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

Chapter 83: Even Those Who Are Broken

If he ever did.

Three days later, they brought the wheelchair, and everyone pretended it wasn't a coffin.

It gleamed in the corner with all the modern efficiency of something designed to solve an unsolvable problem. State-of-the-art, the nurse had chirped, as if technology could apologize for the fundamental betrayal of flesh, bone and nerves.

JL hadn't spoken since the diagnosis. He ate when Steven held food to his mouth, drank when water appeared at his lips, but these were automatic functions, no different from breathing or blinking. The real JL -- the one who laughed at Woongki's jokes and stress-baked for the team and ran like his soul was on fire -- that person had vacated the premises, leaving only this beautiful, broken shell that looked like him but wasn't.

"We should probably..." Kyungho started, then stopped, because finishing that sentence meant acknowledging what they all knew: that JL would need to learn to live in that chair, and that learning would require him to be present for it, and he wasn't. He was so profoundly not there that looking at him felt like looking at a photograph of someone who'd died -- all surface, no depth, no life behind the eyes.

"I'll do it," Steven said finally, and something in his voice made Han want to stop him, to say that maybe trying to force JL back into the world wasn't kindness but cruelty. But Steven was already moving, already kneeling beside the bed with that desperate gentleness of someone who believed love could fix anything if you just offered enough of it.

"JL," Steven whispered, and even his whisper sounded too loud in the room where JL's silence had taken up all the space. "We need to... I'm going to help you into the chair now, okay?"

JL didn't respond, and didn't resist. Steven slid one arm under his shoulders, the other under his knees, and lifted.

For a moment, they were heartbreakingly close -- Steven's careful strength cradling JL's unresponsive weight, the kind of intimacy that should have meant something but didn't because JL wasn't there to receive it. Steven might as well have been holding empty clothes for all the response he got.

"I've got you," Steven whispered, and Han could hear the tears Steven was fighting, could see them in the way his hands trembled as he lowered JL into the chair.

JL's body folded into the seat with the passivity of a doll. His hands fell into his lap. His legs, those traitorous legs that had carried him faster than anyone in two nations, arranged themselves uselessly on the footrests. And through it all, JL's eyes remained fixed on some middle distance that existed only for him, some nowhere place where broken things went to avoid being seen.

"There," Steven said, stepping back, trying to smile through what looked like physical pain. "See? Not so bad."

The lie hung in the air like smoke. Everything about this was bad. The chair was bad. The legs that didn't work were bad. But worst of all was the way JL had gone so far away that even his own tragedy couldn't reach him.

"You're still you," Steven said, dropping to his knees beside the chair, trying to find JL's eyes, trying to make contact with whatever was left. "This doesn't change that. You deserve to be loved, to be here, even if you never -- "

JL turned his face away, and it was the first voluntary movement he'd made in days. Not toward something but away from it, away from Steven's desperate kindness, away from words like "deserve" and "love" that meant nothing in the new mathematics of his existence.

Steven kept trying, his voice getting smaller with each attempt. "We're all here for you. The whole team. We'll figure this out together, we'll -- "

But he was talking to absence. JL had perfected the art of being not-there while still technically present, had become a master of existing without participating. His body sat in the chair but everything that mattered had gone somewhere else, somewhere Steven's love couldn't follow, somewhere none of them could reach.