Work Text:
The Ice Prince
—Last Man Standing.
It was while they were still in bed that Dongsik finally asked Juwon about it.
Juwon's apartment. Early morning, the room still washed in dim grey light.
Waking before dawn had long since become second nature to him. Back when he was still an active-duty officer, he had made a habit of jogging before sunrise, and even now his body remained faithful to that rhythm.
The languid warmth of the previous night still lingered over him.
A sweet memory surfaced without warning, and Dongsik's heart gave a small leap—Juwon's eyes fixed on his, calling his name over and over, low and burning. He quietly closed his eyes, letting the memory wash over him before it could overwhelm him completely.
Only then did he notice it.
Juwon was still asleep behind him, one arm draped securely around his waist. Beneath the light down comforter, bare skin rested against bare skin, sharing a dry, quiet warmth. Feeling Juwon's slow breath brush the back of his neck, and the steady heartbeat against his back, Dongsik couldn't help but smile.
Not long after, Juwon stirred awake, greeting him with a sleepy, softly amused "Good morning." Dongsik reached up and brushed aside the hair falling loose over his forehead—he liked him best like this, hair a little disheveled, making Han Juwon look just a touch younger than he was. Juwon caught the hand reaching toward him and pressed a gentle kiss against his wrist.
It was in that quiet, unguarded warmth that Dongsik finally asked,
"I heard you came in first place in Last Man Standing."
Just as he'd expected, a shadow crossed Juwon's face.
Juwon rarely spoke about his past. Now and then he'd share an amusing story from his student days in England. But whenever the conversation drifted closer to home—high school, or the police academy—he invariably fell silent.
"As a proud representative of the perfectly ordinary, I must admit I'm rather curious what life was like among you honor-roll prodigies."
Juwon looked at him with unconcealed exasperation.
"If you are perfectly ordinary, then I truly cannot imagine what purpose all of my efforts served."
The troubled look returned to his face.
"Moreover, I doubt my academic record is of sufficient interest to anyone."
Dongsik almost laughed. This was the very same man who, years ago, had confidently declared—without the slightest trace of embarrassment—that everyone envied his brilliance. He really had changed.
But there were moments Juwon let his guard down—mornings like this one, waking up together, the sweetness and lingering drowsiness wearing down his defenses just enough.
"Last Man... ah. Now that you mention it, so it did."
For a moment his expression flickered with recollection, but Juwon's eyes quickly narrowed with suspicion.
"Where did you dig up a story like that?"
"Oh? Is this an interrogation? Do you have a warrant?"
Juwon looked faintly exasperated at Dongsik's teasing, but answered with perfect composure regardless.
"A warrant will not be necessary. This is a voluntary interview."
"Then what about my right to remain silent?"
"How curious—invoking the right to remain silent before you have been arrested? Are you confessing to something?"
"Aigoo. Well, that backfired."
"In that case, I suppose I ought to formally advise you of your rights. You may exercise your right to remain silent, and you are entitled to legal counsel—"
"Wait, wait, I never confessed to anything. Fine then, I refuse to be interviewed."
"Refusing the interview would not be in your best interest under the circumstances."
Pulled into a tight embrace, Dongsik let out a rueful laugh. Juwon, smiling faintly at him, went on.
"Now then. Allow me to ask again—where exactly did you obtain this information about 'Last Man Standing'?"
Met with that suspicious gaze, Dongsik looked off into the middle distance, drawing it out just to be difficult.
"As it happens, I've got a secret intelligence network, courtesy of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency."
"Ah. Mr. Kim Changyeong, I take it."
Dongsik blinked, taken aback by how readily Juwon had guessed it.
"How did you know that?"
"What else could it possibly have been? Surely I should be the one asking that question."
Juwon gave him another exasperated look and went on.
"Do not tell me you had a former colleague dig into my past on purpose. Or is uncovering other people's histories simply Superintendent Kim's idea of a hobby?"
“Superintendent Kim”, was it. Hearing his old friend referred to by rank made Dongsik want to laugh—it made Changyeong sound like an entirely different person. And Juwon's accuracy was more than a little unsettling in its own right. Did working in Internal Affairs mean memorizing the organizational chart of half the force? Juwon, meanwhile, was eyeing him with open suspicion.
"I hear Changyeong has a detective on his team who happened to be your classmate at the police academy. Which is how the illustrious Inspector Han's past came to light—quite by accident, as it were."
Juwon's brow furrowed.
"That may not have been avoidable, but I would rather my history not be passed around so carelessly. I believe I ought to have a word with Superintendent Kim about this."
"—Ah, that's—"
Dongsik cut in hurriedly. There was one fact he could not possibly admit to Juwon: that Changyeong already knew about the two of them. If Juwon went to confront him over this, there was no telling what that troublemaker might say, delighted by the opportunity.
"I'll have a word with him myself. There's no need for Inspector Han to get involved."
"Why is that? I am the one concerned. It ought to be me who says something."
"Well—if an elite from Internal Affairs like Inspector Han came down on him, even Changyeong might find that a little frightening."
"Why would a superintendent be frightened of an inspector, two ranks below him? Besides, this is a personal matter. It has nothing to do with either of our positions."
He had a point—an infuriatingly correct one. Dongsik knew he was reaching, but he pressed on regardless.
"Just—let me handle it. As his friend, I'll make sure he understands... Is that really so bad?"
Even Dongsik found himself a little ridiculous—a grown man like him, playing cute like some lovestruck kid—but he committed to it anyway, leaning in close enough to catch Juwon's gaze and giving him a smile. Juwon's breath caught. Dongsik watched those beautiful eyes waver, startled, warming with something like a blush. He supposed that a man his own age, carrying on like this, would only ever get away with it around Juwon. It struck him as funny, somehow.
A sigh escaped Juwon a moment later.
He closed his eyes and pulled Dongsik into a tight embrace once more.
"Very well. I will not contact Changyeong."
"Good."
"But—"
Juwon opened his eyes, looking faintly put out now, and this time it was his turn to search Dongsik's gaze.
"You will tell me everything in return, Mr. Lee Dongsik—every last detail of whatever secret intelligence you happened to receive."
"Understood, Inspector Han."
Amused by his own joke, Dongsik added, almost as an afterthought,
"Though if we are doing this, I would like to hear your side of it too. While we are on the subject, would you tell me more about what happened during 'Last Man Standing'?"
"It is hardly an exciting enough story to warrant that kind of enthusiasm."
Juwon's brow knit, but true to his earnest nature, a look of recollection crossed his face almost at once.
"Let me think. At the time, at the time... how did it go. I believe the record was—"
"18.8 kilometers in sixty-five minutes and forty-eight seconds, I heard."
"Ah. Yes, something along those lines."
Juwon tilted his head, looking genuinely puzzled.
"How is it you know such a specific figure?"
"One of Changyeong's team members wrote it down for me. I believe there were a few other details as well."
"I am not even certain I remembered it that precisely myself."
Juwon's suspicion was unmistakable now.
"Who, exactly, is this person?"
His irritation had shifted its target—now aimed squarely at the "source." Dongsik flinched inwardly.
—One of Changyeong's team.
There was a strong chance she was the same woman who had once confessed her feelings to Juwon. Being pressed further on this would not do at all. For her sake, he needed to steer the conversation away, one way or another. Dongsik hurried to change the subject.
"Well, it is something of a legendary record, is it not? I would imagine the whole class remembers it. I suppose you went charging ahead just to make that insufferable instructor drop out?"
Juwon corrected him, dutifully as ever.
"I was not attempting to make him drop out. I was simply running at my own pace, and before I realized it, I had overtaken him."
That in itself was remarkable enough. If anything, the fact that he could say something like that without the slightest trace of arrogance was almost more exasperating than arrogance itself would have been. Juwon meant every word of it with complete sincerity, which only made it worse. Dongsik could not help a rueful laugh.
"That is impressive, regardless. That instructor—he held records in long-distance running, did he not?"
"You seem to know a great deal about this."
Juwon let out a breath, an expression of faint resignation crossing his face, and at last seemed to settle into telling the story properly.
"The key to clearing this test comes down to pacing."
"Finding a strategy for an extreme endurance test—that is very like you, Inspector Han."
"It is nothing so impressive, really."
Juwon knit his brow again—embarrassed, this time. Dongsik laughed and smoothed the furrow between his eyebrows with a fingertip, teasing him, only for Juwon to press a kiss to that fingertip in return—which was, frankly, more than Dongsik had bargained for. But—moving on.
"First—and most importantly—I could not afford to fall more than five laps behind the instructor."
Dongsik nodded, impressed, as Juwon continued, seeming to reach back into memory.
"Numerically, this was simple enough to calculate. The instructor held an official record of just under twenty-eight minutes for ten thousand meters—a pace of two minutes and forty-eight seconds per kilometer, which is extremely fast. Given the nature of the test, however, I judged he was unlikely to run at that pace from the very start. Realistically—or rather, taking the other students' records into account as well—I assumed he would begin closer to three minutes thirty seconds per kilometer."
Against that, the other students' records—Juwon's own, in other words—
"At the time, my personal best for ten thousand meters was around thirty-four minutes thirty seconds. That comes to three minutes thirty seconds per kilometer. As it turned out, the instructor's actual starting pace matched that figure exactly. I believe his intention was to match his pace to mine, since I held the fastest time among the students, in order to wear down my legs."
If a student felt he could just barely keep up, he might well push himself to match the instructor's pace out of sheer effort—and that plan could easily have worked, on anyone other than Han Juwon.
"Setting off at one's own top speed in a test with no fixed distance would have been reckless. So I decided to begin at roughly four minutes per kilometer instead. Even if the instructor started faster than expected—say, in the low three-minute range—this would let me keep the gap to no more than a single lap over the first five laps."
—And yet.
Thirty-four minutes and thirty seconds for ten thousand meters was, in itself, no small feat. That Juwon could mention it so matter-of-factly was, in its own way, exactly like him. Dongsik, who had managed the same ten-kilometer endurance run in forty minutes back in his own student days, thought—
—Thirty-four thirty. That is an entirely different world.
There was nothing to do but laugh.
"After that, I decided to fix a provisional finishing time."
Juwon's account of his strategy continued, meticulous as ever.
"Last Man Standing is a test with no defined end point. To make it to the later stages, I judged that I needed both to avoid falling behind the instructor and to set some benchmark for how long I intended to keep running."
It was an interesting way of thinking, certainly, but if the test truly had no defined end—as Juwon himself had just said—how did one go about deciding how long to keep going?
"The benchmark I used was the past test records. According to those records, the longest test on record had lasted fifty-eight minutes, covering a distance of 15.5 kilometers.”
"You looked into it that thoroughly?"
"It was less that I looked into it, and more that the instructor told us beforehand. I imagine the intention was to put psychological pressure on us."
For anyone lacking confidence in long-distance running, fifteen kilometers alone would weigh heavily on the mind. And for those who did have confidence, being led to believe fifteen kilometers was within reach, only to be driven onward toward a finish line that kept receding—that, too, could break a person just as effectively. Either way, it was a tasteless sort of strategy.
"So I set my initial goal at running for sixty minutes."
Juwon's reasoning went like this: if he could manage roughly the previous record's duration, the test's outcome, pass or fail, would likely have already been decided by that point.
"Sixty minutes, then, as my final running time. For reference, before the record of fifty-eight minutes, the next longest were forty-nine and forty-seven. Given how much of an outlier fifty-eight minutes was among the records, the probability of anyone surpassing it seemed low, which made sixty minutes a reasonable target."
Juwon went on to explain the advantage of deciding on a time in advance.
"The greatest advantage is psychological. The true obstacle in this test is the uncertainty of not knowing when it will end. That anxiety, that pressure, is precisely what the test is designed to exploit, in order to keep you from performing at your true capacity. So even if only provisionally, I decided on an expected finish time and ran toward that target. Having made that decision gave me both focus and a sense of stability."
It was true that in long-distance running, focus and mental composure mattered more than almost anything else. Getting thrown off pace by the movement of others, growing anxious about one's ranking, or even the smallest nagging doubt—a shoelace that might have come loose, a shoulder that felt too tense—could be enough to make a runner's form collapse from nothing more than a flicker of doubt. And once form broke down, fatigue only compounded, sometimes placing enough strain on the muscles to risk actual injury.
There was one more thing Dongsik found himself curious about.
"What were you planning to do if your final time ended up going past that sixty-minute mark?"
"Ah. In that case—"
Juwon answered as though it were nothing at all.
"I would have withdrawn at that point. Of course, I left open the option of continuing if I still felt capable, but given the physiological limits of endurance, I had judged sixty minutes to be right at the edge of what was reasonable. Rather than being overtaken by the instructor and disqualified that way, my plan was to withdraw of my own accord the moment I felt I had reached my limit beyond the sixty-minute mark."
"Is a test like that one where you are allowed to just retire whenever you please?"
"Of course not."
He answered easily enough, and then smiled—an oddly impish look on his face, one that carried a glimpse of the youthfulness he must have had back in his student days.
"But I reasoned that if I had managed to keep running for a full sixty minutes, the instructor would hardly have had grounds to complain by that point. If anything, I thought he might even be grateful to me for retiring. And if he did complain, I could always claim I had gotten a cramp in my leg."
Dongsik couldn't help the smile that slipped out. That adaptability, that relentless analytical mind he showed during criminal investigations—it seemed Juwon had carried both since his student days.
—The Ice Prince, was it.
The nickname surfaced in his thoughts, unbidden. Among the female students, it had likely been meant to mock a certain coldness of heart, but to Dongsik, this same unnervingly composed analysis felt just as much like "ice." An unshakeable, unbending strength of will. What Juwon had just described was not merely meticulous—it was objective, and genuinely, remarkably clever.
Above all—
—choosing to retire on his own terms, rather than being forced out.
That, in itself, meant something. It meant that Juwon had been the one controlling the contest—controlling the test itself. Not being made to run by someone else, not swept along by someone else's design, but the sense of steering the test himself: that mattered. Even in defeat, he would have faced his own limit on his own terms, and accepted the loss as his own. Because he had made that choice himself, the test could leave no lasting wound on him. There would be no humiliation, no sense of powerlessness at having been crushed by the instructor.
And, more importantly than any of that—
—Juwon had won.
"Inspector Han Juwon seemed completely unaware of anything around him. Even soaked by the rain, his form never broke, his stride never faltered—running on alone like that, it almost looked as though he were running through eternity."
The words from Changyeong's subordinate folded neatly into everything Juwon had said. He hadn't been "made to run" in order to survive—he had chosen to "run" toward a goal he had set for himself, and that was what had let him run in total focus, without even realizing he had won.
—Is it already over?
He'd said that turning back, rain streaming down his face, an expression like someone waking from a dream—or so Dongsik had been told.
Dongsik pressed for how the actual test had unfolded from there. Juwon, adopting a perfectly serious expression, pointed to his own lips.
"Without a reward, I am afraid the rest does not come out."
He said it with such a straight face that for a moment Dongsik genuinely did not understand what he meant—and then he burst out laughing. Juwon, flustered at being laughed at and coloring slightly, looked so endearing that Dongsik leaned up and kissed him. When Juwon's fingers curled hot against the back of his neck, pulling him closer, tongue seeking entrance, Dongsik pulled back.
"That will not do, will it? The rest of the story would end up being something else entirely."
Juwon looked faintly put out, though the flush still lighting up his face made it impossible not to find him endearing regardless. Dongsik found it a little funny, how everything about someone young looked adorable no matter what—proof, he supposed, that he himself had gotten older.
"I keep telling you, there is nothing particularly interesting about it..."
Grumbling faintly, Juwon nonetheless continued—the actual account of what had happened during Last Man Standing.
There had been a hundred and ten participants in total. Out of a class of a hundred and fourteen, four had been excused from training: two female students citing menstrual pain, one male student running a fever, and another who had twisted his ankle in a class the day before.
At the start, exactly as Juwon had predicted, the instructor set off at a pace of roughly three minutes thirty seconds per kilometer. Juwon kept to his planned pace of four minutes, refusing to be swept along, but most of the other students—too consumed by the fear of falling behind, perhaps—matched the instructor stride for stride. As a result, the first students began dropping out around the twenty-minute mark.
"—Wait, twenty minutes in means we're only around five kilometers, right?"
Dongsik found himself calculating on his fingers as he asked.
"Isn't that dropping out awfully early, no matter how you look at it? With the five-lap rule, you'd need a two-kilometer gap before anyone's disqualified. That would mean the ones who dropped out had only run three kilometers."
Am I right? he asked, and Juwon gave his fingers a light squeeze, nodding with an unnecessarily pleased smile. "You are correct."
"Even an ordinary endurance run covers ten thousand meters, ten kilometers, doesn't it? Five kilometers already sounds fast to me—so what does dropping out at the three-kilometer mark even mean?"
"I believe it was because the instructor's pace had increased."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning I was the one who picked up the pace. It must have irritated him, being pressed like that. The instructor increased his own pace significantly in response."
Juwon had begun at four minutes per kilometer, so as not to be left behind by the instructor without straining himself, and so as to keep something in reserve in case the instructor sped up.
But—
—I think I can push a little further.
About eight hundred meters in, two laps around the track, his body had felt light. He'd judged he could manage a slightly faster pace, and picked it up to somewhere around three minutes forty seconds. Running another two laps, sixteen hundred meters in total, he'd felt he still had room to go faster yet.
"How well your body is doing on a given day is, strangely enough, something you cannot know until you actually run. Given that this was meant to be an extreme test, perhaps the sensible approach would have been to run conservatively. But since my goal was to complete the full sixty minutes, I decided to adjust my running according to that target."
Dongsik found himself impressed by just how unwaveringly composed Juwon's reasoning was.
—Choosing to push his own limits rather than settle for the safer option... perhaps that was simply what youth looked like.
No, he thought with a rueful smile.
—Not youth. That was simply the kind of man Han Juwon was.
He had never been trying to clear the test. The opponent he was always competing against was himself. He despised being carried along by anyone else's design, and thought and acted entirely on his own terms. Juwon truly hadn't been competing against anyone at all. He had been running alone, the whole time. Realizing that, Dongsik felt something closer to a quiet loneliness than admiration for his strength.
—So you really were running alone the whole time, weren't you, Juwon.
And before he had even reached the two-kilometer mark, Juwon had already brought his pace up to three minutes thirty seconds per kilometer—matching the instructor's own pace exactly. Naturally, the instructor noticed, and sped up in turn.
"As I picked up my pace, the instructor brought his time down to around three minutes by the five-kilometer mark. Three minutes per kilometer is an extremely fast pace. More than enough to shake off the weaker runners at the back of the group."
The fact that the instructor had increased his pace meant, in effect, that Juwon had increased his. The instructor was only matching Juwon's speed, after all.
"By the five-kilometer mark, I believe I had brought myself up to around three minutes twenty seconds. But every time I picked up my pace, the instructor reacted to it in kind, and I judged that this was not a good pattern to continue. So after that, I kept my pace at a maximum of around three minutes thirty seconds. I did not want it to turn into an endless cycle of matching each other, tit for tat."
Dongsik—
—At this point, the instructor had already lost to Juwon.
He couldn't help a rueful smile. Control of the test had shifted away from the instructor and into Juwon's hands. The moment his pace began responding to a student's, he had effectively surrendered his position as the one in charge. By this point, the instructor's own rhythm had already been thrown into disarray.
—Holding himself back, specifically to avoid that tit-for-tat escalation.
That Juwon had made this call at all revealed exactly where the psychological upper hand lay. The moment the instructor shifted from "instructing" to "competing," the true outcome of this contest had likely already been decided.
Then, after the weaker runners had begun dropping out around the twenty-minute mark, the pace of withdrawals picked up in earnest around the thirty-minute point. With the middle tier of runners collapsing all at once, the test seemed to be entering its final stretch—or so everyone assumed.
The test could not possibly hold much longer. The general expectation was that it would be settled somewhere around the forty-five-minute mark. That impression was only reinforced when
the rain began to fall.
And not gently, either—a hard rain, driven by strong wind, with distant thunder rolling in. Faced with such worsening conditions, the students who had already reached their limits looked toward the judge with a flicker of hope, thinking the test might be called off. But the judge said nothing, only kept watching the track. Faced with that quiet refusal, despair set in, and the number of students dropping out after the rain began rose sharply as well.
And then, at last—the instructor dropped out.
At the forty-seven-minute mark.
Just as Dongsik had guessed, the instructor had likely been struggling to hold his pace since early in the test. And it was not only the students who had been shaken by the rain when it began to fall. With Juwon staying right on his heels the entire time, the instructor must have been carrying an immense weight of pressure as well.
—There is no possible way I can lose to a student.
—Not once, in the entire history of this test, has an instructor ever lost.
—If I lose now.
—My evaluation—my own standing—will fall below that of a student's.
Carrying that rising terror in both arms, unable to correct the pace he had already lost control of, and with the rain now pouring down on top of it all—an athlete who, under any ordinary circumstances, would have run ten thousand meters in under twenty-eight minutes, the instructor was, in this way, crushed by his own weight.
"The instructor suddenly fell."
That was how Juwon described it.
Amid the pouring rain, visibility already failing along the track ahead, the instructor had suddenly gone down. Juwon had caught sight of him out of the corner of his eye, clutching his own leg, convulsing—and simply run past.
"I believe our eyes met, for a moment. It was as though he looked at me as if—"
He said this with an expression of genuine indignation, clearly still put out by the memory.
"As though he were looking at some kind of monster. I remember thinking it was rather rude of him."
Dongsik—
—that much, at least, was almost certainly true.
He couldn't help but laugh. The contrast was too absurd: Juwon sulking here, looking faintly wounded over it, against what the instructor himself must have felt in that moment. The instructor had almost certainly seen Juwon as some kind of monster, some kind of freak of nature. That flash of fear in his eyes, the instant their gazes met—Dongsik was fairly certain there had been no mistaking it.
From that point on, Juwon said, he had stopped checking his time altogether.
"Because the instructor had fallen?" Dongsik asked.
But the answer was stranger than that.
"No. Even when I looked at my watch, I could no longer read the lap times."
His vision had grown hazy, he explained—he could still tell that the numbers were numbers, but their meaning, what they represented, his current running time, the pace of each lap, had simply stopped registering.
"And yet everything in front of me was perfectly clear. Even with the rain falling, it looked as though the whole world were glittering."
Runner's high.
When Dongsik asked whether that was what had happened, Juwon tilted his head, considering—clearly picturing the scene as it had been.
"I have never experienced runner's high before, so I cannot say for certain that was it. But I suspect it was something different. There was no rush of euphoria, no pleasure of the kind people describe. It was simply that my body's movements felt sharpened, refined. I remember feeling as though my body were operating at a hundred and twenty percent of its capacity, and feeling glad, thinking there was nowhere I couldn't run to."
—So he'd entered the zone. A flow state.
Under extreme enough pressure, people sometimes slip into a peculiar state of mind like that. Every sense sharpened to a point, carrying you past what you thought were your limits.
Dongsik knew that state himself.
Near the end of a seventy-two-hour stakeout, exhausted, half-delirious with sleep deprivation, his vision blurring in and out—the moment he'd spotted the suspect, their actual target. Every hair on his body had risen at once, and his vision had snapped into focus. All his fatigue vanished, leaving behind only a strange, hyper-alert clarity. The sounds around him had receded into the distance, the edges of his vision blurring into a haze, while the target alone stood out, impossibly sharp, impossibly bright.
"That guy gets this look sometimes—like some kind of monster."
The memory of a partner he'd once worked with, visibly unsettled by him, surfaced in his mind—and it struck him as funny, that it was the same thing Juwon had been told.
"It felt as though every part of my body had turned into a single, honed blade."
That was how Dongsik knew Juwon's experience had been more than a simple runner's high. He could believe, without any doubt, that it had been a moment where Juwon had staked everything he had, and pushed past his own limit.
—He's talking about it so calmly, but this really must have been a brutal test for him too.
Dongsik tried to picture it.
Juwon, deep in that flow state, still running the track. The wind and rain lashing at him, and beyond even that, entirely outside his awareness, that retreating back—where had it been heading?
"I remember feeling glad, thinking there was nowhere I couldn't run to."
That was what Juwon had said. So he'd been glad, then. Glad that there was nowhere he couldn't go. If that was true—
You really had been running alone the whole time, hadn't you.
Then how far had you meant to go?
How far had you wanted to run—all alone.
Dongsik stroked Juwon's cheek. Juwon leaned into the touch, pressing a soft kiss to the hand that cupped his face, and Dongsik let him, asking quietly,
"Does Inspector Han like running?"
The beautiful eyes that met his lifted for a moment, as though giving the question some thought, before Juwon nodded.
"Like... I would not say I am passionate about it as a hobby, exactly, but I believe I do like running."
He explained the reason without much emotional weight behind it.
"Running is a simple task. Nothing is required beyond swinging your arms and moving your legs, one after the other. And I like that it can be done alone. Depending on the sport, there is no need to match your breathing to anyone else's—you simply run, by yourself. There is no need to worry about other people. You only need to move yourself forward. I like that simplicity."
Then, in the words that followed, something a little more honest slipped through.
"I like that when I am running, I do not have to think about anything unnecessary."
Dongsik watched him closely, that distant look in Juwon's eyes as he spoke, as though reaching back into memory.
"Breath, pulse, the movement of the body, all falling into a single rhythm, carrying you forward—you simply give yourself over to that feeling, and keep moving ahead. When you run, you can force yourself to shake off all the tiresome, bothersome things weighing on you. I suppose that may be why I like it."
After all—
—there had been something he needed to shake off. Something tiresome, something bothersome.
What had that been, Dongsik wondered.
The thing Juwon had wanted to shed, to scrape away from himself—was it a father who had haunted him like a curse? Some devastating memory from childhood? Or was it everything in the world that was not himself? Wherever it was Juwon had wanted to run, endlessly, there was no one who could follow him there. Calling it all "tiresome," all "bothersome," and shaking it off—that was how Juwon ran, alone.
All by himself, faster than anyone, through a world with no one else in it.
Dongsik gazed at him.
Juwon, seeming to notice only belatedly that he'd been stared at for so long, looked back with a "What is it?"—and Dongsik pulled him into a tight embrace.
"Wha—"
Holding Juwon's startled head against his chest, Dongsik murmured softly.
"Why don't we run together sometime?"
Side by side—through the sunrise.
"It would be nice, wouldn't it, if we could run together, no matter how far."
At that, Juwon lifted his head from Dongsik's arms to look up at him. His face was bright, faintly flushed, plainly delighted, without complication. The sight of him breaking almost immediately into a happy smile, already planning their jog together, struck Dongsik with a quiet ache, and he smiled softly back.
"Though I have a feeling I would not stand a chance, if it turned into a race with you."
He murmured it half-joking, and Juwon's face fell into a troubled look.
"I would not go running off ahead by myself, when we are supposed to be running together."
Besides, he added, pulling Dongsik into an embrace of his own, his face close enough now to look faintly cross.
"We are going through all this trouble to run together—there would be no point in it, if we ended up seeing different scenery the whole way."
Dongsik couldn't help the smile that slipped out.
—The Ice Prince, was it.
The prince who had once been known as someone so noble, so untouchably cold that no one could ever get close to him—now, here he was, this warm. Dongsik could feel the certain warmth of him in his arms. Having shed that beautiful, icy armor and chosen to remain at someone's side instead, Juwon surely could no longer be called the Ice Prince.
He held him tight. Tighter still. Meeting that heavy-lidded gaze silently asking for a kiss, Dongsik finally parted his lips for him. Devoured by a kiss fierce enough to feel almost stolen, the embers of the night before stirred low in his body.
Pulling back, breath ragged and warm between them, Dongsik spoke.
"Let's watch the same scenery. Running side by side."
Juwon's heart skipped.
It was the way Dongsik was looking at him—heat in his eyes, and something gentle besides. Even as Juwon let himself sink into the warmth of the arms holding him, even as he pressed down the desire still smoldering beneath the surface, he answered—
—the words he was fairly certain Dongsik had been waiting for.
"Yes. With you. There is nowhere else I would rather be."
He hooked his fingers around the back of Dongsik's neck, and it was shyness that made him lower his gaze for a moment, sensing the kiss to come. He loved this, the way his older lover's bashfulness alone was enough to undo him completely. And yet, when Dongsik tilted his face toward him regardless, eyes half-lidded, it sent a thrill of want straight through him. Juwon watched those well-shaped lips part, the glimpse of tongue beyond them, and covered them with his own, kissing him deep and unrestrained.
"Let's finish what we started tonight. It's still night, isn't it?"
He said it while pressing Dongsik down beneath him, pulling the comforter up over both their heads. In the darkness that swallowed the world, he asked for more, sweetly.
See? It's still night, isn't it—?
Laughing as if he had no choice in the matter, Dongsik accepted the kiss Juwon practically collapsed into him with. And into the sweetness of the night's continuation, Juwon sank down and under— thinking that whatever dream came next, it would surely be of the two of them running together.