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

Chapter 84: The Lowest Point

Han froze, hands still supporting JL's calves, feeling the tremors run through wasted muscle.

"I said I see all of you. Even the parts you hide." Han said, in a voice determined not to shake. 

JL squeezed his eyes shut, turned his face into the pillow, but didn't resist anymore. Let Han see all of it -- the bedsores threatening at his tailbone, the rash from too many hours in unchanged clothes, the way his body had begun to shrink and curl in on itself.

When it was done, Han sat heavily in the chair beside the bed. His shirt was soaked with sweat and other things. 

With what seemed to be ever more increasing frequency, he felt the prick of tears that wouldn't be held back, the helpless moisture in his eyes reminding him he had not been trained for this particular kind of endurance. 

That he had so naively thought love meant fighting beside someone, not watching them surrender by degrees.

* * *

The breakthrough, when it came a month later, was so small Han almost missed it.

Another morning of forcing JL upright. Another session at the parallel bars they'd installed in the living room. JL's hands wrapped around the rails, knuckles white, while Han supported most of his weight from behind.

"You don't have to today," Han said, softer than usual. Four months since this had all began had worn his voice down to a whisper. "We can rest."

JL's jaw clenched. Something flickered in his eyes -- not hope exactly, but something adjacent to it. A stubbornness that looked almost like the old JL.

"I... let's just get it over with."

Han swallowed hard. "Then I've got you."

What followed was not miraculous. JL pulled, Han lifted, and for a moment -- just a moment -- some of the weight seemed to shift. JL's legs, those traitorous, useless legs, trembled with something that might have been effort rather than just gravity.

His face was contorted in silent sobs. Tears ran in tracks now familiar down JL's cheek, from the combination of immense pain, effort and frustration. 

Then it was too much for him to maintain and he collapsed into Han's arms. 

And then -- so small Han thought he'd imagined it -- movement.

Just a twitch. The smallest curl of JL's left toe. Barely visible. Maybe not even real.

But Han saw it.

He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. He wasn't sure, not yet. He didn't want to give JL the cruelty of false hope.

So he held him instead, rocking slightly, whispering nonsense into his hair while JL sank into in his arms, exhausted.

Later, after Han pulled the blanket up to JL's chin before bed, he had been about to move away and switch off the light. 

But JL turned to him, in a moment of burning clarity. His eyes were fever bright, filled with sorrow and ache. Han's breath hitched. His JL, the one before the accident, lingered like a ghost behind those eyes. 

"Han, I am so sorry. For everything." His gaze held shame, sorrow, self-loathing. But most of all, it held acknowledgement. 

Han almost broke down right then and there. "JL, you've done nothing wrong."

"Please don't leave me." The plea was barely voiced, raw and small. The first real thing JL had asked for since the hospital.

Han's throat closed entirely. He couldn't speak. Could only nod, pressing his forehead to JL's, breathing the same air, existing in the same space.

"Never," he managed finally. "Never."

After JL finally slept, Han sat in the living room staring at nothing. The parallel bars gleamed in the low light. The apartment smelled of disinfectant and effort and something harder to name -- not quite hope, but not despair either.

He thought about that twitch. That tiny, possibly imagined movement.

But Han sat with it instead, holding the maybe-miracle close, afraid that speaking it aloud might make it disappear.

Tomorrow he would lift JL again. Would help him endure the pain and agony again. Would clean what needed cleaning.

But tonight, in the silence of an apartment that had become a shrine to endurance, Han allowed himself one thought:

Maybe.

Just maybe.

It was enough to go on.