Chapter Text
Sergio had spent three weeks trying to talk himself out of this.
It hadn't worked. He'd known it wouldn't, but there was a part of him that kept trying anyway, the part that had been raised on the idea that willpower was a kind of grace you could earn if you prayed hard enough, wanted it badly enough, and hated yourself thoroughly enough for the wanting.
He tried all three.
He'd had knelt in his dorm room after lights-out with his forehead pressed to the cold edge of his bed frame and asked God, plainly, to take it out of him—take out whatever it was that made him watch Luka Modrić across a classroom and forget, for the entire minutes at a time, how to breathe normally.
It had never worked on him the way it was supposed to. That was the part he couldn't say out loud to anyone, not even in confession, because Father Mourinho's homilies were the reason Sergio knew exactly what he was supposed to be repenting for.
Disordered.
That was the word Catechism used, the words Father Mourinho had read aloud from the pulpit with the particular gentleness of a man who believed he was being merciful.
Not chosen. Not condemned for existing but disordered, and so not to be acted upon.
Sergio remembered sitting in the pew that Sunday between two boys from his dorm, nodding along with the rest of the congregation because that was what you did, remembered the specific, private violence of hearing an entire church agree that the thing inside his chest was a defect to be managed rather than a fact to be lived.
He had believed it for a while.
He believed it hard enough to date a girl named Pilar for four months and felt nothing when kissing her, an absence where he understood something was supposed to be. He believed it hard enough to avoid looking directly at Luka for the better part of the freshman year, to sit two seats away from him in class instead of next to him, to tell himself that the tightness in his stomach whenever Luka laughed at something was just—proximity. Nothing that needed a name.
It hadn't stayed nameless. That was the thing about trying to starve a feeling—eventually it stopped waiting to be fed and started finding its own way to the surface. It came out in the small things first.
The way Sergio started memorizing Luka's schedule without meaning to, so that their paths would cross in the courtyard on Tuesdays and Thursdays as if by accident. The way he began saving up things to tell him, hoarding them through the day like currency, because Luka's attention felt scarce and that valuable. Luka started doing the same thing back—showing up to the library and sitting where Sergio was, leaving half his lunch on Sergio's tray without asking, sitting close enough during study session that their knees would touch under the table and neither one of them would move.
Neither of them said anything about the touches. A hand resting a beat too long on a shoulder, fingers brushing when passing a book, and once, Luka had fallen asleep against Sergio's shoulder during a study session that ran late. Sergio had sat there rigid and electrified for forty minutes, not daring to move his arm, watching the slow rise and fall of Luka's breathing and thinking, I would set myself on fire for this. I would let this be the only good thing I ever get and call it enough.
He hadn't said this to Luka either but he'd started to believe, in the reckless, unguarded part of himself he kept trying and falling to discipline, that maybe Luka felt some version of the same thing. The way Luka looked at him sometimes—not friendly, something slower and more deliberate than friendly. His gaze lingered longer and then breaking off like he'd caught himself doing something forbidden.
Sergio used to lie awake, cataloguing those looks, turning each one over, trying to decide whether he was imagining a meaning that wasn't there or whether Luka was fighting the exact same battle that Sergio was, alone, on the other side of the dorm hall, with the same weapons—sermons, silence, shame—turned against him. Then, three weeks ago, in the stairwell between the second and third floor, Luka had kissed him.
There had been no lead-up that Sergio could point to afterwards, no moment where he could say this is when it started to happen. One second they were arguing, almost laughing about whether Luka had actually finished reading for class or just skimmed the summary, and Luka had grabbed the front of Sergio's shirt to make a point, and then he wasn't making a point anymore.
He'd kissed him like it had been sitting inside him for a long time, and Sergio had kissed him back with years of starved wanting behind it, both hands clenched in Luka's jacket like if he let go, the whole thing might turn out to be a dream he wasn't allowed to have twice.
It had lasted maybe ten seconds.
Then Luka had wrenched back like he'd touched something burning, and the look on his face—Sergio had turned that look over so many time since that he could probably draw it from memory. Luka's mouth had opened like he wanted to say something but he closed it, because there was nothing to say that wouldn't damn one of them. He'd said Sergio's name once, almost like an apology and he'd left. He hadn't looked back.
Luka started arriving to class right as the bell rang so there was no window for conversation before. He had lunch with different people, barely answered Sergio's texts and when he did, they were clipped, careful sentences. Sergio tried to bring it up and each time, Luka would change the subject.
Sergio told himself that he was simply going to find Luka, say something simple, and then leave before either of them had the chance to bleed on each other. He found Luka in the back pew of the empty chapel. He wasn't praying, just sitting with his elbows to his knees, and his bed bowed.
Sergio stood in the doorway, and every sentence he rehearsed during his walk over dissolved the second he saw him. "Luka."
Luka didn't turn around. "Go back to the dorm, Sergio."
"I need to talk to you."
"There's nothing to talk about." Luka's voice came out flat. "Nothing happened. That's the end of it."
Sergio walked up to the isle anyway, his footsteps loud against the stone. "Nothing happened?" Sergio repeated. "Okay. Then why did you kiss me?"
"Don't."
"Why did you kiss me if you don't feel anything?" His voice rose and broke a little on the final word, and he detested it, hated the fact that he was unable to express his anger in a clear and concise manner, and that all of his feelings for Luke came together in a single, overwhelming current that was unrecognizable.
Luka stood up. When he turned around, his eyes were red-rimmed and wrecked in a way that didn't match the steadiness he was forcing into his voice. "I told you. We can't have this conversation again. I mean it this time."
"You don't get to just—" Sergio's throat tightened. "You don't get to kiss me and then act like i imagined it. Like I forced something you didn't want."
"I did want it." Luka said. "That's the problem, isn't it? I wanted it. And it was weak of me. It was the weakest I have ever been in my entire life."
"Weak? That's what you're calling it?"
"What else would you call it?" Luka laughed. "I prayed on it. I know exactly what it was."
Sergio noticed, then, the stiffness in Luka's shoulders when he moved, the careful contained way he'd lowered himself back into the pew.
"Luka." Something cold dropped through Sergio's stomach. "What did you do?'
Luka didn't answer, he didn't have to.
Sergio heard the old stories, the half-confirmed rumors about boys at the other seminary-affiliated schools, the penitential customs no one official would ever put a name to—discipline administered alone, for a failing no one else was meant to witness.
"You did that to yourself? Because of me?"
"Because of what I did," Luka corrected. "Not because of you but because of what I let myself become for mere seconds in that stairwell."
Sergio reached for anger. At least that was something he knew but what he found instead, looking at Luka standing there, was grief with no floor under it. Grief that went all the way down his body because he understood that Luka hadn't punished himself to stop loving him. He'd punished himself because some part of him already knew that it wouldn't be enough to make that happen, and out of some desperate hope that pain might succeed where prayer alone kept failing.
"Luka—"
"I'm going to ask Anna to be my girlfriend." The words came out too fast, a man jumping before he could think better of it. "This weekend. I've been meaning to for a while now."
The chapel went very quiet.
"She's a good person," Luka went on, and it had the cadence of something rehearsed, a sentence built and repeated until it held shape. "She's kind. She goes to Mass every week without anyone making her go. It'll be—it'll be easier. It'll be right, with her."
"Right," Sergio said.
"Yes."
"How is she going to love you differently than I do?"
Luka flinched.
"Tell me. What is she going to give you that this—that I—can't?"
"She's not a sin, Sergio." The words came out ragged. "That's what she gives me. She lets me stop being afraid of what I am every time I look at her."
"And when you look at me?"
Luka didn't answer that one either.
"She'll never make you flinch," Sergio said quietly. "That's it, isn't it? That's the whole difference. Not that she'll love you any better, just that loving her won't cost you anything you're afraid to pay."
"Please." Luka's voice broke, just enough for Sergio to hear the boy underneath, afraid. "I can't keep doing this. Every time we talk about it, I have to start all over again from nothing, and I don't have it in me. I don't have it in me, Sergio."
Sergio stood there in the aisle of a chapel expressly built for confession, and understood that there would be no absolution offered here, not for this, not for either of them. Luka was going to marry his own guilt to another person's kindness and call it the grace arrangement. And Sergio was going to watch him do it, because nothing in the shape they'd been given had ever included a version where he got to do anything different.
"I hope she does love you well," Sergio said finally. "I hope she loves you so well, you manage to forget this ever happened."
It wasn't a blessing, they both knew that. It was the cruelest thing he had ever said to Luka, dressing it up in the shape of kindness, and watching it land exactly the way he'd meant it.
"Sergio—"
He was already walking away.