Chapter Thirteen
Sebastian – “This will be easy”
The loss against Sydney followed them home.
Not in a way that made the club feel broken or the season feel over before it had properly started.
It was only Round One, and everyone knew better than to start drawing conclusions from a seven-point loss away from home against the Storm.
There were too many games left, too many variables, too many ways a season could bend back into shape if a team was disciplined enough to make it.
That didn’t stop the review from hurting.
Monday morning came with footage, numbers, and Jacob standing at the front of the room with his arms crossed while the first quarter played on the screen.
Every mistake was sharpened by the pause button.
A fumbled handball inside fifty. A kick to the wrong side of a lead.
Giving the Storm enough room to run the ball through the middle.
Then the centre clearances came up. The work they had done had been good. He and Marcos had been good. That was starting to become a problem.
Training kept them together after that, even though Jacob didn’t call it punishment anymore.
No one did.
The schedule stayed aligned because it was working. Gym blocks, drills, centre-bounce craft, running patterns, recovery.
If Sebastian had looked for a reason to be irritated by it, he could have found several.
He didn’t need to share every second of his working week with Marcos Reyes.
He didn’t need Marcos standing behind him in the gym, hands hovering near the bar.
He didn’t need Marcos beside him in meetings, one knee shifting too close under the table before pulling away again.
He didn’t need to know exactly how Marcos breathed when he was trying not to say something.
But the club wasn’t interested in what Sebastian needed privately. The club cared about what worked.
And it worked.
By Round Two, the commentators had noticed.
Not the private part. Not the part that mattered and couldn’t matter. But the version of them that could be put in a highlight reel with a caption and shared by the club’s media team.
Reyes to Nguyen. Former rivals finding chemistry. Mustangs’ new centre pairing showing promise.
The second round had them against the Newcastle Raiders, and the Raiders made the game ugly from the first bounce.
Rain had left the ground heavy, the ball slick, and every clean passage turned into contact.
Marcos spent the first half fighting for space against a ruck who seemed less interested in jumping than leaning, blocking, and killing anything clean before it started.
Sebastian worked off him where he could, but the ball came out wrong most of the time. By halftime, the Mustangs were down by eight and covered in too much mud.
Marcos adjusted after the break. He stopped trying to free himself from every block and started using the weight against him, dragging the ball down into contests the Mustangs could actually reach. Sebastian took two clearances in the third quarter, but it wasn’t enough.
The siren sounded with the Mustangs three points down.
In the rooms after, Marcos sat beside him because the away benches were too crowded and no one moved to make space elsewhere. Their knees touched once as players shifted around them. Sebastian waited for Marcos to pull away.
He didn’t.
Round Three took them to Brisbane, where the heat made the whole game feel too fast and too heavy at once.
The Brisbane Bears moved the ball wide, then back through the middle once the Mustangs overcommitted to the boundary.
Twice, Sebastian saw the danger before the kick came and couldn’t get there in time.
Twice, the Bears turned defence into attack in a handful of possessions.
The Mustangs started well enough. Marcos won the first centre bounce clean, and for a while, it looked as if the work they had done might hold under pressure.
For a little bit, the Mustangs were in front.
Sebastian remembered that clearly. The roar from the small maroon-and-gold pocket. Marcos turning back to the centre, chest heaving. The look he gave Sebastian as they crossed paths.
Gentle.
Which confused Sebastian more than it should have.
The Mustangs didn’t stay in the lead, and lost by thirteen.
The flight home was quiet. Sebastian sat by the window with his headphones in and music playing loud enough to cover the engine. Marcos sat across the aisle.
Halfway through the flight, Sebastian felt movement near his arm and looked down.
A bottle of water sat on the empty armrest between the seats.
Marcos didn’t look at him when Sebastian lifted his gaze. He only leaned back, eyes forward, hands folded loosely in his lap.
Neither of them said anything.
The Perth Stars came next, and by then the losing had started to feel less like separate matches and more like one long lesson in almost.
The Stars were cleaner from the start. White and gold opened around the ground in bright stretches, and the trip itself seemed to sit in the Mustangs’ bodies before the game had even settled.
Long flight, hotel beds, time difference, routine shifted just enough to make every familiar game-day step feel a fraction off.
The first quarter went badly.
The second tightened, barely.
Then the third and final quarters became another lesson in how close wasn’t enough. The final siren came with the ball in the Stars’ hands and the Mustangs one point behind.
The review after Perth was terrible. Jacob made them watch the final six minutes twice.
Sebastian watched it all without blinking much.
Marcos sat beside him through the review. Their shoulders didn’t touch. Their knees didn’t either. But when Jacob replayed the centre clearance from the third quarter, the one that led to Corey’s goal, Marcos’ hand shifted on the bench between them.
It landed right next to Sebastian’s. Marcos’ pinkie slid against Sebastian’s more than once. Enough to feel deliberate.
He didn’t move, and neither of them said anything about it.
Then came Round Five. Home at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
Eighty thousand people were expected.
The morning of the game, Sebastian woke before his alarm again.
Routine carried him through the morning, though his mind lagged behind his actions.
The city outside looked too normal for what his body was doing, but the closer he got to the ground, the more Melbourne began to shift around the game.
Scarves on footpaths. Families moving in large huddles.
Cars with Mustangs flags in windows. People in opposition colours cutting through the same streets, all of them heading toward the same place with different expectations.
Inside the locker room, the air was already heavy with expectation.
The MCG home rooms were better than what Sebastian had gotten used to over the past few weeks. The Mustangs logo was fixed to the wall, not temporarily dressed over someone else’s space, and the difference settled something in him as the team prepared.
Sebastian changed without speaking much.
Randal tried to get something out of him once, then gave up and clapped him on the shoulder instead.
Phetmany sat two lockers down, headphones on, eyes closed.
Harry crossed the room with a certain kind of calm, speaking to players in low bursts.
Jacob stood near the door with a tablet in one hand, watching everything.
Marcos was across the room.
When Sebastian looked, Marcos was pulling his jersey over his head, arms lifting, shoulders shifting under the fabric. His hair was tied back loosely for once, curls still threatening to escape around his temples.
Jacob’s pre-game address was more forceful than any of the others.
Not louder. He didn’t need to be loud. The winless start had done enough.
He spoke about the shape of the season so far, about being close meaning nothing if they kept coming back to the rooms with the wrong result, about contest and composure and finishing the work.
There were games a team lost because they weren’t good enough, and games a team lost because they didn’t do enough of the things they were capable of doing.
The Mustangs had run out of excuses for the second kind.
Sebastian listened. He was calm by the time they left the rooms.
Sound built beyond the walls until the whole stadium seemed to breathe above them.
Then they ran out, and the MCG opened around them.
Eighty thousand people didn’t sound like a number.
It sounded like a storm. Noise sliding over the grass, filling the stands, rolling from one side of the ground to the other before crashing back in the middle.
Maroon and gold filled most of the lower section, but the Wolves’ purple, black, and red still protruded enough to make the noise split in places.
The grass stretched wide under the afternoon light, clean and huge, the centre square sitting ahead like the point everything would keep returning to.
Sebastian ran through the banner and onto the field with the others, legs moving easily now that there was somewhere to put the pressure.
The game started faster than he wanted.
The Wolves came in with the sort of pressure teams used against winless sides when they wanted doubt to do half the work for them. Every time the Mustangs touched the ball, the Wolves had a body near it. Every mark was made to feel rushed. Every loose ball had two players arriving at once.
The first centre bounce went up, and Marcos got a hand to it, but the tap came off the side of his palm and landed in too many people. Phetmany fought it forward, the ball spilled, and Sebastian got half a handball away before being driven into the ground.
They got nowhere.
He pushed himself up and reset.