the shipping container

Others arrived with a perfectly reasonable plan before discovering, somewhere around second year, that they were happier doing something adjacent. Lando, for example, had started alongside George before promptly abandoning it after deciding that he enjoyed making things intuitive far more than making them work. George occasionally questioned his priorities, but Lando was happier now in user experience design, and the quality of his coursework had improved enough that George found it difficult to argue with the decision.

Then there were students like Alex, who freely admitted that he ought to have studied graphic design. Alex possessed the artistic instincts of someone who could have spent years happily drawing logos or illustrating children’s books, but instead had chosen software because software engineers found jobs quickly, were paid obscenely well, and rarely had to explain to relatives over Christmas what exactly they did for a living. Alex complained about code with theatrical misery every week, then quietly finished assignments two days early.

Others seemed to discover that they loved their discipline only after arriving. Charles had entered architectural engineering with vague aspirations of designing skyscrapers and somehow emerged halfway through third year passionately discussing soil mechanics over lunch. George privately suspected that Charles’s sudden enthusiasm had less to do with reinforced concrete than with the absurdly handsome Spanish teaching assistant who supervised half of the structural engineering laboratories, but he kept that observation to himself.

People changed. Interests shifted and evolved. George understood all of that. What George did not understand was Max Verstappen.

Because Max, George was increasingly convinced, had enrolled at the university for the sole purpose of making George’s life a living hell.

George reached that conclusion somewhere around the third week of term, staring at the preliminary architecture diagram for his group master’s design project and wondering how something that had looked so promising fourteen days earlier had deteriorated quite so spectacularly.

It hadn’t been anyone’s fault. Officially.

The software engineering department were allowing computer engineering master’s students to choose which group design track to enrol in, software or electrical engineering, regardless of their home discipline, provided they met the prerequisites.

George had initially considered the arrangement intellectually dishonest. The departments insisted it reflected the realities of modern engineering, where hardware and software teams collaborated constantly. George thought that was a convenient justification for forcing two fundamentally different disciplines into the same assessment rubric.

Computer engineers built hardware and wrote low-level code to make it function. Software engineers designed systems people actually interacted with. The overlap existed, certainly, but it was hardly enough to justify handing students who might never have touched a modern software architecture the same stakeholder projects as people who had spent three years studying them.

At least the lecturers allowed students to form their own groups. Which, in hindsight, had been the first mistake.

George had been perfectly happy with the arrangement he already had. He and Alex made an excellent team. George organised and analysed what work remained. Alex somehow prevented George from tearing Alex’s hair out, or his own.

But when Alex looked at him with those big, dark puppy-dog eyes, tipping his head inconspicuously at his mate from first year slouched in the back, George had found it difficult to refuse him.

Alex’s mate from first year, as it happened, was his former dorm neighbour, Max Verstappen.

To say George was familiar was to say everyone in the engineering faculty was familiar. It was difficult not to be.

Max possessed an almost supernatural ability to appear exactly where regulations became suggestions. He never missed a lecture, arriving early to every hall, bright and early, only to find the perfect seat in the back to sleep away the hour and retain no information whatsoever.

Despite this fact, he received top marks on practicals and programming assignments, the darling of most professors despite not remembering most of their names.

He kept his status in the honors college solely to maintain priority registration, scheduling his modules as late as possible in the day, not rolling out of bed some days until noon. And then, of course, the infamous server-gate incident, when he had distributed his completed assignment for Web Programming to all students with whom he shared a Databases practical the following morning, only for one of them to accidentally submit Max’s copy and nearly sacrificed him to the dean for cheating.

The infuriating part was that he was always happy to help, happy to discuss any problems, any questions after class, functioning as an informal teacher’s assistant who barely remembered his own laptop charger most days.

Max Verstappen spat in the face of every coordinating revision George had ever suffered through, every coloured notebook, every set of flashcards, every professor’s office hours he patiently put up with, investing in relationships with those who sought to teach him.

Max hadn’t even been excited to join their group, grumbling about it still being too early at eleven in the morning as he slung his bag in their clutch of desks. Oh, well. George could manage a night owl.

~~~

The first fortnight of the project was spent around a study room whiteboard in the engineering building.

George preferred whiteboards. Whiteboards were civilised. Problems could be decomposed into sensible pieces, requirements grouped into themes, dependencies identified before anyone wrote a line of code they would later regret.

A group project in his second year had put George in a group project with some unlikely older students in engineering, one of whom had the code to a study room that somehow hadn’t changed from year to year. If it wasn’t booked by other students, George liked the freedom to come and go as he pleased, not beholden to the JSEB online booking system or study groups who left the room empty before their timeslot ended for no reason. He always silently thanked Lewis when the code dinged green, the door unlocking with a satisfying click.

George enumerated edge cases the group had overlooked. Alex doodled increasingly elaborate diagrams in the margins of the board that somehow made the architecture easier to understand with tiny cartoon dinosaurs.

Max wandered around the room spinning a roll of tape he had found in one hand, occasionally interrupting like he was Sherlock bloody Holmes.

“What if we just moved role-checking into its own service?”

George hated him. “Glad you could join us, Max. As we’ve been discussing for the last twenty minutes, authentication is already its own service.”

Max ignored him entirely. “The roles are coming off the token. The auth service doesn’t need to see that. We can do it all separately and not worry about the overhead of the relations here.”

He blinked at George like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Alex shrugged from the board he leaned against. “Sounds right to me,” he said.

George nodded to Alex, who erased the appropriate parts of the diagram and started drawing a new block labeled “role-check service.”

~~~

By the third week, the design had settled enough that there was very little left to debate. The group migrated from whiteboarding to their laptops, each disappearing into their own corner of the project while keeping half an eye on everyone else’s progress.

Max focused on data design and building out the database. Alex worked through the frontend wireframes with headphones permanently in place. George found himself bouncing between components, reviewing everyone’s pull requests before merge conflicts arose.

Max then seemed content to disappear into whichever portion of the codebase no one else wanted to touch. The arrangement worked rather well.

As deadlines accumulated elsewhere, the group’s attendance became less predictable. Alex usually disappeared right before dinner time, without fail.

George understood Alex’s reasoning well enough. Logan was almost permanently installed in the flat they shared. George liked Logan. He was funny, kind, and entirely too patient with Alex.

He was also there every evening since he had been politely asked not to return for the autumn term.

George had no desire to become an unwilling participant in someone else’s relationship by sitting in the kitchen while the two of them cooked dinner together or watched television draped over one another. Staying another few hours in the engineering building before walking home seemed infinitely preferable.

Which was how, without either of them acknowledging it, the late-night JSEB study room gradually became occupied by just George and Max. They weren’t together. They simply worked simultaneously.

They scarcely spoke.

The only sounds after nine o’clock were keyboards, the hum of laptop fans, and Max’s infuriating habit of drumming his fingers against the desk whenever something took longer than expected to compile.

George told himself he appreciated the silence. He certainly didn’t appreciate the competition. It developed entirely without discussion.

George would push a commit, glance at the open pull requests, and notice another fresh commit from Max less than fifteen minutes later.

He would arrive home, shower, make tea, and—purely as a matter of responsible project management—open the repository one last time before bed. Max had committed again.

George began checking his commit history before brushing his teeth. Then once more from bed. It was ridiculous. He told himself he was merely keeping abreast of the project’s progress. He refused to examine why it irritated him so profoundly that Max invariably seemed one step ahead.

The truly offensive part was the quality. George wanted desperately to find something objectionable about Max’s code—sloppy naming conventions, bloated functions, complexity for its own sake. Instead, he found restraint.

Max’s code accomplished exactly what it intended to accomplish and nothing more. Variable names were painfully obvious. Logic flowed in a straight line. Comments appeared only where they genuinely clarified intent rather than compensating for poor implementation. It was irritatingly human to read.

Worse, the bastard wrote tests. Proper ones. George clicked through them one evening with mounting disbelief before finally closing his laptop in mild disgust.

There had to be something. Nobody who slept through Monday morning lectures fuelled almost exclusively by Red Bull and whatever happened to be available in the vending machines outside the laboratory should have been capable of producing code like that. It offended George’s understanding of how the universe ought to function.

Occasionally an email would arrive requesting changes to one of George’s pull requests. Max’s reviews were infuriating for entirely different reasons. There was no condescension, no passive-aggressive phrasing, no egregious attempt to demonstrate superior intelligence. He only left concise observations.

<I think this logic breaks if the cache expires early here.>

<Could simplify this by moving validation into the constructor.>

<I think this endpoint can return null, you are of course only checking for empty.>

George invariably opened the documentation intending to prove him wrong. Naturally, they only supported his argument and fuelled George’s insanity.

Equally infuriating, Max never suggested elaborate rewrites for the sake of elegance. Every comment reduced complexity rather than adding it.

George’s own reviews of Max’s work became increasingly desperate exercises in professional pride.

Once he requested a clearer function name. Twice he suggested expanding documentation. On one particularly humiliating occasion, he merely corrected a missing full stop.

Max replied with a thumbs-up reaction and committed the change six minutes later. Bastard.

His personal habits, at least, remained deeply objectionable. Max typed with what George could only describe as organised violence. Rather than resting his hands properly across the keyboard, he jabbed at individual keys with alarming speed with his forefingers, wrists floating somewhere above the desk, shoulders rounded forward in a posture that ought to have required medical intervention. Every physiotherapist in Britain would have burst into tears watching him work.

The strangest habit, however, was how abruptly he left. There was never any warning. One moment he would be hunched over his keyboard, absent-mindedly bouncing one knee beneath the desk while another suite of tests ran.

The next, he would stand so suddenly his chair rolled backwards, shove his laptop into his backpack with remarkable disregard for its continued wellbeing, and disappear through the study room door at something approaching a sprint. George looked up in surprise every single time.

It never happened at a consistent hour, always after lectures had finished. Always too irregular to resemble any sort of ordinary shift work.

George briefly entertained increasingly absurd explanations. Perhaps Max volunteered somewhere. Perhaps he had another research project. Perhaps he simply enjoyed sprinting through campus after dark.

Whatever the explanation, George found himself watching the door for several seconds after it swung shut before returning to his own screen, mildly irritated that he had noticed at all.

He even attempted to discover where Max was going once. It wasn’t because he cared, just because the behaviour had become distracting.

Max had been in the middle of writing something before springing to his feet with the same inexplicable urgency as always. His chair shot backwards, his laptop disappearing into his backpack with alarming disregard for basic electronics safety, door swinging shut behind him.

George waited perhaps three seconds. Long enough that, if challenged, he could plausibly claim he had simply fancied stretching his legs. He stood, wandered towards the door with what he believed was appropriate nonchalance, and stepped out into the corridor. It was empty.

The engineering building felt entirely different after ten o’clock. The fluorescent lights hummed faintly overhead, illuminating an endless stretch of polished floor interrupted only by closed laboratory doors and abandoned noticeboards advertising careers fairs that had already happened. Somewhere, several floors below, an automatic door clicked open and closed.

Otherwise, nothing. George looked in all directions. The lift indicator remained stubbornly still. The stairwell door was closed.

There was no sound of footsteps, no conversation echoing down the corridor, no glimpse of a backpack disappearing around a corner. Max had simply vanished.

George stood there for another few moments, mildly irritated by the eerie silence, before returning to the study room. His monitor had gone to sleep.

Max’s chair was still pushed back from the table at an awkward angle, exactly where he had left it, as though he had intended to return in five minutes rather than the following afternoon.

George straightened it before sitting back down. He told himself the entire exercise had been a waste of time.

~~~

By mid-October, even George had to concede that something had changed.

Max was still writing code. That, irritatingly, had not deteriorated in the slightest. Everything else had.

He had stopped answering messages in the project chat unless directly tagged. Even then, responses often arrived hours later, if at all. His attendance in lectures became increasingly theoretical. When he did appear, he usually occupied the back row, hoodie pulled over his head, sleeping with an ease George found frankly astonishing. Somehow he still answered questions correctly whenever a lecturer woke him.

He looked untidy, but no longer in the harmless, permanently-student sort of way Max usually did. He looked untidy in a way that suggested he had stopped noticing. George tried not to concern himself with it. He lasted approximately a week.

“I know we’re all pretending not to notice,” George said over lunch one afternoon, setting his fork down beside his tray, “but does anyone know what’s actually going on with Max?”

Oscar looked up from his noodles. “No.” That appeared to exhaust his contribution.

Alex frowned thoughtfully. “I mean…” He scratched at the back of his neck. “I know he was seeing someone.”

Lando glanced over from across the table. “Who?”

Alex shrugged. “Can’t remember. Danny? Australian bloke. Curly hair.”

Recognition flickered across Lando’s face immediately. “Ricciardo?”

“Yeah. That’s him.”

Lando’s expression faltered. “…He isn’t here anymore.”

The table fell unexpectedly quiet.

“What?” George asked, glancing at everyone. “Graduated?”

“Nah,” Lando said, shaking his head. “His PhD went sideways.”

Alex hummed in recognition. “Yeah, he’d just started when I met him. What happened?”

Lando picked absently at his chips. “His supervisors pulled the plug.”

George’s brow creased. “That’s rough.”

Alex nodded in agreement. “I didn’t know.”

“Most people didn’t.” Lando shrugged. “Happened over the summer, I think.”

George found himself replaying the information in his head. Max had been in a relationship. His boyfriend had been years deep in a doctoral program only to be forced to leave for reasons unknown. Then, over the course of several weeks, Max had stopped replying to messages, stopped sleeping properly, and apparently stopped caring whether he looked as though he had slept in his clothes.

It was hardly conclusive. It was, however, the first explanation George had heard that accounted for any of it.

He didn’t know what failing a review felt like.

He had spent three years quietly terrified of it happening to him. His own funding depended on producing individual and group projects well above the departmental average. The thought of watching someone else fail to do so—and then simply vanish from the university altogether—

George understood, at least intellectually, why that might leave a mark. He made a mental note to find Sebastian after Wednesday’s seminar. If anyone knew Daniel Ricciardo, it would probably be Seb.

~~~

George found Sebastian the following afternoon in the environmental engineering building, occupying a corner table outside one of the postgraduate laboratories with a laptop and three folders spread around a disposable cup of coffee that had long since gone cold.

Seb looked up as George approached and smiled. “Avoiding your own projects?”

“Briefly.”

“That sounds ominous.”

George sat opposite him. “Can I ask you something?”

“You’ve already started.”

George ignored that. “Did you know Daniel Ricciardo?”

Seb leaned back in his chair. “Danny?” he repeated. “Yeah.”

“You knew him well?”

“Not especially. We only shared… two modules, I think.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Maybe three, depending on how you count the design project.”

George nodded. “What was he like?”

Seb laughed quietly. “Loud. Friendly.”

“Helpful.”

“And,” Seb continued, “very aware that he was charming.”

“Meaning?”

“He flirted with absolutely everyone.”

George couldn’t help smiling a little. “So I’ve heard.”

“He’d walk into a room and somehow know every single person in it within ten minutes.” Seb shook his head. “If there was a house party anywhere within five kilometres of campus, Danny had either organised it or been invited before anyone else.”

George considered that. “Lando said he fell out of his programme.”

Seb’s expression sobered. “He did.”

“Were you surprised?”

Seb sighed. “No.” It didn’t sound unkind. “Danny was bright,” he said. “Genuinely. Chemical engineering wasn’t beyond him.”

“But?”

“But intelligence only gets you so far.” He snapped one of his folders closed. “PhDs here aren’t awarded because you are clever. Plenty of clever people don’t get them.”

George knew that.

“They’re awarded because you consistently put the work in,” Seb continued. “His supervisors wanted him to revise the methodology. Replicate some of the experiments. Basically rebuild part of the project before he wrote the thesis.”

“He wasn’t dedicated?”

“He was dedicated to his way of doing things,” Seb said, raking a hand through his hair. “He’d done years of work by then. I think he couldn’t bear hearing that part of it needed doing again.”

George found himself nodding. He could understand that, even if he couldn’t relate to it. “Did you know…” He hesitated, trying to remember how Alex had described him, once upon a time. “A younger student. Computer engineering, Dutch, blond? Usually looks like he’s slept in whatever he’s wore the day before.”

Seb’s brow furrowed. “…Max?”

George smirked. “So you do know him.”

“I know of him.” Something in Seb’s expression flickered.

“What?”

Seb looked down into his coffee. “I don’t know how much of this is really my business.”

“I’m only asking because we’re in a design group together.”

Seb was quiet for another few seconds. “Danny and Max were… seeing each other for a couple years, I think.”

George waited.

Seb picked absent-mindedly at the sleeve of his cup. “Danny had a bit of a reputation.”

“What sort of reputation?”

He hesitated again, choosing his words with obvious care. “He liked younger lads.”

George frowned. “Younger as in…”

“First-years.”

“Oh.”

“It wasn’t…” Seb sighed. “Nobody thought Danny was dangerous. That’s not what I’m saying.”

“But?”

“But a lot of us thought it was a bit…” Seb trailed off, waving his hand vaguely.

“Yeah, I get it.” George’s brow furrowed. “But wait, didn’t you have a whole thing with a professor?”

Seb scoffed, a flush creeping up his neck. “Mark was my TA for Materials,” he insisted, like that made a world of difference. “But that was completely one-sided. I don’t think he knew I existed.”

“And anyway, there are plenty of people your own age at university,” Seb continued. “Most people date within a year or so of themselves. Danny always seemed to enjoy…” He searched for the phrase. “…being the experienced one.”

George understood. “He liked the attention?”

“I think he liked shocking people.” Seb smiled without any humour. “He brought Max to a few house parties.”

George found himself picturing a younger Max without meaning to, fresh out of sixth form, trying to fit in.

“He let him drink,” Seb said. “Nobody else was thrilled about that. Max was seventeen, I remember that.”

“You said anything?”

“A few of us did.”

“What did Danny say?”

Seb snorted softly. “‘He’s fine.’” The imitation carried a shockingly accurate Aussie accent that suggested he had heard the words more than once.

“We told him he ought to leave the first-years to settle in with each other.” Seb shrugged. “Suggested he date someone in his own year. He laughed.”

“And Max?”

Seb looked away for a moment. “Max didn’t really know anyone.” His voice had softened. “He always just looked…” He paused. “…happy that Danny wanted him there.”

George felt something tighten uncomfortably in his chest.

“I don’t know,” Seb admitted quietly. “It always sat badly with me.”

“Why?”

“Because nobody seemed to be looking out for him.” Seb rested his forearms on the table. “He was this scruffy first-year tagging along to parties full of older students who all knew each other. Danny was having a brilliant time. Everyone knew Danny.”

“And Max?”

“Max just followed him like a dog.”

Another brief silence settled between them.

“I remember thinking,” Seb said, “that if Danny ever stopped bringing him around…”

George suddenly found it much easier to understand the exhausted young man who now slept through lectures, disappeared from the group chat, and worked until midnight as though the only place he knew how to exist anymore was in front of a computer.

“Yeah,” he agreed quietly.

Seb rubbed the back of his neck. “Of course, that’s exactly what happened. And then it was someone else.”

George blinked. “Someone else?”

Seb looked at him for a moment. “Isn’t Lando one of your lot?”

“…Lando?” he echoed.

“The little one.” Seb looked mildly uncomfortable. “I remember Danny bringing him to a couple of things last year.”

George’s stomach dipped. “They were together?”

“I couldn’t tell you.” Seb shook his head. “Maybe they were dating. Maybe they weren’t. I never asked.”

George felt vaguely nauseated. Lando wouldn’t necessarily mention a thing like that to him. He tended to keep himself to himself, especially his romantic life.

Seb leaned back in his chair, absently scratching at the stubble on his cheek. “I just know that once I met Lando, I stopped seeing Max around.”

~~~

George never consciously decided to become responsible for Max.

Max had acquired an unfortunate habit of arriving five or ten minutes late to the morning software architecture module, usually with damp hair and an expression suggesting he had only just remembered lectures existed.

One Tuesday, finding himself in the lecture theatre first, George dropped his rucksack onto the seat beside him before opening his laptop.

When Max arrived several minutes later, he paused briefly in the aisle, scanning the packed hall for an empty seat.

George looked up. “Max,” he called quietly, sliding his bag into the floor.

Max turned suddenly, blinking. He slid into the chair, already pulling his laptop from his backpack. “…Cheers.”

The following week, George did it again. Soon it simply became expected. Max no longer hesitated before taking the empty seat. Neither of them commented on it.

The Red Bull was almost an accident.

George bought two cans from the little campus shop between the Underground station and the engineering building. Something told him he might need them soon, whatever disasters awaited him come midterm.

That Wednesday, he noticed Max standing in front of the vending machine outside the lab, leaning his forehead against the plastic, the case woefully empty of his preferred energy drink, sighing quietly.

George headed into the lecture hall and set the spare can on the desk beside him.

Max looked at it when he sat down. “What’s that?”

“Looks to me,” George said slowly, “like a Red Bull.”

Max stared at the can for another second before picking it up. “What’s it for, asshole?”

George smiled faintly. “Emergencies only.”

Max cracked it open, the sound loud in the classroom. “This is definitely an emergency.” He drank half of it before opening his laptop.

George bought two every Wednesday after that.

The first-years required more deliberate intervention.

Computer engineering had developed an unfortunate reputation amongst the younger cohorts. Specifically, that if they found Max Verstappen after lectures, he would explain almost any concept they struggled with. George discovered this entirely by chance.

He and Max had barely stepped out of Signals and Systems when a gaggle of first-year mechanical engineering students intercepted them in the corridor.

“Max!” one of them called.

“Hi, Max,” the other called immediately. “Sorry.”

Max didn’t stop walking, but he let the first-years fall in step with them.

“We’re stuck on the MATLAB assignment Shov set.”

George watched resignation flicker across Max’s face. The younger students didn’t even pause for breath before launching into complaints about being forced to draw various shapes with matrices.

“Can you just have a quick look?”

Max shifted the strap of his backpack higher onto his shoulder. “Have you asked your TA? He of course is supposed to help with your work.”

“Checo told us to figure it out ourselves,” the one with dark hair whined.

“Please, Max,” begged the curly-haired one. “No one is as good as you are.”

George realised, with a faint sense of horror, that this had happened many times before. He stepped neatly into the conversation. “Go bother someone in your own department,” he said dismissively. “We’ve got our own work to do, y’know.”

Three pairs of eyes turned towards him. George rolled his eyes. “There are other people who can tutor you in MATLAB, too.”

The broader of the two frowned. “…There are?”

“Yes.” He pulled one of their phones from their hands, switching to Instagram and typing in a handle. “Lewis is EE, and he might be nice enough to look over your dodgy code if you’re polite.”

Max looked sideways at him.

George ignored him. “Tell him you’re friends of George.”

The first-years thanked him profusely before disappearing down the corridor. Only once they were out of earshot did George resume walking.

He glanced sideways at Max. “How did you even meet them?”

Max shrugged. “They were moaning on one of the couches in JSEB, and it was distracting. So I helped them.”

“They ask you often?”

Max’s eyes flicked back. “Enough.”

“You don’t have to say yes.”

“They’re first-years,” Max said easily, as though that explained everything.

George privately decided it did not.

The next time someone approached Max between modules, George answered the question before Max had fully stopped walking. It became another habit.

He fielded questions from lecturers when Max inevitably nodded off twenty minutes into a two-hour lecture. He emailed his notes after particularly dreadful morning modules without waiting to be asked.

He quietly filled out forms twice on his iPad, completing certain administrative tasks for them both whenever professors asked the room to submit a form. He even found himself completing the more tedious sections of the group design documentation before Max could disappear into the code.

Oddly enough, Max seemed to notice. George would simply discover that the use cases had already been updated before he reached them. Then he found that Max had filled out testing records without prompting. Soon, every pull request George opened had already been reviewed by the time he got home.

It wasn’t gratitude in any conventional sense. It felt more like cooperation. The project became easier. They became easier.

Sometimes, after an afternoon practical, they simply walked across campus together towards the next module. Max usually had his hands shoved into the pocket of his hoodie. George usually carried a coffee for himself and a Red Bull for Max to be opened upon arrival.

~~~

JSEB had emptied hours ago.

Rain tapped softly against the windows overlooking the courtyard while George worked through adding another set of integration tests.

Across the study room, Max was hunched over his keyboard, fidgeting restlessly as another build compiled. George looked up instinctively.

Max glanced at the screen before just as unpredictably as always, he moved. His chair rolled backwards. His laptop, he shoved into his backpack, not even bothering to zip fully, and then he was gone.

The door had barely begun swinging shut before George called after him. “Max—”

George stared at the empty doorway for a moment.

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

He abandoned his own backpack beside the desk and hurried into the corridor.

The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. For one terrifying moment, he thought he had lost him again. Then something moved slightly in his peripheral vision.

The heavy door on the men’s toilets hadn’t quite settled back into its frame. George slowed instinctively.

He reached the doorway just in time to hear a cubicle door slam shut and the frantic fumbling of someone who had been waiting far, far too long before finally allowing themselves a break.

A heavy stream hit water, and a low groan emanated out from under the walls of the cubicle. Something about it made George blush, like he should turn away despite no one witnessing his standing there.

George stood motionless just inside the entrance. Max had been sitting beside him for nearly four hours. George had fetched coffee, filled his water bottle, stretched his legs twice.

Max hadn’t moved, not until the very last possible second. Seb’s words drifted unbidden back into his mind.

Nobody seemed to be looking out for him.

George suddenly wondered how many other ordinary things Max had quietly stopped noticing about himself. Did Max pay attention to if he was hungry or tired? Did he recognise his own thirst?

Clearly he had developed a horrifying habit, working late into the evenings until his bladder physically couldn’t take it anymore, bursting from within. How long did someone have to spend surviving one crisis after another before their own body stopped feeling important enough to listen to?

The cubicle remained closed.

George turned quietly back towards the door. He would pretend he had never followed him. He would retrieve his bag. He would walk out of the lab, his thoughts of concern would turn to something calmer and less agitating, and his erection would die back down.

~~~

George’s efforts became progressively more difficult to justify.

Saving Max a seat had been practical. Buying a can or two of Red Bull had scarcely cost anything. Lending him lecture notes and quietly absorbing interruptions from first-years made perfect sense when viewed through the lens of protecting the project.

The food, however, was considerably harder to explain.

It began after George noticed that Max’s lunches, when they existed at all, consisted almost entirely of vending machine purchases. Some afternoons it was a packet of wine gums. Others, crisps. Once, to George’s profound disbelief, Max appeared perfectly content with a chocolate bar and two cans of Red Bull before settling into a three-hour lecture.

George watched him unwrap the chocolate without the slightest hint of embarrassment. “You do realise,” he whispered carefully, “that caffeine is not a food group.”

Max looked down at the wrapper in his hand before looking back at George. “It has calories.”

George closed his eyes briefly. “The nutritional information is not the problem.”

“It’ll do.”

“It really won’t.”

Max only shrugged, already returning his attention to the front of the lecture theatre. George spent the lecture trying to pay attention to consistency models while privately compiling a list of foods that could be eaten one-handed during a seminar.

The following week, George purchased two meal deals on his way to campus. He placed one on the desk between them before Max had finished unpacking his laptop.

Max looked from the sandwich to George with immediate suspicion. “I brought lunch.”

“You brought wine gums yesterday.”

“That was yesterday.”

George raised an eyebrow.

Slowly, with all the resignation of a man accepting an inevitable defeat, Max unzipped the front pocket of his backpack. Inside sat a singular can of Red Bull.

George gestured emphatically. “I rest my case.”

Max stared at him for a moment before letting out a long sigh through his nose. “I liked you better when you hated me.”

George considered denying it before deciding honesty was the best policy and leaving well enough alone. Max actually laughed before reaching for the sandwich.

George discovered, entirely by accident, that Max preferred salt and vinegar crisps to ready salted. He adjusted accordingly. It was hardly difficult.

After that, George stopped asking whether Max had eaten. He simply assumed he hadn’t. Somewhere along the way, the habit extended beyond lectures.

JSEB emptied gradually as evening settled over campus, but George and Max almost invariably remained in the lab, each absorbed in their own corner of the project until the glow from their monitors was brighter than the grey November sky beyond the windows.

At half past seven, George would save his work and close his laptop. “We’re going.”

Max wouldn’t even glance away from his screen. “No.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve nearly finished.”

“You said that forty-five minutes ago.”

“I’m closer now.”

George stood, folded his arms, and waited.

Eventually Max sighed with exaggerated annoyance, pushed his chair back, and reached for his hoodie. “This is coercion.”

“Actually, it’s dinner.”

“That time it was going to build. I could feel it.”

“You can run it again when we get there.”

More often than not, they ended up walking to the students’ union café in companionable silence. George ordered first. Max studied the menu for an alarmingly long time before eventually pointing at the first hot meal he saw. George suspected he would have happily skipped the decision altogether if left to his own devices.

They wound up on one of the benches overlooking the central quad, eating sandwiches wrapped in paper while students hurried between evening societies and late lectures. They seldom spoke very much.

George had long since discovered that silence didn’t seem to demand anything from Max whereas conversation did. Silence merely allowed them to exist in the same place for twenty minutes before returning to the cave that was their study room.

Max tolerated the interruption with remarkably poor grace. He grumbled every time George insisted they leave. He insisted he wasn’t hungry, only to finish whatever George had persuaded him to buy before George himself had reached the halfway point.

When they stood to leave, Max paused long enough to gather both wrappers. “I’ll take these.”

George blinked.

“You bought lunch.”

“So?”

“So…” Max frowned, as though the answer should have been obvious. “…Seems fair.” He disappeared towards the bin before George could argue.

It was a remarkably Max sort of thank you. George found, rather inconveniently, that he liked that about him.

Within minutes of returning to his designated spot at the study table, he would be bent over his keyboard once more as though the break had never happened.

Some habits, on the other hand, proved stubbornly resistant to intervention.

For instance, George eventually realised that if he didn’t remind Max to drink, Max simply wouldn’t. A bottle would sit untouched beside his laptop for hours while can after can of Red Bull accumulated in the recycling bin beneath the desk.

“Drink some water.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve had three energy drinks.”

“I’m still fine.”

“You’re going to feel dreadful.”

“I already feel fucking dreadful.”

George frowned. “That wasn’t the point.”

Max only reached for the bottle because George continued looking at him. He took two dutiful mouthfuls before setting it back down. “There. Happy?”

George waited with a pointed look until Max groaned with theatrical suffering but obediently drank again.

It occurred to George, not for the first time, that he had somehow become responsible for reminding a twenty-one-year-old man to perform the basic maintenance required to remain alive. He found the arrangement faintly ridiculous. He also found that he no longer minded it nearly as much as he thought he ought to.

~~~

George had always believed that concentration was largely a matter of discipline.

JSEB, despite housing thirty-odd engineering students in various states of sleep deprivation, was generally conducive to productive work. The fluorescent lights were predictable, the heating was slightly too warm, and the steady chorus of keyboards and cooling fans blended into a kind of mechanical white noise that George found oddly comforting. Once he settled into a problem, hours could disappear almost unnoticed. That is, until he started working with Max Verstappen.

George had long since discovered that Max was physically incapable of remaining still. His right knee bounced continuously beneath the desk, setting the entire workstation vibrating just enough to register in George’s peripheral vision. When the bouncing stopped, Max drummed his fingers against the edge of the keyboard while waiting for code to compile. When the fingers stopped, he rolled a pen between both hands. If there was nothing within reach, he cracked his knuckles one at a time before immediately beginning again with the other hand. It was relentless.

George stared at his monitor, reading the same paragraph of documentation for the third time, and very deliberately chose not to look to his left. The desk shuddered faintly.

It probably wouldn’t be such a distraction if he wasn’t so painfully aware of Max’s proclivity for holding in his biological urges until the last possible second. It pinged in his mind with a helpful toast notification with every fidget, every bounce of Max’s knee.

Reminder! Max’s bladder is likely full to bursting.

George deleted the nonsensical line of code he had just written.

Five minutes later, the pen began clicking. George looked up.

Max was frowning intently at his screen, entirely absorbed in whatever abstraction layer currently occupied his attention. The clicking appeared completely unconscious.

George cleared his throat, and the clicking stopped. He returned to his work, shifting slightly in his chair. Thirty seconds later, the knee started again.

George let out a slow breath through his nose. He could feel too many details of his jeans. He had absolutely no reason to be aroused like this, but something about Max’s attempt to win over biological need was doing George’s head in. And apparently, his cock.

“Do you realise,” he asked eventually, “that you move almost constantly?”

Max looked over with genuine confusion. “What?”

“Your leg.”

Max glanced beneath the table as though seeing it for the first time. “Oh.”

For perhaps fifteen glorious seconds, it remained perfectly still. Then it started bouncing again.

George abandoned the function he had been trying to write and rubbed both hands over his face. “I don’t think you’re doing it deliberately.”

“I’m not.”

“I know.”

“I’m just thinking.”

“So am I,” George said, exasperated. “Or was, half an hour ago.”

Max looked almost apologetic. “…Sorry.”

George sighed. “It’s all right.”

It wasn’t. Or rather, it ought to have been. George had worked in open-plan offices during co-op terms. He had completed coursework in libraries crowded with hundreds of students. Objectively, a bouncing knee shouldn’t have been enough to derail an entire evening’s work.

But this bouncing knee unfortunately meant something, meant George was all too aware of the implications behind it. And objectively, George had become absurdly aware of Max’s… problem over the previous several weeks.

He noticed when Max arrived late, when Max skipped lunch. He noticed when he forgot to drink the water bottle sitting six inches from his elbow. Apparently, he now noticed every unconscious movement Max made while refusing to listen to his most basic bodily functions as well.

After another twenty minutes of increasingly unsuccessful concentration, George closed his laptop. “Come on.”

Max didn’t look away from his monitor. “Hm?”

“Let’s take ten minutes.”

“I’m nearly done.”

“You’ve been nearly done for the last hour.”

“I’m actually nearly done now.”

George glanced at the corner of Max’s screen. There were still several windows open, a debugger running, and a terminal busily printing test output.

“It doesn’t look like you’re nearly done.”

“It is.”

“You’ve said that before.”

Max finally looked over, an edge of impatience creeping into his expression. “If I stop now, I’ll lose my train of thought.”

“You won’t.”

“I will.”

George hesitated. “Then at least stretch your legs.”

“I will in a minute.”

“You said that an hour ago.”

“I know.”

“And?”

“And…” Max smiled faintly without any real amusement. “…I’m nearly done.”

George had no satisfactory response to that. He reopened his laptop. The study room settled back into silence. Another hour slipped by.

George eventually became sufficiently absorbed in untangling a particularly unpleasant concurrency issue that Max’s fidgeting receded into the background. By the time he finally solved it and leaned back with quiet satisfaction, he realised the room had become strangely still. He looked sideways.

In one fluid movement, Max stood, shoved his laptop into his backpack without bothering to close half the windows still open on the display, slung the bag over one shoulder, and was through the door before George had fully processed what was happening.

The door swung shut behind him. The silence that followed was almost startling. George sat back in his chair, staring at his monitor, his cursor blinking patiently where he had left it.

He had thought the demands of the project had done him the favour of smothering every inappropriate thought he had entertained about Max and his bladder. In reality, he had merely buried them beneath enough work that he could pretend they were something else, right up until they all came crashing through at once, heating his face and groin in a way he imagined wasn’t dissimilar to Max’s at the moment.

A reasonable person would actually accomplish something without the distraction of feeling every twitch of another human being from across the table. Instead, he found himself looking at the closed door. He told himself he was merely concerned for Max’s wellbeing.

Max had spent the better part of five hours glued to his laptop, only to vanish with the urgency of someone responding to an emergency. He had to be on the brink of a medical episode by that point.

George couldn’t bear to think about the alternative.

He lasted perhaps twenty seconds before giving up the pretence. He pushed back his chair, left his backpack where it was, and stepped out into the corridor.

“It’s irresponsible,” he muttered under his breath as he looked both ways down the empty hallway, “I’m blaming you.”

He only dared open the door to the men’s toilets enough to hear as Max stumbled, muttering, thinking himself alone.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Max said to no one. “Ahh—”

The sound of pure relief escaping his teammate was practically euphoric. George’s whole body was frozen against the wooden door with something like a mix of envy and a sick sense of enjoyment surging through him. It had to feel incredible after waiting so long, probably like nothing he could imagine. Certainly sounded like it.

When Max groaned, the way George’s knees buckled reminded him absurdly of blue AU, of all things. Cold on his tongue, almost disappointingly sweet, disguising what was coming, and then suddenly warm all the way down to his toes.

He eased the door shut with undue care, walking briskly back to the study room as if Max might return despite never having done so after any of his previous hasty exits.

Eventually, George’s bulge reduced enough to allow him to ride the bus home. He went to bed that night carrying a quiet, persistent shame. Somewhere along the way, concern had twisted into some perverse interest.

Max was his teammate, someone who needed looking after, not someone George ought to be thinking about with his hand sneaking under his boxers, wrapping around his cock. Max’s name shouldn’t have been on his lips, between groans of pleasure and misery.

George certainly shouldn’t have been imagining Max’s face slack with pleasure, the sounds he made, holding himself, leaning against the partition of the cubicle as he spilled over his own fist, flooded with shame and arousal in equal measure.

~~~

By the time November settled over London in earnest, George could predict most of Max’s habits with uncomfortable accuracy.

He knew which mornings Max was most likely to oversleep, which lectures he would almost certainly nod off during, and roughly how many reminders it took before he would actually drink the water sitting beside his laptop. He knew that Max preferred salt and vinegar crisps, disliked mayonnaise, and would always choose tea over coffee if someone else happened to be making it.

He knew, in other words, a remarkable number of entirely practical things. He realised one Friday afternoon that he knew almost nothing else.

They had escaped the engineering building for once, taking advantage of an unexpectedly dry afternoon to eat sandwiches on a bench overlooking the quad. Students drifted between lectures wrapped in scarves against the cold, while somewhere across campus a brass ensemble was making a valiant attempt at something recognisable as jazz.

George glanced sideways. “Doing anything this weekend?”

Max looked up from his sandwich. “Hm?”

“This weekend.”

“Oh.” Max considered the question for a moment. “No.”

George waited, but nothing followed. “No plans?”

“No.”

“…At all?”

Max shrugged. “I’ll probably work.”

George frowned. “On the project?”

“Some.”

“And?”

“My thesis.”

Alex would have launched into a detailed account of whatever Logan had persuaded him to do. Oscar would have admitted he was planning to catch up on sleep before sheepishly confessing he would probably end up in the robotics lab with the solar car team instead. Even Lando, if asked in passing, would somehow find a way to spend ten minutes discussing brunch. Max simply stopped speaking once the question had been answered.

George tried again. “You don’t go home?”

“Not often.”

“Family nearby?”

“No.”

George bit back the next question before it escaped. It wasn’t that Max seemed irritated. If anything, he answered every question politely enough. He simply treated conversation the same way he treated code reviews. He provided exactly the information requested, no more and no less.

George had spent the better part of a month making himself quietly indispensable to Max’s daily routine, and somehow he still had no idea what Max did when he wasn’t sitting beside him.

~~~

Another late night in the lab found George too deep in reviewing their database indices to notice how long it had been since they had taken a break.

His attention was ripped from the depths of scalability documentation when he heard the telltale sound of a rolling chair being flung back, Max’s backpack slung haphazardly over one shoulder as he practically ran out the door.

George’s stomach dropped. He hadn’t been watching the time, hadn’t been paying attention to Max and how long they had gone this stint without leaving the room. Without a moment’s hesitation, George had his things in hand, shoving his laptop into his bag, not caring to properly zip it shut before jogging out into the hall.

His stride took him immediately to the closing men’s room door, pushing in to see a single pair of trainers under a cubicle in the otherwise empty toilets.

“Fuck, fuck—”

George could hear Max’s panic through the hissed words, the feverish jangling of a belt against the metal of his jeans. But this time, it wasn’t followed by the immediate sound of a stream hitting water.

“No, no, nonono—”

Max’s panic had made way for desperation, tapering into a whimper as a soft hissing sound filled the room, and George realised with a dawning sense of horror that Max hadn’t made it in time, hadn’t managed to unfasten his belt or his fly quickly enough, and—Max was pissing himself.

George stopped breathing entirely.

He stood outside the cubicles for a moment, listening. There was no movement beyond the door, no rustling of clothing, no indication that Max intended to emerge any time soon. The bathroom itself was otherwise empty. The fluorescent lights buzzed faintly overhead, and somewhere beyond the door, the building’s heating system groaned through old pipework. Eventually, the whimpering faded into ragged breathing, and George heard the unmistakable slump of a man sliding to the floor.

He couldn’t—he wouldn’t let Max suffer in there alone, on the floor, soaked in his own piss, no matter how much it pained him. George took a deep breath.

“Max?”

For several agonising seconds, he waited for a response, but none came. George frowned. He had expected some irritated response, some variation of I’ll be out in a minute or Go away. Instead, the silence persisted with an uncomfortable, almost deliberate weight to it.

He knocked gently against the metal door. “Max.”

Several more seconds passed before he heard the faint scrape of fabric against tile. The sound settled something unpleasant in his stomach.

“I’m not leaving,” George said quietly. “Not until I know you’re all right.”

The answer, when it finally came, was so quiet that George almost missed it.

“I’m fine.”

George closed his eyes briefly. It was the first outright lie Max had ever told him. “No,” he replied gently. “You’re really not.”

He was met with only silence again. George rested one hand lightly against the cubicle partition, more to steady himself than for any other reason. He had spent weeks learning the rhythm of Max’s days, learning when to interrupt him and when to leave him alone, when to insist on dinner and when to settle for something from the vending machine. Somewhere along the way, he had become rather good at recognising the difference between reluctance and genuine distress. And this wasn’t reluctance.

“Max,” he said again, keeping his voice deliberately calm, “would you unlock the door for me?”

“No.”

George almost smiled despite himself. There was more life in that single syllable than there had been in the previous minute.

“All right,” he said. “Can you tell me why not?”

“I don’t…” Max stopped, and George heard him draw a slow, wet breath. “I don’t want you to see.”

George looked at the floor for a moment before answering. “I understand. But I’m not going to leave you like this.”

There was a soft, humourless laugh from the other side of the door. George resisted every instinct urging him to keep talking. If there was one thing he had learned from working alongside Max for months, it was that silence didn’t frighten him. Silence was often where Max did his best thinking.

Eventually George spoke again. “I’m not going to force the door.”

Max refused to reply.

“I’m simply going to stay here until you decide what you’d like to do.”

Several minutes passed. George found himself studying the scuffed toes of his trainers while students came and went elsewhere in the building, their footsteps echoing faintly through the corridor outside. The world carried on exactly as it always had, blissfully unaware that two engineering students were negotiating through a locked toilet cubicle.

Then, at last, the lock turned. George waited another heartbeat before easing the door open.

Max was sitting on the floor in a puddle of his own making with his back against the partition, one knee drawn up and his forearm resting across it. His hoodie sleeves had disappeared over both hands. His face was blotchy pink and wet with tears, and he turned away immediately, as though even now he hoped George might not look too closely.

George wished, quite fiercely, that the first thing Max had done upon seeing him was not apologise for existing.

“I’m sorry,” Max muttered.

George crouched in front of him. “What for?”

“You shouldn’t have…”

“You don’t get to apologise.”

Max shook his head without meeting his eyes. “It’s fucking awful.”

George gambled on a joke, knowing Max was bluntly truthful in the most dire of situations. “It’s not my trousers you’ve ruined.”

He spied the smallest twitch at the corner of Max’s mouth. He seized upon it. “Can you stand if I help you?”

Max hesitated. “I think so.”

“Good.”

George held out a hand and avoided looking directly at the deeper blue of Max’s jeans. Max looked at it for several seconds before finally placing his own in George’s. His grip was cold.

Getting him upright took considerably more effort than George had anticipated. Max’s legs were considerably weakened from the effort of holding for some time before giving out, and protested the movement. He leaned against the wall once he was standing, breathing carefully through the embarrassment dripping off the hem of his jeans.

George took one look at the damp backside of Max’s jeans and only then did he realise his own shame tenting his trousers in the narrow space between them.

Automatically, George angled his hips away from the man in distress beside him, cursing himself for allowing whatever horribly twisted wires in his mind to interfere with this incredibly delicate situation. Maybe Max hadn’t noticed. He had been rather busy with his own situation, after all. George could only hope.

He then remembered the spare joggers crumpled in the bottom of his own gym bag from that morning’s workout. He happily snatched his bag in front of his traitorous crotch and pulled them free, holding them out.

Max finally looked up. “What?”

“They’re clean.”

Max stared at them as though George had offered him something priceless. “I can’t.”

“You can.”

“They’re yours.”

“They’re also considerably cleaner than what you’re currently wearing.”

Max looked down at his jeans for the first time. Colour had already crept down his neck, George didn’t think he could flush any deeper. He regretted pointing it out immediately.

“I’ll wait outside,” he said, softening his tone. “Take your time.”

Max looked back at the joggers, then at George. “…Why are you doing this?”

George paused. The truthful answer surprised him as much as it evidently would Max. “Because someone ought to.”

Max’s expression crumpled almost imperceptibly before he looked away again. George stepped quietly out into the corridor, closed the door behind him, and waited.

When Max emerged several minutes later wearing joggers several inches too long for him and carrying his backpack, George simply took the bag without comment and slung both over his shoulder.

“I’m walking you home,” he said.

Max opened his mouth, no doubt preparing another protest.

George met his eyes. “This isn’t a discussion.”

For the first time since George had known him, Max nodded without arguing.

By the time they reached Max’s street, the city had settled into that peculiar late-evening quiet that only seemed to exist between the rush of commuters and the beginning of the nightlife. The pavements were damp from an earlier shower, the shopfronts already dark behind their security grilles, and the rows of brick terraces looked almost interchangeable beneath the amber glow of the streetlamps.

George never had cause to come this way before. He knew, in the abstract, that Max lived somewhere north of campus, but the knowledge had never extended beyond a vague point on a map.

Now he found himself committing little details to memory without meaning to. He catalogued the corner shop with faded advertisements in the window, the narrow alley beside the launderette, the wrought-iron railings in front of Max’s building, one bent noticeably out of shape.

Max had grown quieter during the walk, though not with the brittle, frightening silence that had greeted George outside the cubicle. Whatever had broken loose back in the engineering building had eased into something weary instead. A normal colour had returned gradually to his face, and by the time they reached his flat the blotchiness around his eyes had faded enough that, had George not known better, he might have believed nothing unusual had happened at all. Of course, George did know better.

He shifted both backpacks higher on his shoulder as Max fished his keys from the pocket of George’s joggers. The cuffs had bunched untidily around Max’s slightly squishy trainers for the entire walk, which hid his bare ankles from sight. George found himself absurdly relieved that Max had stopped trying to apologise for borrowing them somewhere between campus and the Underground station.

“I’ll wash these,” Max said quietly, still looking down at the key ring in his hands.

George shook his head. “You don’t have to.”

“I do.”

“You really don’t.”

Max’s eyes were tired more than anything else now. “I’d like to.”

George considered arguing before deciding there was little point. If washing a borrowed pair of joggers restored some small measure of dignity after the evening they had had, it was hardly worth depriving Max of it. “All right,” he said, handing Max his backpack. “No rush.”

Max nodded. George realised, somewhat belatedly, that this was usually the point at which people invited one another inside. He had walked friends home often enough over the years. Alex invariably insisted on making guests tea. Charles would ask whether George wanted to try some baked goods he had sitting on the counter. Even Oscar, reserved as he was, had once invited George up to borrow a textbook rather than making another trip across campus the following day. Max said nothing.

He simply stood with one hand still resting on his keys, looking as though he had reached the limit of what he could comfortably manage in one evening.

George found, to his own surprise, that he didn’t mind in the slightest. He wasn’t especially curious about what Max’s flat looked like. He had spent the walk satisfying himself of something rather more important. Max had stopped trembling. His breathing had settled. He was standing under his own power again, albeit exhausted.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” George said.

Max nodded again. “Yeah. Thanks.” His voice was hoarse enough that George might have missed it had the street been any noisier.

George smiled. “I’ll save you a seat.”

He would’ve sworn Max almost looked pleased before fatigue set in again. “I know.”

He disappeared into the building a moment later, the heavy front door clicking shut behind him. George remained where he was until the light in the communal hallway flickered on. Only then did he turn and begin the journey back across to the bus station.

By the time he reached the flat, Alex’s shoes were already piled carelessly beside the front door, and muffled laughter drifted from the sitting room where Logan had evidently come round again. George called a quiet greeting that neither of them seemed to hear, depositing his backpack in his bedroom.

His evening routine unfolded almost entirely on instinct. He showered, brushed his teeth, laid out clothes for the morning, and set an alarm he already knew he would wake before. His body moved through each task with the efficient familiarity of habit while his mind stubbornly refused to settle.

It was only after he climbed into bed and switched off the lamp that the quiet finally caught up with him. Until then, every decision had possessed an obvious practical purpose. Max had needed help standing. He had needed clean clothes. He had needed someone to carry his bag. He had needed walking home. None of those choices had required much thought. They had simply been the next sensible thing to do. The trouble began once there was nothing left to do.

George lay staring into the darkness, replaying the evening in relentless detail. He remembered the weak sound of Max’s voice through the cubicle door, the shaky weight of his hand when George had helped him to his feet, and the exhausted relief that had softened his expression by the time they reached his street. He turned onto his side and pulled the duvet higher.

At some point over the course of the term, concern had ceased to be only concern. He had been so occupied with lectures, deadlines, and the project that he had convinced himself every thought of Max belonged neatly beneath the broad heading of responsibility. Looking after his teammate had seemed a straightforward matter of organisation, of noticing what Max neglected and quietly compensating for it.

Now, lying awake with nothing to distract him, George could no longer pretend that was the whole truth. The realisation filled him with a deep, persistent shame.

God, had Max noticed? He hoped not. Even now, remembering the panic playing out in front of him, George's dick had swollen between his thighs. There wasn’t an ounce of chivalry in him, apparently.

Max trusted him, however reluctantly that trust had been earned. George had spent weeks making himself into the person Max could rely upon without asking for anything in return. The idea that somewhere amidst all of that quiet care he had allowed himself to develop… feelings felt, in the harsh light of his own conscience, perilously close to a betrayal.

~~~

George spent the next several days bracing for a change that never came.

He arrived early for Monday’s lecture out of habit, set his bag on the chair beside him, and immediately wondered whether he ought to have done so at all. The memory of Friday evening remained uncomfortably fresh. It seemed entirely possible that Max would decide a different seat, a different row, or perhaps a different university altogether would be preferable to facing George after everything that had happened.

Instead, Max arrived three minutes before the lecture began, spotted the empty chair without hesitation, and slid into it exactly as he had every morning for the better part of a month.

“Morning,” he said, setting his laptop on the desk.

“Morning.”

There was no strained politeness, no embarrassed attempt to pretend the previous week hadn’t occurred, and no visible effort to avoid George’s eye. If anything, Max seemed quietly determined to continue exactly where they had left off, as though the surest way of preserving George’s kindness was to refuse to make it into something either of them had to acknowledge. George found the approach both relieving and profoundly disarming.

The more surprising changes revealed themselves gradually. On Tuesday afternoon, George glanced across the desk out of long-established instinct, intending to remind Max to drink something before another three-hour session in the study room. He stopped halfway through opening his mouth. Max was already unscrewing the cap of his water bottle.

George watched him take several unhurried mouthfuls before returning to his work without saying a word.

The same thing happened again on Wednesday, and again on Thursday. By the end of the week, George realised he hadn’t reminded Max to drink water once.

Lunch followed much the same pattern. George continued buying two meal deals, partly because habit had become difficult to break and partly because he still wasn’t entirely convinced Max could be trusted to feed himself consistently. Yet there was a noticeable difference now. Max no longer accepted the sandwich with the air of someone humouring an overbearing project partner. More often than not, George would find him halfway through it before the lecture had even begun, and on two separate occasions Max disappeared during the lunch break only to return carrying food of his own. The first time it happened, George stared openly.

Max caught him looking. “What?”

“You bought lunch.”

“…Yes.”

“Voluntarily.”

Max frowned. “I am capable of feeding myself.”

“I was beginning to wonder.”

Max rolled his eyes with considerably more energy than George had seen from him in weeks. “I’ll make a note to eat less often.”

George grinned. “I don’t think that’s the lesson here.”

Even Max during lectures began to look different. He still arrived looking tired. George suspected that would remain true until after submission, if not graduation itself. There were still mornings when he rested his forehead briefly against the heel of his hand while the lecturer worked through another set of slides, but he no longer drifted helplessly in and out of sleep. He took notes. He asked the occasional question. Once or twice, George even caught him quietly correcting a mistake in the lecturer’s code before the class reached the same conclusion several minutes later. It shouldn’t have surprised him.

This was, after all, the same student whose pull requests required almost no revision and whose code somehow managed to be both elegant and irritatingly readable. George had known for months that the ability had always been there. What surprised him was the effort.

They were well into the latter half of the autumn term by then. Coursework deadlines were beginning to overlap, project milestones loomed uncomfortably close, and nearly everyone in the department looked at least mildly exhausted. Students rarely discovered healthier habits in November. If anything, they abandoned the ones they had. Max, inexplicably, appeared to be trying. George never asked why.

Some instinct told him the answer would embarrass them both. Instead, he accepted each small improvement in silence, finding himself absurdly pleased every time he noticed another empty water bottle or the discarded wrapper from a sandwich Max had remembered to buy without prompting. He told himself, each and every time, that he was simply glad to see his teammate doing better.

~~~

Other changes arrived so gradually that George scarcely noticed them at first.

He arrived late to the study room one Wednesday after an unexpectedly long meeting with their client, and then Professor Vowles had stopped him outside the lecture theatre to ask about a proposed change to the authentication workflow, one question had become five, and by the time George escaped, he had already resigned himself to the fact that Max would have been working alone for the better part of half an hour. He hurried through the laboratory door with a mumbled apology already prepared.

Max looked up briefly from his monitor. “Hey.”

“Sorry,” George said, shrugging his backpack onto the floor. “Vowles cornered me.”

“I guessed.”

George blinked. On the desk beside his keyboard sat a mug of tea. Steam still curled lazily from the surface. He looked from the mug to Max. “Whose is that?”

“You always make tea when you get in.”

“Yes…”

“You weren’t here.”

George frowned slightly. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“I made it.”

George stepped closer, still looking faintly bewildered. “How did you know how I take it?”

Max shrugged without looking away from his screen. “How many times have you bitched about the sugar?” he asked. “One bloody sugar shouldn’t be too much to ask for,” he said in possibly the worst approximation of George’s accent.

George stood there for a moment before bursting out laughing. The tea tasted exactly as it always did.

~~~

A few days later, George made the mistake of checking his email halfway through breakfast. The subject line alone was enough to send his stomach somewhere near his shoes.

<Migration failure.>

He abandoned the remainder of his yoghurt, hurried across campus, and spent the entire walk mentally calculating how much work would need to be redone if the migration script had corrupted the test database. By the time he reached his first lecture, he had already drafted an apology to the client in his head.

Max was alone when George arrived. Without looking up, he said, “Morning.”

George had already crossed the room. “The migration—”

“I fixed it.”

George stopped. “…What?”

“You referenced the old table name in one of the update statements. I saw it before I went to bed last night.”

George stared. “I…”

“It only affected the staging database. I killed the deployment before it went out to prod.”

George hurried to his computer, opened the repository, and pulled the latest changes. There, immediately after his own cursed migration, sat a single commit with Max’s name in the log.

<Fix migration typo before deployment.>

George opened the diff. Max had written a new migration with a correction for the staging database only, nothing more. He looked back over his shoulder.

“You didn’t even mention it.”

“You were asleep.”

“I was asleep?”

“It was half one.”

George looked at the timestamp, 01:17. “…Oh.”

Max returned his attention to his own monitor. “It happens.”

George had never before experienced someone quietly cleaning up one of his mistakes before he even knew it existed. He wasn’t entirely sure what to do with the feeling.

~~~

Lunch changed in much the same way.

George had become so accustomed to buying food for both of them that he hardly thought about it anymore. He simply stopped by the students’ union on his way between lectures, collected two meal deals, and deposited one in front of Max with scarcely a word.

One Thursday, he returned from a meeting to find two paper bags already waiting on the laboratory table.

He frowned. “…Did Alex drop by?”

“No.”

George looked at Max. “You bought lunch?”

“You were busy.”

“I would’ve grabbed something afterwards.”

“You would’ve been late.”

George cocked his head, brow creasing. “…I wouldn’t have been that late. And anyway, it’s one meal.”

Max finally looked over. “You skipped breakfast.”

George hesitated. “I…”

“You left your yoghurt on the kitchen counter.”

George stared. “…How do you know that?”

“You told Alex while we were walking this morning.”

George had no recollection whatsoever of saying any such thing. Max pushed one of the paper bags across the desk.

“Eat.”

George looked down at it. For reasons he could not adequately explain, he obeyed.

~~~

The most disorienting change came towards the end of term.

George became hopelessly absorbed in rewriting part of their authentication service after discovering an edge case none of them had anticipated.

JSEB emptied gradually around them. Chairs distantly scraped against the floor. Students packed away laptops and wished one another good night. At some point the overhead lights switched to their evening setting, though George scarcely noticed.

It was only after he finally leaned back from his monitor that he realised the room had fallen almost completely silent. His first thought was that Max had left hours ago. His second was that the study room door remained closed.

George looked across the room. Max’s laptop was shut. His backpack rested against the leg of his chair. He was simply sitting there, scrolling idly through something on his phone.

George frowned. “…You’re still here.”

Max looked up. “Yeah.”

“I thought you’d gone.”

“I was waiting.”

George blinked. “For what?”

Max looked faintly puzzled by the question. “You weren’t finished.”

The answer was delivered with such complete matter-of-factness that George found himself momentarily speechless.

For months, he had been the one glancing at the clock, insisting on dinner, waiting outside lecture theatres, slowing his pace so Max could catch up. It had never once occurred to him that the habit might travel in the opposite direction.

Max stood, shouldered his backpack, and nodded towards the door. “Come on.”

George gathered his things in silence. From then on, leaving the engineering building together simply became another part of the day. George walked with Max as far as his building, or Max continued with George to the bus station. Neither of them ever suggested the arrangement. Neither of them ever questioned it.

By the time George climbed aboard his bus each evening, Max would already be turning back towards campus, hands buried in the pockets of his jacket, heading home by himself. George always looked through the window until Max disappeared around the corner.

~~~

George frowned at the display on his phone for several long seconds before checking it again, as though repetition might somehow produce a different answer.

“…Oh.”

Max looked up from where he was stacking the empty pizza boxes.

“What?”

“I’ve missed my bus.”

“You can get another one.”

“I can get a bus.” George grimaced. “Not my bus.”

He opened the journey planner and watched it calculate an alternative with ruthless efficiency that would take approximately an hour and thirty-six minutes and three buses. A twenty-minute wait outside Holborn. George exhaled slowly through his nose.

“That’s unfortunate.”

Max crossed the room, glancing briefly at the screen before looking back at George.

“You won’t be home ‘til half two.”

“Approximately.”

“It’s freezing.”

“I noticed.”

George was already mentally rearranging the journey, wondering whether walking to another stop might eliminate one of the changes, when Max’s voice cut through his planning mode.

“You can stay.”

George looked up. “What?”

“You can stay at mine.”

“No, that’s all right. I’ll manage.”

“I know.”

George frowned. “I don’t want to put you out.”

Max looked faintly puzzled. “You wouldn’t.”

George gestured vaguely towards Max’s… everything. “You’ve got your own evening.”

“My evening was over.”

“I’ll still be in the way.”

“You won’t.”

The certainty with which Max said it caught George off guard. It didn’t sound rehearsed. It didn’t even sound particularly generous. It sounded as though Max were stating an objective fact.

George glanced back at the journey planner. He sighed. “…Are you sure?”

Max nodded. “Course.”

The flat was warm enough that George had long since taken off his jumper, but he suddenly felt awkward standing in shirtsleeves in somebody else’s sitting room.

Max disappeared into the bedroom without another word. George remained exactly where he was. When Max returned, he was carrying a neatly folded duvet and a pillow.

“You can have the bed.”

George stared. “…Right.”

Max placed the bedding on the sofa. “I’ll sleep here.”

George looked from the sofa to Max. Then back to the sofa. It was an entirely adequate piece of furniture for sitting. It was manifestly inadequate for sleeping.

“You won’t fit on that.”

“I’ve slept there before.”

George narrowed his eyes. “It isn’t long enough.”

“It’s fine.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Max blinked. “I’ll manage.”

George almost laughed. The phrase sounded absurd coming from anybody else. “You’ll wake up unable to straighten your back.”

Max shrugged. “One night doesn’t matter.”

George looked towards the bedroom door. “You’ve got a bed.”

“…Yes.”

“So we’ll use it.”

Max frowned as though he had misheard him. “We’ll… what?”

George spoke with the same practical certainty he employed when explaining a design decision. “There are two of us and one bed. Sleeping separately is objectively the worse solution.”

Max continued staring.

“…Max?”

“You mean…”

“Yes.”

“We’d…”

“Sleep.”

“In the same bed.”

George frowned. “Well, yes.” He found himself unexpectedly concerned by the length of time that stretched between responses from Max.

“Have I missed something?”

George genuinely couldn’t identify the problem. They had spent the better part of four months shoulder to shoulder in the JSEB study room. They had walked one another home in the rain. George had practically moved into the chair beside Max in every lecture theatre on campus. This seemed, if anything, less inconvenient than the alternatives.

“It’ll only be for one night,” George said. “I don’t snore.”

Max let out a short, disbelieving breath that might almost have been a laugh. “I wasn’t worried about that.”

“Good.” George picked up the folded duvet from the sofa and carried it straight back into the bedroom.

Max remained rooted to the spot for another several seconds before following him.

The bedroom was almost aggressively ordinary. A desk occupied one wall beneath the window, crowded with two monitors, a soldering station, and an assortment of circuit boards that George suspected only Max could identify at a glance. The wardrobe stood half open, revealing a collection of hoodies in varying shades of black and navy. A stack of engineering textbooks leaned precariously against the bedside table. The bed itself was comfortably large enough for two.

George set the duvet down. “There.”

Max was still standing in the doorway. “You really don’t mind?”

George looked up. “No.”

“I steal the blankets.”

“I’ll survive.”

“I move about.”

“So do I.”

“…George.”

George smiled despite himself. “I promise, Max. I’m not making a sacrifice.”

Max studied him for another long moment before finally nodding, sighing almost to himself. “…All right.”

It turned out that falling asleep was considerably easier in theory than in practice.

The lights had been off for nearly twenty minutes. George lay on his back beneath unfamiliar blankets, staring into darkness that was just bright enough for him to make out the pale outline of the ceiling.

The mattress moved every time Max shifted beside him, which wasn’t often, but George was painfully aware of each movement. The room itself was quiet.

He had grown used to the sounds of Alex moving around the flat long after he had gone to bed, to Logan laughing softly in the sitting room before heading home, or conspicuously not. Max’s flat offered only the muted hum of the refrigerator beyond the bedroom door and the occasional rush of tyres on the wet road outside.

Beside him, Max turned over carefully, as though trying not to disturb him. George closed his eyes. He was acutely aware that there was another person breathing scarcely two feet away.

During lectures or evenings in the study room, it had been abstract, outside his direct awareness. But now Max was here, practically glowing, trying, he suspected, every bit as hard to fall asleep as George was.

After several more minutes, the mattress shifted again. George sighed quietly into the darkness. Movement started up again as Max turned over onto his opposite side, facing George.

“George,” Max whispered into the space between them.

He wasn’t any closer to sleep than he had been twenty minutes ago. There wasn’t any harm in talking, he supposed. “…Yeah?”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Nor can I,” George commiserated. “D’you want me to sleep on the sofa? One of us should at least get some sleep tonight.”

“No—Jesus, I just,” Max said a little louder. “I thought this was, like, a bad pick-up line, or something.”

George snorted softly into the darkness. “What, you mean my master plan to rob you of your virtue?”

Max went quiet for a moment. “Yeah.”

George rolled onto his side facing his friend. “I’m offended you’d think so low of me that I would be so unoriginal,” he murmured towards the outline of Max he could only barely make out.

Max laughed through his nose. “I don’t think it would take much.”

George scoffed. “It’s not about what it would take, Max. It’s what you deserve,” he said, emphasizing the word.

Max went quiet again for a long enough stretch that George thought he might’ve fallen asleep.

“What would I deserve?” he asked so softly that George almost missed it.

George took a deep breath to steady himself. There was something about the dark, the anonymity, the warmth between them, that kept the words flowing despite the truth he was revealing.

“You deserve to be cared for,” he said gently.

The silence between them seemed so full it couldn’t hold another breath. When George heard the faintest rustle of fabric, he almost expected Max to turn away again.

Instead, he felt the soft brush of fingers along his cheek, Max’s hand cold against the heat of his face. George’s lips parted, breath gone shallow.

Max’s face drew near, pausing as if to give George a chance to say no, to back away. George simply leaned up, touching their lips together just barely, sharing the heat of breath until it dripped down his spine and Max’s mouth closed over his, kissing him like he had been waiting for days, for weeks to do so. Max’s hand cupped his jaw, cold but so soft, and George’s hands wound their way up around his back, pulling their bodies together like he never wanted to separate.

Suddenly, sleeping that night seemed a distant and minute concern. George let his thoughts fill with nothing other than Max, Max’s hands on his chest, his leg around his hips, his breath in George’s ear. When he felt Max’s hips press into his own, hard and shifting against him in little desperate thrusts, George found it almost impossible to not pin the man to his own bed and take him apart completely.

Instead, he slid a hand down between them, cupping Max through his boxers, the Dutchman groaning into his neck. The messy, gasping panting into his skin made George want to fall apart with him, but he kept his composure enough to keep one hand tangled in blond hair he had only dreamed of feeling, the other merely a tool for Max to rut against.

Soon, Max was cursing, leaking, pulsing into his shorts, hot and wet, coming for him with George’s name on his lips. Slowly, Max’s ragged breathing eased into something softer, arms still loosely wrapped around him.

“You all right?” George asked softly once he had determined Max was, in fact, still alive.

“Yeah,” Max breathed. “‘M all right. I—”

“It’s fine,” George sighed. “Let’s just sleep, eh?”

He tucked Max’s head more firmly under his jaw and they settled into what honestly felt like the most comfortable position they had found all night. Before George was even able to worry about it, sleep had pulled him under.

~~~

George didn’t even question the octopus with every limb around him as he slowly gained consciousness.

Something close to his head said miaow, and he pictured an octocat, meowing and hugging him slowly to death for poor commit messages.

“Jimmy,” the octocat groaned, hoarse with sleep. “Go away.”

Or perhaps Jimmy was the octocat. George wasn’t sure.

Slowly he blinked awake in a bed that wasn’t his, with pale light streaming across his legs from a window he didn’t recognise. And, as it turned out, the octocat’s tentacles were decidedly Max-shaped.

“Morning,” the Max-shaped octocat mumbled.

“Morning,” George echoed.

“Miaow,” Jimmy repeated.

“Fuck off,” Max groaned, pushing the lithe beast with a pillow. “I’ll feed you when it’s breakfast time.”

“What time is it,” George grumbled.

“Shower time,” Max replied into George’s neck. “I am of course disgusting, thanks to you.”

George laughed into messy blond hair as memories from the dark trickled in, and the stiff length between his legs reminded him of the imbalance between them.

“I could use one of those,” he mumbled, stroking down Max’s back lightly with one hand.

“If you wash my hair, you can have mine,” Max bargained hopefully.

George leaned up on one elbow. “Are you offering your body in exchange for hair-washing?”

Max blinked up at him sleepily. “Yes?”

George stared at him for a long moment before kissing him, long and slow. “I accept.”

Warm exploration in the morning light extended their time in bed before they managed to stumble into the steam of Max’s hot shower. The water pressure was just right, beating down on the back of George’s neck pleasantly as he pulled Max close under the spray.

There was something decidedly different about the intimacy in the bright white light of the bathroom compared to the fumbling under the sheets the night before. George found himself exploring with his hands rather than his eyes first, adding to the touch memories established hours ago.

There wasn’t a shred of decency in him that could keep his dick from being interested, however. He throbbed almost painfully while washing Max’s hair, gently massaging the suds into the back of his neck, careful not to rinse any into his eyes. When the Dutchman groaned under his touch, George felt his stomach flutter embarrassingly easily.

Max, to his credit, was an incredibly talented kisser. George’s hands between washing, his lips, under his ear, across his chest—there was hardly a space untouched by Max’s mouth above his waist by the time they were both plenty clean.

When George’s thigh found its way between Max’s, pushing against his half-hard length with interest, Max made a sound that George definitely qualified as something.

George kept up his attention on Max’s neck, biting lightly and pushing with a steady rhythm, Max moaning into his thrusts like he could come from this alone. George wanted to find every which way that he could, really.

But when Max’s hips suddenly pulled away, George almost stumbled.

“Fuck, sorry, sorry,” Max gasped. “I have to, I’m—”

A hand grabbing between his legs told George the truth Max was choking on. His face was slowly flushing darker with shame as he started to climb out of the shower.

Possibly in the dumbest, bravest, horniest moment of his short life, George caught Max’s wrist. “Wait,” he said, a little breathless.

“George, please, I can’t—” Max looked desperate, squeezing himself, pressing his thighs together. “Please.”

“You can if you want,” he said carefully. “But you don’t have to get out.”

Max just stared at him. “...What?”

“I don’t mind.” George pulled his hand to the need throbbing between his own legs. “Quite the opposite, actually.”

Max’s hand hadn’t moved from where he had placed it on his dick, practically tensing in his hand. It took everything in him not to thrust into his grip. This was totally up to Max, regardless of what he wanted.

Slowly, Max pulled his leg back into the shower. George’s breath caught in his throat. He backed up against the wall, allowing Max as much space as he wanted, holding one hand up in offer.

Max tentatively took it, straddling George’s thigh the way they had been positioned before. George thought he might come from the idea alone.

Max’s breath was shaky despite George’s hands to steady him, his thigh to hold up most of his weight. He closed his eyes and tipped his head back, and George practically dove in, kissing up his throat, devouring.

“I want it,” he rumbled against Max’s wet skin. “Want you, fuck.”

Max moaned, hips twitching like he was trying, like he was struggling. “Do you?”

George groaned, low in his throat. “Want you to let go for me, Max, please.”

A few seconds later, despite the warmth of the water flowing over them both, heat spread over his thighs. George looked down to see Max rocking against him, releasing so much over them both. It streamed down their legs, Max moaning with relief, the sound so similar to how he had sounded coming into his boxers the night before. George cursed quietly, fucking against the new wetness, the orgasmic feeling of release as Max let out everything in front of him, over him, between them.

Without even realising, George’s hand was between them, working over himself with barely a handful of strokes and he was spurting, hot and thick over Max’s messy cock. The animalistic sounds that had escaped him were hardly recognisable as human, let alone as himself.

His forehead pressed into Max’s shoulder as he came back to Earth, the pair of them shaking and panting. “Jesus,” he gasped. “Fucking hell.”

“Yeah,” Max agreed. “Something you, uh, do often?”

“First time,” George admitted.