Work Text:
Gaon knows when he wakes up it’s going to be a bad day.
His migraine is awful, pressing behind his left eye with the insistence of a battering ram. Even the thin shafts of light from between the shades are too much and he whines, rolling over in bed to smother his face in a pillow. He knows he could get up, stumble to take whatever medication is supposed to help with this, but that means moving.
Eventually, he does manage to drag himself out of bed, if only with the hope that the sooner he gets going, the sooner he can move to float about the pain or make it lessen just a little. The clothes he puts on feel too substantial, too there, but he swallows a mouthful of too-bitter coffee and goes to work.
Work is a grind. Staring at the screens for too long makes it worse and he burns through the stash of painkillers in his desk before lunch. He’s lucky Jinjoo knows he has migraines and keeps her voice quiet, but there’s only so much she can do. Their office is made too much of glass, bouncing light around white walls and reflective floors in the middle of the hustle and bustle of busy halls. He spends too long in a quiet bathroom, his hands over his eyes, nose buried in his gray jacket just to give his senses a break.
By the time he’s ready to leave, his body aches with the strain of clenching his jaw to avoid the pain, his head pounding exhaustion into his veins. Jinjoo gives him a worried look as he pushes open the door, catching his elbow and asking if he needs someone to help him get home. He shakes his head, saying he needs to go pick up some more medication anyway. He leaves her there and walks off.
He wishes he had let her help.
He doesn’t know who they are. Whether they’re would-be muggers, or punks spoiling for a fight, or more goons looking to send a message.
It’s gotten to the point where he can no longer recognize which ones claim to follow Kang Yohan and which ones don’t.
They don’t take anything from him, they just leave him by the corner of some building he doesn’t recognize. Now it’s bad. He can feel himself getting sloppier with each step he takes, the effort of moving almost too much. He drags himself to a bus stop and all but collapses into a seat.
His head bumps and rattles against the window and he wishes it could jar loose the part of his brain that makes him hurt.
Several passengers give him strange looks at how he looks, small cuts and bruises on his hands and face from where he’s been thrown into walls and onto the ground, but he focuses on hauling himself up to get off at the right stop.
By the time he makes it to the top of the driveway and through the door, he’s dizzy with exhaustion. The thud of the door behind him makes him whimper, the noise too much, too much. This house with its echoless walls snuffs out any hope he has of hearing anything from the outside world so he stands there, dumbly soaking in the silence as his body aches.
But then there are loud footsteps clattering down the hall and he can’t do it anymore.
“For someone who enjoys making us eat like ‘normal people,’ you’re an impressive hypocrite.” He sounds calm, but Yohan often starts calm, and then there’s a hand around his throat or he’s being thrown into something hard. “So what reason do you have for staying out so late?”
He tries, he does, to open his mouth to say…what, he doesn’t know. ‘Sorry,’ probably, but there’s too much. His tongue feels like lead.
“Nothing to say for yourself?” Now he’s angry. His head pounds as Yohan comes closer. Some hysterical part of him notes that he still hasn’t changed out of his suit. “Are you too ashamed to even look at me?”
The force of something grabbing his chin and forcing it up is enough to draw tears to his eyes. He tries again, tries to speak, but all that tumbles out of his mouth is garbled apologies and sounds too pitiful to be described as anything other than a whine.
He does not and has never expected tenderness from Kang Yohan.
He expects a scoff or a scathing dismissal. He expects a casual remark about his state of dishevelment or a smirk about picking fights he can’t win. At the most, he expects to be let go without further comment or a question about who did this, what happened?
He does not expect hands to carefully slide up to his shoulders and under the straps to his backpack, taking it off and setting it on the ground. He does not expect the same thing to happen to his coat, slid from him, and hung over a nearby hook. He does not expect to be led down the hall, one hand on his back, another around his wrist.
And yet here he is, still dizzy with exhaustion, sitting on a couch as Yohan presses a warm cup of something into his hands. A gentler hand tips his chin up now, the light still making him wince slightly as his head changes position. Yohan’s brow is furrowed as he inspects each of the cuts on Gaon’s face.
“You shouldn’t scar,” he says, “most of them are scabbing over already.”
Gaon just blinks slowly.
“Are you hurt somewhere else?” The lights are too bright. “You’re in pain.”
“Lights,” he manages, “lights.”
“Butler, turn down the lights.” Gaon almost whimpers in relief as the lights finally stop drilling into his head. “There, that’s better, isn’t it? Did you hit your head? Did they throw you into something?”
Gaon wants to answer, he should answer, but he’s still shaking, trembling with the effort of keeping himself still in the waves of pain that threaten to bowl him over. Yohan must see it because suddenly there’s a blanket draped over his shoulders.
“You’ve had a very long day,” comes a soft voice, “haven’t you, baby deer?”
When a warm hand slides up to rub gently at the back of his neck, he can’t keep his head up. A rough exhale tears out of his throat and oh, he could cry.
In the end, he doesn’t have much of a choice. Tears run down his face and into his lap, a few falling into the mug still clutched in trembling hands. Yohan tuts.
“Salty tea isn’t good,” he says, taking the mug from him, slow and careful, “you should…”
He trails off when he sees how distraught Goan looks, letting the suggestion face into silence in favor of pressing on his shoulder to lie him back against the couch. In a minute, Yohan will probably ask him if he’s hurt again, or send him off to bed, or something. But for now…for now, he’s just going to sit still and not hurt so badly for a moment.
It’s been a long day.