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...
Han met JL's eyes, unwavering. "Then I'll go through it with you. I'll stay here, no matter how much it hurts. No matter how much you push me away."
JL said nothing, the silence stretching thin and painful. His head dropped, eyes closing like he could shut out the whole world. Han stayed there, on his knees, stubborn and unmoving, ready for whatever fight JL had left in him -- ready to hold him together no matter how many times he shattered.
* * *
That night, Shuaibo stood outside the Zhang compound in Shanghai.
He'd taken the last flight out, telling no one. He simply appeared at the gates of the home he'd sworn never to return to, wearing jeans and a track jacket like armor against everything this place represented.
The guards recognized him immediately. Of course they did. Even prodigal sons were still sons.
"Young Master," they murmured, bowing deep. "The Patriarch is in the Moon Viewing Pavilion."
Shuaibo walked familiar paths -- past immaculate koi ponds, through sprawling gardens tended by thirty-seven gardeners, beneath lanterns lit every night for three centuries. Each step felt like swallowing glass. Each breath tasted of the life he'd rejected.
His grandfather sat precisely where he always sat, in robes that belonged in a museum, pouring tea from a pot worth a small fortune. He didn't look up as Shuaibo entered.
"I wondered," the old man rasped, his voice the texture of aged paper, "how long it would take."
Shuaibo stood there, rebellion made small by the weight of centuries pressing down from every beam, every tile, every perfectly placed stone.
Then he did what he'd sworn he would never do again.
He stepped forward. Then another.
And slowly, deliberately, he sank to his knees.
He placed his forehead against cold marble, assuming the posture of complete submission -- an obeisance reserved for emperors, ancestors, and the kind of request that stripped away pride.
"Grandfather," he said, voice trembling slightly, though he steadied it through sheer will.
The Patriarch's hand stilled over the teapot. In seven years of rebellion, Shuaibo had never once bowed. He'd stood unflinching through lectures, threats, and disinheritances. He had walked away from dynasty itself rather than bend his neck.
And yet here he was, prostrate upon stone that had witnessed six generations of Zhang power.
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"I ask nothing for myself," Shuaibo spoke clearly. "But there is someone -- my teammate. He ran until his body broke. And now they'll discard him, because broken things have no place in their world."
