Running to You | Park Han + JL + Steven | Haneulz + Stejay AU

Chapter 56: The Ride to Busan

Han finally set the folder aside, his movements precise, deliberate. Then he looked up, and it was like staring into a storm that had learned to speak softly. The bus rumbled beneath them, low and constant, like it too was holding its breath.

"I'm doing this," Han said, voice low, "because I'm trying. I told you I would."

He didn't say, You forgave me.

He didn't need to. JL remembered the steam, the closeness, the tremble that ran through him when Han had held him like something precious. Not possession -- not yet. But hope. And Han, who never hoped, had let him see it.

JL looked down at the half-melted ice pack in his hands, fingers damp with condensation. He wasn't angry. Not exactly. Just... tired of pretending he didn't still feel every word Han said like it was an echo inside him.

"I didn't say you weren't trying," JL said finally. "I just don't know what you're trying for."

Han didn't answer. But his thigh was close. Not touching. Not pressing. Just... waiting. The way someone might reach out a hand but leave it hovering in case you didn't want it.

Steven, Row 5

From Row 5B, the view was half-murderous, half-heartbreaking.

Steven sat with his long legs awkwardly angled to the side, his left knee pressed against the seat in front of him, which happened to contain two people he was very much trying not to commit minor violence against.

Or one person. Depending on the moment.

Han sat beside JL like he was born to occupy personal space he hadn't earned yet. Straight-backed, smug in the way only quiet geniuses and emotionally unavailable bastards could be. JL didn't seem uncomfortable -- Steven wished he could say he was -- but JL wasn't exactly relaxed either. His shoulders were drawn up the way they got when he was holding in too many things, and Steven recognized it because he'd spent the last two months learning how to read that posture like it was a second language.

And still, Han had managed to insert himself beside JL like he belonged there.

Like Shanghai had been erased with a few carefully chosen words and a protein gel packet.

Steven stared at the back of Han's neck with the intensity of a man imagining different ways to end a conversation with a headlock. Or a push. Not fatal. Just humiliating. Something involving a water cooler. Or maybe a very shallow ditch.

The bus rumbled along the highway, and Steven leaned his forehead against the window, watching the telephone wires whip past in blurred diagonals. He didn't want to eavesdrop. He really didn't. But the thing about emotional proximity was that it made you fluent in silences. And JL's silence was screaming.

He could hear them talk now and then -- Han's voice low, calculated. JL's quiet, brittle. They weren't flirting. But they were doing something. That slow kind of intimacy that creeps under your skin, like music through a floorboard. Something resurrected.

Steven's chest hurt in the way it always did when he remembered that there had been a before.

Before JL had kissed him on the rooftop in Shanghai.

Before JL had made his ribs ache from holding his breath too long during a hug.

Before Han had returned and reminded them both of how everything had once almost started with him.

Now JL was sitting beside the ghost of that rule's origin story. And Steven was in the row behind. Just a guy with too many feelings and no roadmap.

"Steven," Kyungho murmured beside him, voice low enough not to carry. He passed him a water bottle, unscrewed already.