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

Chapter 64: The First

The walk home was quiet. The team bus had pulled into the university grounds late in the afternoon, and after the fanfare and spectacle of the Supermeet, everyone had been subdued, falling naturally into the hush. The kind of quiet that held things. Like a backpack you didn't know you were carrying until someone else took it. Rain was falling in thin, decisive lines -- not enough to drench, just enough to make the world blurry.

Steven didn't ask if he could come up.

He didn't have to.

JL didn't say anything when they reached his door. Just unlocked it, stepped inside, and left it open behind him -- the kind of open that wasn't an invitation, exactly, but not a rejection either.

Steven waited.

A second.

Two.

Then he knocked. Three deliberate knocks -- not even a full second apart. Not because he needed permission.

But because JL deserved to give it.

JL turned.

And opened the door the rest of the way.

There's this theory in astrophysics -- which is both too smart and too poetic to be entirely wrong -- that black holes don't actually destroy things. They just hold them. Forever. Collapsed beyond recognition, beyond shape, but still there. Trapped in memory. In force.

That was kind of how JL felt most of the time. Like his emotions had been compressed under so much pressure that they stopped having recognizable form. Just mass. Just gravity. Just... pull.

Of course Steven would come.

Of course he'd step inside, soaked from the rain, shirt clinging in ways that were annoying to JL's sense of calm and regulation and basic survival. Steven looked like someone who had been running toward something -- not away. Which was, frankly, unfair.

"I don't want you to be alone," Steven said. Just like that. No grand speech. Just the kind of honesty that makes you sit with it.

JL didn't have anything clever to say, so he stepped back. Opened the door wider. Let him in.

They didn't sit on the couch -- because JL didn't own one. They dropped to the floor, facing each other with knees overlapping, backs against opposing kitchen cabinets like two exiles waiting for the war to end. The kind of closeness that feels accidental until it's undeniable.

JL said, "I think I'm messed up," and meant it in the universal way, but also the specifically personal one. As in: My emotional reality is a six-car pileup of abandonment issues, self-worth deficits, and misplaced athletic ambition.

Steven waited.

"I push people away," JL continued. "Especially when I want them to stay. Because the only time anyone ever really saw me... was when I ran. That's what I was good for. Running. Winning. Not being."

It sounded stupid aloud. Which is usually how you know it's true.

"They said I was a distraction," JL added. "Too soft. Too much. So I ran harder. Tried to become the opposite of soft. I ran like I was trying to outrun the version of me no one wanted."

He turned to Steven, and something fragile leaked out of him -- maybe from the eyes, maybe the ribs.

"I don't even know how to be kissed without thinking I'll ruin it."

Steven didn't say that's not true.

He said something worse.

"JL," he said, soft and steady, "you are worthy of acceptance. And you are worthy of love. Even if you never run again."