The Long and Winding Road || A Vhope FF ||✔️

Chapter 1

You need a break, Yoongi had said.

You need some time out of the public eye, Yoongi had said.

Let me arrange a three month stay in a small town completely free from the troubles of big city life or people who give too much of a shit about you, Yoongi had said, which had finally been the thing that had made Hoseok break down and finally agree to this 'vacation.'

It wasn't a vacation, as much as it was a--mostly--self imposed exile, but that was what happened when you were as famous as Hoseok was, and just had the entire world explode into your face. You needed a break, to give the public some time to forgive you, and then slink back into their hearts.

Hoseok knew that his fans--his real fans, not the possessive weirdos that lurked the darkest corners of the internet and occasionally on the street outside the company building--weren't mad about this. In fact, he had seen a lot of them defending him. But the loudest voices were always the most negative, and so he knew that some people were disgusted with him for even trying to have a personal life at all, and so.

Now here he was, in his car, driving to the destination that Yoongi had programmed into his GPS just that morning.

This was going to be good for him, he reminded himself. He had been getting burned out anyway, and had gotten sloppy, which was why he and Hyosung had gotten caught to begin with. But Hoseok refused to date someone that he didn't care about like that--even if netizens were pressuring him, saying that it would look better if he was in love instead of just horny--and so he had to take a break.

But still. Hoseok didn't become one of the most popular male soloists in Korea by sitting on his ass. He worked his ass off for that, after having despaired that it would never happen, that his dreams were impossible and that they would never work out back in the early days. Only they had worked out, because Hoseok had never stopped working, not even for a second.

So the fact that he was going to have to unplug...he wasn't sure that he could do it. Wasn't sure if he even wanted to do it, to tell you the truth.

Despite all this, Hoseok was going to at least try, damn it. Because he did deserve this. And he did really really need to get a break from the constant online harassment, and the articles, and the speculation about how all of this was going to ruin his career forever.

If he didn't, he was going to start to believe all the people who said that.

I am going to have a good, relaxing time for three months. I will be completely successful limiting my online presence, and access to the mean comments that I read at two in the morning just to stress myself out more. This will be good for me, Hoseok thought, commanding himself to be positive. He wanted this to work that badly. He needed it to, so when he came back, he would be better than ever.

He was only fifteen minutes away from his destination, and was ready for his time off to officially begin.

So this was, of course, when Hoseok heard the loud pop of his tire bursting, and the screeching of metal against gravel.

Cell service was, of course, horrible in the middle of nowhere.

That had been part of its appeal, to Yoongi, when he had set this all up. Now? Now it was the worst kind of inconvenience. Hoseok had no option but to sit and wait for someone to drive by unless he wanted to walk for roughly three hours.

"Fuck," Hoseok said out loud, unable to help the way the curse slipped out of his mouth. Fuck.

He sat in his car with the front door open and his blinkers turned on, and waited for somebody to come by as he played Candy Crush on his phone, hoping that the battery didn't die on him even while he did it.