#hmmmmmmmm.

Now is for waiting, watching. Final checks before he’s let out on the track. Hands curled around the bars, eager. There’s a smattering of applause down the pitlane, and he cranes over his shoulder for the sound.

A crowd has formed by the VR46 garage. Marc sits up, straightens to peer over heads. A figure beside the stripped bike — bare black in place of obnoxious, highlighter yellow. He’s dropped into a tight squat, knees against his chest, head bowed. Something sharp and flighty rises in Marc’s chest, springs to life, a needle with wings.

The rider straightens, and Marc knows. There’s no number on the face of the bike. Marc checks twice. But it’s Valentino. Neon flames licking up his arms and legs, shifting like real fire as he swings atop the bike. Frankie appears at Marc’s side, eyebrows raised. The pin sticks in his heart. Wheedles itself deep, right into the tissue between ventricles.

“What year is it?” He breathes, voice catching. Sounding too real, not enough like a joke. Frankie laughs anyway.

“Diggia is out. Fun little last minute replacement, hey?”

The VR46 Ducati growls to life. Marc snaps his neck around, glues his eyes to his lap, chin tucked.

“Ready if you are,” Frankie adds, hand patting at the rise of his hip. Marc nods. Valentino rides past, standing and stretching, drawing Marc’s attention like a magnet. They let him go and it’s — it’s fine, that he ends up behind Valentino. Eyes on The Doctor spread across the ass of his leathers,

He tries not to feel like he’s been hurled back to the past, stomach flipping in a space-time-warp rush. Valentino leans through a corner, and if Marc wasn’t sure before, then he is now.

Head down. Focus on the bike, the feeling between his thighs. The new set up, new tech. Think about it. Feel it. Get something useful.

Keep his eyes off the sapphire figure Valentino cuts across the track up ahead.

Familiarity is the friend of the devil, and Marc knows it too well. It’s easy like a knife through hot wax, stalking Valentino’s lines. Slinking up close behind him, eyes riveted to the leg he throws out to brake, the held angle of his arms. They’re still getting data. He isn’t sabotaging this. He slides into Valentino’s slipstream and bodily holds himself back from surging ahead of him. 

They fire across the finish line, and Valentino twists to catch Marc over his shoulder through the first turn. Would’ve been hearing the throttle open so close the whole way around. Marc ducks — draws his arms in tight, makes himself smaller, as if he can hide behind the visor. It’s instinct: sudden and razing across the field of his brain. Caught like a fox in a trap and hating it.

Valentino doesn’t pull off to the pitlane, so neither does Marc. They lap again, and again, and everything starts to bleed back into colour. It may as well be Honda and Yamaha, may as well be practice in Sepang, in Argentina, qualifying in Brno. He can’t help himself. And maybe he’s crazy — maybe there’s something ticking wrong, twisted in his brain. But Valentino seems to be allowing it.

They slice around a corner, Marc snug on the inside, front tyre a hair's breadth from the VR46 Ducati’s exhaust. His garage would be on edge. Valentino’s too.

It triggers a pinched nerve sort of shame. Something numb and tingling, the way control slips through his fingers. How his brain spits up blood red against the inside of his skull, the snapping teeth, heart pounding need to tug on the pulsing current between them. To tangle it around his fingers, fishing wire, tension of the line cutting him up good.

He can forgive himself a certain amount, perhaps. There’s room to allow boldness and risk in the face of such opportunity. The pair of them on track again. Even footing. Bikes too loud to exchange words, and thank God for it. Only movement to talk. Dragging his shoulder along the asphalt, begging some kind of understanding.

It isn’t another chance — Marc’s not an idiot. It only feels that way. Allow him that.

So he follows. Valentino goes wide, Marc follows. He slows, rolls into the pits, towards his box. Marc follows. Too far — almost misses the waiting hands of an engineer. Slings himself off before the bike is stopped, and Valentino’s done the same a few boxes down, and it’s an ice age — a glacier, snow tumbling into the ocean. Some sort of animal going extinct.

Valentino turns away from him; severs the line but doesn’t cut the hooks free. Marc feels them in his gills when he wrenches his helmet off, stumbling into the shade of his box, breathing hard. Frankie eases himself into the seat beside him, hands tangled together.

“The… bike. Did you —?”

“Yes, it is —” black and neon in his peripheral, and it’s — Bez. On the other bike. He swallows, blinks hard at his boots. They busy him with data, keep him in while Álex goes out and until Valentino’s completed another chunk of laps. He doesn’t protest it, because he’s not being as useful as he should be. Knows he couldn’t stop it from happening again if he and Valentino were out at the same time once more.

They alternate his time just as carefully in the second session, and there’s only a handful of laps where he catches sight of Valentino several corners ahead. Until the final few minutes, where a throttle opens less than a bike length behind him, loud in his ear. He twists his neck at the next opportunity and looks Valentino right in the eyes.

It’s like a bolt of lightning through his chest, and then Valentino’s alongside, soaring past him through Curva Quercia.

Marc comes in afterwards. There’s a chain tangled around his ribs, spinning, trying to tear him apart. He doesn’t let himself search for Valentino, instead seeks out Álex, anchors himself to his brother’s side and smiles when Álex sees right through him. They change out of their leathers in the Gresini hospitality before the walk back to their motorhome.

Álex asks about the bike, what Marc likes, what he doesn't. If he notices the half baked quality of Marc’s answers, he doesn’t say anything. Not an injury that needs prodding at — Álex knows this. There’s a scuffling sound as they pass the factory Ducati trailers, and Marc pulls up, head swivelling for it.

Valentino descends the stairs of Pecco’s motorhome, chin tucked to his chest. The picture of ease, casual in a too-big white tee, one hand in the pocket of his shorts. Marc’s chest spasms. Álex’s fingers drift over his wrist, but it’s too late. Valentino’s seen them.

Marc expects him to blink through them the way he always does, mouth tight like Marc’s nothing more than a shadow — something that only becomes real if you stare. But he doesn’t. He stills, slants his gaze across the paddock and then back to Marc.

It’s like taking an ice pick to a bruise. Marc can’t see past the froth of blood.

“Go, I’ll meet you,” he mutters, gently extricating his arm from Álex’s cold fingers. In a display of faith, Álex goes. Marc lets a held breath force its way out of him. They’re too far away to speak — Valentino wouldn’t have been able to hear that. Someone has to broach the distance.

Valentino takes one step. Marc takes the rest. They end up in the shadow of Pecco’s motorhome, tucked beside the guttural whoosh of the fan. Whatever gets said, no one else will be able to hear.

Marc tries to force something up his throat. A joke, an observation. Something to bridge the yawning chasm between them. It’s not even a metre: Valentino shifts his weight and Marc feels it move the air. Valentino’s lips twitch. Marc can’t let him speak first. Has too much skin in this, all of a sudden — can’t risk the other man setting the tone with something dirt-dark and greasy.

“Must have felt strange,” spills out of him. Valentino blinks. He shrugs a shoulder, leans back against the shiny red surface of the trailer. Marc tamps down the urge to fall further into his space.

“Is not so different to racing with the boys. The Yamaha event, too — that was not long ago.”

Marc nods, says, “ah,” stupidly. Valentino’s watching him too closely.

“Was weird having someone tail me like that again,” he adds, voice low. Like that meaning like you. Marc chances a look at his eyes. There’s not enough malice for it to make sense, rather something slow and buoyant, exploratory.

“Old habits,” Marc concedes, allowing the barest grin to flash across his face.

“Isn’t it just.” 

The dialogue is awkward, skirting — an unpracticed dance around the sticky periphery of a bleeding head gash. Marc feels like he’s tripping on scabs, too close to catching his ankle on unpicked stitches.

“I am surprised they did not let you test the GP24.”

Marc smiles fully now, because that’s Valentino. Lying — that charming accented lilt to his voice. Making you think he’s on your side. He shakes his head, teeth bared.

“No, you are not.”

Valentino’s eyes crinkle up. He huffs an amused breath, folds his hands together behind his back and pushes away from the wall. It reduces the distance between them by a matter of centimetres, and Marc immediately feels caught again. Snare around his back foot, tight and digging.

“Allora, I am not.”

It’s an open door. A trapdoor, above a nest of snakes and spikes, but a door no less. Marc glances off to the side. A toilet flushes inside the trailer. When he looks back, Valentino drags his eyes up the line of his throat, brazen. Heat turns his insides slick.

“It was like Sepang,” he says, because he needs to push. Needs to challenge, to remind Valentino there’s still teeth at his neck — make him remember who they are. The practice sessions in 2015, a dark sky. Marc crawling all over the back of him, shameless. Valentino’s smile tips too far this side of genuine. His earring glints in the halflight.

“Yes, you have not changed. Still a bastard.”

It hits like a highside, winded against the fuel tank, legs caught under fairings, rolling, hitting asphalt, gravel, bike and barriers. He locks his knees to keep himself standing. It’s fond.

You are still. Still. You have not changed. From when? From before, when they were good? Before Phillip Island, before Malaysia? Before a press conference like a gut punch, before Italian journalists in his home?

Maybe Valentino realises the weight of that. He steps back again, presses his shoulder blades into the lacquered wall.