Chapter Text
They say love begins in the brain.
A quiet misfiring of signals. Dopamine spikes. Serotonin drops. Your heart starts beating faster for no good reason. The body reacting before the mind has time to understand why.
It sounds clinical when you put it that way.
Virat has always liked things that can be explained.
He has spent years inside the fragile architecture of the human mind, learning where it breaks, how it heals, what it hides. There is comfort in that kind of knowledge, in knowing that, given enough time, everything can be traced back to something rational, something that has logic.
The brain makes sense to him.
It follows rules.
It listens.
What doesn't,
Is the heart.
No textbook ever mentioned what to do when it starts acting on its own. No lecture prepared him for the moment logic just... stops working.
For the way your chest tightens when nothing is wrong.
For the way your thoughts trip over themselves trying to keep up.
And you remember things that are deeply, deeply inconvenient.
Because it was just a look.
It should have been nothing more than that.
It was just a smile.
It doens't mean anything more that that.
But the day MS Dhoni looked at him, with that look in his eyes, not past him, but at him, everything went off-script.
And Virat realized, a little too late, he has no idea how to fix this.