▪︎°•Hana•°▪︎

pairing: Lohen x Favonius Knight!Reader

genre/warnings: suggestive language, violence, implied gore, explosive weapons, poison mentioned, unhealthy relationship dynamics if you squint, crack

contains: lohen being insane, knights of favonius reader, dead hilichurls used as decoration, anniversary gifts in the form of weapon upgrades, varka fearing for his life, aggressive flirting, “touch-starved attack dog” lohen, reader enabling him, menace x menace relationship dynamic, lohen trying to get reader off work just to spend time together, probably several violations of knight regulations

𓎢𓎠𓎟𓎠𓎡𓎢𓎠𓎟𓎠𓎡𓎢𓎠𓎟𓎠𓎡𓎢𓎠𓎟𓎠𓎡𓎢𓎠𓎟𓎠

𓎢𓎠𓎟𓎠𓎡𓎢𓎠𓎟𓎠𓎡𓎢𓎠𓎟𓎠𓎡𓎢𓎠𓎟𓎠𓎡𓎢𓎠𓎟𓎠

𓎢𓎠𓎟𓎠𓎡𓎢𓎠𓎟𓎠𓎡𓎢𓎠𓎟𓎠𓎡𓎢𓎠𓎟𓎠𓎡𓎢𓎠𓎟𓎠

notes: Whew first work for the genshin fandom posted! (I'm gonna start writing a LOT more casually in my notes now, bc it just feels to tiring to make sure my grammar is right ALL the time) N y ways I saw Lohen's trailer and WOW that man has got me on my KNEES. ooof so yup I had to write smth. Bc I wasn't ready to post a full written work, I just decided to do a smau, since those are really fun! Also banner made by me (don't mind the messy line work on Lohen I tried to line him on my tiny phone). Also sry for the ass quality of the banner for SOME reason my laptop just makes it 294208th time worse when I download it from canva. Lohen art by hoooooon1099, dagger banner from pinterest!

taglist open: @itzzhana05, @callmeyeri

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I’ve always been like this. Feeling everything and nothing at once. When I was younger, I thought it was normal—to be overwhelmed one moment and hollow the next. To cry so hard over something small, then sit in silence hours later, wondering why I couldn’t feel a single thing. People told me I was “too dramatic,” “too sensitive,” or sometimes just “strange.” I started to believe them. It’s hard to explain what it’s like living in a body that can’t decide if it’s burning or frozen. One day the world is too loud—the colors, the voices, the air itself scratching at my skin until I want to claw it all away. And then, without warning, it all fades. The noise, the ache, the pulse of it—gone. I’m left with nothing but silence. A silence so heavy it makes me wonder if I even exist at all. I’ve lived like this for years. With too much and with nothing. With storms that leave me shaking and voids that swallow me whole. Yet for some reason it began to swallow me whole recently. The catalyst for my episodes unknown. And then there’s Yunho. He doesn’t fix it. He doesn’t try to change me. But sometimes, when I’m drowning in everything or suffocating in nothing, he reaches out—warm hand, steady voice, unshaken presence—and for a moment, it feels like I can exist in the in-between.

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The apartment is quiet today. It’s a good quiet. The kind that settles in your bones and feels like peace. Sunlight streams through the large window in the living room, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air. It’s a Tuesday. Yunho has the day off from his job at the community center, and the hours stretch before us, soft and unstructured.

These are the days I treasure, the moments of calm that feel like a deep, steady breath before the plunge. On days like this, I can almost forget the other parts of me. The part that shatters and the part that turns to stone.

“What are you thinking about?” Yunho’s voice is a low hum from the kitchen, gentle enough not to break the spell. He’s decided we’re making kimchi jjigae from scratch, a project that involves a symphony of chopping and simmering.

“Just how nice the quiet is,” I reply, walking over to join him. I lean against the doorframe, watching his broad back as he stands at the counter, methodically slicing tofu into perfect cubes. He’s a man of steady movements, of purpose. Everything about him feels solid, rooted to the earth.

He glances over his shoulder, a soft smile playing on his lips. “Good. I was worried my humming was too much.”

“Never,” I say, and I mean it. His humming is a constant, a gentle melody that weaves itself into the fabric of our life together. It’s one of the few sounds that never feels like an intrusion.

He gestures with the knife. “Want to handle the onions?”

I nod, taking the cutting board he offers. For a while, there’s only the rhythmic sound of our work. The sharp thump-thump-thump of my knife against the board, the soft slide of his as he works through the tofu. The air smells of garlic and green onion. It’s domestic. It’s normal. It’s everything I’ve ever craved.

Then he moves to the stove, and the sounds begin to layer. The hiss of oil hitting the hot pan. The sizzle as he adds the pork belly. His low humming returns, a counter-melody to the kitchen’s orchestra. And suddenly, it’s not a symphony anymore. It’s a cacophony.

The sizzle becomes a shriek. The rhythmic chopping I just finished echoes in my head, a frantic, hammering beat. The hum of the refrigerator, once background noise, buzzes like a trapped insect against my eardrum. The light from the window feels too bright, bleaching the color from the room. The air is no longer soft; it’s sharp, scratching at my skin, and my sweater feels like it’s woven from sandpaper.

Too much. It’s too much.

My breath catches. My hands, still holding the knife, begin to tremble. The smell of the onions is suffocating. I can’t breathe. I can’t think.

“I can’t do this,” I mutter, the words tasting like ash. With a clatter that sounds like a gunshot in the suddenly hostile space, I slam the pan of chopped onions onto the counter. The sound reverberates through me, a physical blow.

Yunho stops instantly. The sizzling quiets as he turns off the stove. The humming ceases. He sets his own knife down, slowly, deliberately. He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t ask what’s wrong. He just watches me, his eyes patient and calm.

“Okay,” he says, his voice a low anchor in the storm raging inside my head. “Then let’s just sit.”

He takes the knife from my unresisting fingers and places it in the sink. Then he gently takes my hand and leads me to the small sofa in the living room. We sit in silence. The world is still screaming at me, but with him beside me, the volume is a fraction lower. My leg starts to bounce, a frantic rhythm against the floor. My fingernails find the skin of my forearm, ready to dig, to create a pain I can control.

Before they can break the skin, his hand covers mine. Warm, large, and firm. He doesn’t pull it away, just holds it there, a silent barrier. He starts to rub his thumb in slow, steady circles over my knuckles. The repetitive motion is a lifeline. I focus on it. The pressure of his thumb. The warmth of his palm. The steady rise and fall of his chest beside me.

An outburst of tears, hot and sharp, escapes me. It’s followed by a choked sob, then another. I’m apologizing before I even know what I’m saying. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I don’t know why—”

“Shhh,” he murmurs, pulling me against his side. His arm wraps around me, holding me together. “Nothing to be sorry for. Just breathe. With me.”

And I do. I match my ragged breaths to his slow, even ones. Inhale. Exhale. The screaming in my head subsides to a dull roar, then a whisper, then finally, silence. The good kind of silence. When I’m calm, my body limp against his, he doesn’t move. He just waits.

After a few minutes, I whisper, “We can finish dinner.”

He kisses the top of my head. “Are you sure? We can order something.”

“I’m sure,” I say, needing to reclaim the normalcy that was stolen from me. “But… can we put on some music? Something quiet.”

“Of course.” He reaches for his phone, and soon a soft, instrumental piano piece fills the room. It’s a gentle buffer, a layer of sound that keeps the silence from becoming too heavy and the world from becoming too loud.

We finish cooking, and later, we play a mindless card game on the floor. His presence is a constant, unwavering comfort. He doesn’t fix me. He just sits with me in the wreckage until I can find the strength to stand up again.

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The “everything” days grow more frequent, more intense. It’s not just sound or light anymore; it’s emotion. Every feeling is magnified to an unbearable degree. A flicker of sadness becomes a tidal wave of despair. A moment of joy burns so brightly it feels like pain. Love for Yunho is a fire in my chest, so fierce it threatens to consume me. I feel everything as if I’ve been skinned alive, every nerve exposed to the raw, unfiltered world.

It happens at the grocery store on a Thursday evening. The overhead fluorescent lights hum, a highpitched whine that drills into my skull. The wheels of our cart squeak, a rhythmic torture. A baby cries three aisles over, the sound sharp as broken glass. The cheerful pop music playing over the speakers is a garish, mocking assault. Colors bleed into each other—the lurid red of the meat packages, the aggressive green of the vegetables, the dizzying array of labels all screaming for attention.

Too bright. Too loud. Too close.

My heart hammers against my ribs. I feel a primal urge to flee, to bolt from this cage of sensory horror. I stop in the middle of the aisle, my hands gripping the cart handle so tightly my knuckles are white. I can’t move. I can’t breathe.

Yunho, who was comparing two brands of gochujang, notices my stillness immediately. His gaze finds mine, and the concern in his eyes is instant. He puts the jars back on the shelf.

“Hey,” he says softly, stepping in front of me, blocking my view of the overwhelming aisle. “Look at me.” I can’t. I shake my head, my eyes darting around wildly.

“Okay, that’s okay.” He changes tactics. He takes my hand. “We’re leaving. Right now.”

He abandons the half-full cart and leads me through the checkout lanes, his body a shield against the jostling people and beeping scanners. Once outside in the cool night air, the relief is so immense my knees buckle. He catches me, guiding me to a nearby bench. He crouches so he’s at my eye-level, his hands resting gently on my knees.

“You’re okay,” he says, his voice the only sound I can focus on. “We can leave the cart. It doesn’t matter. Just breathe with me.” He takes an exaggerated breath, and I try to follow, my own attempts ragged and shallow. But he’s patient, guiding me through it until my heart stops trying to beat its way out of my chest.

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Later that week, the pressure builds again. It’s late. The apartment is dark except for the glow of the TV. Yunho is tired from a long day. I’m vibrating with an unnamed energy, a tension that has been coiling in my gut all day. I see his empty mug on the coffee table, left over from the tea he had hours ago.

It’s nothing. It’s a cup.

But in my world of everything, it’s the final, unbearable weight. It’s neglect. It’s a sign that this small, perfect space we’ve built is flawed. It’s a crack in the foundation.

“Can’t you just put your cup in the sink?” The words are sharp, venomous. They surprise even me.

Yunho looks up from his phone, startled. “What? Oh, sorry. I forgot.”

“You always forget!” I shout, standing up. The volume of my own voice is shocking. “It’s one thing! One simple thing! Is it so hard?”

He stands up too, his expression a mixture of confusion and hurt. “I said I was sorry. It’s just a mug.” “It’s not just a mug!”

I’m crying now, hot, angry tears. “It’s everything! It’s the fact that I’m trying so hard to hold everything together and you just… you just leave things around like it doesn’t matter!”

The logic is gone. I know it. I’m screaming at him because the air feels wrong, because my past is a ghost at my shoulder whispering that I’m not worth the effort, that I’m a mess no one will ever want to clean up after. My mother’s voice, a phantom echo: You’re a mistake, you destroy everything you touch.

The fight drains out of me as quickly as it came, replaced by a crushing wave of self-loathing. I collapse onto the sofa, sobbing. “I don’t know why I’m like this,” I choke out, pulling at my hair. “You should leave. You have to leave me. I’ll ruin you.”

He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t defend himself. He just comes to me, kneeling on the floor and gathering me against his chest. His arms are strong, a cage of safety. He lets me sob, his hand stroking my back in a steady rhythm.

When my tears finally slow, he presses his lips to my hair and murmurs, his voice thick with an emotion I can’t name, “Then let me be ruined with you.”

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After the storm comes the void. It’s an inevitable pendulum swing. After days of feeling everything, my body and mind, in an act of self-preservation, simply shut down. The world goes from a deafening roar to absolute, muffled silence. The colors drain away, leaving everything in shades of gray. My voice, when I use it, is flat. Detached. The prose of my life becomes short, declarative sentences.

I am in bed. The sun is up. I do not move.

Yunho knows this state well. He calls it “the quiet days,” but it’s not the peaceful quiet we both cherish. It’s a heavy, suffocating silence. It’s the feeling of being encased in glass, able to see the world but not touch it, not feel it.

He doesn’t try to pull me out. He knows he can’t. Instead, he brings the world to me in small, gentle doses. He comes into the bedroom and sits in the armchair by the window, a book in his lap. He reads quietly, his presence a warm weight in the room. He doesn’t ask me to talk. He doesn’t ask me to get up. He just exists alongside me in the nothingness.

He makes me tea, my favorite blend of peppermint and black tea, and leaves it on the bedside table. I stare at the steam rising from the mug, a faint wisp of motion in a static world. I don’t drink it. Hours later, he takes the cold mug away without a word and replaces it with a glass of water.

In the evening, he comes and sits on the edge of the bed. He unfolds a thick, soft blanket and drapes it over me. My body registers the weight, but not the warmth. I stare at a crack in the ceiling.

“It’s okay if you don’t feel it now,” he whispers, his voice barely disturbing the thick silence. He tucks the blanket around my shoulders. “I’ll hold onto the warmth for you. Until you can.”

His kindness should make me feel something—gratitude, love, guilt. But there is only static. A hollow space where feelings used to be. It’s the most terrifying part of this cycle. The storm is painful, but the void is a kind of death. It makes me question my own humanity.

That night, as he lies beside me in the dark, his breathing a slow, steady rhythm, I find the energy to speak. My voice is a dry rasp.

“Yunho?”

He’s instantly awake. “I’m here.”

I turn my head on the pillow to look at his silhouette. “Sometimes I don’t even feel love,” I confess into the darkness. The admission is a cold, hard stone in my throat. “Not for you, not for anything. It’s like I’m hollow. Like the part of me that loves is just… gone.”

I expect him to be hurt. I expect silence, or worse, a platitude. Instead, he shifts closer, and I feel the gentle press of his lips against my temple. His hand finds mine under the covers, his fingers lacing through my own.

“Then I’ll love you loud enough for both of us,” he replies, his voice unwavering. “Until it comes back.”

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Months pass in this brutal rhythm. Storm, void, a fragile peace, then storm again. The cycle is exhausting. It wears me down to the bone, thinning my patience, fraying my nerves. A mountain of assignments, a weekend visit from a well-meaning but loud relative, a string of stressful days—they all pile up, one on top of the other, until the foundation cracks.

It’s a Saturday night. We’ve just come home from a friend’s birthday party. I spent hours smiling, making small talk, pretending to be a person who fits in the world. Now, back in the safety of our apartment, the mask shatters. The energy I expended keeping myself together rebounds, turning inward like a collapsing star.

I begin to pace. A frantic, caged-animal rhythm from the living room to the kitchen and back. My skin is crawling, itching. It’s too tight. I scratch at my arms, leaving red marks on my skin. The words start spilling out, a low, desperate muttering.

“It’s too much. It’s always too much. I can’t do this. I can’t live like this. I’m insane. I’m broken.”

Yunho stands by the doorway, his face etched with a deep, helpless pain. He’s seen this before, but not like this. This is different. This is a descent.

“Hey, come here. Talk to me,” he pleads, taking a step toward me.

“No!” I flinch away, pressing myself against the wall. “Don’t touch me! I’m disgusting! A freak who can’t control her feelings! Everyone I get close to gets hurt.” The thought is a shard of ice in my heart, a truth handed down to me by a lifetime of terrible people and a family that taught me love was a transaction you always failed.

He stops, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender. But my spiral only tightens. I slide down the wall, curling into a ball on the floor, my hands clawing at my scalp.

“Make it stop,” I sob. “Please, just make it stop.”

That’s when he moves. He crosses the room in two strides and kneels before me. He doesn’t try to speak. He just gently but firmly takes my wrists, pulling my hands away from my head. I struggle against him, a wild, guttural scream tearing from my throat.

“No, let me go!”

He doesn’t. He holds on, pulling me forward until I’m half-sprawled against him. Then he does something new. He takes my hands, turns them palm-out, and presses them flat against his chest. Against the solid, steady beat of his heart.

“Feel that?” he says, his voice strained. “That’s me. I’m right here. You’re right here. Feel my heartbeat.”

Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

The rhythm is slow, strong. An anchor in the hurricane. I stare at our hands on his chest, my small ones dwarfed by his. The fight in me breaks. I go limp, my head falling forward to rest against his shoulder. The sobs that rack my body are violent, agonizing. I’m weeping for the little girl who was told she was too much, for the teenager who learned to make herself small, for the woman who is terrified she will lose the only good thing in her life because of the chaos inside her. I take deep breaths calming myself down.

“That’s right deep breaths, love.” He whispers, voice barely above a breath.

“I don’t deserve you,” I whisper, my voice broken. “I’m going to ruin you, I’m crazy!”

I feel a tremor run through him, and when he speaks, his voice cracks for the first time I’ve ever heard. It’s a sound of pure, raw vulnerability.

“Then ruin me love, as I’ve always said,” he says, his arms tightening around me, holding me as if he’ll never let go. “I don’t care if you do, as long as you’re in my arms and I’m with you, I’ll be okay.”

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His words leave a mark. Not a scar, but a shift. Something in the foundation settles. The days that follow are quiet, but it’s a different kind of quiet. It’s the hush after a devastating storm, when the air is clean and the world feels fragile and new. I am exhausted, but not hollow. Just… still.

In this stillness, I start to notice things. The small, constant acts of love that Yunho performs without fanfare. They were always there, but now, my vision is clearer.

I notice the way he always leaves the small lamp on in the living room when he goes to bed before me, knowing I often stay up late, staring at the ceiling. It’s a tiny beacon in the dark, a silent message: I see you. You’re not alone.

I notice how he hums when I’m too quiet for too long. It’s not a demand for conversation, but a way of filling the silence with his gentle presence, preventing it from becoming heavy and oppressive.

I notice the questions he asks. He never asks me to be “better” or “happy.” He asks, “Do you want me close, or do you need a little space?” He asks, “Noise or quiet?” He gives me choices, returning a sense of agency that my own mind so often steals.

A few weeks after the breakdown, we’re sitting on our small balcony, watching the sunset. The sky is a brilliant canvas of orange, pink, and purple. For months, the world has looked gray to me, even on the brightest days. But tonight, I can see the colors.

I don’t feel a surge of joy. I don’t feel a profound sense of peace. But I feel… something. A flicker. A lightness in my chest that is noticeably different from the usual crushing weight.

I lean my head on his shoulder, my eyes on the fading light. “It’s not as gray tonight,” I whisper.

I feel him smile more than I see it. He squeezes my hand, his thumb tracing patterns on my skin. He doesn’t say, “See? You’re getting better.” He doesn’t say anything at all. He just squeezes my hand, sharing the moment with me.

The silence stretches for a while before I speak up.

“Yunho?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m starting therapy”, I say turning to face him.

I see him take a moment to register my words before he pulls me into a bone-crushing but equally soft embrace.

“I’m so proud of you” he breathes out, pulling back to leave a swift peck on my lips.

I chuckle softly smiling to myself, thinking.

The healing isn’t a straight line. I know there will be more storms, more voids. The wiring of my past, the trauma that etched these patterns into my soul, doesn’t just disappear. But lying there, with his warmth beside me and a hint of color returning to my world, I feel a flicker of something I haven’t felt in a long time: hope.

It’s not a cure. It’s not a fix. It’s the quiet promise of a softer tomorrow.

He is my in-between. My safe harbor. With him, I am not just the storm or the void. I am the sky that holds them both.

In the silence, in the storm, he is always there. And that makes me believe I can be, too

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Notes: Hi hi! I’ve been really productive lately, so expect a lot of new oneshots soon. This one’s more on the sad/comfort side — kind of like a diary entry — and very personal because I poured a lot of my own feelings into it.

The “breakdowns” might feel repetitive, but that’s how it really is for me: some days everything feels too loud, like I want to crawl out of my skin; other days I feel completely hollow (Hollow by skz reference??). I haven’t been to therapy or gotten an official diagnosis, so I just call them my “everything and nothing” days.

I hope this story brings comfort to anyone who reads it, because writing it did for me. The opening is actually based on a real diary entry of mine (minus the Yunho part — though Ateez truly is my comfort space). Also, “Be Alright” by Yunho has been on repeat while I wrote this — give it a listen while reading!