Chapter 297. The Origin Point

The Italian sun was a benevolent, golden weight. It pressed down on the terracotta tiles of the villa’s terrace, coaxed the scent of rosemary and sun-warmed stone from the earth, and turned the Tyrrhenian Sea in the distance into a vast, shimmering plate of hammered silver. This was not the moody, dramatic light of Scotland or the sharp clarity of Geneva. This was light with memory in its heat.

Anton stood at the low perimeter wall, his fingers tracing the warm, rough stone. A year and a half. It felt like a lifetime lived between then and now. The man who had stood on this spot, heart a frantic bird in a cage of silk and anxiety, was almost a stranger to him now.

He heard the soft click of the French doors behind him, the shuffle of bare feet on tile. He didn’t need to turn. The particular quality of the silence announced Sabatine’s presence—a calm, grounding energy that had become as essential to him as his own breath.

“It’s smaller than I remember,” Sabatine said, his voice a low rumble in the afternoon stillness. He came to stand beside Anton, their arms brushing. He wasn’t looking at the view. He was looking at Anton’s profile.

“Or we’re bigger,” Anton replied softly.

They had bought the villa. Not the one from the society pages, the one his father had owned—a cold, monumental thing further up the coast. This one was smaller, tucked into a hillside of olive groves above Positano. They’d found it by accident during a desperate, secretive trip after the Geneva fallout, needing a neutral place to simply be while the legal and public relations maelstrom raged. It was here, on this terrace, with the sun setting in a blaze of peach and violet, that Anton—raw, terrified of the vulnerability but more terrified of not seizing the chance—had asked the question that changed everything.

It hadn’t been a formal proposal. There had been no ring, no grand gesture. It had been a stumble of words, born of watching Sabatine sleep peacefully in a shaft of morning light after weeks of nightmares.

“I don’t know what the future looks like. I don’t know if we’ll ever be safe, or what ‘normal’ even means for us. But I know I want to build whatever it is… with you. Exclusively. Permanently. If you’ll have me. If you’ll have this… mess of a life.”

Sabatine had opened his eyes, sleep-soft and utterly clear. He hadn’t smiled. He’d simply reached out, taken Anton’s hand, and brought it to his lips. “Yes,” he’d said, the word a vow sealed into his skin. “To the mess. To life. To you.”

Now, they are back. Not as fugitives or wounded animals licking their wounds, but as men returning to an origin point. The Institute was thriving under Leon’s steady hand. The Academy’s first skeleton of steel and glass rose from the Highland rock. The ghosts of Kaine and Evelyn were persistent but manageable whispers. They had built a life from the chaos, and now they had come to thank the ground where the first, shaky foundation had been laid.

“Show me,” Sabatine said, his voice barely above a whisper.

Anton knew what he meant. He led him away from the wall, towards the centre of the terrace, near a weathered stone bench overflowing with cascading bougainvillaea. The air hummed with cicadas. He stopped, his feet finding the exact spot on a particular sun-bleached tile. “Here,” he said, his throat tightening. “I was here. You were…” He pointed a few feet away, to a spot in the dappled shade of a lemon tree. “There.”

Sabatine looked at the spot under the lemon tree as if seeing a ghost of his past self. Then, with a solemn, deliberate slowness, he walked to it. He turned to face Anton, his expression unreadable, a tumult of memory in his storm-grey eyes. He was no longer the haunted, guilt-ridden operative, nor the confident Director of Integrity. He was just Sabatine, at the exact place where his life had irrevocably veered towards joy.

Anton watched, his breath caught. The world narrowed to this square of sunlit terrace, the scent of lemons and salt, and the man standing twelve feet away, staring at him as if for the first time.

Then, Sabatine moved. Not back to his spot, but forward. He closed the distance between them with a few sure strides until he stood directly in front of Anton, on the tile he had just vacated. He was in Anton’s original space, looking at the spot under the lemon tree where he had once stood.

“This is where you were,” Sabatine murmured, his gaze lifting to meet Anton’s. “Alone. Terrified. Offering me your broken world.”

He reached out, his hands coming up to cradle Anton’s face. His palms were warm, slightly rough. His thumbs stroked the high arches of Anton’s cheekbones. The touch was infinitely tender, a reverence.

“And I was there,” Sabatine continued, his eyes searching Anton’s, seeing the echo of that old fear, now gentled by time and trust. “Seeing the bravest thing I’d ever witnessed. Not a CEO’s power play. A man’s heart, laid bare. A fortress, offering me the keys.”

He leaned in then, slowly, giving Anton every chance to pull away, though they both knew he wouldn’t, he couldn’t. He kissed him.

It was not a kiss of passion, though love thrummed through it like a live wire. It was a re-enactment. A consecration. A homecoming. His lips were soft, sure, speaking a silent language of gratitude, of recognition, of a promise not just remembered, but renewed. He kissed him as the man he was now, kissing the ghost of the man who had stood here, trembling with hope.

When he finally drew back, his forehead rested against Anton’s. Both their eyes were closed. The cicadas’ song seemed louder, a celebratory chorus.

“Yes,” Sabatine whispered again, the word breathed into the space between them, as potent as it had been the first time.

A shuddering breath escaped Anton. He wrapped his arms around Sabatine, holding him tight, feeling the solid, real weight of him, the cool metal of the jet-fuselage pendant against his own chest. They stood fused together in the Italian sun, on the ground of their beginning, and Anton felt a circle complete with a quiet, seismic click.

Later, after the sun had dipped towards the sea, painting the sky in familiar shades of peach and violet, they sat on the stone bench, a bottle of local Aglianico between them. The proposal spot was just a patch of tile again, but it seemed to glow with a residual light.

“I was so sure you’d say no,” Anton admitted, swirling the dark wine in his glass. “I had a whole speech prepared for how we could still work together professionally if you did.”

Sabatine gave a soft, incredulous laugh. “You idiot. I’d have followed you into an active warzone by that point. Saying ‘yes’ to a messy life with you was the easiest decision I’d ever made. It was the first decision that was truly, wholly mine in years.”

They talked of that time not with the pain of recent wounds, but with the gentle curiosity of archaeologists examining precious relics. The fear had been transmuted into strength; the desperation into a foundation.

“Do you ever miss it?” Sabatine asked, his gaze on the darkening sea. “The certainty of old life? The clean, cold walls?”

Anton didn’t need to think. “Not for a second. That certainty was a prison sentence. This…” He gestured between them, at the villa, at the invisible threads stretching back to London and Scotland. “…this is a terrifying, magnificent freedom. And it’s only terrifying because it matters so much.”

Sabatine nodded, understanding perfectly. He reached over, his hand finding Anton’s, their fingers linking. “We should come back every year. To this spot. To remember.”

“Not to remember,” Anton corrected gently, turning his hand to lace their fingers more tightly. “To measure how far we’ve come. To see what new layers the ‘yes’ has built.”

The first stars emerged, piercing the velvet blue. The lights of Positano began to twinkle far below like a scattering of fallen stars. The world was beautiful, and it was theirs, not to own, but to move through together.

As they rose to go inside, Anton paused, taking one last look at the terrace. The origin point. It wasn’t a shrine to the past. It was a touchstone for the present, a fixed point of gratitude from which their entire, sprawling, messy, glorious future had unfurled.

Sabatine kissed him once more, there on the threshold—a quick, warm press of lips that was a promise for the night ahead, and all the nights to come.

“Grazie,” Sabatine murmured against his mouth, the Italian awkward but heartfelt.

“For what?” Anton whispered back.

“For being here. That day. For being brave enough for both of us.”

Anton pulled him close, the past and the future folding together in the warm Italian dark. “You’re my bravery, Sabe. You always were.”

They went inside, leaving the terrace to the cicadas and the moon. The place where a question had been asked and answered held its quiet peace, a sacred plot in the geography of their hearts, forever marking the spot where two solitary paths had decisively, joyfully, become one.

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