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Believe it or not, Gaon is not an idiot.
He is naive, perhaps, in that he does not know the fine arts of stringing someone else along on puppet strings, but he is not so oblivious that he can’t feel them being pulled as he moves. Some people assume he is naive because he lets these things happen to him. He prefers to give people the benefit of the doubt, because he knows he won’t be treated as kindly without it.
People have agendas. Agendas change. That includes him.
Everyone wants something, and sometimes you need to to work together to get what you both want. That doesn’t make him oblivious.
Selfish, perhaps.
Gaon has never been good at recognizing when to stop. He pushes with questions, with actions, with words until something happens. His professor beat his motorcycle to pieces, Soohyun slapped him across the face, his parents—
Well. You get the idea.
But Gaon knows that what he wants is reckless. He’s an adrenaline junkie, perhaps he always has been. Sure, it’s certainly gotten more self-destructive over the years, but he remembers getting scolded for being so careless with his one life.
They never got it quite right, though.
The allure wasn’t the sensation of just getting away with something or catching himself just by the skin of his teeth. It wasn’t the sudden explosion of endorphins or the way his pulse thudded so loudly in his ears that it drowned everything else out.
Not exactly.
It was how much it scared him to not know what was going to happen next. It was the way his focus narrowed down to right here, right now, a split-second that could very well kill him. Even after he’d gotten away with whatever it was, it was the rush of there being consequences and him not knowing what they are.
Balancing here, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Some might call it a need for punishment, or label him a masochist. Some might call it attention-seeking or a cry for help. Some might say it’s a desperate bid for control, one last attempt at making himself feel something.
Gaon doesn’t care to examine it, and whenever someone asks, he brushes it aside.
Sometimes, though, at night when he’s drunk too much to call himself rational, he thinks it might have something to do with getting secure in insecure places. Making unsafe safe.
So when his professor tells him to spy on his new boss, Kang Yohan, Gaon doesn’t hesitate.
Kang Yohan is dangerous. He recognizes it as soon as he walks into his office. His shoulders want to raise, he wants to grit his teeth, he wants to run. But he doesn’t, because Gaon has never run from something like this and so he stays.
He bugs his office because if there’s one thing Gaon does too well, it is asking questions and sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong. He watches the court bend effortlessly to Yohan’s will and feels Dread settle over his shoulders. He scrambles to connect dots when there are none to connect only to turn around and see a full picture that’s already finished.
He keeps pushing.
He digs into Kang Yohan, into his court record, into his childhood, crossing every line he can think of as he sinks his hand into jagged pits of shining crystal, all but asking them to show him something. Every time he thinks he has something, he reaches out to touch it and it’s only a reflection. He bounces wildly off of walls, smacks into more obstacles than he could imagine, and is hopelessly confused.
He doesn’t stop.
Even if the professor hadn’t told him to be wary of Yohan, Gaon suspects he might’ve done this anyway. Before the live court show, Yohan’s record is perfect. Abides by the lawn as it is written in every circumstance, regardless of the defendant. Gaon has never trusted a perfect record.
Just as he knows Kang Yohan doesn’t.
His own record is far from perfect, he knows, but it won’t explain everything. And he knows that Yohan is up to something; people don’t do things with this level of efficacy if they’re not years in the making. So he makes himself a problem. Something to be dealt with. His professor would be dismayed.
Is it smart to pick a fight with a bad guy and hope you don’t win? Perhaps, but Gaon has never been under any delusions of winning.
You can fight without wanting to win.
He knows, at the very least, that he has Yohan’s attention. He’s a mess of contradictions, suspicious enough to bug his office yet throwing himself in the way of a bomb two seconds later. Reckless enough to accuse him out of nowhere yet trustful enough to gain the affection—however sparingly—of his niece and his cat. He knows Yohan needs to figure him out as much as he does.
Maybe Yohan will be better at it.
But Gaon doesn’t have a plan, he never does when it comes to things like this. When he wakes up in Yohan’s house of all places, he feels Dread course through his veins and he thinks he’s finished. That he will be hurt, be hidden, or something, that maybe he’s been declared dead or missing. But no, he’s here to recover. He just has to stay in his room and not wander.
Gaon wanders.
He knocks on doors, pries open locks, asks questions of people who make remarks about drugging him or killing him and passing them off as jokes, and watches Yohan play at being a monster.
Perhaps he is. Gaon doesn’t care.
Dread has a hold of him now as he stays under that roof. He knows Yohan is playing him, knows that strings are being wound slowly around his wrists, his ankles, his neck. His phone is given to him as a reward, for crying out loud. He draws it out as long as he can, feeling every bit the prey circled by a predator.
Then he hears Yohan’s story and something shifts.
If it’s a ploy, it’s a damned good one because it leaves Gaon speechless. He retreats, his tail tucked between his legs, an apology on his lips. Is this the end? Is this the consequence? Dread has lessened, surely, but it isn’t gone. He can’t leave now, he can tell he isn’t finished yet.
So he tries to figure out what he can push for now.
As it turns out, it’s what he’s been getting. It’s scraps of attention, caught in the incredibly brief moments when the masks shift. It’s the smug smirks that say there’s always something he doesn’t know, something being held just out of his reach. It’s the touches, brief and fleeting, that make the dread bubble under his skin.
It’s what Yohan wants as well. Wants him chasing after it, off-balance, hopelessly confused, so ready and pliable to look at him to any scrap of reassurance, to be told what to do next. He can give him that.
Slowly, slowly. It starts with an apology. He’s not too proud to admit he was out of order. In return, Yohan opens the fold a little more, drawing him deeper. He cooks for Elijah, savors the feeling of watching the two eat at the table like normal people. He watches the mask slip a little more and wonders what it will feel like when it slots into place for good.
It only escalates. There is fire, Doh Youngchoon, and a flaming stack of paper, his own hand around a man’s throat after having another illusion shattered in the bright lights of a prison yard. Part of him wonders if this is the consequence, but no, it still lingers, watching him, hands in its pockets. And when he’s cried and screamed himself hoarse, there’s a hand gently around his arm and it begins to rise again. It only grows stronger when he’s pulled roughly against a strong chest next to a burins building. When he throws away a knife that could have answered so many problems.
He thinks of his professor’s face when he sided with Kang Yohan and Dread cuts a string loose.
It helps that, to a certain extent, he agrees with Yohan. The system is unfair. It needs to be fixed. And sometimes you have to burn an old world to start a new one.
If only he weren’t so selfish.
Kim Gaon is well-practiced in the art of hiding his selfishness. He bottles up his appetites and puts them into his work and hides them perfectly. He will not take up too much space until the time comes for it. He will not use his body as his own and when he demands more, it is a pleasant and revered Pain.
If he had his way, he would look at the banquet and eat and eat and eat until his teeth turn black and his tongue falls out of his skull. He would take his face in his hands and kiss him no matter how loud the nightmare gets. He would not move out of the way, he would not beg; he would demand and the demand would be understood.
But he has had his fill of quick and easy hurt. Now he worries his desire into a weapon borne of famine. Dread spills over him on two fronts, a fear of what could happen if he let it run wild and a mind-numbing whisper of when, when, when. When they discover how selfish he really is and rip the carpet out from under his feet. A slower, more exquisite hurt.
Pain is an old friend, and Gaon is determined to give Suffering a proper handshake.
He drowns himself in restraint and paralyzes himself with want. Yohan doesn’t have to lift a finger; Gaon is well-versed in placing himself just on the edge, never taking that last step to commit. He languishes in uncertainty and makes his home where the slivers of doubt brush and prick at his back.
And in very quiet spaces in the middle of long nights, he lets himself reach for Hope.
Hope that maybe this will be the time he miscalculates, that maybe he can actually keep some of the good alongside Dread. That Yohan, who is as clever as the night is long, will see what he is doing and put a stop to it, one way or another.
As with everything that’s happened with Yohan, when the other shoe drops, he doesn’t see it coming.
He walks into the study one day to see Lawyer Ko and K standing there. They turn to look at him, grim expressions on their faces. Gaon looks back and forth between them, until his eyes land on the USB the professor gave him for information in Yohan’s hand.
The bottom falls out of the pit in his stomach and the insatiable Dread begins to swell and swell.
Yohan asks him to wait outside in a dangerously soft voice and Gaon nods, bowing to the three of them and retreating. He climbs the stairs in a dreaded haze as the strings tug him up limb by limb. He tries to fumble with his things but Dread has reached his hands, now, and he must sit on the edge of the bed and let it hurt.
This…this is the part he’s been waiting for. When Dread runs tendrils through his veins and makes the puppet strings fry and disintegrate, cut him loose from any service he could have. When all he can do is sit, or stand, numb and paralyzed with a special kind of emptiness that burns. When it crawls into the spaces behind his eyes and pushes.
He tries to lose himself in it. To drown in the familiar sting of consequence. But something is wrong.
He’s miscalculated.
Now he doesn’t just have the fear of looming consequence, there’s a sickeningly sweet ache in his chest that this really is it. There will be no more evenings here, no more meals and games with Elijah, no more moments where the masks of Judge Kang fall away and just Yohan is left. It hurts with a twist, one that says it won’t matter what the consequence is now, he already has one that will be worse.
Dread tenderly wraps Suffering’s hands around Gaon’s throat and squeezes.
He hears the door open from a mile away and Dread sharpens. It closes with a click and he can’t turn his head. He knows Yohan is in the room from a blur of color and a twist of the knife at the base of his chest. Suffering opens his ribs and waits for Pain.
Yohan crosses the floor. He stands next to Gaon, just to the side, and waits. Silence stretches through the room. If Gaon were being selfish still, he would mumble apologies, fall to his knees and beg forgiveness, but the time for being selfish is over now. He knows this dance, knows when he needs to turn. Knows it is better to sit, paralyzed with want than to whet his appetite and forever go hungry,
The silence stays for a long time.
Yohan moves finally, a hand coming up to catch Gaon’s chin and tilt it upward. Gaon focuses on Yohan’s face and finds the mask perfectly in place. Something soft brushes against his cheek and only then does he realize he’s crying. Dread’s hold on him tightens as Yohan simply watches another tear fall.
“When I asked you to wait outside,” he says, “I didn’t mean come up here.”
A softer opening blow than he was expecting, but one that lodges between his ribs all the same. He whispers an apology that sounds horrible to his ears. Yohan simply tilts his head.
“Did the sight of K and Lawyer Ko surprise you?” Gaon nods. “Do you want to know why there were here?”
No, Gaon screams as Suffering’s hands nod his head.
“They’ve been looking into Min Jungho,” Yohan says, never looking away, “apparently his behavior has warranted some attention. They found some interesting things, not just about me, but about you.”
The room feels cold, inside and out.
“They came to me with a worry that you were being used as a pawn, as a way for him to get to me.” Yohan’s hand shifts its grip a little on Gaon’s jaw. “And I thought: that doesn’t sound like the baby deer that nosed his way into my private life, cooking for my niece, now, does it? So I decided to do some digging of my own.”
Gaon swallows painfully as Yohan tips his chin a little higher.
“I found something interesting,” he says, “well, technically Elijah pointed it out.”
Gaon holds his breath.
“You don’t take very good care of yourself,” Yohan murmurs, “do you?”
When Gaon shakes his head, Yohan makes a soft noise and cradles Gaon’s chin.
“If I could learn that from emotionless and detached records, how could a man who practically raised you not?” He tilts his head. “Then I began to wonder what would happen if he did.”
Something in Gaon screams.
“I wonder if he sent you to me uncaring if you would be hurt or not,” Yohan says lowly, “or if he knew you would be hurt. Maybe you knew it too.”
His expression softens incrementally.
“I’ve hurt you,” he murmurs, “haven’t I?”
He burns too much to nod but the silence is pointed.
“Is that why you ran today? Did you think I was going to hurt you?” Gaon’s throat works against his hand. “Do you think I still will?”
Gaon can’t speak. Yohan sighs, expression still softer than it should be as he eases down on the bed next to him, hand moving to cup his cheek.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” he says softly, “you don’t have to look so scared.”
Yes, yes, he does, because now they’re angry at him. Dread, Suffering, Pain, they want what they came for. They want him, to carve him up, their pound of flesh.
“How is it that made you more scared?” comes the soft tease.
Gaon will not be teased, he wants to know what’s happening. Why Yohan isn’t hurting him. He wants to know why everything hurts and yet nothing does.
“Gaon,” Yohan says quietly, a hand going through Gaon’s hair, “Gaon.”
“Why,” he manages to gasp out, “why?”
“Because Min Jungho miscalculated, and maybe you did too.” Yohan slips a hand around the back of Gaon’s neck. “You’re mine now, and that means you don’t get to fall into pain and get away from me.”
“Y-yours?”
The grip on the back of his neck tightens. “Aren’t you?”
Dread twists gleefully in his stomach. His throat tightens as something whispers this is a trap, this is a trap, this is a trap.
He wants to be. Oh, god, does he? Does he want to say yes and Yohan will drag him out of this pit? Does he want to say no and fall into familiar waiting clutches? Does he want to risk what happens if he says no? Does he want to risk what happens if he says yes?
Yohan’s gaze hasn’t moved from his. He searches frantically, fruitlessly for some crack in that impenetrable facade that will give him something, any idea of what answer he might want.
Only to find the man staring back at him isn’t as inscrutable as he’s used to.
As his eyes dart back and forth, Yohan’s are doing the same. The hand on his neck holds him tightly, yes, but to keep him in place, as if to stop him from running away, running back into Pain.
To keep him.
Oh.
Oh.
He nods slowly.
Something in Yohan’s gaze relaxes and the grip gentles. “Good.”
Yohan is pleased. He’s pleased with Gaon’s decision. He did a good thing. He—
Oh, god, what did he just do?
“Do you need to cry,” comes Yohan’s voice, sweet and worried, “is that it?”
He cries. He tucks his head and tries not to let Yohan see but he tuts, lifting his chin again and guiding it over his shoulder.
“No more hurting yourself like this,” he scolds without any real heat, “you need to look after yourself better.”
Gaon just sobs. Yohan holds him, soft and gentle, arms around him. Suffering retreats in confusion, Pain easing its claws from wounds, even as Dread clings stubbornly to him. Yohan seems to find it, one hand on his head, the other around his waist.
“It’s okay now,” he murmurs, “I can take care of you. You can let me take care of you.”
“I don’t—I don’t know how,” Gaon manages.
“Shh…you’ve done very well at taking care of me and Elijah, we can help.”
A slightly hysterical chuckle bubbles out of his throat. Out of all the things the Kangs do well, providing comfort is not one of them. Then again, Gaon is nowhere near proficient in letting himself be comforted.
“I don’t think I’ll be very good at it.”
“You can learn.”
Another laugh. “That might take a while.”
Yohan holds him closer. “That’s okay.”
Before Gaon can tell him he might be underestimating just how bad he’s going to be at this, Elijah’s voice comes from the corridor.
“Gaon, when are you going to start dinner? I’m hungry and Yohan’s already here, so we can…”
She comes to a sharp stop when she sees the pitiful mess he is in Yohan’s arms. Her eyes widen and she comes over as fast as she can.
“What happened? Why are you crying? Do I need to kill someone?”
“E-Elijah—“
“Tell me what happened,” she orders, hands clenched on her wheels and her mouth drawn tight, “tell me who did this.”
The fierce pride and determination in her voice just make it worse. He was going to hurt them, he—he almost threw all of this away. He would’ve been the worst monster in the world and he was so close and he doesn’t deserve any of this.
“What happened to him?” Oh, Elijah’s moved on to asking Yohan now. “Why is he crying so much? What did you do?”
Yohan shifts. “I scared him.”
“What did you do that for?” Yohan doesn’t flinch as she hits him on the arm but he does tighten his grip. “Don’t scare him!”
“I didn’t mean to,” he snaps back.
It’s too much. It’s too much and he can’t deal with everything and the only thing holding him up is Yohan and he’s going to collapse into more of a mess than he is right now and this is humiliating and he can’t do anything to stop it and—and—
“Why is he crying harder?”
“Well, someone did just burst in shouting.”
“You’re the one who scared him!”
“You’re still shouting!”
Gaon buries his head in the crook of Yohan’s neck and just cries. Their voices crash over his head and he spins, spinning, spinning, unspun in the wake of the maelstrom in his heart. The dam is open, gates shattered in one fell swoop and tidal waves pour out until he’s wrung dry.
His head pounds by the time he realizes he’s gone still. They’ve stopped shouting, and he looks up to see Elijah staring at him with a mix of guilt and worry.
“I shouldn’t have shouted,” she mutters, still looking at him.
He shakes his head. She doesn’t need to apologize.
“You should drink something warm,” she says, “it will help. I’ll go make it.”
“I can help,” Yohan says, starting to stand but Gaon won’t let him.
“No,” Elijah says, already turning and wheeling away, “you once set the coffee maker on fire.”
Gaon snorts into Yohan’s shoulder as the man makes an affronted noise. He shifts again as if to pull away, but Gaon just latches on tighter. If Yohan wants to keep him, he’s going to get him in all his needy, whiny, pathetic, clingy glory. The chest under him sighs and a hand runs over his head again.
“You must be hungry,” comes the soft voice, “should I make dinner too?”
Gaon shakes his head. “I can do it.”
“You need to learn how to let yourself be taken care of.”
“And Elijah’s making me tea.” Gaon pulls back enough to look up at him. “Shouldn’t I learn slowly?”
Yohan huffs, shaking his head. He’s warm. His hand brushes the hair back from Gaon’s face. Gaon leans into it.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says after a pause.
“It wasn’t your fault. I’m sorry for…” Gaon gestures around. “…this.”
“For what, crying on me, being manipulated by your old professor, or the state of the live court show?”
“...yes?”
A scoff and a chiding tug on his hair. “You don’t need to apologize for the world, Kim Gaon.”
I don’t?
As if he can hear the thought, Yohan’s expression softens and he stands, slowly bringing Gaon with him. “Come on. Elijah will be wondering where you are.”
“You—“ Yohan pauses, looking at him— “you’re really alright with me staying?”
“Yes,” Yohan says softly, “you can stay. Now come on.”
A different feeling tingles in the wounds left by Dread’s claws as Yohan helps him down the stairs. He breathes a little easier as Elijah passes him a warm mug and snaps at Yohan to get out of the way. His hands don’t hurt when he pulls the ingredients out of the fridge and smiles at the way uncle and niece bicker across the table.
“Did you really set the coffee maker on fire?”
“Yes,” Elijah chirps.
“Yah!”
As he sets the food on the table and Yohan makes him sit down before anyone eats anything, he thinks he might know what this feeling is.
Hope.