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Jaewon was drifting off slumped against Jihyun, the warm weight of his boyfriend encircled in his arms and leaning against his chest.
His face was pressed into Jihyun’s warm shoulder, and the soft music and ambient sounds of the game his boyfriend was presently focused on were making Jaewon’s brain slightly mushy and his eyelids heavy, as he was slowly lulled to sleep by the gentle feeling of safety engulfing him, like someone had thrown a weighted blanket over him, or he was submerged in taffy.
The frantic anxiety of a few hours ago was a dull ache in the back of his mind as he dozed.
He had been hyperventilating under the covers of his bed. The shouting and slamming against the locked door barely registered as Jaewon’s world shrunk to the humidity of the air around him and his fractured sobs. He felt like a kid again.
Jaewon wasn’t sure how long he cowered there, but finally silence registered in his panicked brain. He had sluggishly re-emerged from the covers and lay in the chilly night air of his room, the only thought he could scrape together with what remained of his logical mind being a vague feeling of desperately wanting to disappear.
Abruptly awoken from a doze on his boyfriend’s shoulder by a gentle hand scritching at the hair at the nape of his neck, Jaewon could have sworn he melted even further into the kind, gentle, oil-pastel-scented warmth of his Jihyun. Maybe if he stayed there long enough they’d become fused together, like candle wax.
“Hi there” Jihyun murmured, like speaking any louder would break the soft calm that had settled over them now, only a few hours removed from one of Jaewon’s worst breakdowns to date. He was hit all at once by an overwhelming wave of affection and near-hysterical disbelief at how careful and understanding Jihyun had been during the worst of it, and continued to be now. Even after shattering into pieces, his boyfriend was always there to meticulously help build him back up again, and somehow go on loving him the same.
Jaewon wasn’t sure how to hold a love like that.
In terms of his parents, extending even to his family at large, well. Their love had always been conditional. He had grown so accustomed to fighting for affection most children rightly grew up taking for granted, even into his adulthood, that Jihyun’s persistent care for him, free from any expectation, even after the accident, felt overwhelming.
He would instinctually scrabble to repay Jihyun in any way he could, an old habit from years of emotional abuse, before Jihyun had sat him down taken his face in his hands and gently told him that he was not Jaewon’s parents, this was not Jaewon’s childhood house, and that Jihyun had no unspoken expectations for him to live up to.
Jihyun had shuffled around slightly between Jaewon’s legs so he could see his face, the music of the game softly continuing, but ultimately abandoned in the face of one (1) sleepy boyfriend.
Jaewon looked up at him from where his face was now pressed into the side of his shoulder. He could feel his eyelids drooping from exhaustion but still tried to make eye contact. Jihyun smiled softly and looked up to where his fingers were fiddling with his boyfriend’s hair before moving to press a soft kiss to Jaewon’s forehead.
Maybe it was the fact that he had been sobbing hysterically only hours ago, but Jaewon found his eyes watery at the radiant person now kneeling in front of him. When his hands found a desperate grasp on Jihyun’s jumper at the strength of the feeling, Jaewon dazedly concluded that the light his boyfriend carried around with him was spreading into his own body, encompassing his bones and beaming out through the fractures at every touch.
It could not make him whole. Some cracks are untreatable. But in spite of that, it could make him feel beautiful.
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