets Namjoon turn to conversation to lighter topics instead - where Jungkook is from, how he’s thinking about moving to Seoul full time but still lives in Busan for now, the comparative merits of airports in Seoul vs Macau, and so on.

Once they’re finished eating, Jungkook waits about sixty seconds and then he starts gathering up the empty containers.

“Hyung,” he says, looking at Namjoon, “how does your recycling work?”

“Oh, uh, Yoongi’s lived here longer, I’ve barely been here a day.”

“Under the sink,” Yoongi says. “Paper, plastic, food trash - you’ll see it.”

“Thank you!” Jungkook chirps, like he’s not the one taking care of cleanup.

When his back is turned, Yoongi turns to Namjoon. “Hyung?” he mouths. Namjoon just shrugs.

“Kid,” Yoongi says. “Do you need a place to crash in town? I’ve got a couch.”

“Oh, no,” Jungkook says. “I should get going, but I’ll be here for a few more days. I booked a hotel. With all my airline points, you know.” He’s grinning, and Yoongi has to admit it’s very charming.

He’s gone in a flurry of lace up boots and leather jacket, and as soon as the door is closed, Namjoon is talking again.

“Still think he’s muscle?”

“Honestly, I’m not even sure he’s a criminal after meeting him,” Yoongi says. “That kid is too sweet to be doing this.”

“Yeah,” Namjoon says, “but, hyung, the way he tracked me down? He’s good.”

“He’s a child with a hero worship problem,” Yoongi says, just to be contrary. “But yeah, that was really good. This thing you’re planning, does it need a hacker?”

“It does now,” Namjoon says.

***

It’s two days before Namjoon is ready to share his plan. Yoongi mostly hangs around the house. He doesn’t know where they’re going, but it probably won’t be here, so he starts prepping to leave: cleaning out the cupboards, thinking about which things he wants to pack vs get rid of, boxing up his books. Namjoon’s got it easy this time with only the suitcase he brought the previous week, but he’s got to figure out how to get the bonsai wherever they’re going, which makes up for it.

He and Namjoon meet Jungkook out for dinner once. It turns out Jungkook’s initial shyness turns into delighted loudness once he’s more comfortable with someone, which limits the amount they can talk shop in public. Instead it’s movies, music, tv - all of Namjoon’s pop culture is four years out of date and Jungkook is too young to go back too far, so there’s a lot of excited explaining to each other. It makes Yoongi feel warm to watch them, right up until Jungkook is wrong about Epik High and he has to jump in to explain all the ways he’s wrong.

He’s a little drunk still when Namjoon and he head home, and he leans contentedly on Namjoon while they wait for the elevator.

“Tomorrow,” Namjoon says.

“Hmm?”

“I think I’ve got it. I need to check a couple more things but then I’ll be ready. I’ll show it to you tomorrow.”

Even if Namjoon hadn’t told him, Yoongi would see it as soon as he comes home the next day. He’s practically vibrating with it.

“Okay, hyung,” he says, before he’s even got his shoes off. “I’ve got it. Well, sort of. Enough of it to get started anyway.”

“Spit it out, Joon-ah,” Yoongi tells him.

You remember the Seoul Museum of Contemporary Art? That robbery that happened right before? We said it would turn up in a few days.”

“It didn’t,” Yoongi says. “I lost track of it but it was never found, that would have made the news.”

“I know where it is,” Namjoon says excitedly. “I want to steal it back.”

Yoongi frowns. “And give it back? There’s a reward but it’s not that much compared to what we usually do.”

“I don’t care. It’s not like you need the money.” Which, fair point. “I just want to fix things.”

“This isn’t some fate thing, is it? This is the moment your life went wrong, you need to fix it to have things turn back up? Please tell me you haven’t gone all philosophical on me.”

“No!” Namjoon squeaks, which means Yoongi is right. “Well, I mean. Mostly not. I just hate the idea of that dick getting away with it.”

“So it was robbery for hire then?”

“Yeah. One of the guys I met, he had a cousin who worked with a guy who was in on it. That wasn’t much to go on, but it gave me a place to start. There’s this rich asshole, Lee Songho, he’s got practically a private museum. He likes to throw parties in it.”

“With his extremely newsworthy stolen art? That seems like a bad idea.”

“He’s got it in a separate room. Not open to the public. He likes to sit there and, I don’t know, jerk off about it.”

Yoongi makes a face. “Please don’t make me imagine that. Wait, is that what you do in your private office?”

“Like I said -“

“I can see you not answering my question!”

“I’m not even going to dignify it with an answer -“

“That means yes!” Yoongi’s never going in there again.

“Like I said, I hate that he got away with it. He’s a rich asshole from a family of rich assholes, and he wanted to have something that wasn’t for sale, so he just took it because he could. His whole family’s done nothing but take, and now they’re taking even our, our cultural heritage. It’s not right. I want to fix it. We can go back to ordinary crime after this, just, first, let’s do this one thing for good for once. Will you help me?”

“You had three years to practice how you wanted to pitch this to me and that’s what you came up with?”

“Hyung!”

“I’m just saying, it could have done without a tangent about your jerk off habits in the middle, you skeezeball.”

“Yoongi. Are you in this with me?”

“Of course I’m in,” Yoongi says, like Namjoon doesn’t know that already. He’s always in for Namjoon’s plans. “Tell me how we’re going to do this.”

“He likes to throw parties, right? Think about it - all those guests in and out, all the extra staff they’ve got to hire. All those people in and out could lead to all sorts of chaos. Who knows what could go wrong.”

“And we’re going to make some chaos.”

Namjoon walks Yoongi through the plan he’s worked up. It’s still rough in some places, and there are a couple ideas that Namjoon has that Yoongi thinks won’t work at all, but it’s enough of a plan to get them off and running. They trade arguments back and forth, refining and rewriting, until Yoongi has gotten as precise as he can be without more research.

He collapses back into the couch. Somehow it got dark when he wasn’t looking. He’s suddenly starving. “We’ve got a lot of questions we still need to answer before I’m confident in this thing,” he says.

“I’ve got notes,” Namjoon says, gesturing with a notepad he conjured up from somewhere an hour into the discussion. “We can work through them.”

“And we’re going to need a team. This isn’t a two person job.”

“I know,” Namjoon says. “I’ve got some ideas, but, uh, you’re probably more current than I am.”

“I get veto power over the team,” Yoongi says, suddenly serious. Namjoon likes people, trusts them when he shouldn’t. Yoongi doesn’t.

“Fine,” Namjoon says. “You’re in?”

“I’m in,” Yoongi confirms.

“Let’s go back to Seoul.”

“As long as you do all the illegal plant transport.”

Once they’re back in Seoul, Yoongi spends three solid days in research, doing his best to fill the gaps in the plan. At some point - he’s not really sure when - Jungkook appears in his office and sets up his laptop in the corner, and Yoongi finds himself turning repeatedly to him to track down the kind of answers that are less available in public record. He quickly learns that Jungkook isn’t much of a schemer and has no head for the art of the con, but give him a task with clear parameters and he’ll work doggedly at it until it’s done. Twice Yoongi catches him nodding off over his laptop and sends him out of the office for sleep; Yoongi in turn curls up in his chair for cat naps when the coffee stops keeping him awake. He must eat at some point - the empty takeout containers are starting to loom - but he’s not sure what it was or how it got there. Namjoon, he assumes. Namjoon is used to this.

When he emerges from his lair, it’s night time. Namjoon is on the couch, reading a book in English, bonsai carefully set up on a stand out of the way. He dyed his hair at some point when Yoongi was in his research binge. It’s a silvery blond now, with the dark roots showing in a way that’s deliberate. It look good on him.

“Hey,” Namjoon says. “It’s Tuesday.”

Yoongi nods gratefully. He’d lost track.

“Done?”

“Almost,” Yoongi says. “Jungkook was a big help.”

“I put him to bed in your room, sorry. I didn’t think you’d be done this early.”

“It’s fine,” Yoongi says, throwing himself down on the couch next to Namjoon. “He needed the sleep.”

“What’s left? Do you need me to do anything?”

“This plan, Namjoon-ah, it’s not going to be cheap. Supplies alone...”

“I’ve been thinking about that. We could fund it ourselves, but ...”

Yoongi makes a face. They hate doing that. Putting your own cash in makes you feel like you’ve bought in. It’s harder to walk away if you feel like you’re losing out, and a con you can’t walk away from is one that’s going to go bad. Better to spend someone else’s money if you can.

“Anyway, I think I have an investor. We’d have to make a couple of tweaks, but we could do it.”

“Show me.”

Namjoon walls him through the changes. Yoongi nods, seeing it fall into place. “We could do it. It’s harder, but we could do it.”

“It’s better this way,” Namjoon says.

Yoongi laughs. “Of course you’re worried about the beauty of the thing. But - this is someone we can trust? Someone who knows what they’re getting into?”

“I trust him. Uh, it sounds like he mostly wants to see Lee Songho lose, so we’re all on the same page there.”

“Good,” Yoongi says. He yawns suddenly. Getting all the details done was the only thing keeping him going and now that he’s done he feels ready to collapse.

“Oh, uh, I’m going to be up for a while yet,” Namjoon says hurriedly. “Do you want to crash in mine? I can sleep on the couch, it’s fine.”

“I can sleep in my office.”

Namjoon snorts. “You’re going to turn into a gargoyle if you keep sleeping in that chair. C’mon, up you go.”

Yoongi is pretty sure this is a bad idea, but Namjoon is a lot more awake than he is at this point, so he gives up on resisting and lets Namjoon haul him down the hall. He’s asleep even before Namjoon has closed the door.

***

After breakfast the next morning - or, at least, after Yoongi makes breakfast for himself and Namjoon, Jungkook still being solidly lost to the world - Namjoon and Yoongi take another look at their plan, this time with an eye to who they’re going to need to recruit to pull it off.

“We need Seokjin,” Yoongi says immediately.

“Ugh.” Namjoon makes a face. “What about that woman we worked with in Busan?”

“Too wanted by the police to get back into the country.”

“The guy from California.”

“Got married, left the game, and moved to Hawaii, and even if he hadn’t, he’s not as good as Jin-hyung.”

“Last I heard, Jin-hyung was doing some weird sex thing in Singapore, who knows if he’s still got it.”

“If he’s still got it? Maybe you didn’t hear about it, but he spent three months last year convincing six different European noble families that he was the lost heir of the Romanovs.”

“So?”

“What do you mean, so? He’s Korean! He doesn’t speak a word of Russian! He pulled it off for three months and only left because he got bored of it.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize you were keeping up with him so closely.”

“You gave me veto power over personnel, remember that, Namjoon? And I am saying that I am not running a con that involves infiltrating a high society party without Seokjin. And that’s final.”

“Fine,” Namjoon spits.

“Fine,” Yoongi yells back.

Just then, there’s soft footsteps from the hall. “Uh. I can come back later?” Jungkook says hesitantly.

Yoongi takes a deep breath. “Sorry,” he says to Jungkook. “We get a little worked up sometimes, don’t worry about it. Did you want breakfast? I made soup, there’s still some left.”

“Thank you, Yoongi-ssi!”

Yoongi sighs. “Kid, you’ve basically been living in my office with me, you can call me hyung.” He dishes out a bowl and hands it to Jungkook. “Here, eat up. I’ve got to make some phone calls,” he says, trying not to see Namjoon glaring at him as he shuffles off to his office.

Seokjin is eager to get in on the con in a way that Yoongi finds frankly suspicious. Yoongi doesn’t want to discuss any details over the phone, of course, and he tells Seokjin twice that it’ll be at least a week before they’ve gotten a complete crew together and are ready to start working. Despite that, Seokjin insists he’ll be in Seoul the next afternoon.

“I’ll get a cab from the airport. Did you move back into that place Namjoon and you used to share? I’ve got the address.”

“How do you remember that?” Yoongi demands. “I think you’ve been here twice and it was years ago.”

“I remember things,” Seokjin says, ominously, and hangs up. Yoongi rolls his eyes and texts Seokjin their address anyway.

“Seokjin’s in,” he says when he returns to the kitchen. “He’ll be here tomorrow.”

“Here? Tomorrow?”

Yoongi shrugs. “He’s going to have to be here eventually, and he wanted it to be tomorrow.”

“In our apartment?”

“I guess? He can stay in my room, I’m not sure why you care so much.”

“We’re going to need warehouse space to rehearse in anyway,” Namjoon says. “I’ll see if I can rent a short term apartment nearby or something too. This is a six person con and there’s no way six people are going to live in this apartment for five weeks while we do prep - no offense, Jungkook, you’ve been a great guest. But we’d have to put bunk beds in the living room or something.”

Jungkook, currently doing dishes, looks startled to be addressed. “Anywhere is fine with me, hyung!”

“Who’s next on the list?” Namjoon asks.

“Explosives,” Yoongi says.

“Hoseok?”

“Hoseok.”

A flurry of slightly confusing texts later, Hoseok has agreed to hear them out and asked to be picked up the day after tomorrow, somewhere halfway out to Incheon.

“I should probably get my car out of storage anyway,” Yoongi says. “I’ll rent a truck too. Who knows what we’re going to need to end up hauling around.”

Namjoon nods. “I’ll start working on spaces this afternoon. Hopefully we’ll have something before we end up sleeping three to a bed.”

“It’d be fine for you, you’ve got a fuck off huge bed.”

“Because I’m not pocket sized!”

Yoongi makes a rude gesture in Namjoon’s direction.

Three hours later, he’s got his own car parked in their parking spot, a small generic box truck parked semi-legally in one of their neighbor’s spots. Namjoon in turn has a lead on a warehouse, as well as a two month lease on a four bedroom apartment in a building a few blocks over. Yoongi’s not sure what Jungkook did all day but he seems pleased with himself too.

After dinner, three bottles of wine, and several rounds of League of Legends, Jungkook is starting to doze off sitting up and Yoongi knows he and Namjoon aren’t far behind. Yoongi glares at Namjoon until Namjoon sighs and hauls Jungkook up.

“This is what I get for calling your room pocket sized,” he says with mock disgust as he guides Jungkook to his room.

As promised, Seokjin arrives the next afternoon. Namjoon has taken Jungkook out with him to look at warehouses, so it’s just Yoongi in the apartment. Seokjin is wearing a shearling coat over a plain tshirt, and somehow manages to make it look like high fashion that he doesn’t want to be wearing. Sometimes Yoongi wonders how he manages to get through airports without being followed by paparazzi.

Seokjin isn’t much of a hugger, but he leans in to give Yoongi an awkward half hug in greeting anyway. “You quit smoking!” he says, in place of any normal greeting.

“I never smoke here,” Yoongi says. Namjoon had always hated the smell, so when they first moved into this place together, he’d resolved not to smoke in it. Now that they’re back, he slipped back into that pattern without thinking about it.

Seokjin’s traveling light, for Seokjin, which means it only takes the two of them one trip to haul his stuff to Yoongi’s room. Yoongi wrinkles his nose at the way his floor space disappears.

“We have another space,” he apologizes, “but we won’t get the keys until tomorrow.”

“This is fine!” Seokjin says. “This means I’ll get to spend quality time with you and Namjoon. How is Namjoon doing these days? Is he adjusting well to being out of prison?”

Yoongi ignores the question. “Be nice to him,” he says. “This won’t work if the two of you spend the whole time fighting.”

“Yoongichi! Are you suggesting he might not be nice to me? Because that’s fascinating. What problem could Namjoon possibly have with me?”

”The two of you are so weird,” Yoongi says rather than answering the question, because he frankly has no idea what’s going on between them. Maybe if he ignores it they’ll get over it.

True to form, when Yoongi and Seokjin emerge from Yoongi’s bedroom to find that Namjoon and Jungkook have returned, Namjoon and Seokjin promptly engage in some sort of weird staring match.

Yoongi makes a decision to not think about any of that and instead introduces Jungkook and Seokjin. Jungkook is either shy or a little in awe of Seokjin, because he reverts back to his formal manners.

Seokjin does not. Yoongi isn’t even sure if Seokjin is capable of formal manners. “Yoongi-yah, you’ve brought a baby into the life of crime. A child!”

“He brought himself in,” Yoongi says. “He’s very good.”

Jungkook blushes and wrinkles his nose. It’s cute.

“Infant,” Seokjin declares, “come with me. I’m going grocery shopping and you can help carry, you’ve got all those muscles for no reason.”

Luckily, Jungkook seems delighted rather than annoyed to be dragooned into carrying groceries, which is a good sign for him getting along with Seokjin in the long run. Yoongi’s relieved - he’s run cons where the participants didn’t get along, and it makes everything three times harder than it needs to be. Hopefully whatever weirdness Seokjin and Namjoon have won’t be catching.

(His hopes that Seokjin and Namjoon have gotten over whatever it was are dashed when he sees that Seokjin decided to make seafood stew for dinner. That’s definitely a passive aggressive declaration of where Seokjin is on the matter.)

The fight the next day is even more clear. Yoongi’s about to leave the bathroom when he hears raised voices from the kitchen, so he leaves the door closed to listen in.

“I’ve got the keys to the other apartment,” Namjoon says. “You can move over there whenever.”

“Want to make sure I’m far away from you and Yoongi?” Seokjin asks.

“It’s only a few blocks. And Yoongi can go wherever he wants.”

“But you’re going to make the two of you the default, is that right?” It’s weird hearing Seokjin fight like this. Yoongi can count on one hand the number of times he’s seen Seokjin get actually angry.

“We’ve been partners for ten years,” Namjoon points out.

“Except, you were in prison for four of those years, right? So it’s really only six years, if you account for the way you screwed up and left him behind.”

“That’s for me and hyung to worry about,” Namjoon says. “It’s not really any of your business.” Yoongi hears the stress on your and winces. That’s going to go over badly.

“Wrong,” Seokjin hisses. “You decided you wanted to work with a group, that means that it’s between all of us.”

Yoongi decides that this clearly isn’t helping them clear the air and is probably only making it worse. It’s really only a matter of time before someone throws a punch, and then where will his heist be?

“So!” Yoongi says brightly, entering the kitchen. “I hear there’s another apartment?”

Namjoon and Seokjin both immediately stop talking. They won’t make eye contact with each other or with Yoongi. The entire thing looks suspicious as hell. Yoongi resolves to corner Namjoon and get the whole story out of him later.

He gets his chance that afternoon, when he and Namjoon go to collect Hoseok.

“Jungkook seems to be settling in well,” Yoongi says, as part of his opening, as he pulls out of the garage. “It’s good that he and Seokjin get along.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Namjoon says, and the thing is, Yoongi has known Namjoon for ten years. He knows when he’s sulking.

“What’s the deal with you and Seokjin?” Yoongi asks.

“Nothing. It’s fine.”

“Joon-ah. You have to tell me. Is this something that’s going to ruin this con?”

“You said you wouldn’t do this job without him, so he’s got to be here. That’s fine. I’ll get over it. It’s fine,” Namjoon says, which is possibly the least convincing thing Yoongi has ever heard him say. He sighs.

“We can make this work without him if we have to. We’ll need some more people, it’ll be harder, but we can do it. But you have to tell me, Namjoon.”

Namjoon doesn’t answer. That’s fine with Yoongi. There’s a lot of drive left for him to try again.

When Namjoon speaks again, it surprises Yoongi. “The two of you got really close when you were in Macau, didn’t you.”

“I guess?” Yoongi says. “He helped me find a job for a while, he came and visited me a bunch.”

“No, but, like. Close.”

“Maybe? I don’t really know what you’re looking for here.”

“Isn’t this where Hoseok wanted to meet us?” Namjoon asks suddenly from where he’s studying the map on his phone. “What kind of mess is this?”

Yoongi blinks and takes in the scene as a criminal and not just as someone running a slightly boring errand in a car. There’s a row of police cars parked outside an imposing looking building - a bank, he thinks, shit - and he can hear more sirens on the way. “Shit shit shit,” he says, succinctly.

“Bomb squad’s here,” Namjoon says calmly. “Wanna do a Cockney Apple?”

Yoongi flips down his sun visor to check his reflection and grimaces. “I’m not dressed for it, fuck,” he says, taking out his earrings, “but we’ll have to.”

“I’ll take point,” Namjoon says as they get out of the car. “Give me ninety seconds, then follow. Here, let me.” He reaches out and straightens the collar of Yoongi’s jacket and hands him his sunglasses. “You’re fine. We’ll be fast, they won’t even notice what we’re wearing.”

Yoongi puts on the sunglasses, even though it’s well into dusk, and leans against his car with his arms folded, doing his best to project a slightly bored air. He watches Namjoon saunter up to the police line and start a conversation with one of the officers. It’s barely twenty seconds after that until more officers in uniform begin leading a series of handcuffed people out of the bank. Yoongi doesn’t recognize the first or the second, but the third is definitely Hoseok. The police sit the group of arrestees down on the curb, presumably to wait for more transportation to arrive.

“My partner, Agent Park,” Namjoon introduces Yoongi when he approaches the police line. “We really appreciate this, it should only take a few minutes.”

Hoseok is the worst liar Yoongi knows, so of course he startles when he sees Namjoon and Yoongi escorted over to where the arrestees are being held. Yoongi tries not to sigh out loud.

“That’s right, Jung Hoseok-ssi,” Yoongi says quickly, “you remember us.”

“We have some questions for you,” Namjoon says. “About that job you did last year, you know, with the thing.”

“And when we heard about this in progress, we hurried right over.”

“Right, it was clearly one of yours.”

“Too bad it didn’t work this time,” Yoongi says with a smirk, which causes Hoseok to throw a dirty look at the man next to him. Ah, that must be the one who screwed this up.

“Come with us,” Namjoon says, pulling Hoseok to his feet. The way he grabs Hoseok’s arm makes it clear it isn’t optional. Hoseok looks a little nervous, but that’s fine, Yoongi thinks. It looks real, like if he was being taken for special questioning.

“Deep breaths,” he mutters to Hoseok as they walk away. “Almost there.”

Namjoon puts Hoseok in the back seat of Yoongi’s car, then takes his own seat in front. “We’re clear,” he tells Yoongi, and Yoongi does his best to get them away fast without drawing too much attention.

Once they’re a few blocks away, Hoseok finally breaks and bursts out giggling, curling over himself and shaking, and Yoongi can’t help laughing either.

“Hob-ah,” he says when he can catch a breath, “did you call us to be your getaway car?”

“That team was so bad at crime, hyung!” Hoseok protests. “I was pretty sure I was going to need help getting out of that one.”

“Happy to help,” Namjoon says, and he means it.

“Now,” Hoseok says, holding up his hands where they’re cuffed in front of him, “did either of you think to grab a set of handcuff keys?”

That sets off a fresh round of laughter. “Sorry, Seok-seok,” Yoongi says. “I’m sure we’ll have something back at home.”

***

Last on Yoongi’s list is an acrobat. He doesn’t have anyone in mind, but Hoseok has a name for him, given that demolitions and acrobatics tend to show up on the same sort of extraction and retrieval jobs. Unfortunately, Hobi’s slightly whimsical sense of humor in how to meet people still seems to be in play, because he’s sent Yoongi and Namjoon to what can only be described as a burlesque show. It’s not quite professional level, but it’s not exactly amateur either.

“You told Hobi acrobat, not honeypot, right?” Namjoon asks after Yoongi pays for tickets.

Yoongi shrugs. “Here,” he says, handing Namjoon the program. “He said Baby G.”

Namjoon scans down the printed sheet. “Third act,” he says.

The first act is a comedic one, involving juggling sex toys. Yoongi doesn’t really get it - literal juggling? is it a pun? - but the performer seems to have lots of friends in the audience, to judge from the hollering coming from all corners of the slightly dingy auditorium. The second act is a classic slow strip tease set to music, performed by a curvy woman with a husky singing voice, and it is objectively pretty sexy. Yoongi could see himself being into it if he wasn’t in a room with 200 strangers and also Namjoon.

Namjoon pokes him just as the third act is starting, just in case he lost track while counting three acts in. Yoongi whacks him with his program in return. They get a dirty look from the woman on Namjoon’s other side, and Yoongi gives her a slight wave of apology.

The third act is a young man dancing with a pair of fans, slowly at first. It’s less overtly sexual than the previous act, but there’s a coyness in the way the dancer looks back over his shoulder at the audience. He’s very good at the sultry looks, and it does nothing to convince Yoongi that they’ve found the right guy, although he’s certain he’d excel at honeypot.

Then, halfway through, the music gradually picks up tempo, and the dance changes with it. Gone are the slow looks and long poses, and instead there’s what Yoongi has to admit is a really impressive display of athleticism mixed in between the body rolls. Now he understands what Hoseok wanted them to see. The music ends with the performer sliding down into a full split and touching his head to his knee. Yoongi winces just watching it. Strong, flexible, and with the kind of grace they’re going to need.

“Acrobat?” Namjoon says.

“Acrobat,” Yoongi says.

After the show ends, Yoongi and Namjoon make their way towards the backstage area, along with at least a quarter of the audience.

“Baby G?” Namjoon asks a woman mostly dressed in body paint, doing a valiant job at keeping his eyes above her collarbones, and she points them to a back corner. They press gently though the crowd, then wait while their target finishes hugging and congratulating another of the performers.

“Uh, Baby G?” Namjoon asks.

He grins. “You can call me Jimin. Are you Hobi-hyung’s friends? He said you might come by.”

“We’re trying to put together a group. Hoseok recommended you.”

“For something like this? Did you like my performance tonight?”

“It was, uh, very nice,” Namjoon stutters out. “But we were thinking more, er.” It’s clear he’s trying to figure out how to describe what they’re looking for without suggesting anything illegal.

Jimin laughs, a bright ringing sound. “I’m kidding, I know what kind of thing you’re looking for. If Hoseok trusts you guys, then I’m in too.”

***

Namjoon and Yoongi’s apartment is blessedly free of other people when they get back that evening, the rest of the group having moved themself into the other apartment Namjoon rented. He’s surprised and pleased to find that someone carefully washed all the dishes and wiped down all the counters sometime since lunch. Probably not Seokjin, based on his usual kitchen behavior. Seokjin also seems to have left most of the groceries he bought behind, so Yoongi starts pulling out ingredients for dinner.

“I can help,” Namjoon offers, as Yoongi starts pouring ingredients into a bowl for a quick marinade.

“Absolutely not, sit there and don’t touch anything,” Yoongi says.

Namjoon takes the refusal with good grace and flips through his notes instead. Yoongi can hear him scribbling on the already over-worked paper.

“So we’ve got six,” Namjoon says, interrupting Yoongi’s humming at the pork he’s frying.

“Mmm-hmm.”

“I’m looking at this and I think maybe we need another con artist. A good liar, with a good lift too.”

“Mmm?” He dumps a cutting board’s worth of chopped vegetables into his frying pan.

“I mean, I can’t really pick pockets-” Yoongi snorts; he really can’t “- and you can, right, but everyone else is a specialist.”

“Hoseok can.”

“Hoseok can lift, but he’s such a bad liar I wouldn’t want to put him as close as he’d need to be to do it. And we need another good liar, even more than we need a pick pocket.”

“This better not be about Seokjin again.” Yoongi doesn’t even understand this fight and he’s already sick of having it.

“It’s not! It’s really not, I really do think we need one more. Look at the math, here, for phase two. Another person gives us a much bigger margin of error.”

Yoongi rolls his eyes at the stove. “Joon-ah, I’m cooking, I can’t check your math.”

“After dinner then.”

“If you say we need one more, then we need one more.” Yoongi checks the pork again and judges it done. Namjoon has put two plates on the table and microwaved some rice, so he divides the stir fry in the skillet between the two of them.

“I’ll get one more,” Namjoon promises.

“Good. Now here, eat your dinner.”

***

“A cafe?” Yoongi asks after they get off the bus at the address Namjoon specified. “This guy wants to meet at a cafe?”

Namjoon shrugs. “That’s what he said. It’s weird, but Seokjin said V was the best option for us.”

Yoongi raises an eyebrow but doesn’t comment. He didn’t know Namjoon and Seokjin were on recommending pick pocket terms. Still, he trusts Seokjin to know who the best options are, since that’s closer to kind of crime that he does as opposed to what Yoongi and Namjoon do.

They’re a bit early, so they order their coffees and find a table. It’s mid afternoon, so the cafe isn’t too crowded, but it’s definitely more crowded than Yoongi would prefer when he’s planning to have a conversation about committing a number of serious crimes.

Yoongi’s distracted by trying to work out which of the arriving patrons might be V, so he almost startles when someone puts a cup of tea down at their table. The guy standing there is one of the ones he’d dismissed earlier. He’s tall and wearing a sweater vest and beret. It’s not a cold day, but he’s stuffed a plaid scarf into his bag. The entire thing is either extremely fashion forward or a look he pulled out of his father’s closet. Yoongi can’t tell which. Maybe both.

“Hi, I’m V,” he says.

“Yoongi, Namjoon,” Yoongi says, pointing. “Have a seat.”

“You said that Seokjin said you might have a job for me. What kind of job are you thinking?”

Namjoon gives a quick outline of what they’re trying to do - target, method, and anticipated take. He doesn’t mention any specifics about the target, but it’s clear it’s still more than he really wanted to say in public. He looks suspicious as hell while he does it. Yoongi just hopes that no one who notices cares enough to find out why he’s being so suspicious.

V is nodding as Namjoon finishes. “That all sounds cool. I’d sign up for that.”

“Seokjin didn’t tell us very much about you,” Yoongi says. “What sort of work have you done recently?”

V appears to have caught the suspicious bug from Namjoon, since he checks over both shoulders and then leans in over the table. What follows is - well, Yoongi’s pretty sure he’s describing a series of cons that he’s run. He’s just not used to the metaphors being quite so florid.

“And that’s how the parrot flew the coop,” V finishes.

“So you like corporate espionage?” Yoongi tries, grasping onto the little bit he did manage to follow.

“It suits me,” V says. “But I’m flexible.”

“Right,” Yoongi says. “Well, uh, we’ll be in touch, I guess.”

“Great,” V says. He’s still sitting there, like he’s expecting more conversation.

“Uh,” Yoongi says. “I’m going to go get another coffee, any one else want anything?” He reaches into his jacket pocket for his wallet, but it’s not there. He frowns, and checks his other pockets just in case.

“Did you lose your wallet?” V asks.

“I’m not Namjoon,” Yoongi mutters, and Namjoon smiles the guilty smile of a man who’s lost his own wallet multiple times, and, memorably, once his ID critical to the con less than an hour before he needed it.

“I can pay,” V says. He turns to where he’s set his bag on the seat next to him and digs through it. The wallet he offers looks just like Yoongi’s, and when he flips it open on the table it turns out that’s because it is Yoongi’s.

“Nice,” Yoongi says, impressed despite himself. He always tries to be careful when meeting pickpockets and other slight of hand con artists to avoid just this kind of posturing, but he hadn’t felt anything. Thinking back, he can’t even figure out when V got close enough to take it.

“I thought a demonstration might help,” V says earnestly.

Namjoon grins at him. “Fine, you’re in. I’ll send you the details for when we’re meeting next.”

“And, uh, do you want to be called V?”

“Oh, you can call me Taehyung. V’s just my pen name.”

Yoongi briefly considers asking what he needs a pen name for and decides he doesn’t need to know. “Great, Taehyung-ssi. We’ll see you soon.”

***

Some con artists like to limit the facts that each of their team has, to try to control how the information gets out and make sure no one can double cross them. That’s never been Namjoon’s style, though - he likes a team where everyone knows what everyone else is doing and can contribute as needed. That means every con starts out with a team meeting, usually with a PowerPoint presentation. Yoongi’s just glad that he doesn’t make them do icebreaker activities or trust falls. He almost said this to Namjoon once but decided not to give him any ideas.

Despite Yoongi’s protests that they’ve just managed to get everyone out of their apartment, Namjoon invites everyone over the next evening to learn the plan.

“The warehouse has terrible ambiance for this sort of thing. Bad acoustics, too,” Namjoon points out.

“We don’t even have enough seating for seven,” Yoongi protests, but he orders a bunch of fried chicken and sets it out on the kitchen table, along with the beer and soju. “And when Hoseok gets too tipsy to go home, he’s sleeping in your bed, not mine.”

“You like Hoseok.”

“Not at seven in the morning, I don’t.”

Seokjin is the first to arrive, with Jungkook in tow. It’s cute. Jungkook falls on the chicken immediately, and Seokjin isn’t far behind.

“Yah, you brat, leave some for everyone else,” Seokjin yells.

“Hyung, you took even more than me!”

“I’m taller!”

Yoongi is briefly worried it’s going to turn into a full on wrestling match on the living room floor, chicken included, but luckily they think better of it and settle in to eat a truly astonishing amount of chicken together. Yoongi’s glad Jungkook is making friends.

Hoseok arrives with hugs for Yoongi and Namjoon, as always, and he laughs as Yoongi pointedly hands him a soda.

“No drinking until after Namjoon’s presentation,” Hoseok promises, and then promptly ruins the solemnity of it by giggling again.

Taehyung has the sleeves of his black tshirt rolled up, which Yoongi wasn’t aware people did in real life. Yoongi had worried if Taehyung would fit with the group he’d assembled - talented or not, the kid had a weird vibe - but he promptly settled himself on the couch next to Seokjin and leaned way into his personal space, so that seemed to be going fine. Yoongi can tell that any moment now Jungkook is going to be pulled into their vertex of weird, so he lets himself drift into the kitchen where Namjoon and Hoseok are having a low voiced serious conversation.

“It’s fine,” Namjoon is saying. “I trust this group.”

“I trust you,” Hoseok says, catching Yoongi’s eye over Namjoon’s shoulder. “But you’ve been out of the game a long time now. People change, or they switch sides.”

“I’ve caught up,” Namjoon insists. “I spent a lot of time getting the lay of the land before we started recruiting.”

Yoongi can’t help but agree with Hoseok. He knows that he himself is almost as rusty as Namjoon is at this kind of thing, but while he had veto on the personnel, Namjoon brought them to him in the first place. There’s a lot of ways this could go wrong if Namjoon is wrong about how much he knows, and prison isn’t even the worst outcome. People survive prison.

Jimin is fifteen minutes late, but when he does arrive he’s met with shrieking and hugs. Hoseok isn’t that surprising, of course, but he’s immediately followed by Taehyung, who’s just as effusive. Yoongi hadn’t realized he and Jimin knew each other.

“Come meet everyone,” Taehyung says, dragging Jimin over to Jungkook as soon as Jimin has his boots off.

“Uh, hi, I’m Jungkook,” Jungkook says, doing his best to be polite from where Seokjin has halfway tackled him onto the couch.

“This is Jiminie,” Taehyung says. He’s hooked his chin over Jimin’s shoulder and draped himself over Jimin’s back. Yoongi can’t see either of his hands. It is, frankly, a lot of touching to be happening in Yoongi’s living room, especially from two people he thought were strangers. “He’s my soulmate.”

“That’s so great,” Jungkook says. “Uh, soulmate, so, that means - no, Jin-hyung, let me up!”

soulmate? Yoongi mouths at Namjoon, who shrugs, equally confused by this revelation. Hoseok, on the other hand, is beaming delightedly at both the wrestling match and the cuddling, so at least there’s one person who was expecting all these interpersonal connections.

“So, uh, now that everyone’s here, I thought I’d go over the plan?” Namjoon says, more of a suggestion than a statement. Luckily, it seems like the group is more interested in art theft than whatever else might be happening. Seokjin lets Jungkook out of the headlock and Jungkook promptly folds himself into a neat seat on the floor, as does Hoseok, and Taehyung and Jimin both find places on the couch. (They’re still holding hands, but Yoongi will take what he can get.)

Namjoon taps the mouse on his laptop, already connected to the TV, and the slides appear.

“What we’re looking at here are the missing works of art stolen from the Seoul Museum of Contemporary Art four years ago. There’s a reward offered for their safe return, but nothing’s been heard of them since they were stolen. What we’ve learned is that they’re in the possession of Lee Songho. He’s got a private museum at his business with lots of legitimate art, and there’s a secret room with his stolen art. We are going to take all of this and return it to the museum.”

“This is a big group, so probably not just a smash and grab?” Hoseok asks.

“Security’s too stiff,” Yoongi says. “Guards, motion detectors, vibration sensors - when the art is locked down, which is most of the time, it’s too locked down for us to move that much material out. We can get some recon in but nothing bigger than that.”

“Which is why we’re going in when it’s not locked down,” Namjoon says. “He likes to throw parties to show off his expensive purchases. We’re going to go in as staff for one of those parties.”

“Rich people don’t pay attention to staff,” Yoongi says.

“A party’s a chaotic time, lots of coming and going. We’ll use that to our advantage to get in. Then, we’ll get the guests out - Hobi, I’m sure you have some way to clear a room - which will give us a brief window of opportunity along in the space. We’ll use that to break into the private room, get the art out, and get out before anyone catches on.”

Seokjin raises his hand. “I’m sure this is noble and all, but just how much is this reward?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Yoongi says. “We anticipate splitting a very satisfactory take once all the pieces of this con are complete.”

Seokjin does not look particularly satisfied by this non-answer, but he settles back down into the couch.

“Can I be the getaway driver?” Jungkook asks.

“There will be no getaway driving,” Namjoon says, and Jungkook’s face falls. “We won’t need to leave in a hurry because they won’t know that anything’s wrong. We’re going to take down the door to the secret room, get the art out, and put it back up before we go. No one is going to want to open the door to a room full of stolen art when they let the guests back in, so he won’t notice anything missing.”

“All in less than four minutes,” Yoongi adds. “Hoseok?”

Hoseok thinks about it. “A secure door, right? Do we have the model information and the installation details?”

“We can get them,” Yoongi promises. “That’s one of the reasons we recruited Jimin-ssi.”

“I have some ideas,” Hoseok says. “We’ll need a test installation to practice on.”

“We’ve already got a warehouse. We can start construction now, and fill in the details as we get them,” Namjoon says.

“Good,” Hoseok says. “I can do it.”

“So that’s the exit,” Seokjin says. “Can you go over the entrance in more detail?”

“Lee Songho uses the same event planning firm for all his parties,” Namjoon says. “Because he’s an asshole, he’s difficult to work with, so the job of being the point person always falls to the newest person in the office. We’ll get the newest person in the office off the job for a while - Jungkook-ah, that’s a job for you - and that’ll create an opening they’ll need to fill in a hurry.”

Jungkook frowns. “But it has to be something nice. Can I have them win the lottery? Or a fancy vacation? I don’t want to get anyone fired, that’s mean.”

“As long as the event planners needs to hire someone, that’s fine.”

“Can I be hired?” Taehyung asks suddenly. “I’ll be the event planner.”

“Uh -“ Namjoon starts.

“He’d be so great at it,” Jimin enthuses. “Babe, do you remember that party you planned for my birthday two years ago, with the feathers and the -“

“Right!” Namjoon says, hurriedly. “I don’t think we need more details on that! I guess we’ve got an event planner.”

“You’ll need to get them to hire a new catering company, which I will run, and that’s how we’ll get everyone into the building undetected,” Yoongi says. “Jin-hyung, we’ll want you to help spread the word about our new company.”

“The party I was at last week, the food was just fantastic. Here, I got their name, have you eaten their stuff? Truly, up and coming geniuses. You’ve got to get them for the garden party you’re having next week,” Seokjin says, right on cue.

“Yes, just like that,” Yoongi says.

“Am I also responsible for producing food suitable for an up and coming genius?” Seokjin asks.

“I can cook!” Yoongi yelps, then pauses. “But yes, I would appreciate your help. Jungkook, we’re also going to need access to their security system, cameras, all that.”

“I looked, but it’s locked down hard from the outside, probably air gapped. I’m going to need to be on site to place some taps on their system.”

“That’s fine, we’ll do that the same time we get the details on the door for Hoseok,” Namjoon says.

Jungkook does a little dance from his seat on the floor which Yoongi is pretty sure translates to ‘woo hoo, breaking and entering,’ and that managed to set off laughter in both Jimin and Hoseok, and after that the slides are a lost cause. They had gotten through the important ones anyway. Any other details they can handle as they come up.

By the time the group stumbles out the front door two hours later, the chicken is gone, most of the soju has disappeared, and Hoseok is just as drunk after one and a half drinks as Yoongi had predicted. Seokjin is flirty when drunk and Hoseok is cuddly, which Yoongi had mentally prepared for, but he had not expected Jimin and Taehyung’s soulmate thing. Whatever that even means - they were all over each other all night, and yet that didn’t stop them from also being all over everyone else. (Taehyung has known Yoongi for all of about three hours and already he’s dragging Yoongi from group to group at their little party.) Yoongi decides he doesn’t want any details and that he’s not going to ask any questions.

Neither Yoongi nor Namjoon is that drunk, maybe a little tipsy, and after Namjoon puts Hoseok to bed, they both end up back in the living room to tidy up, having physically forced Jungkook out the door to prevent him from cleaning.

“So that went pretty well, I think,” Namjoon says.

“The chemistry is good,” Yoongi says, as if ‘good chemistry’ can describe the sheer number of hugs that happened. And, maybe he’s more drunk and tired than he thought, because what comes out of his mouth next is, “I was a little bit surprised that you were so quick to let Taehyung take over that role, since it’s so central to the plan.”

“He’ll be good at it.”

“I mean, I hope so,” Yoongi says. “But really. Do you know anything about him, about what kind of work he’s done?”

“He told us about what he’s done.”

“He told us a bunch of vague stories, which could all be exaggerated. You don’t actually know anything about him for sure, he’s just your last minute name out of a hat.”

“I know enough,” Namjoon says mulishly. Yoongi hates when Namjoon gets in this mood. Neither of them are good at backing down when they’re like this.

“You definitely didn’t know about that soul mate thing he’s got going on with Jimin - who knows what else you missed? You’ve been out of the game a long time, Namjoon.” It’s maybe meaner than he meant to be but somehow Yoongi can’t stop picking at it, at this wound between him and Namjoon.

“I fucked up four years ago!” Namjoon says. “I fucked up and I’m sorry. And I get that you don’t trust me anymore, not like you used to, which is fine, your business, but you need to make up your mind whether you’re in or out on this, and you need to do it soon.”

“Oh, fuck right off,” Yoongi says. He slams the door on his way into his bedroom, which isn’t mature but makes him feel better.

***

Yoongi sulks in his bedroom the next morning until he can hear that there’s no one else in their apartment. He thinks about hiding out in his office all day, but he gets a text from Seokjin asking him to come help out at their workspace in the warehouse. (The text actually reads ‘please I need another adult here’ but Yoongi is good at interpreting Seokjin’s texts.)

Yoongi had known conceptually they were going to build a replica of the gallery, but he hadn’t really realized just how big that was going to look in practice. Jungkook’s gotten them the blueprints from the city’s building department - they’ll have to make sure they weren’t modified after they were submitted for approval, but it’s a starting place. When Yoongi arrives, Jungkook is studying the blueprints and directing Jimin and Hoseok as they lay out tape markings on the floor. They’ve gotten about halfway through, the shape of the gallery starting to appear on the concrete floor.

Seokjin, on the other hand, is involved in some game with Taehyung that seems to involve chasing each other around with tape.

“Yoongi-yah!” Seokjin yells. “Protect me!”

“I came because you said we needed another adult,” Yoongi says. “So I guess I’m here to help Jungkook, since he’s the most adult of you right now.”

Seokjin squeaks in outrage, as Yoongi expected, but when Yoongi takes a copy of the blueprints from Jungkook, Seokjin and Taehyung settle down into helping lay out the outlines. It’s quick work to finish, and then Yoongi looks skeptically at the stack of lumber along one wall. It’s large. There’s going to be a lot of hammering in their near future. It’ll be satisfying, though - Yoongi always likes when he gets to build something in the process of these jobs.

They don’t make very much progress on that first day, but, possibly thanks to Hoseok’s insistence on safety goggles and gloves for everyone, no one suffers serious injury either. By the time they break for dinner, Yoongi realizes he hasn’t seem Namjoon all day.

Chapter Text

Three days later, their dummy gallery is half built and it’s time to go check the details in the real thing. Yoongi and Namjoon had briefly considered sending someone in with a hidden camera, maybe disguised as custodial staff, but Hoseok has vetoed it - they needed to get up close and personal with the door in question, and it would look too suspicious for a cleaner to be doing that, especially if other people were around. Plus, once Jungkook had decided he needed to have physical access to the building’s security cameras and wiring, they had one break-in planned anyway.

“The only problem,” Yoongi explains to Jungkook and Jimin, “is that Lee Songho has a motion sensing laser area installed in the gallery and it’s activated after hours.”

“Whoa,” Jungkook says. “A real laser maze? I’ve never seen one of those before, I thought they were just in movies.”

“That’s because they’re terrible,” Jimin says. “There are so many better ways he could have secured this room. They look fancy, but they’re not that hard to beat if you know what you’re doing and you’re careful. And flexible.” The look on his face leaves no doubt that he considers himself both careful and flexible, and proud of it.

“You try telling a rich asshole that he can’t have a laser maze and see how much progress you make,” Yoongi says.

The plan for the break-in is relatively simple, as these things go. Jungkook and Jimin will go up the exterior gallery wall, then through one of the skylights (Yoongi is briefly thankful that the asshole has bought into the thing about how paintings need to be seen in natural light only.) Jungkook will set his taps on the wires running along the ceiling, while Jimin lowers himself down to floor and makes his way to the door. They’ll both take cameras with them, and Yoongi and Hoseok will watch from the van - Hoseok to make sure he’s getting the information he needs, and Yoongi because he’s a little bit of a control freak.

Van safely parked in a shadowed spot near the service entrance, Yoongi ducks into the back where Jungkook has set up the monitors. Jungkook is busy testing the cameras for connection, while Hoseok checks - again - the rappelling harness on Jimin.

“Safety first,” Hoseok says. “Safety second, too.”

Jimin and Jungkook are both dressed in tight fitting black outfits. Along with the rappelling harness, Jungkook has a slim backpack containing various pieces of equipment to allow him to splice into the security systems. He’s changed his usual boots out for shoes better for climbing and sneaking, and for some reason he’s put his hair into two little buns. He’s adorable, but Yoongi has no intention of saying that out lout.

While Hoseok finishes his check on Jungkook, Jimin runs through a series of stretches. Yoongi suspects he doesn’t really need to - he had done a much longer warmup before they’d set out - but it’s probably a nervous habit. Or he just likes showing off. He really is very flexible.

“Okay, you’re good,” Hoseok finally says, and settles in next to Yoongi in front of the monitor.

“Ready?” Jungkook asks, and when Jimin nods, the two of them are out the door. They run to the fence and Yoongi has to close his eyes, as it turns out running with a camera on your head does not make for a steady picture. Jungkook kneels and offers his cupped hands to Jimin, giving him a boost to the top of the fence, then leaps up to grab Jimin’s outstretched hand. They drop lightly onto the other side, and then they’re running again.

In contrast, the progress up the outside of the gallery is much slower. Jimin goes first, testing every hand and foot hold before he lets it take his weight. Yoongi wants to encourage him, but he’s afraid of causing a dangerous distraction, so he leaves his mic off. Next to him, Hoseok is clinging to his hand and muttering encouragement and praise under his breath, even though Jimin can’t hear him.

Finally, Jimin makes it to the top. Hoseok unmutes his mic to say “good, good, Jimin, very nice,” as Jimin works to secure a rope to the roof. He drops it off the edge, and Jungkook clips on to it. With the aid and safety of the role, Jungkook is up in hardly any time at all.

They leave the rope there and carefully make their way over to the skylights. Yoongi had worried about this part, but it turns out the skylights have hinges and latches accessible from the outside, so there’s no need to do anything clever to avoid a broken window. There’s an alarm, of course, but Jungkook pulls a few items from his pack, fiddles with the alarm for a few minutes, then gives Jimin and the cameras a thumbs up. They carefully open the skylight, then pause to see if there’s any alarm from inside the building. When nothing happens, they attach their rappelling lines to the roof and slowly slide off the edge of the windowsill.

Jungkook halts his descent just below the ceiling, where he can reach the cables discreetly strung between the decorative panels. Jimin pauses along with him, until he gets a signal from Jungkook.

“Cameras on a loop of the last 45 minutes,” Jungkook explains over the radio. “So no one will see us if they look.”

Jimin descends all the way to the floor, then unhooks from the rope and leaves it hanging. He looks around, and Yoongi realizes he’s set himself down in an antechamber rather than the gallery itself. The greyscale of the cameras in the dark means the lasers don’t show on his screen, but Yoongi assumes they don’t start until the gallery.

“Get the walls first,” Yoongi whispers as a reminder, and Jimin makes a slow pan of the gallery walls from where he’s standing. The quality isn’t great, but Yoongi is confident it’ll be enough for Namjoon to identify the pieces on display.

“Good?” Jimin asks.

“We’ve got it,” Yoongi says. “Start whenever you’re ready.”

If anything, Jimin’s progress through the gallery is even more disorienting than the running was. He moves steadily forward, each motion smooth and deliberate, but the camera direction varies widely as he twists and contorts through the gaps. Yoongi turns away to watch Jungkook carefully splice wires together, as if he weren’t hanging twenty five feet in the air.

“Done,” Jimin says, and he sounds proud of himself. “Walls coming up again.”

He does the same slow pan, and Yoongi nods in approval. “Looks good. Hoseok-ah, you’re up.”

Hoseok talks Jimin through obtaining close up video of first the hinges on the door, then the lock. After that, Yoongi loses track of the number of minute details the two of them examine. At one point, Hoseok asks Jimin to lie on the floor to see what airflow is like under the bottom of the door. Yoongi turns back to Jungkook, only to find that he’s spinning in slow circles where he’s dangling from the ceiling.

“You good, Jungkook-ah?” Yoongi asks.

“All done, hyung,” Jungkook says. “Just waiting.”

“I feel sick just watching you,” Yoongi complains.

“It’s fun!” Jungkook protests. He’s experimenting with pulling in his arms and legs to spin faster or slower. Yoongi really is going to be sick if he keeps watching.

Luckily, Hoseok and Jimin soon finish communing with the architecture, and Jimin reverses back through the laser maze. He seems faster this time, which is confirmed when Hoseok clicks his mic back on just long enough to say, fondly, “stop showing off, Jimin-ssi.”

Jimin laughs - quietly, of course, really just an exhalation of breath barely loud enough to be heard over the earbuds - but slows down. He makes his way back to the antechamber and clips back into his harness.

“Very sexy,” Hoseok says, less worried about distractions now, and Jimin laughs a little louder this time.

Jimin and Jungkook retraces their steps out of the building and across the lawn. Once they’re back in the van, there’s a brief pause while Jungkook confirms that the broadcasting equipment he installed has enough range to reach the loading dock, and then Yoongi climbs back into the front to drive them all home.

When Yoongi gets back to his office, he loads up the tape from the night for review. He clips the segment of Jimin and Hoseok reviewing the door and drops it on the server for Hoseok in case he needs to review any details later. Next are the two long shots of the gallery walls. They’re blurry and greyscale, but Yoongi does his best to clean them up before sending then to Namjoon.

Sure enough, when he gets to the warehouse the next day, Namjoon’s carefully tacked up images of all the paintings in the public galleries along the walls in their model of the gallery. He and Jungkook are in a corner away from the construction dust with a handful of easels and an alarming number of blank canvases. They’re starting the work of creating real life sized copies of all the art, to better fill their rehearsal space. Yoongi hadn’t known that Jungkook could paint, but it looks like that’s what’s happening. He’s good at it too, Yoongi realizes, dabbing on streaks of color with very little hesitation. Namjoon’s more careful, his big hands gentle on the paintbrush. He’s never been much of a forger, but it’ll work for what they need it for.

Yoongi had initially planned on helping out with the painting, but it seems to be well under control. Instead, he joins the group by the construction site. Hoseok is reviewing his notes on the door, his scrawl almost too messy to read, while Seokjin and Jimin listen in.

Seokjin brightens visibly as Yoongi approaches. “Yoongi-yah! Come figure out what Hoseokie needs us to install here.”

Yoongi lets Hoseok run through the details again, then asks a few questions about which parts of the installation are critical for Hoseok’s plans and which they can skip. He nods after a moment, then starts sketching. After a few minutes, he has what he thinks is a credible plan for getting what they need built as easily as possible.

Some of the materials will need to be special ordered, but they have plenty of supplies on hand as well, so Yoongi writes out a construction plan for the next few days.

Yoongi is startled when Taehyung appears after they’ve been working a few hours. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” he asks.

Taehyung laughs. “It’s evening, you’re all just nocturnal.”

“Can’t do crime in the daytime,” Yoongi says. “How’s the job?”

“It’s so boring,” Taehyung says. Today Taehyung is wearing tan pleated trousers and a brown sweater, the very picture of an office drone. “They told me when I started it’s either incredibly boring or incredibly stressful but never in between.”

“That’s just adulthood,” Seokjin says. “I can’t recommend it. I’ve decided never to do it.”

“Are the people nice?” Jungkook asks, with the fascination of someone who’s never had an office job.

Taehyung shrugs. “Some of them are. Some of them are jerks. There’s this guy, Yoo Donghyun, he’s made it pretty clear that he’s out to be the boss’s favorite and he doesn’t care who he steps on to get there. And he made the receptionist cry when one of his packages got delayed.”

“Be careful of him,” Yoongi says, and Taehyung nods. The last thing they need is for some try-hard to get in their way. It’ll be messy if they have to get a second person out of the job at the last minute.

“They’ve started dropping hints that I’m going to start on the Lee Songho project soon. Caterers are one of the first thing they’ll want to get nailed down.”

“That’s my cue,” Seokjin says. “Time for me to go be charming and talk up our non-existent catering company.”

“Jungkook has business cards for you,” Jimin says. “He showed them to me this morning, make sure you grab some from him.”

“Did he finally pick a name?” Yoongi asks. He’d been the unwilling recipient of several debates by text on possible names.

“Kim Seokjin Catering,” Jimin says with a straight face.

“Yah! That’s my name!” Seokjin wails. (It isn’t, Yoongi knows, and all his crimes have been committed under aliases three levels deep, so there’s nothing actually wrong with using that name.)

“Too late to change it now. Jungkook thought it would be lucky,” Jimin says, trying for innocent. It would be more convincing it wasn’t for the smirk. “Don’t forget the cards.”

“I’m being bullied by children,” Seokjin complains to no one in particular, but Yoongi sees him grab the cards from Jungkook on the way out.

***

Two days later, Yoongi is watching Jimin and Hoseok argue about the large plates of steel they’ve just gotten delivered while he eats a tangerine. Taehyung drops into the chair next to him and promptly steals one of the tangerine wedges out of his hand.

“You’re up,” he says. “Kim Seokjin Catering has an appointment at the gallery tomorrow afternoon to tour the space and get vetted by their staff. But I wouldn’t worry about that part too much, they’re very excited to have you. Apparently you’re the hottest thing in Seoul right now.”

“Did you tell Seokjin?” Yoongi asks.

“Check your phone,” Taehyung says, before wandering off towards the painting set up.

What he finds is a series of increasingly deranged texts from Seokjin, who appears to be having some sort of full on menu planning breakdown.

did they ask for samples? Yoongi asks, confused.

it’s got to be a menu we know we can cook!!!

“It doesn’t actually have to taste good,” Yoongi points out when he lets himself in to the other apartment to check on Seokjin in person. “We’re not actually trying to run a catering business, it doesn’t matter if they leave us a crappy review.”

“They put my name on it! It’s a matter of honor now!” Seokjin yells. “Also, if it’s too terrible upfront, the party might get suspicious. And a restless crowd will be a lot harder to herd.”

Yoongi concedes that’s a reasonable point. He leaves his coat and bag on the couch, and goes to wash his hands. “What are we cooking?”

Some number of hours later, they have a dozen plates of appetizers scattered across every flat surface in the living room and a disaster area in the kitchen. At some point - Yoongi isn’t really sure when, the last few hours are all a blur - the rest of the group arrived. They’ve been snacking steadily as Seokjin and Yoongi turned out little squares of seared fish and carefully stacked vegetables, but now even Jungkook looks defeated by the sheer quantity of food.

Jimin has taken pity on them and started taking notes on each recipe as the chattering chorus provided feedback. Some of it isn’t that helpful - Jungkook, for instance, loved everything they fed him, even the stuff that Yoongi privately thought wasn’t that good. On the other hand, Taehyung turned out to have a real genius for plating ideas, even if Yoongi is tired already thinking about how they’re going to get a gala’s worth of vegetables carefully stacked.

Yoongi had winced inwardly the first time Namjoon reached for one of Seokjin’s dishes, but Namjoon had provided some helpful feedback on the contrasting textures. Namjoon may not be able to cook, but he loves fancy food. He eats every dish they hand him with his full concentration. Yoongi can practically see the gears turning as he contemplates what he’s tasting, and his comments are thoughtful every time.

“So that’s the menu, then,” Seokjin says, and Yoongi just stares at him bleary eyed over a stack of dirty bowls. Now that they’re done, he feels like he’s been awake for three days straight. He’s been less tired after actually being awake for three days straight.

“Go home,” Hoseok says kindly. “Go to bed. We’ll deal with this.”

“Don’t let Jungkookie do all the dishes by himself,” Seokjin mumbles, already disappearing down the hall.

“I’ll write up the notes and send them to you before your meeting tomorrow,” Jimin says, and Yoongi just nods.

“I’ll call a cab,” Namjoon says, almost as a question, and Yoongi nods again.

Yoongi falls asleep in the cab, of course, and he’s pretty sure he falls into some kind of burst of microsleep on the elevator too. He doesn’t remember making it to bed.

***

Yoongi wakes up the next morning still dressed in his clothes from the night before, although luckily without his shoes. His coat is hung up rather than thrown at the chair, which suggests that Namjoon walked him to bed himself. Yoongi ignores that thought in favor of taking a shower. He thinks there’s probably still sauce in his hair from when he and Seokjin started to lose it after the second hour of cooking.

Namjoon is already awake in the living room. He’s wearing a corduroy blazer over a brightly patterned sweater vest, so Yoongi is 80% sure he’s in costume. (It’s the vest that does it. The blazer on its own might just be Namjoon.)

“Seokjin did some research,” Namjoon says, when he sees Yoongi staring. “He says you need a salesperson to go with you. Good cop, bad cop.”

It makes sense, Yoongi thinks. “Tayhyung’s busy, it can’t be Seokjin, I’m being the chef, so other than you we’ve got Jimin, Hoseok, and Jungkook.”

“Jungkook wants to run tech while we go to get a better feel for the layout and the exits,” Namjoon says. “He’s got hidden cameras and who knows what else for us.”

Yoongi thinks about their options. “Fuck, Namjoon, how did we end up working with an entire group of criminals who giggle when they have to tell a lie?”

Namjoon laughs, which isn’t helping his case, but Yoongi is confident he’ll be fine when it comes time to actually perform. He’s run plenty of simple cons with Namjoon and he’s never broken character in the middle.

As promised, when they see Jungkook, he’s got a camera for Namjoon’s lapel and small trackers for their pockets.

“Get them to take you out through the loading dock,” Jungkook says from his desk as Namjoon and Yoongi collect their trackers. “Say you need to understand the space constraints or something. That way I can use these to make a map of the space and the paths we’ll need to take, so we can work on the timing.”

They’re met at the front entrance of the building by Taehyung and a harried young woman who introduces herself as Cho Hyejin. Taehyung, for some inscrutable reason, introduces himself as Jay, no family name. Yoongi briefly wonders how he made the single name thing work for him in the corporate world.

“It’s so nice to meet you,” Hyejin says, once they’ve all settled into a meeting room and been offered coffee. “I’ve heard such good things about Kim Seokjin Catering, you’re really the hottest thing in the scene right now.”

“We’re very grateful you were able to find space for us in your schedule,” Taehyung says.

“We are very busy,” Namjoon admits. “But it was such an honor to cook for Lee Songho, we couldn’t refuse the opportunity.”

“We’d like to tell you a little bit about the concept for our event,” Taehyung says.

“Of course. We want to make sure that the food really reflects the feel of what you’re going for,” Namjoon says earnestly.

It turns out Taehyung has an actual presentation to go through, complete with concept photos and mood music. Yoongi flips open his notebook and takes notes furiously, although in reality he’s just copying down the menu that he and Seokjin agreed to earlier.

“Wow,” Namjoon says, “you’ve really given us a lot to work with here. I think we’d like to echo the fluidity with a series of dishes based around the sea.”

“Oh that’s perfect,” Taehyung says.

“Stuffed abalone, seared salmon, and a bite sized serving of seafood soup,” Yoongi says.

“And then for contrast, another series in opposition.”

Yoongi pretends to think. “I’d like to do something with vegetables. Very earthy. Maybe a few grilled options and then we could also do beef for earthiness.”

“We’d also recommend some light dishes, to really allow your guests to experience the full range of of the elements. Our deconstructed salads are very popular.”

Hyejin frowns. “We wouldn’t want something that everyone else has already seen somewhere else.”

“We would of course make sure they were unique,” Yoongi says, mock offended.

“And yet still familiar,” says Namjoon. “The tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar is really what creates excitement for the guest.”

It continues on in this vein until they’ve agreed on a menu. Hyejin rejects two of Yoongi’s proposed dishes, but that still leaves them with a full set of things he knows they can deliver. There’s some very subtle haggling over price, and then Namjoon’s promising to email over a contract for review as soon as he gets back to his office.

As they’re standing up to leave, Yoongi says abruptly, “I need to see the space.”

“The kitchen?” Hyejin asks.

“And the event space,” Yoongi says.

“Our food can be quite demanding, in terms of preparation, especially with the kind of sophisticated menu you’ve selected,” Namjoon says. “It’s very important for us to see the space up front to make sure we can truly live up to our aspirations.”

“That makes total sense. A good workspace is so important for any art,” Taehyung says earnestly. “Hyejin-ssi, could you give us a brief tour?”

She looks a little put out by this, but gives in. “Of course. We can start in the kitchen and then the gallery, if it’s free.”

The kitchen is a giant gleaming thing, full of commercial equipment and now mostly empty, as a few employees finish up from what must have been the everyday work for the building’s cafe.

“We have a full kitchen, as you can see,” Hyejin says. “If you have any particular equipment requirements, I’d be happy to connect you to our facilities manager to discuss. We also can work with your rental company if you’d prefer to provide your own.”

“Hmm.” Yoongi says thoughtfully, as he scans the kitchen. “Yes, very complete.”

When Hyejin leads them out of the kitchen, Yoongi very ostentatiously pulls out his phone and starts the stopwatch. He lets his face get progressively stormier as they progress down a hall, up a service elevator, through a set of fire doors, and down another hall to just outside the gallery. He stops the stopwatch and holds it up for everyone to see.

“Too long,” he says curtly.

“We’re worried about the food,” Namjoon explains. “It all has to be served at exactly the right temperature. If we try and hold it warm while we transport, we run the risk of overcooking, especially if there’s a wait for the elevator. If we don’t, there’s a risk it might come to the guests cold.”

“Oh no,” Taehyung says, sounding appropriately dismayed.

“It can’t be done,” Yoongi says. “I won’t put my art at risk like that.”

“Maybe with a less ambitious menu,” Namjoon suggests. “We could reworked the sea series. Fish is so delicate.”

“We can’t!” Taehyung says. “The event really deserves your best work, to water it down would be a mistake.”

“Then we need to be closer,” Yoongi says definitively. “We can do without the fancy kitchen equipment, but we need to be close. A few seconds away would be best.”

“We don’t even need running water,” Namjoon explains. “Our equipment can be very portable. A storeroom would be enough, as long as we can put in some folding tables and still have room for several people to work.”

Hyejin thinks for a moment, then leads them across the gallery and through an unmarked door about halfway down the long wall. “We had been planning to use this for staging the rentals we’ll be loading in for the party, tables and so on, but I suppose we could make it work if we moved all that out to the hallway.”

“This would be perfect,” Namjoon says earnestly. “We’d be so close, we’d have such fine control of the food. It would really guarantee we’d be able to deliver like you expect.”

“It would work,” Yoongi says, pretending to be grudging about it. “Tables here and here, proofers lined up there. Are we near the elevator to the loading dock? That’s less critical for us, but we still need to walk out that way to check on clearances.”

“We do equipment through here all the time when we need to set up a stage in the gallery, there shouldn’t be any problem,” Hyejin says, but she opens a door at the other end of the room into a distinctly utilitarian hallway. As promised, the freight elevator is just a little ways down the hall, and Yoongi insists on riding it down to the loading dock.

“Thank you so much for the extended tour,” Namjoon says to Hyejin, who’s starting to wear the harried look of a woman who knows she’s going to be late to her next meeting. “You don’t need to walk us back out the front door, we can see the street from here. And I’ll send over the paperwork as soon as we get back to the office.”

Yoongi can tell she finds it a little unprofessional to leave her caterers in what is essentially an alley, but either Namjoon’s sincerity or her own lateness convince her, and after an exchange of farewells she and Taehyung disappear back into the building.

Once they’re alone in the alley, Yoongi looks at Namjoon, running through the checklist of what they needed to accomplish on this trip. “Did we need to do something back here? Plant cameras or something?”

Namjoon gives Yoongi a weird look and then steps closer. One of his big hands comes up towards Yoongi’s face and for a brief out of time moment Yoongi wonders if he’s got something on his face, and then Namjoon is bending down to kiss him.

Namjoon’s never been particularly subtle, but this is the least subtle he’s ever kissed Yoongi. It’s been years since they last did this, but it still feels familiar. He lets his arms wrap around Namjoon’s waist, and he’s maybe more solid than he used to be but somehow it still feels the same.

“You’re so hot when you’re mean,” Namjoon mumbles between kissing Yoongi’s jawline. “We’re going to do so much crime. It’s going to be so good.”

“You’ve got a boner for art,” Yoongi says, which is objectively a deeply unsexy thing to say but Namjoon shivers under his hands anyway. He can’t blame him, really. It’s a sense memory from all the times they’ve done this before after really great heists (or once, memorably, right in the middle of one).

It’s easy to remember kissing Namjoon, easy to let his body remember what comes next. He pushes his hips again Namjoon and delights in the way that makes Namjoon’s hands tense on his shoulder. Namjoon lets out a little breathy gasp when Yoongi bites gently at the tendons in his neck. It’s good. It’s always good with Namjoon, but this is really good.

Namjoon lets his hands wander gradually downward, and Yoongi has a shock to realize they’ve reached his belt. He’s torn by his desire to continue and his growing recognition that he’s been pushed up against the wall in an alley. He gently pushes Namjoon away and leans in for one last kiss to soothe the sting. “Not here,” he says. “We’ve got a perfectly good apartment.”

“Fewer dumpsters,” Namjoon agrees with a shaky grin, taking a step back and taking a deep breath.

The drive back is mostly in silence. The moment between them feels fragile, and neither of them want to break it. Namjoon’s hand keeps making it way up Yoongi’s thigh and Yoongi has to keep pushing it back down.

“I’m driving, Joon-ah,” he complains. “Don’t distract me, you’re going to get us both killed.”

Yoongi had intended for them to make it all the way back to their apartment, but as soon as he pulls into his parking space in the garage under their building, Namjoon grabs him again.

“Can’t keep your hands off me,” Yoongi says smugly, and Namjoon laughs.

“It’s true, hyung,” Namjoon says, open and earnest. This time, when he slides his hand up Yoongi’s leg, Yoongi doesn’t stop him.

Just as Yoongi is wondering if he can convince Namjoon to go upstairs, or if the backseat is going to be as far as they can manage, the car speakers crackle to life, and they leap apart, startled. Namjoon squeaks a little.

“Hyung? Is everything okay? I thought you were going to come back here after your meeting so we could review the layout.”

“Did you know he could do that?” Yoongi asks.

“Sorry!” Jungkook says. “I didn’t mean to startle anyone.”

“We’ll be over in a bit,” Namjoon says.

“Okay! Hanging up now! Sorry again!”

Namjoon sighs. “I guess we gotta go over there.”

“Rain check?” Yoongi offers, and Namjoon nods. Yoongi takes a deep breath and resolves to only think unsexy thoughts. He knows this is a bad idea, but he can’t help it. It’s so easy to wish that he and Namjoom could be like they were before.

***

Yoongi’s not sure how Jungkook did it, but he’s transformed their tour of the building into a three dimensional line showing the path they took. Using the video, he’s been able to label various locations - the gallery, the storeroom they’re going to use as a kitchen, the freight elevator. He walks them through it on the monitors he’s installed in one corner of the warehouse.

“And this here is the loading dock, and, uh, that’s the end of the tour, I guess.”

Yoongi winces. Jungkook definitely saw what happened on the loading dock, then. That could make things awkward.

“Do you know how much time it’ll take us to get out?” Namjoon asks, leaning in over Jungkook’s shoulder. Yoongi watches what that motion does to the line of muscles running up his spine.

“You guys weren’t that fast, because you were being professional, but if we hurry - well, there’s nothing we can do about the elevator, but it’s not too slow, especially if we make sure it’s waiting for us - if we hurry, we should be left with three solid minutes in the gallery before we have to get clear. More if the police response time is slow.”

“That’s enough,” Yoongi says. “Probably,”

“We can be fast,” Namjoon says confidently. “It’ll be enough time.”

“We’ll rehearse,” Hoseok says, having joined the group along with Seokjin at some point during Jungkook’s description. “We’ll rehearse lots.”

Seokjin groans. “He’s going to kill us all before we even get this going.”

“Better be fast enough,” Hoseok threatens, “or they’ll end up expecting you to serve a dessert course.”

“I take it back,” Seokjin says. “I’ll rehearse as much as we have to as long as we don’t end up having to serve - what was the bullshit dessert we promised?”

“Jerusalem artichoke ice cream and chestnut-filled cakes,” Yoongi says.

“Right, I am absolutely not making ice cream for this project. No matter how much I love you, Yoongichi, I don’t even know how to make ice cream.”

“Don’t call me that,” Yoongi says, out of habit. He’s not looking at Seokjin, so he sees the way Namjoon’s face falls and he doesn’t know why.

***

Yoongi expects that when he and Namjoon get back to their apartment, they’ll pick up where they left off, but instead Namjoon is tense and jittery all the while back. When Yoongi parks, he doesn’t make any move to get out of the car or to lean across to Yoongi.

“What’s going on, Joon-ah?” Yoongi finally asks.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” Namjoon blurts out. “It was just - I got excited and I got carried away, but I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Yoongi says. He’s confused, but he’s been confused about Namjoon ever since Namjoon came back.

“We work so well together,” Namjoon says. “Even when you’re mad at me - and you’re right to be mad at me - we work well together. I don’t want to screw that up. This con is important to me, I don’t want to make things messy. And I made things messy, so I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Yoongi says again. “It’s not messy.”

Namjoon is probably right, Yoongi thinks, as much as his traitorous dick wishes it were otherwise. The two of them have a lot of history, and it’s not all good history. Throwing in sleeping together on top of that is a bad idea when they’re so close to a big job. It might have worked for them in the past, but things were less complicated them. They had fewer of these landmines between them that Yoongi keeps stepping in. It’ll be easier if they keep it professional for now, no matter what they might have been before.

***

Once construction is done, there’s really nothing left for them to do in their fake gallery but rehearse until they’ve got it down. Yoongi collects his first batch of catering equipment from the rental company, a set of folding tables and the big metal cabinets they’ll use to transport the food in and the art out.

There’s no subtlety to this part of the plan, no quick thinking or special skills needed - all they need to do is be fast enough and smooth enough to get everything out in their window of time. Paintings, from point A to point B, in the three minute timeframe that Yoongi and Namjoon have calculated they have before the police show up and they have to clear the room. The paintings aren’t heavy, but they’re bulky and awkward to carry, and it turns out to take planning to make sure they’re covering ground as efficiently as possible and precision to make sure they’re not all trying to stash their stolen art in proofing cabinets at the same time and causing a backup. Hence the endless rehearsal.

“I’m going to die,” Yoongi complains, collapsing on the floor after the fourth run through in a row. “This heist will be the last job I ever work because I’m going to collapse and die in the middle of it.”

“Just think of how much each additional painting we get is going to be worth,” Hoseok says, unsympathetically. He rubs out Yoongi’s sore forearms, though, so Yoongi will take that over sympathy.

“I already have more money than I know how to spend, Seokseok.”

“Then think how pissed off Lee Songho is going to be. Or think how happy Namjoon is going to be.”

Yoongi doesn’t really want to think about making Namjoon happy. Instead he thinks about how delighted the museum staff are going to be when their lost artwork mysteriously turns up after four years.

Since Hoseok is hard but not actually mean, he lets them all take a break for snacks and water, but after that they’re back at it. Yoongi thinks maybe they’re starting to make progress, and then near the end of the seventh run Jungkook and Namjoon collide and both drop everything they’re carrying. Hoseok yells encouraging words, and the two of them scramble to collect everything they’ve dropped, but when the timer in Seokjin’s hand goes off, they’re both still in the room with art scattered around them.

“Time’s up!” Seokjin yells. “You’re both arrested, and you’re getting everyone else arrested too.”

Jungkook promptly bursts into tears. He’s clearly embarrassed by his error and the fact that he’s now losing it surrounded by the entire team (minus Taehyung, who’s at work), but that doesn’t stop Hoseok from crowding in around him to pet his hair and tell him that he’s doing well, while Namjoon hovers awkwardly with the same sentiment.

Jimin, on the other hand, takes a more direct approach towards solving the problem, picking himself up off the floor and advancing on Seokjin. Yoongi is briefly worried he’s going to have to intervene to prevent a murder, but Jimin just grabs Seokjin, leans down to plant his shoulder at Seokjin’s hip, and stands up, somehow managing to lift Seokjin up over his shoulder. Seokjin, perhaps accepting that he joked too far, struggles a little but not seriously, letting Jimin carry him away from where they’re working.

“No more spectators,” Jimin says as he puts Seokjin down outside the door. “Go do something useful.”

Jimin heads back toward Jungkook, but Jungkook is already wiping his face and standing up. “I’m ready to go again,” Jungkook says. Jimin hugs him anyway, the kind of full body hug that nearly lifts Jungkook off his feet.

They’re not perfect by the time Hoseok lets them quit, but it’s getting closer. Yoongi is starting to believe they’ll actually be able to pull it all off.

Seokjin has apparently decided to apologize with a home cooked dinner rather than another evening of take out, and he invites everyone - really meaning Namjoon and Yoongi, since everyone else is staying there already - to come over and eat. Taehyung is done with work by then, so he meets them there. Either Jimin told Taehyung what happened or Taehyung figured it out through the creepy telepathy that Yoongi is starting to think he shares with Jimin, because he sticks close to Jungkook all night.

“Let’s go out tomorrow night,” Taehyung tells Jungkook, from the corner where they’re curled together on the couch after dinner. “Jimin knows all the best places to go.”

Jimin makes eye contact and smirks at that, which Yoongi has absolutely zero desire to interpret.

“Hyungs, you should come,” Jungkook says, looking up at the group scattered around the rest of the living room and kitchen.

“Yoongi and I have some recon to do tomorrow night,” Seokjin says, which is news to Yoongi, but he’s not really into clubbing anyway.

“I have to meet a guy about some explosive,” Hoseok says, reappearing from taking a shower and now dressed only in a loose robe over a pair of shorts.

“I’ll pass, not really my thing,” Namjoon says. “But you guys have fun.”

“You’ll miss out,” Jimin shrugs.

***

“So we’re doing recon?” Yoongi asks Seokjin the next afternoon.

“We’re going to a jazz club,” Seokjin says.

“I don’t like jazz,” Yoongi says obstinately, even though he knows Seokjin knows he does.

“Yes, Yoongi-yah, that’s why this is work and not fun.”

Yoongi makes a face. “Are you sure? Because this kind of sounds like you’re trying to make me have fun.”

“I, Kim Seokjin, solemnly swear that you will not have any fun tonight. Better?”

“So why are we doing this, if it’s not fun?”

“Recon!” Seokjin shrieks. “I am a professional, and part of being a professional means that I have to understand all the players in the game. Tonight, according to our delightful Jungkookie, Lee Jihoon, oldest son of our target, is going out, and I want to follow him.” He pauses. “Also, I like jazz.”

Yoongi groans. “Hyung, can’t you go out without me?”

“Dress nice,” Seokjin says. “We’re leaving at nine.”

When Yoongi arrives at nine, Seokjin is dressed in a good suit, but he shows no sign of getting up off the couch.

“Are we still going?” Yoongi asks. “Did you decide we could skip the night out?”

“Shh,” Seokjin says. “We’re spying on the children.”

“It’s not very subtle if you’re just sitting in the couch in the living room,” Yoongi says, but goes to sit next to him.

What that means rapidly becomes apparent as first Taehyung and then Jungkook emerge from their rooms to also wait in the living room. They’ve also dressed to go out, but it’s clear that they’re going out to a very different place than Yoongi and Seokjin. Yoongi would have sworn Jungkook was a baby who had never even considered owning a pair of leather pants, but he would have been very wrong. Taehyung’s hands are covered in rings with big colored stones, and Yoongi wonders for a moment if they’re real, and if so just what they must be worth. A very large number, his mental calculations tell him.

Jimin is the last to show, and he’s dressed much the same - tight pants, lots of silver jewelry, a smudge of eyeliner. Yoongi’s pretty sure he sees a trace of glitter too.

“Have fun listening to jazz,” Jimin says, and Yoongi’s still trying to work out if that was an insult as the three of them leave.

When they arrive at the jazz bar, Yoongi does have to admit it’s probably more pleasant than the club would have been - he didn’t really want to go out, but they’ve got a nice table overlooking the floor, the music isn’t overwhelmingly loud, and the drinks are fancy. Their target isn’t there yet, according to Seokjin’s expert scan of the room, so while they settle in to wait, Seokjin tells Yoongi increasingly lurid pieces of gossip about the various people dancing.

“And him, in the gold jacket - he’s conducting a scandalous affair with his poodle’s groomer.”

Yoongi laughs. “Now you’re just making things up.”

“Would I lie to you?”

“For a joke? Absolutely,” Yoongi says, and Seokjin laughs helplessly.

It continues on like that for a while. Seokjin goes and gets them a second round of cocktails, coming back with two different drinks in startling colors. Yoongi complains about his, but privately he starts to think that if Lee Jihoon changed his plans at the last minute and this really is just a nice night out, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. There’s never been any romantic chemistry between him and Seokjin, but hanging out with him is just easy. They don’t fight about anything ever. It’s nice, Yoongi thinks. He might be a little drunk.

Seokjin is still scanning the crowd entering, somewhere behind Yoongi. Yoongi watches Seokjin - it would be too suspicious to have them both constantly scanning the crowd - so he sees the moment Seokjin recognizes someone.

“You see someone?” he asks.

“Turn over your left shoulder, you’ll see him crossing over to the bar. Black on black suit.”

Yoongi turns as directed, and sees Lee Jihoon. He’s never seen him in person, only in photos as part of prep for this job, so he takes a moment to watch the man move and learn his walk and posture, in case he needs to recognize him again. It looks like he’s meeting someone at a table below where Yoongi is sitting, a man in a navy suit, but the other man’s back is to Yoongi and he can’t tell if he should recognize him. It’s subtle, as he watches, but he wonders if they’re a couple - nothing obvious in a place like this, but there’s something about the body language that makes him wonder.

“Do you know who he’s meeting?” he asks, turning back to Seokjin and his cocktail.

“I’ll tell you when to turn around again,” Seokjin says.

There’s a brief break while Seokjin watches, and then he nods at Yoongi. Yoongi turns and sees the man in the navy suit standing, and he recognizes that face. He mentally sorts through pictures in his head and then -

“Oh shit,” he breathes out. He does recognize that guy. That’s the guy that Namjoon had been dating just before, the guy who led the robbery gone wrong.

“Yeah,” Seokjin says sympathetically. “I thought you didn’t know.”

“Are they together?” Yoongi says.

Seokjin shrugs. “They’re not obvious about it, but yeah, I think so.”

“Does Namjoon know?”

“That’s the important question, isn’t it.”

“I think I have to go talk to Namjoon,” Yoongi says. “Thanks for the cocktails, let’s never do this again.”

***

“Did you know?” Yoongi demands as he walks through the door of their apartment, before he’s even got his shoes off. Namjoon must have been reading on the couch - Yoongi is meanly satisfied with the way he startles up.

“Hyung, aren’t you back early? Weren’t you doing recon with Seokjin?”

“Did you know about Minsoo?”

Namjoon immediately looks guilty, which is as good as an answer. “Not until after I found the art. When I started doing research on Lee Songho’s family, it came up then.”

“You didn’t think to mention it?”

“What, you want a list of everyone that his kids are casually dating? It’s not a short list.”

“When one of them knows exactly who you are? Yeah, you better believe I want that list.” Yoongi can’t believe Namjoon didn’t think this was important. “What if he’s at the party? What if he sees you? How long do you think our cover will last once they know it’s an entire kitchen of con artists?”

“I’ll be in the kitchen the whole time, he won’t see me. Besides, you said it yourself: no one recognizes you when you’re dressed like staff.”

“Is this revenge?” Yoongi asks. “Is this whole thing just an excuse to get back at Minsoo?”

“No!” Namjoon yells. “I swear, I tracked the art first. I’m not gonna lie, it’s going to be nice watching Minsoo get conned, but that’s not what this is about. I wouldn’t drag you and Hoseok and everyone else into this just for that.”

“Do you still want him?”

“I fucked up by trusting him, but he fucked up running a shitty con and I ended up in prison for four years. No, I don’t still want him. I want to punch him.”

“Why didn’t you write to me? From prison, why didn’t you write?” Yoongi suddenly has to know the answer to this. It’s been bothering him for years now.

Namjoon sighs and puts his book on the side table. “You didn’t want me to.”

“What does that mean?”

“Don’t try to pretend you did. You were still angry with me, I could tell from your letters.”

“They were just pictures,” Yoongi says.

“Angry pictures.”

“I was angry,” Yoongi admits. He doesn’t know why it’s so hard to say. He’s thought about it every day for years. He’s even said it to Namjoon already.

“You had every right. I was angry too - not at you.”

“Why’d you kiss me?”

Namjoon rolls his eyes. “Are we just doing interrogation tonight? When do I get to ask some?”

“Answer the question.”

“I wanted to kiss you. Like I said, it’s hot when you’re planning a crime. I missed watching you do it. I missed you.”

“Why’d you stop?” Yoongi hopes that doesn’t sound too desperate. He doesn’t think he manages it.

“It was shitty, I said that too. It would be messy.” Namjoon looks guilty, and Yoongi has no idea why.

“We’ve hooked up on jobs before.”

“Not when you’re seeing someone else.”

“Someone else?”

“You know. Whatever you and Seokjin have going on. I didn’t want to be a homewrecker.”

“You think I’m sleeping with Seokjin?” Yoongi is stunned. He had no idea Namjoon thought that. He has no idea what made Namjoon think that.

“Aren’t you?”

“No!”

“Oh.” Namjoon also sounds like he needs to process.

“Wait a second, is this why you were so shitty to Seokjin?” Yoongi asks, putting the pieces together. “Because you thought we were sleeping together and rather than talking to me about it, or dealing with your feelings on your own, you just decided to throw a fucking tantrum in the middle of the job?”

Namjoon looks like he’s going to respond, but Yoongi cuts him off.

“You’re a fucking child, Namjoon,” Yoongi says.

“You’re drunk and it’s making you a dick. We can talk about this tomorrow. Or never,” Namjoon says. He doesn’t wait for a response to this one. He storms out of the living room to his bedroom and slams the door behind him.

He maybe deserved that, Yoongi thinks, as he sits in the living room and stares at the bonsai. He had thought it might be starting a bloom, but now he doesn’t think so.

***

Yoongi takes the opportunity to lock himself in his office. It’s not as dramatic, storming off when you’re the only one left in the room, but it feels good anyway. Of course, now that he’s in his office, Yoongi is stuck pretending to work. He should have gone for his bedroom, but now he’s trapped here, since he doesn’t want to face Namjoon again.

He and Seokjin have been planning out the work needed for their catering debut. There’s a spreadsheet of all their recipes, scaled up, and broken down by ingredient. Sometime in the next week Yoongi needs to start placing calls with wholesalers to get food in these kinds of quantities, but it’s too late in the evening to do that now. He sorts the list a little, vegetables, meats, grains, spices, but he knows it’s just busy work.

When he’s busy resorting the vegetable list for the third time, his phone buzzes.

Seokjin
you still up

Yoongi
I don’t want to talk about my feelings

The phone rings immediately and Yoongi answers it. It’s Seokjin, of course.

“Who said anything about your feelings?” Seokjin demands. “I need to tell you about the horrifying thing that just happened to me.”

“Actual horrifying, or horrifying like the time you dyed all your socks pink?”

“Actual horrifying! I may be traumatized!”

“Okay, hyung, tell me about it.” The volume and pitch coming from Seokjin tells Yoongi this is is no way an actual trauma, but if Seokjin wants to ramble at him, he’ll let him.

“So, I was gaming in the living room, because I had told myself I wasn’t going to bed until I beat this level -“

“That’s how you end up staying up until dawn.”

“It was a solemn oath, Yoongi-yah, very serious business. Anyway, since I was committed to being there as long as it took, I was still awake when the babies came back from their clubbing adventure.”

“Were they doing surveillance too?”

“No, they were just clubbing. Remember when they left, Jimin had glitter on?”

“I guess,”

“But just Jimin! And when they came back, all three of them were covered in the stuff!” Yoongi can practically see the dramatic flourish coming from Seokjin.

“Hyung, that stuff is awful, it gets everywhere. They shared a cab, right? That alone would do it.”

“Not like this. And they were not exactly subtle about the way they came in, either,” Seokjin says darkly. The vagueness adds to the drama, Yoongi thinks. “What I am saying is, the children are getting up to something.”

Yoongi groans. “Please don’t make me think about the children having sex.”

“I had to see it! You need to share my pain.”

“I really was doing fine without it.”

There’s a long pause. Seokjin finally says, “you know we could call this con off at any time, right? We don’t have to do it.”

“It’s fine,” Yoongi says. “The con is fine.”

“I don’t want to be part of a con where the two leads blow it up halfway through. I’d be depriving the world of my face if I went to prison.”

Yoongi waves a hand dismissively, even if Seokjin can’t see him. “Namjoon and I won’t blow it up. We’re fine. We’re just fighting right now.”

“Yoongi...”

“It’s fine. It really is. Go finish your game or you won’t get any sleep at all.”

After he hangs up, Yoongi looks at his spreadsheet again, but he can’t even pretend to work anymore. Instead, he gives up and opens the door. The apartment is silent, but he can see a light from under Namjoon’s bedroom door. He thinks about knocking, but goes to bed instead.

***

Yoongi goes to work the next day firmly determined to prove that he was right to Seokjin. He and Namjoon can pull this off together, no matter how they currently feel about each other. They will be professional. No one else needs to know about what’s going on between them.

Namjoon appears to have taken the same approach. He gives Yoongi a brief nod the first time they make eye contact, then awkwardly starts a conversation with Jungkook on the other side of the room. Luckily, running and re-running their heist doesn’t really require them to interact beyond a few handoffs.

Yoongi thinks he’s doing a good job pretending things are fine right up until the first mid afternoon break, when Hoseok sits down next to him.

“So, why are you and Namjoon fighting?” Hoseok asks. This is the problem with working with people you’ve known for years, he supposes - it’s much harder to get away with pretending. On the other side of the room, Yoongi can see that Namjoon is getting the same treatment from Jimin and Jungkook.

“We’re not fighting,” Yoongi says.

“Is it about how he left you behind and then went to prison?” Hoseok asks. “Becuase you guys really need to air out your feelings on that one.”

“What the fuck,” Yoongi says. “You, suggesting we talk about feelings? You’ve never talked about your feelings in your life.”

“But I’m not you!” Hoseok says cheerfully. “You guys are into all that feeling shit. It’s part of your teamwork. It’s what makes you great.”

“It’s really not.”

“Kiss and make up!” Hoseok says, making a series of increasingly goofy faces that Yoongi supposes are supposed to suggest kissing. “Things go better for you when you’re kissing.”

“What the fuck,” Yoongi says again. Hoseok doesn’t answer, just gives him a grin and fingerhearts and runs off to tackle-hug Jungkook.

They’re wrapping up the second set of practice runs - better, still not quite good enough - when Taehyung enters the warehouse. Must be evening, Yoongi thinks, and then realizes no, it’s earlier than that. Taehyung is almost never done with work this early in the day.

He’s also clearly been crying, Yoongi sees as Taehyung approaches the set. Jimin and then Hoseok abandon rehearsal in the middle of a run to crowd around him. They pull Taehyung over to a couch and wrap themselves around him.

“They took me off the party,” Taehyung says.

Fuck, Yoongi thinks. The plan won’t work if they don’t have a man on the inside to direct things for them. This whole thing could have been a waste.

“Tell us what happened,” Hoseok says gently.

“I screwed up the order for the bar,” Taehyung says. “Or - maybe, I don’t know. I don’t think I did. Lee Songho was yelling at me but I thought I wrote it down right. But the manager of the bar crew, she knows Hyejin I guess, and they talked, and Hyejin said I got it wrong. It wasn’t what they usually ordered.”

“And she wanted you off the gala?”

“No, she just wanted it fixed - it wasn’t too late, it would have been fine. But Lee Songho found out and he yelled at my manager.” Taehyung pauses for a long breath. “See, no one wants to actually work this gala and deal with him. But it’s a great thing to have worked on, because everyone hears about the party afterwards. So this other guy in my department, Yoo Donghyun, he said he could finish it instead of me.”

“He stole your project?” Jimin asks, outraged. “You did all the work and he’s going to take the credit?”

“I don’t care about the credit,” Taehyung points out. “I’m not actually an event planner.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Jimin says, deeply offended on Taehyung’s behalf.

“But if I’m off the project, I can’t traffic direct to get guests out the right door so everyone else has room to work,” Taehyung says. “The whole thing might fall apart.”

“We could get you in as a guest maybe,” Yoongi says. “You could be Seokjin’s plus one.”

Taehyung shakes his head. “In a panicking crowd, it needs to be someone with authority. A guest won’t be able to.”

Yoongi frowns. “Is it too late to get someone else in? Maybe Jungkook could.”

“Too late,” Taehyung confirms. “They wouldn’t give a project this close to being live to someone brand new.”

“Baby,” Jimin says, “we are just going to have to steal your job back from that jerk.”

“How?” Taehyung asks, and Namjoon steps up, right on cue.

“What are they afraid of, at the event planning firm? What’s most important to them?”

“Image,” Taehyung says immediately. “They deal with the rich and famous, they have to be seen as professional, competent, discreet.”

“So something that makes this Donghyun in particular look indiscreet could get him fired. Hyung?”

“What do you know about him?” Yoongi asks. “Bad habits? Seeing anyone unsuitable?”

Taehyung shakes his head. “They’re all workaholics, I don’t hear about any of them dating. Um, he drinks too much, but that’s not too unusual there. Not enough to get fired over.”

“We’ll have to make a scandal, then,” Yoongi says. “Uh. Probably a sex scandal is most dramatic.”

“I can be very scandalous,” Jimin offers.

“We’re not going to ask you to actually sleep with him,” Yoongi says. At least, he hopes it doesn’t come to that.

“I would, for Taehyung.”

“That’s so sweet.” Taehyung says, and he sounds like he genuinely means it. “But I don’t think he likes men.”

“Could you get his phone?” Yoongi asks. “And maybe his keys too.”

“Easy,” Taehyung says.

“Okay,” Yoongi says. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

***

Yoongi idles his car outside the door the Taehyung’s office building. He’s parked illegally, but Taehyung should be out for his lunch break here any minute.

“Here he is,” Jimin says. He suddenly sounds murderous, and Yoongi assumes it’s for the guy walking next to Taehyung. Taehyung stumbles slightly over the sidewalk, brushing against the other man for just a moment, and then he pulls himself up and laughs it off. The lift is so fast that Yoongi, watching for it, barely sees it. Taehyung waves to the other man, all smiles and friendship, then slides into the backseat where Jungkook is waiting. Once he’s in, Yoongi taps his own phone to pull up the GPS and starts driving.

“Got it,” Taehyung says. “Here’s the phone. He’s meeting a friend for lunch so we just have to be back before he is, I’ll put it back and he’ll think he just forgot it on his desk.”

Jungkook makes a grabby hand for the phone and Taehyung hands it over. Jungkook plugs the phone into his laptop and starts typing.

“No problem,” he says. “I’ll be in by the time we get there.”

Getting into the apartment is almost as easy as getting the phone. Jungkook takes one look at the keypad lock, rummages through a series of identical-looking doodads in his bag, selects one, and fiddles with the keypad for a moment before the door clicks open.

Inside, Jungkook hands the phone back to Taehyung while Jimin opens doors at random.

“It’s going to forget it’s got a passcode for about 45 minutes. You won’t be able to get into anything like banking that requires another password, but camera and text is fine.”

“Found it!” Jimin calls from down the hall, and the rest of them troop after him. It is indeed the bedroom. The bed is unmade and there’s a slightly suspicious smell coming from the laundry hamper in the corner.

“Thank you for your sacrifice,” Taehyung says earnestly to Jimin, who’s making a face at the entire bedroom situation. He’s right to judge, Yoongi thinks. The bed frame is cheap, there’s no art on the walls, and the bedside table is covered in clutter. It’s going to be tricky to get any kind of mood lighting with the lack of lamps.

Jimin takes off his coat and hands it to Jungkook, kicks off his boots, then lays himself out on the bed. Taehyung directs him through a series of poses, taking several pictures at each. It’s remarkable, Yoongi thinks, just how naked Jimin can manage to look despite wearing jeans and a tshirt. (Presumably the jeans will not be in the crop. He’s just glad they didn’t decide they needed more verisimilitude there.)

After a few minutes, Jimin gets up and he and Taehyung crowd around the phone to review what they’ve got.

“Hmm,” Jimin says, then reaches up and ruffles his own hair. Because apparently his every day look didn’t project enough sex hair vibes. He pulls out his own phone to use a mirror and makes a few more minute adjustments.

“Lip gloss?” Taehyung suggests, pulling a tube from his bag and handing it to Jimin.

Yoongi cannot believe this fake sex photo shoot has ended up with a hair and makeup department. He catches Jungkook’s eye, intending to laugh at the absurdity of it all, only to see that Jungkook is staring at the scene wide-eyed, still clutching Jimin’s coat. He looks like he hasn’t breathed since this all started, and Yoongi absolutely does not want to know what’s going through his head. If Jungkook is having a psychosexual awakening, it’ll have to wait until next week when they’ve finished the con, when Yoongi has even a breath of spare mental capacity, since he has none right now.

Jimin and Taehyung do another round of photos, and then a final round with Jimin shirtless - Yoongi refuses to make eye contact with Jungkook for that one - before they declare themselves done. Jimin gets dressed again, Yoongi consults the first photo to get the room set back to the way it was when they entered, and they’re gone.

This time, it’s Taehyung and Jimin in the back of the car. They’re pouring over the pictures they took, trying to decide which handful best convey a slightly sleazy memento from last night’s hookup.

“It’s a shame we have to delete the rest of these,” Taehyung says. “Some of these are good work, even if they’re not right for this.”

“Jungkook, could you download them? And not have it be obvious they were there?” Jimin asks earnestly.

“Uh, sure,” Jungkook says, taking the phone back. “I’ll send them all to you? Or ... both of you?”

Once the rejected photos are safely removed, Taehyung starts composing a text message. “Hey you,” he dictates as he types. “Can’t wait to see you again.”

“You looked so good in my bed this morning,” Jimin suggests. “And then the pictures.”

“He was texting with his boss and someone else this morning,” Taehyung says, scrolling through the chat history. “I don’t know who this is but I think it’s a client.”

“Perfect,” Yoongi says. “It’s just, wrong thread, whoops.”

“Should he apologize after?”

“No, he didn’t notice,” Yoongi suggests. “And then when they ask him about it, it’ll make sense that he’s surprised. But the photos will be geocoded to his apartment.”

“And some of his room is in the background, too,” Taehyung says. “I don’t think anyone will recognize it, but just in case.”

“We’re here,” Yoongi announces, pulling the car over. “Good luck, Taehyung-ah, we’ll see you this evening.”

“If this doesn’t work, I’m also willing to consider murder,” Jimin says. Taehyung laughs as he gets out of the car, so Yoongi thinks it was a joke. He hopes it was a joke. He doesn’t have time to hide a body either.

***

Back at the warehouse, Seokjin has set himself on the couch with his menu, a stack of recipes, and a legal pad. He practically pounces on Yoongi when he enters and drags him over to the couch too.

“We’ve got to figure out how we’re going to do the prep work for this party,” he says. “Do you know how many canapés we said we deliver?”

“Yes, hyung, I was there.”

“It’s so many! We’re going to need to start a couple of days in advance, and the ingredients aren’t all going to fit in my refrigerator.”

“We can rent some for down here too,” Yoongi says. “We’re going to need to rent a lot of equipment for catering anyway, I can add a couple of fridges to the list.”

“Okay,” Seokjin says. “Okay, then the prep.”

The two of them sort through the recipes, figuring out what can be made in advance and what will have to be assembled on site. From there, they go over the recipes again, making lists of what needs to be prepped before the cooking can start, and from that, a schedule of what needs to happen when.

Someone’s going to spend a couple of hours doing nothing but chopping onions. Yoongi hopes it isn’t him.

“I can help!” Jungkook offers from across the room. “I know how to cook. Well, a little.”

“Pretty sure we’re all going to end up helping,” Jimin says, “so I want you to know in advance, I cannot cook, so please only give me easy tasks.”

Namjoon and Hoseok are out of chiming-in range, deep in discussion about Hoseok’s newly acquired explosives, but Yoongi knows neither of them can cook either.

“Well!” Seokjin says brightly. “This will just be a learning experience for us all. Speaking of new experiences, how did your fake scandal do today?”

“We haven’t heard back from Taehyung yet, but everything went to plan this afternoon,” Yoongi says.

“Sexy pictures acquired?”

“Very sexy,” Jimin says, smirking.

“So, is this like foreplay for you, or.” Seokjin says. It’s not a question but it’s not not a question either.

Yoongi throws a hand over his face. “Please don’t answer that, Jimin-ah, I do not want to know.”

Luckily, he’s saved by Hoseok bounding over. “Okay, everyone, we’re ready to do some real rehearsal. There’s a limited number of times I’m going to be able to blow this up, so I wanted to save it, but we’re good enough now. I want some run throughs with smoke and explosions and everything.”

“You just like blowing things up,” Yoongi complains, but he lets Hoseok haul him up off the couch.

Hoseok does like blowing things up, of course, but he’s not wrong that they need to rehearse in real conditions. The first time they let Seokjin throw a smoke bomb and then Hoseok blow the door, the noise and the smoke leave them all a little disoriented and unsure, even after all the work they did to commit art removal to muscle memory.

“It was okay,” Namjoon allows, looking over the stack of art they’ve managed to remove in their allotted time.

“We can be better,” Hoseok says. “It’s the smoke, right? Let’s do a couple of runs with just smoke until it stops being a problem.”

He’s right, of course. After three of those, they’re almost back at the times they had before adding in new elements.

“Explosions again tomorrow,” Hoseok says gleefully.

“You’re enjoying this,” Jimin whines from where he collapsed on the floor after the last run through, which leads Hoseok to sit on top of him and pinch his cheeks.

“Explosions are the absolutely best part of theft,” Hoseok says. “You know you love it.”

“I’m making dinner.” Seokjin announces, ignoring whatever is happening on the floor. “Last chance for a home cooked meal before the kitchen becomes off limits for anything besides prep work, who’s in?”

***

“Hyung, can I talk to you?” Namjoon asks after he and Yoongi leave the warehouse, having declined Seokjin’s offer of food in favor of going for barbecue. Yoongi thinks maybe the constant everything of the whole group is getting to Namjoon a little.

Yoongi braces himself, but takes a seat at the restaurant table. “Sure,” he says. “What else is going to dinner for. What did you want to talk about?”

“The other day - you were right, I should have told you about Minsoo as soon as I found out he was even tangentially involved.”

“I shouldn’t have yelled,” Yoongi says in return. “I would have liked to know but - you were right, it’s not going to matter.”

“It does matter,” Namjoon insists. “Does it bother you, that we’ve never talked about it?”

“It?”

“You know. Prison.”

Yoongi is quiet for a long time, fussing with the beef on the grill to avoid looking at Namjoon. “I didn’t know how to talk about it. I was so angry. That’s why I couldn’t write,” he says finally.

“Also in prison they read your letters.”

“Well, that too. It was all I could do to take care of your bonsai, mostly I was so angry.”

“That I got arrested?”

“That you ran a job without me. We were supposed to be partners.” Yoongi hopes Namjoon didn’t hear the way his voice almost cracked on that last sentence. He’ll blame the smoke from the grill if he has to.

“We are,” Namjoon says. “I shouldn’t have gone without you. I spent a long time in prison thinking about all the things I wish I had differently on that job, but the big one is, I shouldn’t have gone without you.”

“I wouldn’t have gotten you arrested.”

“Or you would have gotten arrested with me.”

“Either way,” Yoongi says, but he doesn’t really agree. He wouldn’t have gotten Namjoon arrested. They run a lot of risks in this line of work, but he couldn’t have ever run a job where Namjoon doing serious prison time was a real possibility.

There’s a long pause, then Namjoon speaks again, all in a rush and looking determined. “I shouldn’t have been a dick about Seokjin either. Even if you really were sleeping with him, it would be okay.”

Something twists in Yoongi’s gut at that, but he shoves it back down. “I’m not.”

“I know. But it would be okay.”

“So. Friends?” Yoongi asks.

“Friends,” Namjoon confirms.

“Good talk,” Yoongi says, and he doesn’t even think he’s being sarcastic about it. “Here, eat your meat.”

“Plus, now maybe Hoseok will stop giving me sad looks whenever he sees us on opposite sides of the room.”

Yoongi laughs. It’s good to be able to laugh with Namjoon again, to joke about Hoseok’s motherhen ways. “Oh god, you too? He keeps giving me pep talks about how we need to talk about our feelings.”

“We did! All my feelings, talked.”

Yoongi’s pretty sure that’s a lie - Namjoon’s always had way more feelings than he knows how to talk about - but he’s not sharing all his feelings either, so he’ll let it stand. They’re friends again. That’s what they need for this job, for all the future jobs. That’s enough for him.

Chapter Text

Yoongi’s not sure if his conversation with Namjoon unlocked some kind of karma for them or something, but over the next few days they only get good news. Taehyung gets his position back as lead on the gala, with Yoo Donghyun having had a serious talk with HR about propriety and then been given a two week suspension. They have several successful rehearsals, even with Hoseok’s explosions. The rentals for the catering supplies arrive, refrigerators and all, and are rapidly filled with an astonishing amount of raw ingredients. The whole thing is closer and closer to coming together.

“We’re throwing a party,” Jimin announces at the end of their last day of rehearsals. “Taehyung can help me plan it.”

“He’s a professional now!” Hoseok coos.

“I don’t work for free anymore,” Taehyung announces, from where he’s perched on a chair eating strawberries. Yoongi guesses his resistance is going to last about three seconds once Jimin starts pouting.

Sure enough, when Yoongi and Seokjin get back to the shared apartment the next day with the last of the catering stuff, Taehyung and Jimin are taping up brightly colored streamers, with Hoseok cheering them on. Someone has printed out a banner reading ‘to stealing from the rich!’, one character per printer page, and taped it up over the couch. The entire effect is charming in all its amateur earnestness, Yoongi has to admit.

He’s just wondering where Namjoon and Jungkook are when the door opens again. “Food,” Jungkook yells, waving the bags in his hands, which stops the streamer hanging in its tracks.

“Beer too,” Namjoon says, dropping the carton on the kitchen table.

There’s a little bit of good natured bickering over the various takeout choices that Jungkook brought home, but eventually everyone gets settled in the living room with a bowl of food.

“Speech!” Hoseok yells, looking at Namjoon.

“Oh, uh, I hadn’t planned anything.” Namjoon says.

“Speech!” Yoongi yells. Namjoon gives him a fake-irate look, and Yoongi just laughs harder.

“Uh, well. This job is really important to me personally, and obviously also to the art world in general, so I’m really glad you’re all here along with me for it. You’ve each brought something really special to this project, and I’m so grateful you’ve decided to share that. I really could imagine a better group of people to do this with.”

“Teamwork makes the dream work,” Jungkook announces in English. Hoseok laughs so hard he almost falls into Jungkook’s lap.

As the evening wears on and the beer gets drunk, the mood gets looser and looser. Jimin announces he has party games for them, but his attempt to start one ends with Jungkook giving him a piggyback ride around the living room and markers scattered across the floor. Yoongi doesn’t know if Seokjin and Taehyung ever intended to play the game, but now they’re engaged in some complicated staring match. Seokjin yells every time Taehyung pokes him in the cheek, but he looks delighted every time.

Whoever’s got control of the playlist switches over to old trot at some point and turns the party into an impromptu singalong. Yoongi isn’t even surprised to learn that Jungkook is as good at singing as he is at everything else, even when he’s busy drumming along to the music on Taehyung’s butt. As for Yoongi, he worries more about being loud than being anywhere close to in tune. Namjoon dances along - he can’t dance at all, but his enthusiasm is contagious and Yoongi bounces along with him. Hoseok tries to guide them into at least acknowledging the beat, but makes very little progress. Yoongi doesn’t care.

When Namjoon gets sick of dancing, he ends up on the couch again. Seokjin is there complaining that he’s too old to keep up with the kids dancing, his face animated, but Namjoon is just beaming out at the group. Every time Yoongi looks at him, he looks proud of what he’s assembled. It’s a good look on him, Yoongi thinks. And he should be proud. This is a good crew. They’re going to do amazing things together.

Yoongi gets up to go to the bathroom, and when he gets back, someone has switched the music again. Now it’s darker and clubbier, all bass and drop. Hoseok is showing some sort of dance move to Jungkook, who’s approaching it with the same sort of intensity he brings to almost everything. Jimin calls out tips, all the while he’s got one arm draped over Taehyung’s shoulders and hips grinding lazily against Taehyung. The entire look on the two of them is dirty as hell, and Yoongi almost can’t blame Seokjin for all the elbows in his ribs and suggestive eyebrows he’s making.

(What that means is, he tickles Seokjin for every sharp elbow.)

Eventually, Hoseok’s early riser instincts kick in, and he politely but firmly puts an end to the party, shooing Yoongi and Namjoon out the door. Namjoon is heavy against his side in the cab on the way home. He’s drunk. Yoongi’s a little drunk too. Neither of them trust themselves to make small talk safely when the cab driver might hear them, so they sit in silence on the way home. It’s comforting, Yoongi thinks, to have Namjoon next to him like this and not feel awkward in the silence. They’ve had too many awkward silences lately.

The silence lasts into their building and on the elevator. Just as they’re taking their shoes and coats off in the entryway, Namjoon finally speaks.

“Hyung,” he says softly, “I’m glad we’re friends again. We could have done this just as teammates, but it’s better as friends.” And then he reaches out and pulls Yoongi into a hug, on his own initiative. It’s all very earnest. Namjoon’s a great con artist and an okay liar when he has to be, but earnest is his most comfortable habit.

Yoongi wraps his arms around Namjoon, feeling how solid he is and trying not to think about how he doesn’t want to just be friends. “Yeah, Joon-ah. I’m glad too. We’re better as friends than just as partners.”

***

Everyone is slow moving the next morning - midday really - when they gather, but at least Hoseok isn’t making them run.

“I don’t even know why you blame me for that,” Hoseok complains when Yoongi tells him that. “It’s your con, you planned it that way.”

“You were the one who kept saying we had to go again,” Yoongi grumbles. He’s not really hungover, but he feels like he should be.

When they start unpacking the pallets from the rental company, which up until now had been sitting quietly in a corner waiting, Yoongi has a moment of panic that he maybe went a little crazy with their investor’s money. Along with the dishes and so on - being delivered directly to the gallery on the morning of the gala so at least he doesn’t have to worry about those - he’d rented basically an entire kitchen’s worth of prep equipment and tools. Well, after all, there were seven of them to think about. No use only having a few work stations.

It takes them a better part of an hour to get everything uncrated and set up. Eventually they have a set of folding tables set up, each with a station for peeling, chopping, and other prep work. Anything that requires actual cooking is going to have to happen in batches in the kitchen, which Yoongi is already dreading, but there’s just not room up there for everyone to be chopping at once.

Also, that’s so many onions. Better to have them here in the warehouse where at least there’s industrial ventilation. They’ve already got fans running in preparation.

Seokjin pretends to be easy going and carefree, but when it comes down to it, he’s just as obsessive a control freak as any of the rest of them. You have to be, to be a con artist working at this level. So Yoongi isn’t that surprised when he goes through each of the ingredients that needs prepping and makes several examples of what he wants done - onions minced for one dish and roughly chopped for another, garlic smashed and then minced, herbs cut fine, vegetables peeled and chopped, proteins portioned out to a carefully planned size.

Jungkook, ever helpful, places carefully labeled containers at each station, and then tapes a sign to each fridge so everyone knows what goes where. After that, he get stuck so badly putting on his apron that Jimin has to untangle it for him. Yoongi would feel bad about laughing, if not for the way Jungkook is laughing harder than anyone else.

Seokjin claims the fish butchery for himself and assigns Yoongi to beef. The rest of the group spreads out among the other stations, and Yoongi leaves his beef for a moment to check on how everyone is settling in. Namjoon has forgotten to take the cover off his knife, but once that problem is solved, he does okay. Chopped garlic doesn’t have to be pretty, at least.

Once the meat portioning is done, Seokjin and Yoongi take it over to the apartment to start the cooking process. They’ll finish cooking the proteins just before serving them so they can be served hot, but there’s no way to sear meat with the equipment they’ll have on site, so that has to be done now.

“I watched a video on how the pros do this,” Seokjin mutters as they wait for the pans on the stove to come to temperature. “Huge fryer, dump in your meat, bam, it’s got a nice seared crust on it and you don’t need to think about it again until you’re heating it on site.”

“We’ve got a fryer,” Yoongi says, pointing out the obvious. He’s waiting for the oil to get hot.

“Not like that one, we don’t.”

Four batches in, Yoongi is starting to see his point. He’s limited in the number of beef chunks he can fry at once since he wants the oil to stay hot, and it quickly becomes monotonous. Drop a batch in, count off the seconds, flip, count again, pull out the seared but otherwise raw beef and lay it out to cool. Start over. Every now and again, he gets to swap a fresh sheet pan out of the fridge and replace it with a seared one, and he’s starting to look forward to those moments.

Next to him, Seokjin is doing much the same with his fish on the griddle, his flat pan spread out over two burners. They’ve got the windows open and the fans running and the entire place still smells like smoky haze, a mix of fish and beef. It’s not good.

“Maybe we should have rented a fryer too.” Yoongi says, two thirds of the way through.

“This way we don’t have to worry about Namjoon or anyone getting close to hot oil,” Seokjin counters.

“Instead we just left them down there with knives,” Yoongi points out. “Is that better?”

“Hoseok will keep them from losing any fingers,” Seokjin says, then pauses. “I hope. Hoseok’s not a very good cook either.”

“Gonna be in trouble if they do,” Yoongi says, full of dark humor. “Can’t carry art with one hand.”

Luckily, when they move their finished proteins back down to the big fridges, everyone still has all their fingers. There’s evidence of an onion scrap food fight scattered across the floor, but there’s also three quarts of chopped onion in the fridge, so Yoongi figures he doesn’t need to know what went on to get there.

By the time they’ve done the second round of the day’s cooking, this time blanching vegetables (Yoongi) and prepping a mushroom stuffing (Seokjin), Yoongi is regretting all his choices.

“Why didn’t we go in as maintenance?” he asks in between bites of black bean noodles (take out, of course - he’s decided to never cook again). They’re all sitting in the floor in the warehouse, at the opposite end from where the onion smell is lingering.

“You said it was impossible. The security was too tight any day but a party,” Jungkook points out.

“Sure,” Yoongi says. “But we could have solved that. Probably. I think. And that way we wouldn’t have had to do two days of cooking prep before we can even begin.”

“Don’t forget to stretch tonight!” Hoseok says. “Don’t want to be stiff when it comes to theft.”

Taehyung whispers something to Jimin, who promptly tackles him. Yoongi scoots over so he doesn’t have to worry about an errant limb landing in his noodles.

The next morning is much the same as the previous. The group preps, Yoongi and Seokjin sauté or broil or stew, as various recipes call for. The refrigerators gradually stop being full of raw ingredients and start being full of components ready for assembly.

After lunch, Yoongi and Seokjin pull all the ingredients out for the salad. It’s a hearty salad, well able to sit in a dressing overnight without wilting. There’s just one problem.

“There’s no way we have a bowl big enough to mix this.” Yoongi says.

“Maybe if we mixed it in sections?” Seokjin suggests.

“I’m worried it wouldn’t get even,” Yoongi says.

“How clean do you think my bathtub is?” Seokjin asks out of nowhere.

“Not that clean,” Yoongi says, and then it dawns on him. “No. Absolutely not.”

“We could put down plastic!” Seokjin says.

“No,” Yoongi says again, but in the end neither of them end up having a better idea and they end up mixing a few hundred servings of salad in a carefully-lined bathtub.

“When you first pitched this project to me, I thought it was going to be way more glamorous,” Seokjin complains as he carefully stirs a dressing into their bathtub salad. “You said, infiltrate the elite. Befriend art buyers. Not, cook for two days straight in a bathtub.”

“Could be worse,” Yoongi says, from where he’s perched on the closed toilet supervising.

“How?”

“You could be having to prep 400 perfect little desserts. Pastry, piping, dusted with sugar. Placing sliced strawberries with a tweezer.”

“Why would you say that? I’m going to have nightmares now.” Seokjin ponders his salad. “I think this is mixed well enough, let’s start portioning.”

There are approximately a million tiny serving dishes, by Yoongi’s rough guess, but at least Jungkook has volunteered to run the full ones down to the fridge and bring back more. Finally, finally all the bowls are filled. It didn’t come out even, of course - there’s maybe a few gallons of salad left when they’re done.

“We could add some to some of the bowls,” Jungkook suggests, doubtfully.

“Absolutely not,” Seokjin says. “I refuse to spend any more time with this salad.”

“I’m going to pack it up then,” Jungkook announces. Privately, Yoongi is with Seokjin - he’s spent more than enough time with this salad already - but he’s not going to stop the kid if he wants it. He’s not sure even Jungkook can eat all this before it goes bad, but he’s welcome to try.

***

The next day, everyone’s a little jittery when they meet. It’s a weird energy - everyone’s got heist nerves, but it’s tempered by the fact they have to do an incredible amount of labor before they can even get there. Taehyung’s excused from loading, since he has to be on site to supervise all the other gala details for his day job, but he stops by in the morning anyway to give them all hugs and extravagant flying kisses.

“See you all in twelve hours and several billion won,” he yells as he leaves.

Yoongi, in a fit of panicked over preparation three days ago, had made himself a careful checklist of all the dishes they’re planning on serving, with a list for each dish of what components they’ve made so far and what needs to be assembled on site, as well as any equipment, tools, or platters. He’s trying to avoid a situation where he gets to the gala and realizes he left all his carefully chopped scallions for garnishing behind.

They carefully load each dish’s worth of components into a proofer, sliding trays into the shelf slots, letting Yoongi check them off, then move onto the next dish. Once the proofer is full, it’s wrapped in plastic wrap to prevent accidents on the trip over, labeled with the food it contains, and loaded into the truck. At that point, it gets checked off again. Yoongi’s pretty sure that someone would make fun of his obsessiveness except they’re all just as nervous as he is.

Namjoon counts the proofers as they sit in the truck, just in case any of them have disappeared since they were loaded. “Six, seven,” he mutters to no one in particular. “And the dessert proofer makes eight.”

After the food comes the equipment - bowls, cutting boards, knives, and a truly astonishing number of towels, both cloth and paper. Yoongi checks those off on his list too. Finally, he declares them done. Jungkook and Hoseok have personally dealt with their various equipment needs for the non cooking part of the event, so everything they need for this heist and the gala proceeding it is on this truck.

Seokjin takes his leave after that. As an actual guest at the gala, he has time to shower and dress up before arriving.

“Any last questions?” Hoseok asks, handing Seokjin his package of smoke bombs.

Seokjin shakes his head. “I’ve got it. See you all tomorrow, or sometime. Don’t do anything dumb without me.”

“We’re all set,” Yoongi tells Namjoon.

“Right,” Namjoon says. “Let’s go steal some art.”

Yoongi drives the truck, with Namjoon in the passenger seat. Jungkook clearly wants to ride in the back for the authentic undercover feeling, but Yoongi nixes that as too unprofessional and hence suspicious looking, and sends him, Hoseok, and Jimin in a cab.

“Ready for this, Joon-ah?” Yoongi asks as he parks the truck.

“Even if this goes wrong, I’m glad I’m doing it with you,” Namjoon says awkwardly, then gets out of the truck before Yoongi can respond.

It’s started to rain, so they huddle under the overhang at the dock while they wait. Yoongi really hopes it’s not raining later - among other things, the plan requires them to spend a lot of time outside hanging around for the bomb squad, and Yoongi hates getting wet.

The rest of the group arrives shortly after, and Yoongi hands out chef’s coats and caps for them to pull on over their tshirts. Once everyone is dressed, they start the work of unloading the truck. Yoongi gets his clipboard out again - he’ll check things off as they make it off the truck and then once again once they set up upstairs. It’s overkill, but it fits his uptight chef persona.

Hyejin is waiting for them at the service entrance to see them in, wearing the practical black clothes of a woman who intends to run the show without ever being noticed. They’ve all studied the maps of the building that Jungkook made, of course, but Yoongi pretends he only half remembers the space from the quick tour they had weeks ago.

“We’ve set up your space to the specifications you provided,” Hyejin says. “I’ll send some of my crew down to help you unload and get everything up there.”

Yoongi protests that his team can handle it, but too much protesting would be suspicious, so he settles for standing by the truck and reminding each stranger that the load is delicate and needs to be handled carefully.

“This is so heavy,” one of them complains, rolling a proofer up the ramp to the door. He checks the label. “Dessert? Dessert is this heavy?”

Jungkook, who’s standing next to him, bag of electronics carefully slung over one shoulder, freezes but Jimin slides in smoothly. “It’s all those little porcelain cups. They add up.”

“And ice,” Jungkook finally adds. “We had to pack this one with ice so the desserts wouldn’t melt before service.”

When all the food is upstairs, Yoongi kicks out all the strangers, on the theory that his team needs room to work. They’ve got lines of tables set up, and each table becomes a station for one of the crew, each responsible for a few of the dishes they’re going to serve. There’s a flurry of ripping plastic as the crates of equipment are unpacked and then set up on the tables.

Yoongi takes a quick peek into the gallery. There’s high tables scattered throughout the space, a change since he saw it last, but this is what Taehyung had told them the layout would be. The tables shouldn’t be a problem. The bar is safely out of the way, near the guest entrance. That means guests will have to circulate between the food and the bar, which is the stated reason for the placement, but also that the bar staff won’t be tempted to take breaks in the kitchen, which is the real reason.

“Check your dishes, everyone,” Yoongi announces, slipping into character. “Speak up if you’re missing anything.”

“Yes, chef!” Jungkook yells. Yoongi loves that kid.

Yoongi settles in with his own set of dishes, pulling the components that will be served cool out of the proofer so he can reheat the items that need to be warm. Hoseok comes around with his trays of cans of Sterno. He lights every can on a tray for Yoongi, lighter flickering from one can to the next, then carefully places the tray into the proofer. Yoongi closes the door just enough to keep the heat in without putting the flames out, then turns back to the cold elements of his dishes.

He’s halfway through plating a first round of his dishes when Jungkook comes running over.

“Chef-nim!” he says nervously. “My mousse, I can’t pipe it.”

“Show me,” Yoongi says, and follows him over to his station.

Jungkook is right. The savory mousse has spent too much time in the fridge, and it’s hardened more than Yoongi thought it would. It’s supposed to be piped onto a toast, but that’s impossible now. Yoongi tries spooning a chunk out, but it’s inelegant on the plate.

“Can we wait for it to come to room temperature?” Jungkook asks doubtfully.

“It’ll take too long, I think. Hoseok-ssi!” he calls. “Do you have a butane torch in your bag?”

Luckily, Hoseok does - Yoongi doesn’t know why but he’s grateful - and when he’s done lighting Namjoon’s Sternos he brings it over to Jungkook and shows him how to work it.

“Gently,” Yoongi says. “Just run it along the outside of the bowl until the mousse starts to loosen a little. Keep stirring as it warms, you don’t want to melt any part of it.”

“Yes, chef!” Jungkook says. He looks far too excited about getting to play with flame. Yoongi can see Hoseok keeping an eye on him already.

“Everything going well, chef?” Taehyung asks, ducking around the curtain separating the prep area from the gallery. He’s wearing a white jacket with black lapels, all fancied up for the event, but there’s a smile on his face that says he’s delighted to be getting away with all this. Yoongi can’t help but grin back at him.

“We’ll be ready to start sending out plates as scheduled,” Yoongi promises.

“Good, good. Here, I’ve got a headset for you, in case front of house needs to get in touch. It’s got me, Hyejin, the bar, the head of security.” He looks at Yoongi meaningfully, and Yoongi nods. Not a private channel. “The wait staff will be arriving shortly, I’ll come by and introduce them when they get here.”

“Thank you, Taehyung-ssi.”

The waiters turn out to be a group of young men who look even younger than Jungkook does, but since they were hired separately they’re not really Yoongi’s responsibility. Playing the role of chef, he walks them through each of the dishes they’ll be serving so they can speak knowledgeably about them to the guests. He wishes he could get rid of them after that to give his team some privacy, but it’s too close to event time for them to be loitering in the gallery when guests are going to start arriving. He settles for kicking them out into the service hallway, claiming he needs the space for the prep work. Even so, it’s too risky to do any kind of last minute pep talk or break character.

“How’s everyone doing?” he settled for asking the room at large, in place of what he’d rather say. “Jungkook-ssi, how’s the mousse?”

“Looks good, chef,” Jungkook says, waving a piping bag in demonstration.

“Little behind, chef,” Namjoon admits.

Yoongi and Hoseok are both in a good spot, so they leave their stations to lean over Namjoon’s table. His dish is a carefully layered construction, and they break it down into an assembly line, each of them moving down the table placing one layer at a time. Soon enough, they’ve got enough platters made that Yoongi thinks Namjoon will be able to keep up over the course of the evening.

“Chef-nim, plan to start serving in five,” Taehyung says over the headset.

“Food in five,” Yoongi says loudly to the room, and goes to get the waitstaff.

Service gets off to a smooth start. The waitstaff collect the completed platters, and the team uses the open space created to start new ones. Yoongi switches between working his own station and circulating through the room to help out as needed, so no one falls too behind.

He’s pulling the last of his beef out of the proofer as it finishes cooking, blowing out the Sterno cans to let the proofer cool, when there’s a gigantic crash from the other side of the room. He turns to find one of the waiters standing among a mess of broken dishes and ruined food at the end of Jimin’s station.

Yoongi sighs. The plates at Jimin’s station are hot to keep the delicate dish from cooling too fast as the waiters circulate. They’d made sure to warn the waiter initially assigned to that station to use a dry towel to protect his hands, but the waiters must have rotated.

“It’s fine,” Yoongi calls as he makes his way over with a spare towel. “It’s fine, don’t worry about it.” He shows the waiter how to fold the towel, then practically shoves him back onto the floor with new plates.

Jimin is practically vibrating with anger, which Yoongi gets. They’re all tense, waiting for the next phase of the heist to kick off. What makes it worse is they don’t know when it’s going to happen - Taehyung and Seokjin, out on the floor where they can see the crowd, have to pick their moment. Everyone behind the curtain just has to keep serving food until they get the signal and have to run. It’s no surprise they’re tightly wound, as they all try to pick apart the noise from the other side for a clue for what’s happening. But there’s no time for this.

“Jungkook-ssi, come help Jimin-ssi get caught up,” Yoongi directs. He can’t say “and calmed down,” but from the way Jungkook gently bumps Jimin on the way over, he thinks he heard it. Hoseok’s found a broom from somewhere, and he makes himself busy making sure the plate shards all get swept out of the way, where they won’t be a risk to anyone once the next phase begins.

There’s the beginning of a commotion coming from the floor, and now Yoongi is tense too, wondering if this is it. The only thing he can do is keep sending the waiters back out onto the floor, since none of them can be in the kitchen when it all starts.

Finally, finally, the commotion on the floor is punctuated by a sharp bang, immediately followed by screaming. Yoongi can’t see the gallery, but he knows what he’d see: a bright flash, followed by a growing cloud of smoke. In the kitchen space - and presumably the rest of the building as well - the fire alarms are going.

Everyone in the kitchen has dropped their utensils. Hoseok is doing a last check through his bag, while Jungkook makes a dive for his own equipment in a backpack in the corner.

“Please, everyone, come this way, no need to panic,” Yoongi can hear faintly over the headset from Taehyung as he herds the guests out the front entrance. This is the tricky part - they need everyone out via the front door and not, say, trying to find a shortcut through the service entrance. There’s nothing to do but let Taehyung and Seokjin work the crowd and hope all the guests leave the same way they came in.

“Jungkook-ah, are we good?” Yoongi asks.

Jungkook’s staring into his tablet, where he’s pulled up his tap into the security system. “Looking good,” he says. “All the stragglers going the right direction.”

“Tell us when you’ve cut the cameras over,” Yoongi says.

“Count five,” Jungkook says. “Four, three, two, one.”

“Hoseok, go,” Yoongi says, and Hoseok’s out into the smoke on the floor. He’s laughing as he goes. Yoongi’s never met someone who laughed at explosions like Hobi does and he can’t help but grin too. It’s good doing this with friends.

They know from rehearsal it takes Hoseok twenty seven seconds to reach the door and set his charges, and no one wastes any one of those seconds. Jungkook tapes back the curtain between the kitchen and the gallery so it’s open and out of the way, and the proofers, now empty of food and Sternos, are positioned ready to receive the loot.

As he completes his first several tasks, Yoongi is finally grateful Hoeseok made them rehearse so many times with the smoke. It’s not pleasant, but he was expecting that, and he knows where each one of his goals is and where each of his teammates will be.

“Ready!” Hoseok from the other end of the room. There’s a two beat pause, and then another boom. “Door’s open!”

With that, focus shifts. Namjoon bolts for the open door to check what’s behind it. This is the one thing they couldn’t be sure of before starting.

“It’s here!” Namjoon yells. He sounds practically giddy with it. “It’s here, it’s here!”

The team’s focus changes from what they were doing to the secret room. They had had to guess at the layout of the art on the walls, but a few quick glances tells Yoongi they weren’t that far off. He grabs the frames nearest to him and runs back to the kitchen space.

His paintings safely stashed in one of the now empty proofers, he starts his way back for another loads, but slows when there’s chatter over his mic.

“Yes, all the guests made it out,” Taehyung is saying to someone. “The waitstaff and bar staff all went out this way too. I made sure the room was clear.”

“My team is all here,” Hyejin says. They must be taking a headcount.

“So just the cooking staff is missing?” a gruff older woman asks. Yoongi thinks she must be the head of security.

Yoongi clicks on his headset. “We’re all fine,” he says, doing his best to sound steady and not like he’s been running. “We’re out the back. I didn’t see anyone else on our way out, I think it’s clear.”

“Good,” security says. “In that case, we’ll wait for the fire department to clear the building. They’ve told me four minutes until they arrive.” Yoongi catches Hoseok’s eye, taps his wrist and holds up four fingers. Hoseok nods; this is how much time they thought they’d have.

“You’re waiting?” Hyejin asks. “Aren’t you security? Isn’t this your job?”

Yoongi can practically hear the world weary sigh in the head of security’s voice. “We deal with people and making sure they’re safe. This is a job for professionals. We’re waiting for the fire department.”

Yoongi keeps half an ear on the conversation happening outside, just in case something changes, but now his focus is on getting art off walls and into proofers as fast as he can. The muscle memory makes it surprisingly easy - lift up off the hook, pull toward you, set on the floor so both hands are free to do it again. Run when you’ve got a stack. All around him, the team is doing the same thing. He doesn’t even have to look up to know when Jungkook’s passing behind him, or when Namjoon is working next to him.

“Thirty seconds,” Hoseok calls, snapping him out of his trance. “Jungkook, Namjoon, door.”

Through the headset, Yoongi can hear the sirens approaching. He leaves Hoseok and his assistants to getting the door back on its hinges and takes a last swing through the kitchen space. There’s no art out anywhere it shouldn’t be. The proofers are all neatly sealed. Jungkook’s tech has disappeared back into his backpack. It’s clear.

“Will the fire department enter right away?” Taehyung asks someone off headset. “As soon as they get their gear? So any moment now.”

Yoongi could kiss him for that. He risks one last call before the firefighters arrive. “Guys, out, now!”

Jimin blows past him and down the hall to the elevator. From where he’s waiting, Yoongi can see Jimin holding the elevator door, good.

Namjoon is next, closely followed by Jungkook. Hoseok pauses just long enough to grab his bag - makes sense, there’s suspicious and then there’s a bag full of explosives left behind - and then Yoongi is following him down the hall. Once Yoongi is in the elevator, Jimin releases the door. Jungkook hammers on the button and they’re moving.

“I always thought you weren’t supposed to take an elevator during a fire,” Namjoon says contemplatively. Something about the way he says it breaks the nervous tension, and even after they make their way out into the loading dock, they’re still laughing much harder than it really deserved. And the rain has stopped, so that’s one good omen so far.

“Settle in,” Namjoon says. “We’re going to be here a while.”

Jungkook plops himself down against the wall and fiddles with his tablet again. Undoing whatever overrides he had on the cameras, Yoongi assumes, so it’ll look fine once security has a chance to look again.

“How did the door look?” Yoongi asks. He didn’t get to see it after they reassembled it.

Hoseok waggles his hand in an equivocating way. “Should be okay as long as no one looks too closely. Won’t be okay if anyone tries to open it.”

“They won’t,” Yoongi says with more confidence than he feels. “Police are going to get called in for sure, and there’s no way they’ll open that door with police still in the building.”

“What if they do?” Jungkook asks.

“Taehyung will tell us, and we’ll just disappear.”

“Shame to lose the art though,” Namjoon says.

It’s almost a half hour before they get another update. Yoongi assumes that means the police or fire department found the remains of the smoke bomb and want to investigate. He’s heard various comments from Taehyung that suggest the guests aren’t very happy about being neither allowed in nor allowed to leave.

The group tries for the same attitude, playing with their phones as they stake out places against the wall. Yoongi and Namjoon keep catching each other’s eyes, and every time they do, Yoongi has to look away to keep from breaking out into smiles with Namjoon. It’s working. They’re going to do it, him and Namjoon, just like they planned.

There’s a low voiced discussion happening somewhere at the other end of the headset between the head of security and someone Yoongi assumes is the head of the fire unit. He sighs. They had thought this would happen, but he has still been hoping they’d get away without it.

“Bomb squad’s coming,” he announces to the group. “They think it was probably just a prank, but they want to swab everyone for explosive residue.”

Hoseok holds out his hands like he’s waiting to be swabbed. “Guilty,” he says with a grin.

“Is anyone else at risk? Other than Seokjin, of course.”

Hoseok thinks for a moment. “Namjoonie and Jungkookie are probably fine, but I wouldn’t risk if it you can avoid it, there might have been some transfer from the door. The rest of you are fine.”

“Please make an orderly line,” security says, presumably to the crowd of guests. “Once the police have taken down your information and swabbed you for explosive residue, you’ll be allowed to leave.”

Yoongi sees his moment, now that police are occupied with that task.

“Jay-ssi,” he says to Taehyung, “it sounds like this party isn’t going to be getting back on track. Can I collect my things and leave? We have other events we need to worry about, you know.”

“Do they need to be checked?” Hyejin asks.

“None of the cooking staff ever entered the gallery,” Taehyung says. “It was the waitstaff who was in and out.”

“Fine,” Hyejin says. “Stay out of the way of security and the police when you come back in.”

Hoseok waits in the truck, just in case the police change their mind about testing them, but the rest of the team file back upstairs. Jungkook motions to remind them that the cameras are live again, including the ones in the service hallways, so everyone does their best to look like a catering crew annoying at having to sit on the loading dock for an hour, not a group of con artists about to make a huge score.

Some of them are better at it than others, Yoongi notes. For Namjoon’s sake, he hopes the cameras in the service hallways are low resolution. He keeps forgetting what he’s supposed to be doing and grinning, then catching himself and putting in his tired face again.

In the kitchen, everything is just as they had dropped it. The first order of business is to clean up the stations - tossing the food, stacking the dirty plates for the rental company to pick up, returning their own equipment to bags and crates. Yoongi can’t stop glancing at the proofers lined up along the wall, and he catches Namjoon doing it too.

“Focus, Joon-ah,” he says under his breath, and Namjoon gives him a rueful grin.

They’re all on edge waiting for police to change their minds and show up to question them, but apparently Taehyung’s assurances that they stayed in the catering space were enough. Yoongi can hear the police moving around in the gallery, but no one ever pulls back the curtain to see what’s happening in the kitchen. Finally, everything is tidied up and packed onto carts, and they’re able to leave.

With just the four of them and no extra help, it takes two trips for the equipment and proofers, since they’re being considerable more gentle with the proofers than the usual treatment. Going back for the second load is even more nerve wracking than the first. The elevator ride up is a mess of twitching fingers and attempts at deep breaths. Yoongi’s imagining police waiting to ambush them as they enter the kitchen, but once again they’re left alone to remove an entire gallery’s worth of art via the service entrance.

They carefully tie the proofers down in the back of the truck so nothing is jostled on the way back. Hoseok is serious again, carefully checking each strap and buckle so nothing shifts.

Jungkook begs to be allowed to ride in the back of the truck this time, and Yoongi doesn’t really have a reason to tell him no. Even Hoseok doesn’t seem that bothered by the idea, since nothing is going to be rattling around in the truck as long as he’s in charge.

Back at the warehouse, they unload the proofers carefully, then pull art out of them one by one.

“Holy shit,” Namjoon breathes. “We really did it.”

“I knew we could,” Yoongi says, finally letting himself feel smug about the whole thing.

Namjoon turns to look at him, then makes a funny face “Hyung, you’ve still got -“ He gestures at his ear.

Yoongi reaches up. It’s the headset Tayhung had given him at the beginning of the party, three hours and eighty years ago. He pulls it off.

“Thief,” Jimin yells, pointing dramatically. That does it - the nervous tension they’ve been carrying around for so long finally breaks into full on hysteria. Next to Jimin, Hoseok laughs so hard he ends up on the floor.

“I’ll give it back to Taehyung when he gets back and he can return it,” Yoongi says, several minutes later when the laughter has subsided enough to everyone to catch their breath again.

“Give me what?” Taehyung says, entering the warehouse, still in his fancy suit but looking decidedly more ruffled.

Yoongi offers him the headset.

“You stole it?” Taehyung asks, mock wounded, which of course sets the group off again.

“Not you too,” Yoongi complains, but he knows everyone can see it’s an act from the way he’s laughing too.

“Where’s Jin-hyung?” Jungkook asks.

“Arrested,” Taehyung said. “He failed the explosive test, so they’re going to ask him some questions.”

“Don’t worry,” Namjoon tells Jungkook, who’s looking a little distressed at this news. “Lots of people in powerful places like Seokjin. It’s not going to stick, even with the evidence.”

“Plus the evidence on the other guy will be way worse,” Taehyung says.

“The other guy?” Yoongi asks.

“During the evacuation, Jin-hyung panicked a bit and grabbed one of the other guests. He managed to get residue all over the other guy’s hands, and he probably planted the remote for the smoke bomb too. I didn’t see it but Jin-hyung is very good, he’s got really good hands.”

“Just some random person in the crowd?” Jungkook asks.

Yoongi has a sneaking suspicion about where this is going. “Did you hear the name?”

Taehyung shrugs. “Maybe, but I don’t remember what it was.”

“Was it Han Minsoo?” he asks, and watches Namjoon choke on his bottle of water.

“Could be? It sounds familiar. Do you know him?”

“We, uh, we used to work together,” Namjoon admits.

“A truly random choice at the party probably could have eventually convinced the cops that it really was a frame job with evidence planted on them,” Yoongi says. “Harder to do that when you have priors for robbery.”

No one wants to crate up the art so soon - it’ll all have to be delivered eventually, of course, but not yet - so they leave it scattered across the warehouse. Taehyung knows someone who knows someone who thinks Seokjin will be held overnight, so they decide to save the party for later. The mood’s not right without all seven of them there.

***

“Hyung,” Namjoon says as they return to their darkened apartment, “I want to make a bad decision.”

Yoongi freezes. “How big of a bad decision are we talking about?”

“Not that bad. I hope. Just - stop me if I shouldn’t, okay?”

Before Yoongi can finish untangling whatever that is supposed to mean, Namjoon leans in and kisses him.

Oh. That kind of bad decision.

Yoongi kisses back for a moment, then pulls away. “I thought you said you didn’t want this. I thought you said it would be too complicated.”

“I also thought you were dating Seokjin,” Namjoon points out, and this time it sounds like a rueful joke rather than what it had been before. “So maybe my judgement isn’t any good.”

“I’m not dating Seokjin,” Yoongi says solemnly. He lets his hands rest on Namjoon’s waist. They’d ditched the chef’s coats back at the warehouse, so Namjoon is just in a thin single layer. Yoongi can feel the warmth of his skin through it, every shiver and breath that he takes. He can’t stop thinking about the feel of Namjoon’s skin.

“Good to know, hyung.”

“I’m not dating anyone else, either.”

“You don’t have to do this just because I want to,” says Namjoon, always honorable.

“I do want to,” Yoongi says. “I’ve wanted to for a long time, even when I was busy being angry with you.”

“You’re so hot when you’re doing crime,” Namjoon says. “Winning looks so good on you.”

“You’ve got such pretty hands,” Yoongi says. He doesn’t know where that came from but it’s true. He yanks Namjoon down to kiss again before his mouth really runs away with him.

“Hey,” Namjoon says into Yoongi’s jaw, “how about we take this somewhere not in the hallway?”

“My bed is nicer,” Yoongi says, and lets Namjoon steer him down the hall. Namjoon’s hand slides lower and lower down his back as they go, but Yoongi’s not going to complain.

In the bedroom, Yoongi steps away from Namjoon to pull off his shirt without risking anyone getting elbowed in the head. He’s working on his belt when he sees that Namjoon hasn’t moved.

Yoongi steps in and puts his hands on his shoulders, letting himself trace soothing patterns over the collarbones with his thumbs. “Hey, you can stop any time, you know? I promise it won’t make it weird between us either way. We’ll survive this, whether we do anything or not.”

Namjoon shakes his head. “No, it’s not that, I still want this, I’m just, you know.”

“Nervous?” Yoongi asks, and Namjoon nods. “It’s just me, Joon-ah. We lived in the same room for three years, remember? I already know all about your gigantic dick and the dumb scar you got that time you tried to do rappelling.”

“You think my dick is gigantic?” Namjoon asks, but he’s broken out of whatever trap his mind had built for him and working at his pants. Yoongi helps out by starting on his shirt buttons.

“Oh fuck off,” Yoongi says, then ruins it by kissing at the skin he’s exposed. “You know your dick is big.”

They tumble onto the bed in a way that’s more lumbering than graceful, but they get settled without anyone getting an elbow or knee in a sensitive area. Under the pretext of getting himself untangled, Yoongi gropes Namjoon’s chest. It doesn’t turn out as subtle as he had hoped, because Namjoon laughs at him.

“Shut up,” Yoongi mumbles.

“Like it?” Namjoon asks.

“You got so broad in prison,” Yoongi complains. “And then I kept having to watch you do things with your muscles.”

“Even while you were angry with me.”

“I was angry, not blind.” Yoongi pauses. “Besides, I knew I was going to stop being angry eventually. I didn’t know how I was gonna get there, but I knew it was going to happen.”

“That’s so romantic,” Namjoon says. “You’re not angry with me anymore, what a stirring declaration.”

“Oh, shut up,” Yoongi says again, and kisses him to make him stop.

They make out for a while, bodies pressed up against each other. Kissing Namjoon feels familiar, even if their previous hookups had mostly been hurried things without a lot of time for this leisurely exploration. The feel of Namjoon’s hands on his face and Namjoon’s chest against his feels safe. Yoongi sort of thinks he could spend forever like this, pressed up against Namjoon and feeling the way his breath catches when Yoongi touches him. Namjoon’s mouth is hot against his throat, and he moans when Yoongi tangles one hand in his hair, the sound vibrating through Yoongi.

The kissing is slow right up until it isn’t, and they’re both suddenly scrambling for more friction. Neither of them has the patience to do anything complicated, so Yoongi shoves off his underwear and Namjoon’s so he can get a hand on their dicks. Yoongi doesn’t know how long Namjoon has been waiting for this, but he finds himself suddenly a mess of pent-up desire. He can barely think to keep his strokes steady. Namjoon’s hand joins his, not any more coordinated, but it’s good enough to push both of them over the edge.

Namjoon comes with a series of breathy moans, and Yoongi can’t help but find them cute. He’s going to make Namjoon do it again soon, he promises himself.

Yoongi lets Namjoon wipe them off with a kleenex from the bedside table, but that’s as much as he’s willing to put up with. He’s had a long stressful day, and an emotional reckoning, and a very good orgasm, so now he is going to sleep. He curls himself up against Namjoon, already halfway there.

“Do you want me to go?” Namjoon whispers.

“Shh. Sleep now,” Yoongi mumbles.

“Okay, hyung,” Namjoon says, scooting down a little to make himself comfortable. He drops a kiss on the top of Yoongi’s head. “Sleep well.”

***

Yoongi has long known that one of Namjoon’s many flaws is that he’s a morning person, so he’s not that surprised to find Namjoon awake already when he wakes up.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hi,” Namjoon says, looking up from his phone. He’s got damp hair and he’s in pajamas, like he showered when he woke up and then got back into bed with Yoongi. “We don’t have to be anywhere for a while yet, you can go back to sleep.”

Yoongi thinks about it for a minute. “No, I’m up,” he says, but doesn’t do anything other than press his face against Namjoon’s shoulder. This feels different than the other times he and Namjoon have hooked up. They’ve never done a morning after before.

Namjoon combs through his hair. “Your hair is unbelievably goofy right now,” he says.

“Don’t care,” Yoongi says.

“It’s cute. I wanna see if it does this every morning,” Namjoon says, then freezes, like he hadn’t meant to say that.

“Joon-ah,” Yoongi says. “Yes. I want that too.”

“Good,” Namjoon says, pulling Yoongi in closer. “Good, me too.” He’s quiet for a long time, then finally he says, “I can make coffee for you while you’re in the shower, if you want.”

“Sounds good,” Yoongi says, and doesn’t get up.

Yoongi ends up dozing off a little, which means they’re the last ones to the warehouse. Hoseok takes one look at them when they walk in together and immediately says, “Oh thank god, you fixed it.”

“How can you know that,” Yoongi demands. They’re not even touching.

Hoseok waves his hand up and down at him. “It’s your whole vibe. Anyway, great, I’m happy for you two, now can we please box up these paintings?”

Namjoon looks sadly at each painting that goes into a crate. It’s cute.

“The whole point was to get it back for the museum,” Yoongi reminds him from where he’s dealing with a hammer and nails. Jungkook is working on another crate next to him, and Yoongi made the rest of the group go be elsewhere after seeing them with hammers. Namjoon is hanging out at this end of the warehouse, but there was never any question of him being allowed to help here.

“I know,” Namjoon says. “It’s the right thing to do. But I always hate letting art go.”

Namjoon is spared further teasing on that fact by Seokjin’s arrival. He’s still in his suit from the night before, so he must have come straight from the police station. He’s down to almost normal human levels of attractive, which suggests he didn’t get much rest, but he seems happy to be back.

“Yah!” Seokjin yells, somewhere from under where he’s been tackled by Taehyung and Jimin. “You saw me yesterday, what is all this for.” His ears are turning red, as they always do when he finds himself the unexpected center of attention, but the way he’s hugging back suggests he doesn’t really mind it.

The plan is to drop the crates on the museum’s loading docks that night. There’s a security camera, but since they’re not actually commuting a crime, it’s enough to cover the truck’s license plate and wear masks. The museum won’t investigate too hard, since they’re offering a no questions asked reward. Namjoon wrote a note and everything.

“You know, we don’t really need seven people for this part,” Yoongi says as the entire team climbs into the back of the truck.

“Hyung,” Taehyung says, very seriously. “You have to let us finish it.”

Yoongi can’t really argue with that, which is why all seven of them end up going along to unload three crates of paintings. It takes about thirty seconds with that many people, and Yoongi knows it’s a bad idea to hang around at the scene of the crime, but he can’t help lingering anyway.

“We did a good thing here,” Namjoon says from where he’s hooked his chin over Yoongi’s shoulder.

“Yeah,” Yoongi says, running his thumb over Namjoon’s hand at his waist. It’s not really romantic, staring at a grimy loading dock, even if said loading dock now has a stack of anonymous crates, but at the same time it kind of is. Namjoon’s right: this is a good thing that they did.

“Okay, you had your moment with the art, you had your moment with each other, can we please leave now before we all get arrested,” Seokjin finally says.

“Are you making us dinner?” Yoongi asks.

“Never again,” Seokjin says. “But I will buy you all dinner somewhere nice, just this once.”

Chapter Text

Six months later

Yoongi still has Naver alerts set up for Lee Songho, even after their con is over. He’ll keep them for a year maybe, just to make sure there’s nothing in the aftermath he needs to know about. It’s been quiet of anything beyond PR fluff ever since the flurry of news about the party gone wrong, but today there’s another set of articles. They all seem to be sourced from the same set of reporting in Dispatch, so he reads that one first.

“Lee Songho gallery full of fakes, according to insurance sources,” reads the headline. Yoongi skims through it. It’s all anonymous, of course. They quote an anonymous art appraiser, who alleges that all the art in the gallery is fake. It was all legitimate when the insurance company last reviewed it three years ago, according to the source, so something must have happened to it between them and now. There’s a long discussion of when various pieces were bought and for how much, to convey to the casual reader just how much was lost. There’s even a mention of the infamous party, including the arrest of his son’s guest, to suggest that the entire family is falling apart. In short, it is very very good for Yoongi.

A quote near the bottom of the article catches his eye. It’s from an anonymous outside expert, who went in to consult when the insurance company first discovered the problem. “They’re not even good fakes,” he told Dispatch. “Honestly I’m amazed no one’s noticed before this. This should have been obvious to any art appreciator, even a non-professional.”

Yoongi sighs. “Joon-ah!” he calls. “Did you give an incredibly rude quote to Dispatch?”

“What?” Namjoon demands from the other room, where he’s tending to his bonsai. It’s in bloom. Yoongi smiles every time he sees Namjoon anxiously fawning over it. “He deserved it.”

“What? No, that was just a description, not a complaint.”

“Sounded like a complaint.”

“The complaint is about you giving quotes to Dispatch at all. Aren’t you supposed to be keeping a low profile?” Yoongi grumbles, but he can tell that Namjoon knows his heart isn’t in it.

“Why are you reading that anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be getting ready for our date?” Namjoon wanders into the kitchen where Yoongi is. He’s already ready, Yoongi can see, dressed in what Yoongi privately thinks of as one of his art history professor get ups - jeans, cardigan, beanie.

“You know you don’t have to wine and dine me, right? I’m a sure thing.”

“Shut up,” Namjoon says, affectionately. “I’m going to take my boyfriend on a date and I’m not going to let your whining stop me.”

“I don’t know why you wouldn’t tell me where we’re going,” Yoongi says again as they get off the subway later that afternoon.

“It’s a surprise, hyung,” Namjoon says. He leads Yoongi out of the subway station and down the block. It’s a sunny spring day. It almost makes Yoongi wonder if Namjoon orchestrated this too. He suspects that no matter what Namjoon had originally planned, they’re going to end up at a park at some point.

Yoongi sees their destination before he recognizes it. In his defense, he’s spent more time at its loading dock than the visitor entrance.

“The Seoul Museum of Contemporary Art,” Yoongi says.

“I got us tickets to their special exhibit,” Namjoon says, pulling Yoongi towards the door.

Yoongi’s about to ask what it is when he sees the banner over the entrance. Stolen Masterpieces: Finally Returned

The smaller text inside explains about the initial robbery, the long period of time that they were missing, and finally the mysterious return. The paintings have been authenticated and restored, and are on display to the public for the first time since the robbery.

“You absolute nerd.”

“You love it,” Namjoon says confidently.

“Yeah, I do,” Yoongi says.