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Crack .
The first swing met the ball with a satisfying jolt up his arm and Jaehyo was distantly pleased with himself that he could force his shaking hands to accomplish this. He was dimly proud of himself for thinking to come here instead of going drinking.
Crack .
Another satisfying hit. He tried to make it be satisfying, anyway. Tried to let the accuracy of his hits feel good.
Crack .
It didn’t feel good. Nothing felt good. He felt empty and hollow and sick. He felt carved out and alone. He felt splintered.
Crack .
Maybe the ball wasn’t enough. Maybe he needed something more solid than a moving object. Maybe he needed to think of something besides what he was doing. Unbidden, the face flickered into his mind and his breath hitched.
Crack .
The ball went wide and he had to take a moment to adjust his grip on the bat. His hands were shaking harder now. The cage was getting blurry and it was a moment before he realized that it was because his eyes were filling with tears.
Whuff .
The ball fell flat, sailed right past the bat when it swung. His breath caught in his chest, hitched painfully around a sudden stitch in his side. He raised his hand to wipe at the tears, missed the next ball entirely. His next breath came out in a sob that lurched him forward. The ball hit his shoulder and he swore, stumbled backward and slid down the cage.
Empty words were ringing in his head, phrases that were meaningless and would have hurt less. It’s not you, it’s me. I don’t think I’m ready for something right now. I think we should see other people. Not I feel like I’m settling, Jaehyo. I can’t keep settling.
Thump .
What were they settling for? Him? What, exactly, was not good enough? He regretted asking. He was never going to be able to forget.
Thump .
He regretted a lot of things. He regretted all the messages he’d sent after the replies stopped coming. He regretted banging on the door to try and figure out what was wrong. He regretted the fear that something had happened, the anxiety that had kept him up. He regretted catching a glimpse in a crowd, catching up, demanding answers.
Thump .
He should have gone drinking instead.
He stayed there, sitting in the batting cage with his head down, back pressed to the fence for so long he lost track. The sun had been up when he came, and at some point, the balls had stopped being fired, but he didn’t move. No one came to tell him his time was up, or that they needed the slot he was in. No, instead, they came at close and tapped gently at the door to tell him he actually did have to go. That was fine. It was changing anyway.
At first, it was just hurt. Hurt and sadness. It stayed hurt and sadness as he sat there, but by the time he felt like he could stand, something newer was blooming. Something dark and sickly and ugly. Anger was bubbling in, creeping around the edges of the hurt and making him strong enough to get his feet under him again. He used the bat to lift himself, then carried it out of the cage with him, wiping at his face. He waved to the staff, but didn’t drop the bat off. They didn’t question it.
He’d driven to the batting cages, but he didn’t drive away from it. He didn’t think he could, really. It was probably not safe for him to drive right now. He wanted something to hurt, he wanted something to break, and it wasn’t his own car.
He didn’t know how long he walked, or how far, but it was dark and quiet in the streets by the time he felt the buzzing in his pocket. The phone. How long had it been on silent? Had it been ringing while he was at the cages? He lifted it to his ear and hated the way his voice sounded when he greeted, “Jiho?”
“Jaehyo, where are you?” he asked, sounding mildly irritated and mostly worried. “Are you… Are you crying?”
“No,” he lied, wishing he had a face mask to hide it. Not that it would matter. Jiho couldn’t see him, but he could hear it in his voice
“Where are you?” Jiho repeated, a little slower, like he was wary of the answer.
He didn’t give one for a few moments, rubbing a hand over his face. He didn’t know. Or, more accurately, he didn’t want to admit to himself that he knew exactly where his feet had taken him when he wasn’t paying attention.
“Jaehyo?” the voice on the phone asked again, soft and concerned. His breath stuttered out of him, loud enough to be heard on the phone. “Where are you? I’ll come get you.”
The car was sitting on the street here. Jaehyo’s breath caught again, pulled out in a choked sob. His hands tightened, one on the phone, one on the bat. A choice.
He didn’t hang the phone up before he dropped it on the pavement. He didn’t really think about it, honestly. He didn’t care if it broke, didn’t care if he was going to have to replace it. He didn’t care about anything.
Crack .
The first swing met the headlight with a satisfying jolt up his arm. It was far more satisfying than the ball had been and he drew back, swung and lodged it in the headlight again, deeper now. He didn’t know much about cars, but he hoped it was expensive to fix headlights. He hoped the third swing damaged it so much it wouldn’t be an easy fix. the alarm started to go off, but he didn’t think about it enough to stop. It wasn’t important. This was.
Distantly, he heard someone yelling. He ignored that, moved to the side of the car and swung down. The mirror snapped off easily, hit the ground and shattered. He slammed a foot down on it anyway, for good measure. He kicked it out of the way and turned again, brought the bat down on the windshield. Day trips and dates and kisses in this car flickered through his mind as he swung one, two, three times. Until the bat broke straight through the tempered glass. He climbed up onto the hood, kicked through until pebbled glass rained down into the interior.
An arm wrapped around his waist, dragging him down and to the ground. “What the fuck are you doing?” a man’s voice demanded.
Jaehyo ignored him, shook him off and gave a push that made him stumble back a few steps. He didn’t recognize the face, likely just a good samaritan. A neighbor, maybe, who knew whose car it was. It didn’t matter. Once he was free of the arms, he turned and swung the bat again. It cracked the window.
A hand closed around the bat. Someone was yelling. Then someone was yelling in his face .
The hand around the bat pulled. He pulled back. Another set of arms closed around him, dragged him away. He didn’t think about it, but he definitely should have. He definitely should have thought about something , but he didn’t. He used the weight behind him to kick up, landed a wild leg into the stomach of the man trying to take his bat. His foot hit the car, pushed hard to topple the man behind him and send them both to the ground.
Another satisfying crack as they hit the pavement.
Jaehyo was breathing hard, tears in his eyes, and now there was a lot more shouting to accompany the sound of the alarms. The man who had his bat was kind, it seemed, because he dropped it before he moved forward. Not that kind, though, because he landed a punch on his jaw that made pain burst across his face.
That was the most satisfying crack of the night, something to make him hurt in a new way. In a way that wasn’t this aching hollowness in his chest.
Seeking that again, he surged forward and swung wildly. He didn’t care if he hurt the guy, didn’t really want to win this fight. He wanted to hurt.
His fist connected with his stomach, then with his arm as he got it up to guard. Someone smashed into his side, sent him careening into the shrieking car and knocking the wind from his lungs. A fist connected with his stomach and he doubled over. His arm was blooming in pain and warmth and slipping and he realized belatedly that he’d caught it on broken glass at some point. Another hand shoved his shoulder back, put him on his back against the car and a fist slammed into his cheek again, rattling his teeth in his skull and making him dizzy.
Then, abruptly, the pressure was gone from pinning him down. He slid down the car, coughing wetly and curling against the tire the way he had curled against the wall in the batting cages. He thought he heard sirens, but that could have been the ringing in his ears. Honestly, he wasn’t keeping track.
The fight was still going without him, which was confusing until a hand grabbed his shirt and hauled him to his feet. He stumbled, flinging an arm out to shove the body away. His eyes were too full of tears, his head throbbing, his ears ringing and the noise drowning out whatever they were shouting at him.
When he swung again, trying to shake whoever it was off, he was halted by hands on his face, a little rough in their hurry, but a gentle gesture. Thumbs swiped over his eyes until he could see and Jiho’s face looked up at him, eyes worried and lip bloodied. Then he was gone again, blurred out by tears.
This time, when Jiho grabbed him and dragged him away, he didn’t fight it. He let himself be dragged to another car and shoved into the back seat. He curled up there and pressed against the bruises blooming on his stomach for something to focus on.
He lost track of time again. They drove and Jiho had the music on loud enough that they didn’t have to talk and he didn’t have to quiet the way his breath was coming ragged from tears and probably bruised ribs. When the car stopped again, Jiho moved to the back seat and pulled, tugged, prodded until he was sitting up. He crouched at the door, hands on his knees as he looked up at him.
“Jaehyo,” he got out, and it broke the dam immediately. Jiho was quick enough to open his arms and catch him when he doubled over and mashed his face against his shoulder, letting out a ragged sob that had been building for two days.
From there it turned into a game of Jiho trying to drag him inside. Jaehyo was distantly aware he was still bleeding, that he had bled in Jiho’s car, and he internally promised himself he would pay for the cleaning later. Half an hour of crying and pulling and elevators later, Jaehyo gasped himself to a stop and blinked himself back to awareness. They were in Jiho’s apartment, of course they were, and he was sitting on the floor near the kitchen for some reason. He was curled up against the wall again, with Jiho sitting in front of him, a leg on either side of him and an arm around his shoulders, hand stroking through his hair gently.
“You doing better?” he asked softly, pausing his movements and pulling away enough to look at Jaehyo’s red face. He didn’t answer, but Jiho didn’t seem to mind. “Can we get the glass out of your arm now?”
Jaehyo frowned, pulled back some more, and looked at his arm. Blood was starting to dry, but there were shiny little bits wedged in his skin, pebbles of glass from the windshield. “Yeah,” he croaked, and winced at the sound of his voice.
Jiho moved away and stood, straightening out the ruined shirt before he offered him a hand. Once Jaehyo was on his feet, pain hit him in a fresh wave, like he’d shocked himself back to being aware of his body.
His ribs were killing him. His jaw ached. His arm stung. His knuckles felt raw. Jiho looped careful fingers around his wrist and pulled him to the bathroom. The mirror there made it worse. Jiho looked mostly okay, with a split lip and light bruising on his chin, but Jaehyo was wrecked. The parts of his face that weren’t red from crying were turning purple-black with bruises already. His cheek, his jaw. It was swelling up, making him look uneven and ugly. He dreaded seeing the rest of himself.
Jiho turned him away from the mirror and sat him on the toilet, making him sit so he could get the first aid kit from under the sink.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked finally, sitting on the edge of the tub with a pair of tweezers and starting to pull the glass out of his arm.
Jaehyo shrugged and looked away, not really wanting to see this. “Nothing to talk about.”
He hummed, ignored Jaehyo’s hiss before the little tink of glass hitting the tub came. “I feel like that’s not true.”
The silence persisted for another few long moments, weighing the air in the room down until Jaehyo felt like he might suffocate under the weight of it. “I didn’t mean to go there, I just… After what happened the other day, I got so…”
“You’re allowed to be mad, Jaehyo,” he said gently. Another gentle tink as another piece came free. “But you can’t destroy someone’s car for it. You can’t just hurt yourself because someone else hurt you.”
“ Settled ,” he reminded him, like Jiho didn’t know the full story. Like he hadn’t been there for the first night that Jaehyo had a breakdown over it. Like he hadn’t been there during his frantic worry and the subsequent loss of shit. The first one, anyway.
Jiho sighed heavily and tugged at Jaehyo until he leaned over, running water from the tub until it was warm and washing his arm off gently. “Yeah, we talked about that too. I thought we agreed that it wasn’t true.”
“You agreed that it wasn’t true,” Jaehyo mumbled.
Rolling his eyes, Jiho turned the water off when he could see the arm clearly and poked at the wounds again. Without the blood and glass, it didn’t look so bad. “You know it’s not true. You know that the kind of person who would say something like that is a dick. You know that the kind of person who says something like that to anyone isn’t someone you want to date.”
“Why couldn’t they just tell me that to begin with, though?” he asked, wanting to sound heated and instead sounding broken. It made him more angry, but he was running low on that now. His ribs were aching and he wanted to cry again. “I was losing my mind, thinking something happened, and it was just-”
“Jaehyo,” Jiho said sharply, not unkindly. A hand came up, pressed to his cheek to force him to look at him. “This isn’t something you could fix. You dated a shitty person. End of story. Sometimes, you love someone who sucks.”
He nodded, taking a shaky breath. “I may need you to tell me that again.”
“I’ll tell you a hundred times,” he replied instantly, no hesitation whatsoever. His hands started moving again, disinfecting the scrapes and cuts. “You’re great, Jaehyo. Everyone knows it. I know it. You are the one who deserves better.” Jaehyo’s lip trembled with the urge to cry again. He blinked quickly, trying not to start crying all over again. Jiho’s hand on his cheek didn’t help, nor did the way he pulled him down, held him against his chest and scratched gently through his hair. “You’re okay,” he murmured. “You can cry, Jaehyo. You can be hurt. I’ll be here.”
A sob broke through him again and he curled down against the man’s chest. “I’m sorry about your car,” he choked out.
“I can clean the car,” Jiho assured him.
“I’m sorry about your shirt,” he continued.
“I can replace the shirt.”
He took a shuddering breath. “I’m sorry you had to come find me.”
“I will always come find you.”
“Can I stay with you tonight?”
Jiho snorted, pushing him away just to get a hand on his cheek again, the one that wasn’t blossoming ugly and purple and painful. “You’re not getting out of my sight until I can be sure you aren’t gonna crack again.”