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He still has nightmares about it.
About opening his eyes and hearing the news that Kang Yohan is dead. About watching the broadcast with Jinjoo by his side, barely hearing her horrified gasps as his world turns, turns, stops. About feeling a familiar sadness, patient and without hope, spreading across the guilt like a moth to a flame.
He remembers the steely cold gaze from Lawyer Ko, the betrayed cries of Elijah, and the quiet murmur of alone, alone, alone. He had no more anchor; Soohyun was dead, a bullet spilling blood onto his hands, his knees, his face. His professor had betrayed him, planted a knife in him and twisted, whispering lies about the greater good. Elijah no longer wanted anything to do with him—as well she shouldn’t, he’s been the one to wreck everything for her.
And Yohan was dead.
So he fell. He gave in to the stupid ideas, the reckless plan, because if he was going to throw himself off a cliff, he was damn well going to try and take as many people as he could with him.
Sometimes he gets left in the box, suffocating and cramped, wondering if this is what it feels like to be buried alive.
Sometimes everyone turns their back on him and he never gets in the door, never gets the chance to atone for what horrors he’s done.
Sometimes he stands there, with a bomb strapped to his chest, and when he closes his eyes all he sees is black.
He wakes up with tears in his eyes and an ache buried deep in his chest. He presses a hand there sometimes, and rubs as if it’ll make it go away, only for it to linger. With his sleep-slack brain, sometimes he feels the burning aftermath of another touch.
Because Yohan wasn’t dead.
No, someone had rushed up in a blur, slammed him against the wall, disarmed the bomb, and asked if he was late.
His chest still burns with the memory of it, of rushing through every possible emotion at once only for his perception of the world to narrow down to how it feels to have this man, alive, in his arms. To close his eyes and for one moment, have everything be okay.
Only to have it ripped from his chest.
He still has nightmares about it.
About being thrown bodily from a room laced with enough explosives to bring the whole thing down. About seeing Yohan’s face as he closed the door, detonator flashing bright in his hand. About how the ache in his throat is how he knew he was screaming as the bombs went off.
He remembers collapsing like a puppet with his strings cut and a small part of him wondering what an apt metaphor that was. Because Gaon had never been instrumental in Yohan’s plans, he’d been the one to mess all of them up. If it weren’t for him, it never would have turned out like this. He was a pawn, carefully molded by Min Jungho and Jung Sunah, nothing but a convenient weak point to be taken in and exploited when the time came and he had comported perfectly.
During one of their earlier arguments, Yohan had almost gotten it right.
You’re nothing but a stray, he had said, a lost little stray looking for somewhere warm to belong.
And here he still is now, alone again in the cold, with his tail tucked between his legs and nowhere to go.
But he had work to do, because his pain would only be felt, not lived, as would someone else’s. So he had stood as tall as he knew how, taken a deep breath, and gone to kneel before Elijah, to explain all the he could and offer himself as whatever she needed him to be.
A friend, a family member, or someone to crucify.
But he had found a skeleton of a house and a map, covered in the last thing he expected to find and something to make the unspooling well of grief into something tangible.
Because Kang Yohan was still alive and he had work to do.
Grief became a yoke, shackled him to a drive for justice and his shoulders began to ache long before the nightmares began to sort themselves into distinct categories.
Sometimes the bombs go off and Yohan really is gone; he sees a twisted mangled corpse and eyes that should never be empty.
Sometimes Elijah screams and beats him, sometimes she looks at him with ice in her gaze, sometimes she cries in the arms of someone who she calls her guardian now, who will keep her away from him.
Sometimes he goes to the house and drowns in all the ghosts.
He wakes up screaming from those, chest burning, skin clammy, and reaching, reaching, always reaching. It burns, it always does, and he never gets back to sleep until he’s too tired to think anymore.
He still has nightmares, but he’s grateful for them.
Because he doesn’t know what he’d do if they showed him what else could be.
Kang Yohan is still alive. He’s with Elijah. They’re safe. Elijah is getting treatment and Yohan is getting to breathe.
But they’re not here. They are thousands of miles away and Gaon is alone. Punishment, penance, justice, even, but Gaon is here in his ill-fitting suits, up to his elbows in trying to make a world that doesn’t need Kang Yohan.
He will always be a hypocrite, because he needs Kang Yohan. And he will always hate himself for wishing in split-second moments, in the dead of night when his skin burns cold, that he wishes he were really dead.
Because then it might be a little easier to be alone.
What he doesn’t know is that thousands of miles away, through cameras installed by paranoia and overprotectiveness, another man sits in the cold glow of a laptop and keeps watch. Over the tears, the screams, and hopes the somewhere, somewhere, Gaon knows that he was never a stray, that he does belong somewhere.
Somewhere, where there’s a teenager in a wheelchair, a warm bed, and someone who will vow to ensure he never feels alone ever again.
Ko Inguk: Your boy is pining.
Yohan stifles a scoff as he reads, turning off his phone without responding and glancing back at the footage. Kim Gaon is doing a remarkable impression of someone who is actively reading something, but the slump in his posture and the way he hasn't moved from the current section of the screen in ten minutes gives him away. He toys with the edge of the keyboard.
"When are you bringing him home?"
"Soon." He's given up trying to argue with Elijah.
"When?"
" Yah, didn't you hear me?"
"'Soon' isn't a date."
He rolls his eyes and clicks over to the browser. On it is the confirmation for a flight to Korea and two return trip tickets. "Are you satisfied?"
Elijah squints at the screen with all the imperiousness of a teenager and sticks her nose into the air. "It'll do."
Yohan opens his mouth to retort when his phone buzzes again.
Ko Inguk: If you don't come get him I'll fly him out there myself.
And again.
Oh Jinjoo: You should really tell our friend about your plans, you know. He hasn't been sleeping well lately.
" Aish, you're all the worst," he grumbles, "I want Gaon-ah to come home just as much as the rest of you, why do you keep acting like I don't?"
"You called him Gaon-ah," Elijah sings and he halfheartedly tosses a pillow at her, "you should say that when you pick him up, 'Gaon-ah, come home, Gaon-ah, I miss you—"
"Listen here, you brat—"
He'd thought his days of being driven to some abandoned building and left in the flickering half-light of a dying lightbulb were over, but when Lawyer Ko shows up and tells him to get in the car, he sighs and gets it over with.
Probably some aspiring politician that wants something, he thinks as he paces back and forth in front of the plastic tarps. A waste of time for them, a potentially career-ending one at that.
A shadow lengthens on the floor.
"You have nothing to offer me," he says before they can say anything, "I won't be another pawn in the games of the elite. Whatever your speech is, you can forget it. Nothing you say will convince me."
The shadow pauses, and for a moment he thinks they'll just leave him and he can go home and—well, not sleep but lie still in the night and hurt, but then they come closer. He barely stifles a groan.
"Seriously, you're wasting your time. Just go while I still have plausible deniability." The shadow doesn't stop. "Listen, it's been a long day and—"
A hand covers his eyes and an arm of steel wraps around his chest before he has time to react, pinning his arms to his sides. He bites back a curse and reaches up—did Lawyer Ko set him up? Was this another plan? Did they know he was here?—trying to grab his attacker's wrist and wrench it away, when—
His fingers clasp a very familiar watch.
He freezes.
Slowly, so slowly, he traces the band as though it would disappear and shatter beneath his touch, relaxing into the hold. As he does so, it softens, no longer a restraint but a gentle support against a solid chest. His head comes to rest against a warm shoulder, the hand over his eyes resting there as his own fingers tremble.
He dares hardly breathe.
"C-Chief?"
No response. He swallows, his throat suddenly dry.
"Yohan?"
A mouth, next to his ear. "What happened to not wanting me to say anything?"
And it's so perfectly insufferable that it could only be Yohan and he sags with the relief of it, clutching Yohan's arm as his feet slip out from under him. Yohan just chuckles, his hand still over his eyes, letting him lean against his front. "You— you—"
"Me," he says with far too much softness, "still getting used to those legs, are you, baby deer?"
"What are you doing here?"
"I came back for you."
His blood runs cold. "M-me?"
Yohan hums. Has he done something wrong? He's trying, really, he is, he's trying to do what was asked of him, he's trying to do the right thing, but it's hard, it's so hard—
"Elijah has been very insistent," Yohan says, effectively cutting off the thoughts, "as has Lawyer Ko, and Judge Oh. So yes, I've come for you."
"Why?"
Yohan pauses for a moment, then he mutters something under his breath that sounds suspiciously like damn you, Kang Elijah, before his grip shifts and his voice returns. "Come home, Gaon-ah."
Oh.
Oh.
"…come home?"
"Yes. Come home to Switzerland, come home to me. That's where you belong."
Gaon swallows. "Can I see you?"
"Depends. Will you come home?"
"Let me tell you face to face."
"You drive a hard bargain, Kim Gaon." And for a terrible moment, he thinks Yohan will say no, will slip back into the darkness and Gaon will be left to chase his shadow all over again, but then the hands are sliding around his shoulders and turning him to face him.
Half-expecting this to be a dream, he opens his eyes.
Yohan looks at him expectantly, the familiar smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Well? Will you—"
He doesn't get time to finish as Gaon throws himself into his arms.
"Yes," he near sobs, "take me home."
He still has nightmares about it.
But now, he wakes up to a low voice murmuring in his ear, a hand rubbing gentle circles into his chest, and a strong pulse beating under his fingertips.
"It's okay, Gaon-ah, it's okay. You're safe, you're home. You're not alone."