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

Chapter 86: For the First Time

Han's face crumpled slightly before he managed to return the smile, his chest expanding with something too large and overwhelming to contain. 

I know, his expression replied. And you're perfect.

* * *

By the end of the week, Coach Yang had given JL his new position: Assistant Coordinator.

The title came with a small office overlooking the track, a desk that had seen better decades, and a stack of administrative responsibilities that would have overwhelmed someone less determined to prove their worth. But for JL, it was salvation disguised as paperwork.

Each morning, he rolled into his new office, his hands gripping the wheel rims with practiced efficiency as he maneuvered around the narrow doorframe. His days now held structure and purpose. Travel rosters needed organizing, equipment required cataloging, and each team member's dossier demanded updating. He attacked these tasks with the same methodical intensity he had once brought to training, as if competence in this new role could somehow balance the scales of what he'd lost.

It was while reviewing the team files that the full weight of their shared history crashed over him.

Steven's photograph stared up from the manila folder, captured during his first evaluation at KNSU. Young, eager, radiating the kind of unguarded hope that only came before life taught you to protect yourself. JL traced the edge of the photo with one finger, his chest swelling with an ache that wasn't pain anymore -- it was love, pure and uncomplicated.

Steven. Who had loved him first, loved him gently, loved him enough to step away when stepping away meant JL might live. JL understood now what that sacrifice had cost -- understood that Steven had given up the person he loved most because he wasn't strong enough to be hated, and had been wise enough to know it.

The thought didn't diminish Steven in JL's eyes. If anything, it made him love Steven more fiercely, more gratefully. Steven had chosen JL's survival over his own heart. Had trusted Han to do what he couldn't, had walked away so JL could walk again.

JL's fingers lingered on the photograph, memorizing the hope in Steven's young face. He wanted Steven to find that hope again. Wanted him to be as radiantly, impossibly happy as JL felt in this moment. Steven deserved that kind of joy -- deserved someone who could love him the way he had loved JL, completely and without reservation.

"Be happy," JL whispered to the photograph, the words carrying all the love he'd never been able to give Steven the way Steven had needed it. "Please be so, so happy."

Han's file lay beneath Steven's, and JL found himself staring at another ghost from their collective past. The Han in this photograph looked impossibly young, his dark eyes serious but untempered by the months of caregiving that had carved new lines around them. This was the Han from before Shanghai, before Australia, before the accident had remade him entirely.

JL traced Han's photographed face with reverent fingers, marveling at the transformation. That young Han had been sharp-edged and guarded, brilliant but brittle, quick to cut with words when he felt cornered. But the man who now helped him dress each morning, who anticipated his needs before JL even voiced them, who had learned to love without conditions or barriers -- that man was someone entirely different. Someone who had been forged in the crucible of their shared suffering and emerged not harder, but deeper. Stronger in ways that had nothing to do with walls and everything to do with an unshakeable foundation of devotion.

The Han he loved now still got grumpy when Woongki and Shuaibo invaded their apartment to argue about K-pop survival shows with JL, dragging Han into debates about which idol group deserved to win. ("But Team Beat has the best songs! They deserve a win! What do you think, Han??" Woongki would insist, while Han rolled his eyes with grudging affection.) He still grumbled when JL pushed himself too hard during therapy, muttering about stubborn idiots who didn't know their own limits. But underneath that familiar gruffness was something unassailable -- a maturity that came from choosing love over pride, again and again, until it became his nature.