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bangtanexchange2015-02-14 12:38 pm
bangtanmod) wrote in bangtanexchange2015-02-14 12:38 pm
Entry tags:
for everyone: variable orbits
Title: Variable Orbits
Recipient: Everyone
Pairing: Jin/J-Hope
Rating: pg-13
Word count: 4,478
Summary: Seokjin and Hoseok are partnered up for a monthly trainee evaluation.
Author’s notes: Dear recipient, Thank you for the lovely prompts! Here’s hoping I was able to write something close to what you wanted.
This is never going to work.
Even after a year of this life, somehow Seokjin is still the new guy. But he’s not just the new guy. He’s the new guy training to be an idol with two left feet and the inability to use a microphone properly.
In short: he’s useless.
Conclusion: he’s not an ideal partner.
Instead of afternoon dance practice, Seokjin gets shuffled in line with the newest trainees and they’re told to pick names from a hat. The names are of more experienced trainees. They’re pairing up for monthly evaluations.
He shuffles his weight from side to side, moves up another step in line. There’s always enough room around him in the practice room. Wouldn’t want to get too close to the klutz. He wonders if they can all see he’s always got one finger on the self-destruct button.
He thinks, the way idol trainees walk around bleeding for their dreams sure is a nice, romanticized idea. But Seokjin’s not too sure if this is what he wants and it shows all over when he’s the only one among them without bruises and scars. That alone is sign enough he doesn’t exactly want to be here. Not here as in here and now, but here as in this place, in this life, in this body. He’s content with getting by and it doesn’t bother him, not all that much. And while this fact provokes taunts and whispers behind his back from other trainees, it’s mostly never been a problem before.
It takes all of ten seconds for Seokjin to pick Jung Hoseok’s name, send a wary glance in Hoseok’s direction, and have the whole group unceremoniously burst into laughter.
He knows he’s screwed.
This is never going to work.
-
When Seokjin was in primary school, the first Saturday of every month was reserved for theatre visits with his father. They caught an early afternoon screening when there weren’t as many people, and Seokjin would line up at the concession stand next to his father and watch the popcorn machine shoot flying kernels ping-ponging against the encasement and listen to the crunch of the scoop digging into the tub of hot, popped corn.
Afterwards, during the drive home, they discussed the movie: scenes they liked, characters that frustrated them, if the music fit. This often turned into long-winded discussions with Seokjin babbling on and hardly leaving room for his father to get in a word or two.
By his final year of high school, when he started needing tailor-fitted uniforms for his broad shoulders and his mother finally allowed him to decide on his own hair cuts (“Mum, please, bowl cuts are so embarrassing. Senior photos, mum!”), Seokjin told his parents he wanted to study acting. He was preparing to audition for some choice university acting and theatre departments. There were no questions, no Are-you-sure’s? and for all the auditions, his father drove and waited sometimes hours before Seokjin finished.
He studied for a year, then was pressed by a professor to audition at an idol company they used to work for. Seokjin had a face suited for that industry, they said. He could (probably) have a great voice if he trained it properly, they said. At least give it a try, you never know, they said.
On one hand, he didn’t truly believe in any of it. On the other hand, it wasn’t hard for him to let go and move onto the next thing. All his life he’s felt like one those popcorn kernels, bouncing around from place to place, around and around, and never really sticking to anything.
The only thing that sticks is, of course, his parents.
Whatever he has to do and wherever he has to go to ensure that his parents are happy, he is determined to do it. Becoming an idol is not his first choice, and it’s not ideal, and he doesn’t have any real passion for this line of work. But if singing on music programs and dancing choreographed routines is what is going to make his parents proud, then, he decides, so be it.
-
Following partner selections, Seokjin makes a lot of mistakes. The first one is getting to practice late.
At first, Hoseok had not appeared irritated. Perhaps he hadn’t even noticed. But somewhere in the time Seokjin gently stepped in on the dancer mid-routine and the realization of finally being able to put more than a face and some rumours to Hoseok’s name, Seokjin finds his initial hope was wrong.
Their eyes meet in the mirror at the front of the room.
“Are you just going to stand there... or are we going to practice?” he says, words paced between breaths.
Seokjin is a bit taken aback by the lack of manners. After all, he is the oldest of the two. He walks over to stand beside he dancer, begrudgingly.
“Okay,” he says.
Some hip-hop song, with a name Seokjin cannot place, plays on the stereo and he tries to follow Hoseok’s lead. He tells himself to try.
Hoseok moves fast through the steps and Seokjin understands this is supposed to be an easy part, but he’s slow-learning, forgets steps seconds after seeing them, and his center of balance is completely off.
It’s fast. Seokjin makes a too-sharp turn and projects himself far left. Like a flood, Hoseok gets caught in the collision. A shower of limbs.
It takes an embarrassingly long moment for Seokjin to scramble away from where he lands on Hoseok’s arm and offer his own to help the younger trainee on his feet again.
Hoseok squints up at him for what seems like a timelapse of the entire song. But the next moment, he seems to remember himself and brushes the offer away with the turn of a cheek. He gets up on his own, jaw clenched.
“Sorry. Sorry.”
Seokjin says it twice because there’s at least a couple things he has to be sorry about.
-
Seokjin doesn't like disappointing people.
The entire week he spends all his unsolicited free time practicing, and it would be a more impressive feat if not for half the practice time used only on working out his nerves. If he doesn’t do this, he finds himself holding his breath and missing counts trying to compensate for gasps of air. Hoseok always gives him that look, that disappointed look, whenever Seokjin’s stamina funnels out before the song ends.
He performs the steps and hopes it doesn’t look too awful, hopes it’s good enough, though he knows Hoseok would never be satisfied with good enough. Hoseok: the natural talent, making everything Seokjin can't do look so easy, making Seokjin stand out in the worst possible way.
It’s not his fault he was born into this world clumsy and awkward. His body just. Wont. Work. Right.
He knows, and he doesn’t want to talk about the fact that he's making mistakes left, right, and center. Or that he's holding Hoseok back from performing his best. Or that he’s a frustrating case to work with. These things are pointed out to him on a daily basis. All of that hurts, but the worst part is knowing, and following up with not being able to do much about it.
The only way Seokjin is going to improve in time for the evaluation is by a miracle. Even he knows this much. Still, he has to ask:
"Can you teach me how to dance?"
Hoseok casts him a glance. His eyes are set afire by the fading light at the end of the hall as soft, velvet shadows bustle past them, performing against the glow.
It’s late and Hoseok’s eyes are droopy, the skin under them puffy and coloured with exertion, and they look at Seokjin like there could not possibly be a worse time to be asking this. He wants to be convincing, since he’s all Hoseok’s got for this evaluation, even if he’s nothing to the dancer yet. In Seokjin’s heart, he is still an actor, but he can’t really say who he’s trying to fool now.
"I don't know," is what Hoseok says.
There's nothing I can do to help you, is what Seokjin hears in the falling-out rhythm of sneakers down the hall.
-
The reality is, there are so many stories about Hoseok floating around the company it would be near impossible to not know who he is. Supposedly, Hoseok trained at JYP, and was part of a famous street dance crew in Gwangju, and saved all his money just to train in Seoul against his parents’ wishes. All sorts of rumours dance around him, but Hoseok reflects all of it; he’s determined and focused, but he’s friendly and always smiling. It’s as if nothing phases him.
Nothing except having someone as incompetent as Seokjin for a partner, that is.
Hoseok doesn’t say it, not to Seokjin. He doesn’t really say much to Seokjin at all, actually, choosing to communicate mostly in grunts and ambiguous gestures. But Seokjin can tell all the same. He can tell it’s a bit different between the two of them. He can tell Hoseok isn’t quite like he is with others when it’s just the two of them. Seokjin notices that Hoseok has toned down the routine for their evaluation more than once, replacing complicated moves with simpler ones. He’s noticed also that they are moving at a slower pace than other pairs.
Seokjin’s not dense, despite what the rest of the trainees think.
Generally, the other trainees think Seokjin is nice. Just nice. He is not a terrific singer, clearly cannot dance, and does not have much to offer in the talents department, but he is nice and polite.
Nice doesn't mean much here.
Nice doesn't get him recognition. Nice doesn't help him improve in the areas he's lacking. Nice is a cover-up for the constant ripple of muscles responding falsely to repetitions in a routine he should know by now. Nice is being the injured ligament for which the body learns to compensate—the weak link in Hoseok's otherwise flawless structure.
To Seokjin, fate putting the two of them together feels like a sick joke.
And, thinking of it that way, it’s hard for him to believe in himself.
There are dozens of trainees all on an entirely different level, and then there is Hoseok, who is miles ahead of everyone else. Hoseok has the feverish fluidity of a born dancer with the bony angles of growing up too fast, or trying to. Seokjin doesn’t have anything like that.
Sometimes he watches Hoseok dance over and over until he masters a move, and it occurs to him that he has never really tried that hard at anything in his life. Even acting. And look where that got him.
It’s hard for him to hold his own when everything he thought he once knew is running circles around him.
-
Along with practicing their own routine for the end of the month evaluation, they must also attend group practices. Two weeks into this schedule and Seokjin is still unable to keep up with the others. Their choreographer is aggravated with him. If he wasn’t too drained to care, Seokjin would be fed up with himself too.
This is how another day ends:
Hoseok is the last one standing and bows to the choreographer as he leaves the room. Shoulders up, he downs a his third bottle of water for the day and wipes a layer of perspiration off his reddened face with the front of his shirt, which is also sweaty and therefore not of any help.
The other trainees are collapsed on the floor catching a breath, or barreling out the door in a rush to be anywhere else. For a rare moment, no one else is watching what Hoseok is doing.
Normally Seokjin wouldn’t be watching either, being caught up in his own inadequacies and trying to get his breathing back to normal, but it’s kind of difficult not to notice Hoseok and the way he can control a room all on his own by simply being there. It makes him a bit jealous. He wishes he had that kind of presence.
Leaning against the back wall, Hoseok is close enough to talk to Seokjin, but not close enough to make it look that way. The silver lining of this is at least Hoseok is not outright ignoring him anymore.
Seokjin fans himself with a damp towel and focuses on something in the mirror parallel instead of what he will be scolded for next.
"Why are you here?" Hoseok asks.
His words are blunt. There’s no softness to his edges, but they aren’t sharp either. Fortunately, Seokjin is no longer surprised by the way Hoseok opens a conversation without reserve. Besides, with this, Seokjin often asks the same thing of himself.
"I don't know,” he says, pretending not to see the quirk in Hoseok’s lip. “I just want to sing.”
-
Seokjin doesn’t go to the studio often. He’s only been once, maybe twice. It’s not really his territory. Yoongi and Namjoon practically live in there, but that’s a given because they’re songwriters and that’s what they’ll be evaluated on at the end of the month. And he notices that, sometimes, early in the morning when Hoseok thinks no one else is awake, the dancer retreats to the studio. Seokjin finds it a bit strange. He’s never heard rumours about Hoseok rapping or singing before.
He decides to check it out for himself, to find out.
Hoseok is learning how to rap, to fit in with the rest of his crew, to be more dynamic, he finds out.
Hoseok isn’t used to sit-in’s while he’s there, but he likes the onigiri Seokjin originally bought for his own breakfast, he finds out.
“Don’t sit, you can’t—” Hoseok says when Seokjin lets himself in the studio.
Seokjin is seated.
“Okay. Go ahead.”
“Thanks.”
The studio is a small space. There’s always a low-level current of sound and energy. Even if you can’t hear it, you can feel it. It’s almost meditating: the hum of the equipment, the way the static vibrates in his ears.
Twenty minutes later, Hoseok takes the earphones off and steps out of the recording room to where Seokjin is sitting and watching. Still.
“Aren’t you supposed to be practicing?” Hoseok says, voice low and scratchy.
He sounds like been at the mic for so long that his throat is becoming an overworked muscle, deteriorating without time to repair itself.
Seokjin smiles, lips tight, and places one of the rice balls he unwrapped into Hoseok’s palm.
“Bit early for practice, don’t you think?” Seokjin says.
There’s a tiny jolt in the current. Hoseok gives him a cursory glance.
“Well, now you’ve heard. I’m no good.”
Seokjin isn’t sure what to say to that. Truthfully, would not make the best judge for rapping, but from what he can tell, it was just okay. Hoseok is not confident in his voice, that much is clear, and Seokjin would know what lack of confidence looks like. And he stumbles over his rhymes a few times before getting them right, but at least he gets them eventually.
Seokjin’s never seen Hoseok out of his element like this before. It hadn’t even occurred to him it was possible for Hoseok to struggle this much. With anything.
So they have something in common after all.
Part of him wants to be kind and say, that’s not true. Hoseok is good at everything else, so if he practices enough surely he will improve as a rapper, too. But another part also isn’t sure he really believes that, or that this is something Hoseok would even want to hear.
“I never thought of you like that,” he says instead.
Seokjin cannot tell if it’s any help or what it’s supposed to mean, though.
-
Shortly after starting his training at Big Hit, Seokjin was told to go on a diet.
Dieting, as it turned out, meant a cup of rice and 100g of chicken twice a day. Not filling, not glamorous, not nutritionally adequate. Unsurprisingly, it led to a lot of late night rebellious trips to a convenience store a few blocks away from the company building.
He wasn’t the only trainee foregoing diet, and there was an unspoken rule amongst them, a code: I won’t tell if you won’t. He would’ve actually liked to cook his own food, but he figured treating himself to a cup of ramen or a bag of crisps every so often wasn’t going to hurt. Anyway, he didn’t regret it.
On one of those not-quite-spring nights where each breath still comes out in white clouds and hands burn from the cold, Seokjin made a stop for some craving of the moment. It was a bit late, late enough that the other trainees had already been and headed back to the dorms. Since no one was around he resolved it would be okay to grab a soda, too.
So that’s where he was, at the back of the store with one hand reaching into the fridge, when he caught someone sitting alone by the window. They were wearing a bright green windbreaker zipped up to the top and had a cell phone pressed to their ear, head bowed as they spoke.
“I can’t come home yet… Dad, I’m working so hard… I don’t know.” Sigh. “I just want to dance.”
He hadn’t expected it. He never intended to overhear anything, and certainly not for Hoseok to turn around at the end of his call and find Seokjin standing there.
It was one of those caught with his hand in the cookie jar situations. Their eyes met for the first time and there was an awkward silence as Seokjin tried hard to swallow his surprise. There were a dozen things he could have said—Sorry, being the obvious one—but he didn’t say any of them. Couldn’t.
He offered a tight-lipped smile and abruptly turned away, like if he did it quickly enough, it would be as though he never overheard a secret he wasn’t supposed to find out.
He didn’t return to the convenience store for months. He felt unusually guilty about the snacks that night.
-
There’s a theory that you can figure out someone’s personality within the first five seconds of meeting them. If that’s true, then Seokjin figures out Hoseok is a habitual bullshitter.
It hasn’t even been a month since the two of them properly met, and yet here they are, sat at the window seats in the convenience store at 1AM thanks to Hoseok injuring his wrist in practice and Seokjin being unable to “mind his own damn business” (Hoseok’s words). Hoseok refuses to go to the ER, so Seokjin musters up the best first aid he can—borderline satisfactory—and drags the younger boy with him to get some ice.
Naturally, snacks follow.
Seokjin heats up two cups of ramen, grabs two bottles of soda, and watches Hoseok try to break the seal on a bottle with his undamaged hand.
This is never going to work.
“Uh,” Seokjin says, helpfully, “third time’s the charm?”
“Fuck off,” Hoseok says, but his words are cordial, and the corners of his eyes are doing this crinkly thing that reminds Seokjin of wrapping paper and presents and Christmas time.
Hoseok smacks Seokjin’s arm by habit and hisses so loud at the impact Seokjin fears it might shatter the bottle. He cradles his arm in his lap between his stomach and an ice pack.
Seokjin frowns and pops the cap for him. He doesn’t know for how long Hoseok hid his injury. It just turned up in practice, with Seokjin finding out by chance when he was trying to replicate a more difficult move and grabbed Hoseok’s arm for balance.
Hoseok nods his thanks, but he doesn’t say it, no.
It must hurt like hell.
"You don't have to do this, you know.” Seokjin says.
"Do what?"
"This.”
Without thinking, Seokjin touches Hoseok’s wrist, tentatively. Despite his trying, it’s enough pressure to make Hoseok wince anyway. His fingers hover in the air for a moment, and then make a short trail to Hoseok’s and curl lightly around. He’s still careful. He has to remind himself other people are fragile, sometimes, even people who do not look it.
Hoseok isn’t paying attention. Maybe he doesn’t even realize. Maybe whatever he can see outside the window in the dark is more interesting than Seokjin.
"You know what I mean. Don't run yourself into the ground and pretend it isn’t hurting you."
“Do I have to draw you a picture?” Hoseok says, dropping the pleasant tone.
“I’m fine.”
He has to stop himself from saying Hoseok wouldn’t be able to draw a thing in his current state anyway.
Hoseok continues, "You don't—" Pause. With his free hand, he takes a drink and swishes it in his mouth, like he’s trying to get a bad taste out. "You don't get it. Sorry, but it's true."
Seokjin lets it go—his fingers. He wasn't really holding onto Hoseok. He couldn’t do that. Probably no one could do that.
Hoseok balls his fists in his jacket pockets. The outlines of his fingers flex and release like a rubber band. When he looks up at Seokjin, his eyes catch the light and it tumbles the way a washing machine does, around and around. There’s something there, just below the surface, something difficult that makes both of them remain silent. Hoseok swallows, exhales—shaky—like he's about to laugh or to cry, and Seokjin suddenly becomes aware of their reflections and the steam from the untouched cups of ramen seething over frosted glass.
"Do you ever get that feeling like it could all be over today? That you might be wrong and have to start all over?"
Seokjin nods, weakly. He knows exactly how that feels. He’s felt it for a long time. The only difference is he’s is doing his damndest not to acknowledge it.
“I can't be the one who falls behind,” he says. Then quieter, as an after thought, “There's nothing else out there for me.”
"Do you... do you really think you won't get to debut?" Seokjin asks. He stirs the contents of his cup with a pair of cheap wooden chopsticks, around and around, clockwise.
"Well." Hoseok shrugs, an offering.
A ball drops somewhere in Seokjin’s chest and gurgles as it submerges, sinking for what feels like hours before it hits the bottom, silently scattering whatever lies beneath. Or maybe it’s just hunger.
They replace conversation with food and that’s that.
Except it’s not. Not really.
It’s strange—uncomfortable, more like—to find out someone like Hoseok has moments where he feels down and insecure. This is the same person who makes it his business to laugh or do quirky dances to cheer up the others, smiles at anyone as if they’re his good friend, and hides his injuries so he won’t be a dead weight to his partner.
Seokjin still can’t help but feel fooled somehow. If Hoseok is this good at pretending, it makes Seokjin wonder, between the two of them, who would really make a better actor.
Not that any of that matters now.
-
With a few days left until their evaluation, not much in Seokjin’s lack of abilities has changed. This is never going to work, but for some reason, Hoseok hasn’t given up on him yet. It’s probably because he already accepted he’s stuck with Seokjin no matter what, but Seokjin indulges in other possibilities. Sadly, indulging often leads to mind wandering and ultimately tripping over something: a bottle of water, his shoelaces, air.
The music comes to a pause a moment after Seokjin’s back meets the hardwood. Faintly, he thinks he hears Hoseok asking if he’s okay, but he’s more concentrated on the sharp pain shooting up his tailbone.
“You all right, hyung?” Hoseok asks.
That’s right, Seokjin thinks fondly, cringing only slightly as he shoots his partner a dorky thumbs up. At some point Hoseok started calling him hyung. He smiles.
“I don’t think that’s a normal reaction to falling on your ass but I guess that means you’re fine.”
He doesn’t offer a hand to help Seokjin up. He just sort of stands overhead, hands in his pockets, apparently unbothered with Seokjin staring up at him with this dazed expression on his face.
Seokjin doesn’t mean to, and later he won’t know why he started thinking out loud or how the thought even got into his head that—
“You know, you’re kind of—” Seokjin’s mouth come to a halt mid-sentence, like his lips forgot how to work, like they need a little grease. He licks his lips and then he’s mumbling again: “Pretty. From this angle.”
Hoseok laughs too hard and half snorts, half hiccups in that way that would be ugly coming from anyone else’s mouth. It’s a laugh you’d expect to hear at a party, travelling loud and far over the speakers, one that binds to the eyes and invites others to smile in return. Not so much the kind that hovers above with the yellow, fluorescent glow of practice room lighting behind him.
“Did you smack your head that hard?” he says, shaking his head.
Seokjin frowns. Maybe he did, but that’s not the point.
“You’re supposed to be the pretty one.” He holds up three fingers and says, “Hey, how many fingers?”
Seokjin swats Hoseok’s hand out of his face. “One,” he says, waving his middle finger at the dancer, because that what comes after telling someone they’re pretty, naturally.
Hoseok laughs and drops down and lies next to Seokjin on the floor, stretching out his arms and legs.
They share an easy silence.
“We should have a team handshake,” Seokjin says finally.
“A what?”
Seokjin pulls Hoseok’s arm until they’re both standing again. His fingers shake when he reaches a hand out. It could just be from the exertion of the day’s schedules. Hoseok snorts, but he gives in, not like there’s anyone but Seokjin around to judge him for it and Seokjin’s already seen him in more compromisable positions.
Just before they grasp hands, bump shoulders, and stick their fists in the air, almost as if previously rehearsed, a thought passes through Seokjin’s mind:
At least here in this moment, even if it’s only one moment, they don’t have to fear the future. There’s no making sense of the nonsensical or measuring how good, how much; no articulating what is secure and locked-in or what is spinning them aimlessly, around and around.
Maybe this is never going to work.
But there’s something in the thudding of feet with the clapping of hands and the drum beats and heartbeats assuring it can, it can, it will.
And this time, he believes in it.
Recipient: Everyone
Pairing: Jin/J-Hope
Rating: pg-13
Word count: 4,478
Summary: Seokjin and Hoseok are partnered up for a monthly trainee evaluation.
Author’s notes: Dear recipient, Thank you for the lovely prompts! Here’s hoping I was able to write something close to what you wanted.
This is never going to work.
Even after a year of this life, somehow Seokjin is still the new guy. But he’s not just the new guy. He’s the new guy training to be an idol with two left feet and the inability to use a microphone properly.
In short: he’s useless.
Conclusion: he’s not an ideal partner.
Instead of afternoon dance practice, Seokjin gets shuffled in line with the newest trainees and they’re told to pick names from a hat. The names are of more experienced trainees. They’re pairing up for monthly evaluations.
He shuffles his weight from side to side, moves up another step in line. There’s always enough room around him in the practice room. Wouldn’t want to get too close to the klutz. He wonders if they can all see he’s always got one finger on the self-destruct button.
He thinks, the way idol trainees walk around bleeding for their dreams sure is a nice, romanticized idea. But Seokjin’s not too sure if this is what he wants and it shows all over when he’s the only one among them without bruises and scars. That alone is sign enough he doesn’t exactly want to be here. Not here as in here and now, but here as in this place, in this life, in this body. He’s content with getting by and it doesn’t bother him, not all that much. And while this fact provokes taunts and whispers behind his back from other trainees, it’s mostly never been a problem before.
It takes all of ten seconds for Seokjin to pick Jung Hoseok’s name, send a wary glance in Hoseok’s direction, and have the whole group unceremoniously burst into laughter.
He knows he’s screwed.
This is never going to work.
-
When Seokjin was in primary school, the first Saturday of every month was reserved for theatre visits with his father. They caught an early afternoon screening when there weren’t as many people, and Seokjin would line up at the concession stand next to his father and watch the popcorn machine shoot flying kernels ping-ponging against the encasement and listen to the crunch of the scoop digging into the tub of hot, popped corn.
Afterwards, during the drive home, they discussed the movie: scenes they liked, characters that frustrated them, if the music fit. This often turned into long-winded discussions with Seokjin babbling on and hardly leaving room for his father to get in a word or two.
By his final year of high school, when he started needing tailor-fitted uniforms for his broad shoulders and his mother finally allowed him to decide on his own hair cuts (“Mum, please, bowl cuts are so embarrassing. Senior photos, mum!”), Seokjin told his parents he wanted to study acting. He was preparing to audition for some choice university acting and theatre departments. There were no questions, no Are-you-sure’s? and for all the auditions, his father drove and waited sometimes hours before Seokjin finished.
He studied for a year, then was pressed by a professor to audition at an idol company they used to work for. Seokjin had a face suited for that industry, they said. He could (probably) have a great voice if he trained it properly, they said. At least give it a try, you never know, they said.
On one hand, he didn’t truly believe in any of it. On the other hand, it wasn’t hard for him to let go and move onto the next thing. All his life he’s felt like one those popcorn kernels, bouncing around from place to place, around and around, and never really sticking to anything.
The only thing that sticks is, of course, his parents.
Whatever he has to do and wherever he has to go to ensure that his parents are happy, he is determined to do it. Becoming an idol is not his first choice, and it’s not ideal, and he doesn’t have any real passion for this line of work. But if singing on music programs and dancing choreographed routines is what is going to make his parents proud, then, he decides, so be it.
-
Following partner selections, Seokjin makes a lot of mistakes. The first one is getting to practice late.
At first, Hoseok had not appeared irritated. Perhaps he hadn’t even noticed. But somewhere in the time Seokjin gently stepped in on the dancer mid-routine and the realization of finally being able to put more than a face and some rumours to Hoseok’s name, Seokjin finds his initial hope was wrong.
Their eyes meet in the mirror at the front of the room.
“Are you just going to stand there... or are we going to practice?” he says, words paced between breaths.
Seokjin is a bit taken aback by the lack of manners. After all, he is the oldest of the two. He walks over to stand beside he dancer, begrudgingly.
“Okay,” he says.
Some hip-hop song, with a name Seokjin cannot place, plays on the stereo and he tries to follow Hoseok’s lead. He tells himself to try.
Hoseok moves fast through the steps and Seokjin understands this is supposed to be an easy part, but he’s slow-learning, forgets steps seconds after seeing them, and his center of balance is completely off.
It’s fast. Seokjin makes a too-sharp turn and projects himself far left. Like a flood, Hoseok gets caught in the collision. A shower of limbs.
It takes an embarrassingly long moment for Seokjin to scramble away from where he lands on Hoseok’s arm and offer his own to help the younger trainee on his feet again.
Hoseok squints up at him for what seems like a timelapse of the entire song. But the next moment, he seems to remember himself and brushes the offer away with the turn of a cheek. He gets up on his own, jaw clenched.
“Sorry. Sorry.”
Seokjin says it twice because there’s at least a couple things he has to be sorry about.
-
Seokjin doesn't like disappointing people.
The entire week he spends all his unsolicited free time practicing, and it would be a more impressive feat if not for half the practice time used only on working out his nerves. If he doesn’t do this, he finds himself holding his breath and missing counts trying to compensate for gasps of air. Hoseok always gives him that look, that disappointed look, whenever Seokjin’s stamina funnels out before the song ends.
He performs the steps and hopes it doesn’t look too awful, hopes it’s good enough, though he knows Hoseok would never be satisfied with good enough. Hoseok: the natural talent, making everything Seokjin can't do look so easy, making Seokjin stand out in the worst possible way.
It’s not his fault he was born into this world clumsy and awkward. His body just. Wont. Work. Right.
He knows, and he doesn’t want to talk about the fact that he's making mistakes left, right, and center. Or that he's holding Hoseok back from performing his best. Or that he’s a frustrating case to work with. These things are pointed out to him on a daily basis. All of that hurts, but the worst part is knowing, and following up with not being able to do much about it.
The only way Seokjin is going to improve in time for the evaluation is by a miracle. Even he knows this much. Still, he has to ask:
"Can you teach me how to dance?"
Hoseok casts him a glance. His eyes are set afire by the fading light at the end of the hall as soft, velvet shadows bustle past them, performing against the glow.
It’s late and Hoseok’s eyes are droopy, the skin under them puffy and coloured with exertion, and they look at Seokjin like there could not possibly be a worse time to be asking this. He wants to be convincing, since he’s all Hoseok’s got for this evaluation, even if he’s nothing to the dancer yet. In Seokjin’s heart, he is still an actor, but he can’t really say who he’s trying to fool now.
"I don't know," is what Hoseok says.
There's nothing I can do to help you, is what Seokjin hears in the falling-out rhythm of sneakers down the hall.
-
The reality is, there are so many stories about Hoseok floating around the company it would be near impossible to not know who he is. Supposedly, Hoseok trained at JYP, and was part of a famous street dance crew in Gwangju, and saved all his money just to train in Seoul against his parents’ wishes. All sorts of rumours dance around him, but Hoseok reflects all of it; he’s determined and focused, but he’s friendly and always smiling. It’s as if nothing phases him.
Nothing except having someone as incompetent as Seokjin for a partner, that is.
Hoseok doesn’t say it, not to Seokjin. He doesn’t really say much to Seokjin at all, actually, choosing to communicate mostly in grunts and ambiguous gestures. But Seokjin can tell all the same. He can tell it’s a bit different between the two of them. He can tell Hoseok isn’t quite like he is with others when it’s just the two of them. Seokjin notices that Hoseok has toned down the routine for their evaluation more than once, replacing complicated moves with simpler ones. He’s noticed also that they are moving at a slower pace than other pairs.
Seokjin’s not dense, despite what the rest of the trainees think.
Generally, the other trainees think Seokjin is nice. Just nice. He is not a terrific singer, clearly cannot dance, and does not have much to offer in the talents department, but he is nice and polite.
Nice doesn't mean much here.
Nice doesn't get him recognition. Nice doesn't help him improve in the areas he's lacking. Nice is a cover-up for the constant ripple of muscles responding falsely to repetitions in a routine he should know by now. Nice is being the injured ligament for which the body learns to compensate—the weak link in Hoseok's otherwise flawless structure.
To Seokjin, fate putting the two of them together feels like a sick joke.
And, thinking of it that way, it’s hard for him to believe in himself.
There are dozens of trainees all on an entirely different level, and then there is Hoseok, who is miles ahead of everyone else. Hoseok has the feverish fluidity of a born dancer with the bony angles of growing up too fast, or trying to. Seokjin doesn’t have anything like that.
Sometimes he watches Hoseok dance over and over until he masters a move, and it occurs to him that he has never really tried that hard at anything in his life. Even acting. And look where that got him.
It’s hard for him to hold his own when everything he thought he once knew is running circles around him.
-
Along with practicing their own routine for the end of the month evaluation, they must also attend group practices. Two weeks into this schedule and Seokjin is still unable to keep up with the others. Their choreographer is aggravated with him. If he wasn’t too drained to care, Seokjin would be fed up with himself too.
This is how another day ends:
Hoseok is the last one standing and bows to the choreographer as he leaves the room. Shoulders up, he downs a his third bottle of water for the day and wipes a layer of perspiration off his reddened face with the front of his shirt, which is also sweaty and therefore not of any help.
The other trainees are collapsed on the floor catching a breath, or barreling out the door in a rush to be anywhere else. For a rare moment, no one else is watching what Hoseok is doing.
Normally Seokjin wouldn’t be watching either, being caught up in his own inadequacies and trying to get his breathing back to normal, but it’s kind of difficult not to notice Hoseok and the way he can control a room all on his own by simply being there. It makes him a bit jealous. He wishes he had that kind of presence.
Leaning against the back wall, Hoseok is close enough to talk to Seokjin, but not close enough to make it look that way. The silver lining of this is at least Hoseok is not outright ignoring him anymore.
Seokjin fans himself with a damp towel and focuses on something in the mirror parallel instead of what he will be scolded for next.
"Why are you here?" Hoseok asks.
His words are blunt. There’s no softness to his edges, but they aren’t sharp either. Fortunately, Seokjin is no longer surprised by the way Hoseok opens a conversation without reserve. Besides, with this, Seokjin often asks the same thing of himself.
"I don't know,” he says, pretending not to see the quirk in Hoseok’s lip. “I just want to sing.”
-
Seokjin doesn’t go to the studio often. He’s only been once, maybe twice. It’s not really his territory. Yoongi and Namjoon practically live in there, but that’s a given because they’re songwriters and that’s what they’ll be evaluated on at the end of the month. And he notices that, sometimes, early in the morning when Hoseok thinks no one else is awake, the dancer retreats to the studio. Seokjin finds it a bit strange. He’s never heard rumours about Hoseok rapping or singing before.
He decides to check it out for himself, to find out.
Hoseok is learning how to rap, to fit in with the rest of his crew, to be more dynamic, he finds out.
Hoseok isn’t used to sit-in’s while he’s there, but he likes the onigiri Seokjin originally bought for his own breakfast, he finds out.
“Don’t sit, you can’t—” Hoseok says when Seokjin lets himself in the studio.
Seokjin is seated.
“Okay. Go ahead.”
“Thanks.”
The studio is a small space. There’s always a low-level current of sound and energy. Even if you can’t hear it, you can feel it. It’s almost meditating: the hum of the equipment, the way the static vibrates in his ears.
Twenty minutes later, Hoseok takes the earphones off and steps out of the recording room to where Seokjin is sitting and watching. Still.
“Aren’t you supposed to be practicing?” Hoseok says, voice low and scratchy.
He sounds like been at the mic for so long that his throat is becoming an overworked muscle, deteriorating without time to repair itself.
Seokjin smiles, lips tight, and places one of the rice balls he unwrapped into Hoseok’s palm.
“Bit early for practice, don’t you think?” Seokjin says.
There’s a tiny jolt in the current. Hoseok gives him a cursory glance.
“Well, now you’ve heard. I’m no good.”
Seokjin isn’t sure what to say to that. Truthfully, would not make the best judge for rapping, but from what he can tell, it was just okay. Hoseok is not confident in his voice, that much is clear, and Seokjin would know what lack of confidence looks like. And he stumbles over his rhymes a few times before getting them right, but at least he gets them eventually.
Seokjin’s never seen Hoseok out of his element like this before. It hadn’t even occurred to him it was possible for Hoseok to struggle this much. With anything.
So they have something in common after all.
Part of him wants to be kind and say, that’s not true. Hoseok is good at everything else, so if he practices enough surely he will improve as a rapper, too. But another part also isn’t sure he really believes that, or that this is something Hoseok would even want to hear.
“I never thought of you like that,” he says instead.
Seokjin cannot tell if it’s any help or what it’s supposed to mean, though.
-
Shortly after starting his training at Big Hit, Seokjin was told to go on a diet.
Dieting, as it turned out, meant a cup of rice and 100g of chicken twice a day. Not filling, not glamorous, not nutritionally adequate. Unsurprisingly, it led to a lot of late night rebellious trips to a convenience store a few blocks away from the company building.
He wasn’t the only trainee foregoing diet, and there was an unspoken rule amongst them, a code: I won’t tell if you won’t. He would’ve actually liked to cook his own food, but he figured treating himself to a cup of ramen or a bag of crisps every so often wasn’t going to hurt. Anyway, he didn’t regret it.
On one of those not-quite-spring nights where each breath still comes out in white clouds and hands burn from the cold, Seokjin made a stop for some craving of the moment. It was a bit late, late enough that the other trainees had already been and headed back to the dorms. Since no one was around he resolved it would be okay to grab a soda, too.
So that’s where he was, at the back of the store with one hand reaching into the fridge, when he caught someone sitting alone by the window. They were wearing a bright green windbreaker zipped up to the top and had a cell phone pressed to their ear, head bowed as they spoke.
“I can’t come home yet… Dad, I’m working so hard… I don’t know.” Sigh. “I just want to dance.”
He hadn’t expected it. He never intended to overhear anything, and certainly not for Hoseok to turn around at the end of his call and find Seokjin standing there.
It was one of those caught with his hand in the cookie jar situations. Their eyes met for the first time and there was an awkward silence as Seokjin tried hard to swallow his surprise. There were a dozen things he could have said—Sorry, being the obvious one—but he didn’t say any of them. Couldn’t.
He offered a tight-lipped smile and abruptly turned away, like if he did it quickly enough, it would be as though he never overheard a secret he wasn’t supposed to find out.
He didn’t return to the convenience store for months. He felt unusually guilty about the snacks that night.
-
There’s a theory that you can figure out someone’s personality within the first five seconds of meeting them. If that’s true, then Seokjin figures out Hoseok is a habitual bullshitter.
It hasn’t even been a month since the two of them properly met, and yet here they are, sat at the window seats in the convenience store at 1AM thanks to Hoseok injuring his wrist in practice and Seokjin being unable to “mind his own damn business” (Hoseok’s words). Hoseok refuses to go to the ER, so Seokjin musters up the best first aid he can—borderline satisfactory—and drags the younger boy with him to get some ice.
Naturally, snacks follow.
Seokjin heats up two cups of ramen, grabs two bottles of soda, and watches Hoseok try to break the seal on a bottle with his undamaged hand.
This is never going to work.
“Uh,” Seokjin says, helpfully, “third time’s the charm?”
“Fuck off,” Hoseok says, but his words are cordial, and the corners of his eyes are doing this crinkly thing that reminds Seokjin of wrapping paper and presents and Christmas time.
Hoseok smacks Seokjin’s arm by habit and hisses so loud at the impact Seokjin fears it might shatter the bottle. He cradles his arm in his lap between his stomach and an ice pack.
Seokjin frowns and pops the cap for him. He doesn’t know for how long Hoseok hid his injury. It just turned up in practice, with Seokjin finding out by chance when he was trying to replicate a more difficult move and grabbed Hoseok’s arm for balance.
Hoseok nods his thanks, but he doesn’t say it, no.
It must hurt like hell.
"You don't have to do this, you know.” Seokjin says.
"Do what?"
"This.”
Without thinking, Seokjin touches Hoseok’s wrist, tentatively. Despite his trying, it’s enough pressure to make Hoseok wince anyway. His fingers hover in the air for a moment, and then make a short trail to Hoseok’s and curl lightly around. He’s still careful. He has to remind himself other people are fragile, sometimes, even people who do not look it.
Hoseok isn’t paying attention. Maybe he doesn’t even realize. Maybe whatever he can see outside the window in the dark is more interesting than Seokjin.
"You know what I mean. Don't run yourself into the ground and pretend it isn’t hurting you."
“Do I have to draw you a picture?” Hoseok says, dropping the pleasant tone.
“I’m fine.”
He has to stop himself from saying Hoseok wouldn’t be able to draw a thing in his current state anyway.
Hoseok continues, "You don't—" Pause. With his free hand, he takes a drink and swishes it in his mouth, like he’s trying to get a bad taste out. "You don't get it. Sorry, but it's true."
Seokjin lets it go—his fingers. He wasn't really holding onto Hoseok. He couldn’t do that. Probably no one could do that.
Hoseok balls his fists in his jacket pockets. The outlines of his fingers flex and release like a rubber band. When he looks up at Seokjin, his eyes catch the light and it tumbles the way a washing machine does, around and around. There’s something there, just below the surface, something difficult that makes both of them remain silent. Hoseok swallows, exhales—shaky—like he's about to laugh or to cry, and Seokjin suddenly becomes aware of their reflections and the steam from the untouched cups of ramen seething over frosted glass.
"Do you ever get that feeling like it could all be over today? That you might be wrong and have to start all over?"
Seokjin nods, weakly. He knows exactly how that feels. He’s felt it for a long time. The only difference is he’s is doing his damndest not to acknowledge it.
“I can't be the one who falls behind,” he says. Then quieter, as an after thought, “There's nothing else out there for me.”
"Do you... do you really think you won't get to debut?" Seokjin asks. He stirs the contents of his cup with a pair of cheap wooden chopsticks, around and around, clockwise.
"Well." Hoseok shrugs, an offering.
A ball drops somewhere in Seokjin’s chest and gurgles as it submerges, sinking for what feels like hours before it hits the bottom, silently scattering whatever lies beneath. Or maybe it’s just hunger.
They replace conversation with food and that’s that.
Except it’s not. Not really.
It’s strange—uncomfortable, more like—to find out someone like Hoseok has moments where he feels down and insecure. This is the same person who makes it his business to laugh or do quirky dances to cheer up the others, smiles at anyone as if they’re his good friend, and hides his injuries so he won’t be a dead weight to his partner.
Seokjin still can’t help but feel fooled somehow. If Hoseok is this good at pretending, it makes Seokjin wonder, between the two of them, who would really make a better actor.
Not that any of that matters now.
-
With a few days left until their evaluation, not much in Seokjin’s lack of abilities has changed. This is never going to work, but for some reason, Hoseok hasn’t given up on him yet. It’s probably because he already accepted he’s stuck with Seokjin no matter what, but Seokjin indulges in other possibilities. Sadly, indulging often leads to mind wandering and ultimately tripping over something: a bottle of water, his shoelaces, air.
The music comes to a pause a moment after Seokjin’s back meets the hardwood. Faintly, he thinks he hears Hoseok asking if he’s okay, but he’s more concentrated on the sharp pain shooting up his tailbone.
“You all right, hyung?” Hoseok asks.
That’s right, Seokjin thinks fondly, cringing only slightly as he shoots his partner a dorky thumbs up. At some point Hoseok started calling him hyung. He smiles.
“I don’t think that’s a normal reaction to falling on your ass but I guess that means you’re fine.”
He doesn’t offer a hand to help Seokjin up. He just sort of stands overhead, hands in his pockets, apparently unbothered with Seokjin staring up at him with this dazed expression on his face.
Seokjin doesn’t mean to, and later he won’t know why he started thinking out loud or how the thought even got into his head that—
“You know, you’re kind of—” Seokjin’s mouth come to a halt mid-sentence, like his lips forgot how to work, like they need a little grease. He licks his lips and then he’s mumbling again: “Pretty. From this angle.”
Hoseok laughs too hard and half snorts, half hiccups in that way that would be ugly coming from anyone else’s mouth. It’s a laugh you’d expect to hear at a party, travelling loud and far over the speakers, one that binds to the eyes and invites others to smile in return. Not so much the kind that hovers above with the yellow, fluorescent glow of practice room lighting behind him.
“Did you smack your head that hard?” he says, shaking his head.
Seokjin frowns. Maybe he did, but that’s not the point.
“You’re supposed to be the pretty one.” He holds up three fingers and says, “Hey, how many fingers?”
Seokjin swats Hoseok’s hand out of his face. “One,” he says, waving his middle finger at the dancer, because that what comes after telling someone they’re pretty, naturally.
Hoseok laughs and drops down and lies next to Seokjin on the floor, stretching out his arms and legs.
They share an easy silence.
“We should have a team handshake,” Seokjin says finally.
“A what?”
Seokjin pulls Hoseok’s arm until they’re both standing again. His fingers shake when he reaches a hand out. It could just be from the exertion of the day’s schedules. Hoseok snorts, but he gives in, not like there’s anyone but Seokjin around to judge him for it and Seokjin’s already seen him in more compromisable positions.
Just before they grasp hands, bump shoulders, and stick their fists in the air, almost as if previously rehearsed, a thought passes through Seokjin’s mind:
At least here in this moment, even if it’s only one moment, they don’t have to fear the future. There’s no making sense of the nonsensical or measuring how good, how much; no articulating what is secure and locked-in or what is spinning them aimlessly, around and around.
Maybe this is never going to work.
But there’s something in the thudding of feet with the clapping of hands and the drum beats and heartbeats assuring it can, it can, it will.
And this time, he believes in it.
no subject
And yeah this was really nice, and I really love the details - the imagery with the popcorn and stuff. :)
no subject
As a Seokjin stan I loved his characterization and portrayal here. At times I had to clutch a table to steady myself from the onslaught of feels. The fifth portion was perhaps one of my favorite ones, hitting on points too close to home and accumulating to this one line:
"Sometimes he watches Hoseok dance over and over until he masters a move, and it occurs to him that he has never really tried that hard at anything in his life. Even acting. And look where that got him."
The interspersed moments where they still aren't quite friendly with each other but at least are getting to know one another: Hoseok becoming an inspiration for Seokjin and Seokjin cheering him on in his own way. The fact that because of this pairing for the evaluation, he gets to learn and see sides of Hoseok he would never have had the privy to, the weaknesses and insecurities masked and essentially this line that made me almost cry:
"Seokjin still can’t help but feel fooled somehow. If Hoseok is this good at pretending, it makes Seokjin wonder, between the two of them, who would really make a better actor."
The perfect balance and bringing it back to what Seokjin originally wanted. A beginning and an end hidden within text. Simplicity and easy reading of sentences and everything else I-
The hope that comes and the way it settles back into this level of comfortability and humor. Hoseok indulging Seokjin and Seokjin believing...
It reminds me a lot of American Hustle Life and how because of the two being paired together that their friendship seemed to be a bit deeper, a bit more grounded, a form of compatibility and ease that interweaves together perfectly. Because it might not be what they originally wanted, but it is what they like now.
I'm getting incoherent at this point so all I am going to say is THIS WAS LOVELY AND FABULOUS AND THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR WRITING 2SEOK!!
no subject
and the point is i like what you did with him here! i like that his voice is very practical, which is something i associate with jin. he's aware of his shortcomings and where he stands. and i really like that you went a bit into his acting backstory, where he came from. and your j-hope is good too. i think when looking at j-hope when he's not, you know, on it could be easy to be kind of overwrought or angsty about it, but the way you presented his insecurities feels very natural and realistic.
echoing what the commenter above me said, i think this is a great companion to their scenes in AHL, you provide some of the emotional context for their scenes and i feel like i could look at any of these scenes as outtakes from their lives, it fits them well.
oblig quotes:
It’s late and Hoseok’s eyes are droopy, the skin under them puffy and coloured with exertion, and they look at Seokjin like there could not possibly be a worse time to be asking this. He wants to be convincing, since he’s all Hoseok’s got for this evaluation, even if he’s nothing to the dancer yet. In Seokjin’s heart, he is still an actor, but he can’t really say who he’s trying to fool now. i feel like i need to apologize to jin about how stoked i was on j-hope's frustration with him in this fic but I LOVE IT glare at him some more!!!
Nice doesn't get him recognition. Nice doesn't help him improve in the areas he's lacking. Nice is a cover-up for the constant ripple of muscles responding falsely to repetitions in a routine he should know by now. Nice is being the injured ligament for which the body learns to compensate—the weak link in Hoseok's otherwise flawless structure. I LOVE THIS METAPHOR i love this description of jin (again i feel like i should apologize to jin himself)
He’s still careful. He has to remind himself other people are fragile, sometimes, even people who do not look it. !!!!
thank you for writing this pairing, you have my eternal gratitude ♥
no subject
well done pre-debut fic is hard to come by, and this one was just right on the dot. and just. everything was written so well! like the above commenter, i also really loved the ligament metaphor (i thought that was very aptly done).
thank you for writing this! <3 this was brilliant. you are brilliant!
no subject
i love how you word things, this is so beautiful :')
amazing
(Anonymous) 2015-02-25 10:40 pm (UTC)(link)