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

Chapter 62: Even If You Never Run Again

It wasn't Eli's voice that broke him.

It was the memory of a kitchen light at 1 a.m. Soft and gold. A wooden spoon clicking against a tin pot. Coach Jim humming something tuneless as he adjusted the flame. Coach Jim was pushing eighty-five, and he had a bad cough. The kind JL kept telling him to go get checked, but Coach Jim waved it away saying he was too old for doctors. 

"JL, my son, you deserve to be loved," he'd said that night, pouring the stew over rice with blocky, gnarled hands. "Even if you never run again in your entire life."

JL sat on the little kitchen stool, staring at the tile floor. Hot tears, unbidden, began to dot the surface.

"But you will run again, son. It's just that, you need to run for you. Not anyone else."

That sentence lived in JL's chest like a splinter.

Coach Jim never said much. He didn't hug. He didn't ask questions he knew would go unanswered. But he'd opened his front door when JL had nowhere else to go, no money, no Eli, no apartment, just a set of cracked ribs and a bag that still smelled like antiseptic and hospital sweat.

He let him sleep in the spare room and gave him his old T-shirts to wear. And when JL couldn't stand to be looked at, Coach Jim just handed him a bowl and said, "Eat."

That was love, in the shape of things.

* * *

The email came weeks after the fall.

JL was still using crutches. His legs ached at night, the pain ghosting hot through the injury, so that he relived the moment he fell again and again. 

The subject line of the email was blank.

There was only a video file. The crash. The stumble. His body folding in on itself like paper. And one line beneath it.

This is what happens when you go soft. You lose everything.

No salutation. No signature. Not even his name.

Just that.

* * *

Coach Jim had submitted the scholarship paperwork in secret.

JL hadn't known. Not then.

He'd been too busy trying not to cry into his garlic rice, still bruised from the fall, still wearing borrowed clothes, still feeling like the world had packed up and left without him. He hadn't noticed the click of an old laptop in the next room. Hadn't asked what the typing was for.

He never would've guessed.

Because Coach Jim had never once asked for thanks. Or recognition. He just saw a boy who thought he was broken -- and decided to take matters into his own hands.

He typed out the forms with fingers stiff from arthritis. He attached scanned meet sheets and video clips shaky with wind. There was one of JL barely thirteen, legs too long for his body, crossing the finish line with a grin like it was all still possible.

He didn't have fancy words. But the letter he wrote said this:

"He runs like he's carrying more than his weight. You have to see his sprint in person. I don't have the degrees to tell you how special it is. But I've been coaching forty years. And I've never seen it like this before."

He sent it off just before sunrise. Then he made rice, put a pot of stew on, and waited for JL to wake up.

When the call from KNSU finally came, JL answered it with his heart in his throat and doubt strangling his voice.

Coach Jim didn't say congratulations. He just nodded once, like the outcome had never been in question.

"Told you," he said.

Then he coughed.

And coughed again.

And this time, he didn't get better.

He was in the hospital when JL took his first 200m time trial at KNSU. When JL shaved milliseconds off a record that Han had held for two years. When Coach Yang and the assistant shook their heads in disbelief.

But Coach Jim wasn't there to hear it.

He passed away that same week.

JL never got to send him a photo of his KNSU tracksuit. The new one he'd ironed the night before. He had meant to ask someone to take a picture -- just one, smiling, maybe holding his spikes up by the laces.

* * *

Back in the locker room, JL sat perfectly still.

The others had filtered out, or maybe they were still there, talking low and not touching him, like the way people walk carefully around broken glass.

He couldn't tell.

What he could tell was this:

His breath didn't feel like his own.

His body -- fast, beautiful, functional -- felt like it was made of someone else's pain.

And everything inside him was starting to unravel in slow, quiet threads.