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

Chapter 84: The Lowest Point

But the worst days were the quiet ones.

When JL stopped fighting entirely. When he lay limp and unresisting while Han manipulated his limbs through range-of-motion exercises. When tears ran silent and constant down his face, pooling in his ears, while Han pretended not to notice.

Those were the days Han would return to his own room afterward and stand fully clothed under scalding water, pressing his palms against his eyes hard enough to see stars, muffling sounds that wanted to be screams but came out as something smaller and more broken.

The sobs would come, painful things that felt like they were tearing something loose inside him.  All the grief he'd swallowed rather than shown. All the love he'd felt but never voiced, pooling now on a shower floor. When the sobs stopped, Han stood on shaking legs, composed his face, and returned to check on JL.

* * * 

JL's body was changing. The muscle mass he'd built through years of training was melting away with horrifying speed. His skin had taken on a grayish pallor, stretched too thin over bones that seemed sharper every day. Bedsores threatened constantly despite Han's vigilance. His hair, once carefully maintained, hung lank and greasy, matted to his skull.

"Get out," JL would rasp when Han appeared each morning, the words automatic now, ritual.

"You need to be cleaned."

"I don't care."

"I do."

This exchange had become their greeting, their prayer, their call and response. Sometimes JL would laugh -- a bitter, broken sound that seemed to hurt coming out.

"Of course you do. Because you're so good at fixing things. Always have been."

Han never knew how to respond to that. Because he wasn't fixing anything. He was just maintaining, like someone endlessly repainting a house that was rotting from the foundation. Each day JL slipped a little further away, and all Han could do was wash the evidence of that slippage from his skin.

"I don't know how to fix this," Han admitted once, kneeling beside the bed with a basin of cooling water. "I don't know how to make this better for you."

JL turned then, really looked at him for the first time in days. His eyes were clearer than usual, which somehow made it worse.

"Then stop trying."

The words hung between them like a challenge. Han set down the washcloth, met JL's gaze directly.

"I can't. You can scream at me. Hate me. Throw something. Just -- don't disappear like this."

JL's lips trembled, his chin pulling tight against emotion that threatened to spill over. But he turned away again, back to the wall, back to the middle distance where nothing could reach him.

Han returned to his work in silence. Washing what could be washed. Changing what needed changing. 

His hands moved with practiced efficiency now, no longer hesitant or disgusted. This was simply what love looked like in its most distilled form -- not passion or poetry, but the willingness to kneel in someone else's filth and call it holy.

When he lifted the blankets to change the sheets, the extent of JL's deterioration hit fresh. Hip bones sharp enough to cut. Ribs visible through skin. The muscles of his legs already showing signs of atrophy despite Han's daily massages.

At one point, as Han lifted those useless legs to clean beneath them, JL's whole body began to shake.

"Don't," his voice broke. "Don't look at me."