Archive of Our Own

1 - Chang International Circuit, Thailand

The first time Luca keeps silent, looks, and listens, it’s in the stifling heat of Buriram, and he doesn’t even know he’s doing it yet.

The race ends without ceremony. Tenth place. Three Hondas in the points. The kind of result the PR calls "a solid start to the season" and everyone else calls "not as bad as Yamaha’s". Luca unzips his leathers to the waist, peels off his gloves, and lets the heat of Buriram wash over him. The heat is brutal, the kind that makes the air feel thick enough to drink. His leathers are soaked through, and his hands ache from wrestling RC213V for twenty-six laps. He is the lead Honda rider in the championship. That's true and technically correct. It doesn't feel like much.

He swings his leg over and walks deeper into the garage. The team meets him with polite claps on the back - bene, Luca, bene - and he nods along. The Honda is still a bike that demands more from its rider than it gives back; everyone knows this, and managing tires in this heat meant riding at ninety percent just to finish. He finished. 

What made it worse was that there was nobody left to hide behind. Honda used to survive on Márquez forcing impossible results out of impossible machinery. Now the bike had to be understood properly, piece by piece, vibration by vibration, and Luca spent almost as much time solving problems as riding around them.

The engineers trusted his feedback. Trusted him to finish races. Trusted him to bring the bike back in one piece with enough data to build from.

Some days, that felt dangerously close to becoming his entire job.

He still hoped for better results. The garage buzzes with the usual post-race chaos when the screen above the crew's monitors catches his eye.

Mir - DNF. Mechanical, someone says, and Luca nods again, because that explains part of it.

Luca crosses the garage to make sure Mir himself wasn’t hurt. Both feet on the floor, hands resting on his knees. His helmet is off, but his leathers are still zipped. His face is blank in a way Luca is already starting to recognize. The I'm-not-feeling-anything-because-if-I-start-I-won't-stop version.

No visible injuries. Just a man who had a good race - a really good race, by the look of it - until he didn't.

Luca leans against the wall without saying a word. For a long moment, neither does Joan.

"Twenty-two laps." Joan's voice is flat. "Twenty-two fucking laps. Then-" He makes a vague gesture with one hand. "Electronics stopped working. Vibrations so bad I couldn't-" He stops. His jaw tightens. "I was on sixth."

Luca watches him.

"I was having fun," Joan says as if t's an accusation. As if enjoying himself was the mistake. "I passed Alex. I passed Fabio. I was chasing the front group. And then-" He exhales, sharp and frustrated. "Three laps. Just three more laps."

"It was dangerous to continue. There were no other options."

"Yeah," he says. Quieter this time. 

The worst part was that Joan had been good today - really good - and he still has nothing to show except a DNF and a quiet room and Luca Marini standing next to him. Luca thinks about the garage, about the data he should be reviewing, about the engineers waiting for his feedback. And he even knows what their PR service will say: "We'll analyze what happened. We need to focus on the positives." Joan probably didn’t need him here. Luca stayed anyway. 

It should’ve felt temporary. Instead, Luca found himself staying until Joan stood up first.

2 - Autódromo Internacional de Goiânia – Ayrton Senna, Brasil

Mistake after mistake - Saturday didn't go right from the start.

Luca realizes this the moment he hits the ground in Q1. A repeat of the stupid crash at Turn 4 from free practice, the one that should have been a warning. He was too hard on the throttle because he knew he had the pace, because he could feel a top-five lap in his fingertips right before the front wheel skidded out from under him. He sits momentarily in the gravel, his leathers coated in Brazilian dust, and watches the session tick away without him.

Nineteenth on the grid. Sprint. Race. Both.

In the garage, he pulls off his helmet and stands there, breathing hard. The team hovers. He waves them off. "I'm fine," he says. "Check the bike." The medics come anyway. Nothing broken. Nothing new. He waves them off, too.

Luca charges through the middle of the grid from nineteenth, picking off positions one by one. It's not pretty - the Honda doesn't do pretty - but Luca makes it effective. He finishes tenth. Four points. From the nineteenth. The team claps him on the back like he's won something. He doesn't feel like he's won anything.

Joan's sprint ends on lap 2. Contact with another rider, pushed wide into the dirt, nothing he could do. That's what Joan tells the reporters later, voice flat, helmet tucked under his arm. "I had to open the line, and then I crashed."

Luca watches the interview on the garage monitor. He watches Joan's face, the careful blankness, the way his jaw tightens when he says "nothing I could do", and he knows exactly what that blankness costs.

Sunday is worse.

Not because Joan crashes earlier, but because he doesn't. For eleven laps, he doesn't.

Luca starts from the nineteenth again. The race distance has been shortened - asphalt problems, thirty-one laps become twenty-three - but that doesn't matter when you're at the back. He fights. He overtakes. He does what he always does: bring the bike home, bank the points, survive.

But he also thinks about Joan. Luca catches himself thinking for a few seconds about how this weekend could end with something other than a walk to the medical center.

Then lap 11.

The front end goes without warning. One moment, Joan is there, tucked behind Alex Márquez, managing his tires, preserving his race. The next, he's sliding slowly across the asphalt - a lowside, almost gentle in its inevitability - the bike spinning away.

Luca watches the replay afterward. Joan's bike slips off the track, but he's fine. Yeah, fine.

Luca finds him in a quiet corner of the garage, away from the engineers and the PR and the well-meaning hands trying to pat him on the back. Joan is sitting on a toolbox, helmet off, leathers unzipped. His face is blank in that familiar way. 

"It was a very strange crash," Joan says, not looking up. "So... unexpected."

He could’ve gone back to his engineers. Instead, Luca dragged over a chair and sat down beside him. He doesn't say anything. There's nothing to say that Joan hasn't already told himself.

The garage buzzes around them. Luca thinks about their different paths to the same destination. Joan chases podiums. Crashes. Gets back up. Chases again. "I prefer to know I have a chance", he'd said once, explaining why he wouldn't settle for seventh place. "If I lower the bar, I lose motivation."

Luca understands that. He does. But he also understands that thirteen crashes in a previous season (nineteen if they count the sprints) is not sustainability. It's not a strategy. It's a kind of beautiful, brutal self-destruction, and Luca can't look away from it.

He, meanwhile, finishes. Every time. Earns the points. He dreams of championships too - quietly, privately, without burning himself to ash in the process. His approach is old-fashioned, the team says. Reliable. Boring, maybe, to someone like Joan. But he feels inspired by giving feedback on the bike and trying to improve its performance.

And yet.

And yet they're both here, both dissatisfied, both breathing hard. Both wanted to fight, even with the entire championship on the line. Even knowing that next year the situation will change dramatically: contracts ending, seats opening, some of them are bound to collapse.

Joan will leave Honda. Everybody stays silent. Luca isn't sure where he'll be. The uncertainty hangs between them, unspoken and heavy. 

Slowly - like he's not sure he can do it, like the gesture might shatter something - Luca reaches over and takes Joan's hand. Briefly squeezes his fingers. Just for a moment. Then he lets go.

Joan doesn't react. He doesn't pull away, doesn't acknowledge it. His face remains impassive, his breathing even. If Luca didn't know him better, he'd think the gesture went unnoticed. But Joan's hand stays where Luca left it, open and relaxed. Neither of them mentions it afterward.

3 - Circuit of the Americas, United States

The third time Luca waits, he's not sure anymore if he's waiting for Joan or for himself.

The race ends with a ninth place that feels like a quiet victory - seven points, another finish. The Texan heat is different from Buriram's humidity: dry, almost aggressive. Someone could even say this was progress.

Joan doesn't finish again, but Luca is no longer surprised.

Joan qualified fifth. Fifth. The best qualifying of the season for him, for the team, for anyone on a Honda. Luca had watched from the garage on Saturday as Joan carved through Q2, his lap times dropping, his shoulders relaxing into something that looked almost like joy.
That was a promising weekend. And despite how Mir burned out on the track, he didn't run from the garage to the motorhome and punch walls. He stayed there, watching the race. 

By now, Luca doesn’t even think before looking for Joan after the race. His body does it automatically.

"I don't know what to tell you today."

Luca looks at the timing sheets scattered on the workbench. Joan was running sixth when he crashed. Sixth, after a long-lap penalty for cutting a corner - a penalty he hadn't even served yet because he'd crashed first.

Three points all season, Luca thinks. Twenty-three for me. They don't talk about that either.

It feels like Goiânia all over again, only he has returned to his senses again, and Joan is spiraling deeper and deeper into himself.

Luca thinks about the way Joan's face looked. Just tired. The bone-deep exhaustion of a man who keeps pushing and keeps falling and keeps telling everyone he doesn't regret any of it. He thinks about his own race. A strong performance from the midfield, and Luca isn't sure if that was a compliment or an epitaph.

They both have their regrets, but it has become a habit for Luca to simply check in with Joan after the race to speak up if needed, and for Luca to listen.

4 - Circuito de Jerez – Ángel Nieto, Spain

The fourth time Luca waits, he's not sure anymore why he keeps doing this.

Jerez is supposed to be different. It turns out to be the whole damn circus. The whole grid becomes a lottery, and Luca has never been a gambling man. The sun is out on Sunday morning, burning away the memory of Saturday's rain, and Luca tells himself that maybe this is the weekend things turn. And they don't.

Mir fell on lap 10. Pushed too hard in the wet, lost the front, slid into the gravel. The replay shows him standing up immediately, yanking at his helmet strap, frustration visible even through the rain-streaked camera lens. He's fine. But Luca watches the replay three times. Watches the way Joan's shoulders slump when he realizes the bike is too damaged to continue, and the red flags won't be raised because the white ones have already been - he should have gone with slicks on wets. Watches him kick at the gravel, a small, almost childish gesture of anger, and then walk away with his head down. He's fine, Luca tells himself. But he still needs to see Joan. Luca just needs to hear Joan complain for a few minutes first, and the adrenaline that can't find a way out due to constant retirements, before Luca returns to analyzing the bike's behavior.

The Sunday race is uneventful in the worst way. Luca spends twenty-three laps wrestling the Honda through the pack, gaining positions only to lose them on the straights, fighting a war of attrition that feels more like survival than sport. He finishes thirteenth. His worst result since the beginning of the season.

Somewhere in the stands, the crowd is cheering for Marc Márquez, who won. No one is cheering for Luca Marini. No one is cheering for Joan Mir.

He finds Joan in the garage. Not in the medical center - there's no need for that, not today. His face isn't blank this time. It's something else. Something Luca hasn't seen before.

Anger. Pure, exhausted, hopeless anger.

"I finished fifteenth," Joan says. His voice is tight, controlled, the way it gets when he's holding something back. "Fifteenth. From the fourteenth on the grid. I lost a position."

Luca doesn't say anything.

"Do you understand how stupid that is? I didn't gain anything. What was it for? I just existed on a motorcycle, and at the end of it, I was even worse than where I started."

He looks at Luca. His eyes are bright, but not because of tears. 

"Now I can't even finish a race without something going wrong. The bike, the weather, my own hands. Every weekend. Every single weekend."

Luca wants to say something helpful. Like "the team is improving". 

Instead, he says: "I finished thirteenth."

Joan blinks. "What?"

"Thirteenth. Four points. My worst result since the start of the season."

"You're trying to make me feel better by telling me you also had a bad day, actually finishing above me," Joan says.

"Is it working?"

"No."

Luca almost smiles. Even if Joan winces and frowns, rubbing his knuckles and clenching them until they turn white. 

They sit in silence for a while. The afternoon light slants through the open doors, casting long shadows across the concrete floor. Now Jerez. Another bad weekend. Another quiet moment in a garage that smells like gasoline.

He's tired of watching Joan crash. He's tired of sitting next to him afterward, saying nothing, doing nothing, being nothing but an overheated body in a cold garage.

He wants-... He doesn't know what he wants. He wants Joan to stop crashing. He wants Honda to stop failing them. He wants one normal weekend.

Mostly, he wants this to stop feeling inevitable.

But when he looks at Joan - at the exhaustion in his face, at the anger still simmering behind his eyes, at the way his hands are clasped so tightly together. Luca feels something shift in his chest. Something that feels like impatience. Something that feels like yearning.

He doesn't know what to say to make it better. So he does what he always does. He stays.

"You don't have to keep doing this," Joan says eventually with a flat voice.

"I know," Luca says. There’s no practical reason for Luca to still be here. It wasn't like Joan was giving him any insights on the Honda, whether it was a coincidence or an electronic error, so there was nothing analytical to be gained. Right now, Mir wasn't in the mood to dwell on one more crash.

But this time, Joan looks at him. "Why do you?" Joan asks.

Because he can't stop thinking about Joan. Because when he crashes, it doesn't matter how many accidents Luca has seen.

Instead, he says: "Well, someone has to."

Joan holds his gaze for another long moment. Then he looks away, back at his hands, back at the floor, back to the familiar posture of defeat. "Okay," Joan says.

And that's all. It's the worst answer but the most honest answer he could've given by now.

5 - Bugatti Circuit, France

Luca watches from the garage as Joan's final lap comes together. Hope, he realizes. That's what this is. In sprint, Joan carves through the midfield, battling Quartararo like old times, like championship times. Luca watches the replay in the garage  because his own sprint ended on lap 2. "It was strange," he tells the reporters afterward, voice plain. "Not a great day. We'll see what happens tomorrow." He doesn't mention that he found himself watching Joan's onboard footage instead of reviewing his own data. 

Sunday starts with the sun. Le Mans is unpredictable. The weather changes in the flip of a coin, but the morning is bright. He regrets it by Lap 5. 

With Joan, it happens on Lap 20. Eight laps remaining. Joan overtakes Quartararo - a clean pass, beautiful, the kind of move that makes you remember why he's a past world champion - and Luca lets himself exhale. 

On the replay, it looks like nothing. A straight line. A normal braking zone. And then the front washes out, slow and inevitable, and Joan is sliding across the asphalt while his bike tumbles into the gravel. The yellow flag comes out. The red flag doesn't. The race continues without him.

Luca stops watching the replay. The medical center is white and smells like antiseptic. Overall, similar to the others. Joan is sitting on a bed when Luca walks in. His leathers are cut at the right sleeve. His hand is wrapped in fresh bandages, white gauze spotted with dark brown blood. 

"It backfired on you," Luca says. "In the end, it's still Honda that's breaking you, and not the other way around, isn't it?"

Joan looks up. His face is pale, his eyes hollow, and his lips are tightly pressed together. 

"I expected wiser conclusions," he says.

Luca stands in the doorway. He doesn't sit down. He doesn't move closer. He just stands there, breathing, trying to remember how his lungs work.

Luca stares at him. "You needed stitches."

"Another brilliant analysis! Just a few."

Luca wants to shake him. Wants to scold him like a child, "You crashed, you idiot, you crashed again, and you hurt yourself, and you're looking like that was expected, why don’t you even try asking for less? It would still be the best performance with Honda". Luca wants to grab him by the shoulders and ask what exactly Joan thinks will be left of him by the end of the season. But that's not what they do. That's not who they are. If Joan couldn’t fight for first place, he would rather crash trying. It wasn’t Luca’s place to tell him to change. He was just as stubborn about how to handle his bike. 

The medical center hums with its quiet machinery. 

"Don't do that again," Luca says quietly. 

"It's not a given that I'll have a chance. They don't know if I'll be able to participate in Catalunya. So can't promise that."

"You wouldn't have promised that anyway. Or anyone else in my place."

"You're the only one who always comes after. Well, except for Alberto, but it's like you have different reasons." 

He doesn't hold Joan's hand - not this time, the laceration could be even more serious. But he sits close enough.

The sun is setting over Le Mans when they finally leave the medical center. Luca walks beside Joan through the paddock, matching his pace, not speaking. The crowds have thinned. Most of the trucks are already packing up, moving on to the next race, the next country, the next chance for something to go right.

"I'll see you in Barcelona," Joan says as they approach his motorhome.

"Someone has to be there to wait for you," Luca says.

"You don't have to keep doing this."

"I know."

For a moment, they just look at each other. The paddock is quiet. Then Joan turns and walks inside. The door closes behind him.

Luca stands in the fading light and thinks about home race that Joan might not be able to finish - or might not be able to start at all. He thinks about what he'll do if Joan crashes in Barcelona. He already knows the answer. The same thing he always does. Wait. And listen. And Joan will be seen by him. 

+1 - Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, Spain

Barcelona feels cursed before the lights even go out.

The sprint barely exists in his memory afterward. Only fragments remain: Turn 1 chaos, gravel, bodies sliding across asphalt. Joan is disappearing into it. Binder's KTM tumbling sideways. Someone shouting in Race Direction. Joan later said there was nothing he could do. Luca believed him immediately.

Then Sunday arrives and somehow becomes worse. It comes with heavy clouds and the kind of tension that makes the paddock feel like a held breath.

Red flags. Smoke. Gravel. Luca pulls back into the pit lane with his pulse hammering against his throat and watches mechanics swarm the bike without really seeing them.

Someone says Alex is conscious. Someone else says restart the procedure in ten minutes. No one likes that answer.

The second start is worse.

At the same time, everything happens much closer to Luca, but he does not see the crash; first, he hears the sound. 

Zarco loses control of his motorcycle. Luca has nowhere to go when he crashes into his rear wheel, and Luca falls too, crashing heavily into Pecco, who goes flying with them. For a split second, everything slows - sliding machinery, sparks against asphalt, bodies moving in directions bodies are not meant to move - and Luca has just enough time to understand that this is going to be a serious accident before the impact throws him sideways.

Afterward, the only thing he remembers clearly is Zarco not getting up immediately. For a terrible second, he doesn't move. 

Luca is moving before he fully understands he's moving. Gravel crunches beneath his boots as he reaches him, waving frantically toward the marshals, toward the medics already running over. His own shoulder hurts. His ribs hurt. None of that matters. Zarco's leg is pinned by Pecco Bagnaia's 160-kilogram Ducati prototype.

"Hey," Luca says, breathless through the helmet. "Hey."

The medical crew takes over quickly. Luca steps back, breathing hard, because there's nothing else he can do. His own race is over before it began - just like everyone else's. Red flags again. 
He walks back to the garage in a daze, his hands still trembling. The team was bustling around. The restart was announced even before the medics had taken Joan off the track.

The third start feels wrong.

Everyone knows it. The riders stand around in exhausted little groups while officials make decisions in minutes that should probably take hours. Some riders argue. Some refuse to argue because they're too tired already. Luca sits quietly at the back of the garage while Honda checks the bike again.

Across the room, Joan is still. Not calm. Luca knows the difference now. Still like a wire pulled too tight.

The thing about Joan is that he never stops thinking. Luca understood that months ago. Every session becomes a problem to solve, every lost tenth something to dissect and rebuild until there's nothing left except obsession and exhaustion. Joan calls himself a fighter like it's a fact instead of a choice. Maybe it is.

Most people only see the crashes. Luca sees everything around them, too.

The endless telemetry reviews. The way Joan stares at sector times like they personally offended him. The frustration that curdles inward whenever he believes he hasn't extracted absolutely everything from himself. The impossible standards. The refusal to settle for seventh place just because the bike says seventh is acceptable.

Maybe that's why Luca keeps coming back. Not because Joan crashes. Because Joan keeps standing back up afterward. 

Joan would rather destroy himself chasing possibilities than survive by accepting limits. Luca understands him too well now. Exhaustion layered over concentration layered over the strange emotional numbness that comes after too much adrenaline. The race finally sticks on the third attempt. Last twelve laps. Luca's own race becomes a blur of overtakes and tyre management - he crosses the line in seventh, his best result of the season, and he barely registers it. His eyes are fixed on the timing screen.

Mir is running second.
The podium feels almost unreal after everything that came before it. After all the crashes. After all the Sundays spent staring at gravel traps and medical center walls.

For a few minutes, Luca lets himself believe it will stay. He looks at the podium, rejoicing with it, already thinking about how he'll congratulate Joan. And he admits that Joan was right.

Then the penalty comes. Sixteen seconds for tire pressure.

The kind of punishment that feels detached from reality after a race like this one. Joan drops to seventeenth. The podium disappears as if it never existed at all.

Joan only sits down heavily in the garage chair and drags both hands over his face. Sweat darkens the collar of his undersuit. His eyes are half-closed. Someone from the team is talking to him about tire data, and Joan is nodding automatically, clearly hearing none of it.

"I'm too tired to be angry," he says eventually, walking up to Luca and finding a quiet corner for them. His face is softer. Exhaustion, yes. Disappointment, yes. But also a strange, quiet peace. He finished. He fought. He did everything he could.

"The penalty is bullshit."

"Probably." Joan rubs a hand over his face. "Still got the podium for about twenty minutes. That's almost enough for Honda to print the posters already."

Luca huffs out something that almost counts as a laugh. The tension sitting beneath his ribs all day finally loosens a fraction.

The garage empties slowly around them as evening settles over Barcelona. Mechanics pack equipment into crates. Someone kills the television feed. Outside, the paddock noise softens into distant engines and rolling freight cases.

He'll keep chasing perfection until it destroys him or rewards him.

Luca will keep finishing races. Keep balancing risk against survival. Keep bringing the bike home even when it isn't beautiful. Keep standing quietly beside Joan afterward. The realization no longer feels frightening. Just obvious.

Then Joan studies him for a second too long and says, softer this time, "You crashed today."

Luca blinks. "So did half the grid."

"Still. You look awful."

"You should've seen yourself."

Joan could've been hurt, too. He could've been the one someone waited for. Luca doesn't answer because he isn't sure how to answer that without saying too much.

"You scared me today," Joan admits quietly. 

Luca blinks. "Me?"

"When you ran off the track." Joan stops. Swallows. "Red flags at the same second. I thought maybe it was you. And I couldn't-" He presses his lips together. "I don't know what I'd do if it were you."

"I'm fine," Luca shrugs because he doesn't know how to explain it. The fear still sits under his skin somewhere, ugly and cold. "I thought he wasn't moving."

Joan goes quiet and reaches out and takes Luca's hand and twines their fingers together. Joan stares at their joined hands. His thumb moves, almost unconsciously, tracing a small circle on the back of Luca's hand.

"I'm leaving Honda," Joan says. The words come out rushed, like he needs to get them out before he loses courage. "Gresini. I signed already a few months ago. I didn't tell you because I don't know how you will react-"

"I know," Luca says. "Everyone knows, even though nobody was officially announced. I'm happy for you."

Joan blinks. "You are?"

"You deserve a bike that doesn't try to kill you every weekend." Luca squeezes his hand. "And I’m not staying with Honda either. I don't know where I'll be next year. But that won't change anything about us."

Mechanics roll equipment crates through the corridor. Someone nearby laughs too loudly from sheer exhaustion. 

Joan is still watching him carefully, like he's trying to solve something.

"You know," Joan finally speaks, now in a joking voice. "You really could stop doing this. You would make a good test rider."

Luca leans against the wall beside him. 

"Rude."

"But you thought about it."

"Yes. Who knows - we still have most of the season ahead. We could think about this."

Joan exhales through his nose. 

For months, Luca has learned about Joan through fragments. Through frustration and stubbornness and silence. Through the terrible honesty of watching someone fail publicly and continue anyway. Joan burns through himself chasing perfection because he doesn't know how not to. Luca steadies everything around him because someone has to. Somehow, they met in the middle.

They slide down the wall until they’re sitting side by side on the floor. 

The garage is silent. The sun has dipped lower, painting everything in shades of orange and gold. Somewhere outside, a truck engine starts. 

Luca doesn't know who moves first. Maybe Joan, maybe him. But suddenly they're face to face, Luca leaning on Joan's shoulder, breathing on his cheek. Joan exhales slowly. 

"Come here," he murmurs. 

Luca cups Joan's face with his free hand - gently, like he's handling something fragile. Joan's skin is warm, even hot from the sun, rough with stubble, smudged with gravel dust. Luca pauses close enough to feel Joan’s breath against his mouth. Close enough that pulling away would still be easy. Luca kisses him.

It's quiet, gentle, and nothing about it feels desperate. The kind of kiss that doesn't demand anything - not promises, not explanations, not a plan for next season. 

The touch of their lips is brief at first. They're both careful and tired. Joan makes a quiet, surprised sound against his mouth, like he still can’t quite believe this is happening. His hand catches lightly against Luca's wrist like he's checking that he's real. 

Joan kisses him back. His hand comes up to grip Luca's fingers. Like Luca is the only solid thing in a world that keeps spinning off its axis.

They stay close even after the kiss breaks. The garage is still empty. The light is still golden.

"We should probably talk about this," Joan says, his voice slightly hoarse.

"Probably," Luca agrees.

Neither of them moves.

"Later," Joan decides.

"Later," Luca echoes.

When they pull apart, neither of them says anything. There doesn't seem to be anything left to explain. Joan rests his forehead briefly against Luca's shoulder instead, exhausted down to the bone.

They sit in silence, hands still linked, shoulders pressed together. Just the quiet relief of finally admitting something neither of them had the courage to say before.

Later - minutes or hours, Luca isn't sure - they finally stand up. Joan's joints crack. Luca's back protests. They're both too old (a slight exaggeration - they will both soon turn twenty-nine) for sitting on concrete floors, and neither of them mentions it.

Joan stops walking. Turns to look at Luca. The sunset catches his face, softens the hard lines of exhaustion, makes him look almost eighteen, open in a way Luca has never seen before.

"I'm glad you're the one who keeps showing up," Joan says.

Luca feels something loosen in his chest — something that's been wound tight since Thailand, since the first time he leaned against a wall and watched Joan grieve a race he should have won.

"Me too," Luca says.

Outside, the paddock keeps moving toward the next race, Barcelona sinks slowly into evening light. The season will continue. There will be more meetings, more crashes, and more impossible expectations waiting for both of them at the next circuit.

But not tonight. Tonight, they walk out together. And for the first time, Luca doesn’t have to wait for Joan to come back to him.