party anthem
Aug. 2nd, 2022 03:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
girlrocktitle: party anthem
fandom: f1
pairing: 1016, 516, etc.
rating: m
word count: 8.7k
[sitting in the post-race press conference after season-defining leglerg dnf] uh charles, you know i know you're a gamer, and uh…
the way i wrote all the sebchal parts before his announcement 🥲 anyway i kind of detest whatever this is but i realized at some point that i just needed to post it and get over myself T__T here's some illegible sharlfic. truly sorry. happy birthday you know who you are
Frankly speaking, Charles has been sitting at this table for what feels like hours. He's clean-shaven for the cameras and his legs have grown numb with inertia. He says: "The day I feel fear on track, that's when I'll know. That's when I have to quit Formula One."
In the low light of the studio, they all laugh with him. The air around him is hot and stuffy, his concealer caking deep into the fault of his smile lines. They avert their eyes, smile thoughtfully. Bring a contemplative hand to their chins.
Ask: "But surely you must fear something?"
When he was younger, his father would crouch at his feet and grab hold of Charles's second-place trophies with a smile that reached valiantly for his eyes and fell just short every time. Charles still remembers how it knocked the wind out of him, the swing between his warm congratulations and the ensuing questioning, its critical apex, the way his mouth patiently pulled the unfettered sentiment from behind his teeth. Petit, don't you wish that was you on top instead?
This singular question spurred him on for years to come. A lifetime and then some. In Varennes, still too gangly and quiet for the size of his emerging future, Charles remembers staring Max down a few steps off the podium and letting hunger unfurl in his stomach. It was sharp and acidic and bled him out from the inside. Max, who in his teens reminded Charles distinctly of a nervous squirrel, or some other kind of uncomfortable woodland creature, already vacillated impressively between meek non-answer and shades of furious entitlement a boy his age could only have learned through bloodline imprint. Later Max would claim to have never actually hated him, and the aversion to mutual extremity complicated any further revisionism of Charles's own character, a cruelty in and of itself.
Still, debriefing with his father was one of the first things Charles ever truly learned about motorsport. Nothing of fear or restraining himself. He'd been thrust upon a truth that persisted far outside the track, beyond the thrill of his weight propelling itself toward the racing line. What he meant was, this was all a family affair. No measurement of warmth or upbringing or self-infliction—his father, Max's father, him and Arthur, Jules; what did it matter?—could differentiate the depths of its universal pressure. Winning was everything. It had to be. Charles hated punching below his weight so badly that, in moments of failure, he knew only to turn the fist into himself.
"Of course I'm afraid of some things," he laughs. Earlier they'd dug their shovels into the gravel and pried at buried carnage, asking him about youth and mantles and robbed careers. Topics like this were almost always approached with the suffocating inflection of objective tragedy, a faraway spectator's sympathy. One woman tented her hands and diplomatically hedged, But he saved lives this way, didn't he? As though it'd been a simple and selfless sacrifice. As though each death materialized as little more than a string of grisly data points, graphed and logged and regressed upon in the name of testing.
Still, Charles allowed it. He'd learned this one too: sometimes it hurt less to ascribe honor where well-wishes failed.
"Yeah?" they ask. "Like what?"
In Singapore, Charles knows he's being childish about the whole thing when he begs off the Ferrari 1-2 afterparty two drinks in. The problem would always be that his conviction in being right and his conviction in acting right were wildly different beasts, and at twenty-one they warred continuously, pushing the limits of his goodwill.
So first he waits. Waits until the zealous crowd converges onto its victor, Seb showing far less inhibition at having drinks pressed into his hand, out in the thick of it. The way clears, and a few minutes later he manages a flimsy excuse for heading back to his hotel room, shuffling into the bathroom to wash his hands by the sink.
For a long beat Charles stands in the mirror contemplating the smudged lines of his reflection, the places where his image fractures. The skin of his neck is splotchy and pink from the humidity. Charles isn't drunk—barely even buzzed, but these past few weeks have left a strange feeling rattling around him all the same. The uncomfortable roil of lows and highs grated at him like whetstone.
He'd had time to calm down in the driver's room earlier, where he'd forced shame into quelling indignation. Still, the internal rapprochement of triumph and defeat tasted bitter together. The whiplash of it hurt to digest. Charles knows he should start packing, but he's thinking about the wine in his minibar when he walks back toward his bedroom, nearly reaching for it, wanting to drink himself into bed. He and Pierre used to get drunk just like this—in bedrooms far away from home and removed from the reality of their own lives and bodies, passing a bottle between each other to the acoustics of Pierre's bad music or a significant silence, shared and electric.
He shakes himself off and stops by his suitcase instead. It blocks the hall between the foot of his bed and one of those mahogany drawers that always reveal unexpected souvenirs, like notepads or a menu or a bible. Here he kicks the top open and sets his phone to shuffle through a barrage of wistful songs, getting to work folding his t-shirts at the well of it. The night crawls by in slow measures of low piano melodies and English metaphors he really only half understands, and it's why Charles doesn't know how long he's been sitting there when the knock at the door comes. Only that he's tired and jittery and there's a crick in his shoulder and he feels sore all over, down to the bone.
Charles stands. When the shape from across the peephole comes into focus, he frowns, then brings his hand down to swing the handle open.
"Hi, Charles," Seb says, inexplicably.
This was the thing about Seb.
Back in the beginning, the first time they met, Charles hadn't known what to make of him. He'd thought of Seb as a walking oxymoron, or an enigma too deeply encrypted to decipher. Dwelling on it for too long made his head hurt. Only with time did Charles come to a realization: some people were simply themselves. Even more critically, this didn't seem to hurt them.
Fair or not, that was Sebastian.
Now, Charles's first instinct is to tell Seb that he has the wrong room. He wants to turn him away and force him to gloat in solitude. If only, he thinks, he weren't also stuck on the dimensions of Seb's luxury, his apparent immunity to himself.
He takes a step back.
"Um. Hi," Charles manages. It's clear that Seb has been drinking, because the smell of it is immediate and sour, but as far as he could see the effects ended here. Seb grins the wry grin he carries around with him everywhere, the glow of alcohol working only to bring him even more into focus. Like when people took photos of races and in suspending a car to its static image turned everything still behind it, the track and the barriers and the flags and the trees and the sky above, into a single indistinguishable streak of light. The lens adjusted. "What—uh. Why are you here?"
"Can I come in?" Seb asks.
When Charles says nothing, he steps through the open mouth of the hotel room as if gravitationally pulled toward him. Charles backs imperceptibly into the wall. He watches Seb watch him, leaving him feeling off-balance and wrong. Suddenly it felt impossible that Seb could be shorter than him, any smaller, what with the way he crowded into him so confidently.
Charles tries again. "Did Mattia ask you to speak to me, or—?"
Sebs barks out a laugh. "Charles," he exclaims, putting a hand to his hip, amused. "Obviously you overestimate his trust in me! But, no. You left early, so I came to check on you."
He says this matter-of-factly, perhaps almost kindly. Charles is old enough to recognize a difference.
"At Monza I did not go to your motorhome."
"No," he admits. "You didn't."
"Then why?"
What's important to understand is that, over the course of his time at Ferrari, Seb's rage smoldered and melted down eventually. This was what made him complicated, for Charles, how his moods and priorities were so unpredictable, how he leveled wisdom Charles routinely forced himself to unprocess. The other thing about Seb was that he never lacked for words, and he had a lot to say about himself, or about the environment and the stewards and the drivers around him, about the burns he'd sustained in the wildfire of Ferrari's managerial entropy, third-degree. He loved this word the most: failure.
You see, Seb always began. The thing is, he continued, padding it with an obviously, an of course, a toothy stretch of his mouth. You see—the thing is—well, a relationship is meant to be a conversation, of course. He chased platitudes only a man beyond the glitz of Charles's early twenties might bother finding any obstinate truth in. The thing is that some people get into relationships expecting a mirror of themselves, to have their thoughts and feelings and needs reflected, to be allowed to make another person singular. They keep short memories; they forget the distance they crossed to reach this person in the first place. But that's not really a relationship.
No?
No, Charles. That's just dating yourself.
Charles knew that Seb was the kind of man who liked the sound of his voice too much. He liked winding the tape back to hear the dry monotone of his meandering witticisms, delighting in all wayward manner of capturing another's attention, even if it meant he held Charles's.
So how it happens is like this:
By the wall. One hand braced against patterned paper. The other on the meat of Charles's waist, the flex of each knuckle harsh and vice-like and unforgiving, as if he were giving Charles something with this taking.
"I'm going to tell you something," Seb informs him. He pauses, tilting his head. "You're tense."
Charles isn't only tense, he's practically wound around himself. He wants to shift his body but fears the perception of any movement, Seb's ability to read through him.
"No," he denies. Only it comes out like a question.
"Oh, Charles," Seb coos. "Okay, all right. I'll tell you. You know what the real problem is?"
They were like two points on a line, going backward from each other.
"Everyone—because it's you, it's Charles. You know. Everyone is scared to be honest with you. Obviously, you're always kind, and you want to be a good man." One hand touches at bare skin and feels Charles shiver through it. "But you get angry and then you bite your tongue. Is that how you think anyone wins a championship? Charles, everyone who has ever won something is an asshole."
Charles thinks: did Seb really not know? How his silence would always be a multifaceted thing, how the way Charles held back hurt and protected others in tandem?
"I am not so nice," he protests, terse.
Seb raises an eyebrow. He's still holding all of him in place.
"I'm sure you believe that," he allows, and Charles is struck with an image: the tension that ran through Seb after bad races like a live wire, the way his hair uncoiled from beneath his helmet with each invective hurled within probing range, ready to expound upon the rulebook and his convictions. Charles doesn't mention any of this, though it's a close thing. Its truth runs hotly through his center. Not even a man’s thirties, whatever chalice of maturity he claimed to have drunk from, could salve the red of his wounded ego.
Seb eyes the entire length of him, up and down, openly delighting. He parts his mouth and runs a playful tongue just over the tip of his bottom teeth, like he knows something. This is the lightheartedness he'll don, occasionally, that reminds Charles of the Sebastian Vettel he grew up glimpsing through the TV: fresh-faced and boyish and crying jubilantly over the radio. Those flashes of a younger self. A pre-Ferrari conceptualization, before they sunk their claws in. Which they always did.
His voice refuses to vocalize anything else, so Charles just demands, hushed: What?
Seb hums. He knows that Charles knows too. This time when the hand on the wall reaches out for him it toys at his belt, the waistband, just past where Charles is hard in his pants. Charles has to look forward, into the blue of Seb's eyes, so that he isn't forced to acknowledge the reality of his own desire, how Seb's breath is warm against his cheek, how every part of him wants to give in. Seb smiles again and this time it's beatific, in a way that makes it clear he finds himself disproportionately amusing, the worst kind of smile he has.
"Do you need a hand?" he asks.
Under the orange glow of hotel light, with practiced banality:
The woman you were with in Italy, in the blue dress. Is she your girlfriend?
What?
She's a pretty thing, you're lucky. But quite young. Is that how you like them, Charles? Young?
I—what?
What? What? Is that all you can say?
In short, Sebastian isn't gentle. Not with this. Charles feels him tug his mouth to the shell of his ear and bite at the cartilage, hears him whisper reprobate nothings into the wet of his throat, relentless and unbidden, the swell of it a sick concertino to his own muted unraveling. He feels like he's fraying, the way he sways along with the movement of Sebastian's fist, his hold on him, the stark relief of it.
Please—he keeps whispering this. Doesn't even know why. Over and over again, until the word loses its own shape. Charles doesn’t know when he started shaking, only that it feels like he’s vortexing, limbs succumbing to some impossible pressure.
Look at you. Charles, what do you want?
Please. I don't know.
Charles, you said you wouldn't do anything stupid for Ferrari, right? Didn't you say that?
Yes? Yes. Please. I don't—
With each challenge the edge to Sebastian's voice grows sardonic and hard, filled to the brim with something threatening at the balance of this precarious ecosystem. Almost, but not quite, past the tipping point. Later they'd come to realize that neither of them had known how much further there still was for this to go, how it would somehow become more complex and then utterly unremarkable, two soldiers facing defeat and finally learning to commiserate. God, they weren't even in Styria yet. Puttering around in their shitbox of a 2020 car, clacking their teeth through the frigidity of each ensuing debrief, Mattia's hand gripping meekly at the back of Charles's neck in a gesture of controlled goodwill, some introverted fumble at leadership. Like trying to corral a kitten by nipping unconvincingly at the scruff.
When it ends, it's without tension. It feels like all his temper has been siphoned out of him, the way Seb says I know, I know that you needed this, right as he works him over the edge. Later Charles will wonder whether the verbal acknowledgement spoiled the sanctity of their act, whether it sullied its hazy glowing memory. But for now he can only sag into himself.
A part of Charles almost wishes he were further gone. That he'd had more to drink, that maybe he'd have an excuse to finally make someone stay. Instead, he says nothing. Seb isn't a cruel man, but he still has a race driver’s patience, and as the aftershocks subside so does his hold on him. With one smooth push he's jettisoning back, leaving Charles slumped against the wall. The weight in his shoulders crumbles down like sand, waves of subdued misery crashing in to lap softly at his feet.
There's the sound of hands being washed in the bathroom. The tap being lifted, water running.
"Here you go," Charles hears after a while. Seb is pressing a damp towel to his skin. Seb, who looks at him the way you might look at a wet dog caught out in the rain, trying to figure out whether it's meant to be there, who it even belongs to. Just a few minutes ago he'd thumbed at the small of Charles's waist the way one's hand might find purchase in a collar.
"You okay?" Seb asks this time.
Charles doesn't trust his own voice, but he forces himself to say it: "Yes. Okay."
"Okay. Well," he glances briefly at his watch, "I need to go call Hanna." The dismissal in his voice is clear. Somewhere in the part of Charles's brain that clings still to a modicum of clarity, he thinks that this is ridiculous, because it's his hotel room to begin with. And Seb is the one who showed up at his door smelling of spirits, not him. Seb is the one who crowded him against the patterned wall and stuck the roughened skin of his palm to Charles's chest, his stomach, down the snap of his waistband, who dismantled him coolly and precisely and with systematic indifference.
Charles's voice is hoarse with disuse and something like trepidation. Too timid, even for him. He tries clearing his throat.
"This late?"
When Seb shrugs, it's with a wide roll of his shoulder. The chasm between them splinters as he says this, the truth of their separation. "Yes. Just need to check in on the kids."
Charles nods. Because what else? Of course. It's hard to explain, the way something like this divided them, beyond the obvious configuration of it. He nods again, and Sebastian leans forward to press his lips into the crown of his hair, featherlight, and then he's disappearing into the crevices of the hallway's geometry, letting the door fall behind him. Then Charles is alone. Again.
There's fear, here.
But what do you even say? Really. Honestly. That, now that you mention it, I once felt my heart beat out of my chest watching another man catch fire through my rearview mirrors? That, no, I’m scared this won’t ever be enough, that one day we’ll look back and see that I squandered my best chances at making something of myself, that for all the legacies I’ve carried the sum of my own fell empty and negligent? No poor host, Charles knew, would want for his meticulously gilded cowardice. No one needed to know how painstakingly he ripped stitches out of each new attachment and left them to fester; the longer things went on, the more attuned he grew to their preciousness, the more he wished to minimize their genesis, their significance. Such love would always terrify him.
After Sochi, which is stupid and idiotic, Charles flies back and breaks up with his girlfriend properly. Giada already knows. But still she looks at him and says, rueful and disbelieving: Four years weren’t enough for you?
This is what separated him from Seb. Seb, with a championship to each loved one, his high school sweetheart and picture-perfect family postcards, the vintage motorbikes and his fucking bees, felt a universe apart in comparison. Charles was running away from himself, probably. Or his childhood, the truth of his inquisitions, the way he could never make a conversation of his relationships. He didn't know where the mirror ended. He was used to making excuses, both for himself and the team, had seen nothing to prove with Charlotte but had slept with her in Monza anyway, in her blue minidress, when she'd fallen into his bed and let him press his jaw to the inside of her thigh and said, Shit, Giada is going to kill me.
Charles tells Giada that it's a matter of values. They've grown apart. She calls him an asshole in pinched Italian. Somewhere down the line, Charlotte informs him that she had then proceeded to get spectacularly drunk and wish with a fiercely inebriated emphasis for him to hit the barriers his next race, that there had been few things she'd wanted more at the time than to watch him flame out of her life in brilliant Ferrari red.
That's kind of what this debrief feels like. In Maranello, Mattia folding his hands on the conference table. The tension suffusing through Charles's jaw, excuse after excuse after excuse. Like pulling on loose teeth after a sucker punch, searching for tissue in a mouth shocked dark, red with blood.
Maybe he never walked out of the flames.
On fear:
"Like snakes," he says breezily. They laugh again, this time at the answer’s quaintness. "Yes, snakes, and spiders, and… of course I feel fear. Just not when I put the helmet on."
"That's very impressive," a man tells him, nodding with understanding. "I'm sure I could never do the same."
"Well," he offers. "That's the sport."
Everything ends in 2020, or at least in some sense of the word. Like a sputtering engine. Quietly, then with empty disappointment. After the season is over, Arthur shows up to his place looking pale and sits on the sofa with an uncharacteristic heaviness haunting the lines of his face.
"Charles," he says, twisting his hands together. Charles hates it instantly, the way the image split apart to resemble him. He wishes that their mutual self-scrutiny weren't so plainly encoded in the scratch cards of their genetic lottery, that they hadn't been hardwired to smother themselves beneath each championship result and prospective implication, each win and loss, the gaping what-ifs. What pointless imbuement. "I couldn't even finish first."
The guilt was like this: a survivor's. It was the same Charles felt when Seb pressed his helmet into his hands just days ago in Abu Dhabi and told him to make the most of it, of the future and the team but most of all himself. Seb, justifiably, bore premature suggestions of retirement and punditry as a fundamental affront on his character, but he'd been deathly earnest about this, their farewell, hugging Charles flush to his chest, only serving to deepen the ache of it. Not just the guilt, but the regret and all of Charles's viciousness, too. The moments he'd allowed himself as the season strained and groaned around them. He'd seen Seb drown and simply thought: Soon this will no longer be my problem. And then it was over. And then there was Carlos.
"None of that matters anymore," he promises Arthur.
Arthur huffs and waves a hand around. "It does to me."
As a matter of pride, maybe. But the reality of the situation went unspoken.
"Arthur," Charles insists. "Listen." There was no skirting around it, what he would do for his brother. How much there still was left to repay. A career for a career, snug in the FDA's pocket. "You're still going to make it. I swear. Look at me, when have I ever lied to you?"
Arthur raises an unimpressed eyebrow. He tries for sullen and unmoved but is betrayed by the slightest tug at the corner of his mouth, biting at his lower lip when he says, "Every fucking day, you idiot."
"All right," Charles allows, laughing, knowing the conversation won. He's within his rights to call him an annoying cunt but somehow refrains. Brothers. "Well, I'm not lying about this."
For a long moment, Arthur is silent. He blinks—once, twice—then shrugs in slow acknowledgement. Charles tracks the slow diffusion of his frustration, how it leaves in its gaping haunt a defeated weariness he knew far too well, could recognize and mirror immediately.
"You know it's not your job to look after me, right?"
Charles thinks: But it is. Of course, it had to be. Who else would ever be so willing?
"I'm not making it my job," he defends anyway. "I'm not—I'm not doing anything. You're the one looking after yourself."
It hurts more than he cares to admit. He sticks his tongue into his cheek and feels hot with the shame of unfairness, or perhaps simply the invariability of it. The angle of reproach didn't really matter. What could he even say? Dad chose me first: forgive me? After everything, Arthur still races like he's making up for lost time. His reckless abandon mirrored the way Seb raced, as if he'd been chasing the end of it. Everything was colored the same, just another shade of survivor's guilt.
"We don't have to talk about it," Charles offers. A way out. An exit plan, a strategy. Somewhere between genuine belief and hollow reassurance, spoken to the both of them, "Next year, though. You'll be quick."
Of course, things weren't always like this. The thing is that before Charles really left home—before the mid-season break became synonymous with beach-hopping with his friends and snorkeling off the coast in Cancún with his girlfriend and every other unsanctioned bucket-list escapade; with Alex pulling him away to play golf in the sweltering heat and forcing Lily to partner George in some approximation of self-handicap, so that Alex was allowed a few laughs at the expense of George's form and a gleeful Mate, you are just hopeless; with early-morning training and the repetitive constant of his meal plan and eventually getting called in to sit dully through contract discussions or reviews of team strategy—his summers had once been demarcated by the ever-growing shape of Pierre.
More than anything else, this was a childhood. First, at the eclipse of spring, Pierre lying down on his guest mattress at the foot of Charles's bed. Charles waking him up to listen to the rev of V10s across the circuit, from miles away. How everything that weekend had felt closer and further than ever. Pierre came back every year, once school was out, a study in object permanence. Charles remembers growing up on the back of his family's boats every summer and how they ate moules frites where the light waned into the bay, how Pierre wrestled Charles into playing beach volleyball until they ceded defeat to exhaustion and spent the walk back comparing the damage on the stretch of their sun-reddened shoulders, Pierre golden where Charles burst into angry flares of pink.
Ten years expanded and contracted like a lung. Time exhaled on a labored breath. It was beautiful until it wasn't, and then it was ugly and unbearable but necessary in some profound and unintended sense, and then it was beautiful again, it was perfect, and then it wasn't, and it was, and that was life. That was adulthood.
At the end of 2020, Charles wants to ask Pierre whether he thinks they were destined to always counterpoint each other. His mind goes back to Monza, both years. Those worst weeks of their lives, loss upon rebirth upon ego death, over and over again. How their gouged-out highs never seemed to converge onto each other, only bisected into isolated roads. Beyond the obvious red of Charles's want, there were many things that went unspoken between them. The way Charles thought to himself: I know what it's like. Yes, I do, about surviving another. I know about fashioning yourself into a crypt for other people's memories; being made not just to hold them but in a way to become them, too, that this is what grief tastes like, left out to salt in the sun.
Keeper of the wound. Both of them. It stung, but it could be a comfort, too. To hold the pain so close to you. Most of all it felt like Charles's body simply didn't know how to react to the natural conclusion of things anymore, the way every year was both an end and a beginning at once, an evisceration. How he emerged from the other side feeling dizzy and bereft and flung the wrong way out. Drum the mind around, it said. Rattle the insides until the skin splits and there's nothing left to it.
God. Fuck.
"Do you ever wish we could go back?" Charles hears himself ask, once. Mostly he means the ambiguous responsibility of karting, or missing half of middle school and being told that he was already the pride of the school, that he'd always be the future of something, anything. Everything. Mostly he means winters in the Alps, all the moments that had felt stolen and tender and bruised, how they had—
No.
"Do you?" Pierre counters. He's stretched out on the couch with his limbs running in every direction, trying to take up as much space as dimensionally possible. Charles marvels at the sight of it. In all his life, he's never met anyone so determined to appear perpetually larger than they actually were.
"I mean," he shrugs. And it went like this. Toro Rosso had become AlphaTauri and Charles had joked that at least Pierre was no longer stuck sporting the angry scarlet-lettered slap of his demotion anymore, at least not technically, a barest consolation. Pierre had thrown him a finger and told him to go fuck himself, grinning all the while. Life is fine, Pierre decided later. It's just the fucking car, you know? And Charles did. But he hadn't known how to say that he felt emptier by the day, that it felt like something inside of him had been irreconcilably compromised, structurally, that now there was a fuel leak and no one was doing anything, holy shit, what the fuck, just letting the whole thing go up into flames, so he'd nodded and flattened his tongue instead. "Yeah. Sometimes. I mean, it's only natural, no?"
Pierre's grip on his PS4 controller loosens slowly. When he reaches over and ruffles Charles's hair the palm of his hand is clammy and hot. On instinct, Charles laughs and presses into the warmth of it.
"Hmm," says Pierre. "Sure. I mean, if I'm honest, then I definitely miss when you were like—barely a meter ten. Or not even. Little Charlito!"
"My guy. You are way too obsessed with my height," Charles accuses, scoffing.
Pierre shrugs his hands in a hey, what can I say? gesture. Charles threads his fingers through the top of his own hair and eyes the soft edge of Pierre's smile, the pink of his lips, the scruff of his annoyingly triangular beard. His mind startles with a memory then, or just an unfurling series of truths: Pierre pouting at Charles every time he came back a touch taller and broader. How he'd tell Charles to stop growing because he needed the ballast advantage, kept saying that one day he'd stop hugging Charles when he was too old for its intimacy, for it to not be weird. How he still always found ways of creating a touch Charles could lean into.
Pierre continues, "But we did also have those disgusting haircuts. And you didn't know how to dress yourself at all, not that you do now, but—ow!—still." He runs a hand at the spot in his shoulder that Charles had just dug his fist into. The muscle flexes. Charles hates himself for always noticing. "So I guess it kind of cancels out."
There had been a time, once, with the Red Bull seat looming in the horizon, when Pierre had looked at Charles and decided: Next year, we'll both be fighting at the front. He'd inflected each word with premature clarity. This Pierre could recognize only his own kindness in a shared future's materialization, in hypothesizing about parallel vectors, showing Charles he would make room for him. That Charles was not Esteban, and Pierre wanted to thread competition around their bodies like a promise, a self-constructed courtesy.
This Pierre had been entire lifetimes ago. Now Charles looks at the blue-red, pink-flushed blur of Max on the podium, the victory gold of him, and he thinks: What could have been? What would never be again? Max was not the same person after Abu Dhabi. Whatever weight lifted from him had departed with a wave, a veritable seismic shift, and the change dredged up a mélange of envy and relief in Charles's stomach, frustrating him to no end. Ten years later and he still felt the same hunger. Only the dimensions of it remained impossible. Only they shifted over.
"Have I shown you this one yet?" Max asks him when they're sitting together in the press room after qualifying. He squints as he wags a finger over his camera's photo grid with the elegance of a middle-aged father in desperate need of prescription glasses. Eventually, he locates his bearings and proffers the device to Charles with an open palm.
Charles watches. "Oh!" he cries after a beat, delighted. It's a video of Penelope in a white sundress, snuggling a slobbering dog the same size as her to her chest. "Oh, this is very cute."
"Yeah," Max agrees, smiling mildly. He leans into Charles and mock-whispers, "We try not to really buy her many red clothes. Don't want her getting the wrong idea, right?"
This has never been their shared language, and at first it's disorienting for Charles to recalibrate himself. But Max had proven, with time, that he could be benign without forcible extraction, and Charles likes children all the same, so he learns to react in all the appropriate places. Max helping her blow bubbles at the beach, both of them slipping down a water slide. Racing toy cars in the living room. Subtly, Charles wonders how Max as a father—the lines of his face, the draw of his mouth—differed from the Max who rushed to crowd Charles at parc fermé for impromptu debriefs with his helmet clutched under his arm, free hand gesturing with pinpoint recall and burgeoning urgency.
He looks both too young and impossibly old at once. Charles feels unmoored, the way he does when Pierre talks about all their friends and his old classmates getting married and starting families, or like that time when Seb had asked him how long he intended to muck around in free practice, what he thought the jagged tunneled line of his future looked like. Seb had been joking, of course. But even then Charles had been hardwired to distinguish the challenge of it.
In the end, when it comes down to it, it boils down to this. Formula One would always be a restrictive sport. Some people, like Lewis and Max, or Seb before Ferrari, they got what they wanted. For everyone else, it was the things you didn't let yourself have that mattered.
For Charles, that meant things like Monaco. Or childhood imaginations of glory. Punch-drunk love, the misplaced security of touch; Seb’s hand on him back in Singapore, finishing him off with sympathetic inelegance, knowing not to ask more of him than he could handle. Charles would have gotten to his knees if pushed. That had been the problem. All those hotel rooms he’d held another in, or been held in first, caressed, forced down, wondering whether this time would be the last, desperate to keep his own heart at arm’s length.
For Charles, it meant reexamining the flimsy paper chassis of Pierre's competitive instincts and letting the gap between them widen. This interval, stretching. Long gone was any reverie of symmetrical fulfillment. Now they were both stuck, but in their own ways, entirely separate from each other.
Still, life was fine.
"Nice car," Pierre tells him. He folds his body and steps his way into the passenger seat, clicking the seatbelt into place. Beyond them the Montréal streets are crowded, summer evening mild and upbeat.
"You jealous?" he taunts. Pierre is still in his team gear, drumming his fingers onto the dashboard. Charles glances at the logo strung across his chest, and for a split second lets his eyes linger on its stretch, the white and blue patterning of it. Then he blinks and forces himself to look away. Eyes on the road.
"Oh, definitely. Maybe I'll buy one with my new contract."
Charles laughs. "High baller," he says appreciatively, making a fist with his free hand. The other grips loosely at the steering wheel, easing the car gently forward. Pierre bumps it and then reaches over the radio to fiddle with the music. He connects it to his phone's Bluetooth instead, and the song he plays sounds like it's from a Spotify playlist with a black-and-white cover and a name like Chill vibes, your choice of unrelated emoji. Which, knowing Pierre, was probably right on the money.
Behind the trailing red glow of traffic and tail lights, the car cuts through the damp of the night like a knife.
"How far do you want to go?" Charles says, when the silence has stretched long enough. They have time tonight. Perhaps not as much time as Charles would like, but the future was bigger than any of this, of course, bigger than dinner and the fans by the windows and this car and the hotel and Charles's desperate prolongation of pre-race normalcy. Tonight would have to be enough.
Pierre shifts and Charles feels him lean in just that bit closer to him. Everything feels warm and dark, and there's a still emptiness here that he thinks he could get lost in, the tick-tick of the turn signal and the languid crawl of cars around them and the vague shape of Pierre by his side, the half-there promise of his presence.
For a second Charles wants everything. He wants to pull over and kiss Pierre right on the sidewalk, or make Pierre kiss him, drink the quiet and loving way he liked to pant out Charles's name into the wet of his red and wanting mouth. Charles isn't precious about the way people say his name but has always liked how it sits on his tongue, specifically: Petit. Calamar. Every vowel stretched out, lax and unhurried, the northern roll of it.
Charles doesn't pull over. Doesn't even move, just keeps his knuckles steady, exhaling. In, out. They were both too sober, was the thing. The night had been doomed from the start.
"How far can you go?" Pierre asks.
Charles and Pierre sleep together for the first time in winter, the same month they secure their respective GP championships. At the ski station, on vacation with their families. Two beds to a chalet room. Charles is barely eighteen, skin flushed swollen with youth.
As it were, it happens through a series of deceptions. First: Charles asks what happened to Pierre's girlfriend, the one he stopped posting candid photos of and emoji-laden captions about to his Instagram midway through the season. Pierre says: they broke up last month. Pierre runs a hand down his face. Pierre says: it was all spectacularly stupid, the fact that he was a champion now but was being sent off to Japan instead, that they still needed him back in England between races for testing. Charles says: he'd be pissed off, too, if he had Helmut Marko breathing down his neck to take up shop in Milton Keynes, which frankly would never sound like a real place where actual people lived. Pierre says: oh, shut up. Pierre says: give me that, and then Pierre picks the wine bottle from where Charles's fingers cradle it and where his palm is wet with condensation and he takes a deep, long swig straight from the mouth, the stretch of his neck and throat working in tandem.
They drink. Charles feels sweat bead at his hairline, how his cheeks warm. He wants to take Pierre by the wrist and press his hand to the skin of it, make the touch stick, ask him, You feel that? Because he's drunk, he does. Pierre recoils, says, Gross, just the way Charles had intended.
I'll show you gross.
What does that even mean?
You'll see, he says. Pierre squints at him, slow and unsteady. They're on the same bed, Pierre's, too close for comfort or excuse. Two boys, swaying.
Maybe I'll show you first, Pierre says then, and Charles is electrified with it. The understanding.
They would always be competitive, so they lean in at the same time. Young, drunk. Hidden from the world. It makes sense for now, each movement sweetened by booze and repose, even if just for the moment. Tomorrow they won't talk about it. They never do, each time it happens, which it will—again and again. But for now Pierre places his fingers over Charles's zipper, tugs it free, for now his mouth is dark and tastes of wine, and they hold each other awkwardly, relearning shape and geometry, and Charles wets his lips and asks if he's ever done anything like this before, and Pierre says, No, what the fuck, you?, and then Charles resolves himself, is sinking to his knees, and Pierre curses again, low. Eighteen; twenty. Another lifetime ago.
"Thanks for tonight," Pierre says in earnest. The stretch of Charles's baseball cap on the crown of his head burns into Charles's retinas like a sigil. He wants to extend this moment for as long as possible, hold it between his teeth. Sink his jaw into it.
"I'll see you tomorrow," Charles promises, even though that much is fucking obvious. Jesus. They both laugh, just sitting there, seatbelts still on, Pierre not even bothering to take the damn cap off, pulled into the deepest corner of the hotel's parking garage. Charles is thinking: come back. Is thinking: come to my room, just like old times.
Pierre hesitates for a moment, as if reading his mind. It's late and their surroundings are empty, just them and poorly-parked cars and the solitary concrete beams holding the roof up, its perpetual suspension. Finally, he turns to Charles. His eyes are dark with searching when he asks, "What's your room number again?"
Charles's breath catches. The hang paralyzes him.
703, he says.
"I can't drink tonight," Pierre warns after a beat. It means nothing and everything at once. He unbuckles his seatbelt, and Charles watches him open the door, get out, turn where he stands to lean back in to face Charles. Charles will go back to his room first, wait the minutes, the hour for Pierre to shower, to dress himself, to return to him, and when they fall into bed it will be sober and loveless.
"No," he agrees, because anything else would be stupid.
"Okay." A smile. "You said 703?"
Sometimes, it felt like Pierre's tenderness was being excised from him. He believed in God but on a level Charles could only vaguely conceptualize, and this concentrated belief—the lumbering rationalizations, restraint engendered through pursuit of absolution—made the details of their acts laborious. For Charles, the gymnastics were inevitable. He could accept and understand them. But still they felt wild and foreign to his own body, a man who knew of God but who did not think he would spare Charles any mercy in his assessment of him, a man who did not believe any prayer could soften the agony of his life and want and feelings, his constant abscondence from them, his disdain for actuality.
They only kissed when Pierre pushed himself to the limits of drunkenness. In the morning he bent his face into the toilet bowl as if to rid himself of it, not just the drink but the bruising spit-slick touch and the pulsating smell of another man's mouth and lips. When he didn't drink enough, nothing came out. So he just sat there heaving.
Yuki, Ilies. Him. Was Charles just another man? Or better, or worse: just another boy, still the same one from all those summers ago, the quiet winters, the chalet? One for whom Pierre's ministrations weren't subject to the same notions of intimacy, the same scrutiny, relieving Charles of the solemness of an adult relationship, its reality? Pierre could be sober and harsh, fucking into Charles with his fingers and pressing the damp matted mess of his forehead to his chest as he spilled over his stomach, perfunctory and quick. Or—he could be drunk and tender. When he did kiss Charles it was like he couldn't believe that the space that lingered between them was no longer occupied, that his lips were meeting and finally being met, that he could rut into the heat of Charles's thigh and feel teeth dig into his bottom lip, hear Charles beg, Come on, please, and actually move toward the sound of it. It was like when he finally fucked into Charles and his stubble scraped at the sensitive skin of his jaw and Charles's head fell back and he gasped and felt their bodies fuse together, two plates shifting and meeting down the middle, tectonic, he wasn't sure what absolution was supposed to look like if it didn't mean this.
Honesty to Charles felt like a confession. In this booth the air was thin and the curtains suffocated him.
Translated, a ragged exhale meant, I wanted to kiss you in the car. A gasp, I wanted you to know that I’ve never had anyone to myself for this long. That sometimes I can't believe you're still here, that you ever stayed. The noise he swallowed in the back of his throat, I wanted you to know that I've always been scared of outgrowing you, ever since we were younger and you would put your arm around my shoulder and when we raced up the stairs I had to stand a step above so we'd be the same height and I never wanted a single thing to change, ever, not in that moment.
That I'm still scared. I always will be.
Eventually, finally: Monaco.
Being fixed so close to his roots settles some of Charles's restlessness. There's something about being home that always veers him back toward the unprecedented, the statistically improbable, foolish as it is. What's 10% chance to a hallowed optimist, a believer? Charles loves the boat horns by the port. The salty breeze, the greenery of the streets, the way the sunlight fractures the ebb and flow of the sea.
Overhead the race weekend looms. He and Charlotte are lying in bed together, enjoying the evening chill. Pockets of vestigial light fall through the slats of his apartment's bay windows and kiss the exposed skin of his forearms, warm the space where their bodies tangle.
"You know Giada used to complain?" Charlotte says, apropos of nothing, tracing a finger up and down the small of his back. Flattening the pad over the ridges in his spine, "She said you never told her you loved her enough. That she always had to ask for it."
Charles shifts onto his side. Her hand slips out from under his ribs and comes back to rest on her shoulder, fiddling gently with each bead of her necklace chain. "Is this you asking?"
"No," she laughs, rolling her eyes. "Just—"
"Babe," he interjects. Her hair boxes her face in mousy brown wisps, eyes quiet and unwavering. He’s always liked the way her lashes curl above her pupils. Charles holds her gaze, and what he's really thinking is: how easy all of this was. How easy it could be. He still knew of no straightforward vehicle for expressing the way he felt about Pierre, for what they were to each other. Friends? Obviously. Generously. People who got along, who laughed between each other, who said, on s'entend, tous les deux? The reciprocity was all-encompassing. Somehow it begat no love.
Here, though. Charles entwines his arms around her and pulls her decisively to the jut of his chest, at the base of his throat. Says, "I love you. Okay?"
Whatever noise Charlotte makes in response is trapped against the surface of his skin. She squirms in his hold until finally she manages to free herself, giggling, scooting back to sit up with her arms taut and throwing her head toward him. Her hair swings with the movement, playful. "Yeah? How much?"
"What, is there some kind of measurement system now?" he protests, though he falls back into the divot of his sheets and eyes her from beneath his lashes. Places a hand to his chest. "With all my heart," he announces with appropriate flair of dramatism. "I swear."
She bends her body into his. Pushes a hand down, knocking the wind out of him. "You're so gross."
"I'm being honest!"
In truth, there was a lightness to her that Charles had remembered appreciating the first time they met. After they started dating, properly, Charles had walked to her place with a bouquet in hand and listened to her talk about school and her business aspirations and her sister, an assured affect to her voice, and he'd known then and there that they were the same, or at least that they could be. They both believed in the result over the process. These dogged values. At the crux of it, in the art of compromise. Every time she crawled into his lap and pressed her tongue into his mouth, when he stroked his fingers over the slope of her breasts and between the swell of her body and she reacted in short, punched-out staccato gasps, he thought: was this a conversation?
Turns out it didn't really matter. They both got what they wanted, approximately.
Charlotte yawns and detangles herself, stretching out lazily. Eventually they drag themselves up and out of bed, no longer able to ignore the pang of hunger in their stomachs, called toward the necessity of dinner. Charles dresses himself by the mirror and slips into the hallway. He walks into the kitchen and reaches into the fridge for the carton of eggs, sets a skillet onto the stove to prepare a scramble with practiced ease. After a few moments Charlotte emerges too, one of his shirts thrown over her underwear, and she sits in the living room with her back to him, spine bent over his white piano. Her hair is still mussed and knotted at the vertex of her neck where it had smudged against his pillow.
All of it was so easy. His mother used to tell him, when things had first felt impossible, that there was a difference between an easy life and a simple life. The truth of it grounded him. Charles thought of the endlessness of his own materiality, its simple but inseparable privilege, and then of all the love he commanded, with or without merit. The girl in his bed, his living room, his kitchen. Who held his hand in public and said nothing of his waywardness, the ulcerous cut of his desires. Charles could not take this for granted.
After dinner, they go for a walk around the circle of his apartment building. Charlotte kicks at a pebble on the sidewalk with the toe of her shoe, looks askance, clears her face.
"Guys like you," she says, to no one in particular, out into the quiet of the night. Her voice is friendly with allowance, but it escapes her with a strange and ambiguous cadence, as if he were hearing her from far away, through the thick of fog, or with water-clogged ears. "You always know the right thing to say. She told me that too."
In Monaco, Charles imagines himself on center stage. Feels the phantom spray of Ferrari Trento on his suit, soaking into his skin. He hears the roar of the crowd, basking in the impermanent glow of victory. Charles knows that for all his concerted charm, he too often serves the wrong people. But still he thinks: maybe this year will be different. When Charles dreams, he dreams of being out at sea, on his boat, the waves angry and rolling. He imagines jumping in, or maybe falling in, depending on who you asked, which witness testimony you consulted, and the tide pulls him down, submerges him in its cool and lackadaisical hold.
Things would get better. Or they would get worse.
In these brackish waters, Charles yields to the current.
💬
ok i seriously feel so ridiculous writing dumb ~introspective~ fic about a ship that has 1k fics on ao3 like literally what was the point LOL……… the chirlies have gone there and done that. again i apologize but thx 4 reading o7
+ title song... full lyric + reflection post 2 come. maybe
fandom: f1
pairing: 1016, 516, etc.
rating: m
word count: 8.7k
[sitting in the post-race press conference after season-defining leglerg dnf] uh charles, you know i know you're a gamer, and uh…
the way i wrote all the sebchal parts before his announcement 🥲 anyway i kind of detest whatever this is but i realized at some point that i just needed to post it and get over myself T__T here's some illegible sharlfic. truly sorry. happy birthday you know who you are
quand on a été mordu, une fois, on a peur de recommencer, plus tard, on redoute d'avoir mal, on évite la morsure pour éviter la souffrance; pendant des années, ce principe me servira de viatique. autant d'années perdues.
there's a line that goes all the way from my childhood to you.
can't you find a way?
sweet 16, how was i supposed to know anything?
we're both so familiar / white ferrari, good times
we're both so familiar / white ferrari, good times
there's a line that goes all the way from my childhood to you.
can't you find a way?
Frankly speaking, Charles has been sitting at this table for what feels like hours. He's clean-shaven for the cameras and his legs have grown numb with inertia. He says: "The day I feel fear on track, that's when I'll know. That's when I have to quit Formula One."
In the low light of the studio, they all laugh with him. The air around him is hot and stuffy, his concealer caking deep into the fault of his smile lines. They avert their eyes, smile thoughtfully. Bring a contemplative hand to their chins.
Ask: "But surely you must fear something?"
When he was younger, his father would crouch at his feet and grab hold of Charles's second-place trophies with a smile that reached valiantly for his eyes and fell just short every time. Charles still remembers how it knocked the wind out of him, the swing between his warm congratulations and the ensuing questioning, its critical apex, the way his mouth patiently pulled the unfettered sentiment from behind his teeth. Petit, don't you wish that was you on top instead?
This singular question spurred him on for years to come. A lifetime and then some. In Varennes, still too gangly and quiet for the size of his emerging future, Charles remembers staring Max down a few steps off the podium and letting hunger unfurl in his stomach. It was sharp and acidic and bled him out from the inside. Max, who in his teens reminded Charles distinctly of a nervous squirrel, or some other kind of uncomfortable woodland creature, already vacillated impressively between meek non-answer and shades of furious entitlement a boy his age could only have learned through bloodline imprint. Later Max would claim to have never actually hated him, and the aversion to mutual extremity complicated any further revisionism of Charles's own character, a cruelty in and of itself.
Still, debriefing with his father was one of the first things Charles ever truly learned about motorsport. Nothing of fear or restraining himself. He'd been thrust upon a truth that persisted far outside the track, beyond the thrill of his weight propelling itself toward the racing line. What he meant was, this was all a family affair. No measurement of warmth or upbringing or self-infliction—his father, Max's father, him and Arthur, Jules; what did it matter?—could differentiate the depths of its universal pressure. Winning was everything. It had to be. Charles hated punching below his weight so badly that, in moments of failure, he knew only to turn the fist into himself.
"Of course I'm afraid of some things," he laughs. Earlier they'd dug their shovels into the gravel and pried at buried carnage, asking him about youth and mantles and robbed careers. Topics like this were almost always approached with the suffocating inflection of objective tragedy, a faraway spectator's sympathy. One woman tented her hands and diplomatically hedged, But he saved lives this way, didn't he? As though it'd been a simple and selfless sacrifice. As though each death materialized as little more than a string of grisly data points, graphed and logged and regressed upon in the name of testing.
Still, Charles allowed it. He'd learned this one too: sometimes it hurt less to ascribe honor where well-wishes failed.
"Yeah?" they ask. "Like what?"
In Singapore, Charles knows he's being childish about the whole thing when he begs off the Ferrari 1-2 afterparty two drinks in. The problem would always be that his conviction in being right and his conviction in acting right were wildly different beasts, and at twenty-one they warred continuously, pushing the limits of his goodwill.
So first he waits. Waits until the zealous crowd converges onto its victor, Seb showing far less inhibition at having drinks pressed into his hand, out in the thick of it. The way clears, and a few minutes later he manages a flimsy excuse for heading back to his hotel room, shuffling into the bathroom to wash his hands by the sink.
For a long beat Charles stands in the mirror contemplating the smudged lines of his reflection, the places where his image fractures. The skin of his neck is splotchy and pink from the humidity. Charles isn't drunk—barely even buzzed, but these past few weeks have left a strange feeling rattling around him all the same. The uncomfortable roil of lows and highs grated at him like whetstone.
He'd had time to calm down in the driver's room earlier, where he'd forced shame into quelling indignation. Still, the internal rapprochement of triumph and defeat tasted bitter together. The whiplash of it hurt to digest. Charles knows he should start packing, but he's thinking about the wine in his minibar when he walks back toward his bedroom, nearly reaching for it, wanting to drink himself into bed. He and Pierre used to get drunk just like this—in bedrooms far away from home and removed from the reality of their own lives and bodies, passing a bottle between each other to the acoustics of Pierre's bad music or a significant silence, shared and electric.
He shakes himself off and stops by his suitcase instead. It blocks the hall between the foot of his bed and one of those mahogany drawers that always reveal unexpected souvenirs, like notepads or a menu or a bible. Here he kicks the top open and sets his phone to shuffle through a barrage of wistful songs, getting to work folding his t-shirts at the well of it. The night crawls by in slow measures of low piano melodies and English metaphors he really only half understands, and it's why Charles doesn't know how long he's been sitting there when the knock at the door comes. Only that he's tired and jittery and there's a crick in his shoulder and he feels sore all over, down to the bone.
Charles stands. When the shape from across the peephole comes into focus, he frowns, then brings his hand down to swing the handle open.
"Hi, Charles," Seb says, inexplicably.
This was the thing about Seb.
Back in the beginning, the first time they met, Charles hadn't known what to make of him. He'd thought of Seb as a walking oxymoron, or an enigma too deeply encrypted to decipher. Dwelling on it for too long made his head hurt. Only with time did Charles come to a realization: some people were simply themselves. Even more critically, this didn't seem to hurt them.
Fair or not, that was Sebastian.
Now, Charles's first instinct is to tell Seb that he has the wrong room. He wants to turn him away and force him to gloat in solitude. If only, he thinks, he weren't also stuck on the dimensions of Seb's luxury, his apparent immunity to himself.
He takes a step back.
"Um. Hi," Charles manages. It's clear that Seb has been drinking, because the smell of it is immediate and sour, but as far as he could see the effects ended here. Seb grins the wry grin he carries around with him everywhere, the glow of alcohol working only to bring him even more into focus. Like when people took photos of races and in suspending a car to its static image turned everything still behind it, the track and the barriers and the flags and the trees and the sky above, into a single indistinguishable streak of light. The lens adjusted. "What—uh. Why are you here?"
"Can I come in?" Seb asks.
When Charles says nothing, he steps through the open mouth of the hotel room as if gravitationally pulled toward him. Charles backs imperceptibly into the wall. He watches Seb watch him, leaving him feeling off-balance and wrong. Suddenly it felt impossible that Seb could be shorter than him, any smaller, what with the way he crowded into him so confidently.
Charles tries again. "Did Mattia ask you to speak to me, or—?"
Sebs barks out a laugh. "Charles," he exclaims, putting a hand to his hip, amused. "Obviously you overestimate his trust in me! But, no. You left early, so I came to check on you."
He says this matter-of-factly, perhaps almost kindly. Charles is old enough to recognize a difference.
"At Monza I did not go to your motorhome."
"No," he admits. "You didn't."
"Then why?"
What's important to understand is that, over the course of his time at Ferrari, Seb's rage smoldered and melted down eventually. This was what made him complicated, for Charles, how his moods and priorities were so unpredictable, how he leveled wisdom Charles routinely forced himself to unprocess. The other thing about Seb was that he never lacked for words, and he had a lot to say about himself, or about the environment and the stewards and the drivers around him, about the burns he'd sustained in the wildfire of Ferrari's managerial entropy, third-degree. He loved this word the most: failure.
You see, Seb always began. The thing is, he continued, padding it with an obviously, an of course, a toothy stretch of his mouth. You see—the thing is—well, a relationship is meant to be a conversation, of course. He chased platitudes only a man beyond the glitz of Charles's early twenties might bother finding any obstinate truth in. The thing is that some people get into relationships expecting a mirror of themselves, to have their thoughts and feelings and needs reflected, to be allowed to make another person singular. They keep short memories; they forget the distance they crossed to reach this person in the first place. But that's not really a relationship.
No?
No, Charles. That's just dating yourself.
Charles knew that Seb was the kind of man who liked the sound of his voice too much. He liked winding the tape back to hear the dry monotone of his meandering witticisms, delighting in all wayward manner of capturing another's attention, even if it meant he held Charles's.
So how it happens is like this:
By the wall. One hand braced against patterned paper. The other on the meat of Charles's waist, the flex of each knuckle harsh and vice-like and unforgiving, as if he were giving Charles something with this taking.
"I'm going to tell you something," Seb informs him. He pauses, tilting his head. "You're tense."
Charles isn't only tense, he's practically wound around himself. He wants to shift his body but fears the perception of any movement, Seb's ability to read through him.
"No," he denies. Only it comes out like a question.
"Oh, Charles," Seb coos. "Okay, all right. I'll tell you. You know what the real problem is?"
They were like two points on a line, going backward from each other.
"Everyone—because it's you, it's Charles. You know. Everyone is scared to be honest with you. Obviously, you're always kind, and you want to be a good man." One hand touches at bare skin and feels Charles shiver through it. "But you get angry and then you bite your tongue. Is that how you think anyone wins a championship? Charles, everyone who has ever won something is an asshole."
Charles thinks: did Seb really not know? How his silence would always be a multifaceted thing, how the way Charles held back hurt and protected others in tandem?
"I am not so nice," he protests, terse.
Seb raises an eyebrow. He's still holding all of him in place.
"I'm sure you believe that," he allows, and Charles is struck with an image: the tension that ran through Seb after bad races like a live wire, the way his hair uncoiled from beneath his helmet with each invective hurled within probing range, ready to expound upon the rulebook and his convictions. Charles doesn't mention any of this, though it's a close thing. Its truth runs hotly through his center. Not even a man’s thirties, whatever chalice of maturity he claimed to have drunk from, could salve the red of his wounded ego.
Seb eyes the entire length of him, up and down, openly delighting. He parts his mouth and runs a playful tongue just over the tip of his bottom teeth, like he knows something. This is the lightheartedness he'll don, occasionally, that reminds Charles of the Sebastian Vettel he grew up glimpsing through the TV: fresh-faced and boyish and crying jubilantly over the radio. Those flashes of a younger self. A pre-Ferrari conceptualization, before they sunk their claws in. Which they always did.
His voice refuses to vocalize anything else, so Charles just demands, hushed: What?
Seb hums. He knows that Charles knows too. This time when the hand on the wall reaches out for him it toys at his belt, the waistband, just past where Charles is hard in his pants. Charles has to look forward, into the blue of Seb's eyes, so that he isn't forced to acknowledge the reality of his own desire, how Seb's breath is warm against his cheek, how every part of him wants to give in. Seb smiles again and this time it's beatific, in a way that makes it clear he finds himself disproportionately amusing, the worst kind of smile he has.
"Do you need a hand?" he asks.
Under the orange glow of hotel light, with practiced banality:
The woman you were with in Italy, in the blue dress. Is she your girlfriend?
What?
She's a pretty thing, you're lucky. But quite young. Is that how you like them, Charles? Young?
I—what?
What? What? Is that all you can say?
In short, Sebastian isn't gentle. Not with this. Charles feels him tug his mouth to the shell of his ear and bite at the cartilage, hears him whisper reprobate nothings into the wet of his throat, relentless and unbidden, the swell of it a sick concertino to his own muted unraveling. He feels like he's fraying, the way he sways along with the movement of Sebastian's fist, his hold on him, the stark relief of it.
Please—he keeps whispering this. Doesn't even know why. Over and over again, until the word loses its own shape. Charles doesn’t know when he started shaking, only that it feels like he’s vortexing, limbs succumbing to some impossible pressure.
Look at you. Charles, what do you want?
Please. I don't know.
Charles, you said you wouldn't do anything stupid for Ferrari, right? Didn't you say that?
Yes? Yes. Please. I don't—
With each challenge the edge to Sebastian's voice grows sardonic and hard, filled to the brim with something threatening at the balance of this precarious ecosystem. Almost, but not quite, past the tipping point. Later they'd come to realize that neither of them had known how much further there still was for this to go, how it would somehow become more complex and then utterly unremarkable, two soldiers facing defeat and finally learning to commiserate. God, they weren't even in Styria yet. Puttering around in their shitbox of a 2020 car, clacking their teeth through the frigidity of each ensuing debrief, Mattia's hand gripping meekly at the back of Charles's neck in a gesture of controlled goodwill, some introverted fumble at leadership. Like trying to corral a kitten by nipping unconvincingly at the scruff.
When it ends, it's without tension. It feels like all his temper has been siphoned out of him, the way Seb says I know, I know that you needed this, right as he works him over the edge. Later Charles will wonder whether the verbal acknowledgement spoiled the sanctity of their act, whether it sullied its hazy glowing memory. But for now he can only sag into himself.
A part of Charles almost wishes he were further gone. That he'd had more to drink, that maybe he'd have an excuse to finally make someone stay. Instead, he says nothing. Seb isn't a cruel man, but he still has a race driver’s patience, and as the aftershocks subside so does his hold on him. With one smooth push he's jettisoning back, leaving Charles slumped against the wall. The weight in his shoulders crumbles down like sand, waves of subdued misery crashing in to lap softly at his feet.
There's the sound of hands being washed in the bathroom. The tap being lifted, water running.
"Here you go," Charles hears after a while. Seb is pressing a damp towel to his skin. Seb, who looks at him the way you might look at a wet dog caught out in the rain, trying to figure out whether it's meant to be there, who it even belongs to. Just a few minutes ago he'd thumbed at the small of Charles's waist the way one's hand might find purchase in a collar.
"You okay?" Seb asks this time.
Charles doesn't trust his own voice, but he forces himself to say it: "Yes. Okay."
"Okay. Well," he glances briefly at his watch, "I need to go call Hanna." The dismissal in his voice is clear. Somewhere in the part of Charles's brain that clings still to a modicum of clarity, he thinks that this is ridiculous, because it's his hotel room to begin with. And Seb is the one who showed up at his door smelling of spirits, not him. Seb is the one who crowded him against the patterned wall and stuck the roughened skin of his palm to Charles's chest, his stomach, down the snap of his waistband, who dismantled him coolly and precisely and with systematic indifference.
Charles's voice is hoarse with disuse and something like trepidation. Too timid, even for him. He tries clearing his throat.
"This late?"
When Seb shrugs, it's with a wide roll of his shoulder. The chasm between them splinters as he says this, the truth of their separation. "Yes. Just need to check in on the kids."
Charles nods. Because what else? Of course. It's hard to explain, the way something like this divided them, beyond the obvious configuration of it. He nods again, and Sebastian leans forward to press his lips into the crown of his hair, featherlight, and then he's disappearing into the crevices of the hallway's geometry, letting the door fall behind him. Then Charles is alone. Again.
There's fear, here.
But what do you even say? Really. Honestly. That, now that you mention it, I once felt my heart beat out of my chest watching another man catch fire through my rearview mirrors? That, no, I’m scared this won’t ever be enough, that one day we’ll look back and see that I squandered my best chances at making something of myself, that for all the legacies I’ve carried the sum of my own fell empty and negligent? No poor host, Charles knew, would want for his meticulously gilded cowardice. No one needed to know how painstakingly he ripped stitches out of each new attachment and left them to fester; the longer things went on, the more attuned he grew to their preciousness, the more he wished to minimize their genesis, their significance. Such love would always terrify him.
After Sochi, which is stupid and idiotic, Charles flies back and breaks up with his girlfriend properly. Giada already knows. But still she looks at him and says, rueful and disbelieving: Four years weren’t enough for you?
This is what separated him from Seb. Seb, with a championship to each loved one, his high school sweetheart and picture-perfect family postcards, the vintage motorbikes and his fucking bees, felt a universe apart in comparison. Charles was running away from himself, probably. Or his childhood, the truth of his inquisitions, the way he could never make a conversation of his relationships. He didn't know where the mirror ended. He was used to making excuses, both for himself and the team, had seen nothing to prove with Charlotte but had slept with her in Monza anyway, in her blue minidress, when she'd fallen into his bed and let him press his jaw to the inside of her thigh and said, Shit, Giada is going to kill me.
Charles tells Giada that it's a matter of values. They've grown apart. She calls him an asshole in pinched Italian. Somewhere down the line, Charlotte informs him that she had then proceeded to get spectacularly drunk and wish with a fiercely inebriated emphasis for him to hit the barriers his next race, that there had been few things she'd wanted more at the time than to watch him flame out of her life in brilliant Ferrari red.
That's kind of what this debrief feels like. In Maranello, Mattia folding his hands on the conference table. The tension suffusing through Charles's jaw, excuse after excuse after excuse. Like pulling on loose teeth after a sucker punch, searching for tissue in a mouth shocked dark, red with blood.
Maybe he never walked out of the flames.
On fear:
"Like snakes," he says breezily. They laugh again, this time at the answer’s quaintness. "Yes, snakes, and spiders, and… of course I feel fear. Just not when I put the helmet on."
"That's very impressive," a man tells him, nodding with understanding. "I'm sure I could never do the same."
"Well," he offers. "That's the sport."
Everything ends in 2020, or at least in some sense of the word. Like a sputtering engine. Quietly, then with empty disappointment. After the season is over, Arthur shows up to his place looking pale and sits on the sofa with an uncharacteristic heaviness haunting the lines of his face.
"Charles," he says, twisting his hands together. Charles hates it instantly, the way the image split apart to resemble him. He wishes that their mutual self-scrutiny weren't so plainly encoded in the scratch cards of their genetic lottery, that they hadn't been hardwired to smother themselves beneath each championship result and prospective implication, each win and loss, the gaping what-ifs. What pointless imbuement. "I couldn't even finish first."
The guilt was like this: a survivor's. It was the same Charles felt when Seb pressed his helmet into his hands just days ago in Abu Dhabi and told him to make the most of it, of the future and the team but most of all himself. Seb, justifiably, bore premature suggestions of retirement and punditry as a fundamental affront on his character, but he'd been deathly earnest about this, their farewell, hugging Charles flush to his chest, only serving to deepen the ache of it. Not just the guilt, but the regret and all of Charles's viciousness, too. The moments he'd allowed himself as the season strained and groaned around them. He'd seen Seb drown and simply thought: Soon this will no longer be my problem. And then it was over. And then there was Carlos.
"None of that matters anymore," he promises Arthur.
Arthur huffs and waves a hand around. "It does to me."
As a matter of pride, maybe. But the reality of the situation went unspoken.
"Arthur," Charles insists. "Listen." There was no skirting around it, what he would do for his brother. How much there still was left to repay. A career for a career, snug in the FDA's pocket. "You're still going to make it. I swear. Look at me, when have I ever lied to you?"
Arthur raises an unimpressed eyebrow. He tries for sullen and unmoved but is betrayed by the slightest tug at the corner of his mouth, biting at his lower lip when he says, "Every fucking day, you idiot."
"All right," Charles allows, laughing, knowing the conversation won. He's within his rights to call him an annoying cunt but somehow refrains. Brothers. "Well, I'm not lying about this."
For a long moment, Arthur is silent. He blinks—once, twice—then shrugs in slow acknowledgement. Charles tracks the slow diffusion of his frustration, how it leaves in its gaping haunt a defeated weariness he knew far too well, could recognize and mirror immediately.
"You know it's not your job to look after me, right?"
Charles thinks: But it is. Of course, it had to be. Who else would ever be so willing?
"I'm not making it my job," he defends anyway. "I'm not—I'm not doing anything. You're the one looking after yourself."
It hurts more than he cares to admit. He sticks his tongue into his cheek and feels hot with the shame of unfairness, or perhaps simply the invariability of it. The angle of reproach didn't really matter. What could he even say? Dad chose me first: forgive me? After everything, Arthur still races like he's making up for lost time. His reckless abandon mirrored the way Seb raced, as if he'd been chasing the end of it. Everything was colored the same, just another shade of survivor's guilt.
"We don't have to talk about it," Charles offers. A way out. An exit plan, a strategy. Somewhere between genuine belief and hollow reassurance, spoken to the both of them, "Next year, though. You'll be quick."
Of course, things weren't always like this. The thing is that before Charles really left home—before the mid-season break became synonymous with beach-hopping with his friends and snorkeling off the coast in Cancún with his girlfriend and every other unsanctioned bucket-list escapade; with Alex pulling him away to play golf in the sweltering heat and forcing Lily to partner George in some approximation of self-handicap, so that Alex was allowed a few laughs at the expense of George's form and a gleeful Mate, you are just hopeless; with early-morning training and the repetitive constant of his meal plan and eventually getting called in to sit dully through contract discussions or reviews of team strategy—his summers had once been demarcated by the ever-growing shape of Pierre.
More than anything else, this was a childhood. First, at the eclipse of spring, Pierre lying down on his guest mattress at the foot of Charles's bed. Charles waking him up to listen to the rev of V10s across the circuit, from miles away. How everything that weekend had felt closer and further than ever. Pierre came back every year, once school was out, a study in object permanence. Charles remembers growing up on the back of his family's boats every summer and how they ate moules frites where the light waned into the bay, how Pierre wrestled Charles into playing beach volleyball until they ceded defeat to exhaustion and spent the walk back comparing the damage on the stretch of their sun-reddened shoulders, Pierre golden where Charles burst into angry flares of pink.
Ten years expanded and contracted like a lung. Time exhaled on a labored breath. It was beautiful until it wasn't, and then it was ugly and unbearable but necessary in some profound and unintended sense, and then it was beautiful again, it was perfect, and then it wasn't, and it was, and that was life. That was adulthood.
At the end of 2020, Charles wants to ask Pierre whether he thinks they were destined to always counterpoint each other. His mind goes back to Monza, both years. Those worst weeks of their lives, loss upon rebirth upon ego death, over and over again. How their gouged-out highs never seemed to converge onto each other, only bisected into isolated roads. Beyond the obvious red of Charles's want, there were many things that went unspoken between them. The way Charles thought to himself: I know what it's like. Yes, I do, about surviving another. I know about fashioning yourself into a crypt for other people's memories; being made not just to hold them but in a way to become them, too, that this is what grief tastes like, left out to salt in the sun.
Keeper of the wound. Both of them. It stung, but it could be a comfort, too. To hold the pain so close to you. Most of all it felt like Charles's body simply didn't know how to react to the natural conclusion of things anymore, the way every year was both an end and a beginning at once, an evisceration. How he emerged from the other side feeling dizzy and bereft and flung the wrong way out. Drum the mind around, it said. Rattle the insides until the skin splits and there's nothing left to it.
God. Fuck.
"Do you ever wish we could go back?" Charles hears himself ask, once. Mostly he means the ambiguous responsibility of karting, or missing half of middle school and being told that he was already the pride of the school, that he'd always be the future of something, anything. Everything. Mostly he means winters in the Alps, all the moments that had felt stolen and tender and bruised, how they had—
No.
"Do you?" Pierre counters. He's stretched out on the couch with his limbs running in every direction, trying to take up as much space as dimensionally possible. Charles marvels at the sight of it. In all his life, he's never met anyone so determined to appear perpetually larger than they actually were.
"I mean," he shrugs. And it went like this. Toro Rosso had become AlphaTauri and Charles had joked that at least Pierre was no longer stuck sporting the angry scarlet-lettered slap of his demotion anymore, at least not technically, a barest consolation. Pierre had thrown him a finger and told him to go fuck himself, grinning all the while. Life is fine, Pierre decided later. It's just the fucking car, you know? And Charles did. But he hadn't known how to say that he felt emptier by the day, that it felt like something inside of him had been irreconcilably compromised, structurally, that now there was a fuel leak and no one was doing anything, holy shit, what the fuck, just letting the whole thing go up into flames, so he'd nodded and flattened his tongue instead. "Yeah. Sometimes. I mean, it's only natural, no?"
Pierre's grip on his PS4 controller loosens slowly. When he reaches over and ruffles Charles's hair the palm of his hand is clammy and hot. On instinct, Charles laughs and presses into the warmth of it.
"Hmm," says Pierre. "Sure. I mean, if I'm honest, then I definitely miss when you were like—barely a meter ten. Or not even. Little Charlito!"
"My guy. You are way too obsessed with my height," Charles accuses, scoffing.
Pierre shrugs his hands in a hey, what can I say? gesture. Charles threads his fingers through the top of his own hair and eyes the soft edge of Pierre's smile, the pink of his lips, the scruff of his annoyingly triangular beard. His mind startles with a memory then, or just an unfurling series of truths: Pierre pouting at Charles every time he came back a touch taller and broader. How he'd tell Charles to stop growing because he needed the ballast advantage, kept saying that one day he'd stop hugging Charles when he was too old for its intimacy, for it to not be weird. How he still always found ways of creating a touch Charles could lean into.
Pierre continues, "But we did also have those disgusting haircuts. And you didn't know how to dress yourself at all, not that you do now, but—ow!—still." He runs a hand at the spot in his shoulder that Charles had just dug his fist into. The muscle flexes. Charles hates himself for always noticing. "So I guess it kind of cancels out."
There had been a time, once, with the Red Bull seat looming in the horizon, when Pierre had looked at Charles and decided: Next year, we'll both be fighting at the front. He'd inflected each word with premature clarity. This Pierre could recognize only his own kindness in a shared future's materialization, in hypothesizing about parallel vectors, showing Charles he would make room for him. That Charles was not Esteban, and Pierre wanted to thread competition around their bodies like a promise, a self-constructed courtesy.
This Pierre had been entire lifetimes ago. Now Charles looks at the blue-red, pink-flushed blur of Max on the podium, the victory gold of him, and he thinks: What could have been? What would never be again? Max was not the same person after Abu Dhabi. Whatever weight lifted from him had departed with a wave, a veritable seismic shift, and the change dredged up a mélange of envy and relief in Charles's stomach, frustrating him to no end. Ten years later and he still felt the same hunger. Only the dimensions of it remained impossible. Only they shifted over.
"Have I shown you this one yet?" Max asks him when they're sitting together in the press room after qualifying. He squints as he wags a finger over his camera's photo grid with the elegance of a middle-aged father in desperate need of prescription glasses. Eventually, he locates his bearings and proffers the device to Charles with an open palm.
Charles watches. "Oh!" he cries after a beat, delighted. It's a video of Penelope in a white sundress, snuggling a slobbering dog the same size as her to her chest. "Oh, this is very cute."
"Yeah," Max agrees, smiling mildly. He leans into Charles and mock-whispers, "We try not to really buy her many red clothes. Don't want her getting the wrong idea, right?"
This has never been their shared language, and at first it's disorienting for Charles to recalibrate himself. But Max had proven, with time, that he could be benign without forcible extraction, and Charles likes children all the same, so he learns to react in all the appropriate places. Max helping her blow bubbles at the beach, both of them slipping down a water slide. Racing toy cars in the living room. Subtly, Charles wonders how Max as a father—the lines of his face, the draw of his mouth—differed from the Max who rushed to crowd Charles at parc fermé for impromptu debriefs with his helmet clutched under his arm, free hand gesturing with pinpoint recall and burgeoning urgency.
He looks both too young and impossibly old at once. Charles feels unmoored, the way he does when Pierre talks about all their friends and his old classmates getting married and starting families, or like that time when Seb had asked him how long he intended to muck around in free practice, what he thought the jagged tunneled line of his future looked like. Seb had been joking, of course. But even then Charles had been hardwired to distinguish the challenge of it.
In the end, when it comes down to it, it boils down to this. Formula One would always be a restrictive sport. Some people, like Lewis and Max, or Seb before Ferrari, they got what they wanted. For everyone else, it was the things you didn't let yourself have that mattered.
For Charles, that meant things like Monaco. Or childhood imaginations of glory. Punch-drunk love, the misplaced security of touch; Seb’s hand on him back in Singapore, finishing him off with sympathetic inelegance, knowing not to ask more of him than he could handle. Charles would have gotten to his knees if pushed. That had been the problem. All those hotel rooms he’d held another in, or been held in first, caressed, forced down, wondering whether this time would be the last, desperate to keep his own heart at arm’s length.
For Charles, it meant reexamining the flimsy paper chassis of Pierre's competitive instincts and letting the gap between them widen. This interval, stretching. Long gone was any reverie of symmetrical fulfillment. Now they were both stuck, but in their own ways, entirely separate from each other.
Still, life was fine.
"Nice car," Pierre tells him. He folds his body and steps his way into the passenger seat, clicking the seatbelt into place. Beyond them the Montréal streets are crowded, summer evening mild and upbeat.
"You jealous?" he taunts. Pierre is still in his team gear, drumming his fingers onto the dashboard. Charles glances at the logo strung across his chest, and for a split second lets his eyes linger on its stretch, the white and blue patterning of it. Then he blinks and forces himself to look away. Eyes on the road.
"Oh, definitely. Maybe I'll buy one with my new contract."
Charles laughs. "High baller," he says appreciatively, making a fist with his free hand. The other grips loosely at the steering wheel, easing the car gently forward. Pierre bumps it and then reaches over the radio to fiddle with the music. He connects it to his phone's Bluetooth instead, and the song he plays sounds like it's from a Spotify playlist with a black-and-white cover and a name like Chill vibes, your choice of unrelated emoji. Which, knowing Pierre, was probably right on the money.
Behind the trailing red glow of traffic and tail lights, the car cuts through the damp of the night like a knife.
"How far do you want to go?" Charles says, when the silence has stretched long enough. They have time tonight. Perhaps not as much time as Charles would like, but the future was bigger than any of this, of course, bigger than dinner and the fans by the windows and this car and the hotel and Charles's desperate prolongation of pre-race normalcy. Tonight would have to be enough.
Pierre shifts and Charles feels him lean in just that bit closer to him. Everything feels warm and dark, and there's a still emptiness here that he thinks he could get lost in, the tick-tick of the turn signal and the languid crawl of cars around them and the vague shape of Pierre by his side, the half-there promise of his presence.
For a second Charles wants everything. He wants to pull over and kiss Pierre right on the sidewalk, or make Pierre kiss him, drink the quiet and loving way he liked to pant out Charles's name into the wet of his red and wanting mouth. Charles isn't precious about the way people say his name but has always liked how it sits on his tongue, specifically: Petit. Calamar. Every vowel stretched out, lax and unhurried, the northern roll of it.
Charles doesn't pull over. Doesn't even move, just keeps his knuckles steady, exhaling. In, out. They were both too sober, was the thing. The night had been doomed from the start.
"How far can you go?" Pierre asks.
Charles and Pierre sleep together for the first time in winter, the same month they secure their respective GP championships. At the ski station, on vacation with their families. Two beds to a chalet room. Charles is barely eighteen, skin flushed swollen with youth.
As it were, it happens through a series of deceptions. First: Charles asks what happened to Pierre's girlfriend, the one he stopped posting candid photos of and emoji-laden captions about to his Instagram midway through the season. Pierre says: they broke up last month. Pierre runs a hand down his face. Pierre says: it was all spectacularly stupid, the fact that he was a champion now but was being sent off to Japan instead, that they still needed him back in England between races for testing. Charles says: he'd be pissed off, too, if he had Helmut Marko breathing down his neck to take up shop in Milton Keynes, which frankly would never sound like a real place where actual people lived. Pierre says: oh, shut up. Pierre says: give me that, and then Pierre picks the wine bottle from where Charles's fingers cradle it and where his palm is wet with condensation and he takes a deep, long swig straight from the mouth, the stretch of his neck and throat working in tandem.
They drink. Charles feels sweat bead at his hairline, how his cheeks warm. He wants to take Pierre by the wrist and press his hand to the skin of it, make the touch stick, ask him, You feel that? Because he's drunk, he does. Pierre recoils, says, Gross, just the way Charles had intended.
I'll show you gross.
What does that even mean?
You'll see, he says. Pierre squints at him, slow and unsteady. They're on the same bed, Pierre's, too close for comfort or excuse. Two boys, swaying.
Maybe I'll show you first, Pierre says then, and Charles is electrified with it. The understanding.
They would always be competitive, so they lean in at the same time. Young, drunk. Hidden from the world. It makes sense for now, each movement sweetened by booze and repose, even if just for the moment. Tomorrow they won't talk about it. They never do, each time it happens, which it will—again and again. But for now Pierre places his fingers over Charles's zipper, tugs it free, for now his mouth is dark and tastes of wine, and they hold each other awkwardly, relearning shape and geometry, and Charles wets his lips and asks if he's ever done anything like this before, and Pierre says, No, what the fuck, you?, and then Charles resolves himself, is sinking to his knees, and Pierre curses again, low. Eighteen; twenty. Another lifetime ago.
"Thanks for tonight," Pierre says in earnest. The stretch of Charles's baseball cap on the crown of his head burns into Charles's retinas like a sigil. He wants to extend this moment for as long as possible, hold it between his teeth. Sink his jaw into it.
"I'll see you tomorrow," Charles promises, even though that much is fucking obvious. Jesus. They both laugh, just sitting there, seatbelts still on, Pierre not even bothering to take the damn cap off, pulled into the deepest corner of the hotel's parking garage. Charles is thinking: come back. Is thinking: come to my room, just like old times.
Pierre hesitates for a moment, as if reading his mind. It's late and their surroundings are empty, just them and poorly-parked cars and the solitary concrete beams holding the roof up, its perpetual suspension. Finally, he turns to Charles. His eyes are dark with searching when he asks, "What's your room number again?"
Charles's breath catches. The hang paralyzes him.
703, he says.
"I can't drink tonight," Pierre warns after a beat. It means nothing and everything at once. He unbuckles his seatbelt, and Charles watches him open the door, get out, turn where he stands to lean back in to face Charles. Charles will go back to his room first, wait the minutes, the hour for Pierre to shower, to dress himself, to return to him, and when they fall into bed it will be sober and loveless.
"No," he agrees, because anything else would be stupid.
"Okay." A smile. "You said 703?"
Sometimes, it felt like Pierre's tenderness was being excised from him. He believed in God but on a level Charles could only vaguely conceptualize, and this concentrated belief—the lumbering rationalizations, restraint engendered through pursuit of absolution—made the details of their acts laborious. For Charles, the gymnastics were inevitable. He could accept and understand them. But still they felt wild and foreign to his own body, a man who knew of God but who did not think he would spare Charles any mercy in his assessment of him, a man who did not believe any prayer could soften the agony of his life and want and feelings, his constant abscondence from them, his disdain for actuality.
They only kissed when Pierre pushed himself to the limits of drunkenness. In the morning he bent his face into the toilet bowl as if to rid himself of it, not just the drink but the bruising spit-slick touch and the pulsating smell of another man's mouth and lips. When he didn't drink enough, nothing came out. So he just sat there heaving.
Yuki, Ilies. Him. Was Charles just another man? Or better, or worse: just another boy, still the same one from all those summers ago, the quiet winters, the chalet? One for whom Pierre's ministrations weren't subject to the same notions of intimacy, the same scrutiny, relieving Charles of the solemness of an adult relationship, its reality? Pierre could be sober and harsh, fucking into Charles with his fingers and pressing the damp matted mess of his forehead to his chest as he spilled over his stomach, perfunctory and quick. Or—he could be drunk and tender. When he did kiss Charles it was like he couldn't believe that the space that lingered between them was no longer occupied, that his lips were meeting and finally being met, that he could rut into the heat of Charles's thigh and feel teeth dig into his bottom lip, hear Charles beg, Come on, please, and actually move toward the sound of it. It was like when he finally fucked into Charles and his stubble scraped at the sensitive skin of his jaw and Charles's head fell back and he gasped and felt their bodies fuse together, two plates shifting and meeting down the middle, tectonic, he wasn't sure what absolution was supposed to look like if it didn't mean this.
Honesty to Charles felt like a confession. In this booth the air was thin and the curtains suffocated him.
Translated, a ragged exhale meant, I wanted to kiss you in the car. A gasp, I wanted you to know that I’ve never had anyone to myself for this long. That sometimes I can't believe you're still here, that you ever stayed. The noise he swallowed in the back of his throat, I wanted you to know that I've always been scared of outgrowing you, ever since we were younger and you would put your arm around my shoulder and when we raced up the stairs I had to stand a step above so we'd be the same height and I never wanted a single thing to change, ever, not in that moment.
That I'm still scared. I always will be.
Eventually, finally: Monaco.
Being fixed so close to his roots settles some of Charles's restlessness. There's something about being home that always veers him back toward the unprecedented, the statistically improbable, foolish as it is. What's 10% chance to a hallowed optimist, a believer? Charles loves the boat horns by the port. The salty breeze, the greenery of the streets, the way the sunlight fractures the ebb and flow of the sea.
Overhead the race weekend looms. He and Charlotte are lying in bed together, enjoying the evening chill. Pockets of vestigial light fall through the slats of his apartment's bay windows and kiss the exposed skin of his forearms, warm the space where their bodies tangle.
"You know Giada used to complain?" Charlotte says, apropos of nothing, tracing a finger up and down the small of his back. Flattening the pad over the ridges in his spine, "She said you never told her you loved her enough. That she always had to ask for it."
Charles shifts onto his side. Her hand slips out from under his ribs and comes back to rest on her shoulder, fiddling gently with each bead of her necklace chain. "Is this you asking?"
"No," she laughs, rolling her eyes. "Just—"
"Babe," he interjects. Her hair boxes her face in mousy brown wisps, eyes quiet and unwavering. He’s always liked the way her lashes curl above her pupils. Charles holds her gaze, and what he's really thinking is: how easy all of this was. How easy it could be. He still knew of no straightforward vehicle for expressing the way he felt about Pierre, for what they were to each other. Friends? Obviously. Generously. People who got along, who laughed between each other, who said, on s'entend, tous les deux? The reciprocity was all-encompassing. Somehow it begat no love.
Here, though. Charles entwines his arms around her and pulls her decisively to the jut of his chest, at the base of his throat. Says, "I love you. Okay?"
Whatever noise Charlotte makes in response is trapped against the surface of his skin. She squirms in his hold until finally she manages to free herself, giggling, scooting back to sit up with her arms taut and throwing her head toward him. Her hair swings with the movement, playful. "Yeah? How much?"
"What, is there some kind of measurement system now?" he protests, though he falls back into the divot of his sheets and eyes her from beneath his lashes. Places a hand to his chest. "With all my heart," he announces with appropriate flair of dramatism. "I swear."
She bends her body into his. Pushes a hand down, knocking the wind out of him. "You're so gross."
"I'm being honest!"
In truth, there was a lightness to her that Charles had remembered appreciating the first time they met. After they started dating, properly, Charles had walked to her place with a bouquet in hand and listened to her talk about school and her business aspirations and her sister, an assured affect to her voice, and he'd known then and there that they were the same, or at least that they could be. They both believed in the result over the process. These dogged values. At the crux of it, in the art of compromise. Every time she crawled into his lap and pressed her tongue into his mouth, when he stroked his fingers over the slope of her breasts and between the swell of her body and she reacted in short, punched-out staccato gasps, he thought: was this a conversation?
Turns out it didn't really matter. They both got what they wanted, approximately.
Charlotte yawns and detangles herself, stretching out lazily. Eventually they drag themselves up and out of bed, no longer able to ignore the pang of hunger in their stomachs, called toward the necessity of dinner. Charles dresses himself by the mirror and slips into the hallway. He walks into the kitchen and reaches into the fridge for the carton of eggs, sets a skillet onto the stove to prepare a scramble with practiced ease. After a few moments Charlotte emerges too, one of his shirts thrown over her underwear, and she sits in the living room with her back to him, spine bent over his white piano. Her hair is still mussed and knotted at the vertex of her neck where it had smudged against his pillow.
All of it was so easy. His mother used to tell him, when things had first felt impossible, that there was a difference between an easy life and a simple life. The truth of it grounded him. Charles thought of the endlessness of his own materiality, its simple but inseparable privilege, and then of all the love he commanded, with or without merit. The girl in his bed, his living room, his kitchen. Who held his hand in public and said nothing of his waywardness, the ulcerous cut of his desires. Charles could not take this for granted.
After dinner, they go for a walk around the circle of his apartment building. Charlotte kicks at a pebble on the sidewalk with the toe of her shoe, looks askance, clears her face.
"Guys like you," she says, to no one in particular, out into the quiet of the night. Her voice is friendly with allowance, but it escapes her with a strange and ambiguous cadence, as if he were hearing her from far away, through the thick of fog, or with water-clogged ears. "You always know the right thing to say. She told me that too."
In Monaco, Charles imagines himself on center stage. Feels the phantom spray of Ferrari Trento on his suit, soaking into his skin. He hears the roar of the crowd, basking in the impermanent glow of victory. Charles knows that for all his concerted charm, he too often serves the wrong people. But still he thinks: maybe this year will be different. When Charles dreams, he dreams of being out at sea, on his boat, the waves angry and rolling. He imagines jumping in, or maybe falling in, depending on who you asked, which witness testimony you consulted, and the tide pulls him down, submerges him in its cool and lackadaisical hold.
Things would get better. Or they would get worse.
In these brackish waters, Charles yields to the current.
ok i seriously feel so ridiculous writing dumb ~introspective~ fic about a ship that has 1k fics on ao3 like literally what was the point LOL……… the chirlies have gone there and done that. again i apologize but thx 4 reading o7
+ title song... full lyric + reflection post 2 come. maybe
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Date: 2022-08-03 02:43 am (UTC)it made me scream that sebchal is so much in this compared to u not really caring about them!! seb is so terrible in this poor charles.
the car scene with "How far do you want to go?" / "How far can you go?" is very incredible... and although you described this as piarles fic it really is so complicated
anyway it's just incredible how much research you have done to paint the world in which charles has grown in the sport T___T i think i'm obsessed with f1 but there is still so much history i don't know.
T______T your writing is so incisive and well crafted, and it's amazing how you could show so many sides of charles with so many people, so many fears and feelings. i love that with a career so dangerous safety is tested and regulated rigorously charles here has much more internal fear and it is a good framing device. thank you for writing and thank you for sharing!! I Am So Sad.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-03 05:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-04 01:08 am (UTC)first of all i love the bit you chose for the summary/link like i really do think that ”Winning was everything. It had to be. Charles hated punching below his weight so badly that, in moments of failure, knew only to turn the fist into himself.” is so incising and seriously describes charles as a person so well… i have read my fair share of sharlfic As You Know and yours is really like. i guess a birds eye view of his character? mainly because you didn’t shy away from including any and all of his relationships which i appreciate so much. a lot of other fics kind of grab hold of one his traits and sort of milk it for all its worth but somehow you’ve managed to give us such a complete picture in 8k words it’s literally amazing. it’s messy and it’s real and it’s sad and it’s hopeful. it’s EVERYTHING!
okay let me step back and go through the passages i saved. i was already losing my mind at the seb section…..
[she is speechless] i literally love this paragraph so much. “he’s still holding all of him in place” this lineee how charles is so unmoored and seb is so entirely separate from him… like seb is put together and he can have all of these facets and make it seem so simple but it’s not, not for charles, especially not at this time of his life. and just on a prose level this: ”Please—he keeps whispering this. Doesn't even know why. Over and over again, until the word loses its own shape. Charles doesn’t know when he started shaking this hard, only that it feels like he’s vortexing, limbs succumbing to an impossible pressure.” IT’S SO GOOD!!! the uncommon sentence structure in the first sentence to start with ‘please’ to emphasize how important it is to the scene, how you dropped the subject in the second to emphasize charles ~derealization etc etc ok i sound dumb but literally i could write a thesis about the layers in each of your sentences!!!!!!!!!
also:
No Comment. You Already Know
also unrelated to everything i love how you interspersed the fic with bits from that one interview we watched…. like the main bit on fear is so crazy. (i love what you picked for the main theme as well like fear / the lack thereof / that constant war…) but yes having that background really helps the narrative ground itself which is perfect for the sort of hyperrealistic style you have going on. it is delicious
now we need to finally get to the PIARLES. its so much bc the whole fic up to this point feels almost shaped by pierre’s absence… like charles in this fic is often forcing himself NOT to think about pierre and everything he means and you can tell by like. how slowly the story opens up to him? like the way his first mention comes after a huge paragraph listing all of charles’s summer distractions—it’s like there’s everything else and then there’s pierre. and like you said: ”More than anything else, this was a childhood.” because yes it’s about pierre as a person but it’s just as much if not more so about what pierre represents (and what he /could/ represent). i think charles is such an interesting character because it all comes back so much to HIM. like yes we joke about charles with girlfriend charlotte (female charles) from mount charles etc but he really is such a Main Character. and the super tight self-focused narration reflects that fr
fuuuuuck this whole section i can barely even SPEAK on it. this paragraph is my favorite in the whole thing it’s genius and i feel like should be in one of kafka’s diaries instead of dreamwidth fanfiction. actually i don’t even think kafka was doing it like this. really the whole scene is insane but especially the above paragraph to “do you ever wish we could go back” is ridiculously affecting…
also you putting this line: ”For everyone else, it was the things you didn't let yourself have that really mattered.” right after MAX GIRLDAD SCENE actually insanity. immeasurable layers.
also [2] you’re INSANE FOR MONTREAL CAR DATE INCLUSION!!!! and like i said before the way we slowly learn about pierre’s relationship to charles, the way we don’t know if they’ve slept together or anything until the chalet scene… and then the realization that ohh… its like THAT…… ”Eighteen; twenty. Another lifetime ago.” my god. ”Yuki, Ilies. Him. Was Charles just another man?” my GOD! ”He wasn't sure what absolution was supposed to look like if it didn't mean this.” MY GOD!!!!!!!!!! sorry i have no intelligent commentary anymore i just can’t handle how good this is….
and then the… the comfort and the ease of the charlotte scene but it’s all mired down in everything we’ve learned up to this point. it’s just completely overpowered by what we know of charles’ all-encompassing fear. ”Turns out it didn't really matter. They both got what they wanted, approximately.” ‘approximately’ carries so much weight here…. god it’s all so heavy. and i love how you end it so much, with things getting better or getting worse and the unknowability of the current T___T
sorry this is literally incomprehensible as always but i love and thank u so much for writing this (again) it’s just unbelievably well done and i’m so grateful to have received this on the day of my birth… orz