[Soren’s POV]
Warmth. That's the first thing—before the pain, before cognition reassembles itself from sleep's wreckage.
A body beside mine radiating heat through thin hotel sheets. Someone else's breathing against my shoulder blade. And for one suspended, disorienting moment it feels like something I could get used to.
Like waking up next to another person is something my body was built for and has only just remembered.
Then reality lands and the bruised ribs announce themselves first—a deep, nauseating throb that turns my inhale into a hiss. The swollen eye follows, sealed to a slit that lets in morning light like a blade. My split lip cracks when I swallow.
And the room—Nico's room, Nico's sheets, Nico's pillow beneath my head—arranges itself into a narrative I can't deflect my way out of.
Last night I showed up at his door bleeding and broken.
Last night I told him I was afraid of everything, and then I let him take me apart so gently it felt like being rebuilt.
The urge to bolt is immediate, instinctive—a muscle memory older than any racing reflex, and I start to sit up, already constructing the architecture of escape.
A joke about his terrible mattress. Something light, something sharp, something that puts distance between this moment and whatever raw honesty I displayed last night. But Nico is already awake.
Lying on his side facing me, head propped on one hand, watching me with steady dark eyes that hold no judgment.
Brazilian morning light cuts through the curtains and paints gold across his bare shoulders, catches the dark hair falling across his forehead. He looks like he's been awake for a while.
Watching me sleep and making peace with whatever he found there.
The joke dies in my throat immediately. The quiet between us stretches, warm and unhurried, and for the first time in my life it doesn't feel like silence that needs filling with performance.
It just feels like tystnad—the kind of stillness that holds you instead of haunting you.
"You don't have to run," Nico says. His voice is low, sleep-roughened, stripped of the careful control he usually wears. "I can see you building the exit strategy and you don't have to."
"I wasn't…" I start, but the lie collapses before it forms. My ribs protest as I settle back against the pillow. "Okay. Maybe I was, a bit."
"I know." No accusation, just a fact delivered with the quiet certainty of someone who has studied my escape patterns for over a decade.
The morning light is merciless—no alcohol to blur the edges, no adrenaline to justify the honesty. Just two bodies in a hotel bed in São Paulo, bruised and bare and terrifyingly sober.
I open my mouth to say something clever, and what comes out instead is ugly and broken and eleven years overdue.
"When Marco read your letter and tossed it to me, and I caught it, and I looked down at your handwriting… I understood, Nico. Every word. I understood what it cost you to write that, and for about three seconds I felt something I didn't have a name for. Something that terrified me more than anything else in that room."
The ceiling blurs and I blink hard, jaw clenching as truth that I tried to deny, tried to forget, keep spilling.
"And then I heard my father's voice. Not metaphorically—I mean I literally heard Erik Lindqvist in my head, clear as a radio broadcast, telling me that weakness is unacceptable.”
In any other situation, I would try to parody his voice. Right now I don’t.
“That whatever I was feeling was a sickness. That the only way to survive was to pick the winning side and never look back."
"So you picked the winning side," Nico says.
Not bitter. Not angry. Just naming it, the way you'd name a diagnosis.
"I stood in that semicircle and I laughed at you. I watched your face, and I saw exactly what it did to you, and I kept going because stopping would have meant admitting I…"
My voice cracks and I press my palms against my eyes—the good one and the swollen one—and the pain from the bruise is almost welcome, a physical anchor against this gutting moment.
"I told myself for eleven years that it didn't matter. That we were kids, that you got over it.”
Which is a lie for him, as much as it is for me.
“That time had diluted it to something insignificant. But I knew, Nico… Somewhere underneath all the bullshit and the rationalizing—I always knew it was the worst thing I'd ever done. To the best person I’ve ever had."
The words hang in morning air thick with dust motes. Nico lies still beside me, breathing even, expression unreadable. He hasn't interrupted once, hasn't given me the reaction I've been bracing for—the fury, the cold dismissal I deserve.
“Every time I looked at you across a grid or a garage and felt something I refused to examine—that was Far…”
I stop myself, because he’s my father as much as team principle Henrik is. Maybe Henrik is even more so.
“Erik’s voice telling me what I feel is wrong, and me obeying like the well-trained coward I've always been."
Silence. Long, oceanic, and terrifying. I stare at the ceiling with my one functional eye and wait for the verdict, my chest cracked open and every constructed wall reduced to rubble.
This is where Nico tells me it's too late.
That some things, once broken, stay broken.
"It matters." His voice is quiet. Rough at the edges, but steady—always steady, this man who learned to be his own foundation when I demolished the first one. "Eleven years too late, Soren. But it still matters."
I turn my head. He's watching me with something layered and complex, carrying the weight of a decade's worth of scar tissue.
"I can't tell you I forgive you. Not yet. Maybe not ever completely—I don't know. Some things leave marks that don't sand down. But hearing you say it, hearing you actually name what happened instead of burying it under charm and deflection…"
He exhales slowly and I brace myself for an answer.
"It matters. More than I expected it to."
The relief hits like a physical force—sharp, blinding, so overwhelming it nearly breaks me. My throat closes. My chest heaves against bruised ribs that scream in protest.
I press my forearm over my eyes because the alternative is crying, and I'm not ready for that. But fan, the weight that lifts from my sternum is staggering. Eleven years of carrying the worst thing I've ever done, and someone has finally looked at it and told me it's real.
I reach for Nico's hand, my fingers finding his on the sheets between us. I thread them together, feeling the calluses on his palms, the warmth of his skin, the way his hand tightens around mine.
Nico lets me take it, thumb tracing a slow arc across my bruised knuckles, careful around the torn skin. Then his voice comes low against the quiet.
"I'm going to say something, and I need you to not bolt." His thumb stills against my knuckle. "I have wanted this—you, honest and still and not performing—for longer than I know how to say. And I know that scares you. I know every instinct you have is telling you to make a joke, or kiss me so we don't have to talk. But I need you to let it be big."
Every instinct is screaming. But I tighten my fingers around his instead of letting go, and I stay.
The morning light shifts, the dust motes drift, and we lie there in a silence that finally, after eleven years, feels like the beginning of something instead of the end.