Chapter Text
As he walked into the dark, cold room, Minho wondered if he was in the right place.
He had seen the ad by chance, just a pop-up on his phone one night as he was scrolling the news. He laughed at it at first, and didn’t give it much thought. It was probably a scam, as most of these things promising grand results often were.
Who would name their bar “Pleasure Shop”, anyway?
But the ad had promised an escape.
Something Minho desperately wanted. He hadn’t admitted that to himself until the ad brought it to his awareness, corrupting his mind with the promise of release.
He thought about it while he showered, as he ate his dinner, when he practiced with his members.
Especially then.
Because the thing he was mostly trying to escape was…him.
His companion of many years, forced together by fate when the two of them would have never spoken otherwise.
Minho knew everything about him. They fought, they joked, they got on each other’s nerves. They became friends. His phone was filled with pictures and videos of him that Minho couldn’t bring himself to delete.
But that’s where it stopped. After everything he had tried over the years, consumed by equal parts jealousy and dedication, they never crossed that threshold. He had witnessed countless boyfriends, hookups and heartbreaks. He had wiped his tears and drank with him all night. They even crossed physical boundaries on more than one occasion.
But there was no love. There was no confession like he had dreamt about countless times.
It burned inside him.
It pissed him off.
It made him reconsider the scam ad that popped up on his phone.
And now he was there, in the cold, dark bar that lit up as he walked through it, beams of light circling around both the ceiling and floor, everything in the room made of uninviting chrome.
Welcome to the Pleasure Shop.
A woman’s robotic voice greeted him, but it wasn’t the voice of the bartender that stood in front of him. They hadn’t moved their lips, instead only staring at him coldly with one cloudy eye, their slender arms placed awkwardly at their sides.
But if this cyborg had spoken, Minho already knew exactly how their voice would sound.
“You look just like him,” he said, sitting down on the silver bar stool.
They had the same black hair, the same pale skin, the same pouty cherry lips. But the fire wasn’t present in their eyes, and their movements weren’t graceful and fluid. They didn’t play with their rings or smack their lips or roll their eyes when he stared at him too long.
The cyborg turned, grabbed a card from beneath the bar, held it up with a robotic hand, and scanned it with their cloudy eye. They handed it to Minho, who saw that it already had his face on it, along with a barcode and small picture of a rainbow martini glass in the background.
In fact, the whole wall behind the cyborg was filled with empty martini glasses, and seemingly no other alcohol.
“You don’t talk?”
You’re here to forget.
You want to escape.
The feminine voice spoke again, not belonging to the bartender.
“Yes. And it looks like you already know who I am looking to escape from. How did you take his form?”
The cyborg ignored his question, turning around with a slow, rigid movement, reaching for one of the martini glasses on the wall behind them. When they placed it in front of Minho, it filled with strange, thick liquid, appearing in the glass like magic.
Drink.
His heart skipped and his nostrils flared.
He was terrified. Every instinct in his body told him to run.
But Minho didn’t. He had been running for over sixteen years.
So, he drank.