track team AU | love triangle | slice of life | slow burn | found family | comedy + longing + insane rizz
JL transferred to Korea's most elite sports university hoping for a fresh start. He didn't expect to be rooming beside the nation's top sprinte...
The thing about lying on your back staring at ceiling fans: they become hypnotic in a way that's either meditative or completely unhinged, depending on your current relationship with reality. I was going with unhinged, because meditative people probably don't spend their evenings contemplating blade velocity while nursing bruised knuckles and wondering if they've ruined everything.
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The fan blades sliced through the air, each lazy rotation marking another chance to replay the worst afternoon I'd had in recent memory. Four hours had passed since I'd punched Han. Four hours, which in regular time is barely long enough to watch a movie, but in post-violence reflection time feels roughly equivalent to eons.
My knuckles hurt where they'd made contact with Han's face, and I couldn't deny that there had been a moment of pure satisfaction when my fist connected with his perpetually composed expression and watched his eyes go wide with genuine shock. Like he genuinely hadn't considered someone might one day punch him for his cold, perceptive honesty.
The satisfaction had lasted approximately 1.5 seconds, which was how long it took for Han to recover and punch me back. My ribs were still protesting this development, sending up little flares of pain every time I breathed too deeply or existed in my current corporeal form.
I opened and closed my fist, watching the ceiling fan blades rotate through my splayed fingers. The pain in my knuckles throbbed with each heartbeat, a steady reminder of my spectacular descent into violence, but it didn't hurt nearly as much as the realization of what Han had said to me in those moments before everything went sideways.
"He's already suffering, Steven. He's already in pain."
There's something uniquely awful about someone else saying a truth you've worked hard to ignore. Especially when that someone is Park Han, who was irritatingly good at cutting straight through layers of comforting denial. Even though I hated it -- God, I really hated it -- I couldn't pretend he was wrong.
I'd watched JL slowly unravel for weeks, skipping meals, pushing himself beyond his limits, slipping quietly back toward shadows I'd thought he'd left behind. I'd tried gentleness, patience -- I'd done everything I could think of except confront him directly. Han had taken one look and ripped the bandage right off. I couldn't decide whether I was angry or just jealous he could do it so easily.
Because that's what this was, wasn't it? Love. Not the simple kind you see in movies, but the messy, painful kind where you watch someone disappear a little more each day and you're too afraid of making things worse to do anything that might actually help.
My phone buzzed again, vibrating softly on the floor next to me. There was JL's message, still unanswered: "Steven, is your hand ok?"
I stared at the screen, guilt twisting my stomach. JL worrying about me felt backwards, wrong. I flipped the phone over, not ready to reply yet.
