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Chapter Text

Everything But a Lover

Chapter 1: Paddock Kids

…

The rain came down in sheets thin as fishing line, just enough to turn the painted curbs into ideas. A Saturday at a suburban kart circuit—aluminum bleachers, plastic ponchos, asphalt breathing steam where it met the cold. Parents huddled over thermoses. Marshals tapped their radios like they could summon better weather with static.

The grid formed the way beginnings always do: messy, inevitable, framed by red lights no one on it could control. You could pick them out even then—two shapes smaller than the plastic barriers that guarded the hairpins, two helmets that would one day sell headlines. Mark in a plain white lid with one scuffed stripe, visor down, hands loose on the wheel like he knew grip lived in the wrists more than the fists. Hyuck in a louder lid, a thin streak of blue that looked fast standing still, visor cracked for breath, head cocked like the track owed him an apology.

The cameras, such as they were—parents with phones in Ziplocs—kept catching the same tableau: Hyuck glancing over, Mark not looking, the air between them wired like a fence no one had posted signs on yet.

This narrator has the benefit of hindsight and the arrogance to use it. He will tell you Mark knows Donghyuck Lee—friend, teammate, childhood rival, everything but lover—long before he knows that’s what he’s doing. He will tell you Hyuck believes, with the religious fervor of thirteen, that Mark wakes up in the morning trying to be better than him. He will tell you both boys are wrong about the other in small ways that matter, and right about each other in ways that will matter more.

Five red. Rain dots on visors like constellations only they can read. Engines clenched and whining at idle.

Lights out.

They jump clean. The field behind them flinches—someone fishtails on the wet line, someone else takes the escape road like it was the plan. Mark threads the spray with the patience of the much older man he will eventually impersonate, lining his kart against a seam in the tarmac he learned in track walk and memorized in his sleep. Hyuck answers with violence that isn’t dirty: late on the brake into Turn 2, steering wheel twitch, rear stepping out and catching, a save that earns a strangled cheer from a huddle of umbrellas near the marshal post.

By Turn 4 they have already elected to ignore anyone not named the other. It’s not strategy; it’s biology. The gap is two kart lengths; then one. Hyuck shows nose inside, Mark doesn’t defend because defending there is how you invite the wall to dinner. They pop out of the short chute onto the back straight and the karts are the same speed but the people inside them are not. Mark’s helmet is still. Hyuck’s tilts, eyes searching for a sliver of air that looks like an answer.

They take the hairpin—slick, glossy, a mirror that punishes liars—and both tell the truth. Mark rotates early, minimal steering, weight transfer like a word said under breath. Hyuck carries speed in and drags it by the scruff through the apex; the rear threatens to leave and then thinks better of it because Hyuck asked in a voice the tires respect.

On the pit wall, two mothers lean at identical angles without noticing the mimicry. They have known each other since they were the sort of teenagers who wrote notes in each other’s yearbooks with hearts in the margins. They’ve watched their sons stand in doorways until those doorways were grid slots, watched them share chips, share pens, never share first place without an argument. They are laughing about something unrelated because it is easier than pretending they have control here.

Lap two: the rain decides to try harder. The marshal at Post 5 points futilely at the sky. Hyuck goes purple in sector one—purple here means nothing but audacity—then wide on the curb at sector two and the kart skates. Mark is there, as if he had planned for Hyuck’s mistake and set a place at the table for it. He slides by on the inside clean as a sentence without adjectives.

Hyuck snarls a word Mark will learn to love much later. For now, it’s just thunder. He tucks back into the draft and watches Mark’s rear bumper like it’s a promise he intends to break.

There is a craft to rain driving that older men explain at bars and younger boys discover with their hands. Mark’s craft is subtraction. He takes off everything he doesn’t need—steering input, brake pressure, fear—and arrives at a line so neat it looks inevitable. Hyuck’s craft is faith. He believes he can make grip where no one else thought to look. He usually can.

Lap three through five, the field behind them collapses into separate wars. The director you invent for this moment would have a choice to make and he would point his camera at the front, because narrative isn’t a democracy. The front is where Mark puts together three corners that don’t want to be friends and persuades them. The front is where Hyuck tries the outside of Turn 7 twice and fails twice and smiles both times because failure at the edge feels like a handshake with the future.

“Inside,” Hyuck says to himself, and means left. “Then outside. Then live with it.”

“Don’t fight the water,” Mark tells his hands, and they don’t.

Lap six arrives like a small crisis. A backmarker in a red rental suit has spun at the apex of the carousel, and the double-waved yellows are late because the marshal is busy running. Mark lifts. Of course he does. Hyuck lifts a heartbeat later and it’s still enough. Mark’s kart hums past the stricken kid like a prayer. Hyuck’s rear steps just wide enough to kiss paint. The marshal waves harder; the backmarker restarts and both front karts are already gone.

They split a back straight lapped car like a wishbone, Hyuck catching the better exit and finding—finally—overlap into the hairpin again. Mark leaves room, real room, not the kind that lets the stewards sleep badly. Hyuck takes it, dives, commits to a brake pressure you don’t confess to your father. The kart slides sideways through ninety percent of the corner and then squares, straightens, launches. For three misshapen heartbeats he is ahead.

Mark answers on exit, not apex. He takes the better line to the inside curb like he knew there would be daylight there all along. Their bumpers kiss. Not a hit; a hello.

If you were a parent watching this without context, you’d be furious. If you were a marshal, you’d be alert and resigned. If you were thirteen or fourteen inside those karts, you would be alive in a way you will spend the next decade trying to legalize.

They roar past the pit wall so close together the rain off Hyuck’s tires flicks Mark’s visor clean. Someone shouts a name. It is not clear whose.

By lap eight the story writes itself—but stories lie if you stop reading too early. Hyuck chooses the outside of Turn 7 again because he is stubborn and the track owes him something. Mark meets him there because he is generous and cannot help it. Side by side over the wet curb, the karts two breaths away from mutual destruction. Hyuck keeps it; Mark keeps him. No contact. The universe remembers how to spin.

Two laps to go. The rain lightens, as if contrite. The timing screen—if there were one more official than a dad with a clipboard—would call them identical. They are not identical. They are complementary in a way that will make sponsors write confusing emails later. For now, complementary means they exit onto the final straight in a drag race twelve-year-olds will reenact in their driveways.

Hyuck is slightly ahead because he believed earlier. Mark is slightly behind because he calculated later. The finish line is a strip of paint that has outlived better arguments.

Hyuck leans into the wheel with his whole back, head down, eyes up. Mark holds the line as if physics is contract law and he is a very good lawyer. Spray blooms behind both like wings.

They cross separated by a measurement your thumb could cover. The checkered falls. The karts decelerate in a long exhale. Hyuck sits up first and shouts, a sound that belongs on a different sport’s field. Mark does not pound the wheel. He checks his mirrors and then his hands.

He has lost by less than breath. It looks good on him.

They come into parc fermé in a parade of small triumphs—someone has finished their first race upright, someone else has discovered fear isn’t fatal. Hyuck parks crooked and laughs under his visor like he can store the sound in there for later. Mark parks straight and flips his visor up slow, lashes wet, hair plastered to the strip of exposed skin.

The rain does them a kindness and stops. The umbrellas go down. The phones come up.

Hyuck plants his kart and walks the two steps to Mark like the asphalt belongs to him now. He taps the side of Mark’s fairing once, a knuckle-rap that would read as rude if it weren’t so ritual. “You left it open,” he says.

Mark looks at the damp track and then at Hyuck. “You took it,” he says.

Hyuck’s grin arrives in pieces—wolfish, relieved, young. He tilts his head, pushing sweat off his brow with the edge of his glove. “I’ll always take it.”

“I know,” Mark says, and the way he says it makes a few mothers exchange a look they will remember later.

Hyuck leans closer, like privacy is an angle you can steal at this age. He says something that, at this point in their lives, Mark only half catches. The important half hurts in a way that makes Mark stand taller. If you ask him in ten years, he will claim he understood all of it. He didn’t. He understood enough: the part that sounded like catch me.

“Again,” Hyuck adds, because champions ask for more. He holds up two fingers—ten minutes, heat two—and then he is gone, helmet under his arm, a comet tail of water drops in his wake.

Mark watches him go with a face that people later will call unreadable. It isn’t. It is a calculus problem with a heart hidden in the parentheses.

From the bleachers, a mother in a red raincoat nudges the woman next to her. “Your son,” she says, like a compliment and an accusation both.

“Yours,” the other says, and they both laugh like they’re not worried.

A marshal waves a green at a small flood near Turn 3 as if courtesy can dry it. A father argues about tire pressures with a man who sells tires out of the back of a van. Two boys drink from the same sweaty bottle without noticing or caring. Ten minutes later, the engines will wake back up and the story will try again.

But here—right here, with rain still clinging to the chain-link and steam rising from the spent karts—you could freeze the frame and already know the thesis. The clean line and the faith. The boy who believes grip is a decision and the boy who believes decisions are a grip. The way one of them will spend years pretending the other is an obstacle and the other will spend the same years pretending it doesn’t matter that his obstacle smiles like that when he wins.

They are thirteen and fourteen and irrefutable. They have no idea what they have already started.

After the heat, the noise in the paddock was half-hearted applause, half rain dripping off the tent roof. The karts hissed where water met metal. Mechanics in ponchos crouched to drain fuel from tanks not built to hold it this long. Parents compared notes about brake bias like weather reports.

Mark peeled off his gloves; they made that small suction sound that means you’ve done something hard. His knuckles were raw. Hyuck’s were worse, pinked under tape he’d pulled too tight. They stood near each other because that’s where everyone stood, shoulder to shoulder under the only canopy still pretending to be waterproof.

“You nearly took my nose off,” Hyuck said, not angry enough for the words to bite.

“You left it out there,” Mark answered, deadpan. “Occupational hazard.”

Hyuck laughed once, short. “You always sound like a press conference.”

“You always sound like a weather warning.”

They both looked up then, automatic. A low thunder moved somewhere behind the hills, late to the party. Around them, small karts rattled over wet asphalt on dollies, the sound of a dozen childhoods being pushed toward storage.

Mark crouched beside his kart, checking the front left where Hyuck’s tire mark had left a dark half-moon. He ran his thumb over it until the smear disappeared into the plastic. “You drove well,” he said without looking up.

“Of course I did.” Hyuck bent down beside him, one knee creasing his suit. “You, though… you’re too neat. You make it look like math.”

“Maybe it is.”

“Then I’m failing algebra.”

“You’re passing physics.”

That earned the first real smile between them—quick, startled, a discovery more than a gesture.

Someone called Hyuck’s name from across the paddock. His mother, voice bright, holding out a towel. Hyuck stayed where he was another beat. “We’ll do this again,” he said.

“We always do.”

“No, I mean… bigger. Somewhere it counts.” He straightened, the world’s smallest prophecy in his tone. “You’ll still be chasing me.”

Mark finally looked up. “Or you’ll be chasing me.”

Hyuck smirked, reached out, and tapped the edge of Mark’s soaked sleeve with two fingers. “Keep up, Hyung.” He said it deliberately in Korean, making it a tease. Mark's understanding lagged half a second; his blush did not. Hyuck saw it, grinned wider, and jogged off toward his waiting towel, rainwater flicking from his suit.

Mark watched the blue streak of his helmet vanish behind a tent wall. He would tell people later that he remembered the smell of fuel or the way the puddles mirrored the floodlights. What he actually remembered was the feeling of that word lingering on his skin long after the sound had gone.

The adults packed up the day. Mothers laughed at something private, fathers compared lap times with the satisfaction of knowing nothing truly depended on them. The track lights dimmed one by one until the paddock was a patchwork of silver puddles and soft neon reflections.

Mark’s mother found him still crouched beside his kart. “Good race,” she said.

“I lost.”

“You learned,” she corrected, running a towel over his hair. “And you found someone worth learning from.”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. She saw the direction of his glance and smiled in a way that meant she’d keep the observation for later.

By the time they loaded the kart into the van, Hyuck’s team had already left. The track was quiet except for the generators sighing under the grandstand. Mark leaned his forehead against the window as the van pulled onto the highway. Out there, the rain blurred every taillight into one long ribbon of red, the color of ambition seen from too close.

He would see that helmet again in a month, and again in a year, and again across an ocean. Rival, friend, teammate, almost. The categories would multiply; the feeling would not change.

The narrator, who has watched this scene a thousand times in footage and memory, will tell you that every dynasty starts with a blur of rain and a boy you can’t stop chasing.

Chapter Text

Everything But a Lover

Chapter 2: Dry Lines

…

The Italian sun is not merciful. It turns the tarmac to a low hum and the air above it to a visible thought. The circuit is the kind that lives in calendars and childhoods: olive trees banked beyond the fencing, a tower with an analog clock that is always two minutes wrong, a paddock that smells like rubber dust and latte foam from the café that survives on mechanics and hope. Helmets glint on the workbenches like trophies or promises, depending on who you ask. The loudest language here is ambition; all the others have to commute.

They have made it to Europe exactly the way you would expect: a long list of small decisions disguised as fate. The mothers signed apartment leases in cities whose streets they’d only ever walked on Google Maps. They learned the names of mechanics and the names of cheeses in the same month. They stopped translating their jokes. They learned to love unfamiliar grocery stores and the cold tile echo of flats built a hundred years before karting invented a reason to move your child across an ocean.

All of it brings the boys to this: a junior grid under a noon that erases shadows, two karts nosed toward the line, marshals wearing fluorescent vests like plumage. There are twenty-seven kids who could be champions one day and two who will keep seeing each other at the front whether they plan to or not.

Mark has grown into his quiet. He wears Ardent Academy navy the way some boys wear uniforms they think will excuse them. He doesn’t need excuses. He has brought his neatness across continents: the way he tape-labels tires, the way he calculates chain wear by feel, the way he counts breaths in threes before a start. Korean sits comfortably in his mouth now; his English is still careful, as if it’s a violin he doesn’t want to tune in public. If you want to catch him off guard, say his surname properly. His eyes will go soft for half a second; then the edges return.

Hyuck has not grown into anything so much as sprinted ahead of it and dared it to catch up. Helios orange looks carnivorous on him, all clean lines and bright marketing. His English is better than it should be for a boy who likes to pretend he doesn’t need anything from anyone. When he says okay to a mechanic, the word sounds like an agreement he intends to amend later. When he switches to Korean at Mark, it’s weapon and shelter both. He believes corners will forgive him if he asks quickly and with conviction.

It is media day for juniors, which is to say a hot rectangle of shade behind the podium where a volunteer in a polo shirt insists pre-professionals talk like professionals. The friend group that will one day headline press conferences as adults exists here in its larval form: Jeno and Jaemin in red so flattering it borders on advertising fraud, Jaemin wearing sunglasses he pretends are medically necessary; Renjun and Chenle in papaya with matching smiles that imply conspiracy; Jisung and Sungchan in black, one boy careful and analytical, the other grinning like he hasn’t learned yet that cameras expect containment from their favorites. They are rivals in public, teammates in the group chat, future co-conspirators. They are also teenagers with sweaty hairlines and half-finished homework hidden under their flight cases.

“Say your name, academy, and your favorite corner,” the volunteer says, and the kids comply as if reciting a hymn.

“Jaemin—Ferrari Driver Academy, Turn 9. It’s rude and I respect that.” Jaemin smiles like a cat that knows where all the warm spots are.

“Jeno—also Ferrari. I like the first chicane because it’s a good way to make bad choices look brave.” Jeno’s grin is domestic; it looks like he forgot to bring a scowl and refuses to borrow one.

“Renjun—McLaren. The double-apex.” R’s voice is soft; the words have edges you could balance a setup sheet on.

“Chenle—also McLaren. I like the pit exit because Ji is always there to chase.” Chenle’s eyes cut to Ji, who flushes even on tanned summer skin.

“Jisung—Mercedes. The last corner. If I get it wrong I think about it all night.” He says it as a joke; it isn’t.

“Sungchan—also Mercedes. I like any corner Hyuck takes.” The table ruptures into laughter. Sungchan means it, which is why it works.

The volunteer turns to the two the cameras would have chosen anyway.

“Donghyuck—Helios,” Hyuck says, chin up just enough to register on broadcast if broadcast bothered with children. “Turn 7. It lets you lie and then punishes you for lying.”

“Mark Lee—Ardent,” Mark says, steady. “Turn 7. It’s not a lie if you can do it twice.”

There is a sound that isn’t quite a laugh from the assembled. The volunteer blinks between them like he has entered a conversation that began before he was born. Someone takes notes they won’t read later.

The practice sessions tell a predictable story in the sense that meteorology is predictable: everyone has a plan until a gust arrives. The circuit is sunny, the track is green, the kids are brave. Hyuck is purple in sector two straight away—his personal specialty is carrying speed into a place a coach would underline in red and say do not. Mark’s specialty is subtraction, again: shaving off inputs until the lap time is a proof and not an expression of intent. They end P1 and P2 in practice like a mirror held up to a future where motorsport will insist they invent personalities that fit in headlines.

Between sessions, language becomes another tool. The helmets come off; the accents shift to wherever they are most useful.

“Your line into seven is illegal,” Hyuck says in English, standing too close like he’s certain personal space can be negotiated by speed.

“Everything you do is illegal,” Mark replies.

Hyuck switches to Korean to make a point Mark will pretend not to feel: Then catch me properly.

Mark’s eyes flicker, translation a half step behind his understanding. “I will.” It comes out in English. It is a statement of policy, or desire, or both.

Jeno and Jaemin drift by, sharing a bottle of water like it’s a microphone. “This is going to be a thing, isn’t it,” Jaemin says to Jeno under his breath.

“It already is,” Jeno says, not looking away.

The second practice is tire work and a lesson in who respects track limits and who respects momentum. Renjun and Chenle take turns ghosting each other through the chicanes, identical helmets bobbing in unison, a drone shot waiting to happen. Jisung finds a tenth in a cleaner exit that he attributes to “changing my mind about myself,” which is something only a Mercedes rookie would think to say. Sungchan tries Hyuck’s Turn 7 line and slides so far wide he ends up on the astroturf and returns grinning, heart in his throat, thrilled to have lived.

Qualifying is when the adults begin paying attention. There are more polo shirts, more sunglasses, more quiet men with hands on hips and clipboards that mean nothing until the signatures they want arrive. There is a whisper that a Formula One driver’s junior coach might be in the paddock checking “pipeline health.” There is a whisper that one of the top academies will make a cut in the autumn. There are a dozen whispered futures with only a few seats in them.

Mark sits in the tent listening to his engine idle, eyes closed. He hums under his breath to time the revs, the way his father taught him before his father had to return to a job that didn’t have time zones on the wall. His mother ties his hair back with practiced, domestic precision. “Drink,” she says, and he does. She does not tell him to be careful because she knows careful only works if you’ve already earned it.

Hyuck sits on a tire stack between his engineer and his future. The engineer tells him the delta relative to his best, the tire pressures, the wind direction. The future sits under his skin, ready to argue with the present if it doesn’t move fast enough. His mother squeezes his shoulder once, then lets go like bravery is transferable by touch.

They go out in the same quali group, an inevitability disguised as logistics. The track is hotter now; the air feels like hard candy. Mark’s banker lap is neat, unsurprising, three green sectors and a time that will safely put him on the first two rows. Hyuck abandons his first lap with a hand-flip that suggests boredom; he is building heat in the tires like a baker preheats an oven. The second lap snaps purple at the first split, purple again at the second, and then bites him in the third when the rear asks for respect and he answers with charisma. He saves it, loses a tenth, still puts it on provisional pole.

On their in laps, Hyuck pulls alongside Mark and pulls the rev limiter for half a second—an audio version of sticking out his tongue. Mark shakes his head. He is smiling, and you would only know it if you recognized the way his eyes flatten when his mouth moves of its own accord.

Final runs. The track is grippy in the way that makes teenagers do math they can’t explain out loud. Mark goes early to find clean air, nails a sector two that reads like respect for geometry, and comes across the line two tenths up on Hyuck’s earlier time. Hyuck waits, because patience is showmanship when you decide it is, and launches with two minutes to spare. He threads traffic like an argument, takes Turn 7 in the way he described—let the corner lie to you and then tell the truth anyway—and finds a tenth Mark didn’t want to leave on the table.

They end split by 0.064 seconds, Hyuck first, Mark second, the rest of the grid learning the virtue of modesty. Cameras catch their karts parked nose to nose in the parc fermé bay like two animals deciding whether to be friends. The volunteer from media day looks like he wants to schedule an intervention into fate.

“Pole by a breath,” Hyuck says lightly as they climb out. He’s not panting; he’s incandescent.

“I’ll take the slip,” Mark replies, cool as a shadow.

“Try,” Hyuck says, smile hitting a lower, older gear. He leans in half an inch. “Catch me next time.”

Mark doesn’t flinch. “I intend to.” He doesn’t need to be fluent to understand the part that matters.

If you’re keeping a story, you could end the chapter here. But circuits, like feelings, demand a race.

Lights. A beat that they have learned to stretch like candy in their chests. Off. Hyuck launches just enough; Mark launches perfectly. The first chicane is patience squared; they survive it at the front because the boys behind them want to live. Jisung tucks into P3 and looks like he would happily write letters to his future self about the ethics of defending. The McLaren twins bother Ferrari through the middle sector, one papaya flashing to the other like turn signals.

Hyuck leads with the entitlement of a good start and a hotter banked tire. Mark sits in the slot with the entitlement of a boy who has mastered subtraction. They are not playing defense; they are composing. Hyuck’s lines are declarative. Mark’s are interrogative: is there more here? is there less?

Lap four: Mark is close enough to read the stitching in Hyuck’s glove through the shadow of the seat. The slipstream knits between them; the air makes deals with itself. He feints to the inside at the end of the straight to see if Hyuck will blink. Hyuck does not blink. He swings late to cover, clean, daring Mark to pick a different problem to solve.

Lap six: the first backmarker in a kart that looks like it wears hand-me-down parts and a dream. Hyuck clears him on the outside of the double-apex with a trust in strangers that would worry a mother. Mark waits one more beat and clears between corners, lifting for a breath to frontload the exit. He is not only chasing Hyuck; he is auditing him.

“He’s learning you,” Hyuck’s engineer says into the radio without urgency.

“He should,” Hyuck replies. “I’m interesting.” It’s bravado. It’s also true.

Lap eight: Mark’s front bumper kisses the air bubble off Hyuck’s rear just enough to loosen it. Hyuck lets the kart move under him and brings it back with a correction that would be invisible if you weren’t trained to see it. He tips his head in acknowledgment, a nod Mark feels more than sees.

Behind them, the race is chaos arranged in tiers. Jeno and Jaemin have made peace with papaya for the moment, running P5 and P6 and swapping so often a steward makes a note to check if team orders exist at this level. Chenle attempts a pass on Jisung that is equal parts math and flirtation; Jisung defends with the mortified competence of a boy who knows he will be teased in the chat later and refuses to supply additional material.

Lap ten: the tires complain. Not loudly, not yet, but enough for both boys to make the kind of compromises they will later call “driving within the window.” Hyuck adjusts his steering inputs as if he is playing for the camera that isn’t there; Mark adjusts his brake bias because he keeps a small notebook in his head for such things. The gap is three tenths. Then two.

Last lap. The olive trees stop moving because the wind wants a better angle. Hyuck goes deep into the first hairpin and gets away with it. Mark takes a cleaner exit and inherits physics. Down the back straight, he’s in the draft, close enough to taste rubber. The final complex is a question written in concrete: two corners that hate each other.

Hyuck covers the inside into the penultimate turn with the calm of a boy who has made his choice. Mark takes the outside—less distance, more trust—and tries to square for the final corner. Hyuck slows the kart in the middle to ruin Mark’s momentum and succeeds in everything except discouraging him. Their lines cross like signatures on a document neither of them has read carefully enough.

Out of the last turn, the exit is a drag race to the flag. The finish line is not as far away as it looks; that is true of many fatal mistakes and several good choices. Hyuck plants the rear, counts to one, and opens the wheel. Mark opens it a breath earlier and suffers no penalty. They thunder under the grandstand banner separated by a margin that will be measured in syllables by moms who’ve learned to stare at timing screens.

Hyuck wins by less than two kart lengths. Mark is second by an amount that hurts enough to make him walk taller to the scales. The friend group collapses around them in a circle of congratulation and gloating that has very little to do with finishing positions and everything to do with future dinners. Chenle declares the last sector “romantic.” Jaemin says, “Save it for the podium,” loudly enough that the volunteer smiles into his clipboard.

Parc fermé is ritual now. Hyuck knocks his knuckles once against Mark’s fairing. Mark raises an eyebrow—permission, invitation, acknowledgment. Hyuck steps in, closing the last inch of a distance that is educational and infuriating and addictive. “Caught me properly?” he asks, pure trouble in Korean.

“Almost.” Mark keeps his voice even. The word is its own plan.

The podium is local but enthusiastic: a wooden box painted red and white and green, a bottle of sparkling apple cider pretending to be champagne, a track official who practiced pronunciations in his car. Sungchan hollers from the fence, Jisung hides a smile, Jeno and Jaemin do their best to look unimpressed and fail.

Media scrum, such as it is, arrives with three microphones and a camera that might belong to a parent. “Are you rivals?” someone asks, fishing for the word that will sell the segment on Sunday TV. Hyuck says, “We’re fast,” in English. Mark says, “We’re still learning,” and looks at Hyuck while he does.

“Do you push each other?” another asks. Mark could answer with a list of adjustments; Hyuck could answer with a dare. The answers they give are cleaner than the ones they think.

“He’s annoying,” Hyuck says, voice dry. “It helps.”

“He’s loud,” Mark says, almost smiling. “It also helps.”

The volunteer corrals them for photos. The group ends up arranged by color because humans love patterns: red, papaya, silver, navy, black. The sun glances off the visors hung from their elbows. The photographer tries to coax teenage boys into sincerity and nearly succeeds.

“A little closer,” he says. He means the group. Hyuck interprets it personally. He leans into Mark’s space the way he does into air at 120 kph—so natural it looks like choreography. Mark doesn’t move away. The camera clicks.

“One smile, please,” the photographer begs in the global language of people trying to wring softness from youth on deadline.

Hyuck bumps Mark’s elbow with his own like a secret. “Don’t be a statue.”

Mark turns to look at him, not the lens, and the thing that has been clenched since they left Korea—rain, plastic barriers, the hiss of water on metal—loosens by a millimeter. He smiles by accident, not the polite version he brings to sponsor tents, but the unguarded one that makes the corners of his eyes try on boyhood again. The camera catches it because that’s what cameras are for.

Later, people will scroll past that photo and think it looks like a team-building exercise. They won’t see the tiny lean at Hyuck’s shoulder, the way Mark’s shoe is turned toward him, the millimeters that foretell miles. The narrator, who has learned not to argue with people scrolling too fast to find their own lives, will simply tell you this: they are practicing being seen together. They are very good at practice.

Evening falls like a concession. The paddock empties on a gradient: first the families with long drives, then the teams with tidy checklists, then the friend group, who forget to leave until someone in a polo shirt flicks a light switch pointedly. The mothers trade leftovers in Tupperware that will circulate the continent for the next five years. The boys linger within eyesight of one another, gravitating as if compelled by tires cut for wet the day doesn’t require anymore.

On the way out, Jaemin lifts his chin at Hyuck and Mark without stopping. “Dinner. All of us. If you don’t come, we’ll tell the internet you hate joy.”

“I do hate joy,” Mark says mildly.

“You love it,” Hyuck says, too soft for anyone else. Then, louder: “We’ll come.”

They do. There is pasta and a waiter who insists they’re famous and a collective decision not to correct him. There is Chenle stealing bites from Ji’s plate until Jisung arranges his silverware defensively and blushes at being noticed. There is Jeno ripping a paper napkin into a track map while Jaemin analyzes it like he’s on television. There is Sungchan attempting to toast in three languages and succeeding in one, which is enough.

Under the table, Mark’s phone buzzes with a message he won’t answer until later: a calendar invite from a scout for a different kind of future. Across from him, Hyuck taps his fork against his glass once, gently. Mark looks up. Hyuck tips his head toward the door, a motion that says fresh air without admitting anything else.

Outside, the night smells like basil and hot stone. The piazza drains slowly of teenagers and scooters and day. They stand side by side without touching because touching is a language they haven’t learned yet in public. They say nothing for a while, which is its own conversation.

“You smiled,” Hyuck says finally, low enough to avoid the need for translation.

“You made me.”

Hyuck huffs, pleased. “Good. Don’t wait for rain to be interesting.”

Mark looks at him like he is a corner that will forgive him if he asks quickly and with conviction. “I don’t.”

Back inside, the group leans in for a photo the waiter insists on taking. It looks like a tourism poster for a city that never needed one. Tomorrow there will be another session, another margin measured in syllables, another chance to practice being seen. Tonight there is cold water, warm food, and the kind of laughter that sounds like a starting light clicking down.

The narrator will let the camera drift up: the square, the table, the two boys at its center who are already orbiting each other on purpose, even if they will deny it for years. Dry lines. Clear air. The long season ahead.

Chapter Text

Everything But a Lover

Chapter 3: Lights Out

…

Monza in October is too bright for regret. The air is clean and thin and full of sound: the chainsaw-wail of Formula 4 engines, the low thrum of spectators, the metallic click of camera shutters trying to freeze what can’t be held. Every tree around the circuit leans in like a fan. Everyone knows who this is between.

Two helmets, two stories that share a spine. Donghyuck Lee, Helios white and mint, points leader. Mark Lee, Ardent navy and crimson, mathematically alive and emotionally exhausted. Their names have become the entire press release headline format: “Lee vs Lee.” Someone at a sports site calls them “mirror theories in motion.” Someone else calls them kids. Both are right.

The paddock is a machine built of hope and nerves. Mechanics kneel in unison like a ritual. Team managers pretend their breathing doesn’t affect air density. Inside the Helios tent, Hyuck’s helmet sits on a folded towel, reflecting fluorescent light as if it can see its own future. He’s quiet now—the way a storm is quiet a mile offshore. His engineer reads him delta times; he nods without listening.

Across the lane, Mark ties his gloves tight until the blood leaves his fingers. His engineer, Luca, murmurs strategy: “Be clean into Turn 1, DRS train after Lap 5, no heroics before then.” Mark answers with a polite “Got it,” and means something else entirely. He has dreamed of this race in loops. Every night it ends the same way: Hyuck ahead, taillights like punctuation he can’t catch.

In the briefing room before qualifying, the other drivers watch the two of them watch each other. Jeno and Jaemin whisper in Ferrari red, Chenle and Renjun trade bets with paper napkins. Sungchan leans forward, elbows on knees, like he could hold fate steady if he stares hard enough. When the steward says “Clean race, gentlemen,” everyone hears “Try not to kill each other.”

Quali is mathematics disguised as motion. Hyuck puts down a lap that cracks the track record by a tenth. Mark answers with one three hundredths faster. Onboard replay shows Hyuck smiling inside his helmet when he hears the radio call: “Mark P1, Donghyuck P2.” He says nothing, but the smile does not reach his eyes.

Evening before the race: press conference. Helios brings Hyuck in a tailored team shirt, PR handler like a shadow. Ardent sends Mark in a polo a size too big and no handler at all. The questions are baited hooks. Are you friends off track? Do you think you can beat him cleanly? Does the past influence today? Hyuck deflects with a perfect laugh. Mark deflects with statistics. Neither admits they still dream in each other’s voice.

Night in the hotel. Rain starts against the windows like memory trying to come home. Hyuck scrolls through his phone and pauses on an old photo from Korea: two kids on a kart podium dripping with rain and joy. He forwards it to Mark without thinking and immediately regrets it. The screen stays on “delivered.” No reply. He sets the phone face-down and tells himself it doesn’t matter. It does.

Race morning. Sun out, air thin, grandstands half-filled with people who don’t know they’re about to watch a myth being born out of error. Mark walks to the grid helmet in hand, eyes down, the noise around him a static he can’t translate. Hyuck is already in his car, visor down, fingers drumming on the steering wheel in time with his heartbeat.

Five lights. The world shrinks to a start-finish line. Luca’s voice in Mark’s ear: “Remember the plan.” Hyuck’s engineer: “Win or at least don’t crash.”

Lights out.

The launch is identical—perfect clutch, no wheelspin. Mark takes the inside into Turn 1, Hyuck holds around the outside with the arrogant grace of a boy who has never considered physics final. They clear the first chicane side by side, carbon fibers breathing on each other. The crowd roars not for any particular result but for the feeling of two lines becoming one.

Lap after lap, the gap never exceeds a blink. Mark is the mathematician; Hyuck is the poet of speed. The difference is that poets forget to calculate cost. By Lap 14, their tires are past the window, and the commentators are already writing epitaphs in advance.

“Don’t push yet,” Luca warns.

“I know,” Mark says. He does not.

Hyuck’s rear tire catches a curb on the exit of Parabolica, the slightest wobble. For a second the line is open, and Mark sees it the way men see omens—clear, shining, merciless. He moves before he decides to. Front wing to rear tire. A brush. A sound like a breath being pulled back into the throat of God.

Hyuck’s car snaps right. Once. Twice. Barrier. The impact is white and immediate. The world cuts to silence so complete you can hear people remembering how to breathe. Mark’s hands lock on the wheel until Luca is screaming in his ear: “Keep going, keep going, yellow out behind you.” He can’t. He lifts, looks in the mirror, and all he sees is smoke and a piece of mint-colored bodywork tumbling like a page of a book he never finished.

Red flag. Engines die in waves. Radio chatter erodes into prayer. Mark’s visor fogged with his own breath, he sits motionless while marshals run past with fire extinguishers. In his ear, Luca again, softer: “Talk to me. You’re okay?”

Mark presses the button. “I’m okay.” His voice does not sound like his own. He does not ask about Hyuck because he can’t shape the word is yet.

The camera blinks. Replay. Slow-motion. Contact angle, suspension collapse, a cloud of debris that looks like confession shredded mid-sentence. The commentator’s voice breaks between syllables of both their names. Somewhere in the stands, two mothers stand at the same time without knowing why.

The world waits for the radio click. For Hyuck’s voice. For anything. All they get is static. White noise.

When the medical car reaches the scene, the feed cuts to commercial because even the networks know what silence costs.

Mark is told to bring the car back to the pits. He does, blindly. Helios crew lines the garage mouth like an open wound. Someone throws a towel over the mint and silver logo on the broken nosecone they just brought back on a truck.

The narrator will pause here, because the camera does too, because breath is finite. We can say the impact measured 48 g on telemetry, that the halo worked, that the barrier did not give way. We can say Hyuck was conscious when they pulled him out. We cannot say what Mark saw when the ambulance door closed.

Later, they will replay the moment so many times it loses its edges. For now, the screen is white.

Night in Monza tastes like metal and antiseptic. The air outside the paddock is humid, heavy with headlights and rumor. Somewhere past midnight, reporters still wait by the hospital entrance, lenses fogging in the exhaust of ambulances. Every hour the same two words are repeated in half a dozen languages—“stable condition.” They are meant to soothe. They don’t.

Hyuck lies under white light that doesn’t know how to dim. He wakes once, halfway, when a nurse checks reflexes and someone murmurs his name. The sound swims through morphine and memory—tires screaming, the halo pressing against his helmet, Mark’s voice over radio static saying something he can’t remember. He drifts back under before the monitor stops thinking it matters.

At the circuit, Ardent mechanics roll Mark’s car into the transporter. The navy paint looks darker under floodlights, almost black. PR statements are drafted before anyone knows what they mean. “Incident under investigation.” “Driver Lee is receiving medical care.” “Mark extends his concern.” None of the words belong to him. He signs anyway because silence would be worse. Luca finds him sitting behind the truck, suit half unzipped, eyes unfocused.

“They’re taking him to Milan,” Luca says. “You can’t go yet. The stewards want statements.”

Mark nods. He has learned that nodding is how you keep your seat. “Did they—?”

“He’s alive.” A pause. “You both did everything right until physics stopped caring.”

That night, Mark’s mother drives him back to the hotel. She talks softly, sentences in Korean that are more lullaby than instruction. He stares at his hands, still trembling. “I saw the tire move,” he says. “I thought he’d save it.” She doesn’t correct him; mothers know the difference between guilt and grammar.

The next morning the paddock smells like disinfectant. Reporters move like schools of fish, turning toward every motion of a team jacket. The stewards clear the data: racing incident. No penalty. No blame. The result feels like an insult. Hyuck’s points freeze; Mark inherits the title by default. The announcement comes over the loudspeakers to a half-empty pit lane. The applause is polite and confused.

At the podium, Mark holds the trophy like evidence. The champagne doesn’t spray; it dribbles down his wrist, sticky and bitter. The cameras flash anyway, catching a boy who looks like he forgot to breathe. Later, in the interview pen, someone asks what victory feels like. “Like waiting,” he says. No one prints the quote.

Two days later: Milan. Hospital corridor the color of caution tape. Sung sits on a plastic chair outside ICU with his phone in both hands. When Mark arrives, escorted by Ardent PR, Sung stands immediately. “They said no visitors yet,” he explains, then quieter, “He’s awake sometimes. He asked if his car was okay.”

Mark nods again. “Tell him yes.”

“You can tell him yourself.”

But the PR rep touches Mark’s shoulder. “Not today. Maybe after discharge.” The smile she gives him is trained; it hides paperwork behind kindness. He doesn’t argue. He just stares through the glass at the shape under the blankets, the faint outline of a left arm in a sling. The monitor blinks like a heartbeat translated into Morse code.

Back at the hotel, Mark receives his first official offer letter—Formula 3 seat with Ardent’s parent team. “Congratulations,” Luca says. “You made it.” Mark thanks him because that’s what language is for when meaning has left the building. That night he opens his phone to an unread message from Hyuck’s number sent before the race: Let’s finish clean. Don’t be soft on me. He doesn’t delete it. He doesn’t answer either.

Weeks pass in montage. Winter tests. Media days. A thousand interviews where Mark’s smile is a rehearsed muscle. Hyuck’s recovery clips circulate online—physical therapy, small waves to the camera, a statement read from hospital bed: “Racing gives and racing takes. I’m grateful to still have both.” The world applauds the courage; algorithms turn it into content. Mark watches each video once, muted.

Spring arrives early in southern Spain, where Ardent runs F3 shakedown. The car is faster, the corners meaner, the silence louder. PR tells him not to comment on “the Hyuck situation.” “Focus on the new season,” they say. “You’re the headline now.” He nods until the words stop needing him.

Across Europe, Hyuck learns to walk without a limp. He studies telemetry during physiotherapy, tracing lap maps with a pen that shakes. He hates the word “recovery.” He calls it recalibration. Sometimes Sungchan visits and tells jokes that don’t land; sometimes the nurses play highlights on the ward TV and switch channels when they realize which season it was. One night, Hyuck asks softly, “Did he come?” Sung hesitates long enough to answer twice. “Not yet.”

Mark travels between circuits that all smell like brake dust and denial. He wins his debut. The trophy is heavier now. In the press conference someone asks if he’s spoken to Hyuck. “Not since,” he says. The pause afterward could fit a confession. It doesn’t.

Hyuck scrolls through social media between rehab sessions. A headline: “Lee Takes F3 Win for Ardent—Red Bull Future?” The photo shows Mark lifting the trophy, eyes closed. He turns the phone over, screen against palm. The nurse adjusts his brace and tells him to rest. He nods and does not. When she leaves, he opens his messages and types three words. Have you talked to him? He sends it to Sung, not Mark, because pride is an injury slower to heal than bone.

Outside, Milan’s night traffic hums like an idling engine. In another country, Mark’s phone buzzes on a bedside table. He glances at the screen, sees the name, freezes. Then the screen dims before he touches it. The message waits, unread, until morning.

The narrator will say this softly, the way pit crews whisper to each other after the race is done: accidents have aftermaths, and aftermaths have echoes. Some echoes sound like engines; some sound like silence. For now, the world keeps turning, and both boys keep pretending that movement is the same thing as forward.

Chapter Text

Everything But a Lover

Chapter 4: Restart

…

Ten months is a long time if you count it in headlines. Short if you count it in laps.

The montage plays like a season recap edited by someone who refuses melodrama but can’t prevent it. Hyuck in a hospital bed, then on crutches, then in a physio gym with tape across his wrist like a thesis. Interview bites: “We’re optimistic.” “We’re evaluating.” “He is ahead of schedule.” The press package is a quilt sewn from precise euphemisms. The footage underneath is less tidy—one grimace as a grip-strength meter stalls, one half-swallowed curse when the balance board wobbles, one night shot on a phone where a window reflects a boy awake when he promised the staff he wouldn’t be.

Cut to spring tests in Spain. Mark under a new helmet design, the Ardent navy traded for matte black on Fridays that look like Sundays with fewer spectators. He is quieter now in the interviews, the smile that used to arrive on cue arriving late, if at all. He has learned to let numbers speak: qualifying averages, race pace deltas, points tallies. Journalists thank him for being “measured.” They mean empty. Luca, his engineer, doesn’t use the word. He keeps handing Mark set-up sheets like life rafts and telling him to “breathe between corners.” Mark does. Only there.

Summer arrives the way it always does in motorsport: suddenly, with back-to-back weekends that make airports and paddocks interchangeable. The grid changes shape. A rookie out, an older rookie in. Half the field bruised by bad luck and bad timing. Somewhere in the background, the majors sharpen their pencils. Contracts are drafted and saved in folders with names that look like weather fronts: OPTION_A, OPTION_IF_HYUCK’S_OKAY, OPTION_IF_MARK_WINS.

Then the clip everyone has been waiting for and dreading: a room with neutral walls and an orthopedic specialist speaking the international language of careful. “Medically cleared to return to competitive activity.” Hyuck’s face is still as the sentence lands. Then his mouth moves—first into thank you, then into something that isn’t a smile so much as permission to hope. The doctor shakes his hand like a father in a graduation photo. The camera catches the tape still peeking from under the cuff.

Hyuck goes home to a new training plan and the same old hunger. The gym smells like rubber and disinfectant. He tests. He stretches. He fails safely and then fails less. Mateo—back on his headset, now Helios Next’s senior engineer—relearns Hyuck’s breathing patterns through a door and a glass wall and a monitor line that spikes when he laughs. “You can’t win rehab,” Mateo says one day when Hyuck pushes a set past sensible. Hyuck stares at him and says, “Watch me.” Mateo tells him he’ll accept a draw.

In the group chat, which still calls itself Paddock Kids despite them paying taxes, the news hits like confetti that someone forgot to clear from last season. Jeno: He’s back, we’re all doomed. Jaemin: Finally someone else for the camera to flirt with besides my perfect jawline. Chenle: Group dinner when he passes the beep test or we kidnap him. Renjun: We do not condone kidnapping. Jisung: He can have my physio slot. I hate running. Sungchan: Running loves you. Jisung: That’s the problem. Mark reads the thread. Hearts the first message by mistake. Leaves it there by choice.

The press release drops on a Thursday morning when the sky over the next circuit is the blank white of overexposed film. HELIOS NEXT WELCOMES DONGHYUCK LEE FOR MID-SEASON RETURN. There is a photo—Hyuck in team blacks, hair shorter, eyes steadier. There is a quote—“Grateful to be back, more grateful to everyone who got me here.” There is a footnote that says the stewards and the FIA medical delegate signed off with “no restrictions.” The paddock believes the footnote and none of the adjectives.

Mark sits with Luca in the Ardent truck watching the screen that runs endless images of other people’s days. He sips water he doesn’t taste and catalogues details without meaning to: the particular roll of Hyuck’s shoulders, the way the left hand unconsciously rubs the wrist before he catches himself, the microsecond where his mouth sets between the words we and back. Luca says nothing because silence is a commodity and the team has stockpiled it. On the debrief sheet, in the margin next to front wing settings, there is a dot of pen where Mark’s hand paused too long.

The machine of the weekend assembles itself. Hospitality tents inhale journalists and exhale quotes. Mechanics lay tools out like rosaries. Pirelli trucks yawn open to disgorge tires wrapped in warmers like hospital blankets. The circuit is one of those European tracks with history sunk into the gravel traps—photographs on the walls of the media center in black-and-white, a corner named after a man whose statue no one notices anymore, a grandstand that creaks when the wind picks up. It smells like sausage and rain and fuel, always fuel.

Helios rolls their car out at 09:03 because 09:00 is for people who need to be seen and 09:05 is for people who need to pretend they don’t. Hyuck steps into the paddock with an escort—PR on one flank, physio on the other, Mateo trailing with a tablet that contains both numbers and superstition. Sung is there too, jacket zipped to the collar despite the heat, smile that doesn’t hide how carefully he’s watching Hyuck walk. Cameras move like sunflowers following him down the lane. A boy with a credential lanyard too big for his chest sticks out a notebook; Hyuck signs it without breaking stride.

Across the way, Ardent has its own morning. Mark arrives earlier than usual and later than he wanted to. He moves like a person who has learned what to do with nerves: transmute them into checklists. Helmet bag to bench. Suit hung on the hook that squeaks. Boots lined up toe to toe like infantry. He says good morning to every mechanic by name. He asks Luca about wind direction and track temp and gets back answers he already knew. He puts his earbud in for white noise and gets instead the sound of breathing on the other side of a memory he hasn’t touched in nearly a year.

“Press at eleven,” Grace—Ardent PR—reminds him gently, head poking through the doorway. “Then sim.”

“Copy,” Mark says, because that’s how you talk when your life is a string of sessions. “Anything special?”

Grace hesitates, then doesn’t lie. “They’ll want a comment on Hyuck.”

“What do I say?” Mark asks without looking at her.

“The truth,” Grace says, and then, because truth comes in sizes: “The short one.”

Elsewhere, in a room that will smell like coffee by noon, Hyuck leans into a mic for his first official quotes of the season. The scrum of media is modest by senior-series standards but ravenous by F3’s. “How’s the wrist?” someone asks first, because journalism is often polite cruelty.

Hyuck flexes his fingers once. “Strong enough to sign forms,” he says lightly, earning a polite laugh. “Strong enough to turn five right-handers in a row. We’ll learn about six.”

“Are you afraid?” someone else asks, less polite.

He doesn’t blink. “I’m more bored than afraid,” he says. “Afraid comes and goes. Boredom lingers.” Mateo pinches the bridge of his nose just off camera. Sung, watching from the back, shakes his head and grins.

“What about Mark?”

There it is. Hyuck’s mouth almost apologizes. Then: “He’s fast. He always was. We’ll see each other on track.” He offers nothing else, because offering more would create a market and he has nothing left to sell that isn’t laps.

Mark’s media slot runs later and is shorter. He gives the script he wrote and the truth he won’t: “I’m glad he’s okay.” He uses English even when a local journalist throws Korean at him like a home-cooked meal. He adds a half sentence that lands like a full confession if you’re listening for it. “It’ll be good to have him back in the data.” The room pretends to understand only one meaning of that sentence.

Practice 1 arrives as if obeying weather. The cars roll out, the track goes green, the first lap times drop with the modesty of people testing water temperature. Hyuck’s out lap is a map he knows and doesn’t know: every corner familiar and every curb newly suspect. The first time the rear twitches in a fast right, his left hand flashes pain, quick and bright. He rides it out. “I’m okay,” he says before Mateo can ask. He sets a banker lap. It is not purple. He does not care and also cares so much it cracks something he will fix in the next lap.

Mark holds back two laps on used tires to build heat for the car and patience for himself. He watches the deltas on his dash like a man reading a lie detector. The first push lap is clean. The second is cleaner. The third he lets himself brake where he used to lift and feels something unclench that isn’t mechanical.

In the timing tower, names shuffle. H. Lee P9, then P6, then briefly P3 before a patch of traffic erases the smile no one sees. M. Lee P5, P2, then P1 for half a heartbeat before an ART car drops a lap with a tow that everyone knows is flattering. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the inevitable overlay: Lee on Lee, corner by corner, ghost laps intersecting like handwriting on tracing paper. The engineers pretend not to look. The kids at the fence don’t pretend anything.

When the session ends, Hyuck brings the car back slow, the way you park a borrowed thing you intend to keep. In the garage, the team claps once and stops because more would be religion and they aren’t believers, they’re mechanics. Mateo squeezes Hyuck’s shoulder. “How is it?”

Hyuck considers lying and then doesn’t. “Noisy,” he says. “In here.” He taps his helmet once. “Quieter than I feared.” Mateo nods and writes down a note that says nothing about sound.

Across in Ardent, Luca and Mark stare at the run plan as if it contains the chronological opposite of regret. “Good baseline,” Luca says. “We’re not chasing purple sectors; we’re building a race.”

Mark nods. He has always been good at building things that last exactly as long as they need to and no longer. He takes off his gloves slowly, as if they’ll notice tenderness and tell someone.

The first sighting happens in the bit of paddock that belongs to no one: the narrow lane between hospitality units where the shade is used up by noon. Mark steps out of Ardent hospitality holding a paper cup of water he doesn’t want. Hyuck steps out of Helios hospitality with nothing in his hands, which is how he has always preferred to meet problems. They stop because not stopping would be a different story.

There is an expanding circle of silence around them. Not the dramatic kind with gasps. The clerical kind made of small choices: a camera operator deciding to check a battery, a journalist deciding to tie a shoe, a PR manager deciding that today is not the day to manufacture content from boys who don’t belong to her. Sung nearly barrels into Hyuck, sees Mark, executes a polite orbit in real time, and vanishes with a little salute like a moon.

Neither of them speaks. There are words that would fit here—apology, congratulations, vitriol, all the synonyms for and—but none of them are true in a way that would survive the air. So they look. Hyuck’s gaze drops to Mark’s wrists, as if to check for tremor. Mark’s gaze finds the tape under Hyuck’s cuff and refuses to ask if it hurts. They smile the way people do when a photograph is being taken of their bones.

Hyuck lifts his chin the barest degree. Okay?

Mark’s mouth edges toward something that never arrives. Okay.

Traffic passes. The shade shifts. Someone laughs two hospitality units away; it sounds like a language neither of them speaks. Then Hyuck tips his head—half greeting, half exit. Mark steps aside. Space opens and they move through it, away, on parallel lines that will intersect again whether they plan to or not.

Later, the broadcast highlight will splice this moment between onboards like it belongs to the same species of footage. The narrator—this one—will object on principle and then concede the point: everything here is made of the same elements. Fuel. Oxygen. Spark. Delay. Restart.

Qualifying bites harder than practice because belief is heavier than fuel. The track warms; grip arrives in bands, like radio stations you pass through on a highway. The first runs are tidy: Mark P4, Hyuck P8—enough for headlines with soft verbs. Then the circuit takes a breath, clouds drift off like reluctant ushers, and the second runs turn into confessions.

Hyuck waits in the box for a pocket of clean air. He’s not afraid of traffic; he’s afraid of himself around it. Mateo’s hand taps the halo—one, two, three, the old superstition on the new car. “Box in, out, push, cool, push,” he says into the radio, his voice an instrument tuned to Hyuck’s pulse. “No heroics in Sector 3.”

“I don’t do heroics,” Hyuck says mildly, and everyone who knows him forgives the lie.

Out lap: grip checks the car, checks the wrist. First flyer: green, green, yellow—tiny lift through a kink where last year he wouldn’t have lifted at all. He hisses at himself. Second flyer: green, green, green. The radio clicks with Mateo’s restraint carrying hope in its teeth: “Good job.”

Across the pit lane, Mark’s second run is arithmetic that thinks it’s poetry. He doesn’t chase purple; he chases less. Less steering across the second chicane. Less brake pressure into the final hairpin. Less fear of the moment where the rear starts a conversation and the front decides whether to answer. Luca’s voice: “Box or push?” Mark: “Push.” The lap arrives like a withheld breath—P2 for a heartbeat, then P3 when an ART towed by fortune steals a tenth in the last corner. Fine. It will hold.

They end quali with numbers that mean they will see each other at the start: Mark P3 on the clean side. Hyuck P6, the dirty side, which he treats as a challenge from physics personally addressed to him. Parc fermé is polite—gloves off, chin up, cameras down the line like beads on a string. “How’s the wrist?” a journalist tries again, addicted to the shape of that question. “Fine,” Hyuck says, and turns away before addiction becomes insult.

Race day turns the air metallic. The grid is a rumor with tires. Kids who were in school last year adjust their earpieces like CEOs. Mechanics jog with fans angled like propellers. The formation lap feels like a first sentence finally written after a year of starting over. Engines sway in pitch as they sync. They line up. Five lights. Four. Three. Two. One.

Lights out.

Mark’s launch is good; the ART ahead bogs fractionally; the pole sitter covers. Hyuck’s launch is borderline sublime—wheelspin corrected on the slip, elbows visible only to telemetry, a dart between P5 and P4 before the first chicane has the chance to complain. They clear Turn 1 without debris, which feels miraculous. Somewhere behind them, someone has a slow puncture, someone else gets a track limits warning, the race’s minor math ringing like coins in a jar.

Lap 3, Mark sits P3 within DRS of P2, eyes on wing angles and brake markers and the chill place in his chest where consequence lives. Luca: “We’re happy here. Save for the end.” Mark: “Copy.” His right thumb hovers over the overtake button like a bad idea he intends to have later, not now.

Hyuck rides P5 like it’s a horse he’s breaking—gentle, then firmer, then a flick when the car threatens to argue. First DRS zone, he opens it and the wind answers with that soft flapping sound that never stops sounding like permission. He sends it into Turn 4 late enough to trigger a steward’s sense of smell and still makes the apex. “Nice,” Mateo says, the word a medal withheld from public view.

The middle stint is where racecraft grows teeth. Mark keeps his tires out of the worst of the heat and his car out of the dirtiest of the air. He times his recharge like a monk who schedules faith between harvests. On Lap 11 he takes P2 with a pass that looks so simple the broadcast forgets to replay it. On Lap 12 Hyuck inherits P4 when P3’s rear locks and smokes; he passes without looking at the other boy’s helmet because mercy is faster when you don’t watch it work.

They are now two positions apart and falling into each other’s gravity. Luca tells Mark to manage. Mateo tells Hyuck to calculate. Both boys nod and do versions of the opposite, because instruction lives where fear is, and fear is not driving today, not yet.

Lap 16: Virtual Safety Car for a stranded rookie. The field compresses into the idea of itself. Mark cycles his switches; Hyuck flexes his fingers once and stops when the tape pulls. The VSC ends; the world returns to speed with a stutter. Hyuck takes advantage of the one moment the leader forgets that green flags are not suggestions. He’s P3 now, Mark a corner up the road—close enough to smell the faint metallic note the Ardent picks up under heavy load.

Lap 19: The radio is quiet because talking is slow. Through Sector 2, Hyuck watches Mark’s hands—small movements, none wasted—and remembers the way rain used to erase the distance between them. He tells himself he doesn’t need rain. He tells himself he needs only the space Mark always leaves when he trusts someone to share a corner.

Lap 21: That space appears at the exit of a fast left when Mark catches a slight snap and gives it the respectful inch it demands. Hyuck fills the inch with intention, overlap achieved before either engineer can say careful. Mark does not slam the door; he shows the door and closes it slowly enough that both survive. They run side by side through the kink, white lines whispering under the tires, broadcast cameras finally earning the money they were paid.

“Don’t,” Luca says reflexively.

“I know,” Mark says, and adds, “I know,” again in a language that isn’t in the radio but is in him.

They clear the complex clean and greedy, Hyuck ahead by less than a signature. One lap later, Mark takes it back on the straight with DRS used like punctuation. The crowd hiccups. Somewhere in the Ferrari hospitality, Jeno and Jaemin clap without meaning to and then pretend they clapped for the waiter. In Mercedes, Sungchan stands, sits, stands again, and finally leans both hands on the table as if bracing the entire hospitality suite will help.

They finish P2 and P3 behind the ART that got lucky early and drove tidy late. On the cooldown lap, Mark’s breath returns to the habit of being his. Hyuck’s radio catches half a laugh when Mateo says, “That was almost responsible.”

Parc fermé has rules older than some drivers—weights, fuel sample, hands off until the officials bless your evening. Helmets off, too, and for a moment there are only two boys breathing hard and not looking at each other directly. Hyuck knocks Mark’s shoulder with his knuckles as they pass. The touch is calibrated—friendly to cameras, weighted for them. Mark doesn’t react with surprise. He allows himself a fractional turn of the head. The smile is professional and costs less than the one the photo from Italy stole on media day years ago.

Interviews arrive like weather. “First race back—how did it feel?” Hyuck fields the obvious questions with un-obvious answers. “Loud,” he says of the first lap. “Quiet later.” He does not say where the quiet started: somewhere behind the sternum when the car did what he asked at a speed human beings shouldn’t ask.

“Seeing Mark on track again—was that difficult?” a reporter asks in a tone that promises forgiveness for cruelty.

Hyuck’s mouth presses into false neutral. “He’s part of the track,” he says. “I don’t race the layout emotionally.” Someone in the pen writes that down and thinks it’s a quote about lines, not loss.

Mark’s pen session is briefer. “You and Lee—still the benchmark for each other?” a voice asks.

Mark looks at the microphone like it has asked for blood. “Benchmark is a fabrication of small samples,” he says. Then he adds, quietly enough that only the front row catches it, “We keep each other honest.” Luca winces the way engineers do when emotion refuses to stay within the window. The pen doesn’t pounce. Perhaps they learned something in the last year, too.

The paddock exhales. The sun goes low enough to turn hospitality windows into mirrors. Personnel peel off into dinners and debriefs and early flights. The friend group atomizes then reconvenes by instinct at the café that sells over-extracted espresso to boys who don’t need more heart rate. Jeno holds court; Jaemin corrects him with sweeter words; Renjun and Chenle play a game of who can speak last; Jisung finishes a tiramisu and then apologizes to it for being too good; Sungchan bumps Hyuck’s shoulder and says nothing else because silence is a gift he learned to give humans he loves.

Mark arrives late, leaves earlier than a boy would if he were just hungry. On his way out, Hyuck watches him pretend not to notice and thinks about pretending as a skill set they both share and hate. He gives it ten minutes—enough for plausible deniability, not enough to become disrespect—and then follows the familiar path behind the paddock where conversations go to avoid microphones.

They meet where the light from a generator leaks into the lane like a guilty conscience. Crates stacked to one side, a coil of cable like a sleeping animal on the other. The air smells like the second day of a race weekend—rubber warmed once, not twice; coffee that hums but doesn’t sing.

“You’re walking straighter,” Mark says without hello. The sentence arrives brittle, professionally concerned.

Hyuck’s laugh surfaces and sinks in a single breath. “You’re still making compliments sound like lap time.” He leans against the crate and studies Mark as if someone finally turned the saturation back up on his life. “Thanks for not—” He stops. Starts again. “Thanks for not doing anything stupid today.”

“It was close,” Mark admits. “In the middle sector.”

“I know.” He tilts his head. “You left room.”

“I always did.” It comes out sharper than he means. He winces at himself. “I mean—I try to.”

Silence plants itself like a flag. It’s not comfortable. It’s not hostile. It’s full of unsaid things standing in formation.

Hyuck breaks first, because he always does when endurance feels like a dare. “I got cleared in June,” he says. “I thought about texting.”

Mark looks at a scuff on the crate until it looks like a coastline. “Why didn’t you?”

Hyuck shrugs, then remembers shrugging counts as bravado and drops it. “I wanted you to come first.” The honesty costs him, and he pays in eye contact. “I know why you didn’t. PR. Timing. Optics. But I—” He swallows. “I still wanted it.”

Mark’s reply starts polite and correct. “I should have broken the leash.” He hears himself. He amends, quietly, “I wanted to. I did. I hate that more than I hate the crash.”

Hyuck looks at the ground, then up through his lashes, then straight at Mark because the aim of his life has always been direct. “I hated you, you know,” he says, conversational as a weather report. “Not like the movies. Quietly. Like mold.” The smile that follows is almost kind. “It didn’t stick.”

Mark laughs once, which is mercy letting itself in through a side door. “Lucky me.”

“Don’t get used to it,” Hyuck says, because banter is a rope you can throw across a gap without looking to see if there’s ground on both sides. “I’m still coming for you every lap.”

“I rely on it,” Mark says, and the joke folds around a truth that tastes like metal and relief. He risks a half-step closer. “Wrist?”

Hyuck turns his hand palm up, tape edge visible, the soft bruise of old trauma under new skin. Mark doesn’t touch it—this isn’t that story yet—but his thumb hovers close enough that both of them feel the air move.

“Strong enough to sign forms,” Hyuck murmurs, borrowing his own quote and dulling its teeth. Then, softer, “Strong enough to turn five right-handers in a row.”

They stand like that for a beat that goes on long enough to be counted. In the distance, someone laughs at a joke that needed a different audience. A light flickers and reconsiders. The generator hums.

“We’re not—” Mark begins, and stops because the sentence has too many exits. “We don’t have to decide tonight.”

“About what?” Hyuck asks pretending well enough to pass.

“How we’re supposed to be,” Mark says, choosing the small truth that fits in the space they have. “On track. Off it.” He clears his throat. “With cameras, without.”

Hyuck studies his face like a track map—where it tightens, where it yields. “On track,” he says, “we’re still the same.” A beat. “Off track… you can try smiling again.” The nudge is so light it almost doesn’t press. “You were good at it. Before.”

Mark’s mouth remembers and forgets at the same time. “Make me,” he says, and hates the way it sounds like a request, not a dare.

Hyuck’s grin arrives in pieces, like sunlight coming through blinds. “Careful, Hyung. I’ve been medically cleared for bad ideas.”

“We’re not—” Mark tries again. Then he laughs quietly, gives in to the gravity that has always made more sense than language. “Goodnight, Hyuck.”

“Goodnight,” Hyuck answers, and lets the word hold more than the hour. He pushes off the crate, straightens, and nods once in a way that used to mean see you on the grid and now means see you anyway.

They part without touching, which is more intimate than a dozen rehearsed embraces. Back in hospitality, the friend group’s chat lights up with memes and bad screenshots of their passes. Jaemin posts a photo of the podium with a heart drawn between P2 and P3 and then edits it to a banana when Jeno complains about subtlety. Renjun tags it with “benchmark THIS.” Chenle replies with a lap time and a winking face. Ji sends a paragraph about brake bias that no one reads and everyone loves him for.

Mark sits on the edge of his bunk, shoes still on, suit half undone. He types a message he won’t send: Okay? He deletes it. He types another: Catch me next time. He deletes that too, because the joke has grown teeth and needs muzzling. He ends up sending nothing. For now.

Hyuck lies on top of the covers with the lights off and the curtain open to let the grid’s afterglow run its untroubled circuits on the wall. Sung’s goodnight text is a string of encouraging nonsense and a photo of a dog in a team hat. Hyuck grins into the dark and doesn’t answer for once. He imagines a message that begins with I hated you and ends with I didn’t. He does not send that either. Not yet.

In the morning, the headline is simple and insufficient: OLD RIVALS, NEW CHAPTER. The documentary voice in your head will correct it gently: not new. Restarted. The difference matters, because this time the engine turned over on their terms, and however long the season is, they’ve already taken the green.

Chapter Text

Everything But a Lover

Chapter 5: Slipstream

…

Summer doesn’t arrive in motorsport; it accelerates. Circuits blur into airports, airports blur into hotels, hotels blur into podiums lit like crime scenes. Every race weekend begins the same way: two names on the timing screen chasing the top line by tenths. Mark. Hyuck. Red and silver blinking like twin heartbeats.

Broadcast graphics stutter through highlight packages: Round 7 – Zandvoort – M. Lee P1, H. Lee P2 (+0.421). Round 8 – Spielberg – H. Lee P1, M. Lee P2 (+0.167). Round 9 – Monza – M. Lee P1, H. Lee P2 (+0.019). Commentators start saying their names as a single phrase, a rhythm, a brand.

“Lees again!” the feed yells over engine noise. “Only one corner separating them—these two have rewritten the season!”

Helios engineers stop pretending it’s coincidence. Ardent mechanics joke darkly that if one crashes, they’ll all go home early. Sponsors love it; rivalry photographs better than harmony. Fans make edits: slow-motion helmet removals, lingering looks on podiums, captions like same driver, different body. The documentary cameras follow suit, lenses drunk on proximity.

By July, both boys could drive each other’s laps blindfolded. Mark knows Hyuck’s braking marks like birthdates. Hyuck knows Mark’s throttle traces like lies. Every overtake feels choreographed and improvised at once—a duet played at 300 kph. Afterwards they speak in data sheets, not words.

But the world around them never stops talking.

Media day, Silverstone. A horseshoe of journalists. Jeno leans on his chair, sunglasses half-on, the definition of chaos in Ferrari red. Jaemin at his side, polished grin and practiced affection. Renjun and Chenle whisper across McLaren blue, plotting questions of their own. Jisung scrolls memes under the table. Sungchan, in Mercedes gray, watches Hyuck with the easy fondness of someone who still isn’t deterred by no. The microphones turn toward Mark and Hyuck first, because they always do.

“Is the rivalry still friendly?” someone asks.

Mark’s mouth almost smiles. “It’s professional.”

Hyuck’s laugh arrives half a beat late. “Which means unfriendly, in Mark-speak.”

Laughter ripples through the room; Jaemin fans himself theatrically. Chenle mutters, “Married couple energy,” under his breath; Ji snorts loud enough for the mic to catch it. Mark hides a grin in his water bottle. Hyuck catches it anyway.

Another journalist: “Hyuck, after the crash last year, do you feel you and Mark have grown closer?”

He thinks about saying no, but lying has rules and one of them is mercy. “Depends on the metric,” he says. “Lap time or conversation?”

“Conversation,” someone presses.

“Then we’re still in testing,” Hyuck answers, the smile soft but precise. The room eats it up. Beside him, Mark exhales through his nose, a tiny, invisible laugh. The tension between them translates into click-through rates within the hour.

The friend group leaves the media tent in a cluster of perfume and sarcasm. Outside, July sunlight turns everything into a glare. Jeno drapes an arm around Mark’s shoulders. “So, rival, huh? You ever gonna admit you like him?”

Mark raises a brow. “As a driver?”

“As a disease,” Jaemin offers helpfully. “An incurable one.”

Hyuck, walking ahead, doesn’t turn but calls over his shoulder. “All of you talk too much.”

“We race too little,” Renjun answers, laughing. “Let us have this.”

The camaraderie spills into dinner that night—eight people, three languages, and one argument about who pays the bill. Ji waves a credit card like a flag; Chenle intercepts it; Sungchan quietly pays before dessert arrives. Hyuck watches Mark laugh at something Jaemin says and feels the sharp, absurd ache of nostalgia for a time when laughter wasn’t surveillance.

The next day the grid forms again. Silverstone wind, hard light, crowd roar. Hyuck starts P2; Mark, P3. Launches clean. Lap 4, DRS open, they trade positions twice in one straight. The cameras can’t keep up. Lap 10, a yellow flag for debris. Lap 15, the restart—side by side through Copse, a move they promised their engineers they would never try again. Neither lifts.

“Careful,” Mateo says into Hyuck’s ear. “Please.”

“He won’t hit me,” Hyuck replies. “Not again.”

Mark’s voice, somewhere on another channel, “I know where his wheels are.” Luca says something that sounds like prayer disguised as telemetry.

They finish 1-2, separated by 0.072 seconds. The crowd loses its mind. On the podium, champagne drips off Mark’s jawline; Hyuck wipes it away with the back of his hand and doesn’t realize the cameras have caught it until later that night, when social media declares it romantic. Jeno sends him the clip with thirty laughing emojis. Hyuck doesn’t answer.

Weeks pass like this—Austria, Hungary, Spa. Podiums, cameras, questions. In one paddock photo call, a fan shouts, “Kiss already!” Mark chokes on his drink; Hyuck nearly drops the mic. Renjun makes it worse by applauding. The PR teams pretend not to hear; Grace mutters that next season she wants a driver who’s allergic to chemistry.

Between races, the world compresses into airports and long drives. The friend group’s chat hums with screenshots, gossip, and endless memes. Chenle sends an edit of Mark and Hyuck overtaking each other in slow motion, set to an R&B track. Ji comments: This is harassment. Hyuck replies: What are they feeding these editors. Mark leaves a single heart emoji, red as his suit.

By late August, fatigue sets in. Not the kind you sleep off—the kind that hums behind your ribs, static and caffeine. Mark starts waking before his alarms; Hyuck stops answering goodnight texts. Their post-race interactions grow mechanical. The jokes shrink, the space between them does not.

At Spa, rain threatens but never delivers. Practice runs in damp-dry cycles, traction somewhere between promise and trap. Lap after lap, their delta shrinks to nothing. The broadcast commentator can’t stop saying their names. “It’s as if they’re tethered by an invisible rope,” he says, awe sneaking into the script.

During the debrief, Mark leans over the data screen, voice thin. “Tell me why he’s faster in Turn 9.”

Luca: “He’s not. You’re just angrier in Turn 10.”

Mark presses his thumb against his temple. “I’m fine.”

“You’re exhausted,” Luca corrects. “Which is a type of fine until it isn’t.”

In the next garage, Mateo asks Hyuck if he’s sleeping. “Sure,” Hyuck says. “In small, fast segments.” Mateo doesn’t laugh.

The season closes in on them, tighter and tighter, until every Sunday feels like déjà vu—same anthem, same confetti, same two faces pretending rivalry is enough fuel. Off-camera, the friend group has started tiptoeing. Sung keeps glancing at Hyuck like he’s afraid he’ll vanish. Jeno and Jaemin crack jokes that don’t land. Chenle and Renjun argue about setups no one asked them to fix. Ji, the youngest, finally says what everyone else won’t. “They’re gonna break something,” he murmurs. No one knows if he means the cars or each other.

The next weekend opens gray. Clouds stacked like bruises, air too heavy for daylight. Zandvoort again, full circle. Reporters call it destiny because they’re paid to name coincidences. Mark calls it a race; Hyuck calls it weather. The rest of the world calls it revenge.

Friday practice ends with a half-second between them and a hundred cameras trying to measure the silence. Saturday qualifying puts Hyuck on pole, Mark two slots back. Every lap time, every radio clip, every still photo looks like repetition because repetition is the only thing they trust anymore.

On the formation lap Sunday, droplets bead on visors—fat, uncertain. The director cuts between cockpits, between eyes that refuse to blink. Commentators talk about tire strategy; the real story is muscle memory versus fear.

Lights. Smoke. Launch.

Hyuck keeps P1 into Turn 1; Mark squeezes past P3 by millimeters. They spend the first ten laps like mirror images: same line, same corrections, same restraint that feels like defiance. The rain thickens into a curtain; radio chatter turns urgent.

Mateo: “Box now—conditions worsening.”

Hyuck: “Two more laps.”

Luca: “Box this lap for inters. We’ll undercut.”

Mark: “Copy.”

Ardent rolls the dice; Helios waits. The gamble works for one lap, then the track floods a sector at a time. Mark skates wide through a corner that doesn’t exist anymore and catches it—just. Hyuck’s voice crackles, “Is he’s okay?” Mateo says, “He’s still ahead.” Hyuck mutters, “Not for long.”

They meet again on lap 22, same corner that started everything a year ago. The broadcast knows it; the camera slows instinctively. Hyuck takes the outside, confident, maybe too confident. Mark brakes later, trusting wet grip that isn’t there. The world goes frame by frame: rooster-tails, steering correction, proximity, breath held. Then somehow—miracle or muscle—they separate without contact. Two cars skating inches apart, tethered by disbelief. The stands erupt. The commentator half-screams, “They touched—no, they didn’t! How did they not?”

When the checkered flag falls, it’s Hyuck first by less than a tenth. Mark crosses second, radio silent until parc fermé. The victory photos look like celebration but taste like survival.

Later that night, hospitality halls echo with after-rain quiet. Team personnel drift home; journalists file stories titled ‘Redemption Arc’ and ‘Ghosts Exorcised in the Rain.’ The friend group crowds a low-lit café near the circuit, still damp, still vibrating.

Jeno lifts a glass. “To not dying.”

Jaemin corrects, “To almost dying, beautifully.”

Everyone laughs except the two who nearly did. Hyuck swirls his drink; Mark stares through the window where raindrops distort neon into Morse code. Sung leans toward Hyuck. “You okay?”

Hyun answers without looking up. “I don’t know what that means anymore.”

When the table breaks apart—Ji yawning first, Chenle and Renjun still bickering over strategy—Hyuck slips out into the drizzle. The streetlight turns the air silver. Footsteps follow a minute later. Mark, hoodie up, expression unreadable.

“You shouldn’t walk alone,” he says.

“You shouldn’t follow me,” Hyuck replies, but doesn’t speed up.

They end up under an awning behind the paddock café, rain hammering the tin roof like applause. For a while neither speaks. Engines from the city hum far away, a lullaby for insomniacs and idiots.

“I almost hit you,” Mark says finally. His voice is steady in the way confessions are when rehearsed too long. “Turn 10. If you’d turned in half a beat later—”

Hyuck cuts him off. “But you didn’t.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Then what is?” Hyuck steps closer, rain running down his face like punctuation. “That you still think the crash was your fault? That you still drive like an apology?”

“You could have died, Hyuck.”

“I almost lived harder than you.”

Mark exhales, somewhere between laugh and sob. “You make everything sound poetic and impossible.”

“It’s called racing,” Hyuck says softly. “You either do it scared or not at all.”

Silence again, broken by thunder rolling over the harbor. Mark stares at the water pooling at their feet. “I don’t know what we’re doing anymore. We keep chasing and stopping like it’ll fix something.”

“It already fixed us once,” Hyuck says. “Maybe that’s the trick.”

“Or maybe we’re just addicted.”

Hyuck smiles—small, wrecked, sincere. “That too.”

The air between them vibrates with everything they haven’t said since Italy. Mark reaches out, fingers hovering near Hyuck’s wrist, not touching, remembering the tape that used to be there. Hyuck doesn’t pull back. Rainwater drips from Mark’s sleeve onto Hyuck’s skin, small and electric.

“You scared me,” Mark whispers.

“You scared me first.”

They stand there, too close, both pretending the noise outside will drown out whatever happens next. It doesn’t. The touch lands—brief, knuckles against jawline, acknowledgment disguised as accident. Hyuck closes his eyes, breathes once, steps back.

“Goodnight,” he says, voice cracked open but still gentle. “We have interviews at nine. Try to smile.”

“Only if you do first.”

Hyuck’s grin flashes like headlights through fog. “Deal.”

He walks away before Mark can break it.

Inside his hotel room, Mark peels off the hoodie, sits on the floor, and laughs quietly into his palms until it stops being funny. His phone buzzes—group chat lighting up with memes from dinner. One message, though, is private. Hyuck: We’re fine, right? Mark stares at it until the typing bubble vanishes. He replies after a long minute: Define fine. No answer.

The narrator, dry and tired, would tell you this is how healing actually looks: two boys pacing the same rain-slicked street in opposite directions, neither willing to admit the weather has already broken. The cameras will call it rivalry. The record books will call it a season. You can call it what it is—momentum.

Chapter Text

Everything But a Lover

Chapter 6: Blue Flags

…

Pre-race dinners are supposed to sand the edges off nerves. That’s what they tell rookies. Eat with the people who’ve watched you almost die and watched you win; chew slowly; let the clatter of cutlery replace the click of harness buckles in your head. Hyuck knows the script. He still shows up late.

The place is one of those city-center bistros that survives on drivers and journalists pretending to be normal. Warm light, water rings on dark wood, waiters who’ve learned to walk at the pace of people who count everything. The friend group has a long table; they always do. Jeno and Jaemin share one side like a broadcast panel. Renjun and Chenle have claimed the far end, papaya-bright, whispering a conspiracy they’ll publish as a meme by midnight. Jisung sits with perfect posture and a napkin folded like an apology. Sungchan is next to the empty chair meant for Hyuck, keeping it warm with his presence, which is a skill he has without knowing.

Mark’s there, of course. Hoodie unzipped, team polo visible, hair too neat for a person who forgets to sleep. He’s angled slightly away from Hyuck’s empty chair, the way you angle a mirror so it won’t catch the worst light. He laughs at something Jaemin says and then stops laughing like he remembered himself.

Hyuck slides into his seat with a grin already loaded. “You order without me?”

Sungchan pushes a menu toward him. “I threatened to. They were brave and waited.”

“We are never brave,” Jaemin says. “We are pretty.”

“Speak for yourself,” Jeno adds easily, elbow knocking Jaemin’s. “We’re hungry first.”

Hyuck glances down the table and catches Mark’s eyes for the first time tonight. It’s like catching a curb—small jolt, immediate calculation. “You look tired,” Hyuck says, too casually.

“You look loud,” Mark says, not looking away.

Renjun taps his glass. “Ground rules: no telemetry at the table. No brake bias talk. No weather models.”

“No flirting with lap charts,” Chenle says, grinning at Jisung.

Ji blushes. “I never flirt. I court.”

Jaemin points a fork between Mark and Hyuck. “And you two—no dueling until dessert.”

“We don’t duel,” Mark says mildly.

“We just win consecutively,” Hyuck adds, and the table laughs like it’s harmless. For a while, it is. Bread baskets migrate. Jeno tells a story about a sponsor shoot where the wind machine nearly took his hair off. Chenle tries to convince Renjun to start a YouTube series called “Papaya Problems.” Sung steals olives from Hyuck’s plate and replaces them with tomatoes like that balances anything.

It tilts when the waiter asks about mains and Mark orders grilled fish with a side of restraint. Hyuck orders something riskier because he can’t help himself. Jaemin raises a brow. “Fueling like an adult? Proud of you, Lee.”

“He’s always an adult,” Mark says, slicing bread he won’t finish. “He just doesn’t admit it until the last lap.”

Hyuck smiles with his mouth, not his eyes. “Says the man who turns into an accountant at parc fermé.”

“Accountants don’t bleed points for heroics.”

There it is—the small flint in the bread. The table goes fractionally quieter without admitting it. Sung shifts like he’d like to catch something before it falls.

“He means he loves you,” Jaemin says to Hyuck, sing-song, trying to make it silly. “This is his love language.”

“His love language has too many footnotes,” Hyuck says. He looks at Mark. “Say what you mean without a spreadsheet.”

Mark leans back, mouth a line as tidy as his laps. “Fine. Stop taking lines that aren’t there.”

Hyuck feels heat light under his ribs—a familiar pilot flame. “There’s always something there,” he says softly.

“Not if I’m there first,” Mark says, equally soft. The softness is worse than volume. It’s a glove over knuckles.

Jeno clears his throat. “So the weather tomorrow—”

“Dry,” Renjun says too quickly.

“Humid,” Ji amends.

“Stop,” Sungchan murmurs, like to a skittish animal.

Hyuck and Mark keep their eyes on each other because looking away would be surrender. It’s almost fun until it isn’t.

Hyuck hears his own voice drop half an octave. “You still drive like you’re afraid of me.”

Mark’s reply is immediate, low, and in the same language because honesty requires it. “I drive like I want you alive.”

Jaemin’s smile falters. Chenle and Renjun glance at each other—oh. Ji’s fork stops halfway to his mouth.

“You can’t keep protecting me,” Hyuck says, heat rising, corners tightening in his chest he could normally take flat. “It’s insulting.”

“It’s insurance,” Mark says. “On both of us.”

“Okay,” Jeno says, louder, reaching for levity like a safety car. “Anyone want dessert menus early?”

Hyuck hears him and doesn’t. “You left space last race that cost you P1.”

“I left you room to not die,” Mark says, plain as a pit board.

Hyuck’s laugh is small and sharp. “You think every choice is yours to make.”

“Look what happened when I didn’t,” Mark says. “I’m not making that mistake twice.”

Sung’s hand is on Hyuck’s sleeve now, gentle. “Hey.” English again. “Let’s eat, yeah?”

Hyuck shakes him off without looking. The table shrinks to Mark’s face: controlled, tired, that unbearable careful. He wants to break it and hold it at the same time. He chooses the thing he knows best—speed into a gap.

“You didn’t even come to see me,” he says, not a revelation, just a gun laid on the table.

The sound the table makes is silence; it’s loud. Jaemin’s eyes close. Jeno’s jaw flexes. Chenle bites his lip. Jisung looks down like the napkin has become fascinating. Sungchan says Mark’s name very softly—warning, plea.

Mark doesn’t flinch. He never flinches; that’s the problem and the reason. He keeps his voice level. “I know, I fucked up and I-”

“And now you want to do it in corners,” Hyuck says. “You think that balances the ledger.”

Mark’s knuckles go bloodless around his water glass. “No. I think it keeps us on the same track.”

Hyuck leans in, because distance is for brakes and he was not born with many. “Then stop driving like you’re say sorry, especially if you’re not actually going to apologize.”

“That’s enough,” Jeno says, voice low, the tone that makes younger drivers straighten up in driver briefings.

“Please,” Jaemin adds, hand out like he could catch the next sentence and pocket it.

Sung’s palm presses firmer to Hyuck’s forearm. “Hyuck—”

Hyuck breathes. He has learned to do it in corners that want other things from him. He looks down at the plate in front of him—untouched, beautiful, cold—and then back at Mark. Mark has already done the math; Hyuck can see the result in his eyes. Exit. Now.

Mark puts his napkin down with the precision that makes sponsors choose him. “I’m going to get some air,” he says in English, for the table. For Hyuck, softer, pleading, “We can’t do this here.”

”We never will, because you’re to scared to do it anywhere,” Hyuck says, too fast. It lands like a slap. He hates himself the second it’s out. “I didn’t—” He cuts it off.

Mark stands. Sung halfway rises with him; Mark. shakes his head—no. He looks at the group and finds a lighter voice. “Don’t fight over the bill until I get back, or I’ll pay it out of spite.” He almost smiles. It almost counts. He leaves anyway, shoulders tight, a clean line drawn through the room.

The table exhales like a team after a pit stop that almost went wrong. Cutlery resumes. Conversations try to regrow. They don’t. Jaemin stares at Hyuck like someone he loves just stepped into traffic. “You okay?” he asks, and it’s not casual.

“Fine,” Hyuck says, which is the word men use when the wall is load-bearing.

“You poked a bruise,” Renjun says, gentle. “He poked back.”

“We all have bruises,” Chenle says. “We just hide them in better merch.”

Jisung clears his throat, brave in the small way that counts. “Do you want me to go get him?”

Sungchan shakes his head. “Give him a minute.” He looks at Hyuck, eyes steady. “Give yourself one too.”

Hyuck doesn’t take minutes; he spends them before he receives the allowance. He reaches for his glass, changes his mind, reaches for his fork like hunger will return if he behaves. The food tastes like not food. The room sounds like helmet white noise, the kind that gets under your skin until you mistake it for pulse.

Jeno and Jaemin start a story about some grotesque Ferrari hospitality canapé to fill the silence. Chenle interrupts with a better anecdote about an overzealous brand rep who made them rehearse a high-five. Jisung laughs too loudly at the wrong moment. Sungchan keeps one eye on the door Mark disappeared through and the other on Hyuck, like he can split himself by will.

Hyuck looks at the empty chair across from him and measures the distance. It is not far in centimeters. It is stupidly far in history. He wants to leave, to chase, to drag the conversation out into alley air where it doesn’t echo. He stays, because staying is the fastest way to do the dumb thing after the race, which is when he’s always best at dumb things.

Mark doesn’t come back before the check arrives. Sungchan pays without an argument tonight. The group stands in clusters, hugging in the vague way men like them hug—one arm, quick, no camera. Jeno squeezes Hyuck’s shoulder; Jaemin kisses his cheek lightly like permission, like warning. Renjun salutes; Chenle says, “Don’t die and don’t make me make a documentary about it.” Jisung says, “Sleep,” like a blessing; Sungchan says nothing and walks Hyuck toward the door.

Outside, the air is cool and mean. The street is wet from someone washing the pavement, not rain. Hyuck looks down the block and sees a hoodie at the corner, Mark’s profile cut out of sodium light. He turns as if he felt the look cross the distance like a push.

For one second, it’s the kart track in Korea again, rain, two boys with helmets under their arms and too many sentences for their mouths. Hyuck raises a hand, halfway. Mark’s mouth tilts, almost. A car passes between them. When it’s gone, Mark is too. Hyuck’s hand drops, empty, ridiculous.

Sung nudges him forward. “Come on,” he says quietly. “Curfew.”

“I don’t have a curfew,” Hyuck says. He moves anyway.

Back at the hotel, he does all the motions—ice the wrist, stretch the scar tissue, stare at the ceiling until it admits he’s the one awake. He types a message and deletes it. Types another and deletes that too. He settles for none, which feels like losing and also like control. He falls asleep at an angle that will punish him in the morning and dreams of white paint and rain and a finish line he keeps letting move.

In the morning, the chat is already alive: Jeno sending luck, Jaemin sending a photo of their dinner table with the caption nobody died! progress!, McLaren twins arguing about which of them would make the safer safety car. Ji reminds everyone to drink water. Mark reacts with a single thumbs-up—the emoji equivalent of a heartbeat. Hyuck hearts it and closes the app like that could close the distance too.

Race day will come, and with it the accident he can’t possibly know is waiting. For now, he puts on his boots and zips his suit and looks in the mirror to practice a face he can drive fast inside of. The mirror gives him back something competent and tired. The rest is for later.

Race morning smells like rain and ambition. The garage glows white under fluorescents; engines cough awake; mechanics murmur in a half-language of torque and prayer. Hyuck’s wrist aches under the band of his glove, a phantom pulse of the old injury, but he calls it focus. Mateo hands him the radio pack. “Keep it clean today,” he says, too quietly to be only about corners.

Hyuck answers with a grin that doesn’t reach his eyes. “When am I not clean?”

“When you’re proving something,” Mateo says. “And you always are.”

The grid forms. Flags wave. Cameras search for faces that might break. Mark’s car sits one row ahead, Ardent red bright enough to look smug. Over comms, Luca’s voice is calm, always calm. Hyuck hears it through static, the familiar syllables of “ready, check,” and has to look away.

Five lights. Four. Three. Two. One. Go.

Start perfect. Clutch bite just right. Hyuck takes two off the line, slides into P5 before the first chicane. The track is still damp from morning drizzle, slick in the shaded sectors. He can taste it through the vents—wet rubber, oil, metal. The world narrows to corners and numbers. Behind him, radio chatter turns into noise. Ahead, Mark’s car moves like it already owns the air.

Lap 8. A yellow flag. Debris cleared. Restart. Hyuck times the throttle like a confession. He gains a position, then another. Lap 12, he’s P3, right behind Mark. DRS open. Everything inside him sharpens to a point.

Mateo’s voice: “Patience, Hyuck.”

Hyuck: “Copy.” Lies are smoother when spoken at speed.

Lap 14. Turn 7. He sees the gap, small as mercy. He dives. The rear twitches, over-correction, a flick too late. The world spins left then right—barrier, sparks, the hollow sound of impact heard through water. Radio cuts to static. Camera pans away. Crowd noise folds over itself like fabric. Mateo’s voice is the first back on comms: “Red flag. Red flag. Stay still. Medical on route.”

Hyuck tries to breathe and finds it stuck halfway up his throat. Pain spreads in clean lines down his side. Someone touches his helmet; the visor lifts; light floods in and breaks the world into pieces. He counts the pieces until they stop moving.

Hospital again. Different city, same sterile brightness. The wrist held in place, ribs strapped, an IV line that hums louder than the monitors. Mateo sits in the corner, eyes red. Sung shows up with flowers and a look that says *not again.* Reporters camp outside. Helios PR issues *minor incident, full recovery expected.* The words repeat on loop across every feed, edited into highlight reels that cut just before the crash. Hyuck watches once, then throws the remote across the room.

Three days later, Mark wins the sprint race. The same morning, Hyuck’s doctor clears him for partial rehab. The same evening, Ardent posts a photo: *“Lee joins F2 for the remainder of the season—our champion climbs higher.”* The caption is polite. The timing is a wound.

Sung tells him first, softly, like breaking bad news to a child. “He didn’t plan it this way.”

“No one ever plans the convenient parts,” Hyuck says. His voice surprises him—flat, scraped clean. He closes his eyes. “Tell him congratulations.”

“Tell him yourself.”

Hyuck doesn’t answer. Later that night, his phone vibrates on the tray beside the bed. Mark’s name. ‘You okay?’ Then: ‘I can visit after Monaco tests if PR allows.’ Hyuck stares until the screen dims, then flips the phone face-down. The next morning there’s another: ‘Rest. I’ll call.’ By afternoon, a third: ‘Please answer once so I know you’re fine.’

He doesn’t. Every message reads like pity disguised as loyalty, and he’s allergic to both.

Days turn into weeks. He rehabs the wrist like it’s an argument he intends to win—pain, ice, repeat. He trades morphine for espresso and self-disgust. Mateo counts reps; Sung plays nurse and friend and unwilling accomplice. “He asks about you every week,” Sung says once. “He’s worried.”

Hyuck ties his laces tighter. “Then he should stop watching the news.”

When the bandages come off, the scar is smaller than memory. He rolls his hand, tests flexion, nods. The doctors say six months to full clearance; he decides on three. Sleep is optional; silence is not.

By autumn, he’s strong enough to run laps in a simulator. The first time the virtual Monza loads, he freezes—camera angle, corner, impact replayed in code. He drives it anyway, over and over, until the fear is background noise. On the final lap he whispers, “He’ll see me again.” Mateo doesn’t ask who.

At night, Hyuck watches F2 highlights. Mark on the podium again, eyes upturned toward a flag that isn’t quite triumph. The commentators say “Ardent’s golden boy continues his meteoric rise.” Hyuck mutes the volume. He whispers to the dark, “Meteoric means burning.”

When Sung brings his phone the next day, it’s full of unread messages. ‘You there?’ ‘Heard rehab’s going well.’ ‘Miss your noise in the paddock.’ ‘Call when you can.’ The most recent: ‘I’ll wait.’

Hyuck deletes none of them. He just scrolls back to the top and reads until his eyes sting. Then he locks the screen and starts another set of stretches. The muscles remember, even when the rest of him refuses to.

Later, he texts Mateo two words: ‘Find seat.’ The reply arrives ten minutes later. ‘You’re not ready.’

Hyuck smiles at the ceiling, small and mean. ‘Watch me.’

The narrator—whatever ghost still documents these lives—would tell you this is what determination looks like after heartbreak: not courage, not grace, but refusal. Blue flags are for yielding. Hyuck has forgotten the color.

Chapter Text

Everything But a Lover

Chapter 7: Parc Fermé

…

He learns to talk before he learns to sleep again. That’s how Grace puts it. “Talking is part of the job now,” she says, handing him a binder thicker than a manual. Media training. Brand alignment. Emotional resilience. He reads it like a penance.

She tests him in conference rooms that smell like new plastic and fear. “How does it feel to be in F2 so young?” He says, “It feels earned.” “How do you handle pressure?” He says, “I trust the process.” “How is Hyuck?” He blinks once, twice, and Grace cuts in before he can decide between truth and lie. “He’s not a current topic,” she tells them sweetly. He nods like obedience is oxygen.

After interviews he sits in the car with his helmet in his lap and his own voice echoing back. Every sentence sounds like someone else’s life. The press call him measured. They mean sedated.

Nights don’t end anymore; they fade out. Hotel rooms look identical except for the clocks. He lies in bed watching air-conditioning lights blink like pit limiters. His phone rests on the pillow because hope has terrible manners.

He texts Hyuck anyway. Small stuff. Track looks like ice today. Grace made me do eight takes of the same answer. Still hate sleep. He waits for the three dots that never arrive. He starts leaving voice notes instead because silence feels less like rejection when it’s his own voice bouncing back.

In the paddock he keeps catching glimpses of Hyuck like a glitch in the feed. Monza media day: a crowd splits and there he is—crutches, brace over jeans, smiling for someone else’s camera. Mark’s body forgets every rule Grace taught him. He takes one step forward before a hand lands on his arm.

“Not today,” Grace says softly. “He’s still in recovery. Optics.”

“It’s just a hello.”

“That’s the problem.”

Hyuck looks up then—through people, not at him. Still finds him. A tiny tilt of the chin. Then the moment passes. Crutches click on concrete. Grace guides Mark the other way. Every step feels like he’s leaving something unburied.

Later he watches the clip online. Caption: “Lee returns to paddock stronger than ever.” He pauses on the frame where their eyes almost meet and turns off the sound.

Germany. Austria. Belgium. He sees Hyuck again at each—rehab guest, team visitor, never rival. Once in an airport lounge Hyuck passes close enough that the air changes temperature. Mark opens his mouth. Grace is faster. “Don’t,” she says. “Every photo turns into a headline.” He nods and lets the moment rot.

He asks Sung for updates instead. Sung always sighs first. “He’s stubborn. But good. Getting stronger.” Jeno adds, “He hates you a little less on Tuesdays.” Jaemin says, “He still won’t say your name out loud.” Renjun texts a photo of Hyuck smiling with a caption: ‘rehab royalty.’ Chenle just writes: ‘don’t give up.’

He doesn’t. Every Friday he texts again. Sometimes just a lap time, sometimes nothing but a period. A heartbeat in digital form. He never gets one back.

Once, he shows up in person. Hyuck’s manager meets him in the lobby, smile tight. “Wrong timing, Mark-ssi.” Mark waits anyway until security politely asks him to leave. He sits in the car outside for an hour, watching windows, convinced Hyuck knows and is choosing not to look out.

Grace finds him later and says, “You can’t force forgiveness on a timeline.” He laughs, low. “Racing taught me the opposite.” She doesn’t argue.

By mid-season he’s the face of calm consistency. P3 in the standings. A poster boy for discipline. No one sees the coffee rings on his desk, the messages unsent at 4 a.m. He rehearses conversations under his breath in hotel mirrors. He hasn’t heard Hyuck’s voice in months and still knows exactly where to pause so he can reply.

One morning in Austria he passes a news crew interviewing Hyuck outside a simulator trailer. Hyuck laughs at something Sung says. Cameras flash. Mark stops just out of frame, hands shaking. Grace’s hand finds his elbow. “Keep walking.”

“He looked—”

“Better. That’s the point.”

He keeps walking. That night he dreams of the crutches clattering to the floor, of Hyuck standing without pain and without him.

By September he can tell the difference between cowardice and permission only by how it feels in his stomach. Grace calls it professional distance. He calls it weather. Still, he checks his phone every time a storm starts.

Night races are easier to love and harder to survive. The light pretends to be day; the body knows better. Everything runs too bright, too late. Singapore turns the paddock into a city inside a city—trucks and tents stacked like apartment blocks, air heavy enough to drink. Mark wears the heat like a wet jacket and keeps moving because stopping means thinking.

Grace does the rounds with him. Sponsor suite. Photo wall. Two interviews in a glass room where his reflection sits behind him trying to answer first. “How are you finding F2?” “Challenging, rewarding, a good step.” “Do you watch Hyuck’s rehab updates?” “I keep up with everyone’s progress.” The words have grooves now. He falls into them like ruts.

At midnight free practice, the car feels sticky, then skittish, then fine. He is fine. He repeats it twice on the cool-down lap when Luca asks. The track sparkles where it’s been washed; the painted lines glare up like warnings.

After debrief he showers in a room that smells like burnt hair and detergent. He stares at his hands under the dryer until the nerves settle. The phone buzzes once on the counter. Unknown number until it isn’t: Hyuck’s. The screen lights with an incoming call so sudden he forgets how to breathe.

He answers too late—thumb slipping, heart stalling. Missed call. The notification sits there, obscene in its simplicity.

He calls back immediately. Rings. Rings. Voicemail in a language that already knows him too well. He hangs up before the beep can record his breathing. A message arrives while he’s staring at the mirror: a single bubble.

Wrong timing. Sorry.

His legs try to go out from under him. He leans on the counter. He types, deletes, types again. Any timing is fine. Call back?

Nothing. He pulls on his hoodie and goes hunting for signal like it’s oxygen. The paddock at 2 a.m. is a movie set after the extras go home—cables coiled, lights buzzing, one security guard who looks like a confession. He walks past the simulator trailer where, weeks ago, he’d watched a laugh he wasn’t allowed to approach. He keeps walking until the fence that marks the edge of the world.

The phone buzzes. He flinches. Another message.

Can’t talk. Training early. Sleep.

He smiles, small and wrecked. He texts back, Hypocrite. Adds, after a beat he can’t justify, Miss your noise.

Three dots. They appear, vanish, appear again, like a tide he has no right to predict. Finally: Noise will return. Don’t get comfortable.

He exhales like someone handed him permission. Then he hates himself for needing it. He types, I can’t be comfortable when you were gone. He doesn’t send it. He pockets the phone and walks the perimeter of the service road like he can lap the emptiness and make it give him points.

Qualifying the next evening is ordinary until it isn’t. He turns in a banker lap, a push lap, a lap that should be good enough for the second row. The radio hisses with Luca’s calm, with Grace’s reminders, with his own breath shredding into the mic. He parks P4 when he knows there was a tenth left somewhere he didn’t let himself touch.

Back in hospitality, he stares at sparkling water until the bubbles die. Grace slides into the chair opposite with the look that means she’s about to hand him a script and ask him to bleed in the margins. “There’s a rumor Helios is testing Hyuck in the private sim after hours,” she says carefully. “Don’t engage if you see anything online.”

“I won’t.”

“And if you hear anything,” she adds, softer, “breathe before you act.”

He nods. He breathes. He does not act. He goes to the track walk like a person who believes in rituals. Under the floodlights the curbs look like ruins. He touches one with the toe of his shoe and thinks of rain on paint and a barrier that learned his name.

After midnight, his phone vibrates on the bed just as he’s nearly asleep behind a wall of exhaustion. A photo this time. Sneakers on a treadmill. Caption: Rehab royalty, as Ren would say.

He types, Send video so I know it’s not Sung faking your footwork. Deletes it. Tries again, smaller. Proud of you.

Minutes later: Don’t be. Do your job.

He laughs into the pillow because that’s exactly right and also because it’s him. He answers, I am. Stop reading my lap times before bed.

Make them worth reading.

He sleeps like he lost a fight and woke up relieved anyway.

Race night. The city glows with expensive electricity. The track hums like a power plant. He launches clean, tucks into P3, manages tires with the patience he earns, not the patience people think he was born with. Pit window opens; strategy calls him in; he obeys; he comes out in traffic like a lesson he should have learned the first day he tried to drive away from himself.

In the closing laps the car in front weaves like it has promises to keep and no interest in ethics. He plans a pass, recalculates, abandons it, holds. The radio is oddly quiet. In his ear he hears an old note—someone not Luca—telling him to breathe between corners. He does, and the lap time answers with grace.

He takes P2 on the last lap with a move that will look easy on the broadcast and won’t be. When he parks in parc fermé, the victory photo of P1 is already being staged somewhere else. He sits in the car an extra second with the belts still tight and the lights too white. Then he gets out because that’s the job.

“How does it feel?” a mic asks before he’s even pulled the balaclava off.

“Like work,” he says. “Good work.” He would like to say: like the inside of a clock that finally remembered how to tick.

When he finally checks his phone, there’s a line from Hyuck waiting. Saw the pass. Still neat.

He types, Still noisy?

Noisier tomorrow.

He pockets the phone; his ribs feel less like a cage for once. He finds Grace by the media wall and she raises a brow that asks a thousand questions. “Later,” he tells her. She nods, and that is mercy, too.

On the cool-down bus to the hotel, Jeno and Jaemin throw commentary quotes at him in bad impressions until he swears revenge. Renjun and Chenle send edits before he’s showered. Ji writes a paragraph about brake temps; Sung adds a photo of a paper cup of espresso with the caption: fuel. The chat hums. He replies to everything. He doesn’t touch Hyuck’s thread. Not yet.

Later, out on the small metal balcony that pretends to be a view, he holds the phone like it might jump. The city breathes below him. He tries one last time, without a script. I wanted to come sooner. They wouldn’t let me. I should’ve ignored them. I’m sorry I didn’t. Tell me where to meet you and I’ll go.

The dots appear. Disappear. Return. The message he gets is short enough to tattoo. Stop asking permission. Suzuka. After quali. No cameras.

He closes his eyes, presses his forehead to the cool railing, and whispers something he won’t write down. The text his fingers type next is smaller than relief and bigger than hope. Okay.

He sleeps, finally, like the checkered flag means something besides ending a lap.

In the morning, the headlines don’t know any of this. They say: Lee P2, title bid alive. He lets them. Grace debriefs him on the flight with bullet points and a latte as if she can fortify him against himself. He nods at the notes, thanks her for the coffee, texts nothing to Hyuck for six hours on purpose because wanting should not be obvious if you can help it.

At the next connection, a single message waits. Bring your helmet. We might go karting after.

He laughs out loud in the boarding line. A businessman glances back, annoyed. Mark tips his head in apology and hides his grin in his shoulder. He taps out the only answer that fits in his chest without breaking it: Try me.

The narrator—dry, careful, difficult—would call this progress. Mark won’t call it anything yet. He will show up at Suzuka with clean gloves and a face he can breathe inside of. He will look for the shade behind hospitality where cameras forget to point. He will stop asking permission. The rest is weather, and they have always been good in the wet.

Chapter Text

Everything But a Lover

Chapter 8: Red Line

…

The last checkered flag falls like a curtain drawn too soon. Noise collapses into heartbeat, heartbeat into silence. Hyuck coasts through the cool-down lap grinning inside the helmet, wrist throbbing under tape, lungs full of the smell of victory and brake dust. The radio crackles—Mateo yelling, someone crying, someone singing off-key. He doesn’t hear the words, only the shape of relief.

Podium. Champagne. Cameras that can’t stop saying his name. He lets the noise happen around him; he has run out of resistance. The trophy feels heavier than it should. When he lifts it, the bandage flashes white under the lights like a secret half-kept.

Backstage he finds Mark leaning against the equipment crates, cap low, grin impossible to hide. For once there are no microphones, no Grace. Just air and the smell of burnt rubber.

“You did it,” Mark says.

“We did,” Hyuck answers. He means it. The first thing that isn’t a lie in months.

They talk low, fast, laughing at things that aren’t funny. When the door opens they separate out of habit, not shame. Later, in the hotel room they now book together without discussion, Mark tapes his wrist again, slower this time, the way you’d wrap a present. They fall asleep on opposite sides of the same bed, phones face-down, engines still humming behind their eyelids.

Morning brings a dozen interviews. Hyuck gives them everything he’s supposed to: resilience, teamwork, humility. The world eats it up. Between segments he texts Mark—coffee before flight?—and gets back a photo of an espresso already half-gone. Beneath it, too late. Beneath that, Ferrari tagged you, check it.

He opens the app. Jeno and Jaemin are standing on pit wall in matching red, arms thrown around each other, caption screaming in capital letters: OUR F2 CHAMPION 🏆💥 SEE YOU IN F1 KING LEE. The comments are chaos. Sung added three crown emojis. Ren and Chenle spammed flame icons. Mark just left a single checkered flag.

Hyuck laughs until the media handler stares. He shrugs, pockets the phone. The ache in his wrist is good pain—earned pain. He flexes it once more, feels something click back into place inside his chest.

Outside, the trucks load for winter break. Drivers drift toward flights, futures, factories. Sung claps his shoulder, says, “Next year’s going to be insane.” Hyuck nods. “Next year,” he says, watching Mark disappear through security with Grace already lecturing about schedule, “same grid.”

The team dinner is supposed to be formal. White tablecloths, photographers, too much champagne. By the third toast, formality has drowned in laughter. Someone plays music through a Bluetooth speaker; Sung and Ren start arguing about karaoke scores; Jeno and Jaemin are already half-standing on chairs, singing badly. Hyuck sits with his wrist in a brace and his heart still trying to understand silence.

Across the room Mark is talking to Grace, smiling the practiced smile that fools everyone but him. When their eyes meet across the table, something breaks open. They both look away too fast, like they’ve agreed to misremember it later.

After midnight the crowd thins. They walk back to the hotel together because neither knows how not to. The street smells like summer diesel and sweet bread. Mark carries both of their jackets without comment. Every step between them feels measured, mapped, inevitable.

In the elevator Hyuck catches their reflection in the mirrored wall—two boys with medals and exhaustion pretending they aren’t standing too close. He can hear the breath between words.

“You’re staring,” Mark says, voice soft enough to vanish.

“You like it,” Hyuck answers, and means it as a joke, except it isn’t. The doors open on their floor before anyone decides what that means.

They stop at Hyuck’s door first, because Grace insisted on different rooms, Mark hesitates. “You should rest,” he says. Hyuck’s keycard shakes once before it clicks. He turns, says without thinking, “Come in.”

Mark does. The room is too quiet; the air-con hums like a conscience. They sit on the edge of the bed, talking about nothing: the next season, the food, the absurdity of interviews. Words run out at the same time as courage. Hyuck looks down at their hands—close, not touching. Mark’s fingers twitch once, then stop. The next heartbeat decides for both of them.

The kiss is clumsy, heat and hesitation in equal measure. Hyuck tastes champagne and exhaustion. Mark pulls back first, eyes wide like he forgot how to blink. They breathe each other’s air until it hurts. No one says anything. The silence is full of the same noise they’ve been driving through for years.

He expects a joke, a retreat. None comes. Mark stands, mumbles something about early flights. The door shuts quietly. Hyuck sits there with the world still ringing inside his ribs.

They don’t talk about it the next day. Or the next. Messages stay normal—lap data, breakfast memes, half-finished thoughts. The subject burns a hole between them big enough to park a car in.

Three nights later, ‘logistics have them sharing a room’ they say—double booking, Grace unsure, everyone too tired to care. They end up on opposite beds scrolling through the same highlights, both pretending to watch interviews they’ve already memorized. Rain starts outside, soft and indecisive. Hyuck kills the light. The dark hums.

“Still awake?” Mark’s voice, low.

“No,” Hyuck says automatically, and Mark laughs—quiet, close. The mattress shifts. A hand finds his wrist in the dark, thumb brushing tape. The touch is question and answer both.

They meet halfway. The second kiss isn’t hesitant; it’s hungry and terrified. Heat climbs; the room disappears; restraint cracks like old paint. Mark’s breath catches against his mouth; Hyuck swallows it whole. Someone’s phone vibrates on the nightstand and neither of them cares.

When they finally stop, it’s because oxygen insists. They stay close enough to share the same breath, eyes open, unspeaking. Hyuck traces the edge of Mark’s jaw with a knuckle. Mark whispers, “We shouldn’t.” Hyuck answers, “We already did.”

They fall asleep tangled, clothes half-askew, the world’s noise finally turned off. In the morning, they’ll be the same boys packing for different flights, the same jokes, the same press smiles. Only the silence between them will have changed shape—less empty, more dangerous.

For now, they assume, that’s enough.

…

It should have been simple the next morning. Coffee, flight, distance—reset. But nothing feels simple after the line is crossed. Hyuck sits in the back of the van, sunglasses on, window open just enough to let the wind hit his face and erase thought. The others talk about holiday plans: Jaemin going home to Seoul, Ren and Chenle heading for Tokyo, Sung planning to ski and break something important. Mark says nothing, eyes on his phone, thumb tapping the same screen too long. When the van stops at the airport, Hyuck reaches for his own bag, but Mark is already carrying it. The handles brush. It feels like static.

Security lines move too fast. Grace’s voice is a constant undercurrent—tickets, documents, call times for next week’s promo shoot. Hyuck follows instructions like a sleepwalker. He keeps expecting Mark to look back. He doesn’t. At the gate, Grace says, “See you in January,” and Mark says, “Yeah,” and that’s it. A year of everything ending on a word that small.

The off-season eats its own tail. Hyuck sleeps in four cities, trains until his shoulder protests, lets his phone die on purpose. Every time he wakes up, he reaches for a message that isn’t there. The wrist heals; the rest doesn’t. His mother asks why he looks tired; he says jet lag. His friends send memes; he replies with emojis that lie. Only Jeno notices the shape of silence and asks if something’s wrong. Hyuck shrugs it off. “Nothing’s wrong. Just bored.” The words taste too clean.

Mark’s face keeps showing up anyway—press clips, photo ops, even dreams that start with engine noise and end with a door closing. Once, Hyuck catches a video of Mark laughing with the Ferrari crew, head thrown back, the kind of joy he used to aim for. He clicks it off fast and stares at the blank screen until it blurs.

Weeks later, the universe reroutes itself. Team briefings start again. Flights booked. Media schedules stacked. Hyuck checks in at the hotel and finds a key packet waiting with his name and a note scrawled by the receptionist: *shared room confirmed per manager Grace.* He laughs once, quiet. Of course.

The door clicks open to the sound of running water. Mark’s bag sits by the bed, his jacket draped over a chair. Hyuck drops his own luggage carefully, as if the sound might break something already fragile. When Mark steps out, towel around his neck, he freezes. They stare at each other like ghosts who forgot which one died.

“Didn’t think it’d be you,” Mark says finally.

“Me neither.”

They dance around logistics—left side, right side, early meetings, alarms. The air never cools down. When Hyuck changes into a shirt, Mark turns away too late. When Mark laughs at something on TV, Hyuck’s chest pulls like a stitch. They talk until they shouldn’t. It feels like standing on the edge of a track, waiting for the lights.

Later, Hyuck lies awake, ceiling painted with streetlight gold. Mark’s breathing evens out a few feet away. The gap between beds feels wider than an ocean and smaller than a thought. Hyuck counts heartbeats, tries to fall asleep in the rhythm. It doesn’t work. Eventually, he gives up and whispers, “Still awake?”

Mark turns toward him. The sound of sheets moving is louder than words. “Yeah.”

“We’re idiots.”

“Yeah.”

They laugh, quietly, because anything else would hurt worse. Silence fills in the cracks until Hyuck can’t tell where one heartbeat ends and the next begins. He rolls onto his side. Mark does the same. The distance shortens. Neither closes it. Not yet.

In the morning they’ll go to the circuit, pretend nothing happened, rebuild the armor for cameras that never sleep. But for now—just for now—they let the truth breathe between them, raw and wordless, the way it always wanted to. The city hums outside, engines whispering down empty roads, and Hyuck thinks maybe this is what it feels like when a finish line turns into a beginning.

Now this is actually enough.

Chapter Text

Everything But a Lover

Chapter 9 — Ignition Sequence

…

They both look older under the paddock lights, which is saying nothing and everything. Hyuck’s jaw is sharper; Mark’s eyes have learned not to blink when flashbulbs go off. Red Bull uniforms fit like second skins. Two F1 rookies with identical smiles and entirely different reasons for wearing them.

Grace calls it symmetry. The engineers call it suicide. The fans call it destiny, hashtag included.

At the unveiling the car gleams matte navy and violence. Cameras chase sound bites. “Two of the youngest on the grid,” someone says. “Old rivalry renewed.” Mark and Hyuck stand shoulder to shoulder, microphones reflecting off mirrored visors. Don’t look at him, Mark repeats inside his head. Hyuck looks anyway.

Backstage, Jeno in Ferrari red grins. “Can’t believe they actually paired you.” Jaemin adds, “We started a betting pool. Who crashes first, who kisses first.” Grace glares; they laugh harder. Hyuck rolls his eyes. “You’ll lose money.” Mark mutters with a chuckle, “They already lost.” The pair share a glance worth a thousand headlines.

Pre-season testing in Bahrain burns like noon in purgatory. Thirty-five degrees before breakfast. Hyuck drives first; Mark watches from the pit wall, helmet under arm, pretending the sight doesn’t pull him forward. Data screens bloom with telemetry. Engineers whisper odds. “Two-tenths faster than Lee.” “Wait till he runs softs.” Grace folds her arms like prayer.

When Mark climbs in, Hyuck stays to watch. Mutual torture. He tells himself it’s reconnaissance. The car screams out of pit lane; timing boards flash green. Over radio: “Good entry, keep it tidy.” He does. The lap ends a breath slower than Hyuck’s best. He exits the car smiling, sweat slick and fake casual. Hyuck tosses him a water bottle without looking. Their fingers graze plastic and skin. Engineers pretend not to notice.

Hotel rooms are double-booked “by error.” Grace claims budget; everyone else knows better. Two single beds, one AC unit, one long silence punctured only by phones charging. Mark works on debrief notes; Hyuck scrolls through telemetry like scripture. “You brake early,” Hyuck says. “You oversteer everything,” Mark answers. “I win.” “You got lucky.” They keep talking until the edge dulls enough for laughter. Neither admits the comfort.

The season opener arrives like a gunshot. Grid formation glows under floodlights. Ferrari twins in scarlet two rows up. Mercedes silver behind them—Sungchan, fresh rookie, smile bright enough to start a war. He waves across the paddock at Hyuck, and Mark’s jaw tightens hard enough to creak. Grace notices, sighs quietly, marks a note for later.

Five red lights. Off.

Wheelspin, noise, dust. Hyuck squeezes through Turn 1 on the outside of Jaemin, audacious, beautiful. Mark tucks right behind, finds grip where physics says no. Lap 5: they trade fastest laps. Lap 9: engineers start muttering about fuel modes. Lap 17: Sung dives at Hyuck’s gearbox, backs out. Mark’s radio clicks with Luca’s dry humor: “Calm head, please.” Mark answers, “I’m always calm.” Lies, again.

By Lap 52, chaos. Safety car, then restart. Hyuck launches clean; Jeno and Mark fight through Turn 10, side-by-side until the curbs throw sparks. Hyuck crosses the line P2 behind Jeno; Mark P3; Sungchan P4; Jaemin P5. Top five under twenty-five. The commentators can’t shut up about it.

Parc fermé is heat shimmer and breathing exercises. Helmets off. Sweat running down necks. Hyuck half-laughs, half-gasps, “You nearly clipped me in six.” Mark hands him a water bottle, fingers brushing again, deliberate this time. “You’d have deserved it.” Hyuck drinks anyway. The cameras catch it. Twitter explodes within minutes.

Cooling room: glass walls, too many microphones outside. Jeno sprawls on a bench, Jaemin flicking water at him. Sung leans against the wall, still in silver, grinning at Hyuck. “Hell of a debut.” Mark answers before Hyuck can. “He knows.” Sung’s grin widens. “Maybe I’ll remind him on track.” The temperature drops by ten degrees without help from air-con. Jeno murmurs, “And the plot thickens.”

Press later calls it the new golden generation. Headlines: ‘Rookie Rivals Set Grid Ablaze.’ Photos: Red Bull boys too close in the paddock, Sung in the background looking inconveniently angelic. Grace fields questions with lethal charm. “They’re teammates, no drama.” Everyone pretends to believe her.

In the group chat born that night—newly titled “Young Guns” because Chen insisted—Jeno sends the podium selfie. Caption: ‘Under 25 club supremacy.’ Jaemin adds: ‘Next round on me if no one crashes.’ Sung: ‘Define crash.’ Hyuck: ‘Shut up and rest your neck.’ Mark: ‘Seconded.’ Chenle: ‘Are you two fighting or flirting?’ Jisung: ‘Yes.’ Eight unread messages later, Hyuck texts Mark privately: ‘Nice defense today.’ Mark replies: ‘You left space.’ Hyuck: ‘Always will.’ The typing bubble lingers, then dies.

That night they share a hotel room again—sponsorship logistics, Grace says, eyes too knowing. The air smells like champagne and desert rain. Hyuck sits cross-legged on the bed rewatching the start lights. Mark leans against the window, city reflected in his visor glass from the helmet on the sill. Neither speaks until the silence turns physical.

“You’re not sleeping,” Mark says.

“Neither are you.”

They both laugh, tired and honest. It feels like practice laps—dangerous because it’s safe.

When lights go out for the next round, they’ll do it all again. Engineers will keep betting on who cracks first. Fans will keep drawing hearts over slow-motion footage. Grace will keep pretending she doesn’t notice. Hyuck will still tape his wrist before every race. Mark will still reach for the same bottle after every finish, fingers brushing plastic and skin, ritual disguised as accident.

Some stories don’t restart. They loop.

Chapter Text

Everything But a Lover

Chapter 10 — Crossfire

…

The morning after media day starts with everyone pretending they slept. They didn’t. The hotel breakfast room hums like a pit lane—plates, cups, voices layered into a noise you can mistake for calm if you want to lie.

Hyuck gets there late, sunglasses, hoodie, wrist taped under the cuff because habit is religion. Mark’s already at the corner table with Grace, flipping through a laminated schedule like it wronged him personally. He doesn’t look up when Hyuck arrives; then he does. It’s half a second of recognition and then both of them ruin it by acting normal.

“Coffee?” Mark asks, casual to the point of parody.

“Food first,” Hyuck says, piling eggs he won’t finish. He sits opposite, too far and not enough. The table is an interview desk; the silence is its host.

Jeno and Jaemin arrive in a gust of red and mischief. Jeno throws a napkin at Mark’s head; Jaemin plucks it midair without looking. “Married couple reflexes,” Jaemin announces to the room. “We should study you for science.”

“We’re studying you for tax fraud,” Mark says mildly. Jeno hoots; Jaemin hand-over-heart gasps. “I am a good and honest citizen.”

“You’re a Ferrari driver. Those are different species,” Hyuck says, sipping coffee he doesn’t taste. He means to smile. He doesn’t. It lands like a twitch.

The McLaren twins—Renjun and Chenle—slide in with plates balanced like a magic trick. “We have a theory,” Chenle says. “Statistically, after media day, one of you will say something insane before noon.”

“Define insane,” Ren says, already typing. “I’m drafting the post.”

“No drafting,” Grace says without looking up. “If you post anything, I fall down dead.”

Ji appears like a polite jump scare, hair perfect, camera in hand. “Vlog segment? Ten seconds. Say something inspirational.”

“Drink water,” Mark says.

“Don’t die,” Hyuck adds.

“Ah, deeply original,” Ji mutters, smiling anyway. His camera catches them both in one frame, fidgeting with identical spoons. Later, when he edits, he’ll notice the micro-inclinations—the way Mark’s shoe points toward Hyuck; the way Hyuck’s elbow angles toward Mark’s plate as if he’s about to steal a bite.

Sung barrels in last, Mercedes silver a mirror for the room. He’s sunshine in a jacket that cost too much. He drops into the seat between Hyuck and Jeno, grins wide. “Who else is excited to witness history?”

“Which history?” Jaemin asks. “The podium or the part where our PR handlers unionize?”

“Both,” Sung says, earnest. Then to Hyuck, softer: “Sleep?”

“Like a rock that hates itself,” Hyuck says. Sung laughs like that’s charming. Mark’s fork pauses for half a beat. Jeno and Jaemin notice. Of course they do.

“So,” Chen says brightly, “the gaze-o-meter from yesterday—off the charts. New record.”

“I didn’t look at anyone,” Mark says.

“He looked at everyone,” Hyuck says, trying to shove levity into the gears. “Equal opportunity objectifier.”

“Retaliatory slander,” Mark says, finally smiling in a way that looks like him. Jeno and Jaemin exchange the look they reserve for oh, it’s happening. Ren elbow-nudges Chenle; Chenle writes Episode title: We’re Fine (They’re Not) in his notes app with the gravity of a court stenographer.

Grace stands. “Call times in ten. Wear faces I can show to sponsors.” She taps the table twice. “And—no unscripted comments about each other’s eyes.”

“That’s very specific,” Jaemin observes. “And therefore very real.”

“I said what I said,” Grace replies, pointing at Mark, then at Hyuck. “Behave.”

They try. They fail spectacularly. On the way out, a photographer asks for a candid. Hyuck moves instinctively into Mark’s orbit; Mark doesn’t step away. The photo looks accidental and isn’t at all. Jeno whistles. Sung makes a heart with his fingers behind them in the shot. Chenle cackles and then claims innocence. Ji records five seconds of B-roll he won’t be allowed to post and stores it in a folder called for later.

“You’re staring,” Mark says when they’re finally alone for fourteen seconds waiting for the elevator.

“You like it,” Hyuck murmurs.

“You can’t keep daring me on camera,” Mark replies. The elevator arrives. Two other guests get in with them; the conversation turns into breathing until the lobby spits them all into press again.

Monaco is a mirror held too close to your face. Everything is glamorous from four feet away and brutal at forty centimeters. Quali sweats against stone walls. Hyuck P4 after a razor lap he will replay in his skull until spring; Mark P6 after traffic and a mistake he pretends isn’t on him. Sung parks P8 and apologizes to his engineer for being mortal.

Evening crawls in by yacht. The friend group disperses—Ferrari to a sponsor dinner, McLaren to content, Mercedes to sim work. The balcony attached to the Red Bull rooms faces the city like a dare. Mark’s already out there when Hyuck steps through the sliding door. The sea air tastes like money and old stone.

They stand shoulder to shoulder, not touching, the length of a water bottle apart.

“You can’t keep looking at me like that on camera,” Hyuck says to the lights, not to Mark.

“Then win faster,” Mark says, still looking at the lights.

Hyuck huffs. “I am winning fast. You’re watching slow.”

Mark turns then. The look is a scalpel. “I’m watching you give away pieces of yourself because you think the car deserves blood.”

“It does,” Hyuck says simply.

“Not that blood.”

Silence keels between them. Below: horns, shouts, the champagne pop of a life neither of them lives except on camera. Above: nothing but two boys too good at pretending.

“I keep thinking we’re better at this now,” Hyuck says. “Then you stare like you want to dismantle me in parc fermé.”

“I stare like I want to know if you’re still there,” Mark says. “Inside the noise.”

“I’m here.” He taps his taped wrist. “I’m always here.”

Mark’s laugh is small and mean to himself. “That’s the problem. You’re always here for everyone.”

Hyuck faces him fully. “Say what you mean.”

“Don’t make me.”

“Make yourself.”

They hold it until it breaks. The argument tips into something heavier—not louder, just denser. They volley truths like they’re checking car balance.

“Stop driving like you expect me to forgive you,” Hyuck says.

“Stop needing me to not,” Mark fires back.

“Stop looking at me in the cool-down room like a secret,” Hyuck pushes.

“Stop being one,” Mark admits.

The air shifts. Monaco hushes for them, or they stop hearing it. Hyuck steps forward; Mark doesn’t step back. They’re close enough for the mistakes to be visible.

“We’re not good at normal,” Mark says, quiet, even. “We tried. We fail.”

“We’re excellent at failing normal,” Hyuck agrees. “We could win at it.” The joke works as a fuse. They both let it burn down.

“If we do this,” Mark says, “no half-saying.”

“If we do this,” Hyuck says, “no pretending it doesn’t count.”

So they stop pretending. The kiss lands honest and hungry, the kind you don’t apologize for later because apologizing would be lying. Mark kisses like a plan executed; Hyuck kisses like a plan made up in a corner at speed. They break apart once, breathing hard, eyes open.

“Room,” Mark says.

“Yes,” Hyuck says.

They don’t slam the door because drama is public, not private. Inside: a room the size of someone else’s salary and a bed that finally makes sense. They are careful and uncareful in equal measure. It’s hands on jaw, breath against throat, the laugh Hyuck only gives to one person when he’s startled by joy. Mark’s fingers shake on the tape at Hyuck’s wrist; Hyuck takes his hand, steadies it. They talk between kisses like they forgot not to.

“Okay?” Mark asks.

“Now,” Hyuck answers.

“Now,” Mark echoes.

When the world narrows to skin and heat and the decision to be here fully, Hyuck thinks, stupidly, finally. Fade—because the camera blinks; because not everything belongs to the sponsor reel; because the point isn’t geography, it’s mercy.

They fall asleep facing each other, not touching. Then they touch anyway, an inch of knuckles in the dark like a signature.

The season tilts golden after that. Not easy—never that—but held together by a string only they can see. Wheel-to-wheel becomes choreography. They inhale each other’s exhaust and call it oxygen. Podiums stack like promises. Sung gets a maiden P3 and insists on hugging both of them; Mark tolerates it like someone enduring necessary medical treatment. Jeno and Jaemin alternate between clowning and clapping, sometimes both at once. The McLaren twins make edits with bashful sincerity and then pretend they’re ironic.

At Zandvoort they thread a restart like needlework and finish P2/P3. In the cool-down room Hyuck drops into the chair like a collapsed kite; Mark nudges a water bottle into his hand, fingers grazing just long enough to set rumor mills turning. Grace sighs in five languages and drafts counter-messaging no one reads.

They keep sharing rooms when logistics allow. It stops being weird. It becomes a fact: two alarm clocks timed to the same paranoia; two pairs of shoes at the door; a balcony that remembers arguments and ignores them. They don’t label it. They don’t need to. They’re too tired to lie and not tired enough to stop.

Season finale: lights, noise, heat. Ferrari P1 (Jeno, unstoppable), Hyuck P2, Mark P3. Sung P4, happy like a kid who found out candy is a renewable resource. The podium is a choir. The broadcast calls them a generation. Backstage Mark and Hyuck collide in a hug that looks like a team gesture and feels like a private oath.

“Next year,” Mark says into Hyuck’s shoulder.

“Next year,” Hyuck answers at Mark’s ear.

The cameras miss the words and catch everything else.

The off-season call comes wrapped in politeness and power. Helios marketing, Red Bull PR, a brand consultant who uses the word authenticity like it’s on sale. Hyuck sits in a glass room swallowing sun and fear. A deck appears: notable increases in engagement, appetite for access, the need for narrative structure.

They propose a solution like it isn’t a problem. Public softness, curated domesticity, a pairing with someone the world already loves. Her name is Soojin. She is a chaebol idol with a profile like a marketing render and a fanbase large enough to colonize a small moon. She is trained to be charming in twelve markets. She beams from the slide with a smile that says nonthreatening.

“It’s optics,” the consultant says. “You remain in control.”

“We will set boundaries,” PR adds. “No compromising content, just glimpses.”

Hyuck asks the only question he can stand to hear out loud. “How long?”

“One quarter,” marketing says. “Extendable.” They say it like a warranty.

He argues. They applaud his principles. He asks what happens if he refuses. They show him numbers and then a version of the future where he is less. He knows the game. He plays it. He says he’ll think about it and goes back to the hotel feeling like he’s carrying something he doesn’t want to put down.

Mark’s name lights his phone while he stands in the elevator. He doesn’t answer in a box with cameras. By the time he reaches the room, the internet is already ahead: blurry photos of a studio exit, a caption with both their names and the word rumored in font size thirty. The tags are a riot. Hyuck stares until the words flatten.

He calls Mark. It goes to voicemail. He texts instead: It’s not real. Can we talk?

No response. He texts again: Tonight?

Grace replies from Mark’s phone two minutes later: He’s in debrief. He saw the posts. Give it a day.

Give it a day feels like get out.

They stop rooming together per Mark’s request—Grace’s phrasing, clipped. Logistics “change.” Rooms reassign. Keys don’t share hooks anymore. The absence is loud. Hyuck showers and hears someone else breathing in the echo and has to turn the water off to stop imagining it.

The group fractures not with drama but with migration. Jeno leans Mark’s way, even though Jaemin is Hyuck’s shadow. Ren and Chen plant themselves beside Mark with smoothie bribes and weaponized memes. Sung splits the difference but spends more time with Hyuck, oblivious, kind, saying things like this will blow over with terrifying confidence. Jisung, all gentleness, sits beside Hyuck in hospitality and asks if he wants to be in a vlog about resilience; Hyuck says no and Ji squeezes his shoulder anyway.

The fans notice what they always do. Threads bloom with screenshots, elbow room distances, smile angles. Edits turn bitter; some turn protective. Grace’s email triples overnight. She triages, extinguishes, chooses which fires can burn.

Media day again, different city, same fluorescent doubt. The pair interviews are professional theater. “How is the dynamic in the team?” “Strong.” “Are you two as close as you were in juniors?” “We’re teammates first.” The jabs are subtle. The smiles are the expensive kind. Chen watches from the back, whisper-narrating to Renjun like a nature documentary. Jeno taps his pen against his knee in a metronome of worry; Jaemin keeps looking at Hyuck with an expression that is complicated even for him.

Training days go worse. The yelling happens off camera because they’re not stupid. It starts with brake points and ends with everything they’re not naming.

“You don’t tell me things until the internet does,” Mark says in the gym hallway, voice low and lethal.

“I tried,” Hyuck says. “It was already out.”

“You tried after,” Mark says. “You keep doing that.”

“I keep racing,” Hyuck says, like it might defend him. “This is part of—”

“No,” Mark says. “This isn’t racing.” He leaves before he says the rest. Hyuck doesn’t follow because he has learned when following turns the knife.

At a group outing that someone’s agent insists is “good optics,” they stand on opposite sides of a too-shiny room while cameras harvest their faces. Soojin arrives later and hangs her coat on an apology none of them will accept. She is, to her credit, kind to everyone and careful with Hyuck. When a reporter asks if they’re dating, she defers perfectly: “We’re friends.” The word clips. The internet trims it anyway.

Back in the paddock, Sung walks with Hyuck to pit lane and says, “This sucks,” with the sincerity of a man who believes admitting a problem helps. Hyuck almost laughs. “You think?” Sung’s hand brushes his arm in a way that would be nothing if the world weren’t watching. Mark sees it from thirty meters, jaw hardening like stone under climate change.

That night, after a day of overdosed professionalism, Hyuck texts Mark: Please. Let me explain without handlers.

Minutes pass. A reply arrives like a door opened and then caught. Explain to the person you’re dating on paper. Leave me off the call sheet.

He stands on the balcony with a city breathing under him and writes a dozen messages in the notes app. He sends none. A helicopter cuts a line across the dark, red light blinking like a metronome keeping time for the building soreness in his chest. He practices the apology anyway. He is not good at practice unless it involves tires and physics and a finish line.

The season staggers forward. They race clean. They give quotes clean. They hold the car between the white lines and do not ping-pong into disaster. On Sundays, they still finish within seconds of each other. On Mondays, they sit in different chairs for debrief. On Wednesdays, someone leaks another photo of Hyuck “out with” Soojin and the comments mention Mark’s name like a banned substance.

In the “Young Guns” chat, the noise doesn’t die so much as it changes pitch. Jeno asks if anyone’s seen the new tire blanket regs chart; Jaemin posts photos from a Ferrari factory tour and writes family dinner if the children behave. Renjun lectures about the weather and Chen send racing memes subtitled in compassion. Jisung shares a video of a kitten falling asleep in a shoe. Sung types and deletes six times, then sends a sticker of a cartoon cloud with a bandage on it. Hyuck hearts it. Mark doesn’t react.

When Hyuck finally sees Mark alone again, it’s by accident—service corridor, night air, the sound of ice in a bucket from hospitality. They stop because not stopping would require a different man in each of their bodies.

“I hate this,” Hyuck says, low.

“Then stop doing it,” Mark says, lower.

“It’s three months,” Hyuck says, as if time ever solved anything by itself. “Then it’s over.”

“It’s not over,” Mark says. “You’re teaching people what to think about us.”

“I’m keeping the team happy,” Hyuck says. “I’m keeping the future from shrinking.”

“You’re shrinking me,” Mark says, and it’s almost too quiet to hear over the cooler’s hum.

They stare long enough for the silence to become evidence. Then footsteps echo; a comms intern rounds the corner, sees too much, sees nothing, keeps walking. They step apart on instinct.

“We’ll race tomorrow,” Hyuck says. It lands like we breathe tomorrow. Which is both true and useless.

“We always do,” Mark says. Which is both a blessing and a sentence.

Race day gives them the only ending they can access: competence. They go wheel-to-wheel once with care so sharp it cuts the cameras, and they finish P2/P3 behind Jeno like a punchline and proof. In parc fermé they manage a shoulder knock that the world will read as team spirit and that their friends will read as grief.

The season ends on the books as a success. It ends in their bones like a question. The gala after is gold and noise; the smiles are bright enough to rewrite the narrative if you squint. The Ferrari twins show up in tuxes that break the internet; the McLaren twins arrive in papaya satin and menace; Ji takes photos that make everyone look softer than they felt. Sung catches Hyuck by the drinks table, squeezes his shoulder, says, “Next year will be better.”

“It will be more,” Hyuck says. It’s the same thing if you’re not careful.

Across the room, Mark laughs at something Renjun says and looks at Hyuck like he’s teaching himself to see less. Jeno sees it and looks away, jaw tight; Jaemin doesn’t. The group swirls and reforms like weather systems. Grace watches the room as if she can hold a wall up by sight alone.

Later, when the night is thinner and the noise has migrated to taxis and after-parties, Hyuck steps outside. The air is cold enough to be honest. His phone buzzes with a tag—Ferrari twins posted him again: To our rival who makes us better. Beneath, a thousand comments arguing about what better means. He types one message he will delete and one he will send.

The unsent: I didn’t choose this instead of you.

The sent, to the “Young Guns” chat: Next year, same grid.

Mark hearts it. Then adds nothing. It’s everything.

Chapter Text

Everything But a Lover

Chapter 11 — Redflag

…

Mark POV

Champagne burns in my throat and I smile like it doesn’t. The podium lights are hot; the anthem is a drill through bone. Camera flashes carve the air into slices I can’t swallow. Jeno hoists his trophy like it weighs nothing; Hyuck’s grin looks real from three angles and mine photographs fine from none. I know this because the media wall will tell me in an hour, and the comments will be accurate: he glows; I glint.

“Back-to-back one-two for the team,” the interviewer says. “How does it feel to be the most dominant pairing on the grid?”

“Like the work’s working,” I say. “We’re not done.” I sound calm. I’m not.

“Hyuck, you and Mark—still pushing each other?”

Hyuck nods. “Every corner,” he says. He’s good at this. He always has been—clean eyes, edges hidden. He adds, “He keeps me honest.”

“And you?” The mic tilts back to me.

“He keeps me busy,” I say. The room laughs. I drink water like penance.

We do it three more times for three more outlets and I stack answers in my mouth like coins. Grace is somewhere just beyond my peripheral, willing my body language to behave. I am behaving. That’s the problem. I’m precise and polite and my heart rate is still at restart pace.

“You two have a… lively dynamic,” a reporter says. It’s euphemism with eyeliner. “How would you describe it?”

“Functional,” I say.

Hyuck glances at me. “Fun,” he says.

Someone will cut those together and call it proof. Someone always does.

Back in hospitality, the air smells like sugar and brake dust. I strip out of the suit in one practiced line and sit on the floor with my head against the locker because vertical feels like a lie. The flip in my stomach that used to be joy is static now; it fizzes and fades and comes back when I try to breathe slow.

“Good job,” Luca says, passing me a bottle. “Good restraint.”

“Thanks.” My voice has sand in it. “Next time I pass him earlier.”

“Next time you pass him wiser.” He squints at me. “Eat something.”

I say yes. I don’t. The chat is already buzzing—Ren and Chen posting edits in papaya-colored font, Jeno writing never bet against youth with a red dot that means victory, Jaemin adding a photo that proves bone structure is a sport. Sung sends a voice note that sounds like sunshine; I don’t open it. Hyuck texts me a single checkered flag. I stare at the icon like it’s a hallway with a door I know the shape of, then put the phone face-down because I won’t be the person who answers first.

Night falls like the paddock folded itself up and put the stars on top by accident. I shower too hot and come out too cold, sit on the hotel bed with a towel around my shoulders and the city in the window. My body buzzes. The doctor calls it adrenaline bleed. It feels like failing to land from a jump that didn’t have ground under it to begin with.

Hyuck’s room is three doors down tonight and I don’t knock. Not since the logistics changed. I can hear laughing faintly through the corridor anyway—PR people and a voice I know without wanting to: Soojin. She is perfectly nice and perfectly permanent for a thing that was supposed to be three months long. It’s six now, “due to momentum,” which is what people say when consent has a spreadsheet.

He brings her everywhere. Grid walks, press pens, sponsor suites, photos that look like love from far enough away. When she’s not there, he laughs with Sung in corners like air chose Hyuck’s cheekbones as a reflective surface. Ji defends him on camera with so much kindness it almost works; Jaemin defends him by starting fights with the internet; Jeno stops answering my late texts as fast as he used to. Renjun and Chenle move closer to me like their chairs have wheels. Nothing is wrong and nothing is fine.

I train. Harder, longer, like being tired on purpose is better than being tired by accident. Coach says, “Recovery matters, Mark.” I nod. Then I put another twenty minutes on the bike because the ache quiets my head for exactly twenty minutes and I’m greedy for silence. When the head noise comes back, I run. When running fails, I leave the hotel with a hood up and a name I don’t keep in the morning. The rooms are identical in every city—blue light, sheets that smell like detergent, laughter that isn’t ours. I don’t look in mirrors. I don’t kiss people hello. I don’t stay. It doesn’t help. I do it anyway.

After the third back-to-back one-two, the press conferences taste meaner. “Mark,” someone says, “do you feel overshadowed by Hyuck’s media profile? He’s seemingly everywhere these days.”

“He’s fast,” I say. “Cameras like speed.”

“Is it distracting? The girlfriend on the grid, the brand campaigns?”

Grace steps in. “No personal questions.” She’s about to keep talking; I talk faster.

“We all do what the job asks us to,” I say. “Some of us do extra credit.”

The room laughs again, but differently, and my stomach turns because I hear myself and I don’t like the person with my voice. Hyuck looks at me once, sharp. Later he texts, don’t. I put the phone away and go lift until my arms float.

Sleep tightens like a wire pulled past safe. I stop opening hotel windows because the night air makes the floor tilt. One morning I realize I haven’t listened to music in a week; I forgot to want melody. When I think about wanting at all, I see Hyuck’s wrist tape and my mouth hurts. I bite inside my cheek and the metallic taste returns me to the present: sugar and metal and sound, the holy trinity of this life.

Interview, Thursday. “You and Hyuck—still friendly?”

“Define friendly.” I don’t smile this time.

“In the cool-down rooms you—there’s… chemistry,” he says, emboldened by his own narrative. “Fans want to know if—”

“Fans want to win,” I say. “So do we.”

He blinks. He adjusts his mic. “Are you happy?” It’s a stupid question in a bad place and I hate that it lands like a knife anyway.

“I’m fast,” I say. It’s not an answer. It’s the only one I can afford in public.

Hyuck brings Soojin to that evening’s walk through hospitality. She wears a jacket I could never afford, smiles like a promise I was never offered, tells a camera she loves hardworking people and fast cars and I want to throw something into the sea where it will sink without a sound. Sung bumps my shoulder and says, “You good?” and I say, “Always,” and he believes me because he is built to believe in morning.

Friday practice is fine until it isn’t. My delta hovers a tenth down on Hyuck through the middle sector and a tenth is a mile with a haircut. Luca says, “Back it out. We build for Saturday.” I say, “Copy,” and don’t. I chase purple. I over-drive by two percentage points and the car tells me politely to stop. I don’t. Sector three is a conversation with the rear that almost works. In the garage, I pull my balaclava off too fast and the world goes glittering at the edges.

“Food,” Luca says. “Now.”

I eat an energy bar like a punishment. It tastes like cardboard and virtue. I hate both.

Back at the hotel I shower twice like I can reset nervous systems with water pressure. Someone texts me hi and I answer with a room number and a time and when the knock comes I open the door and the face is new and kind and that makes it worse. It’s always worse when people are kind. The rest is breath and skin and nothing I’ll keep. I don’t look them in the eye; I don’t pretend I’m here for anything else. Later, I sit on the floor where the light doesn’t reach, breathing like the fire alarm could go off if I do it wrong.

Sugar. Metal. Sound. I hold those three things until the shape of this life returns. Then I sleep for two hours and dream of white lines.

Saturday quali: he’s P2; I’m P3. I’m not happy. The interviews want us to be adorable about it. “Front-row start for Donghyuck, you on the second, Mark—strategy for Turn 1?”

“Leave the car intact,” I say. “Win later.”

“Hyuck?”

“He’ll be there,” Hyuck says, and that sentence contains too many meanings to fit on TV. I see it in his face: he wants to say something else to me with no microphones. So do I. We don’t.

Night before the race I lace my shoes too tight and run the hotel stairwell until my legs remind me blood’s for living. I come down drenched, lungs burning, heart steadier, and yes I’m counting that as a win. A message from Jeno waits: do you need to talk or do you need me to bully you into sleeping. I type bully and then turn the phone face-down and do neither.

Race day breathes hot. The grid smells like rubber and nerves. On the formation lap I can feel the front wanting to knife, the rear wanting to argue, everything wanting to be asked nicely. I ask mean. Lights. Launch. Clutch bite just right; I cover inside into Turn 1, hold, hold, the car talks back in a language we’ve agreed to share. Hyuck ahead, Jeno ahead of him, the world narrowing to the inches between our choices.

Laps stack. Tires wear. Fuel delta whispers. We’re on for another podium—one-two-three if we don’t blink at the wrong moment. That’s when the trick rain arrives: not much, but enough in sector two to turn a curb into a dare. “Calm head,” Luca says. “Repeat. Calm head.”

“Copy,” I say, which means nothing when the part of me that wants quiet is losing to the part of me that wants proof. Hyuck’s taillights flash up the road like a metronome for my breathing. He’ll call it discipline. I call it distance. I take two tenths back through the high-speed left and think I’m a genius. The right-hander after laughs in my face.

Turn 8 asks for patience like a teacher who’s already moved on. I don’t give it enough. Wet curb, late throttle, a fraction too much steering lock because I’m aiming the car at a future I want to exist and the present declines. The rear steps. I catch the first step. The second step catches me.

Time slows. It always does when physics insists. The wall is a white sentence, straightforward and unkind. I brake into the slide and the car says, no. There’s a sideways glide that feels like confession, then the angle bites and the nose takes the hit and the screen goes bright with sparks. The sound is giant and then tiny. Heat roars up my calf where the tub complains about being metal in a fire’s world.

I try to speak and the mic turns my mouth into sand. I smell fuel. A bright hiss turns into a brighter bloom. The cockpit becomes a question I can’t answer. I think not like this and for a second the helmet presses inward like hands and then the world detaches from the idea of me. Vision tunnels; breath scratches; a red story opens. The marshal is a shape in heat. The halo is a friend I don’t deserve. I reach for the belt toggle and my fingers miss. My body tries to shake and my body decides against it.

Sound narrows to two things: the fire’s chew and the radio trying to be my name. My name is a code I’m not sure I remember. I blink. The light goes sideways. The heat gets teeth.

I’m gone before anyone else can get here. I don’t mean I die. I mean I slip. Something pulls. Then nothing pulls. Then a voice I know from before everything breaks in my ear, too close to be radio, saying something I can’t carry to where I’m going. I think it’s mine. I think it’s his. I think it says, *stay.*

The rest is not mine to tell.

Hyuck POV

The champagne from last week still lives under my tongue and I’m pretending it doesn’t while I sign a cap for a kid on the way to the grid. The kid’s hand shakes; I steady it with my palm and try to put my smile in the Sharpie. Soojin is perfect beside me, PR grace noted and notarized; when cameras swing I know which side to give. I choose the one that looks least like a lie. Sung wipes rain from his visor and tells me something cheerful about tire temps; I nod like optimism is transferable by language alone. Jaemin says, “Bring it home,” and I say, “Always,” and that used to be true.

Helmet on, world down. The visor drops and the air goes filtered—fuel and wet asphalt and detergent, the civilization of speed. Radio check, the ritual that proves I exist. “Box, confirm,” I say. “We have you,” Mateo answers, and I let the cord between us pull tight enough to hold me upright. Hands on the wheel, fingers doing the old piano. The car hums in the bone; the seat is a hand shaped to my back. Outside this bubble, the separation still gnaws and I still feed it quiet. Inside, there’s only counting: brake points, delta, breath.

We roll to the grid and I do not look left. That’s where he is, one row behind, the color I’ve been chasing since we had karts and borrowed courage. I can feel him like weather. I picture the thing I’m supposed to be with him now: professional. I don’t picture hotel rooms because we don’t share them. I don’t picture the balcony because we don’t stand there. I don’t picture the laugh he has when it’s only me because I haven’t earned it lately.

Lights. Launch. The first stint is math I can do in my sleep. The car is a promise kept; the track is an older promise broken and rebuilt; the radio is a string between me and the version of myself that doesn’t panic in public. Jeno ahead by a polite amount. Mark behind by an impolite one. He’s been breathing fire for weeks and I have been bringing water in a paper cup. The water helps no one. The fire keeps us alive until it doesn’t.

Corner one, two, three—switches flow under my thumb, muscle memory fused to carbon. The tires talk in vowels. I keep them in the window and the window keeps me. In my head there’s a second commentary track that never makes broadcast, the one that says don’t look in the mirrors for him like a boy looking for a summer that ended. I look anyway. He is there, a steady pulse of red. The pulse moves closer with every lap he decides not to be kind.

“Strat two,” Mateo says. I click it. The engine lengthens its sentences. “How’s balance?” “Settled,” I say. Truth: the rear is a rumor that could be a story if I get clever. I don’t get clever. Clever is how you crash when the car is begging for boring.

When the rain begins it’s an argument with a bad listener. Sector two slickens like someone spilled history. I change nothing because changing everything is how you spin. “Inters?” I ask. “Hold,” comes back. We hold. I take Turn 6 with mercy and Turn 7 with respect. I plan to take 8 with patience. Plans are jokes.

He’s closer. I can feel it in the way my mirrors become the size of knives. The thought tries to climb my throat: don’t chase me like this. I bite it before it makes air. What I say instead is, “Tell him to cool his tires.” Luca answers from the other side of a wall I can’t enter: “We only manage our driver, Hyuck.” Fair. I think, we only manage our lies, and breathe out slow to keep the cabin from shrinking.

The visor beads. I blink and the world streaks. Little adjustments—the kind that decide families and funerals. My wrist aches under tape, old scar tissue remembering its job. The hurt is distance measured honestly and I accept it. I do not accept the ache behind it: the four hotel doors, the text he didn’t answer, the way he looked through me last Tuesday like I was a press backdrop. I decided to be the one who could carry this, so I carry it. The carrying has a noise; it’s a thin metal squeal that no one else hears.

Turn 8. I take it two centimeters wide to leave him air he won’t take because he likes doorways more than doors. The curb shines wrong. My brain notes it the way people note the weather before a funeral: yes, and? The hands do their work, the car takes the set, and then behind me the ghost of his line reaches into my body like heat through glass. I can feel him aiming to close the story, to fold the margin into confession. Good. We race like this or we don’t race at all.

The lap board clicks down. The radio does breathing with me. I keep the throttle under my heel like it would run away if I were sloppy. I think of nothing. I think of everything. Soojin’s laugh from the grid walk floats up, frictionless and harmless, and I hate that harmless is what I asked for and it still damages. Sung’s shoulder bump in hospitality—innocent—felt like a spark in a dry room. He doesn’t mean it. I don’t mean it back. The cameras do.

“Good pace,” Mateo says. “Keep it smart.” The word smart snags in my teeth because the smart thing is to stop needing him to look at me the way he used to, and I have not achieved that. The need is a big animal sitting in the passenger seat; I pretend not to feel its weight. The car knows. It always does. If I drive with want, it steers me into debt. If I drive with work, it pays out. I pick work and hope want doesn’t call my bluff.

Two laps. Then one. Then zero—because time collapses into one bad moment when the rain deepens across the middle sector and the patchwork grip becomes religion. “Caution 8,” someone says. My foot loosens. My hands soften. The car agrees. The curb still shines wrong. I aim wide again, leave a door because I prefer his life to my trophy. The universe does not care what I prefer.

His car steps left. Correction—clean, competent. It steps again. That second step points him at the white sentence and I can hear my body do a thing I didn’t request—every tendon pulling in one direction: back. The hit is sideways and then forward. The sparks cut the air into a million useless suns. The hiss becomes flame like it always would in a story you tell people not to scare them but to make them drive better.

“Red flag red flag red flag.” Words, not meaning. The meaning is heat. My hands are already moving. “Stay out,” they say. I don’t. The line between orders and vows breaks like a wet match. I stop because I stopped last year inside myself and promised never to watch from far away again. The car refuses to die on the limiter; I kill it. The belts release faster than they have any right to. I am out and running and the gravel is a carpet made of knives and I deserve them.

Fire looks smaller than it is until you’re in it. The helmet turns the roar into a hallway. My gloves bloom hot across the palm when I get a hand on the halo and the heat talks through the glove like language. “Unlock,” I say. I don’t know to whom. To the car. To the part of him that listens when I shouldn’t ask. To the version of me who didn’t come last time. The latch is where it always is because practice forgives a lot of sins.

He’s gone. Not gone-gone. Just not-there in that way bodies leave without leaving. His head slumps toward the left and rage eats oxygen—it’s not right that the fire gets to be in the same sentence as his name. “Mark.” It cracks out of me, the old name, the small one. It’s half-yah, half-prayer. Stay. The marshals shout a list of instructions at physics; physics does what it wants. The extinguisher noise is snow in hell. White foam blossoms where the orange was trying to write its thesis. My throat closes and opens and closes.

I wedge in where I shouldn’t fit and pull where my physio told me not to pull since Italy. Something gives. It’s not him. The belt finally, then the weight of a man who has been carrying both of us too long. He is heavier than he looks. He is always heavier than he looks. Every time I forget until I am holding consequences in my arms like they were meant for me. Maybe they are. His boot catches the lip and fury goes bright in my veins because how dare a piece of shaped metal interrupt the part where he lives.

We half-lift. We half-drag. The marshal’s shoulder bangs my helmet and the world rings and I don’t care because ringing means I’m here. Foam scours flame. The smell hurts. Underneath the chemical, the human. It is the worst perfume in the world. It is also the only one that has ever mattered to me.

We clear the worst of it and the noise turns thin, the way rooms go quiet when you realize someone decided to live. I lay him down where gravel gives up and tarmac begins because that’s where everything has ever begun for us, and my gloves are shaking like they have smaller hearts inside them. Someone with a medic patch kneels and tries to push me away nicely; I don’t go far. I take his wrist with a gentleness I have only ever used for two things and feel nothing, then feel something, then hate time for being slow. The pulse is there—late to the party, but stubborn.

“Mark,” I say, and my voice sounds wrong in my own head. “Hey. Hey.” The visor fogs from the inside; I rip it up and breathe too much air at once. I’m counting without numbers. He coughs—a small sound, the size of a coin dropped in a church. It’s everything. My chest collapses in on relief so fast it hurts. Somebody says my name like they’re trying to remind me I’m a driver, not a person. I ignore them. I’m a person right now. I’ll be a driver when he’s looking at me again to tell me to stop being one badly.

The medical crew do the work I should not do. I nod when they tell me to move back and immediately forget and move closer. Sung is suddenly there on the other side of the ring of humans, visor up, eyes huge, saying something that I can’t make into words. Jeno’s radio crackle leaks into real space and then fades. Jaemin’s hands are fists and he is praying in a language that sounds like jokes from a distance and like love up close. Ji’s somewhere further back, not filming, finally not filming; he’s crying with his mouth closed like the good kid he is. Soojin—God—Soojin’s voice is on the radio net because PR patched her into something they shouldn’t have and she is saying my name like she practiced it for a softer movie. I shut the channel off with a thumb and feel the smallest guilt for that. Forgive me. Not now.

He stirs again. The sound has edges. One of the medics says, “Airway,” and the other says, “Got it,” and the world makes room for oxygen to be a possible answer. My hands still haven’t learned to be still when he is this. I’m holding the wrist, my thumb warm against his skin through the glove, as if my pulse could bully his into staying on schedule. I want to say a hundred things from the inside of my mouth where the cameras can’t translate. I say none because I have done enough damage with words in good lighting. The thought flickers and becomes a shape: the hotel corridor four doors, four nights; the way he flinched when Sung touched my arm; the click when Grace said we were sleeping apart; my own signature on a piece of paper that said pretend six months and turned into pretending longer. I did this—the distance, not the fire. But the fire found the gap I made and walked through.

An official crouches, touches my shoulder, gentle. “We need you to step back.” I nod like a man who can do that. I take half a step back. The body refuses the second half. “Hyuck,” they say again, apologetic, and I am a child with a toy he won’t hand over. Then the medic looks up and says, “We’ve got him,” in a tone I believe. The tone matters more than words. I let go because I can, not because I want to.

I kneel on gravel and find that my knees are making a case for pain. Good. I want the receipt for this day written on my body somewhere visible. The world’s edges begin to come back—the rain’s thin hiss, the PA announcing a stoppage, a thousand phones becoming a thousand eyes—and none of it reaches the place where I am holding the one fact that rules me now: he is not gone. He is not gone.

“Status?” Mateo asks, the voice of someone trying to keep me anchored to a bright red logo and a future that still expects me to show up. The animal in my chest calms by millimeters. I try to answer and land on the only sentence my throat allows. “He’s breathing,” I say. It comes out like a tear sliding downward through a voice. “He’s—” I can’t stop it. The word stumbles and breaks and rebuilds itself the way the track team rebuilds guardrails overnight. “He’s breathing.”

I press my forehead to the back edge of my glove and let the visor hide exactly none of it. Somewhere, a camera will zoom and a narrative will form and I will let it. They can call it heroism or inevitability or romance or punishment. They can call it what buys ads. I know what it is. It is the only thing I am willing to be true about in public, and it fits in four syllables my voice barely survives.

They lift him. They move him. I stand because I remember I have legs. The car sits there, gullied and ash-edged and ridiculous, and I look at it with the disappointment you save for furniture you loved until it tried to kill your family. A marshal claps my shoulder. Sung says my name once more and I hear it this time and nod. The world tilts back toward function.

Later, they will ask me why I stopped. They will ask if I understood the risk. They will ask what Mark means to the team, to the sport, to me. I will say what I have learned to say: teamwork, safety, respect. The rest is what I carry out of the gravel on my knees and inside my chest and in the skin where his pulse tried, then tried again, then decided to stay. The rest is this: a promise I made alone that I will keep even if it breaks the parts of me the sponsors pay for.

For now I keep my eyes on the moving red of the medical car tail lights and pretend it’s just another delta I can hold. For now I breathe with him from thirty paces away the way we used to breathe down the same straight. For now I am only the man who knew how to get his hands under the belt and lift. The driver can come back later, when I’m sure he will be there to keep me honest again. He will be. He will.

“He’s breathing,” I say again, softer, to the gravel, to the rain, to the old white paint, to myself. And I say it once more into the radio because the version of me that drives needs to hear it publicly to make anything else possible. “He’s breathing.”

Chapter Text

Everything But a Lover

Chapter 12: Recovery Run

…

He wakes to a ceiling that looks like it’s been scrubbed of every color. Lights buzz. Oxygen hisses. His mouth is wool and ash. Somewhere to the left a monitor stutters his name in green. Mark blinks and the room blinks back. The crash arrives in fragments—heat, a buckle that wouldn’t, a voice in his ear that sounded like home.

His throat finds a word before his brain does. “Hyuck.”

There’s a startled inhale and the scrape of a chair leg. Hyuck’s face swims into focus, close and careful. Hoodie, cap dragged low, eyes red the way people pretend allergies explain. Mark tries to smile; his face forgets how.

“You should be resting,” Hyuck says. The voice is raw and almost steady.

“You should be winning,” Mark croaks. Everything hurts. The joke lands like gravel.

Hyuck huffs half a laugh that sounds broken-in. “Not without you.”

Mark stares at the ceiling again because the ceiling will not flinch. He feels the tug of an IV in the back of his hand and the dull ache under bandage, the sternum a locked door. He counts the breaths because numbers have always been kinder than people. When he looks back, Hyuck is still there.

“How long?”

“You were out, awake, out again,” Hyuck says. “It’s been… hours that felt like years.”

Mark lets his eyes close. He doesn’t fall asleep. He just stops having to perform being awake while someone who knows him sits watch.

Days reduce themselves to a loop: the clatter of breakfast carts, the antiseptic sting a nurse apologies into, the careful touch of fingers at his wrist checking pulse. Hyuck learns the ward’s rhythms faster than Mark learns to sit up. The nurses stop asking him to leave. He signs forms with the bored competence of a man who has been handed too many ballpoint pens. He writes Mark’s full name like an oath.

When the medication fog thins, frustration comes roaring up behind it. Mark measures the distance from bed to door with his eyes and loses. He tries to pick up the cup and his hand shakes like bad weather over a bridge. He hates the sound that catches in his throat when he fails. It isn’t pain; it’s humiliation, which is worse.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he says one morning when Hyuck’s gaze won’t move.

Hyuck blinks. “Like what?”

“Like I’m broken.”

Silence. The IV drip clicks a small metronome. Hyuck shakes his head once. “You’re not.”

Mark wants to argue. He doesn’t have the energy to finish the sentence. He turns toward the window and spends the afternoon memorizing the way rain stripes glass.

The first day they wheel him into the rehab room, the smell of rubber flooring and disinfectant hits like a training montage gone wrong. Bands looped over hooks. Light dumbbells that weigh more than they look. A chart that says RANGE OF MOTION in cheerful font as if fonts can fix bone.

Hyuck is on the floor beside him before the physio can bend. Palms warm under Mark’s bandaged wrist, supporting, not directing. The physio nods once, approving the help like it’s always been part of the plan.

“You got this, hyung,” Hyuck murmurs, close to his ear. “Just one more, hyung.”

The word slides across skin softer than courage. Mark pulls, the band resists, his forearm trembles. The pain is a clean blade; he prefers it to the dirty ache of helplessness. He grits his teeth and finishes the rep. The band slips from his fingers on the next one and snaps his knuckle. He swears, voice too thin to do it justice.

Hyuck doesn’t flinch. He resets the band, steadies Min’s grip. “Slow down. We’ll get the speed back after the range.”

“I don’t need a lecture.”

“I’m giving you my voice,” Hyuck says, small smile. “Use it as a metronome.”

Mark wants to stay angry. The warmth of those hands turns anger into heat that doesn’t know where to go. He does the set again, slower. He finishes. He hates that he almost feels proud.

Rituals accumulate. Fruit cups appear with their lids peeled back halfway so Mark won’t fight the plastic. Electrolyte packets are stirred into water with the care of a scientist. Hyuck learns the physio’s language—scar mobilization, isometric, eccentric—and then learns where not to touch. When Mark grimaces he adjusts pressure, heel of his palm moving in small circles over tissue that complains in whispers. It is clinical. It is intimate the way someone tying your shoe is intimate: unnecessary if you were fine, sacred because you’re not.

“If you don’t do it, it hardens,” Hyuck says, repeating the physio. “We don’t want you to lose range.”

“You learning medicine now?” Mark asks, a thread of humor he didn’t expect to find.

Hyuck shrugs. “Just for you.”

Sometimes Mark can do nothing but lie there and breathe around the weight. On those days Hyuck takes his hand and rubs the knuckles with his thumb, the motion mindless and perfect. Mark stares at their hands like he’s seeing his own name spelled correctly for the first time after weeks of misprints.

The bad day ambushes them between a good morning and a decent lunch. The stretch band peels out of Mark’s grasp twice in a row; the third time he loses not just the band but the fragile hold on his voice.

“I can’t even hold the damn wheel.”

Hyuck is there at his shoulder, firm but not hard. “You will.”

“When? When you’re too far ahead to see?”

The room holds the sentence like a breath nobody wants. Mark hears it echo off the mirror and hates the sound, hates the look that crosses Hyuck’s face—small, wounded, swallowed. He looks away first. Hyuck’s hands don’t move.

“Not today,” Hyuck says, steady. “Maybe not next week. But you will.”

“You sound so sure.”

“Because we got this.”

Mark sits there vibrating with effort and shame until the tremor in his arms ebbs. Hyuck doesn’t let go until Mark exhales and nods.

He tries to outrun himself in a body that won’t cooperate. The next day, he hides an extra set in the middle of the program, sneaking reps like cheating on a test whose only proctor is pain. It lasts five minutes. His wrist surrenders in a jagged line and the room tilts. He tastes metal and panic. The physio’s voice is calm through the fog. Hyuck’s hand is a dock. Mark lets himself be moored.

“You don’t have to be brilliant today,” Hyuck whispers, close as breath. “You just have to be here.”

“I don’t know how to be anything else,” Mark says, and surprises them both with the honesty.

Nights are smaller. The TV murmurs with the sound off, looping highlights of races he hasn’t watched yet and may never watch the same way again. Hyuck reads recovery notes in a notebook, copying terms like a student learning a new alphabet. One sneaker is kicked off, hoodie hood up, face open in a way daylight disallows.

Mark rests heavy-eyed in the half-dark, the plastic cup sweating on the tray like a nervous date. He speaks without opening his eyes. “Why are you still here?”

Hyuck doesn’t answer right away. He sets the notebook down. “Because you would be.”

Mark pretends not to hear, because admitting it would mean moving a wall he doesn’t have tools for. He listens to the rustle of pages until the sound becomes a lullaby. He sleeps through the first of many nights where staying is the only sentence either of them can finish.

When they let him outside for the first time, it’s in a chair he hates and a sweatshirt that smells like laundry and a scared animal. The afternoon is thin sun and a breeze that treats his lungs like a test he can pass. Hyuck is behind him, steering with one hand, paper cup of coffee in the other, posture a kind of ease he earns by faking until it becomes real.

They do a loop of the courtyard. Pigeons strut like they own healthcare. Mark’s right hand trembles once on the armrest and Hyuck reaches around the side without looking, finds his fingers, steadies them with a squeeze. No commentary. No heroic music. Just the click of wheel over seam and the small mercy of skin finding skin.

Back in the room, Mark stares at the wheelchair like it insulted his mother. “I hate that thing.”

“Then let’s graduate you out of it,” Hyuck says. “Two minutes standing tomorrow. One today.”

“That’s not how graduation works.”

“It is here.”

He stands, shaking, as Hyuck counts slow and steady in a voice that has lapped him for years and never left him behind on purpose. At forty-five seconds, the world goes white at the edges. Hyuck’s arms are there. The chair is behind his knees. The floor stops being a threat. Mark breathes like the first lap after a safety car—awkward, necessary, precise.

Rehab becomes choreography. Parallel bars. Step-ups. Grip trainers that bite until they don’t. Hyuck jogs beside him during treadmill walks, hoodie darkening along the spine with sweat he hides under a shrug. He starts showing up with new tape techniques and compression gloves that actually fit. He knows where the ice goes and when to heat instead. He listens to the physio like a coach and practices on his own hand so he won’t mess up Mark’s.

“You can go home, you know,” Mark says one afternoon, breathless. It’s not an accusation. It wants to be permission.

Hyuck squeezes his shoulder with his thumb. “I do. Every day, after here.”

“And the team?”

“I train in the mornings. I drive on weekends.”

“And the rest?”

Hyuck’s mouth tilts, not quite a smile. “This is the rest.”

On the day his pain spikes for no good reason and the doctor says the words nerve fatigue in that clinical tone Mark hates, something inside him tips. He wants to throw the room. He settles for throwing the towel. It drapes over the mirror like a surrender flag someone ironed.

“You don’t get it,” he says, not looking at Hyuck. “You can still drive.”

The silence afterward is colder than any argument. Hyuck steps into the mirror frame beside him, their reflections separated by a towel and physics.

“How could you think I would want to be on the track without you? When have I ever,” he asks, voice smoke-thin.

Mark turns. He sees the sleepless under Hyuck’s eyes, the way his shoulders sit lower, the notebook lines pressed into his palm where he held the pen too tight. He sees every day Hyuck hasn’t missed. He swallows the next sentence before it hurts them both.

“I didn’t mean—”

“You did,” Hyuck says, not unkindly. “And that’s okay.”

Mark nods, once, because nodding is cheaper than talking. They pick up the towel. They fold it together in silence that feels like a truce you don’t announce so it won’t break.

Late, when the ward is soft and the TV is pretending to be stars, they sit with the window cracked an inch. Mark works a squeeze ball while Hyuck copies another page of exercises into his notebook in that steady, tidy hand. The pencil smudges at the side of his finger. Mark's voice finds the space between heartbeats.

“You pulled me out.”

Hyuck doesn’t look up. “Of course.”

“They told you to stay in.”

“I didn’t hear them,” Hyuck says. Then he lifts his eyes, and the weight of it lands. “I never hear them when it’s you.”

Mark’s throat tightens around a dozen dangerous words. He presses the squeeze ball until it squeals. He lets go.

“Don’t stop saying ‘one more,’” he says instead. “It works.”

Hyuck’s smile is small and clean. “Then one more, hyung.”

They count together. The numbers feel like future again.

The first time Mark stands without the chair behind his knees, Hyuck is close enough to catch him and far enough to let him prove he doesn’t need to be caught. The clock ticks past sixty seconds and Mark doesn’t pass out. When his legs start to tremble, Hyuck says the words that have become their religion.

“You got this. Just one more.”

Mark laughs, surprised by it. The sound feels like a thing his body invented just to see if it still could.

They never talk about the cameras. They don’t have to. The tabloid hints bleed through hospital glass anyway—blurry photos of Hyuck in a waiting room, captions that pretend compassion while counting clicks. Grace moves like a firewall between them and the world: statements that are half-true and therefore survivable, schedules that hide the time Hyuck spends here under charity visits and “media prep.” Mark hates that he is grateful for the lie and the person who tells it.

On a Thursday when the sky is the color of a television tuned to nowhere, Mark takes his first walk down the corridor without the chair and the nurse only three paces back. Hyuck matches him step for step, hands low and open, ready but not assuming. The floor hums under the soles of his hospital socks. Every door they pass reflects them back thinner, taller, more possible.

At the end of the hall is a window that looks out over a parking lot pretending to be a city. Mark leans his forehead to the glass and closes his eyes. Hyuck’s palm lands between his shoulder blades, pressure just heavy enough to say I’m here.

Mark breathes. He lets the breath be ugly and necessary and his. When he turns, Hyuck is exactly where he always is—close enough to count on, far enough to choose. The space between them is measured in one more. He thinks: this is how we race again. Not against. Not away. Together until the line decides who was where.

“Tomorrow,” Hyuck says.

“Tomorrow,” Mark answers.

They walk back. The window keeps the shape of their foreheads like a promise it intends to keep.

…

Hyuck POV

He keeps two lives in one backpack. Race notes, setup sheets, sponsor lanyard. And under that: physio handouts with Mark’s name at the top, a roll of kinesio tape, a small bottle of massage oil the rehab nurse recommended, and the notebook where he’s copied every exercise they said to do at home. The backpack comes with him to every circuit now. It also comes to the hospital. Sometimes he thinks he could just live there if they let him. Sometimes the nurses look at him like they know he’s trying.

Morning is racing. Night is Mark. He doesn’t say it out loud because it sounds like choosing and he doesn’t want to make anyone prove where they rank.

On media day they ask, “How is your teammate?” and he says, “He’s improving,” and everyone nods like that’s neutral. On the plane that night he studies the photo of Mark’s arm rotation and writes under it, don’t let him skip this. He’s so tired his eyes burn. He closes them. He still sees fire. He opens them again.

The photo drops on a Wednesday—blurry, hospital hallway, him pushing Mark’s chair. It’s nothing. It’s everything. The caption is polite poison: Hyuck visits teammate again — guilt or devotion?

Grace grabs him before FP1 like she’s catching a tire. “Okay,” she says, low. “Here’s what we’re going to say: you’re supporting a colleague. You were both in the incident. You’re checking on him. You are a model teammate. You are not giving them romance fodder. You are definitely not camping in the rehab wing like a lovesick trainee.”

He blinks at her. “I am supporting a colleague. I was in the incident. I am checking on him.”

She exhales. “Right. Good. Say it in that exact order.” She softens—she always does, eventually. “You’re doing the right thing. Just… let me cover for you while you do it.”

“Thanks,” he says.

“Don’t thank me,” she says. “Win so I don’t have to lie so hard.”

He wins P3 that weekend. Doesn’t even celebrate. Shower, media, car. Straight to the hospital with damp hair and a burger still in the bag. The receptionist doesn’t even ask now. “Room 412,” she says. He nods. Knocks once. Walks in.

Mark’s asleep, TV throwing blue over his face. The burger goes on the table. The backpack goes on the chair. He washes his hands in the too-bright bathroom, dries them on the paper towels that feel like race paper—cheap, rough, effective. Then he sits and watches him breathe.

He could leave. He doesn’t.

He has learned things he did not plan to learn. That scar tissue needs heat before you work it. That you press beside a bruise, not on it. That if you put the ice pack in too long the skin fights you; short cycles are better. That Mark’s right forearm tightens more than his left when he’s angry. That Mark pretends not to be in pain if someone else is in the room, but not with him. That if he rubs circles over the back of Mark’s hand with his thumb, the tremor slows.

He keeps doing it even when Mark is awake.

“You don’t have to,” Mark mutters once, eyes on the ceiling.

“I know,” Hyuck says. He keeps going.

Some days he makes it to rehab before Mark. He talks to the physios like he’s joining their department. “He’s overreaching,” he says. “How many reps can he add?” “None today.” “Tomorrow?” “We’ll see.” He memorizes everything. Everything in racing is repetition; this is just another car with different parts.

Then Mark limps in, jaw already set like he’s fighting a qualifier, and Hyuck switches from student to engine mode.

“Morning,” he says.

“You look tired,” Mark says.

“I look good tired.”

“…you look good,” Mark admits, grudging, and Hyuck smiles because he needed that more than breakfast.

Their work pattern is always the same because bodies like rhythm. Warm up: shoulder circles, assisted. Hyuck at his back, hands under Mark’s elbows. He can feel how much force Mark is using to pretend this is easy. He doesn’t call it out.

“Up. Hold. One… two… three…”

Mark’s breath is in his ear. “It hurts.”

“I know.”

“It hurts more than driving.”

“Yeah,” he says, soft, honest. “But this gets you back to driving.”

Then grip work. Then balance. Then the thing Mark hates most: stair repeats.

The first time, Mark pushes too far. Of course he does. Two flights, okay. Third flight, the leg decides it’s had enough of heroism. His foot doesn’t quite clear the next step, his weight tips, and Hyuck’s body moves before thought. Arm around his waist, hip braced, shoulder under his, hauling, catching, lowering. They land together on the mat like the end of a dance no one clapped for.

“Stop,” Hyuck says, breathless. “Stop. Listen to your body.”

“My body doesn’t listen to me,” Mark bites out.

“Then let mine listen for it,” Hyuck says, and pulls him back against his chest so Mark can just breathe and not hold up the world for once.

Mark lets go. His head falls back against Hyuck’s shoulder, sweat damp at his hairline. Their breath syncs the way it does on formation laps. Hyuck keeps an arm across his chest—light, not a cage. He feels Mark’s pulse calm under his palm and something in him unclenches too.

He’s making mistakes on track. Not big ones. Not “he’s crumbling” ones. Just small missed apexes and hesitation on overtakes. The team think it’s nerves from the crash. He lets them think that. It’s not nerves. It’s time. It’s that he leaves half his head at the hospital every weekend.

He comes in P4 on a day the car could’ve made P2. Debrief is polite but pointed. “You could have attacked lap 38,” the engineer says. “You backed off.” Hyuck nods. “Understood.” He doesn’t tell them he was thinking about Mark’s next scan. He doesn’t tell them he was thinking don’t break the car, don’t show him crash footage again.

After the meeting, Grace hands him a coffee and a list. “Here,” she says. “These are the events you did this week.”

“I did?”

“Yes,” she says. “Hospice visit, youth karting, sponsor dinner. You were charming and on-message. You were not, notably, at a hospital.” She looks him in the eye. “You owe me so many podiums.”

He laughs, tired. “I’ll get you one.”

“Get me him back,” she says, softer. “Then get me one.”

He goes back that night. Of course he does.

Sometimes Mark is in a mood. Not angry—he burned most of that off in week two. Just flat. Doing the work because he was born for work, but eyes unfocused, humor on mute. Those days hurt worse than the days with swearing.

“We can skip,” Hyuck offers once.

“No.”

“We can move it to tomorrow.”

“No.”

“…okay.” He kneels, tapes Mark’s wrist, checks the tension. “Then we do it slow.”

He learned the taping from the physio but he’s better at it now. He pulls the tape in clean lines, no creases, no pulled hairs. He writes the date on the end with a pen like he’s signing art. Mark watches him.

“You got good at that,” Mark says.

“I got practice,” Hyuck says. “You kept needing it.”

“Sorry.”

He looks up fast. “Don’t be sorry.”

Mark looks away. “I hate needing anything.”

“Then you picked the wrong friend, wrong person” Hyuck says. “I’m not going away.”

He means it. He proves it. He sits through doctor’s explanations three times so Mark doesn’t have to pretend he understood everything the first time through the pain fog. He asks follow-up questions. He asks about long-term steering torque, about neck load, about cockpit ergonomics. He translates it into racer: “You can hold the wheel. We just have to get you there.”

Mark nods like he believes him. That’s all he wanted.

The tabloids don’t stop. A second image: him leaving late at night, hoodie up, mask on. Caption: “Nighttime visit — romance confirmed?” Comments scroll: ‘it’s guilt’ ‘it’s best friends to lovers’ ‘he’s just a good teammate’. He drops his phone face-down and rubs his hands over his face like that could push privacy back into the world.

Next day he finds Grace outside rehab, sitting on the curb with coffee like she’s a regular person. “They’re relentless,” she says without hello.

“So am I,” he says.

“I know.” She sighs. “Okay. We’ll run it as heroism, not romance. Russians eat that up.”

He laughs. “Okay.”

“And Hyuck?”

“Yeah?”

“If you ever want to tell the true version, pick a day when I’m not at work.”

The true version catches him on a Tuesday when the gym is empty and the evening is the kind of gray that makes windows into mirrors. Mark is doing banded internal rotations, jaw tight, forearm shaking. Hyuck is on his knees in front of him, adjusting the angle, hand on his elbow.

He hears himself say it before he clocks he’s saying it.

“I never wanted to beat you.”

Mark stops mid-rotation. The band pulls his wrist inward, shakes. His eyes find Hyuck’s like they always do when it matters.

Hyuck swallows. Keeps going. “I just wanted to stay beside you.”

Silence. Not the bad kind. The kind that feels like a door opening on an empty room you can decorate.

Mark’s chest rises, falls. His mouth twitches once like he’s about to say something sharp and changes his mind. His hand lets go of the band and reaches for Hyuck’s instead. He squeezes, once, hard.

“Then don’t stop,” he says.

Something in Hyuck’s spine unknots. “I won’t.”

They go back to work. Reps, holds, breaths. Nothing dramatic. But everything’s different. The air is lighter. The counting is joint. Now when he says, “One more, hyung,” it sounds less like an order and more like a shared plan.

Progress comes in millimeters. First full set with no shake. First stair flight with no catch. First day Mark says, “I can do that one alone,” and actually can. Hyuck lets him. He watches anyway. Not because he doesn’t trust him. Because he needs to see him win at something again.

Outside, the world keeps spinning. Soojin’s agency announces schedules, no mention of him. Fans notice. Some floods of comments die down. Some don’t. Sungchan visits once, arms full of flowers, cheeks warm with embarrassment. “Hyung, I didn’t know what to get so I got everything.” Mark laughs. Hyuck laughs. For a second it’s just friends in a hospital room, not headlines.

Then the day comes when it’s time to sit in a car again.

Not the F1 car yet. A trainer cockpit in a private facility, hospital cleared, Grace on alert, engineers under instructions not to leak a single pixel. The room smells like clean rubber and hope. Mark stands beside the cockpit, staring at it like it’s an old enemy he’s ready to greet.

Hyuck is already there, hands on the halo, thumbs running along the carbon like it’s a talisman. He looks at Mark. “You ready?”

Mark blows out a breath. “No.” Then, after a beat: “Yeah.”

Hyuck nods. Helps him in—not because Mark can’t, but because they promised to do this part together. Straps go over shoulders, snug, familiar. Mark’s fingers find the wheel. His wrist doesn’t scream. It just complains. That’s good. Complaining bodies can race.

Hyuck leans in, close enough for Mark to see the nights under his eyes. “I’m right here,” he says. “You stall, I’m here. You panic, I’m here. You drive, I’m here.”

Mark’s mouth curves. “You’re annoying.”

“Yeah,” Hyuck says. “So drive away from me.”

The tech signals thumbs up. The engine hums to life, low at first, then higher, the vibration crawling up Hyuck’s hands where they’re still on the halo. It buzzes bone-deep, the same way it did the day he pulled Mark out of fire. But this buzz is good. This buzz is future.

“Ready?” he asks again, louder over the noise.

Through the visor, Mark’s eyes are clear for the first time since the crash. “Always.”

Hyuck steps back, gives him room, but not distance. The car rolls forward, slow, controlled. Every centimeter is a victory. Every centimeter says: we didn’t break for nothing.

He stands there in the still-warm air of the garage, fingers still tingling from vibration, and thinks: I never wanted to beat you. I only ever wanted the view from your side.

Chapter Text

The light in the doctor’s office is the same white as the hospital ceiling, but it doesn’t feel like a sentence now. It feels like a test he might pass. Mark sits with his hands flat on his thighs and tries not to press them into fists. The wall chart shows a smiling cartoon shoulder doing perfect circles. His does not feel like a cartoon. His feels like a machine he rebuilt in the dark.

The doctor runs through the last checks. Grip dynamometer—squeeze, release. Range of motion—up, hold, out, back, pain? “Two,” Mark says, which is honest and still feels like cheating on the truth. Reflex hammer, light tap, nerves answering from far away like a friend who moved time zones without telling him.

“Strength?” the doctor asks, glancing at the sheet.

“Ninety,” Mark answers. The word sits in his mouth like a coin. Not a hundred. Not yet.

“Full mobility. Strength at ninety percent with excellent progression. No neurological deficits. Healed fracturing stable.” The doctor looks up at him and not the chart for the first time today. “You’re cleared.”

The sentence hits harder than he’s braced for. It isn’t relief. It’s a door opening onto a cliff. He nods like his body knows how to behave when something important happens. “Okay.”

“We’ll send the report to your team doctor, of course.” The doctor smiles a real smile, the kind you don’t learn in school. “Congratulations, Mark.”

He says thank you because you do. The paper crinkles as he rises. One sleeve of his hoodie rides up; the old bruising is yellowed into memory. Outside the door, the hallway smells like printer ink and hand gel. He almost trips over Hyuck’s backpack before he sees him.

Hyuck is leaning against the wall pretending to scroll his phone like a man auditioning for unsubtle. Cap low, hoodie zipped, the same backpack that carries two lives. He looks up, eyes seeking, every muscle pretending not to be braced.

“Well?”

Mark lets the word live between them a second longer than necessary. Then: “Cleared.”

The grin that hits Hyuck’s face is too big for the hallway. It’s the kind that wins cameras. Here, it wins him. Hyuck steps forward, stops before he does something public, and settles for knocking his knuckles against Mark’s. It’s careful, it’s loud, it’s home.

“Guess you’re officially my problem again,” Hyuck says.

“You never stopped being mine,” Mark answers, and only realizes how it sounds when Hyuck’s mouth twitches toward trouble. He clears his throat. “Don’t say things like that when there’s paperwork involved.”

“I brought a pen,” Hyuck says, patting the backpack like a bit. “Let’s sign something.”

Mark huffs, half-laugh, half-breaking. The corridor is too small for his chest. He pushes the door bar and the afternoon opens like a lens.

Spain is a color he remembers in his bones. Dry heat. A track that looks simple at ten paces and eats pride at speed. Grace is there pretending to be invisible in sunglasses big enough to count as witness protection. The private circuit has two cars prepped and a single engineer who already knows his NDA would survive a nuclear winter.

They don’t do speeches. They do belts. They do checks. They do radio checks that sound like prayer by now.

“Box, confirm,” Mark says, helmet heavier than fear.

“We have you,” a voice returns. Hyuck’s voice slides in on a second channel, private. “You ready?”

“No.”

“Good.” A beat. “I’ll go out first. You follow. We don’t time the first run.”

“You’re terrified I’ll beat your out-lap delta.”

“Terrified you’ll brake at 300 and make me look careful.”

Mark smiles into cotton and carbon. The engine wakes and the vibration climbs his forearms, familiar and wild. He rolls. He breathes. The pit exit white line looks like it always has: a boundary and an invitation.

Hyuck stays half a straight ahead for the first laps, his lines clean enough to trace without thinking. Mark’s hands remember twenty thousand decisions a lap makes you make. Turn-in. Patience. Throttle when the car asks, not when his head does. He is not fast. He doesn’t need to be. He needs to stay.

Third lap, his wrists stop anticipating pain and start reporting position. Fifth lap, the seat cradles and not cages. Seventh, he hears his own breath through the radio and forces it back into even counts. Tenth, Hyuck dips a wheel wide on purpose so Mark can see where not to, the old language of teaching disguised as teasing.

“You’re early on throttle,” Hyuck says, gentle, after the twelfth.

“You’re late on compliment,” Mark answers.

“Compliment: you look good in my mirror.”

“I’m going to eat your mirror.”

“We brought spares.”

They keep it there—half-sarcasm, half-instruction, all breath. When the engineer finally says, “Box this lap,” Mark’s fingers ache and his chest is a drum and he can’t feel the shape of fear anymore.

They sit on the pit wall with their helmets cradled between their knees like animals that need soothing. Water bottle. Tape adjustment. A physio trick Hyuck learned for forearm burn and executes with a thumb rolling across muscle in slow, even lines.

“Pressure okay?”

“Yeah. Keep going,” Mark says, and the words do something in Hyuck’s face he files away for later. Grace pretends to answer an email from an important person and just looks away so they can have this without the world.

Second run, they switch places. Mark leads. He feels the track come toward him instead of away. He feels the car trust him. He hears Hyuck’s breathing on a stray channel he forgot to mute and feels his own fall into step with it on accident.

Sun moves. Asphalt changes color. They take the last session at sunset when the air is a little kinder. Hyuck suggests they drive each other’s cars for a single lap “for science.” Grace pinches the bridge of her nose and says she’ll leave if they do. They do. Grace does not leave. The engineer suffers nobly. On the cooldown, Hyuck laughs in his ear, the kind of laugh that leaks relief. “You left your seat too high.”

“You need to grow,” Mark says. “I can’t lower for you.”

“You’re clearing medical and coming for my anatomy?”

“Priority list.”

They pull in side-by-side and the silence that follows is not empty. It’s full. It’s full of everything they didn’t say when they were busy surviving interviews and fire.

The “Young Guns” chat detonates the first time Mark sends a blurry photo from the pit wall—two cars, sunset, a thumb in the corner, the kind of picture that looks like anonymity until you’ve memorized the shape of their helmets.

Jeno: YOU’RE ALIVE

Jaemin: THE BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWN

Renjun: what if i posted this for you by accident

Chenle: i’m drafting the caption rn

Jisung: proud of you hyungs (three soft hearts)

Sungchan: i’m crying in the mercedes gym don’t @ me

Grace (DM to both): post the tire. the TIRE. not your faces. you will give me a stroke.

Hyuck obliges, sends a close-up of a used soft compound like a still life. The chat spams flame emojis and inappropriate tire jokes until Mark mutes it and laughs into his wrist.

They stay a week in Spain under a rumor of brand testing Grace hand-built from nothing but audacity. Mornings: laps. Afternoons: data, stretch, tape, naps in the garage office on a couch no one admits to using. Evenings: short runs on the service road, two shadows lengthening in parallel. No cameras. No press. Just the work and the person who makes it possible.

The second-to-last day, the engineer suggests “for calibration purposes” they do a ten-lap push, staggered start, no passing until lap five. It’s a dare and a data point. Mark nods. Hyuck clicks his radio twice in answer.

Green. Out-laps tidy. Lap one: feeling the track under them like an old floor they know the squeaks of. Lap two: tools warming. Lap three: the car in a truth-telling mood. Lap four: the gap closes from three seconds to one-point-eight. Lap five: the rule melts with the day.

He goes for it under the bridge, late on brake, early on hope. The rear whispers you sure and he answers yes and the car agrees. He slides alongside Hyuck’s right rear and the world becomes a thin bright line he has known since he was a kid chasing a friend he didn’t know he’d spend his life trying to catch. Hyuck leaves him a car’s width plus mercy. In the radio: a laugh, clean and unbroken. “There he is.”

They run wheel-to-wheel for a corner and a half like children drawing on a wall they own. Mark clears him into the long right. The radio crackles on both channels at once. Hyuck: “About time, hyung.” Mark: “Say ‘good job’ like an adult.” Hyuck: “Never.”

They finish nose-to-tail and pretend not to notice who is where. They roll to a stop against the garage door and sit there with the engines ticking down and the sound of their breath turning into the sound of the world.

Hyuck tears a protein bar in half like communion and hands him the bigger piece. “You scared me last season,” he says, voice gone small at the edges.

“You saved me,” Mark answers, and for once the truth doesn’t cost anything to say out loud.

On the last night, they drive out to the far end of the property in a golf cart that complains about being asked to participate in history. The sky is wide enough to pour the season into without spilling. Hyuck kicks his shoes off on the grass. Mark hooks his fingers under the edge of the seat and lets his shoulders fall in a way he can’t when he’s in public.

“What if I’m not as fast,” he asks, quietly, like telling a secret to the place where he might stop being afraid.

Hyuck thinks for a second, not because he doesn’t know the answer, but because he wants to say it right. “Then I’m not as fast either,” he says. “We’re doing this together. Or it doesn’t matter.”

Mark looks at him, really looks, and feels the click of something lining up that’s bigger than telemetry. The wind moves across the circuit like a crowd exhaling. He nods. He doesn’t say thank you. He doesn’t have to. They sit there until the stars show up like late friends who still remember the address.

They leave Spain with lap charts that would make sponsors salivate and a new language for what they are that requires no translation. Grace meets them at the airport with the kind of hug a manager only gives when she’s too tired to pretend she’s a hologram. “No leaks,” she says, pinching their cheeks with two fingers each like they’re eight. “Do not ruin my streak by posting something stupid in the next forty-eight hours.”

Hyuck opens his mouth. Mark elbows him. “We won’t,” he says. They both know they will send a single picture of shoes on a doormat and the group chat will combust for twelve hours. They both know that’s allowed.

Back in England, the air is wet and honest. The factory smells like resin and ambition. They give their debrief to a small team that has learned the art of hearing what is not said. Mark’s notes are clean. Hyuck’s additions are spare. The engineer who came to Spain nods like a man who saw a ghost and was relieved it wasn’t his.

On the way out, Mark stops in the corridor and leans his shoulder to the wall. Hyuck stops too, as if pulled. The corridor is empty in that late-hour way that makes you speak softer.

“When we go back,” Mark says, meaning the grid, the lights, the thing that tried to eat them, “don’t make room for me. Make room with me.”

Hyuck’s mouth tilts. “I never wanted to beat you.”

“I know,” Mark says. “Just stay beside me.”

“Always.”

They don’t touch. They don’t need to. The air between them is charged the way the grid is before a start: full of every possible ending and convinced of only one.

The contract room is colder than the corridor, colder than Spain, colder than anything that deserves a signature. It has water bottles with labels turned out and pens stacked in a row like they were trained. Grace is at the end of the table, tablet open, glasses on for effect; legal is two seats down, neat piles of clauses layered like sediment.

Mark sits, palms flat, heartbeat steadier than the air. The top sheet carries his name in a font that wants to be a guarantee. Two years. Options. Numbers that would have made the kid he was dizzy. The kid he was wants a phone more than a pen.

Grace inclines her head toward the document. “You’ve read the highlights. Matching clauses. No precedence language. Performance bonuses adjusted. PR carve-outs maintained.” She looks at him over the frame. “You’re not a hostage.”

He nods. He reaches for the pen. He doesn’t pick it up. He picks up his phone instead and dials without warning.

Hyuck answers on the second ring, wind noise or an open window in the sound. “Hey.”

“Are you re-signing?” Mark asks. No preface. No hello needed.

There’s a breath. Then: “I already did.” Not proud. Not shy. A fact he wanted Mark to know this way.

Mark closes his eyes. The room doesn’t change, but something inside his chest does—a realignment, a click. “Okay. That’s all I needed.”

He hangs up. The pen is weightless now. He signs the bottom of the page without flipping it, then the next two tabs Grace has flagged. Grace exhales a laugh that sounds like a parachute opening. “You didn’t read page twelve.”

“He did,” Mark says, sliding the signed stack back. “For both of us.”

Legal blinks like they’re not paid to understand friendship. Grace just tucks the papers away and nods toward the door. “Go before I make you do a photo holding a pen.”

Hyuck is waiting in the hallway with a paper cup and a smile that refuses to be camera-safe. He takes one look at Mark’s face and tips the cup toward him. “We broke them?”

“They’ll live.”

They bump shoulders lightly and keep walking. There’s nothing to rehearse. There’s only the work.

The apartments are mirror images split by a wall more symbolic than structural. Two identical penthouses perched over the same city hum, two sliding doors that face each other across a narrow gap where weather and dumb jokes travel unchecked. The first night, Mark stacks his boxes in a grid and Hyuck stacks his in a hazard; the second night, Mark brings over a label maker and Hyuck brings over takeout and they both pretend the other approach is not being adopted in small, suspicious ways.

The balcony doors stay unlocked. It’s theater at first. Then habit. Then vital infrastructure. When Mark can’t sleep, he hears Hyuck’s music low—old R&B mixed with engine notes recorded from a phone, a playlist made of obsession and comfort. When Hyuck can’t sleep, Mark puts a pot on the stove and lets the smell of rice drift until a shadow moves on the other side and a knock comes through glass like a heartbeat.

“Still can’t sleep?” Mark asks, leaning in the frame with two chopsticks crossed like antennae.

“Only when it’s too quiet,” Hyuck says, stepping over. He looks at the pot, then at Mark. “Is this bribery?”

“This is mercy,” Mark says. “You cook rice like a crime.”

They eat at Mark’s counter, feet hooked on the rungs of the stools, knees bumping with the pace of a shared day. No big speeches. Just late-night chew and the click of a clock they aren’t racing for once.

The “Young Guns” chat keeps running like a heartbeat in the background. Mark sends a photo of two helmets on a shelf with a plant precariously wedged between them. Jaemin replies with a screaming emoji, Ren posts a meme about domesticity, Chenle threatens to redesign their whole apartment theme in papaya, Ji sends a shy heart, and Sung writes: open balcony policy is crazy but i support it. Grace DMs privately: do not tag locations. i will delete you both from the internet.

Off-season becomes a rhythm only the two of them hear correctly. Mornings: factory or sim. Afternoons: private gym where the mirrors don’t listen. Evenings: runs along the canal in mismatched hoodies, caps low, gait matched. Hyuck keeps the kinesio tape next to his keys. Mark keeps extra ice packs in Hyuck’s freezer because he forgets to buy them and refuses to admit it. They trade a language of hands—thumb on the wrist to say rest, palm along the forearm to say push, knuckles bumped once to say today was enough.

The tabloid noise tries again, hungry for blood after starving for flame. Grace treats it like weather: forecasts the worst and keeps them under cover. She schedules their public appearances out of phase so they’re never seen together on official time. She then looks the other way when they send the group chat a low-res video of a kart night at a no-name indoor track, Mark drifting like an idiot around a hairpin while Hyuck laughs so hard he ditches himself on purpose.

Jeno: i hate you both i’m getting in my car

Jaemin: bring snacks

Chenle: post or perish

Renjun: grace blink twice if you need extraction

Grace: i don’t blink anymore

Red Bull makes it official with a press release that reads like a treaty: both drivers extended, equal terms, equal status. The photo is clean—handshake, suits, the correct amount of grin. None of it catches the private detail that Mark signed because of a two-word answer over a scratchy line. None of it catches the way Hyuck stood in the hallway like a door that had already been opened.

They keep the private races for themselves. A quiet Tuesday at Dunsfold. A borrowed afternoon at a proving ground no one photographs well. Hyuck keeps a stopwatch he doesn’t show anyone. Mark keeps a logbook he does not put in any cloud. Sometimes Hyuck is faster. Sometimes Mark is. When they’re identical, they pretend not to be relieved and fail.

Between runs they talk through corners like people who learned each other’s lines before they learned their own names. “You’re a meter early at the apex,” Hyuck says. “You’re a meter late at admitting it,” Mark replies. “Cut me a meter.” “I always do.” The laugh they share sits in the empty hangar like a promise with tire smoke around it.

On moving day, Hyuck tries to carry a box labeled COOKWARE and staggers. Mark takes it from him like a man confiscating contraband. “These are mine now.”

“I can learn,” Hyuck says, opening a drawer like it might contain an instruction manual for a stove.

“You did,” Mark says. He taps a knuckle against Hyuck’s grip. “Different kind.”

They arrange their kitchens like pit walls—efficient, labeled, within reach. The first night the fire alarm tries to become a character and Grace texts PLEASE in a lone bubble that carries three separate headaches. They open the balcony doors and fan the detectors with a cutting board and the laughter is bigger than the noise.

Preseason coalesces, piece by piece: the smell of resin, the sting of fresh carbon dust, the hum of a factory turning midnight into lap time. The car wears their numbers like a dare accepted. The wind tunnel whispers, the dyno shouts, the simulations shrug and then nod. Bahrain waits at the end of a calendar like a finish line pretending to be a start.

They touch down into heat that feels like Spain’s older, richer cousin. The hotel curtains don’t meet in the middle. The paddock is already a rumor; cameras hover, content factories restarting their engines. Grace hands them schedules that look like puzzles. “Smile like your cheekbones owe me money,” she says, and they do.

Underneath the public, the private continues. Tape at night. Ice before sleep. Hands finding the same places without asking. Radio checks that are half ritual, half reminder. “Box, confirm.” “We have you.” Hyuck’s channel opens a breath earlier than Mark’s and closes a breath after. No one else hears it. They do.

Test day one breaks clean and clear. Mechanics fuss like artists. Tyre blankets release heat in soft waves. Engineers murmur in a language of numbers that has always sounded like poetry to the people who survived in it. The world is about to restart and pretend it’s never stopped.

They stand side-by-side behind their cars without touching. Jeno and Jaemin wander by in sunglasses, pretending not to see them while seeing everything; Sung jogs over, nearly trips on a cable, blushes, declares himself fine, declares them beautiful, gets dragged away by a Mercedes handler. Ren and Chen materialize long enough to snap a covert photo before Grace materializes to steal their phones and scowl them into repentance.

“Focus,” she says to Mark and Hyuck, softer, like a mother finally letting her kids ride their bikes to the corner alone. “Bring me something I can use.”

They nod. They always do.

Helmets on. The world shrinks to a cockpit that knows their shapes. Mark breathes once, deep and not pretty. Hyuck’s voice floats across the private channel they never admit exists. “The track is green. Don’t let it lie to you.”

“You don’t let it lie to me,” Mark says, gloved hand settling around the wheel like forgiveness.

They exchange one look across carbon and crew. No bravado. No apology. The look says what the papers didn’t print: it’s us or it isn’t worth the flag.

Hyuck’s chin dips, the smallest nod across the distance. The lights on the gantry run their old red down to silence. Mark’s thumb taps the radio, once.

“One more, hyung.”

“Always.”

They launch together into the morning, twin lines carving one decision across a track that suddenly remembers their names.