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National duties. Managing workload. A strategic calendar.

Those words acted as a shield, polished to a deceptive gleam through eight years of constant use. Mitchell Starc offered them to journalists, friends, and the ghost of himself that gazed back from the spotless windows of his Sydney apartment.

That was the official story, neat and professional. But in the silent solitude of a morning like this, with sunlight lying across the minimalistic space of his living area like a gilded shroud, the truth was a living, breathing creature in his chest.

The truth had a name, and it was a flavour on his tongue that carried the memory of both sanctuary and ruin.

Virat Kohli.

Just the thought was a physiological event – a cold fist tightening around the chambers of his heart, a flush of heat beneath his skin that had nothing to do with the Australian sun.

Pathetic... After all this time, you're utterly and completely pathetic.

The apartment was a monument to Mitch's control: sleek lines, curated silence, and a view of the harbour that stretched into a calm, blue distance. It was a life meticulously crafted around an absence. He brewed coffee for himself. He set the table for himself. The other side of his king-sized bed remained perpetually pristine, a snowfield of Egyptian cotton untouched, a silent testament to no one.

In the hollow quiet of these mornings, before the world woke up and demanded ‘Mitchell Starc, Australian Fast Bowler,’ there was only Mitch.

And Mitch longed for him. He longed for him in the way he took his coffee – black, bitter, no sugar, just as Virat had teased him was ‘akin to drinking asphalt’. He longed for him in the silence that wasn’t peaceful, but echoingly empty. 

Every morning, I long for you.

The thought was a sacrilege in the temple of his composure, a quiet vandalism. He eradicated it, crushing the feeling to dust beneath the heel of routine: He had meetings. He had training. He had a life.

He repeated it like a mantra until it nearly seemed true.

Across the minimalist expanse that evening, the air thick with the golden hour glow, Josh Hazlewood and Pat Cummins dissected the upcoming 2023 IPL Mega Auction. Their voices were familiar, comfortable waves breaking against the isolated cliff face of his solitude.

Pat spread a printout of financial projections on the coffee table like a general’s map. “Look, the maths is undeniable. It’s generational wealth. But for me, it’s the tournament itself. No place like it to test your cutters, your death-bowling plans under insane pressure. You just come back a smarter bowler.”

Josh, leaning back with a contemplative air shaped by several seasons immersed in a different cricketing culture, nodded. “A hundred per cent. But it’s more than just the cricket, Pat. It’s… the immersion. You’re living it. And the people you’re with, they become a different kind of family. You see sides of blokes the world never does.” He took a sip of his beer, his gaze drifting thoughtfully. “Take my time at RCB these two years. Completely different beast from anything back home.”

Mitch kept his eyes on his laptop screen, the blank form a white void. His fingers were cold. Don’t engage. Don’t ask.

“Kohli’s been with them forever, right?” Pat said, ever the pragmatist, stating facts. “Must be an experience, playing under him there.”

“Under him, with him… it’s a blur,” Josh said, with a note of genuine warmth and respect that had deepened into something akin to fondness. “At first, you just see the intensity, the legend. And that’s all real. But after a while, you get let into the circle. Not the team circle, the inner circle. The man’s loyalty… It’s ferocious. Once you’re in, you’re in for life. He’ll fight for you, remember things about your life you mentioned in passing six months ago.”

Mitch’s coffee turned sour in his stomach. The inner circle. A place he had once inhabited, not just as a teammate, but as something far more intimate. A place he had voluntarily banished himself from.

A memory then, not summoned but bestowed – a gift and a wound from a past self: It unfolded in the soft, sepia tones of an ordinary afternoon.

A lazy Bangalore day in 2015, with monsoon rain drawing rivers down the windowpanes. They lay collapsed on the sofa, a tangled knot of limbs, with some forgotten cricket documentary murmuring in the background. Virat was half-asleep, his head a warm, perfect weight on Mitch’s thigh, his fingers idly tracing soothing circles on his knee.

Mitch held a book he wasn’t reading, his gaze constantly lowered: to the dark fan of Virat’s eyelashes against his skin, to the calm that softened the normally fierce lines of his face.

In that suspended moment, there was no captaincy, no screaming headlines, nor the next innings. There was only the rhythm of the rain and the syncopated beat of their breathing. Virat had stirred, nuzzling closer, his voice thick with sleep and contentment. “Yeh acha hai… This is nice. Just this. Just us.” 

And Mitch had felt it then – a love so vast and deep it was dizzying, a riptide pulling him under. It wasn’t about the roar of a stadium or the glitter of a trophy. It was about the sacred, ordinary intimacy they had been granted. The right to this quiet. The right to be boring together.

This – the simple weight of his head, the trust in his stillness – was the unremarkable yet devastating detail that made his heart surrender completely.

That ‘just this’ – the most meaningful gift of his life – was now merely a quaint story about Virat’s kindness, recounted in a Sydney living room. His most sacred scripture had been reduced to a footnote in Josh’s travelogue.

Josh continued, warming to his subject, unaware of the landmine field he was crossing. “We got reasonably close, I reckon. He’s not an easy man to get close to – the walls are high – but once they come down… he’s surprisingly bloke-y. Loves a stupid meme, absolutely obsessed with those Punjabi songs, will argue for an hour about the best brand of protein powder.” Josh chuckled, a genuine, affectionate sound. “He’s got this wicked, dry sense of humour too. Takes the piss out of himself more than anyone.”

Each anecdote was like a needle piercing the deep, buried nerve of a memory Mitch believed had died. Stupid memes. Punjabi songs. Protein powder. These were the ordinary, human details Mitch had once cherished as sacred relics. Hearing them now, casually shared by Josh, felt like a betrayal. This was his domain, the secret land of Virat Kohli, the man behind the icon. And Josh was now a citizen there.

Pat grinned. “Sounds like you’ve made a proper mate. Good to have a local guide in that madness, I suppose.”

“More than a guide,” Josh said, his tone becoming slightly more serious. “He’s… a proper friend. Checks in during the off-season. Called me when I had that side strain this year, not just a text though, a proper call, knew the specifics of the rehab. When I told the team I’d miss the 2024 season because of Cheri's pregnancy, he sent me an incredibly lavish gift basket. I told him it was too much, and he just said, ‘It’s for the future RCB all-rounder.’” Josh shook his head, a gentle smile on his lips. “He bears all that responsibility, the weight of a nation, but he makes space to care about your world too. It’s… humbling.”

Humbling. The word resonated in Mitch’s chest. Virat’s ability for intense, focused care was a force he knew all too well. It was a sun that once warmed him to his core. Hearing it now, knowing it was shining on Josh, on his unborn child, sent a surge of something ugly and possessive through him – a jealousy so sharp it instantly humbled him.

“He asked about you, you know,” Josh said, his eyes shifting from Pat to Mitch.

The air was drained from the room. For a moment, the only sound was the high-pitched hum of his own blood rushing in his ears, drowning out Josh’s voice.

“What?” The word was a dry scrape.

“A few times, actually,” Josh said, as if discussing the weather. “The first was in the ice baths last season. Out of nowhere: ‘How’s Starc’s shoulder? The left one.’” Josh’s imitation was uncanny, capturing the specific, focused cadence that could make a simple question feel like the most important thing in the world. “I said you were fit, firing on all cylinders. He just stared at the white tiles for a long time. Then he said, ‘Good. That’s good. He deserves to be fine.’ And he swam off like he was trying to outrun a shark.”

Mitch couldn’t breathe. He believes I deserve to be fine. The uncertainty was tormenting. Was it a clinical assessment? A blessing from afar? Or was it the quiet, anguished hope of a man who once mapped that shoulder with reverence akin to worship, who had whispered into that skin in the dark, “This is where you carry the world. Let me share the weight”?

Stop. You’re building cathedrals from dust. You always did.

Josh wasn’t finished, apparently. The dramatic irony of which he was blissfully unaware was a knife slowly twisting into Mitch. “Then, just before I flew back this time, we had a coffee. He was in a reflective mood. Talking about legacy, about the core group he’s built at RCB over the years. He mentioned the old days – you, AB, Gayle. Said, ‘We had something special then, too. A different kind of fire.’ He got quiet, and then he said, almost to himself, ‘Mitch… he was the best swing bowler I ever captained. Unplayable on his day. A once-in-a-generation talent.’ Then he sort of shook his head and changed the subject to the squash tournament our team was holding.”

The words struck like physical blows. The best swing bowler I ever captained. Professional praise of the highest standard. Yet, amid everything left unsaid, it felt like an epitaph on a shared grave. He was reduced to a cricketing footnote in Virat’s reflective history. A talent. Not the love of his life. Not the ghost in his quiet moments. A bowler.

Pat let out a low whistle. “High praise from the man himself. See, Mitchy? Legend recognises legend.”

Mitch forced out a sound that might have been a laugh. It was strained. His knuckles whitened as he gripped his knee under the table. The casual intimacy Josh described – the private coffees, the reflective conversations – painted a vivid, painful picture of a friendship he had never permitted himself to have with Virat after their end. They had gone from lovers to strangers, with no space for anything in between. And now, Josh occupied that in-between space with an ease that felt like Mitch’s personal failure.

“Sounds like you two have a proper bond,” Pat observed, and the remark was like salt in the wound.

“Yeah,” Josh said quietly with a sincerity that was worse than any boast. “I think we do. He’s a complex bloke, carries a lot. But he’s one of the most genuine people I’ve met in this game. His friendship… It means something.”

His friendship means something. The final, devastating sentence. Josh possessed what Mitch had intentionally destroyed and could never regain. Not only romantic love, but also the simple, deep human bond. The right to a coffee, a chat, to be part of his current world.

Pat’s voice, calling him ‘legend’, finally broke the silence in his mind, and that void was flooded with the full-sensory memory of Chennai, like a relapse.

The post-match handshake line, a gauntlet of blue. Then, him. Virat, sweat-drenched, with eyes holding the embers of battle and something else — something terrifyingly gentle — a bridge he desperately sought to build.

Their hands clasped, and then Virat’s other hand rose, not for a back-slap, but to grip Mitch’s forearm, the pressure of his thumb a deliberate, silent question pressed into his flesh. As if begging: Talk to me. See me. It’s still us here.

And he, Mitchell Starc, had looked into that open, hopeful, vulnerable face and chosen the coward’s ice. A minute, seismic shake of his head. His gaze then hardened, becoming like flint, an impenetrable wall of ‘Mitchell Starc, Professional Opponent.’

He had watched, in dreadful, slow motion, as the light in Virat’s eyes faded – snuffed out like a candle in a sudden, cruel draft – replaced by the polished, impersonal gleam of the icon. The rejection had been a silent, violent act.

Mitch had spent the rest of that World Cup tournament haunted by it, the ghost of that extinguished light flickering behind his eyelids in every quiet moment. On the team bus, gazing out at the busy, lively Indian streets, he would catch a glimpse of a familiar gait, a certain tilt of a head, and his stomach would tighten. ‘I miss you on a train,’ the silly, poetic thought came to him, even though he was on a bus.

He missed the opportunity with himself. He missed the man who might have been sitting in the train seat beside him, a solid, warm presence against the chill of the air conditioning, his quiet breath a counterpoint to the rumble of wheels on tracks.

He kept missing Virat in every crowd and at every event.

Mitch had dismissed the idea of a bridge entirely. Josh had constructed one effortlessly.

“You’ve gone a bit grey around the gills, mate.” Pat’s concern was a distant bell tolling through fog.

Take a breath in. Exhale.

You are Mitchell Starc. You have a life here. Stay focused. You’re in control.

He placed his coffee cup on the glass table. The clack sounded absurdly loud in the carefully muted room. “Just a headache,” he murmured, the lie tasting of ashes and a jealousy so weighty it nauseated him. “Maybe the glare off the water.”

He looked back at the laptop screen. The blank ‘IPL 2024 – Intent to Participate’ form was like a cliff edge overlooking a sea of memories and regrets he had sworn never to sail again. The World Cup had tested his mythology of recovery and found it hollow. But this conversation, this glimpse into Virat’s life through Josh’s easy, affectionate lens, was a different kind of test. It proved that the world had moved on. Virat had built new bonds, strong and meaningful. He was fine. He had a friend in Hoff.

And that knowledge, more than anything, made the hollow in his chest ache with a fresh, startling clarity. His love wasn’t a relic; it was a living thing, and it was starving in a prison of its own making, while the object of its devotion was out in the world, living, connecting, being.

Mitch yearned for Virat during the dull routine of his days: in the way he still, unconsciously, kept the last piece of something sweet, because Virat had had a relentless, childlike sweet tooth. He missed him in the morning silence, which seemed less like peace and more like an absence waiting to be filled. The particular rhythm of his voice – the way he’d say “jaan” with a certain lilt – was fading now, a melody half-remembered. There was something else, too, about him that Mitch now couldn’t recall, but the echo of the feeling, the seismic shift that man had caused within the tectonic plates of his soul, remained, clear as crystal and just as capable of drawing blood.

This was no longer just a surrender to a feeling. It was a frantic, irrational urge to bridge the insurmountable gap, to see if the apparition in Josh’s stories still recognised him. It was the compulsive, ruinous logic of a ghost who could not bear to be erased from the story.

He had to prove he still existed, even if only as a rival in the text, a fragment of history embedded in Virat Kohli’s present.

His finger hovered over the keyboard. The cursor blinked, a tiny, persistent lighthouse in a sea of white. Tap. Tap. Tap.

He unclenched his fists. This is madness. It’s like walking into a fire knowing you’ll be burned.

He pressed Enter.

The sound was the soft, final click of a lock disengaging. He felt it in the hinge of his jaw, in the sudden, terrible lightness in his chest. He had just voluntarily stepped back into the gravitational pull of a star that had already burned him to cinders, hoping this time, he might learn to enjoy the warmth of the ash.

The M. Chinnaswamy Stadium absorbed Mitch as he arrived. It was a living, breathing archive of his own joy and its quiet, subsequent funeral. The air itself was a Proustian madeleine – thick with the scent of hot grass, damp earth, fried spices, human sweat, cheap perfume, and distant incense. It was a sensory ambush that dissolved the present and left him stranded, gasping, in 2014.

He knelt on the outfield, a man conspicuously dressed in the wrong colours, a purple and gold aberration against the familiar green grass. His world shrank to the sacrament of his laces.

Tie the knot. Make it tight. Ensure it holds. You are now Mitchell Starc of Kolkata Knight Riders, not Royal Challengers Bangalore. You are a contract. You are a valuation. You are the most expensive bowler in history. You are not the boy who was priceless here. Pull. Loop. Strangle it shut.

Then.

A voice. The voice.

“All that money, you’re never gonna have to work another day in your life now, Cratsy.”

Cratsy.

The world dissolved into a constellation of pure sensation.

That name.

It was more than a word; it was an incantation, a skeleton key turned in the lock of a chapel he had sealed within the deepest vault of himself. It was the sound of his own heart, given a nickname by the only person who had ever been allowed to listen to its true, unfiltered rhythm.

Don’t look up. If you do not look up, it isn’t real. It’s all a hallucination. A memory.

But he was forced to. He had to see the ghost.

He looked up.

Time shattered.

There.

Virat Kohli.

The icon, the monarch, the myth made flesh, and yet somehow more than flesh. The years had sculpted the boy he knew into a monument. His shoulders, once shaken with laughter under his hands, now bore the granite weight of a kingdom. The face that once held a private galaxy for him was now etched with the topography of a decade spent in the public glare. Mitch mourned the softness, even as he was captivated by the power of what had taken its place.

But Virat’s eyes… They were the same windows. Today, they held a silent, roaring storm: shock that blossomed into a wonder so delicate it hurt to behold, a hesitant joy trembling on the edge of shattering, and beneath it all, a perfect, mirror-image reflection of his own hollow, hungry ache.

And there, in the bruised depths, the familiar old question from that Chennai match, now worn smooth by time but no less piercing: Why did you turn away?

God. Oh, God. I can’t do this. I can’t.

The space between them collapsed, pulled inward by a gravity all their own. Their meeting was a return to a homeland that had been razed. Mitch’s arms encircled him, and his hands spread against the familiar, sacred landscape of his back – the same ridges and plains he had charted in the dark, with his lips and fingertips and blind, trusting touch. He felt the solid, real weight of him – the only anchor in the dizzying sensory storm – and the heat that bled through the thin fabric of the red jersey, a brand against his palms, a permanent claim staked in a country he had once renounced. He buried his face, for a stolen, shameful eternity, in the sacred space between neck and shoulder, and inhaled.

The scent was like a time machine, a heartbreak divided into two acts. First, the new, expensive cologne: woody, assertive, an armour worn for the outside world. But beneath it, rising steadfast and devastating as bedrock, was him. The essential, unique scent of Virat’s skin: warm, clean, with a hint of salt and something mysteriously sweet, like sunlight caught in amber.

It was the aroma of his own beautiful, perfect ruin. It was the scent of home.

When they parted, the stadium’s cacophony rushed in – a vulgar, roaring intrusion upon their private silence. Mitch’s hands felt instantly, desperately cold.

Virat was attempting a smile. It was the most heartbreaking thing Mitch had ever seen – a hairline fracture in the marble façade of the king, revealing the fragile, mortal man beneath. “You’re back,” he said, and his voice was softer than memory recalled, rougher at the edges, worn by a decade of carrying the hopes of a nation on his shoulders. A delicate, terrible awkwardness blossomed between them, a garden of unsaid things thriving in the humid air.

“KKR,” Virat said, the letters hanging between them like unfamiliar runes. “Big price tag. They’ll want their pound of flesh.”

Mitch reached for the script of normality, the banal lines that kept the world turning. “Enough to retire on, I reckon. Buy that golf equipment, finally.” The words felt like stones in his mouth, crude and clumsy.

Virat’s smile flickered, like a candle guttering in a sudden draft. “Still obsessed with that sport, I see.” A pause fell, heavy and thick as monsoon air, filled with unspoken words. “How… How have you been, Mitch? Truly?”

The question was a landmine disguised as courtesy, buried in the no-man’s land between them. “Good. Can’t complain. The usual grind. You?” he was a liar building a house of cards in the path of a hurricane.

Virat’s gaze held his, and it saw straight through the flimsy construction. It always had. “Busy. The wheel never stops turning. It just gets heavier.” He glanced away, studying a crack in the concrete, then back, the silence between them growing teeth and claws. “You bowled well. In the World Cup Final. Unplayable that night.”

Don’t. Please don’t take us there. “Thanks. You… Your whole tournament was… monumental.” Chennai, the unspoken word shouted in the charged space between their bodies.

Virat nodded, a muscle twitching along the line of his jaw. “It was. It was... intense.” He seemed to teeter on the edge of a precipice, eager to leap and say what had lingered for years. Instead, he deflected, gesturing vaguely at the buzzing, familiar arena. “This place. It hasn’t changed, has it?”

The ground is a tomb, and our love is the only body within it. “No,” Mitch breathed, the word ragged. “It hasn’t changed at all.”

The silence that followed was almost a living thing, filled with the ghosts of a thousand shared moments – sweaty training sessions, secret smiles in changing rooms, whispered promises in the dark – and many more that had been lost forever. They were two of the most famous, accomplished athletes in the world, silent under the weight of their shared history.

It was Virat who finally broke, his words slipping out as a gentle, wounded exhale, a confession torn from a place of exhausted truth. “I… I didn’t think I’d ever see you here again. Not after the airport. Not after…” He trailed off, but the ending lingered in the air, more tangible than the shouted names from the stands. Not after you looked at me in Chennai and chose to see a stranger.

Mitch grasped the old, frayed script, the one that had helped him survive. “It was a lifetime ago, Virat. We’ve… grown. Moved on to different paths. Built different lives.” The lie tasted like copper, like blood on his tongue. “No hard feelings?” It was a desperate plea, disguised as a casual question.

Virat’s composure shattered. The captain vanished. The global icon disappeared. All that remained was the boy from Bangalore’s balcony, powerless under the bright lights. His eyes, those famous fiery oceans, shimmered with tears he would never, ever allow to fall in this sacred, public arena. “Moved on?” The whisper was ragged, torn at the edges, vulnerable in a way the world never saw. “You were my first… everything. The first thing that ever felt more real, more vital, more terrifying than the sound of a bat hitting a ball… You don’t – You don’t move on from your own heartbeat, Mitch. You learn to live with its phantom pain. You build your life in the hollow, echoing quiet it leaves behind.”

Phantom pain. Yes, the long-lasting condition. The ghost limb that still reached for a cup of coffee it would never hold. Virat had simply named the haunting that Josh had so innocently chronicled. He was living in the hollow echo, while Josh was sharing coffee with the man making the sound.

A sharp, icy panic gripped him. Escape. You must escape now.

He took a half-step back, a retreat that felt like tearing skin. His mouth opened, the flimsy excuse about team drills already forming. But before the lie could escape, Virat’s voice, stripped bare of all its usual leader’s steel, stopped him.

“Why, Mitch?”

Two words. The question that haunted the corridors for 3,215 nights and countless empty, echoing days. Asked not in accusation, not in anger, but in a voice drained of everything except genuine wonder.

The dam within him, patched and repatched over a decade with willpower, distance, and false victories, finally gave way.

“You said it was the geography!” Virat’s voice was a low, urgent thrum, a vibration meant for his soul alone, a secret amid the carnival. “The injuries, the rehab, the fucking oceans between us! I gave you the escape! I handed you the noble, practical reasons, and I took them for myself! I said I couldn’t handle it either! That my career demanded a singularity I could not compromise! That was my lie, Mitch! My coward’s lie, written in the language of sacrifice!”

The world ceased to spin. The stadium's noise faded into a distant, meaningless roar: What? What is he saying?

“I saw it!” Virat pressed, his gaze like a laser cutting through the layers of years, regret, and carefully nurtured resentment. “In the quiet after the storm, when the crowds had gone, and it was just us in the empty dressing room. You would look at me not with love, but with a kind of... sacred fear. As if I were a stained-glass window, beautiful and complex, and you were terrified my love would be too clumsy, too ordinary, and you would break me. I thought my need for you—my desperate, all-consuming, messy need—was a weight your generous heart was too kind to set down. I thought if I made our ending mutual, clean, and sensible... a joint decision for the sake of our careers... then you would be free. You could walk back to your life and become Mitchell Starc, the legend, unfettered by the beautiful, chaotic storm that was loving me.” A single, perfect tear escaped, tracing a gleaming path through the fine dust on his cheek. He did not wipe it away. “I thought I was giving you a gift. Your future. Your greatness. Even if it meant painting over my own with the grey paint of regret.”

No, no, no, that’s not how it was.

The story Mitch had lived with, the pain he had used as fuel, was that Virat’s destiny was a supernova, and he, Mitch, had been quietly but inevitably pushed out of its glorious, necessary orbit. The story was that he hadn’t been enough for the epic. That his love was a gentle stream next to Virat’s raging, ocean-bound river.

This new version was an earthquake in the cemetery of his memories. Every headstone of resentment he’d visited for years: ‘He chose cricket’, ‘I wasn’t enough’ – they all splintered and fell. In their place stood a single, monstrous truth: They had been co-authors of their ruin. Their suffering was a duet of doubt, a masterpiece of misguided protection.

His own truth, confined and starved within the ironclad prison of his pride, burst free in a rush of anguished air.

“No,” he gasped, the word a confession torn from a sealed vault, rusty with disuse. “You had the compass backwards. You were reading the map upside down. I wasn’t scared of your need. I was terrified of mine.”

Virat stared, utterly lost, his brow furrowed in response to this rewritten history.

“Loving you,” Mitch whispered, the truth now flowing like a long-dammed river — cold, clear, and shocking. “It wasn’t a choice; it was a fact of my existence. Like gravity. Like the need to breathe. Trying not to love you would have been an effort. But needing you? Craving you? That became my religion. And I could see it becoming my ruin. I would sit in strategy meetings, and my mind would craft messages to you rather than listen to the plans. I would bowl a delivery, and the only success that mattered was whether you would give me that nod of approval. My world was shrinking, day by painful day, into a single point of light: you. And you… Your world had to encompass galaxies. I was becoming a moon to your sun, reflecting your light but generating none of my own. And what value is a mirror to a star? I was the boy who was priceless, transforming myself into something with a mere reflective worth.”

The shame was a bitter tide, but he let it come, let it wash over him. “I left because I was utterly petrified that if I stayed, there would be nothing left of Mitchell for you to love. Just a silhouette, a shadow shaped by adoration, a hollow man echoing only your name. I used the distance, the injuries… all of it as a shield. Because the real reason was too pathetic to voice to a king: I loved you with a force that felt like self-annihilation. To love Virat Kohli completely, I feared, meant the end of Mitchell Starc.”

The silence that settled between them was unfamiliar. It wasn’t the charged silence of unspoken words; it was the echoing silence of a vault that had finally been emptied of its last, grand secret.

The air itself felt scrupulously clean. There was no blame involved. No victory claimed. Only the devastating, deep realisation of a perfect, tragic mismatch of timing and courage.

A final memory, neither sweet nor bitter, but simply the last, arose between them.

The night before the end, in the humming silence of a Mumbai airport lounge. The hour before the farewell, the suspended stillness of impending loss. They sat side-by-side on stiff leather chairs, not touching, but watching planes taxi like silent beasts through the rain-streaked windows. No more words remained. The practicalities had been agreed upon in calm, clinical tones. The mutual lie had been ratified.

In that sterile, silent space, Virat simply reached over, his movement slow and deliberate, and took his hand. Just held it. His thumb stroked once, softly, across Mitch’s knuckles. A silent language: I love you. This is tearing me apart. But this is goodbye.

They sat like that until the final boarding call, two statues of grief, connected only by that single point of contact. It was the most intimate moment of their ending.

Virat made a sound, a shattered thing between a laugh and a sob. “My God,” he breathed, the fight draining from him, leaving only a vast, weary landscape of grief. “We were both running. But not from each other; from the sheer, terrifying magnitude of what we held. We broke our own hearts to save the other’s dream. We were architects of our own loneliness… We built separate palaces and called them solitude. We weren’t ready,” Virat whispered, the words dust on the wind, yet heavy with the weight of a lost lifetime. “We were given a symphony written for two souls, but we were just boys who only knew how to play a single, solitary note. We had a love that could have been a country. And we were so afraid of the messy, glorious work of governing it – of drawing borders, of weathering storms – that we chose to be eternal tourists in each other’s lives instead. And then we chose to stop visiting.”

Mitch could only nod, the weight of the lost decade – of the alternate life, of the parallel world of shared mornings, quiet victories, and growing old not as legends in separate halls of fame but as men together in a house with a view – pressing down on him like the density of a collapsed star.

Virat was the only love. The right love. Someone he met at just the right moment when they were both strong enough to feel its power but too young to trust in its lastingness, too painfully convinced of their own unworthiness.

Virat shook his head and extended his hand. But it didn’t feel like a handshake; it was more of an absolution. A final, gentle surrender on a battlefield that had been silent for years. A white flag over their ruins. “No hard feelings, Mitchell Starc?”

Mitch looked at the offered hand – the hand that had held his face as if it were the most delicate, precious thing in the world. The hand that had waved goodbye had lasted a lifetime.

He grasped it.

The contact was like an archaeological brush against a fossil. The shape of what was preserved in stone. He sensed the familiar, firm grip, the dry warmth of his palm, the specific calluses earned from a decade of gripping a bat that had written history. And with his thumb, hidden from watchful eyes, he found the pulse point on Virat’s wrist. It beat there, strong and frantic, a fierce, living rhythm against his skin: a testament to a life being lived utterly apart from his own. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

The heartbeat he’d tried to outrun, forget, and replace with the roar of crowds and the hollow clang of personal achievement. The heartbeat that had been the secret, sacred soundtrack to his brief spell of heaven.

For one suspended, infinite second, their separate pulses seemed to sync, finding a forgotten, perfect rhythm – a final, private duet played for an audience of ghosts.

“Never,” he breathed, pouring all of his endless, unwavering, doomed love — the love that had shaped, broken, and ultimately forged the lonely man he now was — into that single word. “Just the echo of what once was.”

He released his hand. The severance was neat and silent. He turned, his movements like those of a man walking away from his own shadow, and made his way towards the blinding, alien purple of his new tribe.

He did not get far, only reaching the yawning, shadowed entrance of the players’ tunnel, where the stadium’s roar faded into a dull echo. The world blurred at the edges, with the vibrant greens bleeding into a sickly watercolour.

He did not cry. Men like him, engineered for impact, capable of absorbing the recoil of a hundred thousand deliveries, were not made to show tears outwardly. They were designed to internalise force. So, the tremor that overtook him was the seismic data of a contained shockwave, a silent Richter scale registering in the marrow of his long bones. He slid down the cold, rough concrete wall, his back pressed against its unyielding surface, and dropped his head into his hands, fingers lacing through his hair as if to hold his fracturing mind together.

He had portrayed himself as the martyr; I had seen myself as the ghost. We had spent a decade building our own opposing museums of sacrifice, only to find today that they were parallel wings of the same empty gallery.

That night, within the soundproofed silence of his hotel room, high above a city alive with a pulse he couldn't feel, the raw truth settled over him like an unchangeable climate. It was the cold, crisp atmosphere of a planet whose sun had been understood too late. He lay in the perfect darkness, the faint scent of Virat’s skin – the real one beneath the cologne – still clinging to the collar of his shirt, a scent he could not, would not, wash away. Not yet.

Love was his gravity: the silent, unchanging bedrock upon which the structure of “Mitchell Starc” had been built. Every trophy, every headline, every searing yorker that tore through a batter, were the ornate stones he had quarried and lifted for nine years to construct its towering yet empty façade. He had built a public monument of glory upon the private catacomb of them.

He would love Virat Kohli until the last star in the sky winked out. Not as regret, not as a fond memory, but as the fundamental, atmospheric condition of his soul. A love with no address, no future tense, no right to present itself. It would be the quiet space in the roar of his triumphs, the hollow in the centre of every victory.

They would meet again, on different pitches, under diverse flags, in the glimmering circuit of world cricket. They would exchange the courteous, cautious nods of respected rivals, the steady handshakes of professionals who shared a history nobody else understood. They would embody professional respect, creating a photo opportunity for the ages. They would become legends, their stories told separately.

And he would love him. He would love him even when the news displayed a picture of a diamond on a hand that was not his, on a finger whose size he once knew by heart. He would love him then, not with jealousy, but with a curator’s quiet grief for a masterpiece now housed in another’s museum.

He would love him when they were two old men, and a stiffness in his own left shoulder would whisper not of a bowling injury, but of the memory of a head resting there, a weight he had taught himself to live without.

He would love him with a loyalty that had already outlasted their actual time together and would endure beyond his own mortal lifespan. 

A perfect, permanent, pointless, brave, devastating, flawless love.

The right love.

They had been given a universe in the palm of their joined hands and watched it slip through their fingers, each believing, with the tragic, romantic folly of the young and fiercely proud, that letting go was the ultimate act of love.

Now, they would spend their days in the exquisite silence they had created — two kings, two separate, splendid yet lonely kingdoms. Forever listening, amid the roaring crowds' adulation, for the haunting, silent echo of the one heartbeat they had been too afraid to call their own. And in the quiet of a thousand lonely mornings, in the curated silence he had once mistaken for peace, that echo would be the only thing that ever truly felt like home.