JYP was twelve hours of dance practice and six hours of vocal coaching, school was crammed in wherever you could find the space for it and sleep was an untold luxury. The tutors would scold you till every shred of self esteem was from your talent and they beat you if you ever dared talk back. 

It was hard, brutal work, but it was living the dream. And one way or another, every successful trainee puts in too much blood, sweat and tears in their rise to the top to back down at the final hurdle. 

Hoseok watches Seokjin from the corner of his eye throughout dance practice. He does not dance with ambition and that is far, far more irritating than his lack of limb coordination. He has not struggled to be here, he has not suffered, he’s worse than Taehyung. 

"Hoseok you’ve been off beat all morning," Jimin snaps.

He’s right, Hoseok has let himself become distracted by a glitch in the system. In any good science fiction movie he would pay dearly for ignoring it, but this is not science fiction. This is the hyper-real, superspeed world of the trainee idol, and if Seokjin isn’t competition then he’s hardly worth being called a distraction. 



Big Hit is dance practice if you think you need it, vocal coaching whenever you want it, studio time as often as possible and sleep is an untold luxury. The tutors praise you if you’re good and verbally guillotine you if you’re anything less, and sometimes there are whispers through the halls of misbehaving trainees being taken outback and hit hard enough to see the stars. 

Here they are trying to build a team. Hoseok isn’t used to this format, the idea that he has been thrown into the ring with people he is honestly expected to debut with is a mind bending gear change that he quickly realises he is poorly equipt to deal with. He’s too used to being cutthroat, to stamping out weak links as soon as they show their true colours.

This is not teamwork, this is something that the other trainees do not recognise as anything other than open hostility. When Hoseok talks down to Namjoon for skipping out on dance practice, the others rally; when Hoseok scoffs at Donghyuk missing the same note three consecutive times in vocal coaching, the others rally; when Hoseok shares a few choice words with Hunchul when he shows up late for recording sessions the others rally. 

When Hoseok is passed out on the dance studio floor, too starved and exhausted to stay standing for another moment, he wakes to find that someone has thrown a blanket over him and left two convinience store rice cakes by his head. He eats them alone, wrapped in the blanket, sobbing for reasons he cannot fully understand. 

Hoseok is so unused to having to care, and so unused to being cared for.

The kneejerk reaction to treat every new object in the trainee matrix is hard to breed out, however. Hoseok is the unstable king pin in the building of their team - things are fundamentally structured around Namjoon but without Hoseok’s approval the changes can never intergrate. This is something that the Team understands, and outsiders do not. 

Seokjin does not expect special treatment but his disadvantaged position demands it. Namjoon and Yoongi have known no other trainee life and the empathy comes naturally to them, but the other kids are far more flexible than Hoseok - it makes him wonder if it is him or Seokjin who is the outlier in this situation. 

The brainless boy with the natural goodlooks or the streamlined racing car, product of the idol industry that Hoseok has become - so bizarrely misplaced. He tries to remember what iit felt like to not fit in, but can only recall a calm understanding that everyone else was doing things wrong. 

He still thinks everyone else is doing things wrong, he’s just gotten better at understanding that he is not always right. 



Hoseok learned to rap the way he learned everything else - through hardwork and sleepless nights in aid of a better future. At the end of the day it’s just talking, just talking with a rhythm, just talking with a rhythm and a rhyme and a purpose. 

Rapping is hard. Namjoon thinks it’s fun. Hoseok learned early on that the people who find the hard things fun are the people it is not even worth trying to hold back. 

Yoongi also thinks rapping is fun, and production, but mostly he thinks long lazy Sunday mornings in which he lies in bed and does nothing are to be treaured. He is going to be a blip in the system, the kind of person who should have been disposed of on day one but has discovered a loophole - an idol by a technicality. Some days Hoseok has to remind himself that he is not here to erradicate Yoongi’s kind, but it can be hard, even once they’re friends going to the top together, it can be hard. 



Mutually assured destruction - it’s a . Seokjin benefits from it as much as the rest of them and yet they all know that the ground is perfectly stable without him. Now that he’s here the ground will shake, then still and hopefully it will be stronger than ever before. 

Or maybe Seokjin will be one grain of rice too many on the precariously balanced scale that they have become - maybe he’ll have to go, maybe Hyosang will have to quit, maybe they’re not worth it after all. It’s terrifying, but no one’s future is ever particularly certain in this industry anyway. 

That’s something Hoseok understands a whole lot better than the rest of them - trainees are not made to suffer for the twisted pleasures of the higher ups, or as a means of casting out the weak. They are simply being trained to live in fear of the world they have worked so hard to build falling apart around them, in the blink of an eye. It could happen to any of them, it isn’t going to get better any time soon. 



"Can you help me?" Seokjin asks

Hoseok knows what he’s asking for, but he always loved the thrill of playing coy, “help with what? The dance?”

"With everything,"

It’s impossible not to laugh. How is he supposed to explain that he doesn’t know how, that for all the distance he’s covered and all the lessons he’s learned he’ll never know how to pass them on. That kind of teaching requires a indepth understanding of how he came to be the person that he is today and if he knew how he learned it all, he would know how to unlearn it. 

Hoseok doesn’t know how to unlearn anything, Hoseok doesn’t know .

"No point in teaching you everything, they’re training you for everything else,"

And no matter where you go in this industry, that at least is a universal constant.