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It’s like motion blur. The space between one place and another is a lot of things, none of them particularly spacious. It’s dizzying, overwhelming, disorienting—but Hoseok doesn’t want to call it a sickness.
Not even when he’s trying so hard to hold back dry coughs that tears slip hot from the corners of his eyes. They’re on a plane going… somewhere new, Hoseok thinks. He’s not sure. His head is pounding and he swears his lungs hurt, but the less attention they draw to themselves the better, even in first class. It’s not just strangers, Hoseok has learned, but cameras that seek out moments of vulnerability. He doesn’t usually mind, but he’s tired, and—
“Hoseok-ah,” comes a whisper from behind the curtain to his pod.
“Hyung?” asks Hoseok. He scrubs at his eyes with a loose, exhausted fist.
There’s a little grunt of agreement, and then the curtain peels back far enough for Yoongi’s face, shiny from the sheet mask he likely just took off, to peer through. “You okay?”
It’s a running joke that the seven of them share some form of telepathy. Hoseok wonders, though, just sometimes, if there isn’t something to it. To knowing someone so well you get to know yourself better too.
“Fine,” he croaks.
Yoongi rolls his eyes at him, face still bracketed by the curtain. He looks like a little ghost. “Want company?”
There isn’t space, but Hoseok says yes anyway, because there are six hours left of this flight and he’s feeling less and less grounded with every minute that passes. Like he’s on the other side of the window: a stranded bird in flight, a lost balloon, anything but a real person with a real body.
Yoongi climbs in, complaining under his breath about the blanket quality on this airline before relaxing into the seat, one ankle hooked over Hoseok’s, hair pressed into Hoseok’s neck.
With Yoongi’s weight against him, Hoseok can feel warmth in every one of his own fingers and toes.
/
The thing about it is that Hoseok usually likes traveling. He considers himself to be very good at it, actually. He’s a planner who’s not afraid to go off-script, meticulous without clinging so tightly to his itineraries that he’d miss something amazing, and he treasures their scraps of free time in new places.
Travel is liminal. It’s the surface of a soap bubble. It’s possibility splayed out like pinpricks of light in a stadium—connecting, twinkling, temporary, warm.
/
Hoseok knows, intellectually at least, that the motorcycle is loud, that the pavement beneath them is slamming against the tires like its own backing track, that other people are yelling directives in his ear. In reality, however, he can only hear the sound of his own shrieking.
“Fighting, hyung!” comes a cry from another bike. Jimin’s fist is raised triumphantly in the air as he clings to the driver’s waist and cackles.
If Hoseok had any breath to catch he’d yell right back, but his vocal chords are a little busy right now.
It feels like an eternity before the motorcycle rolls to a stop, slowly and then with a final jerk that throws him against the back of the stunt driver, who has been kind enough to overlook the shouting. “Sorry,” he manages, hoarse, and he feels the body beneath him laugh.
“It’s fine,” he says, and then Hoseok is being guided off of the bike and bundled into a blanket.
“That must have looked really cool,” Jimin gushes under his own blanket, giggles spilling out of him like he’s still riding the adrenaline high. “As long as your face isn’t in it, I think it’ll make it into the video.”
Hoseok pouts but doesn’t protest. “The fans like when I’m loud,” he says instead, which just makes Jimin laugh more.
“They do, hyung. They do.”
His eyes light up like he wants to say something else, but they’re interrupted by a call from the director. “Let’s try that one more time!” she shouts.
Hoseok feels the blood drain from his face, and after a moment his weak knees are responsible for holding not only himself up, but a cackling Jimin, too.
/
In the car ride back to the hotel, Hoseok’s phone rings.
“Did I get the timing right?” his father asks excitedly when Hoseok picks up. They’ve been playing phone tag for a few days, time zones dizzying and ever-changing.
Hoseok smiles, cheeks sore from the concert, and says, “Yeah, perfect timing. How are you guys? How are things?”
Every conversation with family feels like a waterfall these days, rushing words and time flooding in one direction. If fame has taught Hoseok anything, it’s that once something is out of the box you can’t ever put it back. As his father speaks to him calmly about their day, the road flies out from beneath them. Fifteen minutes to the hotel, Hoseok can’t help but think. Five up to his room. An hour, maybe, before he needs to go to sleep so he can wake up and do it all over again.
“... and that’s why your mother is banned from the community garden,” his father laughs, finishing up a story Hoseok had only half been paying attention to.
A pang of guilt jolts through him. “Ha,” he laughs, belated.
There’s a pause over the line. “Hoseok-ah, tell me about you. Are you okay? Eating well?”
“Yeah,” says Hoseok immediately. “Yes, I’m eating. I’m good, you shouldn’t worry about me.”
“That’s what parents do.” His father’s tone is— not warning, but right at the edge of it. Almost disapproving.
“I know, I know,” answers Hoseok. “Really, though, I’m fine.”
He doesn’t think about the third pair of practice shoes he’s bought in as many months. How the soles get worn down so quickly under the weight of this work.
/
The underbelly of the stage is a mess of light and noise, and Hoseok bounces with his head ducked as staff members wheel him from one side to the other for his next entrance. It’s early enough in that show that the adrenaline is still pumping hard enough to crowd out fatigue, but not so early that he didn’t need to get his ankle taped up again.
“Your shoulder too?” the physio had asked, holding up the tape.
Hoseok remembers turning to the stylist, who nodded but asked that they use skin-colored tape because he tends to sweat through parts of the white shirt they’ll put him in later.
He feels the tape pulling at him now, perfectly in rhythm with the rickety movement of the cart. It’ll peel up at the edges when he dances, but for now it stays, sticky and supportive. No one warned him about this when he joined, but Hoseok is a dancer. He’s been tearing his body apart and limping through joyful moments for as long as he can remember. He never planned on a future without this kind of reckless ambition. So his heel aches; so his breath veers unsteady when he forgets to be careful; so every little jolt of the cart over a bundle of wires sends a sharp pain through the back of his skull. Hoseok knows about sacrifice, tally marks accumulating with every concert. Is it worth it, he sometimes wonders, and feels the weight he’s carrying on his back like lines in a ledger.
And then he catches the edges of the crowd chanting their names as they approach the lift, raucous and grateful and stunning, and the slate is wiped clean once more.
/
A cap pulled low over his face. A staff member’s nondescript jacket dwarfing his narrow shoulders. The steady plod of his own footsteps accompanying hundreds of others by the side of the Han.
He won’t exhale in relief until he’s home, but this was a break he’d been needing. The others tell him he’s slow to ask for help. They complain about it sometimes, in that joking way that’s not really joking, and Hoseok can only ever offer them a shrug and empty promises to do better. It’s not that he doesn’t think it’s important to talk about your problems or find a shoulder to lean on. They wouldn’t have made it this far if every one of them didn’t intimately know what it’s like to be held through a nervous breakdown. It’s just that Hoseok hardly ever knows what he needs well enough to ask for it, and by the time he finds the words the emotions are already half-gone. Better to put it into a song—give it an ironic twist, laugh between lines in the demo, get hopeful about the hopeless bits. Have some fucking fun with it, right?
His burden is heavy tonight, dragging down the slope of his shoulders, the corners of his mouth. It’s almost always humid this time of year, but the torrential downpour last night must have cleared out the worst of it, because Hoseok breathes easy as he walks.
What do I need? he wonders to himself absently. The thrumming flutter of nerves caught between his ribs doesn’t have a name or a remedy. If this thing that drives him, that makes music out of the hard parts and calls it beautiful, that sits pretty in the pit of his stomach and surges both when he needs it and when he really, really doesn’t—if this is the thing he has to abandon to be happy, then maybe this walk by the water that asks nothing of him is happiness enough.
A few dozen meters ahead, children shriek and tumble in the grass. To their left, young couples dot the landscape with picnic blankets and portable speakers. In another life, that’s him with a takeout bag in hand, him in a boat on the water laughing into the bright sky and all of its sunshine.
Hoseok thinks about his extraordinary life, the tension it leaves in his jaw and hands, the incomparable rush of terrifyingly unconditional love, and feels himself smile.
/
Outside of the train’s window, a meadow pours over the hills like spilled paint. The sun is an egg yolk and Hoseok stares at it until his eyes water. It’s been a long… well. Week, month, year—however you want to look at it, exhaustion creeping into the edges of the picture. The others are mostly asleep and scattered around the train car (except for Jimin, who’s playing cards with a few staff members), and Hoseok had been planning on doing the same, but his brain’s too awake for that.
So he’s been half-dozing while looking out at the scenery.
They’re technically filming, he knows. Any of this could be used as b-roll or behind the scenes footage. But it’s easy to forget about that when they’re three and a half hours into the ride and the planned games are done. No more secret cameras or half-scripted conversations, at least until they reach their destination.
“Hyung?” comes a voice from behind him, and he turns to find Jungkook peeking over the edge of the seat, obviously sleepy but wide-eyed all the same. “Are we close?”
His hair is ridiculous. Hoseok can’t help the laugh that bubbles out of him, and he only laughs harder when Jungkook rolls his eyes before giggling himself. “A couple hours, still,” he answers.
Jungkook groans, forehead falling to bump against the seat. “Wake me up when we get there,” he mumbles into the fabric.
Hoseok laughs again. “Come on, don’t sleep like that. You’ll mess up your neck before the show.”
“I’ll ask for a new one.” “A new neck?” asks Hoseok.
He feels helplessly fond when Jungkook just nods, already half-asleep again. Hoseok’s exhaustion is less pressing now, a manageable ache behind his eyes rather than the thick blanket of tiredness it was before, and he gets up and moves a row back.
Jungkook grumbles when he’s jostled—“You’re fine,” Hoseok soothes—but he does eventually settle happily with his head on Hoseok’s shoulder, drifting.
Out the window, the landscape speeds by.