Chapter Text
i. commander
Kim Jong-kook is so tired of being strong.
He’s said it before: to Yoo Jae-suk, of all people, in the pretend-intimacy of that white room, just the two of them, taking a seat before the hungry lenses of the cameras. Sometimes he has to say those things. Be those things.
The strong one. The powerful one. The person the other members are terrified of.
Sometimes, he wants to ask if they’re all right, when Lee Kwang-soo topples over from a smack, or after he’s lifted Jae-suk as if he were a toy and dumped him in the mud. He can’t, though. That’s not what the Tiger does, and so he chokes back the words instead.
They bicker, even though after years and years and years on the variety scene, they’ve worked a comfortable camaraderie, and he thinks he knows exactly how far he can go, and how much the others can take, and how much they’ll give as good as they get, but even then—
Sometimes, Kim Jong-kook wonders where the line is, and if he’s crossed it and hurt them, even though that’s the last thing he wants to do.
All those years on Running Man, of being the Commander, the Tiger, the strong man, the capable one who excels at games and anything physical (and really, quite a few mental challenges too), and sometimes he’s quietly terrified he doesn’t know how to be anything else.
If he isn’t strong, when his body stops bouncing back from the abuse and the demands he throws at it: what will he be?
Kim Jong-kook knows he’s going to find out, eventually.
But right now, he’s just tired of being strong.