LH44 fics ⋆˙⟡♡ @xo-lewrarri44 - Tumblr Blog

I JUST DON'T KNOW YOU YET - LH44

MASTERLIST ᯓ★

author's note hi angels!! welcome to Lo's Valentine's Special🩶 this is incredibly long, but it kinda had to be lol. welcome to a universe where making eye contact with your soulmate ultimately destroys you from the inside out. especially if your name is lewis hamilton and you don't believe in "that bullshit". it doesn't end where i wanted it to but also 30k+ words seemed a little insane. lots of love x

pairing: lewis hamilton x reader (soulmate AU) wc: i'm not even sure anymore. LONG. summary: lewis hamilton never believed in soulmates – or anything that couldn’t be measured, tested, or explained. when a season of unexplained pain and foreign emotions begins to unravel him, he searches for a physiological answer and finds something far more destabilising instead. he thought his body was failing him. he was wrong. what’s failing him has no medical name, no explanation, and no mercy. and fate has already won. (heavily inspired by this song pls listen) warnings: time difference inaccuracies (i gave up after australia), very dark and heavy angst in some parts, lewis losing his mind a bit, mental health struggles, medical terminology, charles leclerc briefly thinking lewis is dying lmao, reliving the trauma of the 2025 season, slow burn, involuntary soul bond, emotional bleed, panic attacks, anxiety attacks, grief, unexplained chest pain, misdiagnosis, hospital scenes, vomiting, crying, breakdowns, self-doubt, identity crisis, fear of losing control, career pressure, racing frustration, post-breakup grief, loneliness, isolation.

Lewis had long given up on the idea of soulmates.

When he was younger–less jaded by reality, less disciplined about what he let himself believe—he’d entertained the possibility. Maybe they existed. Maybe he’d even thought he’d found his once or twice. But then the inevitable happened, and it ended. It always did. He learned that most flames flicker out eventually. That his life didn’t leave room for patience, for the slow, careful growing something like that would require.

His friends joked about it. Soulmates. As if they weren’t all watching the same twenty-five girls cycle through the paddock, weekend after weekend, season after season. Sure, love was real. He wasn’t cynical enough to deny that. He’d felt it, he thought. But the soulmate thing? That was bullshit. A story people told themselves to soften endings that were never meant to last.

If it were real, if it worked the way some people claimed, surely people would act differently. They’d search. They’d talk about it openly. They’d admit to waiting, or looking, or feeling something unmistakable when the right person crossed their path. But Lewis had watched his friends fall in love, get married, build lives together, and not one of them had ever spoken about it like that. No dramatic certainty. No sudden knowing. Just time, choice, compromise. Ordinary, deliberate things.

That version of love made sense to him. It made logical sense.

He knew the term existed beyond jokes. Everyone did, in some vague, half-remembered way. It came up occasionally in articles he didn’t read past the headline, in conversations that drifted sideways and never lingered. Always framed as rare. Always framed as romantic. Something you’d know when it happened. Something that sorted itself out neatly, once the right person was found.

Lewis had never believed that part. Anything real, anything powerful, didn’t announce itself like that. It didn’t come labelled.

His dad used to talk about it differently. About how when he first met Linda, something in him shifted. Like his nervous system had rewired itself overnight. Emotions spiking without warning. Sadness, panic, happiness so sharp it felt physical. His dad had known then, apparently. Known she was it. Known he’d be with her forever. The ‘symptoms’, his dad called them, only settled once they were together.

Lewis had always chalked that up to love. To intensity. To the way memory smooths itself into something cleaner than it ever was. People were good at turning chaos into meaning once they’d come out the other side.

Besides, he’d heard other explanations for the ‘symptoms’ people talk about. Quieter ones. About stress responses. About bodies under pressure misfiring. About how the mind filled in gaps when it wanted certainty badly enough. That framing sat better with him. It was practical. Containable. Something you could train around.

If something like that were ever to happen to him, he was sure of one thing: he wouldn’t romanticise it. He’d assume there was a reason. There was always a reason. And the sensationalised bullshit everyone spoke about? Not real. They clearly just didn’t know how to handle their emotions properly.

He wouldn’t have been thinking about any of it at all if Miles hadn’t been doubled over on the sofa, cry-laughing at his phone.

“Please,” Miles said, wiping at his eyes. “You have to hear this.”

Lewis was tying his braids back, watching himself in the mirror as Miles tried to get through the headline without losing it again. “Some girl from Love Island USA is claiming she accidentally locked eyes with a guy and felt all his emotions. Like…boom. Instant soulmate bond.”

Spinz didn’t even wait for Miles to finish before he cackled. “No. Absolutely not.”

Lewis didn’t look up, fingers busy gathering his hair. “That’s not a thing,” he said easily.

Miles scrolled anyway, adopting an exaggeratedly serious tone. “Apparently it’s a rare neurological phenomenon. People mistake it for anxiety or panic attacks.”

“Yeah,” Spinz said, still laughing. “Or being on reality TV.”

Miles snorted. “They’re calling it emotional bonding. Soulmates.”

“Emotional what?,” Spinz said. “Sounds romantic. Sounds fake.”

Lewis secured the tie at the base of his neck and finally glanced at them in the mirror. “People will say anything for attention,” he said. “Doesn’t make it real.”

“Imagine ruining your life because you made eye contact at a bar,” Spinz added. “Couldn’t be me.”

Miles swiped the article away, interest already gone. The conversation shifted—to where they were going, who might already be out, how late it was going to get.

Lewis grabbed his jacket, the word lingering only briefly in his mind. Not because it meant anything. Not because it unsettled him.

Just because it was one of those things in popular culture that refused to die, no matter how many times it got dragged out and laughed at. Repackaged every few years, dressed up as something new. Romantic when it needed to be. Pseudoscientific when that sold better.

He remembered it being mentioned once when he was a kid, in a Year Eleven ‘Physical, Social and Emotional health’ class. Tucked between discussions about stress management and emotional regulation. Framed carefully, vaguely. As something people used to believe. As folklore that had survived into the modern day because no one could quite scientifically disprove it, and no one wanted to be the person who tried.

Rare. Unverified. Often misinterpreted. That was all they’d said.

Lewis had rolled his eyes then, too. Filed it away with the rest of the half-formed warnings and well-meaning nonsense they fed teenagers to make the world feel smaller and safer than it really was.

If something like this soulmate bond shit was real, it didn’t need that much of an explanation. It didn’t need caveats or soft language or cultural disclaimers. It didn’t survive by being passed around like a story people weren’t quite brave enough to let go of.

The idea hadn’t earned his attention back then.

It hadn’t earned it now.

Lewis wasn’t really a fan of Tape in London. If he was honest, he’d grown tired of it a while ago. London clubs, in general, felt underwhelming compared to everywhere else he’d been—overhyped, overcrowded, trying too hard. But Spinz had planned the night, so Lewis showed up. He always did.

They were settled at their table, bottles of something expensive sweating in buckets of ice, bass thumping so hard it rattled through his ribs. He barely drank anymore. Not properly. He liked control too much for that.

The air was thick and humid. It felt heavy, clinging to his T-shirt, sticking it to his back. Bodies pressed in from all sides. Spinz was already surrounded, laughing, arm slung lazily around a girl’s waist. Miles had someone perched on his lap, whispering in his ear like the rest of the room didn’t exist.

Lewis stayed where he was, sunglasses still on despite the low light, expression fixed into the easy smirk people expected. Hands brushed his stomach, his biceps, lingered just long enough to be intentional. He let it happen, scanning the table slowly, detached. Assessing. Choosing.

Picking the best option for the night.

A girl slid into the empty space beside him like it was already hers. Tall, confident, the kind of pretty that knew exactly what it would do to him. She leaned in just enough to be heard over the music, perfume cutting cleanly through the sweat and haze.

“Hi,” she said, eyes hidden behind lashes that did most of the work for her.

Lewis glanced down at her, letting his eyes wander slowly. He took her in. The dress. The mouth. The way she held herself like she was used to being chosen. Objectively sexy. His mouth tipped into something close to a grin.

“Hey,” he replied, voice easy, unbothered.

She laughed at something he hadn’t said yet, fingers brushing his knee like it was accidental. “You look bored.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe I just look like this.”

That earned him a smile, wide and appreciative. She shifted closer, thigh pressing against his. This was the part he understood. Chemistry that didn’t ask for anything. Attention without expectation.

Her hand rested on his arm now, tracing muscle like she was confirming something she already knew. “You dancing tonight?”

“Depends,” Lewis said, eyes flicking briefly back to the crowd. “You good company?”

She tilted her head, clearly enjoying the game. “I can be.”

Nice, he thought. Simple. No complications.

He leaned in slightly, close enough for her to hear him over the bass. “Alright then.”

She smiled like she’d just won something.

And that was how Lewis’s night went. Easy, predictable. Letting her dance against him, his hands settling at her waist out of habit more than hunger. Her body warm, familiar, moving in time with the music. His mouth brushing her neck when she leaned in close, breath ghosting skin, nothing about it demanding more than the moment.

At some point it got too hot and crowded. The air thick enough to feel like too much work.

Lewis pulled back, murmured something in her ear, and slipped toward one of the windows. He lifted his sunglasses, wiping sweat from his face with the hem of his shirt, grateful for the second of space.

The girl he’d been with drifted off toward the bar, already pulled into another conversation. Lewis stayed where he was, one shoulder against the glass, the bass settling into a familiar, steady thrum beneath his ribs. That was when he noticed her.

She was dancing with her friends in the middle of the floor, loose and laughing, movements uncoordinated in the way that meant she was drunk and unbothered by it. She didn’t look sloppy, she looked more… beautifully free. Spinning, bumping into her friends, laughing when she nearly lost her balance. There was something infectious about it, something that made watching feel easy.

Lewis laughed under his breath.

He watched her for a moment longer than he meant to, not because he wanted anything, just because she looked like she was having a good time. Like she’d decided, for the night at least, not to rein herself in. There was nothing strategic about it, no calculation. He was simply enjoying witnessing someone be unselfconscious, unobserved even while being watched.

She glanced up like she could feel his eyes. Her eyes met his and stayed there. A shared second of awareness in the middle of the noise.

Lewis grinned and tipped his chin, a small, instinctive nod. Approval, maybe. A little bit of encouragement. Keep going. You’re good.

Her face lit up immediately. She laughed, threw him a grin like he’d said something clever, then turned back to her friends, dancing harder, more exaggerated now, like the moment had only added fuel to her fire.

Lewis shook his head, still grinning at her. He leaned back against the window, the glass cool through his shirt, and let the feeling pass. Something nice that happened in the middle of a night full of other nice little moments. The crowd shifted, and the music swallowed the moment whole.

Lewis put his sunglasses back on and didn’t think about her again.

“He was sexy, babe!” your friend shouted over the music as you backed into her, laughing when she caught your waist to steady you.

“I have a boyfriend,” you called back over your shoulder, grinning despite yourself.

She snorted, rolling her eyes in a way that only worked because she was tipsy. “A shit one.”

You huffed out a laugh, half fond, half tired. “We’re not here to talk about him.”

And you weren’t. That had been the point. You’d come out tonight because things had beef off. Not broken, yet. But you were fraying at the edges. Distance, even when you were technically together. Conversations that felt heavier than they used to. Pressure piling up, from work, from expectations, from the quiet assumption that you should be moving toward something more settled by now.

You loved him. You were sure of that. But lately love felt like something you were carrying alone.

He’d cancelled date night earlier that evening—work, again—so you’d pulled on the dress anyway and met the girls. No sense letting it go to waste. No sense sitting at home spiralling when the music was loud and your friends were here and, for the moment, you could still lose yourself in the noise.

For now, that was enough. Hours later, you found yourself in the bathroom, palms braced against the sink, makeup smudged and softened by sweat. You stared at your reflection for longer than necessary, watching your face blur. The cracks you’d plastered over with loud music and quick joy were starting to show through now, thin and unmistakable.

God. You barely recognised yourself. You looked tired. Not just I need sleep tired, but worn down in a way that felt deeper than the night. Hollowed out. That was when you decided to go home. The Uber ride passed in a muted haze. The alcohol still hummed in your bloodstream, everything outside the window smeared into colour and light. Streetlamps streaked past like afterimages. You rested your head back and let the city move without you.

Your apartment was dark when you got in. Familiar and still. You went through the motions—washing your face, changing out of the dress, moving softly without thinking too hard about any of it. He was already asleep, sprawled across the bed like he always was. You paused in the doorway, looking at him, something tight twisting low in your stomach.

Don’t, you told yourself. Don’t do this.

You slipped in beside him anyway. He stirred, half-awake, kissed your temple without opening his eyes. His arm came around your waist, loose and practiced, a murmur against your skin that sounded like love because it always had. You stared up at the ceiling, blinking slowly.

You thought about the good times. The beginnings. The butterflies, the dates that ran late into the night, the holidays where everything felt easy and certain. The safety you’d built together, piece by piece.

Then, inexplicably, you thought about the stranger at the club. The nice man with kind eyes who’d caught your gaze and laughed, nodding like it mattered that you were enjoying yourself. You huffed quietly at the memory, embarrassed now by how ridiculous you must have looked.

Eventually, you rolled onto your side and closed your eyes.

And you didn’t think about him again.

Weeks passed in a haze for you. Work in the office, home to your boyfriend, the same weekly cycle repeating over and over. Nothing new. Same old. You worked, you smiled, you got the train home and looked at the clouds, wondering when life had started feeling this dull. You tried to think about the last time you felt alive. Not drunk. Not distracted. Not needing some kind of release. Just alive in your own body.

You couldn’t remember.

Every single night you curled up next to him. He talked about his day, his job, how busy he’d been, how much you grounded him. He said it like it meant something important. He rarely asked about yours before you were kissing, before his hands were on you, before you were losing yourselves in each other. Like sleeping together could plaster over the cracks that were starting to show.

Most nights you lay with your head on his chest. You listened to his heartbeat. You let him hold you. And still, you felt lonely. This heavy, aching loneliness that sat in your bones and didn’t move. The quiet dread that this really could be the rest of your life. That this was it.

You knew he was a good guy. A great one, even. Intelligent. Gorgeous. Kind when he wanted to be. You’d built something solid together. Something people were meant to want. But when love becomes routine, when people stop trying, is it still love? Or is it just comfort with a different name?

That thought kept you awake more nights than you liked to admit. The sinking feeling that after all this time, after everything you’d given and grown and planned together, it still wasn’t enough. That you were still waiting for something you couldn’t name.

You didn’t know if love was supposed to feel like this over time. Maybe the magic faded. Maybe the butterflies dulled into something quieter and more practical. Maybe this was what staying looked like.

You felt safe. Safety was fine. Safety was good. But you kept wondering if good was all you were ever going to get.

You were almost certain he’d noticed. A few days ago he came home with your favourite flowers. Cooked your favourite dinner. Put music on and danced with you in the kitchen like you used to. You laughed. You let yourself believe, just for a moment, that it could be enough. That the spark could be rekindled. That wanting it badly enough might make it true.

Later, lying in bed beside him, you stared at the ceiling and felt that familiar ache settle back into place. You realised, with a devastating certainty, that wanting it to be enough didn’t make it so.

Lewis had learned, over the years, not to be afraid of his emotions.

It hadn’t come naturally. It was something he’d had to practice. Something he’d had to choose, again and again, in a world that rewarded him most when he stayed composed and unreadable. But eventually he’d realised that ignoring how he felt didn’t make it go away. It just made it louder later. So he made space for it.

Mornings were quiet when he could help it. Training days started early, but he still carved out time before everything else crowded in. Meditation first. Ten minutes, sometimes twenty. Sitting on the floor, eyes closed, breath steady, letting whatever showed up do so without judgement. Some days it was nothing. Just stillness. Other days it was impatience, frustration, a tight coil of pressure in his chest that had no single source. He noticed it all. Named it. Let it pass.

He journaled most nights. Not pages and pages of confessions, not poetic declarations. It was mostly honest observations. How he’d felt that day. What had set him off. What had sat heavy. What had surprised him. Writing it down helped him organise it. Turning his feelings into something legible, something he could work with.

He knew he was emotional. Deeply so. He always had been. He felt things sharply, intensely. Joy, anger, grief. He didn’t pretend otherwise. The difference now was that he didn’t panic when it happened.

When he cried, he let himself. Privately, usually. In the quiet of his own space, where it didn’t have to mean anything more than release. He’d learned the hard way that holding it in only made it leak out sideways. Into impatience. Into distance. Into exhaustion.

2021 still surfaced sometimes. Not as a constant ache, but in flashes. He let that grief sit where it belonged. He didn’t rush it. He didn’t shame himself for it. Some losses didn’t shrink away like the rest of them. They just settled into something he didn’t have to think about or relive every day.

Roscoe still came up sometimes. Not every day, not in a way that knocked the air out of him anymore. Just in small, unexpected moments. When he reached automatically for a lead that wasn’t there. When he saw a dog the same size out on a walk. When everything felt a little too quiet in the evenings.

He missed him in a steady, uncomplicated way. Wrote about it when it lingered longer than usual. Grief, he’d learned, didn’t need fixing. It just needed space. Love came with fear of loss, and he’d accepted that a long time ago.

The career pressure never really left, either. Records. Expectations. The weight of being watched, of being measured against his own past every single season. He was aware of it. He’d built systems around it. Training, therapy, routine. People he trusted enough to say, honestly, when he wasn’t okay.

He spoke about how he was feeling more than people realised. Not publicly. Not performatively. But with the people who mattered. He didn’t need everything fixed. He just needed it seen.

Lewis knew when something was wrong. He knew when he was overwhelmed, when he was angry, when he was sad. Even if it took him a little while to get there, he always did. He could sit with his emotions without trying to outrun them. He trusted himself to handle what came up. He trusted his ability to recognise it, even if it took time. He’d spent too long learning how his mind worked to confuse discomfort with danger, or sadness with something deeper. He knew the difference between pressure and grief, between stress and loss.

Whatever came up, he knew how to sit with it. And if something ever did feel unfamiliar, he trusted himself to notice that too.

It eventually happened on a Thursday. Nothing dramatic led to it. No betrayal. No shouting. No single moment you could point to and say this is where it broke. You got home from work and he was already there, sitting on the sofa with his elbows on his knees, head bowed like the weight of the room had finally settled on him.

You knew instantly.

It wasn’t panic. It wasn’t shock. It was a simple, dull, sinking recognition. A quiet, awful sense that this was how it was always going to end. On an ordinary Thursday.

He looked up when he heard the door close. His eyes were red, rimmed with something raw, and there was a crease between his brows you’d never been able to smooth away, no matter how much you tried. As much as you’d felt the slow erosion, the gradual thinning of whatever you used to be to each other, it still hit you like a kick to the stomach.

You crossed the room and sat beside him without thinking. Muscle memory. You took his hands in yours, thumbs brushing over his knuckles the way you always did when one of you was nervous.

“Look, baby,” he started, voice already unsteady. “I just… I came home early because I—”

“Hey,” you cut in softly. “Hey. It’s okay. You can talk to me. Just breathe.”

He did, but it shuddered on the way out. One tear slipped free before he could stop it, landing on his jeans like proof he hadn’t meant to offer yet.

“I can feel you pulling away from me,” he said quietly. “Physically. Emotionally. I can… I know you are.”

You swallowed, throat tight. You didn’t pull your hands away, even though part of you wanted to curl in on yourself, to protect whatever was left. “I’m not trying to,” you said.

He shook his head, he looked just as tired as you felt. “I know you’re not doing it on purpose. That’s almost worse.”

Silence stretched. The flat felt too small for it, like the walls were leaning in to listen.

“I feel like I’m always reaching for you,” he went on after a moment. “And sometimes you’re there. Sometimes you’re not. And I keep telling myself it’s just work, or stress, or a phase. But it’s been a while now.”

You stared at your joined hands, at the familiar shape of him, of this life you’d built. “I’m tired,” you said finally. Your voice sounded strange to your own ears. Thin. “I’m tired of trying to feel the way I used to. I keep waiting for it to come back. I keep telling myself it will.”

He squeezed your fingers, like he was bracing himself. “And does it?”

You didn’t answer straight away. You wanted to lie. You wanted to say yes, of course it does, we just need to work harder, try more, be better. But you were too tired for that now too.

“No,” you whispered. “Not really.”

He nodded slowly, like he’d already known. Like he’d been rehearsing this moment in his head long before today.

“I don’t think either of us is doing anything wrong,” he said. “That’s what’s killing me. We’re good to each other. We’re kind. We’re safe. And I don’t know when that stopped being enough.”

The word sank in your chest. Safe.

“Are we in love,” you asked, barely louder than a breath, “or are we just… comfortable?”

He opened his mouth. Closed it again. His eyes filled, and this time he didn’t try to stop it.

“I don’t know,” he said, voice breaking. “I want the answer to be love. I really do. I wanted you to be the mother to my children, t-to be my wife.”

You both cried then. The kind of crying that didn’t come with sobs or raised voice, but tears slipping down, shoulders shaking, grief seeping out of places you hadn’t realised were still holding hope.

“I don’t want to wake up in ten years and resent you,” he said eventually. “Or have you resent me. I don’t want to look at you and feel like we stayed because it was easier than leaving.”

You pressed your forehead to his shoulder, breath hitching. “I don’t want that either,” you said. “I don’t want to wake up and feel like I missed my life.”

He wrapped his arms around you, tight, desperate, like maybe if he held on hard enough the moment would pass. You clung back just as fiercely. For a second, it almost felt like before. Almost.

But even in his arms, even with his face buried in your hair, you felt it. That same hollow ache. That same certainty that love shouldn’t feel like this much work just to exist.

“I still love you,” he said softly. “I know,” you replied, tears soaking into his shirt. “I love you too.”

Somehow, heartbreakingly, that wasn’t enough to save you anymore.

You stayed there for a long time, holding each other on the sofa where you’d watched films, shared takeaways, planned futures that would never happen now. Outside, the evening went on like nothing had changed. Cars passed. Someone laughed in the street. The world didn’t pause for you.

When you finally pulled apart, your face felt swollen, your chest hollowed out.

“So,” he said quietly. “What do we do?”

You wiped at your cheeks, hands shaking, like your body was already learning how to exist without him. “I think… I think we let each other go.”

He nodded. It took him a second, like the words had weight. Then fresh tears spilled as they finally settled. “Okay.”

It was the saddest agreement you’d ever made.

You think about all the conversations that never got to finish. The half-jokes about rings that lingered too long, the quiet one days that lived between sentences. The way kids had come up not as a plan but as an inevitability, said casually, like the future was something solid you were already walking toward together. Like settling down wasn’t a decision you still had to make.

Now it collapses in real time. You lose all of it in under an hour.

12:22 a.m. That’s the exact time he walked out of your apartment. Out of your life. The loss is so intense it’s disorienting. Grief so deep the tears don’t even come straight away. It sits in your chest instead, heavy and sharp. The nausea. The pins and needles in your limbs. Like your body doesn’t know where to put the absence yet.

You don’t cry when he leaves. You cry later, when it finally sinks in that you aren’t just mourning him. You’re mourning a life you never even got to try for. A house you never argued over paint colours in. Children who never existed but already had his smile in your head. A version of settling down that only ever made sense with him in it.

The worst part is knowing that nothing was taken from you. You let it go. Love was there. It just wasn’t the right kind anymore.

Lewis liked Australia.

There was something about Melbourne that always reset him. The light, the space, the way the season opened here like a deep breath before the year really began. First race of the season. He was back. New team, new car, new colours stitched into his routine. Ferrari red, a different badge over his heart. It still felt surreal sometimes, but in a good way. Like the beginning of something he’d chosen carefully.

The winter break had been full. Learning Ferrari’s rhythms. Trying, and mostly failing, to pick up Italian beyond the basics. Finding somewhere quiet to stay near Maranello. Endless press days, questions on repeat, the weight of expectation sitting heavy but not unwelcome. He’d asked for this. He was ready for it.

He arrived at the paddock early, as usual. The place was still half asleep, the air cool, the hum of preparation just beginning to rise. Angela was back at his side, grounding as ever, talking him through pre-hab like it was the most normal thing in the world. That familiarity mattered. Anchored him. He felt good. He felt really, really good.

Loose. Focused. A little nervous in the way that meant he cared. Excitement that sat bright in his chest rather than tight. Ready.

Angela had just finished when Ella poked her head into his driver’s room, phone in hand, already smiling like she knew she was interrupting something calm.

“Fan stage in ten,” she said. “Just a reminder.”

“Oh yeah. Right. Of course,” Lewis laughed, pushing himself up from the bench. “Thank you.”

He tugged at the hem of his Ferrari t-shirt, glancing down at it like he was seeing it for the first time all over again. Ferrari red. Bold. Unmissable. He caught his reflection in the mirror and grinned.

“Red suits me, right?” he asked, turning slightly toward Angela.

She snorted, utterly unimpressed. “Whatever helps you sleep at night, Lewis. Go on. Your people await.”

He laughed again, light and easy, and followed Ella out into the paddock. The noise was building now. Fans lining barriers, cameras already tracking him, the familiar buzz settling into his bones.

Charles was exactly where Lewis expected him to be, lingering near the stage access, talking animatedly to someone from the team. He looked relaxed too. Comfortable. At home in this place.

Lewis had always liked Charles. Even back when they’d been on separate teams, even when the paddock politics tried to pit them against each other. He was talented, hardworking, funny. Recently they’d found an easy rhythm together. Chess games that got way too competitive. Late-night debates about the best pizza toppings, which Charles took far too seriously.

“CL!” Lewis grinned, clapping a hand against Charles’ back.

Charles turned, breaking into a wide smile. “LH! Ah, you are on time, no?”

Lewis laughed. “Always. You ready?”

“For this?” Charles shrugged, mock dramatic. “Always ready. First fan stage of the year. Everyone very excited, very loud.”

“Yeah,” Lewis said, falling into step beside him as they walked toward the stage. “Feels good though. First one of the season. New start.”

Charles nodded, glancing sideways at him. “You look happy,” he said simply. “Good happy.”

Lewis felt the truth of it settle warmly in his chest. He smiled wider and nodded. “I am.”

The noise swelled as they stepped into view, cheers rolling over them like a wave. Lewis lifted his hand automatically, flashing that familiar smile, soaking it in. This was his world. The paddock. The people. The pressure and the joy braided together so tightly he could barely tell them apart anymore.

Right now, everything felt exactly where it was supposed to be.

He checked his watch. 11:00 a.m. Half an hour of this, then back to the routine he’d set in stone before free practice. First time on the track, in front of a crowd, in a Ferrari.

The stage was raised a few feet off the ground, a simple platform with big screens behind them. Microphones were handed to them both, a line of cameras creeping closer with every second. Fans pressed against the barriers, waving flags and phones, calling out names in that high, urgent pitch that made adrenaline blossom in his chest.

He spotted it first: a massive red flag, Ferrari logos in each corner, and in the middle, a picture of him smiling in the new race suit, like he’d been airbrushed into a legend. He grinned, lifting a hand in acknowledgment. “Wow… that’s commitment,” he muttered.

Charles glanced over, smirking. “Yes. And if you crash the car this weekend, you will have no excuses. Big face, big pressure.”

Lewis laughed, shaking his head. “Oh, fantastic. Thanks for the pep talk.”

He looked out at the crowd again, at all the waving hands waiting for one in return. The fans roared. A few shouted his name in unison, a tidal wave of sound that made the air vibrate pleasantly against his ribs. Angela gave a small thumbs up from the side, reassuring him. He nodded, appreciating the grounding.

Questions started coming in from the host, short bursts of energy, easy fodder for smiles. “Lewis, first race in red—how does it feel?”

“Feels amazing. Honestly, just… I always wondered what it would be like to stand here in red, and now here I am,” he replied, voice carrying over the speakers, eyes scanning the crowd enough to meet a few faces, soak in the energy.

Charles leaned in beside him. “You will charm them all. Already winning tifosi hearts before the car even moves.”

Lewis snorted, nudging him lightly with his elbow. Another question. “Lewis, Ferrari fans are excited. Are you feeling the pressure?”

He laughed, warm and easy. “Pressure is part of the fun. Keeps you sharp. Keeps me smiling.” He threw a quick glance at the massive flag again.

The host asked about the new teammate. Lewis looked at Charles and raised an eyebrow, playful. “Oh, you know… keeping him on his toes. We’ve bonded over chess and pizza already. It’s… competitive but friendly.”

The crowd laughed, and Lewis mirrored them with a small grin, letting the light energy of the morning sweep over him. Everything was familiar here, yet new. A first race, a new car, a new chapter.

They played a few games with the host, chatted some more. Lewis’s eyes flicker to his watch again as the host talked to Charles about the car. He hoped this media stuff would be over soon. 11:21 a.m. he’d have time for a smoothie before free practice if they wrapped this up quickly.

He looks back up to say something funny, clever, to get another laugh out of the crowd.

At first, it was just a flutter, like his heartbeat had skipped. He shook his head, smiled, tried to laugh it off. But the next second the floor felt further away, like gravity had been switched off for him alone. His ears rang. Pins and needles shot up his arms. His vision blurred at the edges. Then the grief came.

It wasn’t something he could process. No memory, no event, but it landed like a tidal wave, cold and sharp, curling around his ribs, clawing at his chest. It bloomed from somewhere inside him he didn’t know existed. Panic flared immediately. His first thought, sharp and logical, like his brain had a checklist: Heart attack. Maybe heart attack. Stay still. Don’t faint. Don’t collapse.

He reached out instinctively, clutching Charles’s arm as though the other man could make it stop. “I—I don’t… I can’t…” he gasped, the words catching in his throat.

He tried to take a steady breath. Tried to blink it away. Tried to force rational thought into the edges of the chaos, but the feeling kept growing, spreading, swelling until it consumed everything. His chest burned, his stomach lurched, a metallic taste in his mouth. Tears burned at the corners of his eyes. He squeezed his eyes shut, praying it would pass, that this was just panic, dehydration, nerves…but it wasn’t. It wasn’t going away.

His knees felt weak. Every breath came sharp and shallow, like his lungs had forgotten how to expand. His hand still clutched Charles’s arm as though it were a lifeline, but even that didn’t help. Pins and needles continued to run up his arms, into his shoulders, prickling under his skin. His stomach roiled. The world tilted.

Heart attack, he thought again, cold logic latching on. This is it. I’m having a heart attack. His mind cycled through everything he knew about symptoms—pain, tightness, nausea, shortness of breath—and it all matched. Every rulebook he’d ever mentally stored about “how your body betrays you” was screaming: something is catastrophically wrong.

He tried to steady himself. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. But each breath was heavy, jagged, like breathing underwater. His chest burned and throbbed with a rhythm that wasn’t his own, a panic he couldn’t control.

“Lewis?” Charles’s voice cut through the haze. Far away, distorted. But he couldn’t answer. Couldn’t speak without gagging on the panic. He wanted to move, to run, to get somewhere safe, but his legs refused.

Everything slowed. The crowd blurred into a wash of color and sound. Camera flashes felt like stabs. Laughter and applause sounded distant, warped, meaningless. He couldn’t process it. He couldn’t filter it. His body was screaming at him, and every part of him obeyed.

Tears burned behind his eyes, unexpected, unbidden. Why now? Why this? What the fuck is going on? His chest felt like it would split open. A pain so raw it was blinding. His throat was tight. He was dizzy, nauseated, shaking. The rational side of his brain tried to intervene: You’re fine. Just breathe. Calm down. Focus. But it had no purchase. He couldn’t focus. All he could feel was this, the unbearable heaviness crushing him from the inside.

He clung harder to Charles’s arm. Not because he needed Charles, not because he even knew why, but because his body screamed for connection, for something solid to hang on to. Then a strange, suffocating sorrow blossomed behind the panic, wrapping itself around every nerve ending. It had no name. He didn’t understand it. He just knew he wanted it to stop.

Somewhere deep inside, the tears he’d been forcing down finally broke free, trailing silently down his cheeks. The sound of the crowd faded entirely. His world contracted to his chest, his trembling hands, and the raw, screaming ache in his lungs.

Time slowed to an almost unbearable crawl. 11:22 a.m. The watch on his wrist glimmered faintly in the sunlight, the second hand moving agonizingly slow. Every tick was a hammer, every tick marking him suspended in a moment he couldn’t escape.

He tried to blink, to force control back, to convince himself it was just nerves, too much adrenaline, maybe dehydration. But the grief wouldn’t leave. His body shuddered with it, hot and cold at once, heavy and hollow, a tidal wave that made him gasp and shake and cry.

Charles had already moved into action, steering him off the stage and into Angela’s waiting hands, but Lewis’s iron grip on his arm didn’t loosen. Every nerve screamed; every sensation was amplified. His chest seared with pain , tight and heavy, pins and needles continued to prick up his arms like fire ants, and his legs felt like they might fold under him. Dissociation washed over him—he could see faces, hear their voices, but it was as if someone had muted the world. Everything except the pain.

He blinked rapidly, trying to focus on something—Angela, Charles, Ella, anyone—but the edges of their faces wavered, flickering in and out of focus.

“Something’s wrong. Something’s really fucking wrong,” he gasped, breath shallow, hand pressing into the center of his chest as if sheer force could push the ache out.

“Can we get some doctors?!” Angela’s voice cut through the haze, sharp and commanding, but distant, echoing.

Charles lowered him into a chair, keeping him steady, kneeling in front of him. Lewis clung, fingers digging into his shoulder, sweat glistening over his face. His mouth was dry, ears ringing with a high-pitched whine he couldn’t place.

“LH? Lewis? Eyes on me…” Charles’s voice was soft but firm, trying to get through to him.

Lewis shivered violently, cold sweat and heat fighting across his skin. His chest felt impossibly heavy, his heart pounding in a rhythm that didn’t belong to him. Panic clawed through his ribs, twisting his stomach into knots. “F-fuck… my chest—” he panted, words breaking apart.

“Chest pain?” Charles echoed, alarmed, glancing at Angela like she might have an answer he didn’t.

Lewis tried to nod, tried to take a steady breath, but each inhale was sharp, shallow, tearing. His vision swam. The world was simultaneously spinning and frozen. He thought, briefly, about collapsing, about not being able to stand again.

Every instinct screamed: This is life-threatening. This is it. Do something, Lewis. You can’t die.

Yet, through it all, a small, unreasonable thought clung to him: Why does it feel like my whole body is trying to tell me something I’ve never known before?

Medics were suddenly everywhere.

“Get him down. Now. Shirt up. ECG leads on,” one of them ordered, already kneeling in front of him. Hands were on him before he could process it, lifting the red Ferrari shirt over his head, cool air hitting his sweat-soaked skin as adhesive pads were pressed rapidly across his chest.

Lewis’s breathing turned frantic. He couldn’t keep up with it. “Something’s wrong. Something’s really fucking wrong,” he repeated, voice breaking, eyes darting between faces he couldn’t quite focus on.

“Chest pain confirmed. Monitor’s coming up,” another medic said. “BP cuff. Oxygen.”

Angela stayed close, one hand steady on his shoulder, the other gripping his hand. “I’m here. You’re okay. Just breathe with me,” she said softly, firmly, a tether in the noise.

Charles hovered just behind them, pale, jaw tight, watching like he was waiting for someone to say the words none of them wanted to hear.

The monitor beeped to life beside him. A medic leaned in close to read it. “Sinus rhythm. Heart rate elevated. Check again. Full read.”

Lewis’s stomach twisted violently. A wave of nausea crashed over him so hard he gagged, folding forward before anyone could stop him. He threw up onto the floor, body convulsing with it, breath hitching painfully in his chest.

“Airway clear. Get him upright slightly. Oxygen on,” a medic snapped, fitting the mask over his face.

He sucked in air through it like he’d been drowning. It didn’t help. Nothing helped. The grief, the pain, the panic, it was all still there, pressing in from every angle. His chest ached like something inside it was breaking apart.

“I can’t—” he rasped, clawing at Angela’s hand. “My chest—fuck—”

“We’ve got you,” she said, voice low, steady. “Stay with me.”

“ECG clear,” another medic called out. “No ST elevation. No signs of ischemia. Repeat reading.”

Lewis shook his head weakly, eyes wild. “No, no, something’s wrong. I can feel it. I can feel it.”

His vision blurred again, ears ringing louder, the world narrowing into the sound of his own ragged breathing. The pain in his chest didn’t ease. It spread, radiated, mixed with something heavier, something that felt like loss so sharp it made him want to scream.

He gagged again, still unable to stop it. He threw up a second time, body shaking violently with the force of it.

“BP high but stable. Pulse elevated. Oxygen saturation good,” a medic reported, confused urgency in his voice. “He’s presenting cardiac but readings are clean.”

Lewis slumped back slightly, trembling, sweat dripping down his temples, tears still spilling freely. He didn’t even know why he was crying. He just knew he couldn’t stop.

“Lewis, eyes on me,” Angela murmured, thumb pressing firmly into his hand. “You’re safe. You’re here. Breathe with me.”

“I’m having a heart attack,” he whispered hoarsely, like he needed someone to confirm it. Like saying it out loud might make it make sense.

But nobody said yes. They kept checking. Kept reading the monitors. Kept moving around him with controlled, clinical urgency.

Lewis lay there, half upright on the chair, chest exposed to the cool air, oxygen mask fogging with each frantic breath, absolutely convinced he was dying while every machine around him insisted he wasn’t.

The afternoon sun spilled across the paddock, warm and bright, but Lewis didn’t feel it. He sat slumped in the driver’s room, Ferrari shirt damp from earlier, chest still tight even hours after the medics had cleared him. Angela was perched on the edge of the couch, calm but watchful.

“I don’t… I don’t understand,” Lewis said, voice low, hoarse from earlier. He rubbed his face, tried to blink some of the lingering dizziness away. “All the readings were fine. Blood pressure okay. Heart rate okay. Everything… and yet—” He shook his head, frustration threading through exhaustion. “I felt it. Everything. Something’s wrong, Angela. I know it.”

Angela didn’t answer immediately. She kept her eyes on him, steady, patient. “Lewis… you’re exhausted. You’ve been under pressure. The first race, the move, the new team…”

“I’m not just tired,” he cut in sharply, almost bitter. “I know my body. I know what’s normal. That wasn’t normal. That wasn’t me.” His hands trembled slightly as he clasped them together in his lap. “I need a second opinion. Someone outside of all this—outside the team, the medics—someone who can tell me if there’s actually something wrong.”

Angela let out a slow breath, leaning back and running a hand through her hair. “We’ll do that,” she said carefully. “After this weekend is over, okay? You finish the race, the media stuff, everything. Then I promise. We’ll find someone, you’ll get checked. Thoroughly.”

He stared at her, hands still shaking. “Promise?”

“I promise,” she said. Firm and certain, the way she always had been. “But right now… you need to rest. You need to get through this weekend.”

Lewis let out a shaky laugh that was half disbelief, half resignation. “Rest. Right. Like I can just rest after… that.” He gestured vaguely toward the lingering shadows of panic in his chest, the tight ache that wouldn’t leave.

“You can,” Angela said softly. “I’ll sit with you. I’ll stay here. You’re not alone. Not now, not ever.”

He sank back into the chair, eyelids heavy. The earlier grief and raw panic, the tidal wave that had pulled him under, felt like it was still there just at the edges. But with Angela close, hand resting lightly on his arm, the pain softened.

Before he could sink fully into the quiet, the door clicked open and Ella slipped inside, phone in hand, her expression a careful mix of concern and business.

“Hey,” she said softly, lowering her voice so the room didn’t feel smaller than it already did. “The team’s released a statement.” She held the phone up just enough for him to read.

Lewis’s eyes flicked from the statement to her. “…Videos are circulating, right?” he murmured, voice tight.

Ella nodded. “Yeah. A few clips from the fan stage. Nothing graphic, but… people are talking. Fans are worried, social media’s buzzing. The team wanted a clear statement out fast.”

He exhaled, a slow, shuddering release, letting his head fall back against the chair. “For fucksake,” he muttered. “Of course it’s everywhere already.”

Angela reached over, fingers brushing his arm. “Ignore it for now. You rest. That’s what matters.”

The heaviness loosened slightly. Enough that sleep crept in, quiet and insistent. And with it, the pain and grief that had no name faded, just for now, dissolving into the quiet warmth of the driver’s room, the comfort of the hand on his arm, and the promise that someone would listen after the weekend was over.

The break up was far worse than you could’ve imagined. You thought because it had slowly been dying for months that when it ended, it wouldn’t have felt as bad. Oh, how wrong you were.

The night he left, you cried yourself to sleep. The pain felt like it was clawing its way out of your body, scraping your insides clean. You’d never felt anything like it.

Yes, you knew it had to end. You both did. But the grief sat low in your stomach like an inextinguishable fire. It burned up into your chest until the ache felt physical, like something pressing from the inside out. He was everywhere. The mugs in the kitchen. The rug you’d picked together for your bedroom. His toothbrush still sat in the bathroom, angled just slightly toward yours, like it had always been.

You didn’t sleep properly all weekend. You drifted in and out of shallow exhaustion, waking with your heart already racing, breath tight in your chest like you’d been running. Every morning began with the same sick lurch in your stomach, the same split second where you forgot, and then remembered all over again.

You couldn’t eat. Food felt wrong, foreign, like your body had decided it didn’t need it anymore. You tried toast on Saturday morning and gagged after two bites, throat closing around it like rejection. By Sunday you stopped trying. Your hands shook constantly, fingers buzzing with nervous energy that had nowhere to go.

Sometimes the panic came out of nowhere.

You’d be standing in the shower and suddenly your chest would tighten, breath hitching painfully as tears spilled before you even understood why. Your ribs ached from shallow breathing. Your heart hammered so hard it felt bruising, like it might burst straight through your sternum. You pressed your palm there instinctively.

Other times there was nothing. No tears. No thoughts. Just numbness so complete it scared you more than the sobbing. You’d sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the wall, mind blank, body heavy, like someone had turned you down to half-volume. Then it would hit again.

Sobbing so sudden and violent it folded you in on yourself. Sounds ripped out of you that didn’t feel like yours. You cried until your face ached, until your throat burned raw, until your stomach cramped painfully… and still it didn’t stop. It felt endless, cyclical, like grief had found a rhythm and your body was trapped inside it.

You kept thinking: This doesn’t feel normal. You’d expected the sadness, the pain, but this panic?

Breakups hurt. You knew that. You’d been through heartbreak before. But this felt different. Like something essential had been torn out of you, leaving your nerves exposed. It didn’t feel like missing someone, it felt like withdrawal. Like your body was panicking at the absence of something it needed to survive.

The thought terrified you. Had you made a mistake?

The question crept in late Saturday night, quiet but insistent. You replayed every conversation, every reason you’d both agreed it couldn’t go on. All the things that hadn’t worked. All the ways you’d tried. Still, the doubt dug in deep and cruel. What if you were wrong? What if this pain meant you should’ve fought harder?

You wondered if there was something wrong with you. If maybe you were anxiously attached. If maybe this was just your nervous system spiralling because it couldn’t stand being alone. The thought made you feel ashamed, small. Like your suffering wasn’t valid, just a flaw.

But even that explanation didn’t fit. Because anxiety didn’t explain why your chest physically hurt. Why your limbs felt weak and heavy. Why grief bloomed in your body without warning, knocking the air from your lungs. Why it felt, genuinely, like you were dying without him.

You spent most of Sunday curled up in bed, phone face down on the nightstand, afraid to touch it and afraid not to. Every sound startled you. Every quiet moment felt too loud. Your body existed in a constant state of alert, waiting for something or someone, who never came.

By Sunday night, exhaustion settled deep into your bones. You cried one last time, softer now, tears slipping quietly down your temples as your body finally gave in. Sleep took you not gently, but out of sheer necessity. When you slept, the pain eased. Even if it was only for a couple of hours.

Lewis managed to drive the car in Melbourne despite feeling like someone was slicing through his chest the whole time. The exertion didn’t help. If anything, it made it worse. The race barely distracted him — adrenaline spiked and fell in waves, and every time it dipped, the pain and panic rushed straight back in.

Sometimes it peaked so sharply he had to pull over after sessions, ripping off his helmet with shaking hands, breath coming fast and shallow as if he’d just surfaced from deep water. Once, between FP3 and qualifying, he ended up back with the medics, hunched forward on a folding chair, knuckles white where he clutched Angela’s sleeve.

They ran the same checks. Again. And again.

Clear. Stable. Elevated heart rate, sure — but nothing that explained the way his chest burned or the way grief seemed to claw up his throat without warning. He tried to give the press something neat. Something physical. Something explainable.

“A bit of a chest infection, maybe,” he said with a shrug that didn’t quite land for the cameras. “Been feeling run down. Probably just the travel, change of climate. Nothing major.”

It made sense on paper. Tight chest. Fatigue. Shortness of breath. A cough he half-faked into his fist to sell it. Something viral. Temporary. Treatable. Anything but this. But the spikes kept coming.

On Saturday morning, lying awake in his hotel room, the grief and pain in his chest hit so hard it knocked the breath out of him. No trigger, again. Just an overwhelming sense of loss so sharp it felt like something had been ripped clean out of his chest. His eyes burned. His throat closed. He stared at the ceiling, jaw clenched, forcing himself not to cry, forcing himself to breathe through the ache until it dulled into something bearable. Eventually after an hour or so, it did.

This is not normal, he kept thinking. This is not me.

Anthony noticed before Lewis could properly hide it. “You alright, son?” he asked quietly after qualifying, eyes sharp with concern as Lewis tugged his cap lower, shoulders tense.

“Yeah,” Lewis lied instantly. “Just tired. New car, new everything. Takes it out of you.”

Anthony didn’t push. He never did. But his gaze lingered, unsettled, like he was filing it away for later.

Fred noticed too. The clipped conversations. The way Lewis went pale after climbing out of the car. The uncharacteristic silence in debriefs, his answers shorter, less assured. He’d known Lewis a long time, and he could see that Lewis was off. Charles hovered like he didn’t quite know what to do with his worry. He stayed close. Checked in constantly. Passed Lewis water bottles he didn’t ask for. Walked with him through the paddock instead of leaving him to the swarm of cameras.

“You sure you are okay? The doctor’s said you are okay to race?” Charles asked softly more than once, brow furrowed in that way that meant he wasn’t convinced.

Lewis smiled through it. “Yeah. Promise. Just… body being dramatic.”

But inside, he was spiralling. Sunday didn’t go how he’d hoped. The car felt off the entire time. Balance, grip, something not quite clicking. It was all new, he should’ve expected it, he guessed. But Lewis couldn’t tell where the car ended and he began. Every lap felt heavier than it should have. Every corner demanded more focus than usual. His chest ached relentlessly, a dull burn that flared into something sharper whenever the sadness surged again, unexpected and suffocating.

By the end of the race, P10 stared back at him from the timing screens.

Not what he wanted. Not even close. He sat in the car for a moment too long after the chequered flag, helmet still on, chest rising and falling unevenly. The noise of the crowd washed over him, distant and muffled. He should’ve been disappointed about the result. About the points. About the weekend. Instead, all he could think was: What if it’s me?

What if his body — the thing he’d trained, disciplined, perfected for decades — was betraying him? What if he’d pushed himself past his limit? What if he’d had some sort of underlying cardiac issue that he’d trained through for years?

By the time he got back to the paddock, the sadness hit again. Harder this time. A crushing weight in his chest that made his eyes sting and his throat tighten. He pressed a hand there, fingers digging in as if he could physically hold himself together.

Why does my chest hurt like this? Why do I keep feeling like I’m dying? Why do I feel so fucking sad?

It didn’t make sense. None of it did. By Sunday night, Lewis was done rationalising. Done minimising. Done pretending it was just travel, or pressure, or a chest infection he didn’t even fucking have.

“I need more doctors,” he said flatly to Angela, pacing the hotel room like a caged animal. “Second opinions. Third. I don’t care. This isn’t normal and I’m not ignoring it. I know my body Angela, I know my brain. My body is telling me something is wrong, so something is. It must be.”

She watched him, concerned but steady. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll do that. We’ll get second opinions in China, call some people…we’ll figure this out, Lewis.”

Because something was wrong. Deeply wrong. He was sure of it.

Four days wasn’t enough time.

Four days between Melbourne and China, between panic and the expectation that he’d somehow be fine again. Lewis flew with a knot permanently lodged in his chest, every spike of turbulence making his heart jump for the wrong reasons. He barely slept. Every time he closed his eyes, that grief rose again — sharp, sudden, inexplicable — like his body was remembering something his mind refused to acknowledge.

By the time they landed, he was already exhausted. The hospital smelled clean and impersonal. Angela stayed close, calm as ever, eyes tracking him like she was waiting for the next wave to hit.

The cardiologist was first. They ran everything. ECG. Echocardiogram. Bloods. Stress tests that pushed his heart hard enough to remind him why he was here in the first place. Lewis lay still while probes pressed into his ribs, while screens flickered with lines and numbers that meant nothing to him but everything to the people reading them.

The doctor frowned. Adjusted settings. Ran it again.

“Your heart looks strong,” he said eventually. “No structural issues. No arrhythmias. No evidence of ischemia.”

Lewis stared at him in disbelief. “That’s not possible.”

The doctor smiled gently, the way people did when they thought reassurance was helpful. “I understand how frightening your symptoms must feel. But from everything we can see, your cardiovascular system is in excellent condition.”

Excellent. Lewis laughed once, sharp and humuorless. “It doesn’t feel excellent.”

They sent him upstairs for neurology. MRIs. Reflex tests. Cognitive checks. Cold instruments and colder explanations. He answered questions automatically, irritation simmering just beneath the surface. His head was fine. He knew his head was fine. This wasn’t dizziness or confusion, this was pain.

The neurologist flipped through scans, nodding slowly. “No abnormalities. No signs of seizures, lesions, or neurological dysfunction.”

“So what?” Lewis snapped. “You’re saying this is just… what? Stress?”

“I’m saying your nervous system may have experienced an acute event,” the doctor replied carefully. “A dysregulated stress response.”

Angela shifted beside him. Lewis felt heat flare in his chest, sharp and sudden. A wave hit him before he could argue. His hands started to shake. Pins and needles raced up his arms. His breath shortened, chest tightening painfully as that familiar grief surged out of nowhere, hot and suffocating. His vision blurred at the edges. He shook his head, praying and willing for it to go away. It didn’t work. The pain seared through his chest, hit his lower stomach, he gagged instantly as his own panic escalated.

“Lewis,” Angela said quietly, already moving closer. “Sit down.”

“I’m fine,” he insisted through clenched teeth, even as his knees threatened to buckle. He sank into the chair anyway, one hand gripping the armrest.

The doctor watched, concerned but clinical. “This is similar to what you experienced in Melbourne?”

Lewis couldn’t answer. His throat closed. Tears burned behind his eyes, unwelcome and humiliating.

“It hurts,” he managed finally, voice low and furious. “My fucking chest hurts.”

They gave him water. Slowed his breathing. Waited for the wave to pass. It did. Eventually. Like it always did. Leaving him wrung out and shaking, fury replacing fear almost instantly.

The psych consult came last. Lewis crossed his arms before the psychiatrist even spoke.

“I’m not anxious,” he said flatly. “And I’m not depressed.”

The psychiatrist nodded, unfazed. “I’m not here to label you. I’m here to understand.”

Lewis laughed again, sharp and defensive. “Understand what? That my body keeps doing this for no reason? I have a therapist! I journal, I meditate, I know my emotions like the back of my fucking hand and it’s taken me a long time to get here–”

Angela stopped him with a hand on his forearm. He stared at it for a second before taking a shaky breath and meeting the psychiatrist's eyes again. He nodded for him to continue with this bullshit assessment, he wanted it to be over.

The questions were invasive. How had he been sleeping? Eating? Had there been any recent emotional stressors? Major life changes?

Yes. Everything. And still, that didn’t explain the physicality of it. The pain. The grief. The fact he’s certain there’s something wrong with his heart, his lungs. Something.

“This doesn’t feel psychological,” Lewis said, jaw tight. “It feels like something is wrong. Physically wrong.”

Lewis felt like he was repeating himself into a void. The psychiatrist didn’t argue. That almost made it worse. By the end of the day, the verdict was the same across the board. Nothing. No diagnosis. No cause. No answers.

Lewis stood in the hallway outside the last consultation room, hands on his hips, chest rising fast as anger burned through him hotter than the fear ever had.

“This is bullshit,” he said, voice shaking. “You’re telling me there’s nothing wrong while I feel like I’m dying.”

Angela met his gaze steadily. “I’m telling you they haven’t found anything yet.”

“Yet,” he repeated bitterly. “Because something IS wrong. I know my fucking body, man.”

He stormed out towards the waiting car before Angela could respond. That was what terrified him the most, though. His body, the thing he’d trusted more than anything, had never lied to him before. Why was it lying now?

Eventually, day by day, the heartbreak did lessen.

There was no morning where you woke up and felt brand new. It simply thinned at the edges, like fog slowly lifting from a field, leaving shapes clearer than they had been the day before.

You returned to work properly that week. The first full day felt like moving underwater. You answered emails you didn’t remember opening, nodded through meetings that blurred together, and accepted sympathetic smiles from colleagues who spoke to you in softened tones. You hated that tone.

But routine is persistent. It does not care about heartbreak. It wraps around you and pulls you forward anyway. By Wednesday, you found yourself laughing in the break room at something mundane, something unremarkable, and only later did you realise that nearly an hour had passed without you thinking about him at all.

The relief of that realisation was sharp. The guilt that followed was sharper. You went home and cried that night, not because you missed him in that moment, but because you hadn’t.

Your friends rotated sleepovers like a quiet protective detail. They brought takeaway and wine and the kind of brutal reassurance that only people who love you can offer without cruelty. They told you that you deserved better, that timing is cruel, that sometimes love fractures under pressure no matter how tightly you try to hold it together. You nodded through most of it, absorbing their certainty even when you didn’t fully believe it.

They packed his things into boxes while you stood in the kitchen pretending to reorganise drawers that didn't need reorganising. You listened to the sound of hangers sliding from the wardrobe rail and felt each soft thud land somewhere inside your chest. When they were done, the apartment looked different, rearranged in a way that made it clear something had been removed.

After they left, you began moving things yourself. You shifted the bed to the opposite wall so it no longer faced the door the way it used to when you would wait for him to come home. You rotated the sofa so it didn’t sit in the space where his legs would stretch across the cushions. You changed the bedsheets to ones he had never touched and lit candles that didn’t smell like him. You tried to make the space feel like yours again.

Some nights you were almost okay. You could sit with the quiet without it pressing down on you. You could make dinner without imagining him walking in midway through. Other nights, the spirals came without warning. You would sit on the edge of the bed, phone in hand, thumb hovering over his contact, and your thoughts would turn vicious.

What if you overreacted? What if you never found safety and stability like that again? What if that was it, the love of your life, and you let it slip through your fingers because you were scared it wasn't enough?

You never called. You always locked the screen and set the phone face down, as though distance could be enforced by force of will.

By Wednesday, the ache felt manageable. It was still there, but it no longer knocked the air from your lungs. It had settled into something you could carry without doubling over. That morning, you woke and realised you hadn’t dreamt about him. The absence startled you more than the dreams ever had.

You made coffee and opened the windows. The air that moved through the apartment felt lighter, cleaner, as if something stale had finally been cleared out. You stood in the kitchen with the mug warming your hands and allowed yourself, cautiously, to think that you might actually be okay.

Then, the panic arrived without warning. It dropped into your chest like a weight, heavy and electric, as though someone had reached inside you and flipped a switch. Your breath stuttered mid-inhale. The edges of your vision blurred slightly, not enough to black out, but enough to make the world feel narrower. Your heart began racing so quickly that the rhythm felt wrong, uneven and violent.

You gripped the kitchen counter to steady yourself. This was not grief. You weren't thinking about him. You weren't replaying the breakup. There had been no triggering memory, no intrusive thought. You'd been standing in your kitchen, perfectly neutral, moments away from taking a sip of coffee.

And yet dread flooded you, raw and visceral. It felt specific, focused, as though something terrible had just been confirmed. Your chest tightened sharply behind your sternum, a slicing sensation that made you instinctively press your palm there. Your hands trembled. Beneath the panic was confusion, thick and disorienting, like waking in a room you didn't recognise.

You told yourself it was anxiety. Delayed stress. Hormones. Burnout. Anything that felt plausible. But it didn’t feel like your anxiety. It felt displaced, unanchored from your own thoughts.

Then, just as abruptly as it had arrived, it receded. There was no gradual calming, no steadying breath that brought relief. It simply vanished, leaving you standing in sunlight as though nothing had happened. You exhaled slowly, unsettled.

It happened again that afternoon. This time it wasn’t panic. It was frustration, intense enough to make your jaw clench. You were answering emails when it rose inside you, sudden and hot, as though you had been arguing for hours and no one was listening. Your chest burned with it. Your head felt tight. It was the kind of anger born from helplessness, from demanding answers and receiving none.

You stared at your laptop screen in confusion. Nothing in your inbox warranted that reaction. The feeling surged, peaked, and then drained away just as quickly, leaving you disoriented in its absence.

That night, you opened the Notes app on your phone and began recording the times.

Wednesday 10:17am — random panic. No trigger. 2:42pm — intense anger/frustration. No trigger.

You stared at the words for a long time.

Over the next few days, it continued. Waves of fear that made your stomach drop as though something catastrophic had just occurred. Confusion so thick you had to sit down and close your eyes. A dread that felt anticipatory, as though bracing for news you didn't want to hear.

One evening, you were sitting on the sofa, half-watching something forgettable on television. You had even caught yourself smiling. The apartment felt peaceful in a way it hadn’t all week.

Then terror flooded you so violently that you doubled forward before you could process it. It was sharper than anything you had felt before, panicked and spiralling and frantic. Your chest constricted as if someone were squeezing your lungs in a fist. Your heart pounded hard enough to hurt. Beneath the fear was something worse, something suffocating and relentless: the conviction that something was deeply, catastrophically wrong.

Not with your life. Not with your apartment. Not with your breakup. With your body. It felt like standing on the edge of an answer you couldn't reach, like staring at test results you didn’t understand, like demanding clarity and being met with silence. There was anger threaded through the fear, frustration so acute it made your head spin.

You gasped for air. You weren’t thinking catastrophic thoughts. And yet the fear felt specific, directional, as though it belonged to someone in a brightly lit room asking why this was happening and why no one could explain it.

It lasted nearly thirty minutes. Then it drained away. You remained curled forward long after it passed, breathing carefully until your heart steadied. The television continued to flicker. The room looked unchanged. Nothing in your physical world had shifted. But something in your understanding had. You reached for your journal with hands that still trembled slightly and stared at the blank page for a long time before writing:

These don’t feel like mine.

The episodes ease over the week, but they don’t disappear.

By the time Lewis settles in China, the agony that flattened him in Melbourne has retreated into something less definable. The sharp, incapacitating pain has dulled into intermittent tightness. The dizziness no longer steals his vision. He hasn’t needed medical between sessions.

Objectively, it looks like improvement. Subjectively, it feels like waiting.

He notices it most in the quiet moments. When he wakes in the hotel before dawn and lies still, monitoring his breathing. When he’s seated in the back of the car en route to the circuit and his chest tightens faintly, not enough to alarm anyone but enough for him to register it. Enough for him to wonder whether it’s beginning again. He’s starting to think the anxiety that another episode could hit him is worse than experiencing an episode itself.

His body has always been predictable. That has been the foundation of everything he's ever known. Discipline, optimisation, control. He knows how dehydration feels before the data shows it. He knows the difference between adrenaline and anxiety, fatigue and weakness. He’s built an entire career on listening closely. This feels like static in his system.

On Thursday afternoon he sits in the motorhome, one elbow resting on his knee, fingers pressed lightly against his heart, checking for a change in his pulse that isn’t there.

Angela watches him in the quiet way she does when she’s concerned but trying not to crowd him.

“You saw it,” he says finally, without looking up.

“I did.”

“In Melbourne.”

“I know.”

He shakes his head slowly. The memory still sits close to the surface. The fan stage, the sudden narrowing of the world, the way pain had bloomed hot and violent through his chest.

“I was in agony,” he says. “That wasn’t discomfort. That wasn’t nerves.”

“No,” she agrees.

“I couldn’t breathe properly. It felt like something was tearing through me.” He exhales through his nose. “And now they’re telling me I’m fine.”

“They’re telling you they can’t find anything.”

“That’s worse.”

He stands and begins pacing, slow, contained steps across the carpet. The physios have cleared him. The cardiologist found nothing structurally wrong. Bloodwork is clean. Neurology unconcerned. Even the second psych consultant had been neutral, asking gentle questions about stress, transitions, pressure.

Pressure. As though he was new to it.

“I need more tests after this weekend,” he says. “More opinions. I don’t care how many. I ned to figure this out.”

“We’ll get them,” Angela replies calmly. “But right now, you’re safe to race.”

Safe. He nods, but the word doesn’t settle any of the fear in his chest.

That night, in the hotel room overlooking a skyline lit in sterile white, he opens his journal. The leather cover is worn at the edges. Most entries are structured. Gratitude lists, race reflections, affirmations he has written so many times they feel carved into his muscle memory.

Tonight the handwriting is less controlled.

20.3.25 It’s not as constant. But it’s still there. That’s what’s fucking with me. How does something hit that hard and then just quiet down? That doesn’t make sense. That’s not how anything works. If it was my heart, they’d see it. If it was neurological, there’d be something on the scans. Stress doesn’t feel like that. I’ve been stressed before. I’ve had pressure my whole career. That wasn’t pressure. That was my body shutting down. I know my body better than anyone. I’ve built everything on that. You don’t get to this level without knowing every signal, every shift. Melbourne wasn’t in my head. I wasn’t imagining that. I was on a stage in front of thousands of people thinking I might actually die. Now I’m supposed to just accept “we can’t find anything”? Nah. Something happened. I don’t care how much better I feel this weekend, that doesn’t erase it. Win the weekend. Control what I can. Then I’m finding answers.

Friday shifts something. The car feels different here. More compliant, less temperamental. In sprint qualifying, as he pushes through the final sector, there’s a clarity he hasn’t felt in a car in a long time. The corners arrive and he meets them instinctively, no hesitation, no second-guessing his physical response.

When he crosses the line and hears Adami’s joyous voice, confirming pole for the Sprint, something uncoils in his chest.

He laughs. It surprises him, that sound. After a week of hell.

Back in the garage, red floods his vision. Mechanics clap his shoulders. Charles pulls him briefly into an embrace, grinning in the effortless way of his. Fred’s approval is contained into a smile and a nod, but it’s there.

For the first time since Australia, Lewis feels uncomplicated. When he takes the chequered flag and hears P1, he exhales in a way that feels almost like relief. His dad embraces him, laughing, pride written openly across his face.

Lewis raises a hand and waves at the fans, smiling wide enough that his cheeks ache. The heaviness that has stalked him all week feels distant, muted beneath adrenaline and validation and the simple, grounding fact of performance. His body feels steady.

Lewis goes to bed, and for the first time in over a week, does not brace for pain before he falls asleep.

Sunday unravels it quietly. The race itself is a grind — measured, strategic. Not the fairy-tale continuation of the sprint, but solid. He extracts what he can. Crosses the line having fought for every inch.

Then comes the summons. It arrives as these things always do: procedural, clinical. Post-race scrutineering. He’s still in his suit when the message filters through that there’s an issue. He doesn’t react at first. Technical checks are routine. Margins are tight in Formula One.

But margins can be cruel. One of the skid blocks is below the required thickness. Millimetres. A detail invisible to the naked eye, now towering over everything. He stands in the back of the garage as the confirmation settles. Disqualified from the Chinese Grand Prix. The atmosphere changes without noise. Conversations quiet. Movements slow. Engineers stare at laptops as though the data might rearrange itself under scrutiny.

Lewis inhales once, deeply. “Okay,” he says evenly.

He changes out of his suit slowly. The adrenaline drains from his limbs, leaving them heavy. Yesterday echoes faintly in his mind, the weight of the little trophy, the surge of belief. Stripped so quickly.

By the time he reaches the motorhome, the emotional drop has settled into something almost physical. Not sharp pain this time. No blinding episode. Just a dense heaviness spreading through his chest. Angela finds him sitting alone, elbows resting on his knees, gaze fixed somewhere indistinct on the floor.

“That’s racing,” she says gently.

He nods, but the gesture feels automatic.

“It’s always something,” he murmurs.

“You drove well.”

“Doesn’t change the result.”

He leans back, staring at the ceiling. The earlier lightness feels distant now, like it belonged to a different version of the weekend.

The episodes haven’t returned in their Melbourne form. There’s no acute agony, no collapse into a medical emergency again. But beneath the disappointment, beneath the professionalism and composure, there’s still that underlying thread.

Confusion. A flicker of fear he can’t rationalise. His body is functioning. The doctors are satisfied. The pain is less frequent. So why does it still feel like he’s waiting for something to go wrong?

Why, in the quiet after the disqualification, does the sadness feel deeper than it should? Not about the points. Not about the result. Something else. Something he still can’t name.

He texted you Saturday morning.

Can I come by around four to grab the rest of my stuff?

You stared at the message longer than necessary, thumb hovering over the keyboard as if the right phrasing might make this feel less final.

Yeah. That’s fine.

The pain wasn’t dramatic anymore. Not like that first night. You hadn’t cried in two days. You’d slept almost normally. You’d even managed breakfast, half a bagel and a coffee that didn’t turn your stomach.

But the thought of him standing in your hallway again settled into you like damp air. All day there’s a low ache. A heavy, dull reminder humming in your chest. You stack his books. Coil his chargers. Place whatever the girls missed into boxes with a precision that borders on ritual. It feels important to do this right. By three thirty your stomach is tight again. You tell yourself it’s normal. He’s coming over. Of course you’re anxious. Your chest feels bruised.

At four on the dot, he knocks. You open the door and there he is. Gorgeous and familiar and wrong at the same time. He looks tired. Softer around the eyes. Like he hasn’t been sleeping well either.

“Hey,” he says gently.

“Hey.”

The apartment feels smaller with him inside it. You hand him the first box and your fingers brush his. You can see the physical grimace on his face, like simply being this close to you is painful torture for him

Then, it’s like someone flips a switch behind your ribs. Warmth floods your chest so fast it almost makes you dizzy. Not relief. Not numbness. Joy. Pure, effervescent, ridiculous joy.

Your stomach flips, but not in dread. In something bright and fizzy. Your lips twitch upward before you can stop them. You actually have to bite the inside of your cheek to stop yourself from laughing. What the fuck.

He’s mid-sentence about picking up the rest of his kitchen things and you're suddenly glowing. There’s this overwhelming sense of triumph blooming through you. Of victory. Of something achieved. You feel light and giddy. Almost proud.

You hand him the second box with a grin you absolutely cannot justify.

He pauses, blinking at you. “You okay?”

“Yes,” you say, far too brightly.

You sound… delighted. Absolutely over the fucking MOON. Inside, panic sparks. Why am I happy? Not in a bitter way. Not in a good riddance way. This isn’t relief. This is JOY joy.

Your skin feels electric. Your heartbeat is fast but buoyant. You feel like you’ve just won something. Like you should be celebrating. You have to resist the urge to spin on your heel and dance into the kitchen.

He shifts awkwardly, clearly misreading your expression. “You seem… good.”

“I am,” you reply automatically.

You are not. You’re watching yourself from somewhere slightly above your own body, horrified and fascinated. Because underneath the fizzing brightness, your brain is screaming. This makes no sense.

Ten minutes ago you were standing in the bathroom staring at your own reflection. thinking about how relationships can quietly erode until there’s nothing left to save. You’d felt hollow. A little raw. Sad, but steady. Now you’re practically glowing while your ex-boyfriend carries your shared history out the door. He gathers the last of his things. There’s a strange softness in his expression, like he’s trying to read you one final time.

“I hope you’re… okay,” he says.

You smile again. It’s radiant and absolutely unhinged. “I am.”

You close the door behind him. The second the latch clicks into place, the joy doesn’t fade. It expands. It swells into the quiet apartment, filling the corners, curling into your lungs. You press your back against the door and laugh under your breath. You feel positively incredible. Which is terrifying. Because nothing about this moment warrants incredible. Your ex has just left your life. The relationship you grieved for months has officially ended. There should be ache. Emptiness. A quiet sort of mourning like you felt a week ago.

Instead, you feel like you’re standing at the top of something. Like you’ve conquered a mountain you didn’t know you were climbing. You push away from the door and walk into the living room slowly, testing whether the feeling will dissipate with movement. It doesn’t. It follows.

It sits warm in your chest while you tidy the coffee table. It hums through you as you flatten the sofa cushions. You catch your reflection in the TV screen and there’s colour in your cheeks, brightness in your eyes. You look happy. Overwhelmingly gleeful.

“What the fuck is wrong with me?” you whisper to the empty room.

You try to summon the sadness. You try to remember the heaviness from this morning. You can access it intellectually — yes, you’re heartbroken, yes, it ended for a reason — but the emotion itself feels muted under the rush of something celebratory.

You check your phone. No messages. No news. Nothing that explains this chemical shift. Still, the joy lingers.

You wake up still warm. It’s the first thing you notice. It lingers softly under your skin like sunlight that never quite cooled overnight. You stretch beneath your duvet and for a moment you almost forget that anything ended at all. Your chest feels open and light. You make coffee. You water the plants. You move slowly around the apartment, aware of the absence but not bleeding from it anymore.

It’s strange, but it’s manageable. Around late morning, though, something shifts.

It’s subtle at first. The warmth dims slightly, like a cloud drifting across the sun. The buoyancy that carried you yesterday begins to level out. Your heartbeat slows. Your shoulders relax. The joy doesn’t crash; it dissolves.

By midday, you feel neutral. Clear-headed and grounded. You sit at your kitchen table with your laptop open. The ache of the breakup feels distant again. Not gone, but compartmentalised. You can touch it without it overwhelming you.

You assume this is what healing feels like. Up and down. Waves and stillness. You even allow yourself a small, tentative thought: maybe you’re going to be okay.

The feeling lasts a few hours. Then, without warning, something drops inside your chest. It’s not the sharp grief from the first night. Not the anxious dread from earlier in the week. This is heavier. It hits low and sudden.

Your breath hitches. You press your hand to your stomach instinctively as if you’ve been winded. There’s no thought preceding it. No memory triggered. No spiral you can trace backwards. It’s pure impact. Your stomach twists hard enough to make you lean forward in your chair. Heat rushes to your face, then drains just as quickly, leaving you cold.

“What—” you whisper, blinking rapidly.

Confusion floods first. Then disappointment. Thick. Crushing. Out of proportion to anything currently happening in your life. It feels like something has been taken from you. Something you’d just touched. Something you’d earned.

Your throat tightens unexpectedly. Tears prick at your eyes, not from heartbreak this time but from something closer to humiliation. Like being told you’d won something, only to have it snatched away in the same breath. You stand abruptly, pacing your kitchen without knowing why. The apartment feels too small again. Too close. Your mind scrambles for a reason.

Did he text? Did something happen? Did you miss something?

You check your phone. Nothing. The dread deepens.

It’s layered now, disappointment tangled with anger. Frustration that burns under your skin. A sense of injustice, of unfairness so sharp it makes you grit your teeth. Your heart pounds harder. You feel like you want to argue with someone. Defend something. Fight for something that’s already been decided. But there’s no one here. No argument. No event.

Your knees weaken slightly and you sit back down, pressing your palms flat against the cool wood of the table. The sadness that follows is profound. It rolls in heavy and suffocating, different from breakup grief. This doesn’t feel personal. It feels systemic. Bigger than you. Like watching something crumble that mattered deeply, even if you can’t name what it is.

Your eyes fill and this time the tears spill freely. You don’t know why you’re crying. You just know your chest feels like it’s collapsing inward.

“This doesn’t make sense,” you murmur, shaking your head.

Because yesterday you were glowing while handing your ex his belongings. This morning you were calm, almost hopeful. Now you feel like you’ve just lost something monumental.

A strange phrase floats through your mind — it’s not even my fault — and you don’t even know what you’re referring to.

You stay like that for a long time. Sitting and breathing shallowly. Eventually the intensity softens, but it doesn’t disappear. It lingers like ash after something has burned.

By evening, you're drained in a way that feels borrowed. You lie in bed staring at the ceiling, one hand resting over your heart, unsettled by how deeply the ache had cut. Because it hadn’t felt like remembering, it felt like witnessing something emotionally that you couldn’t see with your eyes. You reached for your phone, desperate for some answers.

Can breakups cause some sort of temporary bipolar? Happiness then sadness for no reason after breakup? Emotions that don’t make sense after a breakup.

You stopped yourself googling as your thumb hovered over reddit. This was just healing. You were just healing. That must be it.

Lewis has always been hard on himself. That isn’t new. It's part of the architecture that built him. But after Hungary, when the car never quite switches on and strategy slips through their fingers and he crosses the line knowing he extracted everything he had and it still wasn’t enough, something in him caves inward.

He stands in parc fermé, helmet still on, staring at the ground. The interviews blur together. The words leave his mouth before he filters them.

“Useless,” he says quietly, shaking his head. “I-I'm just useless.”

It isn’t theatrical. It isn’t bait for headlines. It's frustration he’s felt deep in his bones for months now. Back in the garage, he sits alone for a long time. Sweat cooling on his skin. Jaw tight. Eyes distant. He knows the car isn’t perfect. He knows development is ongoing. But the voice in his head is merciless.

You’re slipping. You’re not sharp enough. You’ve lost something.

That night in the hotel, the feeling spikes. Not the sharp chest agony from Melbourne. This is different. Heavy. Self-directed in a way he normally manages to fight against. No amount of mediation, of journaling, of talking to his therapist would have stopped the low, corrosive shame that crawls under his skin.

He presses his palms into his eyes, exhales slowly, tries to reason with himself. But the thought repeats anyway.

Useless. Useless. Useless. Useless. Useless.

Across the world, you’re folding laundry on your sofa. You’d had a good day. A genuinely good one. You’d laughed at work. You’d gone for a run and felt strong. The breakup feels months behind you now. A scar, not an open wound. You’d found ways to reinvent yourself that didn’t involve him, had started to shift into a reality where he wasn’t at the centre.

Then, mid-fold, something sinks into your chest. It’s not sadness about your ex. It’s sharper. The most violent self-disgust you’d felt in years. You freeze, staring at the towel in your hands.The thought lands in your mind fully formed, venomous and alien:

You’re useless. You’re fucking useless. You don’t deserve anything you have. You’re letting everyone down.

Your stomach drops. You haven’t thought that about yourself in years. You’ve worked hard not to.

“Where the fuck did that come from?” you whisper.

Your heart pounds, not in panic but in humiliation. Like you’ve failed publicly. Like you’ve disappointed thousands. It makes no sense. You sit there on the sofa, suddenly small inside your own skin, trying to trace the emotion back to something you did that day. There's nothing. But the shame lingers for hours.

The crash happens quickly enough that he barely registers the exact moment it’s gone. He doesn't have time to react to the rear stepping out with a violence that feels disproportionate to the input. He corrects on instinct, muscle memory, thousands of hours, but the grip has already disappeared. The wall rushes toward him in a blur of grey and spray.

The impact is controlled. It always is, with him. But the finality of it lands heavier than the hit itself. DNF. For a moment he doesn’t move. His hands remain wrapped around the wheel, visor still down, breath loud in his ears. The engine is dead. Somewhere beyond the cockpit, marshals are already moving.

He knows what the headlines will say before they’re written. He knows what the pundits will dissect. He knows the tone. He hears none of it because all he feels is fury. A tight, white-hot coil buried under his ribs. At the car. At the snap he didn’t catch. At a season that keeps slipping through his fingers in increments too small to fight and too frequent to ignore.

When he climbs out, he removes the steering wheel with more force than necessary. Gravel crunches beneath his boots as he walks away from the car without looking back. In the debrief he’s composed. Analytical and perfectly professional. He speaks about rear instability, about data trends and brake migration. His voice is steady. His posture relaxed.

Inside, however, something is splintering. That night, alone, the anger morphs into something worse. Fear. Not fear of crashing again, he made peace with that risk long ago. Fear that he's deteriorating. He lies back on the hotel bed and replays the moment in obsessive loops. The throttle input. The steering angle. The split-second correction. Could he have saved it? Should he have anticipated the snap sooner?

Is this age? Is this instinct dulling? Is something in me… off?

His chest tightens — not violently, nothing like Melbourne — but persistently. A phantom ache. A reminder of how this season started, and how nothing has been the same since. He presses his palm there, jaw clenched, head pounding. Why does it still feel like something is wrong with me?

You’re standing in the supermarket when it hits. One second you’re comparing two brands of pasta, scanning prices without really thinking. The next your hands start to shake so badly the boxes rattle against each other.

Heat floods your body in a violent rush. Anger so intense it narrows your vision, makes the fluorescent lights above feel too bright and sharp. Your jaw locks. Your heart pounds as if you’ve just narrowly avoided disaster. You want to throw something. You want to scream. But you’re in Aisle Seven, holding dry spaghetti.

“What is happening?” you whisper, breath unsteady.

The anger dissolves as abruptly as it arrived, replaced by dread so suffocating it makes your knees weak. A certainty that something irreversible has just occurred. That something has slipped beyond repair. You abandon your basket and walk out without buying anything.

In your car, you grip the steering wheel and try to breathe through it. You tell yourself this is delayed grief. Hormones. Stress. Trauma responses surfacing late. It doesn’t feel like stress.

It feels like someone else’s disappointment settling into your bones.

October. Mexico. The weekend begins with something dangerously close to hope. The car feels alive beneath Lewis in qualifying, balanced and responsive in a way that has been rare this year. He pushes it, extracts everything, and when he crosses the line and hears P3 on the radio, a small, restrained smile tugs at his mouth.

Podium possible. Momentum possible. For a few hours, the world tilts back toward alignment. The cruel joke that the universe has been playing on him for months feels like it might finally be leaving him alone.

Then, during the race, the penalty comes. He listens carefully over the radio while it’s explained to him, the measured tone of Adami that makes him want to scream at the top of his lungs, and something inside him goes very quiet.

Not rage. Not even visible frustration. He recognises it as a deep, exhausted disbelief. Again? The word echoes louder than anyone’s voice.

He thinks of 2021 before he can stop himself. Abu Dhabi. The safety car. The radio silence that followed. The hollowed-out feeling of injustice that never quite left his bloodstream. Unfairness has a taste now. Metallic and familiar. He answers the media with restraint. Talks about regulations, about moving forward, about focusing on what they can control. His expression is composed, but his eyes are tired in a way that cameras can’t fully capture.

Back in his room, he sits on the edge of the bed and stares at the carpet for a long time. Is it the car? Is it the team? Or is it me?

The question no longer feels theoretical. He presses his palms together and breathes shallowly. Beneath the competitive frustration, beneath the strategic calculations and development meetings, there's something else. A persistent undercurrent of emotion that does not belong neatly to race results.

Fear. Loneliness, maybe. Grief without a reason for it. Confusion as to why he feels like he’s slowly losing his mind. He's seen cardiologists. Neurologists. Sports psychologists. He's repeated scans, bloodwork, stress tests. Angela has sat beside him through episodes, watched his body fold in on itself without visible cause.

Everything comes back the same. You’re healthy. You’re fine. Stress manifests in strange ways. But this doesn’t feel like stress. It feels like interference he can’t run away from.

That same weekend, you’re at your sister’s house. Your niece launches herself at you the second you step through the door, arms tight around your waist. Your nephew tugs at your hand, desperate to show you the drawing he made at school. It’s a chaotic rainbow house with stick figures grinning beneath a sun that takes up half the page.

You crouch down, and the love that hits you is almost overwhelming. Your chest expands so suddenly it nearly hurts. Pride swells through you, a feeling that’s fierce and protective and radiant.

They're perfect, you think, eyes stinging. They're so perfect. You sit cross-legged on the living room floor, helping assemble a puzzle, listening to their chatter, feeling anchored in something uncomplicated and pure after months of fear and confusion.

Later, driving home, the warmth lingers. It feels real. Finally, something that makes sense.

Lewis is lying on his hotel bed when it brushes against him. The warmth. It’s gentle at first, a softening in his chest. A gentle lift that feels entirely out of proportion to his circumstances. He frowns instinctively, staring at the ceiling.

There's no breakthrough. No good news. And yet, for a moment, the dread completely recedes. He feels…proud? Not of himself. Not of racing. Just proud and happy, and an overwhelming sense of love for something or someone completely unnamed.

The sensation hums through him before fading after an hour or so. He’s grateful for the peace, he just has no idea where it’s coming from.

He sits up slowly and grabs his journal with trembling hands.

27.10.25 I think I might be losing my fucking mind.

The months stack on top of each other. This ‘emotional dysregulation’, as Lewis has started to call it, does not stop. No matter what he does. He even tried to get hypnosis. Nothing would stop these feelings, sharp and unbidden, burying themselves deep into his nervous system.

There are days when he wakes up heavy without explanation. Days when panic brushes against him mid-briefing, when anger spikes so fast it makes him grip the edge of the table to steady himself. Nights when sorrow seeps in like fog, unconnected to lap times or strategy calls. Moments he should be miserable where he feels overwhelming happiness. He questions everything.

If the car feels unstable, is it setup or him? If he misses an apex by inches, is it development lag or distraction? If his chest tightens before lights out, is it adrenaline or that thing?

The doubt eats at him in a way nothing ever has before. It isn’t fleeting insecurity or a bad weekend’s frustration. It’s systemic, corrosive, seeping into places he used to consider unshakeable. He’s always been self-assured, anchored in his own ability, in his understanding of himself. That certainty was the foundation of everything. Now it feels cracked. He moves through his days with the unnerving sense that something essential is slipping beyond his control. The quiet, persistent dread that he is losing command of his own body, of his own mind, never truly fades.

He starts watching old onboard laps late at night, searching for proof that he used to be sharper, faster, braver. He tells himself he’s studying data, looking for marginal gains, but really he’s searching for reassurance. He’s searching for evidence that the driver he remembers still exists. He hopes that somewhere in the footage he might pinpoint the exact moment he began to slip.

But his mind keeps circling back to one point in time. Melbourne. The first episode he’s still convinced was some sort of cardiovascular anomaly the doctors don’t understand. The moment something inside him fractured, and nothing has felt entirely his own since.

At night, when the paddock is silent and the performance persona finally drops away, the fear grows teeth so sharp it slices through him.

Long after the noise fades, he sits on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, hands hanging loosely between them.

“I don’t know what I’m doing anymore,” he murmurs to the empty room.

He thinks about 2021 again. About what was taken. About how hard he fought to rebuild himself from that fracture. He thinks about retirement. The word lingers longer than it ever has before.

Maybe my body’s trying to tell me something. Maybe I don’t have it anymore. Maybe I’ve already had my last great drive and didn’t even know it at the time.

His chest tightens sharply, and this time it isn’t anger at the unknown, or anger at never finding an answer to these strange symptoms he can’t seem to shake. It’s grief. Deep and unfiltered and so raw he can do nothing but feel it.

The tears come before he can stop them. He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, shoulders shaking as a quiet, almost embarrassed sob escapes him. He hasn’t cried like this in years. Not like this, not where it feels like something fundamental to his entire being is slipping away. He turns his face to the wall so no one, not even the empty room, can see him break. He feels small in a way he hasn’t felt since he was a boy with something to prove, except now he isn’t sure there’s anything left to prove at all.

For weeks after, it continues. Not every night. But enough that people start to notice him withdrawing. He lies in dark hotel rooms across continents, staring at ceilings he won’t remember, feeling as though something inside him is unraveling thread by thread. He wakes with dried tears on his cheeks, and a misery so strong he feels like it’s becoming all that he is.

Some mornings he sits on the edge of the bed long after his alarm has gone off, unable to summon the version of himself the world expects, wondering how much longer he can keep pretending he isn’t falling apart. Failing himself. Failing everyone that believes in him.

You don’t understand why evenings have become unbearable. Your days are steady now. Work flows. You laugh with friends. The breakup feels like a bruise instead of an open wound. It’s been months now, and you’ve come out the other side.

But when night falls, something shifts. You’ll be brushing your teeth, or folding laundry, or reading in bed when the heaviness descends. Not nostalgia. Not missing him in any tangible way. Despair. It presses down on your chest so suddenly it steals your breath. Tears spill before you even know what you’re crying about.

“I’m okay,” you whisper into the dark, like you're convincing someone else.

The words feel urgent. Necessary. Sometimes you sit up in bed and speak aloud, voice trembling but firm.

“You’re not a failure.” “You’re not done.” “You’re still worthy.” “You’re still strong.”

You don’t know why those specific phrases feel so important, why they seem aimed at something larger than your own life. They just do. You press your hand over your heart and breathe through a sadness that feels too expansive to belong solely to you. Across the world, in another timezone, Lewis turns onto his side, exhausted beyond measure. Neither of you understands. Both of you are afraid. Somewhere in the dark, without knowing it, you are trying to hold this stranger together with words he can’t even hear.

You last one more week before you give in. Seven evenings of the same unbearable descent. Seven nights of standing at your bathroom sink or sitting in bed, feeling the air change in the room as if something invisible has entered it with you. The drop comes with such precision now that you start bracing for it around sunset. Your body knows before your mind does. Your shoulders tighten. Your chest grows wary.

By the end of the week you are not functioning. You are existing between waves of inexplicable despair.

You stop sleeping properly. You start dreading 9 p.m. the way other people dread alarms. The grief is no longer a passing episode, it’s an event. Something that arrives and occupies you fully, rearranges your insides, leaves you shaking and hollow and confused.

On Sunday night, after another hour of crying on your kitchen floor for reasons you cannot logically name, you wipe your face with the sleeve of your sweatshirt and open your laptop.

The glow of the screen feels accusatory. You type slowly at first, embarrassed even in private.

Random emotions spiking for no reason. Sudden grief at night no trigger. Feeling emotions that don’t feel like mine.

You read medical articles until the words blur together. Anxiety. Panic disorder. Burnout. Delayed breakup processing. Hormonal shifts. Nervous system dysregulation. You examine each explanation carefully, like you’re selecting a diagnosis off a shelf.

Some of it fits. But none of it explains the specificity. None of it explains the way the grief feels textured, foreign in its shape. As if you are hosting something rather than generating it.

Your cursor hovers over a Reddit link. You almost don’t click it. You do. The first post makes your stomach turn. You sit back in your chair and read it again more slowly.

💬 reddit ← 🟠 r/mentalhealth_advice • 9 hr. ago

2am_andconfused

I think I’m feeling someone else’s emotions and it’s ruining my life. Am I having some kind of breakdown? First-time poster, please be kind. I genuinely don’t know how to explain this without sounding unwell. I (24F) moved to the city about six months ago for work. It was meant to be exciting. New job, new place, fresh start. And at first it was. But slowly, I started feeling… off. Not sad exactly. Not anxious in a normal way. Just emotionally overwhelmed in ways that didn’t match what was happening around me. I’ll be sitting at my desk, nothing stressful going on, and suddenly I feel this wave of dread so strong I can’t breathe. My hands shake, my chest hurts, and I have to go to the bathroom to calm down. But nothing triggered it. No thoughts. No events. It just hits me out of nowhere. Other times, I’ll be walking home perfectly fine and I’m hit with this heavy sadness that feels like grief. Like I’ve lost something. I’ve cried in public more in the last two months than I have in my entire life. The weirdest part is the timing. It’s not random. It happens at very specific moments. Late at night. Certain afternoons. Once, it happened so sharply I dropped a plate in my kitchen because I suddenly felt this spike of anger and frustration that didn’t feel like mine at all. I’ve tried tracking it. Sleep, food, stress, hormones, nothing lines up. I even went to my GP because I thought maybe it was panic disorder or burnout. Bloods are fine. I’m not depressed. I’m not particularly anxious in my actual thoughts. The doctor suggested stress and told me to rest more. But this doesn’t feel like stress. It feels like I’m picking up a radio signal I didn’t tune into. I know how that sounds. There are moments where the emotion is so strong I know it isn’t coming from me. I’ll be calm, neutral, and then suddenly I’m hit with this intense feeling that feels foreign. Like it belongs to someone else and I’m just experiencing the aftershock. Yesterday was the worst one yet. I was fine all day. Then at around 4pm I was suddenly overwhelmed with this crushing, hollow disappointment. I had to sit on the floor because my legs went weak. I felt like something important had just gone terribly wrong, but nothing had happened in my life. I ended up crying for almost an hour and I still don’t know why. I haven’t told anyone because I don’t want them to think I’m losing it. I’m a pretty rational person. I don’t believe in supernatural stuff. I don’t do drugs. I don’t drink much. This just started happening and it’s getting more frequent. Has anyone ever experienced anything like this? Is this some weird form of anxiety? A nervous system issue? Am I dissociating without realizing? I feel like I’m going crazy but also weirdly certain that this isn’t coming from inside my own head. I don’t know what to do.

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🔵 clinically_caffeinated • 8h ago • This sounds like panic disorder or derealization. Please see a mental health professional, OP. You’re not alone. ↑ 1.1K ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘

🔴 moonlighttheorist • 6h ago • I know this is going to sound insane, but I had something similar happen when my long-distance partner was going through a really bad time. I used to get “waves” of emotion before he’d even text me. Probably coincidence but this post gave me chills. ↑ 389 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘

🟡 throwaway_ERPstory • 3h ago • OP, please message me. I’ve been researching something called emotional resonance between people. There’s very little info online but your timing description is important. ↑ 211 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘

🟣 garlicbread420 • 1h ago • Not me reading this at 2am and now convinced I’m haunted. ↑ 97 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘

Your breathing shifts without your permission. The details are wrong in a way that makes them right. The way the feelings feel so foreign. The strange timing. The humiliation of trying to explain it to a doctor and sounding unwell. You scroll, automatically clicking and searching for more.

💬 reddit ← 🟠 r/soulmatebond • 6 hr. ago

lavender_static

What does your bleed actually feel like? Not the theory side. I mean physically. For me it starts in my chest. Like someone dropped cold water straight into my lungs. Then it spreads outward. Sometimes it’s emotion-heavy (sadness, panic, anger), but sometimes it’s just this overwhelming pressure that makes me stop whatever I’m doing. Curious how it shows up for other people.

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⚪ coastalmirror • 5h ago • Mine feels like adrenaline without context. Heart racing but no anxious thoughts. It’s almost irritating because my brain is calm but my body isn’t. ↑ 402 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘

🟢 aprilsignal • 4h ago • I get temperature shifts. I’ll go freezing cold out of nowhere. First time it happened I thought I was getting sick. ↑ 231 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘

🔵threadbarelogic • 4h ago • Does anyone else get the “drop” feeling? Like when a rollercoaster starts descending? That’s how mine began the night I made eye contact with him. ↑ 198 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘

🟤 newcityconfused • 3h ago • Yes to the rollercoaster drop. That’s EXACTLY it. I thought I was just overwhelmed from moving cities but the timing never matched my actual stress levels. ↑ 167 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘

⚪ logicalskeptic • 3h ago • I’m still not convinced this isn’t confirmation bias but I can’t explain why my “bleed” always lines up with major events in his life (we compared timelines later). ↑ 142 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘

🔴 sunlitarchives • 2h ago • The eye contact moment is what freaks me out. Mine was literally 2 seconds. I remember thinking “why did that feel important?” and then ignoring it. ↑ 186 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘

🟡 moonlighttheorist • 1h ago • The worst is when they’re going through something intense and you’re just… sitting at work trying to function. ↑ 99 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘

🟠 mod_note MOD • 1h ago • Reminder: Please avoid romanticizing distress. Emotional bleed can be disruptive. Seek professional support if symptoms impact daily functioning. ↑ 61 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘

The subreddit name makes heat creep up your neck. Soulmate bond. You nearly close the tab out of reflex. Instead, you keep reading.

💬 reddit ← 🟠 r/soulmatebond • 1 hr. ago

citylibrarythrow

Serious question: did anyone NOT believe in this before it happened? Because I used to actively make fun of soulmate discourse. Now I have spreadsheets.

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🟡 rational_but_tired • 58m ago • I have timestamps. It’s embarrassing. ↑ 173 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘ 🔴 garlicbread420 • 52m ago • NOT THE SPREADSHEETS. ↑ 211 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘ ⚪ lavender_static • 47m ago • The fact that so many of us started with “this is stress” before landing here is telling. ↑ 134 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘ 🟤 coastalmirror • 41m ago • I only accepted it after we accidentally locked eye contact again months later and it felt like someone plugged me into a socket. ↑ 188 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘ 🟣 newcityconfused • 35m ago • Wait does the second eye contact make it worse?? ↑ 102 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘ 🔴 tidepuller • 30m ago • For some people, yes. It can intensify the resonance. ↑ 146 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘ 🟠 mod_note MOD • 25m ago • Reminder: There is no confirmed scientific explanation for this phenomenon. Share experiences responsibly. ↑ 58 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘ :::

Each thread peels another layer of certainty off you.

People who didn’t believe in any of this. People who mocked it. People who tracked timestamps like data analysts because they were desperate not to be irrational. People who insisted it was stress, until the timing aligned too cleanly to ignore. You feel like you’re standing on thin ice, listening to it crack.

By the time you reach the comments about eye contact, about the second one intensifying everything, your hands are trembling. You slam the laptop shut so hard you’re surprised it doesn’t break. The sound ricochets around your apartment.

“No,” you say out loud, as if the word can undo what you just read. “Absolutely not.”

You stand up too fast. Pace once. Twice. Press your palms hard against your eyes until stars bloom behind them.

This is absurd. You are a rational person. You don’t subscribe to cosmic threads or invisible tethers or destiny narratives. You believe in psychology. In attachment theory. In stress responses.

You don’t believe that you are somehow emotionally entangled with a stranger. That was just silly folklore some people still told, narratives people sold to tabloids. And yet, the grief at night doesn’t feel like your breakup anymore. It doesn’t feel like your life. It feels heavier. Broader. Like pride being dismantled. Like identity cracking under pressure. Like someone sitting alone somewhere, thinking, I don’t know who I am anymore.

The horror arrives first. Holy fuck. What if you’re actually not in control? What if this isn’t your nervous system misfiring, but responding?

The thought makes your skin crawl. It feels invasive. Like your ribcage has become a doorway to someone else without your consent. You didn’t ask to carry someone else’s despair. You didn’t agree to share space inside your own body. Tears spill, sharp, frightened ones this time.

“Jesus Christ, am I going crazy?” you whisper into the empty room.

But beneath the fear, beneath the humiliation, something else is rising. A simple recognition. You replay the episodes in your mind. The texture of the grief. The sharpness of the anger that never matched your thoughts. The particular heaviness that feels distinctly… masculine.

It isn’t romantic. It’s catastrophic. It’s someone who built themselves on certainty suddenly losing it. Your breath stutters.

“That’s my person,” you say without meaning to, and the words shock you with how certain they feel.

You don’t know his name. You don’t know where he is. You don’t know if this is coincidence layered with loneliness. But your body recognises him. The rhythm of his unraveling. The way the waves crest hardest at night.

Suddenly the fear tilts into heartbreak so clean it almost steadies you. If this is real, even a fraction real, then he is going through something profound all alone.

You think about the nights you’ve sat upright in bed, clutching your chest, whispering into the dark. You’re not a failure. You’re not done. You’re still worthy. You’re still strong. You thought you were convincing yourself. Now you wonder who you were really speaking to. The idea doesn’t feel delusional. It feels devastating.

You open the laptop again, slower this time. You scroll not for proof, but for solutions. People write about regulation. About grounding. About how proximity calms the spikes. About how confusion eases once awareness exists. You cling to those comments like case studies. If there is a thread, some sort of invisible soulmate bond that you’ve unknowingly entered, you need to steady your end of it.

You begin meditating longer. You regulate your breathing the second you feel the first shift in your chest. You journal timestamps. You track your moods. You guard your emotional baseline like it's sacred. You refuse to let your own chaos travel outward. He is clearly carrying enough.

That night, when the grief descends again, heavy and bone-deep and not yours, you don’t fight it. You sit upright in bed. You press your palm flat over your heart. Your eyes burn, but your voice is steady.

“I don’t know you yet,” you whisper. The words feel fragile and enormous at the same time.

“But I can feel you.” Your throat tightens.

“I’m so sorry you’re hurting.” Tears slip quietly down your cheeks.

“I don’t know your name. I don’t know where you are. But if I ever find you… I will help you. I swear. I will not let you go through this alone.”

It sounds irrational. It sounds like something you would have mocked months ago. You don’t care. Because somewhere, in another timezone, someone is questioning whether they are disappearing. And every night, without fully understanding how, your body feels it too.

You start praying, to who? You aren’t sure. Praying for him to feel some kind of relief, to find some answers to whatever he’s going through. You don’t light candles. You don’t kneel. You just lie there in the dark and aim the thought outward. I don’t know what’s happening to you, but please let it ease.

You’ve never needed religion to believe in something larger than what you can see. Energy makes sense to you. Resonance makes sense, in theory. The idea that two nervous systems could tangle across distance doesn’t strike you as impossible, just unexplained. It was never something you took too seriously, despite the way it trickled through popular culture like a legend that could never be proved or disproved. But the empirical evidence was here, slapping you in the face, and it aligned too much with the other accounts you were reading online for it to be merely an accident.

So you stop fighting the possibility. If this is real, then it’s real. If it isn’t, you’re still choosing compassion over fear. That feels sane enough.

The grief doesn’t scare you anymore. Not the way it did when you thought it meant you were having some sort of breakdown. Now when it rolls in, you study it. You map it. You pay attention to its texture the way you would learn someone’s accent. It has edges. It has restraint. It feels swallowed more than expressed. It feels like someone who doesn’t want to break in front of anyone. That’s what undoes you.

You begin building small, quiet stories in your head. Not cinematic reunions. An airport gate. A hallway after an event. A mutual friend’s party. You imagine the moment not as lightning, but as calibration. The background static inside you lowering to a hum. Your body going still instead of bracing for the next wave of emotion. You imagine looking at him and thinking, Oh.

You imagine him going quiet, but not defensive. Relieved that someone else has noticed the pattern. You don’t romanticise his pain. You don’t treat it like something poetic. It isn’t. It’s heavy. It’s destabilising. You can feel the way it erodes his confidence, the way it makes him question himself in private.

But you're not intimidated by it. If anything, it makes you steadier. When the waves come now, you don’t spiral with them. You breathe slowly and picture the emotion passing through you instead of lodging. You talk to him sometimes in your head, but it’s less promise and more practicality. You’re not crazy. You’re not finished. You’re allowed to struggle without it meaning you’re done.

You don’t need him to be perfect when you meet him. You don’t need him at his peak. You just need him intact. You start praying differently. Not for some grand collision, just for his nervous system to quiet. For his sleep to deepen. For whatever cracked to mend cleanly.

If you’re meant to intersect, you will. If you aren’t, then at least somewhere in the world someone was rooting for him without an agenda. You can feel his sorrow, and you are not afraid of it. It doesn’t overwhelm you. It doesn’t swallow you whole. It simply exists, a current running parallel to your own.

If this is a connection, then it isn’t glittering or cinematic. It’s this. Staying. Steadying. Choosing not to look away from someone’s darkness even when they can’t see you standing there. You don’t know his name yet. But when the day comes, if it comes, you suspect you won’t recognise him by his face. You’ll recognise him by the silence. By the way the continual hum of sadness you feel from him disappears. By the way your body, for the first time in months, doesn’t brace for night.

Abu Dhabi feels like a mirage. The air is thick and warm even after the sun slips below the horizon, the floodlights turning the circuit into something almost artificial. It’s too bright, too clean, too polished to match how he feels inside. The last race of the season. The end of the worst year he can remember.

He should feel relief. Instead, he feels hollow. The strangest part is that the episodes have stopped. No more sudden chest tightening in the motorhome. No more dizzy waves of grief that make no sense. No more moments in the car where his hands tremble on the wheel for reasons he can’t name. It’s been weeks now — steady, manageable, quiet.

He notices it one morning and almost doesn’t trust it. Maybe I’m better. Maybe whatever that was… is gone. The thought should comfort him. It almost does. But it also makes him wary, like a man who’s survived a storm and keeps scanning the horizon for another one forming.

Because Melbourne still lives under his skin. He hasn’t said it out loud to anyone, but after that episode in Melbourne, after the room tilted and his chest felt like it was collapsing in on itself, something shifted in him. Not just physically. Mentally. The fear of it happening again lis buried somewhere deep.

Every time his heart rate spikes, even for a normal reason, there’s a split second of panic. Is it starting again? The physical symptoms might be gone, but the anxiety about them hasn’t left.

On top of that, there’s everything else. The qualifying sessions that slip through his fingers. The car that won’t behave. The radio messages that feel thinner than they used to. The headlines. The whispers. The statistics.

Worst season of his career.

He sees it written everywhere, even when no one says it to his face. He’s tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix.

By Sunday night in Abu Dhabi, the exhaustion has settled into his bones. Another frustrating session. Another result that isn’t him, or at least doesn’t feel like him. He sits outside the hospitality unit long after most of the team has drifted away, the city glittering behind the paddock like a postcard version of success.

Miles sits down beside him first. Spinz follows a few minutes later, dropping into the chair opposite and studying him in a way that isn’t casual at all.

“You good?” Miles asks, gently.

Lewis shrugs. It’s automatic. “Yeah. Just tired.” They don’t buy it.

Spinz leans forward, forearms on his knees. “You’ve been saying that since April.”

Lewis lets out a dry laugh. It doesn’t reach his eyes. “I am tired, bro.”

There’s a pause that stretches, and he feels his friends' eyes on him. He stares out at nothing in particular, jaw tight. He hadn’t planned on saying anything. He rarely does. But something about the end of a season loosens things. Maybe it’s knowing there’s nowhere left to run until next year.

“After Melbourne,” he says finally, voice quieter than he expects, “I thought something was properly wrong with me. I’m sure I told you at the time, I thought I had a heart attack. For real, like I thought I was going to die.”

Neither of them interrupts.

“I’ve never felt like that before. Couldn’t breathe. Chest was… tight. Like it was folding in on itself.” He shakes his head slightly. “I was in agony, genuinely thought I was about to pass out.”

Miles’ expression shifts into soft concern.

“And ever since,” Lewis continues, staring straight ahead, “I’ve been waiting for it to happen again.”

The admission hangs there. “It hasn’t recently,” he adds quickly. “Not like that. It’s been better. But from like March to October…shit I thought I had something wrong with my heart or…or my head. The random stuff stopped now though, so I should feel relief, but I just…don’t, man.”

Spinz frowns. “Random stuff?”

“Just… emotions and pain, I think. Out of nowhere. Shit that didn’t match anything that was happening.” He swallows. “One minute I’m fine. Next minute I feel like someone’s died.”

He laughs but it's devoid of any happiness. “Makes no sense when you say it out loud, sorry.”

Miles doesn’t laugh. “You talk to anyone about it?” he asks carefully.

Lewis shakes his head. “I thought it was physiological. Stress. Burnout. Adrenaline crash or something. Paid for different doctors to give me seventh opinions but they all said that there was nothing physically wrong. I figured if I just pushed through it’d settle.”

He wanted something to be wrong. At least then there would be a solution.

“And has it?” Spinz asks.

Lewis hesitates. “The episodes have stopped,” he says. “But now I’m just…” He exhales, long and slow. “On edge. All the time. If my heart rate goes up, I think it’s starting again. If I feel off for a second, I think I’m about to spiral.”

He presses his thumb into the heel of his palm, grounding himself.

“And then the season’s been what it’s been. So it’s like…” He trails off, searching for the words. “It’s like I’ve been fighting two things at once. The car. And my own head.”

That’s the closest he’s come to naming it. Silence settles between them again, but it’s heavier now.

“You should talk to your dad,” Miles says eventually. “Or someone. You don’t have to carry all of that by yourself.”

Lewis’ jaw clenches slightly at that. Not in anger, in reflex. “I’m fine,” he says, trying not to be defensive. “It’s just been a shit year.”

Spinz studies him, eyebrows furrowed. One of his friends who has known him longest. “You’ve been crying when you get back to your hotel, Lewis.”

It’s not a question. Lewis looks down at his hands. He could lie. He doesn’t.

“Yeah.” The word is barely audible.

“Some nights are worse than others,” he admits. “I just… feel done. Like I’ve got nothing left in the tank.” He swallows again, throat tight. “And then I wake up and do it again.”

Miles’ voice drops to a whisper. “That’s not weakness, bro. You know that, yeah?”

Lewis nods, but the gesture is distant.

“I just don’t want that feeling again,” he says quietly. “That Melbourne feeling.”

Miles reaches over, squeezes his shoulder.

“You won’t know unless you deal with it properly,” he says. “Avoiding it won’t stop it.”

Lewis nods, but his eyes are distant again, fixed on the lights shimmering across the water. He tells himself it was stress. Burnout. Pressure. That he’s learnt to manage it. That the worst has passed. He tells himself he’s getting better.

But that night, back in his hotel room, the ceiling feels too close. He lies awake for hours, replaying qualifying laps in his head, replaying Melbourne, replaying every missed opportunity this season. The thoughts loop and tangle until his chest aches for an entirely different reason.

He turns onto his side, presses his face into the pillow. The tears come quietly now. Controlled and familiar.

He hates that this year has reduced him to this, to second-guessing himself, to fearing his own body, to wondering if maybe he’s already peaked and everyone else can see it before he can.

“I’m so tired,” he whispers into the dark, though there’s no one there to hear it.

The air doesn’t feel as suffocating as it did months ago. The ache in his chest doesn’t spiral into panic. There’s sorrow, yes. Frustration. Grief for the season he thought he’d have.

He closes his eyes and lets the exhaustion take him, unaware that somewhere far away, someone is awake and steady and holding the line without even knowing his name.

Christmas with his family should’ve felt grounding. Instead, Lewis feels exposed. Anthony notices things. He always has.

They’re sitting outside with two mugs of tea gone cold between them, evening settling in properly now. The conversation has drifted through the safe topics first. Training, plans for next season, the usual optimism people attach to January before it arrives.

Anthony watches him across the table, concern visible in the furrow of his eyebrows.

“You’re not right,” he says simply.

Lewis huffs a quiet laugh. “Bit dramatic.”

“I’ve known you since you were born, Lewis. Don’t try it.”

There’s no accusation in it, just the subtle art of knowing things a father possesses. Lewis leans back in the chair, staring out at the dark garden. He debates brushing it off. He’s done that all year, told everyone he’s fine, just tired, just frustrated, just adjusting.

But something about being here, about not having to perform, makes the truth sit closer to the surface.

“I’ve been struggling a bit,” he admits finally.

Anthony doesn’t react outwardly, he nods once.

“I thought it was just the season. Results. Pressure. You know.” He gestures vaguely. “So I doubled down. Therapy. Journalling. Meditation. All the stuff I’m supposed to do.”

“And?”

Lewis presses his lips together and shrugs.

“It helps. Technically. I understand what I’m feeling. I can label it. But it doesn’t… shift it.”

Anthony’s brow furrows slightly. “Shift what?”

Lewis hesitates, trying to find the right words. “The weight.” He swallows. “The constant edge. Like I’m bracing for something.”

Anthony’s gaze sharpens.

“Since Melbourne?” he asks quietly.

Lewis’ jaw tightens at the word. Anthony had been there. Not at the fan stage, but close enough in the aftermath. Close enough to see his son pale and shaking, close enough to hear the panic in his voice when he’d said he thought he was having a heart attack.

“Yeah,” Lewis says after a moment. “Since then.”

They sit with it for a second.

“I genuinely thought I was dying,” Lewis says quietly. “My chest— it was like someone had put a vice around it. I couldn’t get a full breath. My hands were shaking. I thought my heart was about to give out.”

Anthony takes a deep breath to steady himself from the memory.

“I’ve never felt like that before,” Lewis continues. “Not properly. I’ve had stress. I’ve had bad days. But that was different. It wasn’t just panic. It felt cardiac.”

“You had every test though,” Anthony says, factual rather than defensive.

“Yeah.” Lewis gives a humourless half-smile. “And then I had them again. And again.”

Countless appointments. Cardiologists. Scans. Blood work. Monitors. He can still picture the sterile rooms, the way doctors reassured him in measured tones. Your heart is healthy. Your lungs are clear. There’s nothing structurally wrong.

“I kept thinking they’d missed something,” Lewis admits. “That there was something wrong with my chest they couldn’t see. Inflammation. A defect. Something.”

Anthony says nothing, letting him empty it out.

“And it didn’t just happen once,” Lewis adds. “After Melbourne, it came back. Not as bad, but enough. Randomly. April. May. June.” He exhales. “All the way through to October, really. Episodes where my chest would tighten and I’d think—” He stops himself. “Here we go. This is it.”

The fear creeps back into his voice despite himself.

“I was convinced one of them was going to be the one that didn’t stop.”

Anthony’s hand flexes slightly on his knee.

“And now?” he asks carefully.

“It’s… faded.” Lewis frowns slightly. “That’s the weird part.”

“Weird how?”

Lewis struggles to articulate it without sounding irrational.

“There were other things,” he says slowly. “Before. Around that time. Just… random waves of emotion. Didn’t match what was going on. I’d be fine and then suddenly I’d feel—” He cuts himself off, frustrated. “It doesn’t matter. It stopped around October. The chest stuff. The spikes. It just… eased.”

Anthony watches him closely.

“And the doctors?”

“Still clear.” Lewis shrugs. “Apparently I’m the picture of health.”

“And you don’t feel like it.”

Lewis shakes his head faintly.

“I don’t trust it,” he admits. “I keep waiting for it to come back. Every time my heart rate jumps, I check it. Every time my chest feels tight from training, I’m analysing it.” He rubs a hand over his chest unconsciously. “I hate that I don’t trust my own body anymore.”

Silence settles heavily between them.

“And the therapy?” Anthony asks gently.

“It’s good,” Lewis says quickly. “I’m not— it’s not that I’m avoiding anything. I talk. I do the work. I’m not in denial about stress. I know it’s been a brutal year.”

“That’s not what I’m asking.”

Lewis looks at him.

“I’m asking if it feels like stress.”

Lewis opens his mouth to answer automatically — yes, of course, what else would it be — but the certainty doesn’t come as easily as it should.

“It felt like stress at first,” he says carefully. “Now it just feels… external.”

Anthony goes very, very still.

“External how?”

Lewis shakes his head immediately. “I know how that sounds.”

“Humor me.”

He hesitates again.

“Like it wasn’t entirely mine,” he says quietly. “Like something was bleeding through. The chest stuff felt physical. But the emotion that came with it didn’t always line up with anything in my life.”

Anthony leans back slowly in his chair, eyes never leaving his son’s face.

“When I met Linda,” he says after a long moment, “I thought I was having heart problems.”

Lewis’ head snaps up slightly. “Dad—”

“Listen.” His tone is calm, not preachy. “I’m not saying that’s what this is. I’m just telling you what happened to me.”

Lewis exhales through his nose but doesn’t interrupt.

“I had chest pain,” Anthony continues. “Tightness. Palpitations. Went to the doctor convinced something was wrong with my heart. Tests came back clear.” He shakes his head softly. “I didn’t believe them at first either.”

Lewis remembers the stories. He’s always filed them under romantic exaggeration.

“You’ve told me that before,” he says carefully.

“I don’t think I explained it properly before.” Anthony’s voice lowers slightly. “It wasn’t poetic at the time. It was destabilising. I thought I was ill. The only thing that changed was proximity. When we were apart, it was worse. When we were together, it settled. I understood how I was feeling because it was what she was feeling. I regulated her, she regulated me.”

Lewis shifts in his seat, uncomfortable now.

“That’s just intensity,” he says. “New relationship. Hormones.”

“That’s what I told myself.”

“And?”

Anthony holds his gaze. “And it didn’t feel like that.”

The words sit heavily between them. Lewis looks away first.

“I don’t believe in that stuff,” he says flatly. “Soulmates. Symptoms. That narrative.”

Anthony nods. “I know you don’t.”

“It doesn’t make logical sense,” Lewis continues, more firmly now. “If it were real, people would talk about it differently. They’d search. They’d know. It wouldn’t be this vague myth that only shows up in hindsight.”

Anthony considers that. “Maybe,” he says. “Or maybe people don’t talk about it because it sounds mad.”

Lewis lets out a short laugh. “Exactly.”

“I’m not telling you that’s what this is,” Anthony says again, steady. “I’m telling you that dismissing something just because it doesn’t fit your framework doesn’t make it untrue.”

Lewis’ shoulders tense slightly. “I’ve worked too hard to ground myself in reality to start chasing…” He gestures vaguely. “Stories.”

Anthony studies him carefully. “Is it chasing a story,” he asks quietly, “or investigating a pattern?”

Lewis doesn’t answer. Anthony leans forward, elbows on his knees now.

“You say therapy helps you label it but not move it. You say it felt external. You say the episodes ran for months and then eased without a clear medical explanation. That’s a pattern.”

Lewis’ mind resists the direction this is heading. “It’s probably just my nervous system recalibrating,” he says. “Stress peak after Melbourne. Then comedown.”

“Maybe." The word is too neutral and open for Lewis’s liking. Anthony sits back again.

“I just don’t want you scared of your own body,” he says gently. “Whatever this is — stress, burnout, something else — it shouldn’t own you.”

Lewis swallows. “I was convinced my heart was failing for half the year,” he says quietly. “That’s not a small thing to shake.”

“No,” Anthony agrees softly. “It isn’t.”

They sit with that for a second. Anthony looks at his son. He looks so tired, drained of life in a way he's never seen before.

“Then be curious,” Anthony says after a moment. “Not fearful. If it’s physiological, you’ll find the explanation. If it’s psychological, you’ll work through it. And if it’s something you don’t currently have a category for…” He shrugs lightly. “You’re intelligent enough to research before you dismiss.”

Lewis looks at him, irritation and intrigue warring quietly behind his eyes. “You really think there’s something to that soulmate stuff,” he says.

Anthony doesn’t answer immediately. “I think the body sometimes knows things before the mind does,” he says finally.

Lewis shakes his head faintly, but the dismissal doesn’t carry the same weight it used to. Later that night, lying in the guest bedroom, staring at a ceiling he hasn’t looked at all year, the conversation replays in fragments. Heart attack. Clear scans. External. Pattern. Be curious.

He tells himself it’s ridiculous. He tells himself he’s not about to spiral into folklore because of one destabilising season. But his laptop is already in his lap.

For the first time since this all started, instead of searching for symptoms of cardiac stress, he hesitates, and types something he never would have entertained six months ago. He tells himself he’s doing this to disprove it.

That’s the only reason he opens his laptop. Not because he believes in anything metaphysical. Not because some dormant, teenage version of himself wants the universe to be neater than it is. It’s because the pattern is irritating — and Lewis has always hated unresolved patterns.

He approaches it the way he approaches everything else: controlled, clinical. Search terms refined. Filters applied. He avoids anything glossy, anything that looks romanticised or sensationalised. The first wave of results is exactly what he expects, tabloid headlines and pop psychology dressed up as science.

SOULMATE SYMPTOMS DOCTORS WON’T TELL YOU ABOUT. WHEN YOUR CHEST HURTS BECAUSE YOUR PERSON IS SAD.

He clicks one out of sheer stubbornness and closes it within thirty seconds. “This is bullshit,” he mutters to the empty room.

It’s all glitter language. Destiny, invisible strings, immediate recognition, magnetic pull.

None of it resembles what happened to him. There was nothing romantic about March. Nothing poetic about being escorted off a fan stage in Melbourne convinced his heart was failing. Nothing mystical about the months that followed: the cardiology appointments, the scans, the monitors strapped to his chest overnight, the creeping dread that one day the tests would finally show something physically wrong.

He refines the search again. Removes soulmate. Removes destiny. He types instead: emotional transmission physiological without cognitive trigger research.

That’s how he ends up on Reddit. At first he only scrolls. Observes. Notes the tone. Strips the emotion out of other people’s posts to study how they’re answered. Detached. Direct. It feels safer that way.

Then he creates an account. The username is meaningless, anonymous, untraceable (he started with roscoelovescoco1985 and realised that was bait, changing it to the initials instead). He drafts the post carefully, removing identity, removing adjectives, leaving only symptoms and timeline. He refuses to let it sound dramatic. He reads it twice to make sure it doesn’t sound unhinged. Then he hits post.

💬 reddit ← 🟠 r/AskDocs • 11 hr. ago

RLC_1985

Sudden episodes of acute emotional distress with no cognitive trigger. Neurological? 40M. Athlete. No history of anxiety disorders. No substance use. Regular bloodwork all normal. For the past several months I’ve been experiencing sudden, intense emotional episodes that do not correlate with my environment or thoughts. At first I thought I was having a heart attack, but it doesn't make sense anymore. Examples: – Sudden, overwhelming sadness/grief mid-training. Sometimes it feels like physical chest pain. – Acute anxiety spikes during otherwise controlled conditions. – Brief but severe anger/frustration that resolves within 10–20 minutes. – A distinct “drop” sensation in the chest prior to onset. Vision blurs, ears start ringing, pins and needles. There is no associated rumination. My thoughts remain rational and calm. It feels physiological first, emotional second. Cardiac screening clear. Hormones normal. Sleep consistent. Nutrition monitored. No recent trauma. Episodes seem time-specific rather than situational. Has anyone seen cases where emotional responses present without cognitive origin? I am open to neurological explanations. Not looking for psychiatric labeling without cause, this does not feel like generalized anxiety.

( ↑ 1.8K ↓ ) ( 🗨️ 629 ) ( ↳ Share )

🟠 NeuroReg_MD • 10h ago • Physiological anxiety can absolutely precede cognition. The body reacts before the brain narrates. However, timing specificity is interesting. Any environmental cues you’re overlooking? ↑ 942 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘

🟡 cardio_throw • 9h ago • If cardiac + endocrine are clear, could be stress manifesting somatically. High performance careers do this. ↑ 611 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘ 🔵 empirical_lad • 8h ago • There’s fringe research on “affective resonance” between bonded individuals but it’s not recognized clinically. ↑ 402 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘ 🟣 RLC_1985 • 7h ago • Can you link the research? ↑ 518 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘ 🔵 empirical_lad • 6h ago • It’s mostly archived conference papers. Look into “emotional resonance phenomenon.” Not widely accepted. ↑ 623 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘

He closes the app immediately after and tells himself he won’t check it for a few hours. He checks it in twelve minutes.

The responses are measured at first, predictable. Anxiety. Panic disorder. Somatic stress. He feels steady reading them, grounded by the clinical tone. It’s familiar language, the same vocabulary he’s been handed since March.

Then one comment mentions something he’s never seen framed this way before. Affective resonance. Fringe research. Not recognised clinically.

His jaw tightens slightly. Fringe doesn’t mean fabricated. It means inconvenient. He replies before he can talk himself out of it. Can you link the research?

The answer is vague. Archived conference papers, scattered references. “Look into emotional resonance phenomenon.”

He stares at the phrase for a long moment. It sounds institutional. Sanitised. Devoid of romance. He searches it directly. Most of what comes up is commentary, cultural essays, sceptical breakdowns. He nearly closes the tab. Then he finds something else.

An archived reference note. Institutional formatting. Government-domain mirror. No branding. No advertising. No dramatic tone. He clicks it. The document opens plainly. Black text. Structured headings. Clinical language. He reads the title once.

REFERENCE NOTE: EMOTION-RESONANCE PHENOMENON (ERP).

He expects pseudoscience. He doesn’t get it.

He reads slowly, and somewhere halfway down the first page, his breathing changes without him noticing.

It isn’t mystical. It doesn’t promise love or destiny or recognition. It describes sustained, mutual eye contact. Involuntary transmission of extreme emotional states. Misinterpretation as panic disorder, cardiac events, burnout. Physiological symptoms disproportionate to circumstance. Emotional states described as “foreign” or “not mine.” Distance irrelevant. Permanent once activated.

His pulse begins to climb. This is confirmation bias, he tells himself immediately. It’s broad enough that anyone could read themselves into it. But the specificity keeps catching. First episodes almost universally misinterpreted as cardiac or neurological events. Melbourne. The vice around his chest. The ringing ears. The pins and needles in his fingers. The absolute certainty that he was having a heart attack. The way he’d braced himself for collapse.

Months of clean scans. He scrolls again. Distance and time do not inhibit transmission. Symptoms often reduce with emotional regulation practices, despite lack of causal treatment.

He thinks about October. About how the episodes didn’t taper gradually, they stopped. Not perfectly; the exhaustion remained, the fear remained, the bad nights remained. But the acute spikes, the drop sensation before onset, the crushing panic that felt injected into him? Gone.

No new medication. No new medical explanation. He leans back in his chair slowly.

“This isn’t real,” he says under his breath.

He rereads the section on public framing: romanticised, immediately recognisable, dependent on love. Inaccurate. A hollow laugh escapes him. Of course it is. If something like this were real, no one would recognise it for what it was. They’d do exactly what he did: cardiologists, endocrinologists, therapists. Label it stress. Label it burnout. Label it anxiety.

He scrolls to the internal note at the bottom.

ERP-related distress is underreported due to stigma, minimisation, and fear of being perceived as unstable.

He shuts the laptop halfway and sits there, staring at his own reflection in the darkened screen. Unstable. That’s the word that kept him quiet for months. He opens the laptop again. Goes back to Reddit. His hands move before he consciously decides.

💬 reddit ← 🟠 r/AskDocs • 2 hr. ago

RLC_1985

Update: Found something unusual while researching. Would appreciate professional input. Following up on my previous post regarding unexplained affective spikes. A user mentioned “emotional resonance phenomenon.” I assumed pseudoscience, but I searched academic databases anyway. Most results were cultural commentary. However, I located a reference note archived under a behavioural neurodynamics index. It appears institutional but not publicly circulated. I’m linking the mirror below. I am not endorsing the terminology — I’m asking whether anyone in neurology or psychiatry recognises this as a legitimate framework. Archived file: www.behavioural-archive.gov/internal/ERP-reference-note_v4.1.pdf If this is fringe theory, I’ll disregard it. But the presentation section is uncomfortably specific. Would appreciate clinical perspective.

( ↑ 2.4K ↓ ) ( 🗨️ 1.1K ) ( ↳ Share )

🔵 empirical_lad • 1h ago • That document isn’t meant to be easy to find. ↑ 1.3K ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘

🟠 NeuroReg_MD • 1h ago • I cannot comment on internal archives. I would advise caution in interpreting descriptive frameworks as causal mechanisms. ↑ 842 ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘

🔴 throwaway_policy • 45m ago • Delete this post. ↑ 2.1K ↓ 🗨️ Reply ∘∘∘

This time he links the document directly. He frames it clinically, detached, asks for professional input. If it’s nonsense, someone credible will dismantle it. The replies flood in faster than before. One in particular makes his stomach drop.

That document isn’t meant to be easy to find. He stares at the comment. Refreshes. Delete this post.

Two words. Thousands of upvotes. Something cold and electric runs through him. Not fear of fate, fear of implication. Institutions don’t discourage harmless myths. They ignore them. They don’t archive them under behavioural neurodynamics indices and attach internal notes about stigma and ethical concern. He leans back again, heart steady but heavy.

He still doesn’t believe in soulmates. He doesn’t believe in destiny or fate. He believes in mechanisms. And what the document makes painfully clear is not that this is impossible, but that the mechanism hasn’t been identified. He thinks of his dad. Of the way he described chest pain before he ever described love. Of proximity easing symptoms. Of the quiet certainty in his voice.

Lewis rubs a hand absently over his face. If activation requires sustained, mutual eye contact... He searches his memory. Paddock. Events. Grid walks. Interviews. Thousands of faces. Hundreds of fleeting exchanges. He doesn’t remember locking eyes with anyone long enough to matter.

But there are flashes. Moments he’d dismissed. Someone holding his gaze a second too long. His stomach tightens. No. That’s retrofitting narrative. That’s how people turn chaos into meaning. He stands abruptly and paces once across the room.

Let’s say, hypothetically, this is real. Then somewhere, someone else experienced March too. What the fuck were they going through to transmit feelings like that?

He’s frowning before he can stop himself. Somewhere, someone else might have felt the waves of panic that didn’t belong to their circumstances, but belonged to him. The thought of putting someone else where he’d been trapped mentally for so many months knocks him sick. Somewhere, someone else might have thought they were losing their mind.

The idea doesn’t feel romantic. It feels destabilising. Permanent once activated. No severance method. He exhales slowly through his nose.

“If this is real,” he says quietly, testing the weight of it, “then…then…it’s not just because of me.”

That’s where it shifts, not into belief, but into recognition. Random things don’t follow patterns for seven months and then cease without intervention. Random things don’t mirror documented presentation markers with uncomfortable precision. Random things don’t make institutions uncomfortable enough to bury language around them.

He sits back down. His scepticism is still intact. But it’s no longer airtight. There is a crack now. Through it presses something he has spent years dismissing, not destiny, not fairy tales. A fated connection, being interlinked with his person. Uncontrolled. Unconsented. Unexplained. He stares at the screen for a long time. Then, very carefully, he downloads the document. Not because he believes it fully. Because he can’t ignore it anymore.

Two weeks later, you agree to dinner with your girls.

Just to get out of the house. Just to feel something normal instead of talking to a potential phantom man at the end of your neurons.

You hadn’t told anyone about that, obviously. God forbid they start gently suggesting therapists with soft voices and white rooms. It sounds insane when you say it out loud, that you can feel someone. That you’re certain someone else can feel you. But you are certain. Incredibly certain.

You’d dressed properly for the first time since the breakup. A long, flowing dress, maroon red. Elegant, soft, but dipping just enough at your chest to feel intentional. You did your makeup properly too. Full face. Blush, liner, lip gloss. You hadn’t done a full face in months.

You almost didn’t recognise yourself in the mirror. You booked one of those posh London restaurants, the ones with tasting menus where the food looks microscopic but beautiful. Ceramic plates that look like art installations. You and the girls were going all out. It had taken you long enough.

You arrived arm in arm with one of them, laughing too loud in the foyer before being politely ushered to your table.

“Look at you, babe!”

“You look insane.”

Wine was ordered immediately. You were glowing under the low lighting, catching up, interrupting each other, clinking glasses. For the first time in months, you felt steady.

Normal. It was beautiful, really. Then you heard his laugh. It cut clean across the room. Your head snapped toward it before you could stop yourself. Your ex. Sat opposite a girl you didn’t recognise. His hand stretched across the table, laced with hers. He was leaning forward the way he used to lean toward you. Smiling like that. Giggling.

You felt it, the exact second your stomach dropped. Like the floor tilted. Like something inside you misaligned.

This is fine. I’m over it. I really am. I haven’t thought about him in months. Don’t stare. Look away. It was never going to work. The spark faded. It ended amicably. Don’t let it ruin your night. Don’t let it ruin your ni—

Your chest ached, your breath htiched like your nervous system was back in March.

“Sorry—” you’re standing before you realise it. Your chair scraping too loud. “Sorry, I just need— just give me a second—”

Your girls barely register it before you’re weaving between tables from the back of the restaurant.

Your chest is burning. Your vision is blurring at the edges. You’re trying to steady your breathing but it won’t catch properly. It’s like your lungs forgot the rhythm of how to breathe. The grief hits you like a ton of bricks again because the last thing you’d expected to see tonight was him, here and moving on.

You push toward the front of the restaurant, blinking hard, refusing to let tears spill. You were fine. You were fine.

Lewis was in London for his birthday. He hadn’t planned to make a big deal of it. But when Spinz books a Michelin-star restaurant with a curated vegan menu and invites Miles and his dad, how is he supposed to say no?

He’d dressed nicely. Sleeveless Dior knit, dipping low enough to show the edge of his tattoos on his chest. Diamonds resting against his throat. Loose jeans to keep it effortless. He told himself this would be easy. Safe people. Safe space. Familiarity. People he never had to perform for.

He arrived, hugged everyone, sat beside his dad with Miles opposite. The lighting was warm. The wine was good. They were laughing, really laughing. He’d just relaxed into it when the starters arrived.

He reached for his fork–

His hand flew to his chest, a punched-out sound escaping him before he could stop it.

His dad stiffened instantly. “Lewis?”

Miles was already half standing. Spinz glanced around, scanning the room for cameras.

“Oh f-fuck…” Lewis groaned, face twisted in agony.

The pain sliced through him. Sharp and sudden and so familiar he thought he would throw up on the table. Not quite physical. Not quite emotional. Overwhelming in the worst possible way.

His brain threw him straight back to Melbourne. That helpless, suffocating wave. The not knowing if he was dying on the spot.

Shit. Shit shit shit. It had been so long since the last episode.

He tried to inhale deeply, but he choked on it. His vision fuzzed at the edges. His heart was racing but it didn’t feel like his anxiety. Pins and needles prickled up his arms. He fought with all his strength not to double over in his chair. “I just need air,” he forced out, already pushing his chair back.

His dad reached for him but Lewis was already moving. He didn’t even think about it. He made a beeline for the door on unsteady legs, praying that they wouldn’t give way in public.

The night air greets you cool and unsuspecting when you push through the restaurant doors, as though nothing inside has just rearranged itself inside your chest. You don’t get far.

The pavement feels uneven beneath your heels, your breath thin and unreliable, and you press your nails into your hands to feel something else but the pain. London moves around you in soft blurs of headlights and low conversation, taxis sliding past, someone laughing at the corner, but it all feels distant, dulled by the roar of your own pulse in your ears.

You tell yourself this is temporary. That this is simply shock. That seeing him with someone new is a bruise you didn’t know was still tender. You bend slightly, drawing in what should be a calming breath. It shudders on the way down.

Then a sound so raw and human breaks through the grief that’s consuming you. A broken, strangled sound from your left. Not loud. Not dramatic. But deeply, deeply wrong.

You lift your head. There’s a man several feet away, braced against the brick wall beside the restaurant entrance, one hand fisted tightly into the fabric over his chest as though he’s trying to physically hold his heart in place. The other arm is planted behind him, palm flat against the wall, his body angled forward as if gravity itself is testing his resolve.

He’s dressed beautifully — sleeveless knit, skin and ink and diamonds catching the amber streetlight — but none of that softens the image before you. His face is pale in a way that doesn’t belong to the evening. His jaw is clenched so tightly that the muscle trembles. His breathing comes in uneven pulls, each inhale catching somewhere deep and resistant.

For a moment, your brain does something cruel and absurd. It tries to compare pains. The table inside. The girl holding your ex’s hand. The humiliation blooming hot in your throat.

Then it abandons all of it, because none of that matters in the presence of this. Seeing someone look like they might collapse in front of you overrides the flicker of heartbreak entirely. You’re moving before you consciously decide to.

“Hey—” Your voice is unsteady but urgent, your steps quickening toward him. “Hey, can you hear me? Are you okay?”

His eyes remain shut, lashes pressed against skin that looks far too drained of colour. His fingers curl tighter into his chest, knuckles whitening.

A new kind of fear floods you then, sharper, colder. Fucking hell, he’s dying.

“Are you having a heart attack?” you ask, the words tumbling out without filter. “Do you need an ambulance? I can call—”

You reach for him instinctively, your hand wrapping around his forearm because he looks like he might slide down the wall at any second, and the moment your skin makes contact with his—

Something shifts. Lewis has been suspended in a private terror, the kind that feels isolating and humiliating and inescapable at the same time.The pressure in his chest had built so suddenly that it convinced him, in the span of seconds, that this was it again — that he had ignored some silent warning sign, that his body was betraying him in public, on his birthday of all nights.

Melbourne flashes through him in jagged fragments: hospital lights, the metallic taste of panic, the awful not-knowing whether it was physical or psychological or something far worse. He’s already halfway convinced that he is about to fold onto the pavement when the contact happens.

Your hand on his arm. And with it, an emotion that does not belong to him. It isn'tt the spiralling dread and heartache he has been drowning in. It's sharp and immediate and entirely outward. Fear. But not for himself. His eyes snap open. The sensation jolts through him so abruptly that he inhales on instinct, and for the first time in several minutes the air reaches the bottom of his lungs without splintering apart. The pain in his chest doesn’t disappear, but it changes shape, as though it has been rerouted.

Someone is going to die. The thought slams through him with terrifying clarity. Not him. Someone else. His gaze tries to focus on your face.

You’re closer than he expected, tears slipping unchecked down your cheeks though you seem unaware of them, your grip firm and trembling on his forearm. There is raw horror in your expression, the kind that surfaces when a person believes they are watching something irreversible unfold. You look as though you are bracing yourself to witness his last breath. You look exactly how he's now feeling. The intensity of that realisation snaps something inside him into place.

“I’m not dying,” he manages, though his voice is rough from pain and panic.

You don’t look convinced.

“Oh my God,” you whisper, your thumb shifting slightly against his skin checking for warmth, for solidity. “You look like you’re about to collapse.”

He can feel your pulse through your touch, rapid and frantic, and with it comes something else. A grief that had been blooming in you moments ago, something about something ending, something about loss. It brushes against him and then recedes, overtaken entirely by the fear that someone is slipping away in front of you. It’s overwhelming. But it is not his. Because he can tell it’s not his, he can see it more clearly.

“Breathe,” he says, the word emerging not as an order but as a plea. He isn't sure how he's talking, how he's found it in himself to be steady. It's instinctive.

Your eyes flicker to his, shock that he’s forming coherent words.

“What?”

“Breathe with me,” he repeats, more gently now, lifting his free hand between you as though demonstrating something fragile. “Slowly. In.”

You hesitate only half a second before mirroring him, your chest rising in a shaky inhale that falters midway. He feels it falter in himself too.

“Again,” he murmurs.

This time you focus. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. The noise of the street begins to seep back in around the edges of your awareness, no longer drowned by the thunder of panic. His shoulders stop jerking so violently. The colour in his face begins, gradually, to return.

Your grip loosens slightly, not because you’re letting go but because you’re realising he’s still upright, still conscious, still here. The pain in his chest eases into something almost warm, almost humming.

It feels less like collapse. More like connection. You don’t know how long you stand like that, breathing in synchrony beneath the dim wash of the restaurant’s exterior lights, two strangers anchored together by nothing more than instinct and skin and shared adrenaline.

At some point, your tears slow. At some point, his trembling subsides. In the quiet that follows, something else settles between you. A recognition that does not require explanation.

You become acutely aware of the way your hand fits around his arm, the way his breathing instinctively adjusts to match yours without either of you consciously trying. The air between you feels charged, not with panic now, but with a low, steady current that makes your skin hyperaware of every inch of proximity.

His eyes search yours as though he's trying to place you, though he knows with absolute certainty that he’s sure he’d remember you if he’d seen you before. They flicker over your face, memorising each individual feature. One of his hands moves to gently rest over yours on his forearm, on instinct again.

Your eyes search his face too. The nose studs, his long lashes still a little damp with tears. The freckle on the right side of his face on his cheekbone. Then you go back to his eyes. You’re certain you can see the sorrow you’ve been feeling for months, the confusion, the insecurity, the slow erosion of a man who used to be so certain of himself.

It feels like relief layered over astonishment. You don’t feel fear. Not a single ounce of it. Neither of you speaks. The silence is too full for language. You’re still touching him. He doesn’t dare move away when he finally feels grounded to reality for the first time in months.

Somewhere, beneath the fading echo of fear and the last remnants of heartbreak, you both feel it. The thread. Unmistakable. Alive.

It isn’t romantic in the way people expect something like this might be. It doesn’t feel soft or whimsical or cinematic. It feels structural. Foundational. Like a beam has slid into place inside your chest that you hadn’t realised was missing, and now that it’s there, the architecture of you has shifted around it.

Lewis’s face changes as the realisation settles in. It’s subtle at first, the way his jaw tightens, the way his eyes flicker as though he’s running through possibilities at speed. But then something heavier moves through him. Not relief. Not joy. Something far more complicated.

Resignation. Fear. Disbelief. Beneath it all, something that looks dangerously close to grief. As if he’s watching a version of his life close in real time. You see it happen. The internal calculation. The weight of it.

Because this Emotional Resonance is not a light thing. It’s not a passing attraction or an interesting coincidence outside a restaurant. It feels binding, and binding means change. He’s also acutely aware of how naked he feels under your gaze. That if his gut instinct is right, the emotions he’s been sending you unconsciously means that you know more about him than 99% of people in the world. It's humiliating, makes him want to run away and hide.

His breathing remains steady now, but his gaze shifts from your eyes to somewhere just past your shoulder, like he’s trying to regain the foundations of himself. Like he’s checking that he still exists independently of the sensation humming between you.

For a man who has built himself on control — on discipline, on self-sufficiency, on never needing more than he can carry alone — this doesn’t feel like a gift. It feels like dependence. Like inevitability. Like something that could unmake him if he lets it. You feel the tremor of that realisation ripple faintly through the connection. It’s not rejection, it’s more like a resistance. A quiet, instinctive recoil from the magnitude of what this could mean.

Still, the thread holds. Alive and waiting.

“It’s okay,” you whisper as gently as you possibly can, and his eyes snap straight back to yours. You can still see the panic, the stubborn refusal to not believe, the deep sorrow.

He nods silently, jaw still clenched. The tension in him hasn’t eased; it’s just focused now, drawn straight to you. You need him to talk, to say something.

You try again. Softer this time, you tell him your name. An introduction, technically, even though it feels absurdly unnecessary, like you’ve already known him in the dark for months.

He nods again, takes a shaky breath. “Lewis,” he responds, voice low and trembling slightly. “My name’s Lewis.”

tags: @70srogertaylor @forzalewis44xo @mikaissance @saintslewis @liveloungeharry @knowinglewis @thegirlinblackgreensilver @palefacestudentlove @nebulastar @determinednot2fall @misolii @wetweathermilton @snebrsblog @jajouska @moonballspls122

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