Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Mark couldn’t wait to get home from work. His new job at Racing Bulls was rewarding, yes, but it was a different kind of satisfaction. More methodical, precise, and far removed from the rush of adrenaline he used to crave as a driver. Almost eight years had passed since he walked away from Formula 1, officially retired from racing for 5 years. Yet the sport had a way of pulling him back. First as a manager for younger drivers, then eventually as a development coach, he found himself once again orbiting the same world he had tried to leave behind.

On a normal day, the moment he pulled into his driveway, he would hear the scramble of paws on the other side of the door. Simba and Shadow, his dogs, excitedly waiting for him, tails wagging, bodies pressed against the frame, desperate to welcome him home. But tonight, the house was quiet. Too quiet.

Mark’s breath hitched as soon as he stepped inside. There, on his couch, sat a figure who looked entirely too comfortable with feet up on the sofa, his dogs’ heads resting peacefully on his lap as if they had belonged there all along. The dogs barely acknowledged Mark, lifting their eyes for a moment before settling back down, as though their loyalties had shifted.

“Hi.”

That was all Sebastian managed to say. His voice was soft, almost hesitant. The years were etched into his face now. Fine wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, his once golden hair longer and touched with fatigue, his blue eyes tired but still impossibly familiar. Mark found himself staring, unable to look away. It's been years since the last time Sebastian was home. At his home.

“What are you doing here?” Mark asked, his voice sharper than intended. He walked towards the kitchen dropping his things on the counter. Purposely putting as much distance as he can with the other person in his living room.

“I guess you didn’t read my messages?” Sebastian replied.

“You couldn’t call?”

“We both know you don’t pick up.”

Mark didn’t answer. Instead, he reached for his phone, buried deep in his work bag. A swipe, a scroll, and there they were. Dozens of unread messages, both long and short, each one carrying weight he hadn’t prepared himself to face. His eyes caught on one in particular: We’re getting divorced.

It was as though the air had been ripped from his lungs. His chest tightened, his heart stumbling over itself in a frantic rhythm. His fingers dug into the marble countertop until they ached, but it wasn’t enough to ground him. The room tilted, blurring at the edges. Panic attack.

“Mark, are you okay?” Sebastian’s voice cut through, closer now.

No. He wanted to shout, to tell Sebastian not to come near, not to touch him, not when everything felt so raw and dangerous. But his body betrayed him. His legs refused to move, his throat locked tight, and when Sebastian’s hand finally touched his back—warm, steady, achingly familiar—his knees buckled.

Sebastian caught him with a speed that spoke of instincts honed long ago on the track. Carefully, he guided them both to the floor, holding Mark upright as if he were something fragile that might break apart completely. Mark burned at the contact, his skin alive with the memory of everything he thought he had buried.

When his gaze finally lifted, it met Sebastian’s. The same blue eyes once bright, mischievous, magnetic now dimmed by years and hardship. Mark had loved those eyes. He had hated them. He had dreaded them. And now, seeing them wet with tears, searching his face desperately, he felt something unravel inside him.

“Breathe with me, Mark. Please?”

Sebastian’s voice was low, calm, steady. He inhaled slowly, exhaled with care, and after a beat, Mark forced himself to follow. His chest trembled, but gradually the rhythm returned, shaky but present. Sebastian’s hand intertwined with his, the other rubbing slow circles across his back, grounding him in the gentlest way possible.

How ironic, Mark thought dimly, that Sebastian the one in the middle of a divorce, the one who stood on the brink of losing everything, was the one holding him together keeping him from falling apart.

His breathing steadied. His vision cleared. Embarrassment began to creep in. Mark pulled his hand away, forcing his body upright. His legs were still unsteady, but Sebastian was quick to hover close, ready to catch him again if needed. Mark made it to the kitchen counter, his hands shaking as he reached for a glass. He filled it with water and drank deeply, each swallow rough but necessary. Even with his back turned, he could feel the weight of Sebastian’s gaze, following him, patient, unrelenting.

The water was cold, almost painfully so, but it gave Mark something to focus on besides the man now standing close to him. Too close. He lowered the glass slowly, the silence pressing in heavier than any words could. Finally, he turned, meeting Sebastian’s eyes again.

“So,” Mark said, his voice hoarse, “you’re getting divorced.”

Sebastian’s jaw tightened. He looked down at the dogs now hovering at his feet, as if searching for the right words somewhere in the fur of creatures that loved unconditionally. “Yeah,” he admitted quietly.

Mark’s laugh came out sharp, brittle. “What the fuck are you doing here then?"

“I don't know.” Sebastian’s tone was calm, too calm, like he’d rehearsed this. “I came because I guess I wanted to let you know. And because despite everything, despite all the years, this…” His hand gestured vaguely at the room, at Mark himself. “This still feels like home.”

The words landed like a punch. Mark gripped the counter harder, nails biting into the marble. Home. The very thing he had tried to rebuild without Sebastian, the very thing he thought he had finally made peace with.

“You don’t get to say that,” Mark muttered, the words tasting like iron on his tongue.

He wanted to stop there, but the silence in the room pressed too heavily against his skull. Sebastian’s presence, the easy way he sat in Mark’s house like he still belonged scraped against every raw edge Mark had tried to bury.

"You don’t get to just barge in whenever things fall apart with her." Sebastian flinched but didn’t answer. It was always the same pattern, wasn’t it? Sebastian showing up when his marriage cracked, carrying the word divorce like a weapon he never actually used. Mark had heard it before. Too many times. Each time, he had mourned it, clung to it, bled for it. And each time, Sebastian went back. 

He clenched the counter until his knuckles blanched. He could still remember those nights, the quiet apologies, the promises that it was finally over. And then the disappearing. Sebastian slipping away like smoke, leaving Mark with nothing but wreckage and silence.

“I’ve played this game before,” Mark said aloud, though his voice was quieter, almost hollow. His eyes didn’t leave the countertop. If he looked at Sebastian, if he looked at those eyes he might lose what little strength he had left.

“Because this isn’t new, Sebastian,” Mark pressed on, his words harsh, clipped. “This is what you do. You show up broken, lost, desperate and I’m supposed to pick up the pieces, right? I’m supposed to put you back together while you…” His laugh cracked, bitter. “…while you go back to your perfect little family. Every. Single. Time.”

The dogs stirred uneasily at the edge in his tone, their tails still but their eyes watchful. Sebastian’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t interrupt, didn’t fight back. He just stood there, taking it, and that almost infuriated Mark more.

Mark shook his head, his chest tightening again not panic this time, but something heavier, older. “You think I can just pick up where we left off? Like nothing happened?”

“No,” Sebastian said. His voice cracked on the single word. “I don’t expect that. I just… I needed to see you. Needed you to know.”

Mark shook his head, his hands still gripping the counter like if he let go, he’d fly apart. “I’ve played this game before. I know the ending. You leave me bleeding and you go running back. And I—” His voice cracked, sharp with something between rage and grief. “I can’t do that again. I won’t do that again.”

For the first time, Sebastian’s composure slipped. His eyes flickered with guilt, pain, the ghost of something Mark recognized too well—remorse that always came too late.

“I didn’t come here to hurt you,” Sebastian whispered.

Mark barked a humorless laugh. “Then you’re doing a hell of a job failing.”

Mark’s throat ached. He wanted to tell Sebastian to leave, to take his memories and his apologies and go back to the wreckage of his own life. But as Sebastian stood there, raw and broken, the dogs still loyal at his side, Mark couldn’t say it. Not yet.

Chapter Text

Mark Webber, the aussie grit, a driver with such a prolific racing career wouldn't probably be able to recount every detail of his life better than Wikipedia. But if you asked him about Sebastian Vettel, about the first times, he could confidently ace any exam without hesitation. His memory about him was still vivid.

The first time they met.

The first time they kissed.

The first time they had sex—and the moment it shifted into making love.

The first time they fought.

The first time they “broke up.”

And the first time Sebastian told him he was getting divorced.

It had been almost the same scene, years ago.

Sebastian in his living room, younger, so much younger but with bloodshot eyes that gave him away. His marriage still fresh, barely two months old, already fraying at the seams. He looked frustrated, restless, the kind of lost that only Sebastian could be when life wasn’t bending to his will.

Mark could still see it. Sebastian pacing the length of the living room, hands flailing as he recounted every petty fight, every slammed door, every word his new wife had thrown at him. She was heavily pregnant, exhausted, and fed up. He’d been more focused on Ferrari than on her, more obsessed with proving himself than learning what it meant to be a husband.

“She kicked me out, Mark,” Sebastian had snapped, dropping onto the sofa like a sulking teenager. “Over nothing! Over the stupidest, pettiest thing.”

But nothing was ever really nothing with Sebastian. Not then. Not now. Mark remembered how he’d ranted for hours, about the way she nagged him for being gone too much, about how she didn’t understand the pressure of his new seat at Ferrari, about how unfair it all was. He had been all sharp edges and frustration, like a boy throwing stones at glass just to hear it shatter.

And then, finally, the words. Yelled in the same careless way he’d slammed the door on his wife in Germany before boarding a plane to London straight to Mark. Let’s get divorced.

Just two months into marriage, and already Sebastian was here at Mark’s door, at Mark’s mercy, complaining about a life he had chosen but didn’t yet know how to live.

Mark had comforted him, of course. What else could he do? Sebastian was crumbling in front of him, unraveling like a boy too young for the weight he’d taken on. Mark had sat beside him on the couch, letting him rant and rage, letting the storm pass until Sebastian finally slumped against him, exhausted.

He remembered the heat of Sebastian’s forehead pressed into his shoulder, the way his voice cracked when he complained about how unfair it all was, how suffocating marriage felt already. For every bitter word, Mark had given him quiet patience, steady hands, the kind of calm Sebastian had always pulled from him without asking.

But he hadn’t believed it. Not for a second.

Not the talk of divorce. Not the declarations that he couldn’t go back. Because beneath all the dramatics, beneath the tantrum of a man still half a boy, there was a reality Sebastian couldn’t run from. He had a wife waiting in Germany. A baby on the way. And no matter how many times he swore he was done, Mark knew he wouldn’t leave. Not with a child about to be born.

So he had held him, stroked his hair, whispered reassurances he didn’t truly believe. And when Sebastian finally fell asleep on his couch, looking more like a boy hiding from consequences than a man ready to walk away from a family, Mark had only sighed.

By morning, Sebastian was calmer. Quieter. The fire of his tantrum had burned down into sullen ash. He sat at Mark’s kitchen table with a mug of untouched coffee, staring at the floor as if he could will the world into stopping just for him.

Mark remembered choosing his words carefully that day. Gentle, but pointed. He reminded Sebastian of the vows he had made, of the wife he had left in tears, of the child she carried who hadn’t even been born yet. He’d laced the words with practicality, but underneath, there was guilt. Enough to push Sebastian back toward Germany, back toward the family he’d sworn he wanted to walk away from.

It wasn’t the first time Mark had done it. Months before this incident, when the marriage was still an idea more than a reality, he had played the same part. He’d convinced Sebastian that marriage was the right thing, that a baby deserved parents who at least tried to build a home together. Mark had buried his own ache in the process, pressing Sebastian into the very life that would keep tearing them apart.

And it had worked. Sebastian went back. He always went back.

That was the pattern, the cycle Mark could predict down to the breath. Sebastian would run to him when it all fell apart, declare it was over, swear he couldn’t do it anymore. And Mark—stupid, loyal, still hopelessly in love—would put him back together, then send him home to someone else.

Mark had been certain it would never change. Certain he would always be the place Sebastian came to fall apart before going back to his real life.

At least, until the first time Sebastian told him they were getting divorced and Mark actually believed.

Chapter Text

Mark’s throat worked, words caught somewhere between fury and grief, until suddenly it all narrowed into one thought. His chest seized, and before he could stop himself, it burst out.

“God, Sebastian where are the kids?”

The words landed like a slap. Sebastian froze, mouth half-open, eyes flicking down as if the floor might give him an answer. Even the dogs stirred, ears twitching at the sharpness in Mark’s tone.

Mark pushed off the counter, closing the space with steps that felt heavier than they should. “You come here, sit in my house, and tell me this! While they’re… what? Just waiting? Just wondering where the hell their father is?”

“They’re safe,” Sebastian said quickly, the words stumbling out. His fists tightened against his knees. “With her. With their mother. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“Safe,” Mark bit out, the laugh that followed sharp, bitter. “You think that’s enough? You think saying the word makes it true? You don’t get to vanish from their lives and call it safe.”

Sebastian’s face cracked, guilt spilling through the lines around his mouth, his voice catching on the edges. “You don’t think I know? You don’t think I lie awake wondering what this is doing to them? I do, Mark. Every night. But I—” he swallowed hard, “I didn’t know where else to go.”

Mark’s words kept coming, sharp and merciless, each one meant to cut deeper.

Mark’s chest tightened, anger folding into something heavier, but he refused to let it soften. He saw them in his mind, the small faces carrying pieces of Sebastian, every line and glance unmistakable. They deserved better than this, better than excuses.

He sank into the chair opposite, voice low but cutting. “They don’t care about excuses. They just care if you’re there.”

Sebastian’s head lifted at that, eyes glassy, searching, but Mark didn’t meet them. He kept his gaze fixed on the floor, jaw locked, because if he looked up—if he really looked—it might all unravel.

Mark leaned forward, the chair groaning under the sudden weight of him. His words came low, sharp, every syllable meant to wound. And just like that, it felt like they were back at Red Bull as teammates and rivals playing the same game of who can tolerate the pain more. Mark throwing every blow he could find, vicious, calculated, not caring if he left bruises. So he kept swinging. Because that was what he had always done against Sebastian. Hit harder, even when it broke him too.

“You sit here telling me about divorce like it’s just another game you’re playing but it’s not just her, Sebastian. You’ve got kids. And you leave them to clean up the mess every time you decide you can’t hack it. Do you get that? You’re not just walking out on a marriage, you’re walking out on them.”

Sebastian’s jaw worked, a tremor passing through his mouth before he bit it down. He didn’t answer.

Mark pressed harder, the heat in his chest burning bitter. “You want to know what this looks like? It looks like you choosing yourself. Every time. You’re selfish. You run here, to me, while they’re left asking where the hell their father went. You think that’s safe? You think that’s love?”

Sebastian’s shoulders hunched, guilt dragging him smaller in the chair. His eyes glistened, but he didn’t look away.

Mark’s throat tightened, his fury spilling faster, sharper. “They deserve better than a coward who bolts the second it gets hard. You’re not just a bad husband, you’re a bad father.”

The words hung in the air, vicious, final.

But that wasn’t true, and Mark knew it. He’d seen Sebastian with them—how his voice softened, how patience came so easily, how his whole body lit up when one of them reached for him. Sebastian was reckless, impossible, and infuriating, but never with them. Never with his kids. He was a horrible husband, maybe, but not a bad father. Mark knew that as sure as he knew his own name. He hated himself for saying otherwise.

Sebastian flinched as if struck, but still he didn’t move, didn’t defend himself. Just sat there, silent, as if taking every word Mark threw at him was the only penance he knew how to give.

Mark’s laugh came sharp, humorless, filling the silence Sebastian refused to break.

“Christ, you don’t even fight back, do you? You just sit there, let me do the talking, because it’s easier than owning up to it. That’s who you are, Sebastian. You make a mess and then leave everyone else to sweep it up. Your wife. Your kids. Me.”

Sebastian’s lips parted, as if to protest, but nothing came out. His throat worked, silent.

Mark leaned in, eyes burning. “Do you ever think about them? Really think about them? Do you picture their faces when they’re asking where you are? Do you imagine what it’s like for them to watch you disappear every time you decide you can’t handle it? Because that’s what they’ll remember, Sebastian. Not the wins. Not the trophies. Not even the bedtime stories. They’ll remember that you left.”

Sebastian’s breath hitched, quiet but sharp, like the words had pierced somewhere deep.

Mark’s voice rose, ragged. “You don’t get to call yourself a father if you’re only one when it’s easy. If you can only show up when it suits you. That’s not a father. That’s a coward hiding behind excuses.”

His chest heaved, every muscle tight, fury boiling over into something he couldn’t stop. And still, underneath it, he knew the truth. He had seen Sebastian hold them, tuck them in, kiss their foreheads like they were the only thing in the world that mattered. He knew Sebastian loved them in a way that was deep, unshakable. He knew, if there was anything Sebastian had ever done right, it was being a father. But the words kept coming anyway, because Mark needed to hurt him, needed him to feel even an inch of the pain he carried.

Sebastian’s eyes were wet now, unblinking, fixed on him. He didn’t move. Didn’t run. Just sat there, stripped bare under every accusation Mark hurled his way.

Mark slammed his hand against the counter, the crack of skin on stone splitting the air. “You’re selfish, Sebastian. Always have been. And now you’re dragging them down with you.”

The silence that followed was a chasm, heavy, suffocating. Even the dogs had stilled, ears pinned back, watching with wide eyes. Mark stood there, chest heaving, throat raw, staring at the man across from him and hating himself for how much he still cared. Mark’s voice was ragged, low, but it carried like a blade.

“You think they don’t notice? You think kids don’t feel it when their father disappears?”

Of course they notice. Of course they feel it. And yet Mark knew Sebastian never let them. He’d seen him crouch to their level, explain the world with patience Mark never thought he had. He was present in ways Mark could never erase. But he needed to hurt him now, so he twisted the knife.

Sebastian’s mouth opened, shut again. His knuckles whitened against his knees.

Mark leaned in, relentless. “They’ll remember, Sebastian. Not the bedtime stories, not the weekends you managed to show up. They’ll remember the nights you weren’t there. The questions their mother couldn’t answer.”

But Mark remembered the stories too. He remembered Sebastian on the floor with toy cars, voices and laughter spilling out like he had all the time in the world. He remembered watching, heart aching, because Sebastian was a better father than he had ever been a husband. Still, he couldn’t stop himself. He needed to strip it bare.

Sebastian’s breath came unsteady, chest rising too fast. Face too red trying to surpress all his sobs.

Mark pressed harder, his laugh sharp, hollow. “And one day, they’ll stop asking. They’ll stop waiting at the door. Because kids aren’t stupid. They’ll learn. They’ll realize not to expect you at all.”

God, he hated himself. He’d seen those kids run to Sebastian every single time, faces lighting up like nothing else mattered. They never stopped waiting. They adored him, clung to him, thrived in his orbit. But saying it cut deeper, and Mark wanted him to bleed.

“Mark—” Sebastian’s voice cracked, barely audible.

Mark cut over him, every word a strike. “And when that day comes, they won’t just see a husband who failed their mother. They’ll see a father who failed them.”

Lie. Lie. Lie. He had never failed them, not once. Mark knew it, hated himself for knowing it. Sebastian could burn every bridge, betray every vow, and still never those kids. But it didn’t matter. Mark wanted him broken. He wanted him to feel it.

Sebastian’s head snapped up, eyes wide, face breaking.

“Stop.” His voice shook.

Mark didn’t. He leaned closer, words venomous now. “They’ll know exactly who left them, Sebastian. Exactly who wasn’t there when it mattered.”

He was always there. Mark had seen him leave the track early just to make it to a school recital. Had seen him sit cross-legged on the carpet with all of them climbing him like he was the center of their universe. But truth didn’t matter here. Only pain did.

“Stop.” Louder this time, ragged, like he couldn’t breathe. His hands trembled against his thighs.

Mark’s chest heaved, anger still spilling. “You’ve been running your whole life. But this—this is the one thing you don’t get to run from. They’ll carry it. Every day. And when they’re old enough to understand, they’ll know their father chose himself over them.”

No. No, he hadn’t. Not once. Sebastian had chosen them every time, even when it cost him everything else. Even when it cost Mark. And maybe that was the worst cut of all, that Mark had never been chosen in the same way.

“Stop, Mark!” Sebastian’s voice finally broke, the words torn from his throat. His whole body shook, tears brimming over as he snapped, raw and desperate:

"One day they'll realize you never fought for them—"

“It wasn’t me this time! It was Janna! She’s the one who wants out!”

The confession ripped the air apart, leaving only the sound of Sebastian’s ragged breathing.

Mark froze. His mouth still half-open from the accusation, his body leaning forward, ready to strike again but the sound of Sebastian’s voice, cracked and desperate, cleaved straight through him.

Janna.

She was the one. Not him. Not this time.

Mark’s chest heaved, the fire of his anger sputtering out all at once, leaving only smoke, only exhaustion. He blinked, slow, as if trying to process words in a language he didn’t understand. Janna wanted out. Sebastian hadn’t said those words before, not once, not in all the years of tantrums and threats and slammed doors. It had always been him. Always Sebastian shouting divorce in the heat of an argument, swearing he couldn’t do it anymore. But Janna, she had always stayed. Janna had forgiven. Janna had kept the house standing, no matter how broken the beams were.

And now she was the one who wanted to leave.

Mark sank back, shoulders heavy, guilt crawling up his spine like a fever. Every word he had hurled, every cruel strike meant to cut Sebastian down, suddenly felt hollow. Lies he’d spat just to wound and none of them true. None of them fair.

His throat tightened, the weight of it crushing. He had tried to frame Sebastian as a selfish father, a coward who couldn’t stay. But he knew better. He’d always known better. He was a terrible husband, yes. But never a bad father. Never.

The silence that followed was unbearable. Sebastian’s chest heaved with ragged breaths, his eyes still wet, his hands trembling in his lap. And Mark was tired. exhausted. The anger had drained out of him, leaving only shame in its wake.

He rubbed a hand over his face, the fight gone from his voice when he finally spoke. “Christ, Seb…”

The words died there. There was nothing left to throw. Nothing left to hide behind. Just the truth, sharp and raw, that he had wasted every breath lashing out only to find it had all been for nothing.

Chapter Text

The silence pressed in thick, suffocating. Not the kind that settled rooms into peace, but the kind that rang in the ears, louder than any shout. Mark sat in it, chest heaving, throat raw, and all he could hear was the echo of his own words—sharp, merciless, untrue.

Sebastian hadn’t looked at him in what felt like hours. His gaze stayed fixed on the floor, lashes wet, jaw tight, shoulders curled in as if bracing for another strike. It was the longest Mark had ever seen him avoid eye contact, and it unsettled him more than the shouting had. Sebastian had always been defiant, always ready to meet a blow head-on, even when he was wrong. But now he just sat there, small and still, as if every year had finally caught up to him.

Mark studied him in the silence, unable to stop himself. Gone was the boy who had once stormed into his life, all sharp elbows and impossible arrogance. Gone was the golden-haired prodigy who believed he could bend the world to his will. In his place sat a man who carried the weight of years in the lines around his eyes, in the slump of his posture, in the gray threaded through his hair. He looked older. Tired. And for the first time, Mark realized he couldn’t remember the last time he had seen Sebastian look young. It was only then Mark saw the tears. They slid soundless down Sebastian’s face, catching in the light before falling to his lap. No words, no protest, just tears that kept coming, carving paths through years etched into his skin.

Mark felt his chest seize, throat closing, and only when his vision blurred did he realize the damp on his own cheek. He wiped at it with the back of his hand, furious with himself, but it didn’t matter. The silence had stripped them both down, and there was no hiding left.

He had accused Sebastian of being a coward, a selfish father, a man who abandoned the children who adored him. Lies. Every single one of them. Lies he had thrown because he wanted to see Sebastian break, because he needed to hurt him the way he’d been hurt himself. And Sebastian had let him, sitting there with tears threatening, taking every blow as if he deserved it.

It wasn’t the first time he’d reduced Sebastian to this. He remembered another night, years ago, when he had torn him down just as brutally. Words had cut deep too, sharp and unforgiving, until Sebastian was shaking, sobbing against him like the world was ending, begging him for something Mark couldn’t give. And Mark had consoled him the only way he knew how. He had pulled him close, let him collapse into his arms, held him through every ragged breath until the fight drained out of him. But comfort had bled into something heavier, something desperate. Sebastian had clung to him as if he was the last solid thing left, and Mark hadn’t stopped him. He hadn’t wanted to. He let Sebastian take what he needed, let himself give in too, until every touch, every kiss, carried the weight of goodbye. That night, Mark had made Sebastian feel—if only for a few fleeting hours—that he was still his. That he belonged to him. That nothing outside that room mattered. But even as he gave him that, Mark knew the lie he was weaving. He knew he was going to push him back toward the life he swore he didn’t want, back toward vows that were already waiting at the altar.

And now, watching him cry silent tears at his kitchen table, Mark felt the same pull. The urge to reach across, to hold him again, to patch over the wounds he himself had opened. To give him something, anything, to quiet the breaking. But his hands stayed clenched at his sides, his body rigid with guilt. He was torn between repeating the way he had consoled him years ago to make up for the pain he had caused, or just let the pain linger and let it be.

He dragged in a breath, fighting against the memory that pressed at the edges of his mind. The last time he had hurt him like this. The last time Sebastian had begged him not to.

It had been the night before the wedding.

Mark had kept his distance for weeks, cutting contact clean, convincing himself it was the only way to survive the inevitable. The wedding was coming whether he liked it or not, and he had tried to make peace with the fact that he had to let Sebastian go. He ignored the calls, the messages, anything that might pull him back in.

Until Sebastian’s parents called. Not just called, begged. Their voices low, frantic, breaking in ways he’d never heard before. Sebastian was losing it. He wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t stop pacing the house, raging one moment and crumbling the next. Nothing calmed him. Nothing worked. And finally, they pleaded: Please, Mark. Come. He’ll listen to you.

So he went. Against every instinct, against the wall he’d built, he went.

And what he found was chaos. Sebastian in the middle of it, younger but wrecked, red-eyed and raw, pacing the length of the room like a caged animal. His voice was hoarse from shouting, from crying, from tearing himself apart in front of anyone unlucky enough to be near. His parents looked on helplessly, their hands wrung tight, as if Mark’s arrival had been their last hope.

When Sebastian saw him, the breakdown only sharpened. His face crumpled, his body sagged with relief and fury all at once.

“Where the hell have you been?” Sebastian’s voice cracked, a mix of rage and grief. “You just vanish! Like none of this matters to you while I’m supposed to stand there tomorrow and marry her?”

He was spiraling, shaking, words tumbling out faster than he could control.

“I can’t do it, Mark. I can’t. I don’t want this! I don’t want her.” His fists slammed against his chest, against the walls, against anything he could find. “I don’t want to lose you.”

Sebastian was unraveling in front of him, every second louder, messier, more impossible to contain.

“You think I can just walk down that aisle tomorrow and pretend?” His voice broke, cracking sharp in the air. “Pretend I love her, pretend this is what I want, when all I can think about is you?”

He paced the room like he was trying to wear a hole through the floor, his movements frantic, jerky. His hands clawed at his hair, tugging until strands slipped free, until his scalp was red. His chest heaved, every breath catching like it hurt to draw air.

“I begged you not to leave me, and you disappeared anyway!” His fists slammed the wall so hard the frame rattled. He spun back toward Mark, face twisted with rage and heartbreak. “You think I can live with this? You think I can stand there tomorrow and bind myself to her while you—while you stand back and let it happen?”

Tears streamed unchecked, his whole body shaking with the force of it. He was a storm contained only by four fragile walls, breaking everything inside with him.

“Say something!” he shouted, voice raw, pleading now. “Tell me not to do it, Mark! Please—please tell me, and I’ll stop this. I swear, I’ll stop it all. Just tell me you still want me.”

Sebastian’s knees buckled, his body collapsing into the sofa like the weight of it had finally crushed him. He buried his face in his hands, sobbing, the kind of sound Mark had never heard from him before, animal, broken, tearing itself out of his chest.

And through it all, he kept repeating, over and over, voice muffled but desperate.

“I don’t want her. I don’t want this. I just want you.”

“Actions have consequences, Seb,” Mark repeated, his voice sharp, venom cutting every word. “You think you can scream your way out of this? You think throwing a tantrum fixes the fact you fucked up?”

The words slipped out before Mark could stop them, low and venomous, but it was because he couldn’t stand the sight of him like this. Sebastian crumpled, sobbing, looking more shattered than Mark ever felt himself and that was unbearable. Because Mark was hurt too. Maybe more than he would ever admit.

He’d left Formula 1, thrown himself into WEC, forcing himself busy enough to survive. He told himself it was the right choice, the only way to carve out a life that wasn’t orbiting Sebastian Vettel. Meanwhile, Sebastian was still there, still chained to Red Bull, suffocating under the pressure of a team that had turned its back on him after every misstep. Mark had heard the whispers, the bad race, the fight with the engineers, the new teammate who outpaced him. How the golden boy of Formula 1 had started to wobble, cracks splitting through the armor he had built around himself.

And in that spiral, he had wavered. Drowned it out in alcohol, too much too fast. Mark hadn’t been there, not to steady him, not to drag him out before it went too far. He’d been thousands of miles away, head down in his own new world, too determined to move on to notice Sebastian was falling apart. And one drunken night had changed everything. Janna. His childhood friend. The mistake that could never be undone.

Mark felt the bitterness rise in his throat even now, the same bitterness that had burned in him since the first moment he heard it. “You got yourself here, Seb. Fighting the team, sulking after every bad race, letting that kid teammate of yours eat you alive. And instead of getting your head straight, you drowned yourself in booze like a coward, you lost your head. And look where that got you. You can’t claw that back. You can’t scream your way out of it.”

Sebastian lifted his head at that, face streaked with tears, eyes bloodshot, furious, and wide. It was the first time Mark has blamed him for what had happened and he sure pressed on, his voice rougher, harsher, because he was drowning in it too.

“You think I wasn’t gutted when I found out? You think I didn’t tear myself apart knowing I wasn’t there—that I let you fall into her arms when it should have been mine? You think that doesn’t kill me, every damn day?”

“You weren’t strong enough to face me, so you found her. One drunken night, and now she’s carrying the weight of it all. Your mistake. Your mess. And tomorrow you’ll stand there, hand in hers, because you couldn’t control yourself for five fucking minutes.”

He shook his head, jaw tight, his chest burning with fury and grief tangled so tight he couldn’t separate them.

Mark’s chest heaved, fury spilling unchecked. “You want me to say I still want you? You want me to save you from this? Christ, Sebastian, you ruined that the second you let someone else touch you. The second you let her become the mother of your child.”

The words hit harder than he intended, heavier than he could take back. The look on Sebastian’s face—devastated, undone—would haunt him for years.

And still, Mark hated himself, because even as he spat them, his body betrayed him. He wanted to reach out, wanted to hold him, to kiss the tears from his face, to take him one more time before it all ended. But instead, he stayed rooted where he was.

Mark’s voice broke, rage twisting into something rawer, messier.

“God, you don’t get it, do you? You don’t know how much I wanted you. How much I fucking hated this—” He gestured wildly, at the room, at the world, at the mess that had swallowed them both. “I hated watching it all happen, hated knowing I wasn’t there for one goddamn second, and in that second you managed to ruin everything.”

Sebastian’s breath caught, his shoulders jerking.

Mark leaned closer, eyes burning. “If I’d been there—if I’d just stayed by your side...you wouldn’t have drowned yourself in booze, you wouldn’t have stumbled into her bed, and you wouldn’t be standing here about to marry a woman you don’t love. All because I blinked. All because I wasn’t there for you once.”

The words fell like shards of glass, jagged and unrelenting. His throat ached, his chest tight with the truth he could no longer choke down.

“I hate it,” he whispered, voice trembling now. “I hate what you’ve turned us into. I hate that you’re tying yourself to her because of one mistake. And I hate that you’re mine in every way that matters—but tomorrow you’ll belong to her.”

Sebastian’s face crumpled completely then, silent tears streaking hot down his cheeks. And Mark knew, with a sick weight in his gut, that nothing he could say would fix it.

Mark’s jaw clenched, his words turning flat, measured, cruel in their steadiness. “We don’t always get what we want, Seb." Sebastian flinched, his eyes lifting, desperate, but Mark didn’t waver.

“You’re Sebastian Vettel. Four-time world champion. The golden boy. The one who was supposed to be untouchable.” His tone was almost clinical, a statement of fact, but the venom curled beneath it. “You don’t get to fall apart like this. You don’t get to say you don’t want it anymore. And you sure as hell don’t get to walk away with me.”

Sebastian shook his head violently, tears spilling faster, but Mark pressed on, relentless.

“You think you can just drop everything—her, the baby, the family, the reputation—and run off with me? Like the world won’t notice? Like it won’t burn everything you’ve built to the ground?”

His chest rose and fell, his throat raw, but the words kept coming, cutting sharper.

“You can’t. You can’t just walk away. Not from this. Not from them. Not when you’re you.”

The silence after was brutal, heavier than any shouting could have been. Sebastian sat there, undone, tears streaming, the fight ripped out of him. And Mark felt the weight of his own words slam back into him, cold and merciless. He hated himself for saying them. Hated himself for meaning them.

Sebastian’s head snapped up, wet eyes blazing through the tears. “I don’t care!” His voice cracked, half-shout, half-sob. “I don’t care about them, about the press, about Red Bull, about the fucking world—I just want you! I don’t want her, I don’t want this marriage, I don’t want any of it if it means losing you!”

He pushed forward, grabbing at Mark’s arm, his grip trembling, desperate. “Say the word, Mark. Tell me not to do it, and I won’t. I swear I won’t. Just tell me you still want me and I’ll walk away from it all right now.”

Mark’s chest seized, his breath catching rough. For a moment he almost gave in, almost let himself believe it could be that simple. But then the truth slammed into him, heavy and brutal.

This wasn’t Sebastian. Not the Sebastian he knew. Sebastian was stubborn, relentless, insufferably ambitious. He didn’t beg. He didn’t fold. He didn’t talk about giving up, not on anything, not on anyone. To see him like this, ready to throw away everything he’d built for something as fragile as love, for him —it was unbecoming. Wrong. Like watching a world champion throw the race before the lights even went out. This wasn’t the fighter he had gone wheel to wheel with. This was someone broken, reckless, begging to lose. Sebastian Vettel doesn't mean any of those words.

Mark tore his arm back, fury and grief tangled in his throat. “Don’t—” The word came out like a plea, hoarse and guttural. “Don’t you dare throw your life away for me.”

Sebastian froze, tears streaming unchecked.

Mark’s throat burned, his vision blurred, but he forced the words out. “You’ve got a child on the way, Seb. A family. A whole future tied to them. You walk away now, and you’re not running to me! You’re abandoning everything! And I can’t let you do that.”

The silence after was crushing, filled only by Sebastian’s jagged sobs, his body folding in on itself. And Mark sat there, trembling with the weight of it, knowing the only thing left for him to do was carry the guilt.

Sebastian shook his head so hard it looked like he might tear himself apart. His hands clawed through his hair, his shoulders jerking with sobs he couldn’t swallow down.

“I don’t want a future without you,” he choked, voice wrecked. “Don’t you get it? I can’t stand there tomorrow and pretend. I can’t smile for the cameras, I can’t promise her forever when forever is you. It’s always been you, Mark. It’s only ever been you.”

He reached for him again, fingers trembling, clutching at his shirt like a drowning man. “Please,” he begged, tears streaming freely now, no pride left in him. “Please don’t make me do this. Tell me not to go through with it. Tell me I can stay. Tell me I’m still yours.”

The sound of it ripped through Mark’s chest, each word another crack he couldn’t patch. He had wanted this, God, he had wanted this for years, he had wanted Sebastian to choose him, to say his name like it was everything. But not like this. Not when it meant burning everything else to ash.

He pressed a hand against his face, hating himself for the tremor in his voice. “God knows I want you. God knows I’ve never stopped. But I won’t be the reason you burn it all down. I won’t carry that. Not for the rest of my life. Not for the rest of yours.”

“Please.” The word tore out of Sebastian, ragged and unsteady, like it had been dragged from the deepest part of him. He dropped to his knees before Mark, hands trembling as they clutched at his legs, his face tilted upward, eyes wide and wet with a kind of pleading Mark had never seen from him in all their years.

But this wasn’t Sebastian. Not the fighter, not the champion, not the boy who would wrestle the world into submission just to win. This was someone breaking in his arms, desperate enough to surrender the very things that made him who he was.

Mark’s jaw clenched, his vision blurred, his body trembling with the effort to hold the line. But when Sebastian’s voice cracked one last time, “Don’t let me lose you."

Mark broke, the fight left him.

He reached out, grabbed him, pulled him close until Sebastian collapsed against him, sobbing into his chest. Mark held him tight, one hand in his hair, the other gripping his back like if he let go, they’d both disappear. He whispered nothing, no promises, no reassurances, because there weren’t any left to give. There was only this, the weight of Sebastian in his arms, the heat of his tears soaking through, the ache of knowing this was the last time.

And when Sebastian kissed him, desperate, broken, Mark didn’t stop him. He kissed him back, because he couldn’t do anything else. Because for that night, for those hours, he let Sebastian be his again.

Their last night together. Only Mark and Sebastian. The night before the wedding.

That night, every touch felt like a prayer, every kiss like a last goodbye. Mark memorized him with his hands, with his mouth, as if carving him into memory could keep him. He moved slow where he could have been rough, gentle where he could have been selfish, because he knew this was it, the last time Sebastian would be his. The last time he could hold him without anyone else between them. The last time they could pretend they're the only people in the world.

Sebastian clung to him like a man drowning, whispering his name like a plea, like a confession, like it was the only word he had left. Mark kissed the tears from his face, whispered nothing back, because there was nothing he could say that wouldn’t make it worse. So he let his actions speak instead. He held him, took him, gave him the only comfort he had left to offer, the comfort of belonging, of being Mark’s for one more night.

And when it ended, when Sebastian finally stilled against him, shaking and exhausted, Mark wrapped his arms around him and refused to let go. He buried his face in his hair, breathed him in, and felt his own tears fall silently. He held him through the night, wide awake, heart breaking with every breath, because morning was coming and he couldn’t stop it.

Morning came all the same.

Sebastian sat on the edge of the bed, eyes swollen, face pale, body heavy as if gravity itself had doubled overnight. He couldn’t move, couldn’t lift his head, until Mark forced himself to. He rose, wordless, and gathered the pieces. He found the suit hanging by the door, crisp and waiting. He brought it to him, one piece at a time, and dressed him like he was fragile glass. Straightening the jacket. Buttoning the cuffs. Smoothing the tie.

Sebastian’s tears spilled again, silent, sliding down his cheeks as Mark worked. And Mark kept his face steady, his hands firm, even as his own vision blurred. He swallowed the lump in his throat, forcing himself to be strong, because one of them had to be.

When he finished, he cupped Sebastian’s face in both hands, wiped the tears away with his thumbs, and pressed a kiss to his forehead. He lingered there, eyes shut, lips against skin, as if he could seal the moment into forever.

Then he let go.

And Sebastian stood, dressed for a wedding Mark had convinced him to face, carrying the weight of a night that would never happen again.

The morning blurred into the ceremony, though Mark remembered every second of it. He remembered walking into the church and keeping himself tucked away in the back row, far from the cameras, far from the eyes that might have recognized him. He sat where no one would notice, where he could see Sebastian but Sebastian could never see him. And God, did he watch.

Sebastian stood at the altar, clean and sharp in the suit Mark had dressed him in only hours before, his face pale but composed. The boy who had fallen apart in Mark’s arms the night before was gone, replaced by the world’s golden champion, standing straight, jaw tight, giving the performance of his life. The vows came halting, rehearsed, but steady enough for everyone who mattered to believe them. Everyone except Mark. He could hear the break in every word, see the flicker in every glance.

Mark’s hands clenched against his knees. Every part of him wanted to scream, to drag him out of there, to undo it all. But he sat still, shoulders hunched, eyes burning, swallowing his own devastation in silence. Because this wasn’t his fight. This had never been his fight.

At one point, he glanced sideways. Sebastian’s parents were a few rows ahead, their shoulders tight with tension, eyes glistening but proud. His mother turned ever so slightly, her gaze finding Mark in the shadows. And in that small moment, she gave him a nod, soft, grateful, knowing. A thank you for holding her son together when no one else could.

That was when Mark stood. He couldn’t take it anymore. He slipped out quietly, his footsteps muffled against the stone floor. He didn’t wait for the rings, didn’t wait for the kiss, didn’t wait for the applause. He left Sebastian to his vows, to the life Mark had pushed him back toward, and walked away before the ceremony ended.

Outside, the air was sharp and cold. He didn’t look back.

The memory bled away slowly, dissolving into the same heavy silence that filled the kitchen now. Mark blinked, and it was no longer the church, no longer that suit he had buttoned with shaking hands, no longer the vows he hadn’t stayed to hear. It was Sebastian here, older, heavier with years, tears drying on his face but eyes still glistening in the dim light.

Mark swallowed hard, throat raw with words he hadn’t spoken in years. After everything he had just remembered, after everything he had thrown at him tonight, all he wanted, maybe for the first time, was to apologize.

He opened his mouth, voice low, hoarse. “Seb, I'm so—”

But Sebastian cut him off, sharp but steady, shaking his head before Mark could go further. His voice was quiet, but it carried, as if it had been waiting all along.

“You don’t have to apologize,” he said. His gaze finally met Mark’s, firm despite the redness in his eyes. “What I did to you was far worse.”

Mark’s brows drew tight, his voice breaking rough. “Why?”

Sebastian’s shoulders lifted with a shaky breath. He looked down at his hands, then back up, and this time there was no bitterness in his face. Only a softness, almost fragile, as if admitting it out loud had taken something heavy off him.

“Janna found someone,” he said quietly. And then he smiled. A real smile, small, tired, but genuine. His eyes shone, not with resentment, but with something close to relief. “She deserves that, you know? Someone steady. Someone who loves her the way I never could.” He swallowed, the smile trembling but holding. “I’m glad for her. I really am.”

The words hit Mark harder than if he’d spat them with venom. His chest tightened at the sight of that smile not because it was cruel, but because it was kind. Because Sebastian meant it.

Mark leaned forward, voice unsteady, almost disbelieving. “Then why?” His hand pressed flat against the table, knuckles white. “Why have another kid then? Why keep tying yourselves tighter if you knew you couldn't make it last?”

Sebastian’s eyes flickered, the smile faltering at the edges, but not vanishing.

Mark’s throat ached, his voice dropping to a whisper. “I love your kids, Seb. All of them. Every one of them. Maybe sometimes Basti the most... because he’s still so little, because he still looks at you like you hung the moon.” His chest heaved, grief knotting his words. “So why bring another life into this, if you weren’t going to make it work?”

The question lingered in the silence, cutting through the room sharper than any fight they’d ever had.

Sebastian said nothing. His lips pressed tight, his shoulders curled in, his eyes fixed on the floor. And in that silence, Mark felt the shame. The answer that would never come.

There were no words to his question. No neat reason why they hadn’t fought harder, why it had slipped away even after another child, why every attempt had crumbled. Just silence.

Mark leaned back slowly, the weight of it pressing on his chest. For a long moment, the only sound was the hum of the refrigerator, the faint shift of the dogs on the floor.

Finally, he asked, his voice rough but steady. “Are they still going to Melbourne? For the grand prix?”

Sebastian lifted his head at that, blinking once, as if surprised by the shift. Then he nodded. “Yes, Mathilda’s swim meet is the same week in Melbourne. And you know how much Samantha loves the Moomba Festival.” His mouth twitched faintly, something softer flickering across his face at the mention of his daughters.

Mark’s jaw worked, his throat tight. He nodded once, clipped, the words almost mechanical. “Okay. I’ll have the beach house prepared again.”

Sebastian shifted in his chair, wiping at his face with the heel of his hand. His voice was quiet when it came, careful, almost apologetic. “I should go. I don’t want to bother you. You’ve already done more than I deserve just by listening.”

For a moment, Mark said nothing. His chest was tight, his head full of all the words he could say. You are a bother, you’ve always been a bother, you’ve ruined me, you’ve saved me, you’ve been everything I never should’ve wanted but still do. But none of those came out.

Instead, he looked at Sebastian, really looked. At the lines carved into his face, the exhaustion in his posture, the tears drying at the corners of his eyes. And for once, Mark didn’t think about the past or the future, about everything that had been said or everything still unsaid. He thought only of now.

“Stay."

Chapter Text

Four days have passed since Sebastian arrived at Mark’s house. The days had bled together in the quiet way only Mark’s home could manage. Slow mornings, the smell of coffee that wasn’t his, the faint creak of the same floorboards he used to know by sound alone. Everything felt familiar but somehow foreign, like a song whose lyrics he still remembered but couldn’t bring himself to sing.

It had been three years since he had stayed here. Never dared to visit even once. Too ashemed, too guilty to even deserve to step foot in the this place. And for the first time since he became tied with family, he's actually staying. Slept under this roof, set his toothbrush next to Mark’s, counted the footfalls down the hall at night and knew who they belonged to without looking. Three years of Mark making sure their paths only crossed in safe places, crowds, holidays, rooms with witnesses. He had told himself it was better that way. Cleaner. He had been lying to himself with both hands.

He used to do that often. Show up without warning, suitcase in hand, shoulders heavy with fights he couldn’t win at home. Mark would open the door without a word, and Sebastian would slip inside like he was crossing into another life. Those nights blurred together. The smell of rain on the porch, Mark’s quiet tolerance, the same seat at the kitchen table where he’d pretend not to cry. It had been the one place where he could unravel without having to explain himself. The one person who never made him feel small for breaking.

But now, sitting in that same kitchen, he felt like a trespasser. Every corner of the house seemed to remember him better than Mark did. The faint scratches on the countertop from when he’d once carved something carelessly with his keys. The old mug still shoved at the back of the cupboard, white with a fading red stripe that Mark never used but never threw away. The ghosts of his laughter were still here, lingering like perfume that refused to fade, and that made it worse.

He ran a thumb along the rim of the mug, eyes downcast. He knew what he’d done. Every visit, every night he had left this house behind, every time he’d chosen to walk back into the life that crushed them both. It had all led here to this uneasy peace, this silence that wasn’t quite forgiveness. He knew how deeply he’d hurt Mark with that pattern, the arriving, the soft landing, the leaving. He could trace the fractures by memory. Apologies that asked too much, silences that lasted too long, the morning goodbyes that pretended not to be goodbyes at all. When he finally stopped coming, it wasn’t restraint. It was punishment. He had thought distance might make him better. It only made him aware of how much he had taken.

The last three years had been a pattern of short, polite interactions. Holidays when the kids insisted on seeing “Markie.” That was how they saw each other, through birthdays and recitals and school pick-ups that needed an extra adult. Mark came to Christmas once, stood at the back for Mathilda’s swim meet twice, brought a cake on Samantha’s birthday because “someone has to bring a decent one.” All kindnesses routed through the kids, never through Sebastian. Always enough to prove he still cared, never enough to reopen anything. A system that worked as long as he pretended it didn’t hurt.

He missed the ordinary things. The sound Mark made when he yawned and tried to hide it. The way he hummed without realizing when he chopped herbs. The instinct of moving around each other in the kitchen without colliding. He missed the permission to be quiet in someone else’s space. He missed Mark, and the missing lived under his ribs like a permanent stitch.

Sebastian used to tell himself it was enough. That Mark’s small gestures like the yearly postcard on his birthday or the short exchange of messages after a bad race meant something close to affection. But sitting here now, breathing the same air again, he realized how much he had starved for more. He missed the mornings when Mark’s voice was the first sound he heard, the way he’d hum absent-mindedly while making breakfast, the calm that came from simply being near him. He missed belonging somewhere, even if that belonging had always been temporary.

This house had been his hiding place. His halfway home. The one door that always opened when the world shut him out. This very house have always provided him warmth but now that he was back, it felt colder—not because Mark had changed the thermostat, but because Mark himself had changed.

Before, Sebastian had been the one with the sharp edges. Bratty, short-tempered, grabbing at the nearest thing and shaking it until it stopped making the wrong sound. Mark had been water on a flame. An anchor. Annoyed sometimes, yes, but patient, amused at the worst moments, infuriatingly calm. Now the roles felt reversed. Mark met him with shortness at the corners, with answers that came too fast, with a tired anger that didn’t flare so much as glow from beneath.

In these four days, Mark’s patience had thinned to threads. He snapped at the smallest things, sharp words cutting into the quiet. The man who once listened in silence now barked orders, muttered complaints, slammed doors a little too hard.

Sebastian took every one of them without a word.

It started with little things. The first morning, Sebastian had poured milk into Mark’s coffee and left the bottle on the counter instead of putting it back.

Mark’s voice cut through the room, low but pointed. “You planning to leave the whole kitchen out, or is it just this bottle?”

Sebastian blinked, startled. “Sorry, I’ll—”

“Don’t apologize,” Mark muttered, snatching the bottle himself and slamming it into the fridge. “Just… think.”

Sebastian had let it go.

Later that day, Mark came home to find Sebastian had taken the dogs for a walk, something he used to do instinctively. This time, Mark’s reaction was clipped, almost irritated.

“Next time, tell me first,” Mark said. “They’ve got a schedule. You can’t just change it.”

“They’re dogs, Mark,” Sebastian said lightly, hoping to ease the tension. “They won’t mind a longer walk.”

Mark shot him a look. “That’s not the point.”

Sebastian’s smile faltered. “Right. Of course.”

By the third day, it wasn’t about anything specific anymore. The wrong towel in the bathroom. The way Sebastian hummed while drying dishes. The sound of his phone buzzing too long before he answered.

“Could you not do that?” Mark snapped one evening, gesturing vaguely toward him.

“Do what?” Sebastian asked carefully.

“That thing. The—” Mark exhaled sharply. “The way you just stand there like everything’s fine.”

Sebastian’s voice softened. “I’m not trying to bother you, Mark.”

“Yeah, well,” Mark muttered, “you’re doing a hell of a job anyway.”

It would have been funny once. Sebastian would’ve laughed, thrown it back with a teasing grin until Mark’s irritation cracked. But now, the air was too fragile for humor. So he just nodded, eyes down, and finished washing the dishes. Every time Mark lashed out, Sebastian thought he deserved it. Maybe he did. Maybe this was what forgiveness looked like. Quiet punishment delivered in fragments, as if Mark couldn’t stop loving him but couldn’t stop resenting him either.

Still, he couldn’t help the ache. Every time Mark turned away, every clipped word, every slammed cupboard. It felt like watching something die in slow motion.

There were moments, though, between the tension and the silence, that still felt almost like before. Evenings when Mark would cook. Nothing fancy, just pasta, or soup and Sebastian would hover awkwardly by the counter, pretending to help but mostly getting in the way. They’d eat in near silence, sometimes talking about work, sometimes about the kids, sometimes not at all.

It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

Sebastian would watch Mark across the table, the way he chewed slowly, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, the faint crease in his brow when he was thinking. It was domestic in a way that felt dangerous. Soft, ordinary, everything Sebastian had once dreamed of.

He’d missed this. The quiet normalcy. The way dinner stretched longer than it needed to, simply because neither of them wanted to get up first. Sometimes Mark would even pour him a glass of wine. Sometimes he’d stay at the table after, talking about the testing schedule, about the car, about trivial things that didn’t hurt.

And every night, when Mark finally stood to clear the plates, Sebastian’s chest would tighten with the same thought he never said aloud, I could live like this.

But even that peace never lasted.

Tonight, Sebastian sat at the kitchen counter alone, the clock ticking past nine. Mark had texted hours ago: Running late. Don’t wait up.

Sebastian waited anyway.

He’d picked up pizza from the place they used to go to—extra cheese, no olives, Mark’s favorite. The box sat unopened on the table, steam long gone cold. The dogs had given up circling him and now slept by the door.

He traced a finger along the rim of his glass, thinking about the season ahead. The testing had gone well enough with Aston Martin. The car felt stable, predictable, maybe too predictable. The team seemed content, even optimistic. And yet, for the first time in years, Sebastian felt… still. Not restless. Not hungry. Just tired.

The thought of retirement had been whispering in the back of his mind for months. He’d hinted at it lightly during the day’s press session. Nothing direct, just a quiet “I’ve been thinking about life after racing.” It had slipped out before he could catch it, a half-truth wrapped in a smile. He hadn’t expected it to matter. Not yet.

He glanced at the clock again. 9:42. The front door opened sharply.

Mark stepped in, still in team gear, the smell of cold air clinging to him. His face was set, jaw tight, movements clipped.

Sebastian opened his mouth to greet him, but Mark spoke first.

“So it’s true then,” he said, voice low but cutting. “You told the press you’re thinking of retiring?”

Sebastian blinked. “I—yes. I just mentioned it. Casually. It wasn’t—”

“Casually?” Mark’s laugh was sharp. “You drop that kind of statement in a press pen and call it casual?”

“I didn’t mean it as an announcement,” Sebastian said, keeping his tone calm. “It just came up—”

“Do you even think before you speak?” Mark snapped. “You know what that does to the team? Your team? To the sponsors? To everyone who’s been backing you?”

Sebastian exhaled slowly. “Mark, it wasn’t planned. They asked about the future, and I said I’ve been thinking. That’s all.”

“You’ve been thinking,” Mark repeated, scoffing. “God, you sound just like you did before Red Bull imploded.”

The words landed heavy. Sebastian’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing.

Mark pressed on. “You don’t get to just hint at quitting like it’s a weather forecast. You owe people clarity. You owe the team, the fans, hell, you owe yourself some damn consistency.”

Sebastian’s patience strained, but he kept his voice even. “I don’t owe anyone anything, Mark. Not anymore.”

“Oh, of course not.” Mark’s tone turned icy. “You just wake up one morning, decide you’re done, and the world has to adjust, right mate? Typical.”

Sebastian’s brow furrowed. “Why are you angry about this? It’s my career.”

“Because you’re doing it again!” Mark’s voice rose, sharp and ragged. “You’re walking away when it still matters, when people still need you. When I—” He cut himself off, fists clenching. “You don’t just quit, Sebastian. That’s not who you are.”

Sebastian stared at him, searching for the man who used to steady him. “You make it sound like a crime to want peace.”

“You call it peace,” Mark said bitterly. “I call it running away.”

Something in Sebastian snapped then—not loud, but final. Days of holding back, of accepting every small cruelty, boiled to the surface.

“You think I’m running away?” His voice shook, low but sharp. “You think I haven’t earned the right to stop? I’ve given everything, Mark. Every race, every season. I’ve missed birthdays, I’ve lost sleep, I’ve broken myself just to keep fighting and you call it running away?”

Mark took a step closer, eyes dark. “You’re not fighting anymore. You’re quitting before you’ve got nothing left to prove.”

Sebastian laughed, disbelief cutting through the air. “Nothing left to prove? To who? To you?”

Mark froze.

Sebastian’s words came faster now, the dam breaking. “You think this is about you? About living up to your idea of what a racer should be? You left, Mark. You got out. And you think that gives you the right to decide when I should stop?”

“I left because I didn’t have a choice!” Mark shouted. “Because I couldn’t keep killing myself to prove I was worth half as much as you!”

“Then maybe you weren’t,” Sebastian snapped.

The silence that followed was brutal.

Mark’s expression didn’t change right away. His face just… emptied. Like something inside him shut down completely.

Sebastian realized what he’d said a heartbeat too late.

“Mark—”

Mark stepped back, jaw tight, eyes cold. “Don’t.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t,” Mark said again, quieter this time. He turned, grabbed his jacket from the chair, and left without another word.

The door slammed, rattling the frame.

Sebastian stood there, chest heaving, the words still burning in his throat.

He sank into the nearest chair, head in his hands, the weight of it all crashing down at once. He’d meant to explain himself. He’d meant to stay patient, to prove he could handle Mark’s temper, to not make things worse. But instead, he had done exactly what he swore he wouldn’t—hurt him again.

And this time, he didn’t know how to fix it.

He hadn’t even made progress, hadn’t rebuilt an inch of what they’d lost. And now he’d added a wound he didn’t know how to close.

The pizza sat cold on the counter between them, untouched.

Sebastian stared at it until the lights blurred, until his own reflection in the window looked like a stranger.

Chapter Text

It was hours past midnight, and Sebastian still hadn’t moved. The house had gone still hours ago, save for the faint ticking of the clock in the hall. Too loud in the silence, too deliberate, as if marking each second of his failure.

He sat on the edge of the guest bed, half undressed, staring at the dark window where his reflection looked almost unrecognizable. The argument replayed again and again. Mark’s voice sharp, his own sharper, and then that single, merciless line. Then maybe you weren’t. He had said it like a reflex, like a punch thrown without thinking. The words still echoed now, jagged and unforgivable. He couldn’t remember how Mark’s face looked when he said it, only that it went completely still, that all the warmth drained out of it, and that the sound of the door closing afterward had been louder than anything else that night.

Sebastian pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes until color burst behind them. “Idiot,” he muttered under his breath, voice hoarse. “You absolute idiot.” He hadn’t meant it. God, he hadn’t meant it.

If there was one thing Sebastian never doubted, not through every fight, not through every fractured year —it was how much Mark had given to the sport. To him.

Mark had built his entire life around racing. Not the glamorous, trophy-polished version the world liked to photograph, but the brutal, bone-deep kind that left scars no one saw. The man had driven through pain most people would’ve retired over. Broken ribs, leg implants , concussions he’d hidden behind a grin because sitting out meant falling behind. Sebastian remembered 2010 vividly. Mark’s crash in Valencia, the image burned into him like fire. The car flipping, the explosion of dust, the unbearable stillness before the radio crackled and Mark’s voice, almost casual, said, “Sorry, mate, that was a bit too high.” Everyone else had seen a miracle escape. Sebastian had seen the way his hands shook that night in the motorhome, how he had to ask Sebastian to open a water bottle because his grip wouldn’t stop trembling. And then, the next morning, Mark put the helmet back on and went out again. No hesitation.

That was who Mark was. Always back in the car, even when the pain hadn’t faded. Even when he should have stopped. And Sebastian spent years watching that kind of loyalty to the sport, admiring it, resenting it, never once realizing how much it must’ve hurt. How much of himself Mark had carved away to stay. He had never acknowledged how dirty Mark’s final years in Red Bull had been. How the team, their team, had turned on him. How every smile from management was barbed with contempt. How every press conference dug deeper. Mark had taken every insult quietly, never fighting back publicly, never feeding the circus. Sebastian had been too young, too arrogant to see the cost of that silence. He’d called it professionalism then. Now he knew it was pride, the kind that bleeds unseen.

He remembered that last year vividly. How Mark could’ve left sooner, how there’d been whispers about Ferrari, about a seat waiting if he wanted it.
But he didn’t take it.
He stayed.
Stayed with the team that had broken his trust. Stayed for one more season, one more year beside Sebastian.

He had told him once, late at night after a debrief gone too long, “I just want to see it through with you.” Sebastian hadn’t understood the weight of it then. He thought Mark meant the car, the championship fight, the final push. But now, sitting in the dark, he realized it had meant something else.

He had stayed because of him.

And tonight, he’d thrown that devotion back in his face. Used it like a blade. Then maybe you weren’t.

Sebastian’s throat closed. The guilt burned behind his ribs. He had wanted to hurt Mark for hurting him, to stop feeling small beneath his anger. Instead, he had gone straight for the one part of Mark that had never deserved cruelty. His career. His pride. His years of sacrifice. He could still remember those Red Bull fights, sharp and stupid and endless. The car, the strategies, the championship. Their rivalry had started mechanical—split strategies, stolen wins— but somewhere in the chaos, it had turned personal. They’d torn into each other so many times, publicly, privately, on and off the track. And somehow, impossibly, out of that came love.

It hadn’t been gentle, not at first. It was the kind of love that came from surviving a war together. The kind that only two people who’d seen each other at their absolute worst could understand. He’d loved Mark because Mark saw him, not the prodigy, not the four-time world champion, but the boy who still flinched when the lights went out. And Mark had loved him because Sebastian refused to let him drift into irrelevance. They balanced each other in a way that no one else ever could.

Back then, every fight had ended the same. One of them bleeding, the other cleaning the wound. They hurt each other, yes, but they always came back.

Now, it felt different.

Now, Mark wasn’t the one bleeding. Sebastian was. And this time, he was the one who’d driven the knife in.

He leaned back against the wall, staring blankly at the ceiling. He had spent years watching Mark hide his pain behind control, the same way he’d done tonight. The silence, the clenched jaw, the way his eyes had gone blank before he left. Sebastian knew that look too well. It was the one Mark wore when he refused to let anyone see him break. And yet, Sebastian also knew deep down that Mark wouldn’t come back tonight. Not like before. Not this time.

He’d crossed a line that couldn’t be smoothed over with an apology. Not when Mark had trusted him with every secret, every wound, every vulnerable part of himself, only for Sebastian to use it as ammunition. Mark had given him everything. His patience, his steadiness, his quiet, unspoken love. He’d stayed when no one else would. He’d opened himself in ways Sebastian never thought he could. And now, Sebastian had turned those very things into the weapon that cut deepest.

He had once told Mark, You make it too easy to hurt you. Now he understood the cruelty of it. Mark had made it easy only because he trusted him not to.

Sebastian pressed his fingers against his temples, his chest tight. Every memory of Mark in a racing suit flooded back. The sweat, the grit, the way his eyes lit up in the grid minutes before lights out. How he would always glance at Sebastian’s car on the formation lap, a silent acknowledgment between them. How, even in their worst years, Mark’s hand had always found his shoulder after a hard race, a silent, grounding touch that said we’re still here.

He thought of 2013, the year everything burned brightest. The wins, the crashes, the headlines that split them apart. The Multi-21 debacle that everyone still remembered. The moment the world decided Sebastian was the villain, and Mark the martyr. But behind closed doors, it hadn’t been that simple. Behind closed doors, it had been two men too proud to admit they were terrified of losing each other.

That night in Malaysia, after the podium, when the cameras had gone and the lights dimmed, Mark had found him alone in the motorhome. He hadn’t shouted. He hadn’t thrown anything. He just looked at him — eyes hollow, voice quiet — and said, You can’t do that to me again. And Sebastian hadn’t known whether he meant the overtake or the betrayal.

That had been the night they’d stopped pretending.

He swallowed hard, blinking back the sting behind his eyes. He could almost hear Mark’s voice now, soft and low, the way he used to say You’re better than this whenever Sebastian lost his temper.

He wished he could hear it now.

The clock read 2:49.

He should sleep. He had media at eight, testing at ten. But his mind wouldn’t stop spinning. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Mark walking out.

He imagined him driving aimlessly, maybe sitting in the garage with the lights off, the smell of oil and metal thick in the air. Or maybe he’d gone to the cabin, that quiet stretch of wilderness where he went when the world got too loud. Sebastian had spent nights there too, years ago, when everything between them had felt easier. He thought about waiting up, keeping the lights on. Maybe Mark would see it from the driveway, maybe it would mean something. Maybe it would be a way of saying I’m sorry without words. But the longer he sat there, the less sure he was of what Mark would want. Mark had always hated grand gestures. He preferred action, something fixed, something mended. Sebastian didn’t know what to fix anymore.

He reached for his phone on the nightstand, thumb hovering over Mark’s name. The last message he’d sent was still there: Running late. Don’t wait up. He wanted to reply, to say Come home, or I didn’t mean it, or even just Please. But every sentence felt too small for what he’d broken.So he set the phone down and stared at the wall instead. The night outside stretched endless, thick and unmoving.

He thought of Mark behind the wheel, every scar on his body, every race he’d driven through the pain because walking away wasn’t in his nature. Mark had been many things: angry, stubborn, unyielding but never a quitter. And that was why the words had hurt so much. Because they weren’t true. Because Mark had always given everything. And Sebastian, who had once been the one worth staying for, had become the one who made him leave.

He drew his knees up, curling into himself, the silence pressing harder with every minute. Somewhere in the house, the dogs shifted, sensing the unease but not stirring.

He whispered to the dark, the words catching rough in his throat.

“I’m sorry, Mark.”

No one answered.

He stayed like that until the first pale hint of morning crept through the window, the exhaustion dulling everything but regret. He still hadn’t slept. And Mark still hadn’t come home. He didn’t know how long he’d sat there, spine pressed to the cool wall, eyes raw from not blinking. At some point the house shifted, pipes sighing, the old timber doing that quiet settling he used to fall asleep to. He kept listening for a car, for a key, for anything.

When it finally came, it wasn’t gentle. The front door hit the stop with a dull thud, a scrape of rubber against wood. Heavy footsteps, not the even stride he knew by heart but a clumsy rhythm. Too much weight on the edges, an uncoordinated climb that fumbled the first stair and then recovered with a muffled curse. Sebastian’s body moved before his mind did. He was on his feet and halfway to the door with relief breaking open so fast it made him lightheaded. He came back. The thought spilled through him, warm and reckless. This was his chance. He could apologize. Not with long explanations, those always made things worse, just the simple kind. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it. I know what you gave. He imagined Mark’s face softening by degrees, that tightness at the corners easing. He imagined a hand raised, a nod—enough, Seb. He imagined silence that wasn’t punishment.

His fingers touched the doorknob.

Then the voices reached him. Low, messier than footsteps, overlapping in a tangle that took a half second too long to resolve into meaning.

“Mark—slow down—ah—wait—”

Sebastian froze. The hallway carved itself into his hearing. Coat brushing paint, shoes dragging in a stagger, the clatter of a belt against a doorframe, breath choked into laughter and then into something else. A body—no, two—bumped the wall outside the guest room, shoulder or hip or both knocking into the plaster with enough force to shake dust from the picture hook. A half-whisper, a swallow, a gasp. Not alone.

His hand slid off the knob like he’d touched a live wire.

He didn’t mean to listen, not at first. He didn’t intend to be the person on the wrong side of a door holding his breath while the house revised itself around him. But the hallway was narrow, and sound had nowhere else to go. The voices found him whether he invited them or not, turning the air into a tunnel that ended at his eardrums.

Another tangle of words. A laugh. Soft, breathy, rising up from the throat as if it had tried to be quiet and failed. There was a voice in it he recognized even before the name formed.

Jenson.

It landed like a knife slipped between ribs at an angle that avoided bone only because it knew the anatomy. Not the worst pain he’d ever felt, but the most precise.

Of course. Jenson.

Odd, how the mind grabbed old files in a crisis and laid them out in neat, unhelpful rows. He hadn’t thought of him in months, maybe years, not in any way that mattered. And yet the history arrived complete. The press conferences with polite smiles edge lit by a rivalry neither of them pretended not to enjoy. The improbably kind interviews. The little wars waged with setup sheets and tyre choices. Those winters when the sport contracted to a handful of names you measured yourself against, and Jenson’s was always there, deceptively easygoing, deceptively soft, hiding steel under good manners.

He had been a focus of Sebastian’s jealousy once, and for reasons that embarrassed him now. Not because Mark had ever said anything, not because there had ever been a confession or a rumor worth chasing. Because the universe had a sense of humor about symmetry. Almost blonde, a shade darker than his. Blue eyes, also a different shade. A calm that read as confidence and sometimes as complacency. A face the cameras trusted without asking questions.

And then, the more honest part: Jenson mattered to Mark. Not like Fernando did—Fernando was a sun around which the entire sport had learned to orbit, Mark’s complicated friend/enemy/fellow survivor. No, Jenson was something else in Mark’s life. Warmer, nearer, a companionship that didn’t bruise, full of long distance runs and charity rides and shared panels, the kind of easy cruelty free closeness Sebastian had envied because he had rarely been allowed to be easy with anyone.

Another stumble. Another laugh, higher this time.

“Wait—” the voice said again, half laughing, half breathless. “Mark—”

Then Mark, closer to the door now, voice rough and low and familiar enough to tilt the room. “God—look at you.”

Sebastian braced a palm against the wall, the paint cool against the heat rising under his skin. The guest room felt suddenly too small for air, too full of his own body. He didn’t move. He couldn’t. To open the door would be to perform something he wasn’t sure he could survive with dignity.

The hallway choreography continued. A pause, a clumsy shuffle, the awkward ballet of two people trying to move in one direction at once. Something metallic clicked against wood. Keys grazing the frame or a zipper losing patience. A half swallowed sound, then Mark again, closer, pressed into the grain of the building. “You’re—” The sentence dissolved into a groan and came back as a different one. “—so pretty.”

The word punched him in the mouth from the inside. Pretty. He didn’t know why that was the one that unseated him. He had heard worse and softer both. He had been called worse and softer both. But the combination—the fuck carried by breath, the so pretty eroded by a kiss—carved something out of him he didn’t know he was still protecting.

He could hear the answer, too, muffled in Mark’s jacket, Jenson’s laugh going small as if he were trying to keep it from knocking anything over. “You’re drunk,” Jenson said, and there was care in it, annoyed and amused and unafraid. “Slow down.”

“Not that drunk.” A mock offense in Mark’s voice that made something low in Sebastian’s gut twist. The kind of offense you didn’t bother with unless you were comfortable.

A hand landed on the guest room door. The knob turned a millimeter under Sebastian’s forefinger and then stopped as if the person outside sensed the mistake of it. There was a pause, a soft sorry spoken into someone’s shoulder. The apology wasn’t meant for him, but he accepted it anyway, because that was the kind of fool he had become.

Another bump into the wall. Jenson’s breath caught in a sound that wasn’t quite a moan, wasn’t not one either, somewhere between surprise and surrender. An answering sound from Mark, deeper, a note Sebastian knew by touch more than hearing. He remembered it from another life. A sound forced out of a throat when concentration finally lost its argument to want. He should have locked the guest room door. He should have turned on music, put the tap on, something. Instead he stood very still and let the hallway talk.

“Don’t cover your mouth,” Mark said, words blurred together like a secret told against skin. “I want to hear you.”

The world compressed to a point. The old house performed its acoustics with a cruelty it had not previously displayed. The narrow corridor turned intimacy into broadcast, turned the join where the floorboards met into a drum. He could hear Jenson try to hover between quiet and not, could hear the smile in his voice even when the sound broke into something less articulate.

“Feels like you’re—” Jenson managed, the sentence bumped into a lower register. “—pushing all my buttons right.”

Sebastian closed his eyes. The phrasing would have annoyed him on any other night, something too clean to be believed. Tonight it simply landed, another weight on a scale that had tipped a long time ago. His mind did what pain trained minds do, it went to inventory. Petty, precise, defensive.

Jenson. He had always seemed, light. Not simple, never that, but aerodynamic. He could slip through a room without turbulence, could smile without raising a flag. He had the kind of beauty that made strangers kinder, the kind of ease that let him treat attention as weather. Sebastian had resented him for that. Not because he didn’t think he deserved it, but because he himself had never known how to move through a space and be forgiven on sight. And Mark—Mark had always been susceptible to ease. He was not an easy man. The world didn’t offer him ease. He built structures against chaos and lived inside them. He loved competence, clarity, edges that didn’t lie about their sharpness. With Jenson, ease arrived without asking. No debt, no ledger. It made sense that Mark would reach for it on a night when nothing else held.

This is what you get, he told himself, quiet and vicious. You wanted to hurt him, and now you get to find out what it sounds like when he chooses not to be hurt by you.

He listened to their bodies try to coordinate with the door. A laugh. A whisper that might have been leftor here or god. Knuckles hit the jamb. The handle rattled and didn’t catch. They cursed in harmony. Mark had locked his own room. It would have been funny if it weren’t killing him one decibel at a time.

“Key,” Jenson said, the word half-lost as someone kissed him through it.

“Pocket,” Mark answered, and the zipper sound came again, that intimate, unphotographable domesticity of searching in the wrong pocket twice before finding the right one. Sebastian remembered that, too. He had always kept his key in the left, even when it made no sense.

“Give—” Jenson again, a wobble of laughter. “Mark, give me—”

“Had it,” Mark said, contradictory and satisfied, the lock yielding with a soft mechanical sigh.

For a ridiculous second, Sebastian wanted to step into the hall and say something mundane. You’ll wake the neighbors. Shoes. Key’s sticky, you have to jiggle it. As if inserting himself into the machine would somehow strip the night of its voltage and return it to tools and tasks.

Instead he pressed his tongue to the back of his teeth and breathed through his nose like someone learning to be underwater. There was a pause in the threshold of Mark’s room, one of those tiny pauses that contain decisions too small to examine. He could sense the gravity shift as they crossed it, as if the house had been holding its breath for exactly this and finally let it out. The door grazed the frame, then stopped a hand’s width from shut, as if leaving the gap open would make the situation less real, easier to undo. Sebastian had been waiting for it to be closed, a slam, or a click, but it never came. A gap had been left, how torturous.

Sebastian stayed where he was. His hand rested against the guest room door, the way you might steady yourself on a train that hadn’t started moving yet. The hallway returned to quiet in the space between doors. However from the gap he could still hear faint evidence through the old joinery, rhythms more than sounds. Not enough to know anything, more than enough to know too much. He forced his attention to the ceiling, to the tiny crack in the paint he’d noticed on his first night back. It branched like a river on a map. He followed it with his eyes until the room stopped tilting.

He catalogued what he knew and what he only thought he knew. He knew Mark had left angry, hurt in that still way that was always worse than shouting. He knew Mark drank when he shouldn’t, sometimes, in response to pain he refused to name. He knew Jenson had texted Mark today. The kind of overhead knowledge you absorb from years of recognizing notification sounds, a musical chirp he remembered from some charity thing. He didn’t know how the night had brought them here, only that the probability routes were not hard to reconstruct.

He wanted to be fair. The thought startled him with its presence. He wanted, absurdly, to hire fairness to walk him past jealousy like a security escort through a crowd. He told himself, Mark did not owe him purity or performance. Mark did not owe him a hinge to return through in the middle of the night when the person who had cut him had decided to say I’m sorry. He told himself, this was not betrayal because there had been nothing between them to betray except four days of trying not to break anything.

And yet his body did not care. His body pressed its palm to the wall and felt the house alive on the other side and called it knife. He looked at the small suitcase by the dresser, the soft leather one he always overpacked, as if too many shirts could be armor, and imagined picking it up, walking down the hall, out into the thin cold of the hour where even birds can’t be bothered to sing. He pictured the drive, empty streets, the way a city at 3 am. can feel like someone else’s city, borrowed and a little embarrassed.

His mind, unhelpful and obedient, opened more drawers labeled with years. Red Bull corridors. The way Mark’s back looked when he was angry and pretending not to be. The feel of the motorhome carpet under knees the night they decided to stop pretending they were only rivals. The hotel room with the bad orange curtains where Mark had kissed him like a man negotiating his own surrender, tongue-tied and stubborn and finally honest. The night before the wedding tile under his palms. The morning he buttoned Mark’s cuffs with hands that refused to stop shaking. The years after, when he starved himself of this house and called it discipline.

He thought, with a clarity he didn’t enjoy, You opened your mouth and made yourself the least safe person in his life. Why are you surprised he reached for safety somewhere else?

He let that sit, ugly and accurate.

Through the wall, a bed frame protested. Old wood voicing objection on behalf of people who wouldn’t. He looked down at the floorboards where the hall met the threshold and remembered learning every squeak by heart. The ones you avoided if you came back late, the one you targeted if you wanted to announce your presence before you said anything. No point in that knowledge now. The house was being used for its purpose by the person who owned it. He was the trespasser, the guest, the man pressing his shoulder into a door so he didn’t have to admit he needed it to hold him up.

Another brief sound, Jenson again, trying to bite a reaction in half and failing. A matching hush from Mark that wasn’t unkind so much as focused. That was somehow worse, that Mark’s concentration sounded exactly like it always had. Practical, intent, a man who did nothing by halves.

Sebastian inhaled through a throat that had no room left. He stepped away from the door and sat on the edge of the bed like an obedient student returning to his assigned seat. The guest room, so carefully neutral, suddenly felt crowded by all the versions of him that had slept here. The younger man who thought time was infinite. The angrier one who mistook endurance for devotion. The disciplined one who believed absence could heal what honesty had not.

He stayed. He endured all the grunts, the moans, the slamming of the bed frame to the wall separating them. At some point the screaming, more of Jenson's, repeated mouthing Mark like a mantra. But of course he stayed. Leaving would have been a performance, and he had given this house enough of those.

He pictured Mark’s face again, not tonight’s emptying but a thousand other expressions layered one over the other. The smirk after a joke he shouldn’t have made, the narrowed eyes over a telemetry line, the way his mouth softened when talking about the dogs, the specific patience he saved for children who wanted to tell him long stories about nothing. He had hated himself earlier for saying maybe you weren’t. Now he hated himself for needing to hear anything from the other room at all. He could have put in earphones. He could have turned on the shower. He could have left. He did none of those things. He sat and learned, again, how much space a heart can take up when it refuses to be quiet.

Minutes, hourse—or years—went by. He lost track. The house resumed its ordinary noises around the edges. A car somewhere distant, a late laugh on the street, a fox or a cat knocking over a bin lid two houses down. The privacy of other people’s nights used to comfort him. Tonight it emphasized his outsideness. He had always known how to be the center of a race. He had rarely known how to be the side of someone else’s life.

He thought of the version of this scene that would have existed in a younger decade. Him throwing the guest room door open in a blaze of theatrical self-destruction, him saying a cruel thing he would spend three years paying for, him making sure nobody in the house slept ever again. He found he didn’t have that man in him tonight. He had something milder and, somehow, more durable. The ability to sit in pain without turning it into a weapon.

He lay back without taking off his shoes, as if pretending he might leave at any second. The ceiling crack spread out above him like lines on a map he didn’t have the key for. He traced it with his eyes until the angle where it forked into a thin branch he hadn’t noticed before. He discovered he could be grateful for something that small. He discovered that meant the night had already asked too much.

In the room beside his, a floorboard creaked, weight shifting, the small adjustment people make when they’re done pretending they can be still. A murmur. A breath. Silence that sounded like skin cooling. Then nothing. Real nothing. The kind that doesn’t press, the kind that finally lets the air expand back into the room.

Sebastian closed his eyes but did not sleep.

He turned his head toward the wall, not to hear better but because his body insisted on facing what it could not fix. He listened to the house return to being a house and told himself he would stay until morning because leaving now would turn this into a scene and he had promised himself, quietly, to abandon scenes.

He stayed where he was, palms flat on the coverlet as if testing whether it could lift him if he asked, and took inventory of the rules: he would not knock on Mark’s door, he would not text, he would not perform pain for an audience. He would wait until the light came through the blinds and then he would decide whether to pack the soft leather bag or to wash two glasses and pretend the night had been a weather event that passed without leaving measurable damage.

He knew it had left damage. He also knew some houses were built to hold both kinds of night. The ones where apologies are spoken at kitchen counters, and the ones where they have to be carried in the mouth for hours before anyone will believe them. He set his jaw against everything that wanted to break and lay listening to the quiet settle inside him, where it would be harder to evict.

Dawn found him still upright, shoes on, back against the headboard as if posture alone could hold off whatever else was coming. The window had gone from mirror black to that thin grey that made the room look underwater. No birds yet. The hour before the world remembers itself. He sat there and let time pass through him, the silence swollen with all the things he could not unhear.

When the house finally settled into real quiet he thought, stupidly, that it might be possible to lie down. He didn’t. He stood instead, hands clumsy on the doorknob, and walked out into the hall as if it might be normal to do so. The corridor smelled like sleep and stale heat and something else he didn’t name. The floor complained once under his heel, the old, familiar note he used to avoid to keep from waking anyone. Pointless now.

He descended the stairs without turning a light on. The kitchen accepted him the way it always had, a square of shadow and gleam. Outlines of chairs, the cold rectangle of the fridge, the dogs’ bowls like moons on the floor. He didn’t touch the switch. He stood in the doorway and listened to the quiet press at his eardrums until it ceased to be quiet and became weight.

He poured water by feel, the glass clinking against the tap in a small, betrayable way. He didn’t drink it. He set it down and pressed his hands to the counter, palms flat, as if the stone could wick something out of him if he stayed long enough. He looked at the window and could just make out his reflection—blurred, cut by the faint lines of the blinds. A ghost of himself occupying a house that had learned to live just fine without him in it.

He thought of apologizing and found, to his disgust, that the word felt ornamental now. Sorry would be a flower left at the wrong grave. What he owed was harder to name. He had cut Mark where there was pride, where there was history, where there was the stubbornness it takes to keep showing up when the world says you don’t have to. Maybe you weren’t. The sentence ran across the back of his teeth like a taste that wouldn’t leave.

He thought of Mark years ago, in pain that no camera could capture. The quiet room after a crash, the hand that wouldn’t stop shaking, the way he had sat on the edge of a cot and laughed like a man who had looked at the thing that could have ended him and decided to make it a joke instead. He thought of all the mornings Mark had moved as if pain were simply part of the air you breathed to live this life. He had called him a quitter anyway. Not in the word, but in the cut. Unforgivable.

Light thinned further at the edges of the blinds. The wall clock ticked, indifferent. His eyes burned in that way that comes not from tears but from hours spent not blinking because you are too busy keeping watch over nothing.

Footsteps entered the silence from the hall. Not Mark’s. Lighter, cautious in a way that suggested the person in question knew they were walking into someone else’s house. Bare feet against wood, a rhythm adjusted mid-step like a runner shortening their stride.

Jenson stopped dead at the kitchen threshold. Even in the dim, Sebastian could see the shape of him resolve by degrees. Boxers, Mark’s white dress shirt open and hanging loose, hair pushed into something careless by pillows and hands. The shirt made a neat arrow of light down his chest where the panels didn’t meet. When he lifted his head and saw Sebastian, all the easy composure he carried in public dropped straight through him.

“Fuck—Seb,” he whimpered, the word crumpling at the edges. His eyes went wide, mouth parted on a breath he hadn’t been planning to take. British vowels flattened by shock.

Sebastian didn’t answer. He didn’t move. He looked, because there was nothing else to do. The shirt cuff fell back when Jenson reached for the tap, exposing the inside of his wrist, red where a hand had gripped too hard. His thighs bore a ladder of faint marks, not obscene, simply undeniable. There were small flushes of color on his chest where the fabric had chafed, or a mouth had insisted, or both. The line of his throat was blotched in that telltale way skin advertises recent want. He stood in Mark’s kitchen in Mark’s shirt and looked, in the half-light, younger than he had any right to be.

Something like hatred coiled in Sebastian, tight as wire. Hatred was not the right word. It was shame remade into a weapon, jealousy dressed as contempt. He let his face hold it because he needed Jenson to see something that wasn’t collapse.

Jenson, still reeling, fumbled a glass into the sink, the noise too loud and much too human. “I—I didn’t know,” he started, scrambling for purchase, for explanation. “Seb, I promise, I—I didn’t—” He was already apologizing without the words. “I’m sorr—”

“We’re not,” Sebastian cut in, the words out before he could decide what they were supposed to do. “We’re not together.”

Silence opened a little doorway inside the sentence and stood there, considering. He hadn’t realised until he said it that some stupid corner of him needed to clear that up first—as if telling the truth would make any of this feel less like betrayal.

Jenson swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing in the grey. “Still,” he said, voice low, almost boyish. “I didn’t know you were here.” A beat. He lifted his eyes to Seb and then back down, unsure which direction courtesy lived in. “Mark never mentioned—” He caught himself. “He didn’t say.”

The words landed sharp and small. His secret. A pang lit in Sebastian’s chest so cleanly he had to grip the counter again. He wasn’t supposed to want to be announced. He wasn’t supposed to want to belong. He was supposed to be grateful to be allowed in at all. And yet. The humiliation flared. The old kind, from the years when his name could move walls and still didn’t open this door properly. A guest. A shadow. It made his jaw go hard.

“Well,” he said, and the ice in it surprised even him, “I didn’t know you were keen on having affairs. Last I heard, you were married.”

Jenson flinched, not dramatically. Honestly. “I—I—” He exhaled, the sound thin. “It’s not like that.”

“Isn’t it?” Sebastian tilted his head, letting the cruelty angle itself just so. “Drunken wedding in Las Vegas is still a marriage, last I checked.” He remembered the photos. The offhand story everyone treated as charming, as if vows made under too much neon were somehow lighter. He had not found it charming. He had filed it away under people who get to be forgiven for being beautiful.

Jenson’s lips parted, shocked, apologies forming, but Sebastian cut him off with a low laugh that didn’t sound like him.

“Oh, save it. You’ve always been sorry after the fact, haven’t you? Same way you were with her.”

Jenson blinked, thrown. “What—?”

“Britney,” Sebastian said, soft but surgical. “Your wife. You really thought I didn’t notice the name?”

The air seemed to drain from the room.

“You married someone named after him. After what you named Nico.” His tone stayed quiet, almost tender in its cruelty. “And don’t even try to deny it. You could have picked anyone, any name, but you picked his. Because you couldn’t have him, could you? Not really. You're not his first. Not even the second choice. You weren’t an option, so you made a copy.”

Jenson’s throat worked, his jaw tightening, a flash of something, hurt then fury. “Don’t you dare—”

“Oh, I’ll dare,” Sebastian snapped, stepping forward. “Because that’s what you do, isn’t it? You orbit people who never pick you, and then you spend years pretending it doesn’t still kill you.”

The silence afterward was sharp enough to sting. Jenson’s mouth opened, but nothing came. The British composure cracked just slightly, his accent thickening when he finally managed, “You don’t know a damn thing about it.”

Sebastian smiled without humor. “Don’t I?”

For a moment they just stared at each other. The German precision against the English restraint, two men who had spent half their lives learning how to wound without raising their voices.

Jenson blinked, stung. “I’m not—” The softness receded and something sharper stood up in its place. “I’m not the one married and with kids who keeps crawling back here.”

It was clean because it was true. The words clipped at the end the way only a Brit could make them. Measured, cutting, polite even when they were anything but. Sebastian felt them land and force a steadier posture into his spine.

“It’s not like that,” he said, and heard that he sounded as thin as Jenson had a moment ago. “We’re not. I’m—” He exhaled harshly, hating the way explanation put him on his back. “I’m getting divorced.”

“Oh,” Jenson said. Not victory. Understanding, perhaps, dismayed and late. He scrubbed a hand over his face, the cuff falling again, the fabric slipping on the sweat still cooling on his skin. “Right.” Then, not able to help himself, “But I’m the one he took to bed. Haven’t you heard?”

That was cruelty. Sebastian could see the regret even as it left Jenson’s mouth. Tired men reached for sharp things when cornered. He had a whole drawer full himself.

“Fuck you,” Sebastian said, without heat, because the heat would have given it dignity.

“Look,” Jenson said, the word coming out like a sigh and a start over. “I don’t want to fight.” He sounded very British then, practical, weary, someone who had stepped squarely into a mess at an hour when no one should be made to do anything but sleep. He took a breath and chose a lane. “I’m sorry you had to hear… any of that.”

Sebastian barked a small, joyless laugh at the euphemism. “Hear. That’s one way to put it.”

“I’m not trying to be clever,” Jenson said, quiet. He turned the tap and drank, long and immodest, the way the truly thirsty drink in kitchens at dawn. The water traced a clean line down his throat. He wiped it with the back of his hand and put the glass in the sink as if he might be allowed to come back in daylight and wash it. He kept his eyes down when he spoke next. “I didn’t plan it. He… texted. I was nearby.” He hesitated. “He sounded—” He didn’t finish the sentence. Drunk wasn’t the right word. Hurt was. He didn’t say it. He didn’t have to.

The dogs appeared, summoned by plumbing and people, tails offering cautious optimism. Shadow sniffed Jenson’s shin and sneezed, offended by something invisible. Simba leaned against Sebastian’s leg and claimed him without asking. Sebastian’s hand fell into the familiar groove behind Simba’s ear. A sound caught in his throat that could have been a laugh if there had been more oxygen in the room.

“Why the fuck are you letting Mark be an affair,” Sebastian said, the accusatory edge arriving late, honed by hours of not speaking. “If that’s what this is.” The word tasted filthy in the mouth. He thought of rumors he had heard, two year old talk in corridors, names mentioned together at charity things, a weekend in Monaco that had looked like it contained more than sunshine and boats. He had refused to believe any of it. Not because he didn’t think Mark was wanted, or Jenson capable. Because Mark had said no to him—drunk, sober, grieving, hungry. He had blocked kisses with the palm against the chest that meant no, Seb, the gentlest wall in the world. He had chosen control around Sebastian every time. The realization that he might not require it with someone else made something in him split very quietly down the center.

“Shut up,” Jenson said, but there was no venom in it, only abrasion. “Don’t do that. I didn’t force him into anything.” He straightened the shirt without buttoning it, as if decency could be assembled from halves. “And I’m not—” He glanced up, met Sebastian’s eyes properly for the first time. “I am not his secret either.”

The last word hit like a door. It landed because it was where the shame lived, and Jenson had a knack for finding the honest target even while bleeding. Sebastian’s mouth went dry. The kitchen seemed suddenly very full of edges. The clock ticked a little louder. He heard himself say, because pettiness arrives dressed as principle when you have nothing else left to wear, “Look at you. In his shirt, in his kitchen. If it’s not a secret, what is it?”

“An accident,” Jenson said simply. “A bad idea. A—” He searched for the right word and found none that wouldn’t be used against him. He tried a different tack. “A choice made by a man who didn’t want to be alone tonight.” He let that sit, a small offering made to a god he didn’t worship. “You’ve been that man. Don’t make me explain it to you.”

Sebastian stared at him because that was easier than agreeing. The sunrise pushed a little more light through the blinds, the slats drew prison bars across the countertops and the side of Jenson’s face. He looked like a painting of contrition. It irritated Sebastian unreasonably that he could be handsome even like this.

Jenson shifted his weight, winter lean, runner’s fidget, British awkwardness in a foreign kitchen. “I am sorry,” he said again, and either meant it or was very good at sounding like he meant it. “For you hearing it. For this being… whatever it is. I’m not here to—” He gestured, searching for a noun that would offend the least. “—complicate.”

“Too late,” Sebastian said. The words came out steady. They felt better than most of what he’d said all night.

Jenson inclined his head, a concession. “Yeah. Too late.” He took a beat and then, with the grim humor of someone trying to manage a crisis with the tools at hand, added, “Do you want me to make tea?"

Sebastian found, to his horror, that the corner of his mouth almost moved. He bit it back like an oath. “No.”

“Right.” Jenson nodded. “Fair enough.” He glanced at the ceiling as if sound might come down through it, as if the house might present Mark fully formed and able to arbitrate. It didn’t. Houses rarely performed miracles on command.

As Sebastian started to leave, walking toward the hall, Jenson hesitated saying, “For what it’s worth,” he said, looking not at Sebastian but at a polite middle distance they invented for apologies, “I didn’t know you were here. If I’d known, I—” He stopped. There were no versions of the sentence that wouldn’t be insulting in one direction or another. He settled for, “I’ll talk to him. If you want—”

“I don’t,” Sebastian said, too fast.

“Right,” Jenson repeated softly. “Of course.”

He stepped past the dogs, careful not to tread on paws that had claimed the floor long before either of them. When Sebastian reached the middle of the stairs still in view of Jenson from the kitchen, he started again, a thing he seemed to do—a man who hated leaving messes unswept. “Sebastian?”

Sebastian paused but didn’t answer.

Jenson tried one last line, gentle because a blade would do too much damage to a body already full of them. “It’s awful, what you did to him.” He didn’t say it like a verdict. He said it like a fact that needed no witness. “You know that.”

Sebastian did not look back and continued walking. “I know.”

“Right,” Jenson said, and let him leave.

Sebastian went upstairs then. Past Mark’s closed door. Past the seam in the wall where the bed had knocked and left a ghost of impact, hairline and already drying. His hand found the banister and he let it guide him to the guest room he had not earned. He closed the door softly because slamming would have been self congratulation, and he had no appetite left for that.

By the time the sky lifted from grey to a flat, reluctant blue, Sebastian had decided he would go to work whether he could think straight or not. Motion as medicine. Routine as the only kindness left. He showered fast, dressed without turning on the overhead light, packed his bag with hands that knew where everything lived even when the mind didn’t. The guest room smelled faintly of detergent and the sleep he hadn’t managed. He checked for his pass, his phone, the spare charger. He couldn’t shake the sense he was leaving something behind that wasn’t an object.

He opened the door. The landing was cold on his bare forearms. A strip of light reached down the hall from the kitchen and cut across the stairs like caution tape. Simba and Shadow didn’t appear. The dogs slept off the night the way dogs do, purely without analysis.

Sebastian started down, quiet by habit, and reached the last step before the house informed him he was not alone. Voices, low. A soft scuff against tile. The sound of a body leaning, then another body choosing to be leaned on. He stopped with one hand on the banister, just past the line of sight. The angle from the stairwell offered the kitchen like a stage seen from the wings. Half the island, the sink, the pale of morning sitting on stainless steel. And two figures framed in that washed out light.

Mark stood with his back to the doorway, bare to the waist, wearing only boxers. The muscles along his shoulders moved with each slow breath, skin mapped in a constellation of fresh marks that didn’t belong to him alone. Scratches raked thin across one shoulder blade, the red curve of teeth near his neck, faint bruises at the waist where hands had clearly held on. None of them accidental. All of them precise. The shirt from last night, his own, was gone, now hanging in the shoulders of another man he had spend the night with. Jenson stood in front of him, half in shadow, hair still a mess, one hand resting flat against Mark’s chest as if to measure distance.

Sebastian didn’t move. He didn’t make a sound. Something inside him made the decision for him—an odd, delaying instinct he could not defend. See it. As if confirmation could cauterize.

Mark bent slightly, head turning toward Jenson’s throat, mouth tracing the edge of a collarbone already bruised by attention. Jenson’s head tipped back, a small sound caught between breath and restraint. From where Sebastian stood, he could see each red mark bloom under the light as Mark’s mouth found it again, reclaiming what he had already claimed.

“You didn’t tell me Seb is here,” Jenson said, voice quiet, careful. The British in him made the sentence neat even with breath snagging on the edges. He turned his face half away as Mark’s mouth hit the hinge of his jaw, and the name slid out half formed. Seb, not Sebastian, familiarity that had nothing to do with intimacy and everything to do with years of sitting at the same tables.

Mark, without lifting his head, “Why does that matter?” Another kiss, closer to the corner of Jenson’s mouth, the words blurred against skin. “Come back to bed.”

Sebastian stared at the floor a second, at the seam in the tile he had once tripped over carrying two mugs. He saw his own shoes in his peripheral vision and did not recognize them. Move. His body ignored the order.

“That’s rude,” Jenson said, turning a fraction. Mark’s mouth found his cheekbone instead. “It’s not proper.”

“Proper didn’t matter to you,” Mark murmured, and though the tone was soft it carried that familiar edge he used on a straight line argument he had no intention of losing, “when you were—” He broke off not because he couldn’t finish but because he chose another geography, kissing instead of naming. "—screaming my name." He finished in a lower tone. Sebastian could almost see him smirk.

Sebastian’s stomach folded in on itself. He’s goading you, some rational part of him thought with clinical detachment. He knows you’re here? No. Mark hadn’t looked up. Neither had. They were in the self contained bubble of people who have learned the shape of each other well enough to ignore the room.

“Don’t you have work?” Jenson asked, the words coming out steadier, the small British rebuke tidying itself into the sentence like a tie tucked into place.

“I’ll call in sick,” Mark said, not joking. He kissed the hollow at the base of Jenson’s throat as if he were pinning the point of the argument there. “Just for you. If we go back to bed.”

The levelness of it stung more than it should have. No performance. No swagger. Just decision. Mark’s hand slid up, fingers drawing a line across Jenson’s sternum, pausing over a mark as if to acknowledge his own work. Sebastian had a sudden, humiliating memory of the night before his wedding—of smoothing a tie under a collar, of hands that shook. Different man. Different decade.

“He’s hurt, Mark,” Jenson said, and there was something like reluctance in it, something like conscience. He didn’t push Mark away. He pressed his palm flat against his chest and held him there. “He’s calling this an affair between us.”

Mark went very still, the kind of stillness that isn’t absence but concentration. The pause stretched a breath too long. Sebastian could hear the tap drip once behind the quiet. He watched the muscles in Mark’s jaw decide.

“It’s been two years,” Mark said. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t lower it either. “I’m not as regular as your other boy toys.” A flash of dry humor through the understatement, then gone. “But if it isn’t an affair, then what is it?”

The words found their way under Sebastian’s ribs and sat there, heavy as a full pocket. Two years. He had refused to believe the murmurings that had drifted through corridors and dinners. Not because he thought Mark desired no one, but because Mark had carved restraint into himself around him. Every time Sebastian had been stupid enough to try—a kiss offered drunk or sober, a line crossed in a hallway—Mark’s palm to his chest had been the gentlest stop sign in the world. No, Seb. The realization unspooled quietly, that wall might not exist for everyone. That the thing Mark would not be for him—weak, faithless, selfish—he might permit himself to be with someone who did not carry the same wreckage in their hands.

Sebastian’s eyes dipped to Jenson’s back, the small scatter of old freckles there turned to something new by touch. Mark's dress shirt now one side draped not to his shoulder, leaving a part of his back exposed. The marks were not cruel. They were evidence. He catalogued without wanting to, the angle where Mark’s mouth had spent time, the shallow crescents along a shoulder blade, the place where a flat hand had held too firmly. None of it pornographic. All of it intimate. His vision steadied, then narrowed.

He felt his breath go high and thin. This is not your house. The thought arrived with a clarity so simple it should have calmed him. It did nothing. He looked at Mark’s face—half profile, morning making him look older and, unfairly, more beautiful, and wanted to speak every sentence he had promised himself he would save for a better hour. He had the presence of mind to keep them in his mouth. Barely.

Jenson let his head fall forward until his forehead touched Mark’s shoulder. Not a surrender. A pause. “He heard us,” he said, lower. “All of it.”

Mark’s mouth pressed into a line. He exhaled through his nose. “Good.”

The word hit like a slammed drawer. Sebastian flinched before he could stop himself. Petty. Hurt. You wanted to hurt him back. None of the labels helped.

“Don’t,” Jenson said softly. “Don’t make it uglier than it is.”

Mark looked down at him then, the corner of his mouth tipping in a shape that could have been argument or apology, except it wasn’t either. “Come back to bed,” he said again, gentler this time, as if rephrasing the request might rewrite the night.

“Mark,” Jenson persisted, a warning folded into the name. “Work.”

Mark’s answer was a hand, open and warm, spanning the hollow where neck met shoulder. His thumb drew an unthinking half circle. “Stay,” he said, and meant it in more than one direction.

Sebastian realized his fingers were biting crescents into the wood of the banister. The scene held itself a moment longer, the image imprinting whether he wanted it to or not. The two of them barely clothed, the kitchen a bright tired blue around them, Mark’s mouth softened for someone else. It wasn’t the bodies that did it. It was the ease.

Something inside him gave way with a soundless click. He stepped onto the tile. He didn’t disguise the footfall. He made a noise where a stealthier man would have slid by, shoulder catching a chair just enough to nudge it out of line. The sound wasn’t loud, but it was unmistakable: I am here.

Both heads turned.

Sebastian walked into the frame the house had drawn and didn’t stop until he could see their faces without guesswork. If there was a flinch left in him, he hardened over it. He let silence do the first part. Let them register that he had seen, that he had listened, that he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. Then he said, evenly, “I’m going to work.”

No preface. No apology. No request.

Mark didn’t move, didn’t reach for him, didn’t speak. His eyes were unreadable, cooled iron over banked fire. Jenson stepped an inch sideways, not to hide, not to display. Just to take his own body out of the center of someone else’s pain.

Sebastian went to the hooks by the door and took his jacket down without hurry, one sleeve at a time, the practiced choreography of departure. He checked the pocket as if his hands required a task to maintain their neutrality. Keys. Pass. Wallet. He tasted metal like he had bitten a coin.

Simba appeared, then Shadow, the soft thump of tails adding something almost absurd to the tableau. Simba nosed at Sebastian’s knee. Sebastian let a hand fall to the familiar head, felt the press of a creature who loved without concept of scandal or chronology. Lucky dog, he thought, and hated the thought, and loved the animal anyway. He put on his shoes. Tied them cleanly. The act felt like a liturgy. Jenson shifted his weight, subtle, the athlete’s habit of readiness. Mark’s hand slipped from Jenson’s shoulder at last, fingers flexing once like a man remembering he could still make a fist if he needed to.

Sebastian opened the door. Cold air reached in, clean and thin, morning’s honesty. He didn’t look back when he added, to no one in particular and both of them at once, “Don’t wait on me. The schedule’s full.”

It was petty, and small, and the only armor he had on short notice. He stepped out. The hallway smell—salt, coffee ghost, laundry—followed him to the threshold and stopped as if obedience were a scent. The door shut behind him with a sound that made the memory of last night’s click feel louder than it had.

On the pavement, the city looked bleached, buildings undecorated by weather, sky a sheet too bright to confess a dawn had happened at all. He stood a second longer than necessary, measuring the morning, then started toward the car with the gait of someone who had a list and would complete it even if he had to do it hollow.

Inside, the house recalibrated around the absence he left. In the kitchen, Jenson exhaled a small, flattened sound. Mark did not move for a long moment. The dogs settled by the mat, heads on paws, sentries relieved.

The word affair hung in the air like steam slowly cooling on glass. No one claimed it. No one disavowed it. It simply existed, and the room kept breathing around it.

On the street, Sebastian drove, eyes dry, hands steady because the car demanded steadiness. The day would start whether he came to meet it or not. He put himself in motion and let the rest catch up later, the way it always did.

Chapter Text

The house adjusts first. Something had changed. Not loudly, not with confrontation, but in the fragile hush that lingered between them. After the night of voices through walls, after the morning of avoidance, the house itself seemed to breathe differently. No slammed doors, no broken plates. Just a new choreography laid over the old one, the way furniture seems to shift after you move a single chair. Footsteps shorten. Doors pause in the last inch of closing, then commit. The fridge hum becomes a clock. Even the dogs feel it. Simba’s head comes up quicker at the sound of keys, Shadow waits at thresholds that used to be automatic crossings. Nothing dramatic. Everything different.

They are polite about it. That’s the strangest part. Polite in a way they haven’t been in years. No sharp edges, no bright flares. Mark makes coffee and leaves a second mug out without comment. Sebastian rinses the dishes he didn’t use and dries them with a towel that isn’t his. “Thanks,” one says. “No worries,” the other answers. They both hear the space between words and try not to look directly at it.

It’s only been days since the night with the hallway and the half-closed door and the morning that felt like a confession drawn in daylight. Days, but the house has already memorised this altered weather. There is no storm now. There is waiting. The kind where both people listen for thunder and pretend it’s far away.

Sebastian moves quiet, but not the old quiet that asked to be forgiven for existing. This one is measured, practical, a man conserving energy when he isn’t sure what he’ll have to lift later. He is kind to the dogs. He is kind to the space. He is less kind to himself. He wears that stillness he learned from podiums and press pens, the one that looks like calm until you get too close and see the grip marks on the underside. He has detached just enough to keep breathing, not enough to feel safe. There is a numbness in him, and he treats it like a splint. Necessary. Ugly. Temporary, he hopes.

He wants time. That’s new, and it embarrasses him. He has always been the driver who grabbed the gap before it closed, the man who thought any pause was cowardice dressed as thought. Now he waits. Not passive. There is nothing passive in the way he relearns the kitchen’s drawers, or the way he chooses which words to leave on the plate and which to swallow. But he waits. Because the choice he made before, to fix pain by striking first, left a damage he can’t pretend was tactical. He will fix this. He has told himself so in as many languages as he knows. He just isn’t trusted with the delicate parts yet, not even by himself.

Part of it is the realization that keeps throwing sparks across the back of his mind whether he looks at it or not: that Mark could make himself a secret for someone else, could be reckless and tender and unhidden in the same house, and yet had never allowed himself to be those things for him. Not once. Not even in the worst, softest nights. Mark had locked himself down around Sebastian with a discipline that felt like kindness and now looks, in certain light, like fear. That thought hurts in a way Sebastian doesn’t have a useful word for. He holds it carefully, as if the wrong pressure will break it and cut him again.

Mark tries not to think at all. That is his strategy, at least in the hours that take place between nine and five. Work absorbs him like rain. He wears the uniform of authority the Racing Bulls gear, easy headset, the calm voice that can move teenagers to confidence and engineers to consensus. He is good at this. It’s a relief and a penance. Between meetings he has flashes of hallway, of the way Sebastian didn’t speak, of the way he himself did. He files them and closes the drawer. It never latches. He closes it again.

He knows he crossed a line. That is the cleanest sentence he has. The underlying reasons are messier. He’d been angry, yes. He’d been drunk, yes. He’d wanted to hurt, yes. He has never been a man particularly interested in reasons when the thing in front of him is the result. He brought someone home. He let the house carry it. He didn’t check if the guest room door was open. He didn’t care if it was. That’s the gist of it.

He doesn’t know how much Sebastian heard in the morning. The conversation with Jenson that slid between apology and provocation, his own voice saying things loud enough for the room when he should have said them quietly to himself. He doesn’t know whether the worst thing wasn’t the night at all but the daylight: the kitchen, the marks, the ease, the phrase come back to bed uttered like an invitation and a dare. He suspects both. He suspects neither. He doesn’t ask. Not because he’s a coward, he tells himself, but because the answer will only rephrase guilt into a longer sentence.

He spoke to Jenson, properly, later. Not an argument, not a justification. Two men folding a mistake in half and putting it where it belongs. Jenson was good at that; he is good at most things that require adult tone. He said, “We need to be smarter,” and Mark said, “We need to be done.” There wasn’t a fight, which made it worse, or better. Mark isn’t sure which. The truth is, Jenson didn’t come for mess. He came for comfort. They were both capable of misidentifying one as the other.

Now Mark looks at Sebastian as if the edges of him are razor wired. He watches his hands, not because he expects them to strike but because he expects them to break. He speaks in sentences that don’t waste syllables. He does not snap. That is the second strangest part, how immediately he stops snapping, as if the argument with the world has burned out of him and left only smoke.

Sebastian notices. Of course he does. He counts it as both kindness and punishment. A restraint that is easier to live inside and harder to forgive. He doesn’t try to charm it away. There is no teasing, no careening into a joke to smooth a corner. He does not, as Mark likes to say, kiss the air around the problem. No grand gestures, no last night of the world speeches. He says almost nothing and then makes dinner, or he leaves a folded towel outside the bathroom door when Mark forgets one. The smallest usefulness, performed quietly.

The result is a version of peace that feels like a bruise you don’t remember getting. They pass each other in the hall and both step to the same side. They look up at the same time when a car pulls into the driveway and both exhale when it keeps going. Their eyes meet across the kitchen while the kettle boils, then look away in the same moment. Symmetry has always been a cruel joke between them. Now it feels like a truce.

At night, the house conducts experiments in proximity. On Wednesday, they share a couch with the dogs between them. A movie plays, some documentary Mark pretends he’s seen and Sebastian pretends he hasn’t. Simba chooses Mark’s lap and Shadow chooses the floor but drifts closer to Sebastian’s foot each time he shifts. Mark’s knee brushes Sebastian’s calf once and neither of them moves away. They don’t mention it. The credits roll. “Good?” Mark asks. “Good,” Sebastian says. They stay five minutes after the names end, not because either of them wants to, but because neither of them wants to move first.

On Thursday, Mark comes home late and the house is dark except for the halo above the stove. A pot is on simmer. Pasta, sauce kept warm. A note: Eat. Training meeting tomorrow at nine. – S. Mark stares at the note too long. He eats standing up, fork scraping the pan, not because he likes it that way but because sitting at the table with the note would be a conversation he isn’t ready to have with anyone, including himself. When he turns off the light, he leaves the hallway lamp on. He calls it practical. He knows what he is doing.

On Friday, Sebastian is the only one home at dinner time. He eats on the back steps with a sweater on and breath steaming, looking at the square of yard where the grass is never quite green. He texts Mathilda: Good luck tomorrow. She texts back a string of fish and wave emojis and a tell Markie to wear sunscreen. He hikes vague laughter out of his chest and sends back a thumbs up. He does not tell Mark. Not because it is a secret, but because the smallest kindnesses are hard to handle just now.

Mark watches him from the kitchen window. He had come in quiet, not to be unseen but to not interrupt. Sebastian sits like a man performing the act of sitting, shoulders squared as if posture might keep the cold off. Mark looks at the line of his neck and thinks, You are still here. The sentences that follow that one are less helpful. He closes the curtain because looking feels like trespass.

Saturday morning is logistics. Testing schedules. Calls. A list on the counter with four items crossed out and three added in different ink. Sebastian is at the sink, sleeves pushed up, carefully washing the mug with the fading red stripe, the one Mark never uses but never throws away. He puts it on the rack and reaches for a towel, his knuckles graze Mark’s wrist. Contact, brief as a blink. They both look at the towel. It is blue. It becomes the most interesting object in the room. “Thanks,” Mark says, too loud. “Sure,” Sebastian says, too quiet. He lets the towel hang over the oven handle with care, as if the edges might fray if he looks away. The moment passes and then doesn’t. They both find reasons to stay in the kitchen for another three minutes, doing things that don’t need doing.

They speak about work more than they have any right to. It is the safest country they share. Mark mentions a simulator update and Sebastian asks the kind of question that proves he was listening. Sebastian mentions a feedback quirk on turn in and Mark notes the variable without arguing about the driver. They are both better when they have a problem that can be solved with hands and math. Feelings don’t torque to spec.

In the spaces between technical talk, they look at each other the way people look at paintings they are not allowed to touch. Head turned a fraction more than politeness requires. Longer than a glance, shorter than a stare. The eyes give away more than either of them wants. They look away before guilt has time to organise itself.

Once, on the way to the car, Mark reaches for the same door handle Sebastian is reaching for. The back of Mark’s hand brushes the inside of Sebastian’s wrist, a warm, factual contact that feels like a translated apology: I know. I’m here. I’m trying. Sebastian’s fingers close around empty air. He doesn’t turn his hand over to catch Mark’s. That would be a new language. He isn’t fluent.

They do not talk about Jenson. Not by name, not by pronoun, not by any of the useful euphemisms adults use when they need to confess without confessing. The conversation in the kitchen at dawn exists now as a document both have signed without reading. Mark has filed it in a drawer labelled avoidable. Sebastian has shelved it behind a book labelled deserved. Neither system works particularly well.

They do not talk about the argument either. Not the words. Not the impact. They do not revise the sentences down or rewrite their ends. The scar sits under the shirt and both pretend not to see the way it tugs when the shoulder moves. Mark thinks, periodically, you told the truth badly. Sebastian thinks, you lied to hurt me. Both thoughts are true, which is what makes them useless.

If there is a change that feels honest, it is this: neither of them tries to shave blame to fit one face. They share it like a badly cut coat and wear it around the house, bumping into doorframes, apologising to furniture. “Sorry,” one says when the dishwasher sticks. “Sorry,” the other answers when the dog’s toy gets kicked under the sofa. They are both saying the wrong sorry to the wrong object in the right tone. It will do for now.

At night, sleep is transactional. Mark falls into it hard, like an engine that shuts off at the kill switch. He wakes at three and stares at the ceiling, thinking of the night before the wedding and of a kitchen with too much light and of the way Sebastian said I’m going to work like a man teaching his legs to walk again. He rubs his eyes. The dogs come into his room and put their heads on the mattress. He says both their names and then neither. He sleeps again.

Sebastian doesn’t so much sleep as drift. He lies on his side facing the wall and counts the imperfections in the paint. He wants to cross the hall. He wants not to want it. He wants to deserve it. He settles for memorising the pattern the blinds make at dawn. He thinks about Melbourne. About the beach house. About Mathilda’s race meet and Samantha’s insistence on the Moomba parade and the way Basti still says please like it’s a magic word that might open anything. He thinks: You owe it to them to be better. He thinks: You owe it to him not to break the house you keep asking to be let into. He closes his eyes. He is still awake when the alarm goes.

The week wears itself like this. New habits accrue. Old ones wait on hooks. There are moments that look almost like comfort and then reveal themselves as choreography. They stand too close while looking for the takeout menu and both step back at the same time. They reach for the same bottle of olive oil and let their fingers knock as if it were accidental. They sit on the edge of the same silence and talk about tyres because it is easier than talking about love.

On Sunday afternoon, they end up on the floor with both dogs for no reason either of them can explain. Simba has confiscated a tennis ball that belongs to no one, Shadow is convinced the ball possesses occult properties and must be subdued. Mark throws it once, it bounces wrong. Sebastian laughs in a way that startles them both. Mark looks at him and that expression—half fond, half wounded—makes the room smaller. “What?” Sebastian asks, instantly defensive and already hating himself for it. “Nothing,” Mark says, just as quick. “It’s good.” Neither of them asks what it is. They don’t need the answer to know.

After the dogs collapse, Sebastian stands and offers a hand down to Mark. It is reflex, courtesy, muscle memory from podiums. Mark hesitates half a second too long and then takes it. The pull to standing is simple. The letting go is not. Their hands release like edges of tape peeling apart. Slow, adhesive, reluctant. They both look at their palms as if expecting to find a mark there. There isn’t. There is.

And so it goes. Distance that knows exactly how far it is. Longing that disguises itself as civility. Want that finds expression in the domestic: the folded towel, the quiet meal, the way one of them leaves the porch light on and the other turns it off after standing in the doorway for a count of five. Neither of them believes this equilibrium will hold. That is part of why they abide it. It’s a bridge, they tell themselves, not a house. It gets you across. It does not shelter you. It wobbles in the wind, you grip the rail and keep moving anyway. They are both good at movement. They are both worse at standing still.

On Monday morning, Mark leaves early. A note on the counter: Meeting. Back late. Don’t wait up. It reads like logistics. It is an apology wearing a high-vis vest. Sebastian stands over it with a cup of coffee and reads it twice as if the message might have layers. He puts the note under a magnet, because throwing it away would be ungrateful and keeping it on the counter would be sentimental. The magnet squeaks. The dogs look up as if summoned. “Walk?” he asks them, and is absurdly grateful that their answer is immediate and uncomplicated.

In the afternoon, an email arrives with a flight change. Melbourne nudged a day earlier. Sebastian forwards it to Mark with nothing in the body, not because he is stubborn, but because he has finally learned to stop writing things he cannot repair in text. Mark replies with a thumbs up, then sends a second message three minutes later: Beach house key is in the left drawer. The second message is the one that matters. Neither of them says so.

Evenings are the hardest. The hour when it would be natural for one of them to say, come sit, and the other to answer, just a minute. Instead they orbit, tidy, carefully wrong. Mark reads a set of notes that does not require that level of concentration. Sebastian scrolls through photos he has already seen. They both invent small tasks:, wiping a counter already clean, rearranging the fruit, airing a room for exactly seven minutes and then closing the window. If this were anyone else’s house, it would be comedy. In theirs, it is devotion in a language only they are fluent in. Acts that say, I am here, I am not breaking anything else today.

They speak more softly. They touch less. They look longer. It feels fine but not really. It looks right but not entirely. Something is off key, and neither of them will strike the piano to find which note it is. They will, eventually. They always do. For now, they listen to the instrument buzz under their hands and call it music because calling it silence would be an admission neither of them is ready to make.

Night takes the house back, as it always does. Doors close. Lights go out. The dogs sigh the way dogs have sighed since people built houses to hold their sighs. In separate rooms, two men lie awake and do the same math at different speeds: what was said, what was meant, what can still be salvaged if both of them stop insisting on being right long enough to be kind.

In the morning, they will pour coffee into cups that belong to both of them and neither of them. Someone will say thanks. Someone will say sure. The distance will be exactly what it was yesterday. The longing will be, too. And yet, somewhere beneath the quiet choreography, both of them are reaching, the way a plant reaches toward light it cannot see, certain only that it exists.

_________

Mark had started to grow used to the rhythm of it all.

The quiet mornings that began with the hiss of the kettle, the clink of two cups instead of one, the sound of the dogs’ claws clicking against the tile when they recognized Sebastian’s steps. It frightened him, how easily the house had folded around the pattern of two people again. The domesticity slid over his life like an old jacket he’d once loved and outgrew but somehow still fit into. It shouldn’t have felt natural but it did. And that terrified him most of all.

He’d always imagined himself immune to comfort, the kind that came from being seen, from being known. But there it was every night. The weight of another person in the same air, the quiet hum of coexistence he hadn’t realized he missed. He caught himself cooking without thinking, setting out two plates even when he swore he wouldn’t. He noticed himself checking the weather before Sebastian’s commute, preheating the oven before Sebastian came home, making sure the lights were warm enough, soft enough. All the small things he told himself didn’t matter were beginning to look like care, and care had always been dangerous.

He had gone overboard before he could admit that now. Every bit of cruelty, every word meant to cut, all of it had been a poor disguise for what he really felt. Want. Years later, the same want still haunted him. He wanted Sebastian back. Not as a guest, not as an echo, but as his. And that was the problem. He knew how that story ended.

It was strange, he thought, how proximity made everything worse. How the sight of Sebastian moving through his home in bare feet, wearing one of his old shirts, could make him ache in places he’d long stopped acknowledging. How the smell of Sebastian’s shampoo on the towels could make him feel like it's 2013 again, reckless and dumb and stupidly hopeful. He hated it. He craved it. He lived for it.

He told himself this shouldn’t happen. That he shouldn’t still want to touch Sebastian’s hair when he fell asleep on the couch. That he shouldn’t stare too long when Sebastian smiled at something on his phone. But want didn’t listen to reason, and love had never been rational between them. It was hunger and survival and ruin, all tangled together.

He still remembered what ruin felt like.

Because once, he had believed.

Once, he had let himself think that maybe, after all the fights, after all the distance, they would find their way back to each other. And Sebastian had let him believe it. The late-night calls, the stolen weekends, the soft words between. Mark had been foolish enough to think they meant permanence. But then the silence came. Then Germany. Then the phone call. And Mark had shattered so cleanly he’d almost admired the precision of it.

He didn’t think he could survive that kind of breaking again. Not now. Not after learning how long it took to piece himself back together, how fragile those repairs really were. So he had done what he did best, he built walls out of anger and snide remarks, hid fear behind irritation, and hoped the noise would keep Sebastian from hearing how terrified he still was.

But despite himself, something inside him had started to thaw these past few weeks. The dinners. The quiet. The almost apologies passed between dishes and folded laundry. He found himself watching Sebastian from the corner of his eye and thinking, maybe. Maybe this time would be different. Maybe all the wreckage had softened them into something gentler. Maybe this—this domestic, quiet rhythm—was what they had always needed. He knew better than to believe in maybe. But he did anyway.

Dinner that night was almost peaceful. Too peaceful, like the air before a storm. Mark had made pasta, his own signature, the one Sebastian used to crave after long races. The sauce was thick and rich, the way Sebastian liked, and he’d even opened a bottle of wine they both favored. Conversation came easy, small and harmless. They talked about the car, the tests, Mathilda’s upcoming swim meet. Sebastian smiled more than usual. Mark let himself relax into it.

For the first time in a long while, it didn’t feel like penance.

After the plates were cleared, Mark brought out dessert, tiramisu. He’d made it the night before, mostly to prove to himself he could still make something sweet that didn’t taste like regret. Sebastian looked genuinely surprised when he saw it, then quietly pleased. They ate in near silence, the kind that felt less like avoidance and more like familiarity. Mark caught himself thinking: this could be enough.

Until Sebastian spoke.

“I’m coming back to Germany.”

The words landed without warning.

Simple, matter of fact, devastating.

Mark froze.

For a second, he wasn’t sure he’d heard right. His fork stopped halfway to his mouth, his chest tightening as if someone had sucked the air from the room. He tried to swallow, couldn’t. His heart stuttered once, twice, then began to hammer in his throat so loudly he could barely hear anything else.

Of course.

Of course this would never last.

He should have known better.

He always did.

He managed a weak, almost polite, “Oh?”

His voice sounded foreign, too steady for how much he was shaking inside.

Sebastian nodded, setting his spoon down, tracing the rim of the glass like he was afraid to look up.

“Janna and I are… working on practicing custody. In between weeks.” His tone was careful, rehearsed, as if he’d said it aloud a dozen times already.

“I guess I haven’t brought it up yet, but we decided the kids will stay in Germany. It’s home for them now. Their schools, their friends. We’ll exchange schedules on who stays at the house.”

Mark stared at him, the words spinning in his head but refusing to land. Practicing custody.Exchange schedules. Home for them now. It sounded real this time. Not the vague talk from before. Not the kind of divorce that lived in the air as a threat. This one had structure, decisions, paperwork. Finality.

He should have been relieved for Sebastian, happy that he was taking control of his life again. But all Mark could feel was the same old gravity pulling him under. It didn’t matter if this divorce was real. It didn’t matter if it failed or succeeded. Because in every version of it, he lost him anyway.

He managed to nod once, muttering, “Right.”

But his pulse was a roar in his ears.

He couldn’t breathe properly. The world felt too small, the light too harsh. He looked at Sebastian’s hands, steady and calm, and thought, how can you say it so easily? How can you sound so sure while I’m falling apart?

Sebastian continued quietly, “I’ll be back when it’s Janna’s turn.”

Mark forced a sound out of his throat that might have been a laugh but came out hollow.

“Up to you,” he said. Soulless, automatic.

Sebastian frowned. “Mark—”

“I still want to fix this,” Sebastian added quickly, as if to fill the silence. His eyes flicked up, searching for something that wasn’t there.

“This. Us. I still want things to work between us.”

There’s nothing between us, Mark thought.

He didn’t say it. He just stared at the table, at the faint ring left by Sebastian’s glass. His chest felt tight, but his face remained still. He had learned long ago how to keep heartbreak from showing.

“I’ll come back,” Sebastian said again, softer this time. “That is… if I’m still welcome. Here. With you.”

There it was. The same old promise. The one that had undone him years ago.

Mark wanted to laugh. Or scream. Or both.

Instead, he swallowed the noise and said, flatly, “You do you, Seb.”

The silence that followed stretched until it felt unbearable.

Sebastian’s face fell. Not dramatically, not even visibly to anyone who didn’t know him—but Mark saw it. The small shift in his eyes, the tightness in his jaw. The way his fingers twitched like he wanted to reach out and didn’t.

Mark didn’t move. Couldn’t.

He kept his hands still on the table, staring at the untouched wine glass between them.

He wanted to say, Don’t go. Don’t make this another almost.

He wanted to say, If you leave again, I won’t come back from it this time.

But the words stuck somewhere between his teeth and his pride.

He just looked at him instead. Really looked. Sebastian, with his hair falling over his forehead, eyes tired but certain, the faint scar at his temple that only Mark ever remembered to touch.Three years had passed and he still loved him like a reflex. And he hated himself for it.

When Sebastian stood to clear the dishes, Mark let him. He sat there, motionless, pretending to check his phone, pretending he wasn’t watching every movement. The clatter of ceramic felt like punctuation to something unspoken.

As Sebastian rinsed the plates, Mark stared at his back and thought about all the times he had dreamed of this. Sebastian in his kitchen, sleeves rolled up, water running, the kind of quiet intimacy that once seemed impossible. And yet here it was, playing out in front of him, empty of everything that mattered.

He closed his eyes for a moment, breathing through the ache. He remembered what it felt like to believe. He remembered the warmth of those early mornings years ago when he’d thought they were building something real. And he remembered how it felt to wake up to silence after Sebastian left, how it felt to realize he’d been just another stop on the way to somewhere else.

He couldn’t do that again.

So he didn’t beg, didn’t ask, didn’t try.

When Sebastian came back to the table, drying his hands, Mark had already stood.

“I’ll lock up,” he said.

Sebastian hesitated, then nodded. “Good night, Mark.”

Mark gave him a small, tired smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Night.”

He waited until Sebastian disappeared down the hall before letting the mask slip.

His chest hurt. Not sharp pain—just a deep, heavy ache that pressed against his lungs. He braced a hand on the counter, exhaling slow, the taste of wine and defeat thick on his tongue.

Of course it wouldn’t last.

Of course he’d almost let himself believe again.

He should have known better. He always did.

Still, as he turned off the lights and stood in the dim hum of the kitchen, he couldn’t help glancing toward the hallway, to where Sebastian’s door was half closed, a faint glow leaking from the bottom.

Some stubborn, foolish part of him still hoped that maybe the light would stay on a little longer, that maybe, for once, Sebastian wouldn’t leave entirely.

He shook his head and looked away.

Hope was a habit he couldn’t afford anymore. And yet, as he climbed the stairs, that same hope followed him, quiet and persistent, like the echo of a voice he’d never learned how to stop hearing.

Mark did not sleep.

He lay on his back, hands flat on the duvet like a man bracing for impact, and stared into the dark until it changed shades and still refused to be morning. He didn’t move when the first thin light found the edges of the blinds. He didn’t reach for his phone. He didn’t breathe any louder than he had to. He had the childish thought. If he didn’t open the door, if he didn’t look, none of it would happen. The house would stay suspended, undecided, like a coin trapped mid-flip. He told himself he didn’t care. He told himself he did. Neither sentence made a difference.

He heard Sebastian before he felt the day. Not speech. The small noises a life makes. The dogs’ soft, hopeful whine, the click of the leashes lifted from their hook. The slow, familiar scrape of a zip across the teeth of a jacket he could picture without seeing. Footsteps down the hallway, steady, unhurried. The front door opened and closed, a rush of cold air pulling under Mark’s door like a tide and then letting go again. Silence. Mark stared at the ceiling and counted his heartbeats until he lost track and had to start over.

Minutes later, the door again, the dogs’ nails ticking quick on tile, breathy excitement, the bustle that follows a small adventure. Sebastian’s voice—just the shape of it, not the words—low and routine. Bowls moved. Water poured. The cupboard with the treats eased shut without a bang because Sebastian never let things slam if he could help it. A pause that was him scratching behind Simba’s ear and then the other hand finding the hollow under Shadow’s chin. Mark could chart it like a map. He closed his eyes and pretended he hadn’t heard any of it.

He didn’t get up. He lay there and listened to the vacuum start, ridiculous and ordinary, and tracked its progress room to room. It clattered against the skirting and straightened again, the long mouth of it chewing the hallway runner, the low drone swallowing dog hair and crumbs of last night’s breadcrumbs and whatever else a house collects when people are trying not to speak. The sound made something low in him clench. He didn’t want this cleaned. He didn’t want evidence erased. He wanted evidence to sit where it hurt and say see, see, this is what happens when you try.

He told himself not to look and got up anyway, padding barefoot across the room and lifting the edge of the blind with one finger. The driveway lay in a strip of dull morning. Sebastian’s car sat where it had since he arrived, peppered with the freckles of fallen damp, the driver’s side mirror still slightly misaligned because he never fixed the little things unless you made him. The sight of it there, still here, sent a stupid, weightless relief through Mark’s chest that he hated himself for feeling. He dropped the blind and retreated to the bed like he’d been caught at a window he had no right to look from.

Immature, he told himself. You are being ridiculous. He couldn’t help it. He had not learned another way to survive the hours when departure was a probability and not yet a fact. Three years ago he had survived those hours by pacing and making lists he never used and loading the dishwasher one glass at a time just to hear something obey. He remembered seeing Sebastian off then—no, he remembered letting him go, because that’s what it had been—and the way relief had walked in with the ruin. The promise of return had been clean, neat, folded. He had believed it because believing had been the only way to breathe. Then the silence. Then the word that had made belief a joke. I'm sorry. Again. The moment had lived in his chest ever since, a shard he’d learned to angle his movements around.

So could anyone blame him for not wanting to watch another version of the same story play to the same ending? For refusing sleep like it was a trick? For pretending absence could be outwaited if he lay very still and did not hand the day his eyes?

He told himself he didn’t want to see it. That if he didn’t see it, it couldn’t become the thing he’d have to live with. And a smaller, crueler part of him wanted to see it, wanted to watch the door close, to inventory the weight of the bag, to mark the exact moment the car left the drive and turned out of sight. He wanted, against himself, to say goodbye. Who knew when Sebastian would be back in this house again? He had wasted their hours on temper, on punishment, on pretending he didn’t want what he wanted, and now the hours were running out and all he could do with them was listen.

He lay there and did not drink water, did not make coffee, did not eat. He calculated despite himself. The flight times he remembered, the drive to the airport, the double-checking of passports and chargers and kid drawings folded into laptop sleeves. He thought: if I get up now, if I stand in the hall and he turns and sees me, if I say nothing and only put my mouth on his shoulder where the shirt meets skin, will he stay? Will he come back sooner? Will he come back at all?

He put his hand on the doorknob and almost turned it. He felt the brass cold against his palm, the weight of the latch pulling. It would be nothing to turn. It would be a kind of jump. He pictured the hall. He pictured Sebastian under that thin, ordinary light, coat half on, his travel bag already zipped. He pictured stepping forward and doing the thing he’d refused to do the night before—closing the distance, putting both arms around him, saying the smallest, stupidest thing he had left. Please. Promise. Mark let his hand rest there until the muscles in his forearm trembled. He released the knob as if it were the only discipline he had left.

It will pass, he told himself, the way one talks to weather. Let it pass. He lay down on top of the covers and waited for the world to rearrange itself without asking him.

Time did tricks. It flattened and then sprinted. He lost it, found it again when the floorboard by the stairs—second from the top, always—complained. He heard Sebastian moving toward him. The instinct to get up and meet him at the door hit so hard he had to clench a fist against the mattress to keep from obeying it. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He had done enough standing in doorways like a man auditioning for a role he never got to play.

Knuckles on wood. Not loud. The kind of knock you use when you know the person on the other side is listening already.

“Mark?” Sebastian’s voice. Not tired. Careful. Close.

Mark stared at the hairline crack in the ceiling and said nothing.

A second knock. “Mark.” Then, a pause in which Mark could hear him deciding whether to pretend cheer. He didn’t. “I’m going now.”

The sentence ran through Mark and took something with it. He swallowed and felt the swallow hurt.

“Shadow and Simba have been fed,” Sebastian went on, as if reading a list he had written to keep his hands from shaking. “Dinners in the oven. I—” the word caught— “made chicken.”

Right. A parting gift. Mark closed his eyes. Of course he had. Of course there would be something comforting left behind to land after the absence. He could see the roasting pan in his mind, lemon halves in the corners, rosemary gone black at the tips, the way Sebastian always overdid the garlic because he said it made the house smell like someone loved it.

“Mark?” Softer this time. “I’m going now.”

A tear traveled sideways into his ear. He wiped it away with the back of his wrist, angry at his own face. He pressed his teeth together until his jaw hurt. He could open the door and end this—the knock, the waiting, the hovering. He could put his hand on the back of Sebastian’s neck and decide to believe a promise again. He could fail himself properly. He didn’t move.

“What?” he said finally, because the silence had become a weight he couldn’t bear. The word came out flat, unshaped. He didn’t recognize his voice. He didn’t want to.

On the other side of the door, a small, audible release of breath. “I just—” Sebastian began, then abandoned explanation. “Okay.” The faintest smile trying to live in the word and failing. Then, after the quiet had lengthened into something cruel, “Goodbye.”

Mark didn’t answer. His throat would have made a noise he didn’t want to gift the world. He let the word sit there and be heard and not returned.

Footsteps moved away. The second stair complained again. The hallway exhaled. The front door opened and gave the house a lungful of air and then shut the same air out. Silence came back with its pockets full.

He stayed on the bed long enough for the light to move across the wall and change the shape of the crack above him. He stared at nothing until his eyes watered. He askd himself: how do I get back to my life now? As if there were a life that waited obedient in a corner while you performed this kind of rehearsal. As if one could simply pick up the day and put it on like a shirt.

He didn’t. He lay there and hated everything that made it easier, the sheets that still held a warmth he hadn’t earned, the pillow that smelled faintly like his own shampoo and therefore not at all like comfort. He listened for the car and refused the window. He counted even when he told himself to stop counting. When he finally stood, it was because the room had begun to feel like a closed mouth.

He opened the door onto a hallway that had already forgotten him. The light had gone grey in that way mornings do when they’re more apology than beginning. He moved through the quiet and found it undisturbed. The house made the small noises old houses make, as if reminding him he wasn’t alone, not entirely. He walked past the hooks by the door and didn’t look at the empty one. He went to the kitchen because that’s where the living things are: the coffee, the animals, the evidence of heat. He stopped at the threshold and took inventory like a coward.

The oven light glowed a steadfast orange. He opened the door. The heat pressed his face. Chicken, as promised. Lemon collapsed in on itself. Rosemary speared into char. The garage smell of garlic turned to something like sweetness. He stood with a hand on the door, letting the heat fog his vision and tell him he had not imagined the sentence I made chicken at all. He took the pan out and set it on the stove, then stepped back as if it might bite.

He couldn’t eat. The idea of a fork felt obscene. He couldn’t throw it away either. He put the foil back on and left it there like an altar.

The house had learned to live without Sebastian. It had had three years worth of practice. It knew where silence fit. It knew how to fold the days around a single body and its chores. And yet now, with him gone, it felt wrong. Shifted. As if the rooms had been levered into new positions while Mark slept and didn’t want to be moved back.

Evidence everywhere. His toothbrush, still standing in the cup beside Mark’s like a sentence that hadn’t reached its period. The cheap blue handle Sebastian always bought even when Mark told him to stop. The coffee grinder left on the finer setting Sebastian preferred, a small adjustment Mark felt with his tongue before he could see it. The pantry still arranged in lines a soldier would approve of, labels facing forward, a logic that wasn’t Mark’s and made more sense. Lemons in the bowl instead of apples because Sebastian cooked with light. A folded sweatshirt on the back of a chair, clean and unclaimed, that Mark picked up and then put down as if it might trigger something if he moved it from its chosen posture. The dogs’ leashes left in a more reachable tangle because Sebastian always refused to hang them neatly when they would only be used again in an hour. A scribbled shopping list on the pad by the fridge, ink dark, handwriting rushed: milk, parsley, bin bags, Shadow ointment (ask vet), beans. He put his thumb over the word beans and pressed until the paper gave.

He went to the sink and found the mug Sebastian had favored these past weeks. White with the fading red stripe that had survived purges and moves and one stupid flood. It was clean, turned upside down on the rack, a neat circle of light trapped under it. Mark lifted it. His hand remembered the weight. He set it down somewhere else and then moved it back to its place like an apology.

He walked to the front hall and saw his shoes were moved to make space for another pair that no longer sat there. The empty rectangle of floor looked indecent, like a mouth without a tooth. He looked at the doormat and saw the damp stamp of goodbye already vanishing. He hated that things vanished.

He went upstairs because downstairs hurt and upstairs was a different kind of hurt. The guest room door was open, he didn’t cross it. He stood on the landing and looked in without entering. The bed was made. Of course it was. Not the way Mark made beds—tight corners, military—and not the way hotels do, performative crispness. Sebastian’s way. Sheets pulled straight, top cover folded down with a hand that wasn’t measuring angles but still got them right. On the nightstand, the charger Sebastian had borrowed and never returned sat coiled, patient. Next to it, a single lemon sweet wrapped in paper, the kind he pocketed from cafés and forgot until he emptied his jeans. He must have found it and put it there like a kindness to a future he wouldn’t inhabit. Mark smiled, the worst kind of smile, the one you make with your mouth while your eyes tell the truth. He didn’t touch anything. He felt touched by it all and wanted to set a match to the carpet.

He told himself he was not the kind of man who burned things. Then he pictured it: flame on tea towel, flame on paper list, flame licking the edge of the red-striped mug before it admitted defeat and cracked. He pictured the house giving back light. He pictured the rebuild afterward, the honest work of hammer and nail, hands busy, no ghosts. He wanted that simplicity so badly his fingers itched.

He went back downstairs and stood in the kitchen again because kitchens ask less of you than bedrooms. He opened the fridge without thinking and found it stocked like a solved problem. The milk brand Sebastian bought, the one Mark said he didn’t taste the difference in and did. Yogurt with honey because Sebastian couldn’t stand it plain. The good butter. A tupperware with something green inside and a post it on top in a hurried hand: for lunch if you remember to eat. Mark closed the door with more force than necessary and the bottles clinked against each other like disappointed relatives.

He leaned his palms on the counter and let his head hang. The dogs came and pressed themselves to either side of his legs, patient bookends. He rested the edge of his foot under Simba’s belly until Simba huffed and moved just enough to touch him better. Shadow nosed his knee and then, when no instruction came, lay down with the dramatic resignation of a creature who knows love and cannot fix anything with it.

He stood there until the light changed again. Afternoon eroded to something thinner. He didn’t make coffee. He didn’t answer his phone. He didn’t turn on a single lamp. He let the house go dim and told himself he was saving electricity when he was only refusing clarity.

At some hour that had no name, he opened the oven and looked at the chicken again, as if the passing of time would turn it into a different object. He lifted the foil and the smell walked the room. He put the foil back on. He could not make his hand hold a fork. He felt stupid not eating, he felt virtuous. He spat in his head at both men—the one who cooked and the one who refused to eat—and realized he was both and hated it.

He went to the sink, turned on the tap, turned it off without filling a glass. He walked to the back door and looked at the garden he never quite got right without Sebastian’s particular patience for pruning. The rosemary bush had gone wild. He should cut it back. He didn’t.

Night came in carefully and then all at once. He did not turn on the porch light. He let the house be a shape in the dark. He thought: this is how to live now. You stop touching anything that remembers him, you stop repairing useful small failures, you sit with your hands on a counter and pretend the hardness of the stone means you still have a body. He laughed once, a sound entirely without humor, startled by the thought that the house had already chosen a side. It had, in a few days, learned his handwriting again, his cooking again, his steps again. Now that it had them, it didn’t want to give them back. It felt like Sebastian’s house, not because Mark no longer lived here, but because love had rebranded the walls. He could still see where a body leaned if he let himself, could still feel the temperature difference in the bathroom where steam had held longer with two showers. He hated the accuracy of it. He hated the way the house let itself be used for longing.

The urge to burn it rose again, not a drama, an engineering solution. Fire purifies. Fire leaves truth. But he knew the truth fire leaves is ash, and ash gets into everything, including the lungs. He thought—fine. Breathe it. He put his hands flat on the counter again and pressed until the tendons protested. He would not set a match. He would not pack a bag. He would not call. He would do the thing he had practiced: stay. This time, staying would look like not moving. It would look like eating if he could and sleeping if he had to and, tomorrow, putting his keys in a pocket and going to work like the world had not taken another tooth from the mouth and left the smile to pretend.

He stood there and watched the dark thicken and did not move until the sky at the edge of the window began to guess morning again. Only then did he walk the rooms and turn the lights on as if he had been living all along. The chicken sat on the stove, patient, a stubborn proof he didn’t need. He lifted the foil and then lowered it and left the house to its job: holding what he could not.

He went upstairs and closed the guest room door gently, not because anyone slept behind it, but because leaving it open made the air wrong. He paused at his own door and touched the knob with the same useless tenderness he had resisted earlier. He went in and shut out the hall and leaned his forehead against the wood and exhaled once like a man choosing not to answer a question he would be asked again. The dogs settled on either side of the bed without instruction.

How do I get back to my life, he asked the dark. The dark refused to answer. He lay down without undressing and let the ceiling be the only honest thing in the room.

Downstairs, the oven light glowed faintly in an otherwise dark kitchen, as if something still wanted to be warm.