💛💛💛

I got your picture I'm coming with you Dear Maria, count me in There's a story at the bottom of this bottle And I'm the pen

happy birthday Dear Maria, Count Me In music video <3

a couple of tweets and instagram posts plus that gif they put up...

5sos what the fuck are you doing stop leaving these cryptic messages and release the goddamn album

Sean Tighe ❤️

THE GREAT DEPRESSION BY AS IT IS IS AN AMAZING ALBUM JUST GONNA PUT THAT OUT THERE OFFICIALLY SOLD MY SOUL TO THIS BAND

@crankthatfrank so i don’t use fahrenheit so i had no idea what 104 is but GOD FUCKING DAMN FRANK GET SOME FUCKING REST 40 DEGREE FEVERS ARE NOT GOOD THAT’S THE FUCKING WEATHER IN AUSTRALIA DURING SUMMER INSIDE YOUR BODY praying to Geesus, Beesus, BeJeesus, Cheezwhizzus, Stumpus, Yeesus and Reesus for your recovery

\ \ Can I have your attention please \ \ 

don't steal

the faim <3

you guys should check these guys out they’re great

idkhow didn't have to go that hard with the EP but here we are. a work of art was presented. 

Jumpsuit jumpsuit cover me

spirit is truly my favourite fic writer. literally crying at 1am. such elegant writing and the flow is so natural and almost like floating on a calm sea. highly recommend that you also read the footnotes because the amount of detail she pours into this is incredible.

( all credits to @argentinagp for this dreamy gifset! )

❁ — FRITILLARIES AFTER FALL ; C.LECLERC

summ. This story is yours, but it isn't about you. Not exactly.   pairing. charles leclerc / f!driver!reader w.count. 20.2k (bible-fic) a/n. Warnings for death, & racing crashes. Late drivers are mentioned & pivotal to the story. Anyway, sorry I've been dry; have a 20k angst fic as an apology & a merry new year!

YOUR DEATH COMES with the Autumn seeding of the Fritillaries in his grandmother’s back garden.

It had not been violent, nor abrupt, nor unjust— 

You had simply breathed out, and it felt like a release.

Then came the feather-touch of Charles’ hand emerging from the still darkness, somewhere between the flames and its shadows, fingers wrapping around your wrist— an old habit that stuck from his younger years— pressed so tightly that you could feel the ghostly beat of your pulse against the thin of your own skin. Charles spoke to you then, gently, in the same cadence he used when you whispered to each other as children, I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.

No matter anything.

And you’d followed it obediently; led hand in hand through rain and across asphalt, and kept walking somewhere in-between the margins of what felt like a waking dream, until you settled on the evergreen grass of his childhood home, overgrown and tickling your ankles, beside the purple-dotted bellflowers his grandmother tends to so carefully.

You follow the carnations all the way to the flagstone path that’s twisting in ways that defy logic, take the time to admire the spider-lilies that are finally blooming for you, until you reach that familiar Coast off of South France, a thousand miles away from home.

2014. He’s smitten the first time he lays eyes on you.

Not exactly the first time he sees you, no. That would have been when he was nine years old and baby-cheeked, during a Summer break with Pierre and Anthoine, drifting somewhere off the coast of Southern France on the family boat. You were a familiar face to everyone but Charles, padding down the bow with seawater-footprints after a dip— and as much as Anthoine had insisted on introducing you to each other, the both of you had only managed a passing hello before feeling the violent urge to shy away upon sight despite sharing the enclosed space for the next hour. Call it puppy love.

But, anyways, no. He means the first time he sees you. Past the road-rage during your shared karting days and the plastered smiles you’d put on show for media’s sake. You’d landed into single-seaters— unheard of for girls of the sport at the time— in the Formula Renault 2.0 Euro. The pictures attached in the bylined announcement articles truly didn’t do you justice, he’d concluded, and his mouth hung open when you moved to sweep your hair from your face. 

You’d been scrutinising racing simulations and analysing lines of data even he couldn’t quite catch up with (you were always the smarter one, anyway), brows stitched tight in concentration, spectacles on your scrunched nose and one hand on your racesuit-tangled hips as you discuss with engineers. When you catch his eyes wandering, you’re quick to shoot him a friendly smile, and it jumpstarts the beat of his heart like the pop of a starting-pistol.

How was the race? His phone pings that evening. Had to retire the car :/ !!!! Sorry to hear that, Calamar.

But, Charles types. Just asked out the loveliest girl in the world. 

A pause. He almost laughs at the way the text bubble appears and disappears, pictures the narrowed gaze of the Frenchman through the screen.

Sounds horrific, Pierre replies. Glad I wasn’t around to witness that. She said yes, idiot. How miraculous. Who in the right mind would even do so?

Charles tells him. Pierre nearly bursts from the seams asking for details.

Later, in Pau, France, ahead of the following race, your date goes a little something like this:

Charles will prepare a bouquet of “Roses, because she loves a cliche every once in a while,” according to Pierre, and will compliment your hair and outfit you’ll throw on. Then he’ll bring you to a stellar restaurant that has stellar food, where he’ll charm you with his even-more-stellar jokes, and then end the day off by walking you back home to the hotel with his jacket over your shoulders, where he’ll call you beautiful for the final time, because he’s the blueprint of what every gentleman should be.

But, no. The date does not, in fact, go like that. 

Charles will forget the bouquet he’d bought at the dresser by his hotel bed, because he spends the last 5 minutes panicking over his hair in front of the mirror, and curses himself the entire way he comes to meet you down at the lobby. Then he’d stumble over his words, say, “You’re pretty today. Not that you aren’t, always. I mean, like— every other day you are pretty too. Or beautiful. Pretty beautiful. Beautiful beautiful. And, and a good driver too. Yeah.” 

He chases it with a joke that doesn’t quite land, but you laugh anyway, because his ears have burned bright red throughout the entirety of the ordeal, and it’s quite possibly the most endearing thing you’ve ever witnessed.

When you arrive at the restaurant he’s been raving to you about over text, you’re met with a closed sign and the realisation that it’s been under renovation for the last two months. Charles is thrown completely off-kilter with this revolutionary piece of information, and spends the next 10 minutes apologising for being a complete idiot. Dieu, I should have checked. I am so sorry. This is a disaster—!

Relax, Charles, you say. You’d never seen him this stressed, not even before a race. You circle a hand around his wrist, and he slows to a stop at the touch. It’s just me.

Exactly, he breathes. It’s you.

And— huh. Well. Charles supposes he’d done one thing right tonight, because you’re suddenly shying away with a smile on your face.

Burgers are what you settle for, in the end, despite how overdressed you are in a summer dress and him in his too-polished shoes. He makes a joke that does land this time, and the both of you laugh and chatter endlessly, after which he pays, of course, for everything, because his father had raised him right. When it’s time to leave, he brushes his knuckles against yours, fleeting, and makes sure to keep you on the inner side of the sidewalk while he offers his jacket.

Then he tells you you’re beautiful again, properly this time, where he goes out of his way to pluck a flower from a low-hanging branch to tuck into your hair, and you do that thing where you smile so sweetly it makes him haywire like a short circuit.

The day ends at the front of your oak hotel room door, and the both of you exchange awkward goodnights and see-you-tomorrow’s on shifty feet.

In another universe, restaurant or no-restaurant, you think it still would’ve turned out the same:

You smile, all crescent-eyes, and he all dimples, and then you lean to lay a hand on his chest, feel the thunder-beat drum of his heart beneath your palm, and press a kiss to his cheek.

How did it go? Anthoine texts you. Clumsy, but charming. You’re so boring, he spams, I need details! Did you kiss him?

You debate on answering, but he buzzes your phone until you do. Yes, you reply.

Lips?? No!! Just the cheek Oh. Booooo Idiot

The coast off Port Hercule in Monaco is always the right temperature at any time of day, but summer break that year feels even heartier.

The family comes around in annual tradition. Jules dismisses talking about his Silverstone race in favour of muscling both you and Charles into a headlock, and ruffles your hairs into a mess in congratulations. Charles had just won both rounds in Monza, where things are looking up for him as a junior championship contender— and “Yet here you are, the only girl in the grid, and you’re giving them a run for their money!”

You laugh, snatch the towel off Jules’ bare shoulder, and conspire with Lorenzo to shove him overboard into the sea. And then you're screaming too, bright and threaded with laughter as Charles follows suit, and takes you down with him in a crash of whitewater. He holds your wrist, delicate throughout it all.

Later, when Pascale calls everyone back to eat, she makes him fetch a pitcher of warm water from the cabin.

Hervé is coughing more now. No one talks about it. You’ve lost count the amount of times Lorenzo has slid a glass his way with that shadow in his eyes— the one where it looks as if he’s trying to pretend like everything is okay. 

There will be worry, regardless. 

Thin, like a veil over everyone’s heads, or perhaps a bubble— until Arthur divebombs starboard with a grand splash, all lanky limbs and pre-puberty shrieks, and the summer air clears with musical laughter. 

By the evening, when the sky dusks and the sun melts into the waves in blinding light, you’re curled into Charles’ arms. It doesn’t feel as awkward as you’d expected. His family had always been familiar with you, and you suppose being this close to Charles wouldn’t be a sight too difficult to adapt to. If anything, Pascale had practically adopted you into the family long before you’d even gotten together with her son.

“As-tu du sommeil?” he asks, when you yawn into his freckled shoulder. You smell of the ocean and the SPF sunscreen you’d insisted he lather on that afternoon. 

“Just a bit,” you nod, before chasing the sleepiness away with a stretch. You’re sunkissed and warm now, hair haloed in gold from the setting hour, and Charles has to take a moment, because he’s quite sure you’re the most beautiful thing he’s ever set his eyes on. 

“Come on,” you pinch at his skin and he swats you with a yelp, “Let's help Jules get the drinks.”

Downstairs in the cabin, the Formula One driver muses into the fridge as he shifts contents around. “I always knew you two would be a thing.” 

You can feel Charles smiling against your bare shoulder as he noses a kiss into it. He’s never shy in showing his affection to you, much less around Jules. “They bet on us, did you know? Him and Lorenzo.”

“Bet?” you gape, shooting a narrowed look to Jules as he feigns a sheepish face behind the counter. “Did you atleast win?”

“Ofcourse,” he answers, confidently, pulling out a handful of Blue Coasts and sodas to pass to you to deliver back up the cockpit. “I can always count on Charles.”

Once he’s sure you’ve disappeared from sight and out of earshot, Jules pops two spare bottles open, sets them down, and slides one across the cold counter with a raised, calculated look. “You better be careful, you hear me?”

Charles is positively startled. 

“I— Dieu, no, we’re not— I haven’t—”

Jules snorts into his drink, breaking off into a laugh. “Not that, you…”  He could never really keep a straight face around him. “I’m saying be careful with a woman’s heart. Especially hers.”

“Bien sûr,” Charles answers, quickly, unhesitatingly. “I’m serious with her. I—”

Charles cuts himself off. Jules doesn’t press any further. Love, after all, can be a terrifying thing to admit.

2015. Anthoine hounds you; Pierre hounds Charles.

The troublemakers of the two resort to innocent jabs and the occasional tease, directed more to Charles’ way than yours, because he’d always been the pushover since you were children. (A part of you had feared the thought of dating amongst the friend group, but, the dynamic between all of you doesn't change, thankfully. It never really does, in the grand scheme of things— only ever suspends whenever it comes to racing against one another.)

“Just, don’t be stupid,” Pierre advises, in a rare moment of level-headedness for his character, albeit delivered ungracefully. He had come to visit the races, and Charles had gone off to sneak you all an oily lunch. “That’s Anthoine’s job.”

You laugh. Pierre fails to dodge the smack Anthoine sends his way.

“Shithead!” he snorts, but snags you and Pierre around his arms anyway with that same, dreamy look he gets in his eyes whenever he looks over to the horizon. “None of us are allowed to kill each other,” he gestures. “After all, we still have yet to race each other one day, in Formula One.”

And you beam at them, confident, saying yes, we will, together, because you’re seventeen, young and innocent and hopelessly in love, feeling like you had the entire world in the palm of your hands; naïve enough to believe that being the only girl to make it into single-seaters at this day and age would matter, that your burning passion is all it’ll take to keep this career going against any uphill battle.

It’s only after the final race of the season, that the both of you find out about the accident.

There’s no time to celebrate your win. You don’t really care, at that very moment. Both of you book a flight out of Spain instantly. Charles is quick to seek you out, lean to you in some form of desperate stability with a slip of his hand into yours. You stay like that, pressed close, holding each other all the way throughout the 12 hour flight toward Japan, and then several more throughout the dreadful hours on the stiff seats of the hospital waiting room.

He’s barely turning eighteen when he learns that the only thing greater than love is loss.

It’s the first time you see him breakdown.

Jules’ departure scalds Charles in a way he never knew possible, and for awhile, he becomes an unrecognisable shell of himself. The media won’t know this, ofcourse, because he’s been trained to keep his head high, fed his PR-answers, told to smile that same, dimpled smile, throughout the remainder of his F3 career. They tie every win and every point he gets to Jules, Jules, Jules, as much as it stings him. 

All the while you try to keep his head above the tide, even when it feels like you’re drowning too— try to tell him to breathe with you in between each coming wave when the bouts of panic rattle him to the core. He makes you promise not to tell anyone about it, and you keep it. 

“I’m sorry,” he hiccups, the first time it’d happened. He had snatched his palm away from yours abruptly, curled up with his knees up to his chest as he tried to steady himself. “I want to, but I can’t— I can’t—”

How does he tell you the world doesn’t feel right? That it felt too big looking at the sky, and too small looking at the four walls around him; that he wants to throw up, but there’s a pit in his stomach; that he wants so desperately to hold your hand, and that he can’t, because right now he wants to peel the skin off his bones; that everything is heavy and his lungs aren’t functioning and he can’t fucking breathe, God, I think I’m dying, please, stay, don’t go, just stay—

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, again, that night, when he sneaks you into his hotel room. He’s uncharacteristically nervous, having shown you his whole heart at its most vulnerable just that afternoon. It’s tough to keep up appearances when you’re in the same Feeder Series with him now, too. The spotlight of being the only competing girl on the F3 grid is heavy. Charles doesn’t want to add on to that. “For everything.”

I love you, you want to say.  Having seen him at one of his worst, to be able to see this dismantled version of him he presents to the world— it’s trust. It’s love. But you settle on something else. You don’t want to bombard him with such a grandiose statement out of the blue, even though it feels like the right thing to say. Even if you know it’s true. 

“C’mere,” you say, soft, feel him shift closer to your touch. “S’nothing to be sorry about.”

“J’suis un désastre.”

“We all are,” you hum, let him press his face into the crook of your neck. Tucked next to him under the duvet, legs tangled around each other, you smell like clean sheets and the hotel shampoo. “I’ll always be here, no matter… No matter anything.”

“No matter anything?” he says, with a tiny smile, and you know it’s real; you can thumb at the dimples on his cheeks as he bumps his nose against yours. “Is that correct english?”

“Dunno. It is to me,” you laugh, because Charles is contagious like that. “I’ll always be right here no matter anything. I promise.”

“Really?” he asks, even when he knows what your answer is. You’d never been the type to go against your word, but tonight he just needs to hear it.

“Yes.”

“Even if I snore?”

“Ah, well, hmm…” you feign a second thought, but let out a yelp when he pokes your side with a ‘Ey! 

Okay! Yes! Yes, stop— you concede, trying to keep your laugh low as he tickles you. But then Charles shifts, impossibly closer now, and catches your lips into a kiss. 

He’s warm all over while you run your hand down his jawline, and when he breaks away, his pupils are blown wide under the moonlight. “I love you,” he says, breathless, terrified.

Oh. You blink, let out a huff of laughter, and say the same. I love you.

“No matter anything.”

“No matter anything,” Charles confirms, and seals you into another kiss.

The crest and the fall comes in 2017. 

No matter anything sticks. Even on bad race days, when the car just doesn’t cooperate, when someone takes a bad corner and you pay the price having been there at the wrong place at the wrong time; Even on date nights that never come around to be, sacrificed when Charles or you are whisked away to entertain other businesses in sponsorships and PR duties; Even on the death threats of your social media accounts that you managed to hide, months following your relationship being revealed, and he’d discovered it only after you’d accidentally left your screen unlocked on your vanity. 

No matter anything sticks, especially when his father passes— the sickness had been aggressive; hard to fight and even harder to beat— and Charles gets his maiden win just four days later, like a Greek tragedy come to life. No matter anything sticks when he confesses to you, broken and heaving in your arms, that he hates himself; That he’d lied to his father about his signed contract with Ferrari, because he deserved to be happy. I just wanted to see him smile, I needed to see it.

No matter anything sticks, even when you watch the way he’s slowly eroding into someone entirely different, throughout the years.

No matter anything sticks, until it doesn’t. 

Grief, you come to learn, is what sticks just the same. It sticks like the watermelon candy you share with Pierre, sticks like the soot in Charles’ grandmother’s fireplace, black and permanent and relentless. Grief hurts even more when you’re grieving for someone who isn’t dead, who’s alive and breathing, who’s making the choice to walk away from you.

Fights have always been few and farther in between, never really holding any gravity or significance unless it truly mattered. But, time changes people, and he didn’t even bother waiting for the plane ride to be over, didn’t even bother waiting for touchdown to the airport, didn’t even bother waiting to tell you at the hotel. 

“Maybe this just isn’t the right moment for us, amour,” he’d said. Dropped, practically. Then the seat belt light overhead pings off in perfect timing, and you stay for a second to soak in the way his words sound like radio-static in your ears, the way he can’t even bring himself to look you in the eyes. You excuse yourself to the washroom, stay there for ten, fifteen minutes, maybe— Enough that the stewardess knocks on the door to check on you— breathing but not really, feeling like your soul’s escaped its body and been left behind to drift thirty-thousand feet in the air.

The rest of the ride is completed in dead silence, both of you drafting the right words to say in your heads to let each other down slowly. How do I fix this, you’d panicked. How do I end this, he’d thought. 

You’re the first to break when his hotel room door shuts. He wipes your tears, because of course he does, because he can stand anyone’s tears but yours— even less knowing he’s the reason behind every one. It’s the racing, he reasons gently, the career.

And you get it, really, you do. You’d spent your childhood karting alongside Charles and Pierre and Anthoine for Christ’s sake, raised in engine smoke and grease since you could walk, so of course you understand the lifestyle, the grit. You get it. You get it. But you don’t. Because if you could handle it, then, well— why couldn’t he?

“It’s…” His face twists in frustration when the luggage he rolls catches at the carpet lip. “I can’t balance it all. Us, the driving, the— the expectations.”

The implication stings, but you know he hadn’t meant it to sound out that way. Charles is well aware of just how much you sacrifice being in this with him, too. You, who’d been spotlit until you melted, who’d been kept under the giant, unblinking eye that was Skysport, analysed down to the last breath and blink you take in social media; you who’d practically been studied under a public microscope— being waited on, preyed on, for a single misstep, misgiving, mistake, just so they could tear you to pieces for being Charles’ girl, for thinking you had a shot in a ruthless sport like this, for being a woman in a man’s world.

You toe the wheel off the lip his luggage is stuck on, and watch as he nudges the bags to the corner of the room with a little force more than necessary. 

“I have expectations,” you say; not angry, not yet, because you still wanted to salvage this relationship, still wanted to lick your wounds together with him in the aftermath, still wanted to crawl into his arms by the end of the day and pretend this never happened.  “We can work this out, Charles.”

“I’m—” he blinks his eyes hard, brushes past you and into the kitchenette, as if it pained him to even gather the effort to look at you. “We’ve tried. I can’t— I can’t give you what you deserve. You, you deserve someone bett—”

“Stop,” you flinch, rear your head back in disbelief. “You sound exactly like everyone else; telling me what to do, what I need. Like you know how I feel. You don’t get to decide what I want, Charles.”

“Putain—” He leans into the marble countertop of the kitchen island, arms spread, lets out an exasperated sound because he knows where you’re going with this; because this was descending into an argument faster than he’d expected. “—That’s. That’s not what I’m trying to do.”

You’re giving up, you don’t say, because it’d hurt you just as much to admit it out loud for him. “Isn’t it?” 

“I don’t want to fight,” he overrides, evenly, cut to the quick when he hears your calm begin to give way. Above all else, he’s always been a pacifist, and you’d never thought you’d come to hate it until now.

“Not even for us?” Your voice cracks but you shake it off in irritation. “So what? That’s it? You’re not some hero, sacrificing your heart for what’s best for me, Charles. You’re just being a coward.”

His shoulders drop. “You’re being unfair.” 

The statement nearly gives you whiplash. Charles had just broken up with you on a red-eye flight, waited until both of you arrived in the hotel to explain himself— and when he did, gave a shitty excuse— and now, now you’re the unfair one? 

“I’m doing what I think is right. I, what—? Wait,” he stumbles, alarmed, when he sees you toss the roomcard to the counter in front of him. “Amour, arrête!” he calls, rounds the island to grab you by the sleeve just as you pick up your phone to make headway to the door. “Tu fais quoi?”

You’d tried to sound resolute, but the tears flooding your vision aren’t helping, and his now-unfamiliar touch is making you waver. “To book another room. I can’t be here,” then, more bitterly, “You don’t want me here.”

Charles feels the fight drain out of him. “That’s not true.”

And in another universe, this would be where it ends well, where the love rekindles again. This is the part where the fork in the road would be, and he’d take the path that would save the both of you. 

This would be the part where Charles apologises, says, I’m sorry. We can talk about this tomorrow. Let’s unpack, and eat, and rest. Just stay, please; because I love you, and I don’t think I can go to sleep knowing you’re hurting, and you would cry from the relief because at least, at least, you know now that it isn't the end just yet, that he’s still willing to fight for this, to fight for you, no matter anything.

Pierre receives a text late that night from Anthoine, frantic, and he only truly realises this one might be the worst, might truly be it, when he reads; Piccolo, she called me crying tonight. Did you know about this? 

What did you do, Calamar? Charles. Reply me Hello?? She’s my friend too. I’ll beat the answer out of you if i have to.

I broke up with her.

I’m going to fucking kill you.

So it goes.

2018. Charles is green-lit and signed into Sauber that season for F1, and you’re left behind. It’s no surprise to you— your management had told you to brace for it; that no one would want to sign the only girl, as interesting as the headlines would read, because who would want to bet on a shot in the dark? Your results are impressive, yes, that you’d been able to hold your ground against the better half of the grid is a feat in its own— but the world of motorsport, and Formula One specifically, is first and foremost money-hungry, all-political, and then some. It’s too late for you to realise the cards have never played in your favour, and never will, as a woman. 

Summer break grows dull. You’re not here for as long as you used to visit because of scheduling differences, and now neither is Jules, and neither is his Dad. When Charles reaches for the Blue Coasts in the fridge, he freezes. “What’s wrong?” Lorenzo says, across the same counter Jules had stood all those years ago. 

“Nothing,” Charles answers, and doesn’t even bother hiding the fact that it’s a lie. He pops a bottle and slides it to his brother, fights back the déjà-vu suffocating him. “I just remembered something Jules said to me here, last time.” He’d been seventeen then, now he’s twenty-one. Four years fly faster than expected.

2019 rolls by. Both of you have long since drifted, separate in your own careers, though you’re not sure he keeps an eye on yours as much as you do his in Ferrari. The occasional bump and race overlaps happen every now and then, but conversations are reduced to minimal topics that mean little to nothing to the both of you. You talk more with his mother and brothers, granted, horrifically awkwardly; until he’d brought his new girl, had no choice but to nervously introduce you two when he couldn’t get out of it.

(A model; young and ambitious and wearing sponsored brand collections to every paddock visit she does. You almost laugh at the way you see so much of yourself in her innocence, in the way she looks at Charles like he was a God amongst men.)

This one is a distraction, you can tell. They’ll break one another like how you both did 2 years ago. Or maybe you’re just bitter, jealous, angry. You’ll get over it. You’ll get over him. You’ll—

It’s Anthoine that brings you back together. 

In another time, you’d see sense in the morbid poetry of it all.

You’d caved, sobbed; the weight of grief and of loss and of death and everything else, bearing down on you. “It was supposed to be all of us. You, and me, and Pierre, and— We, we were all supposed to be here, Charles. We were all supposed to race.”

I’m sorry, is all he can manage, inadequate as it is, at the face of your anguish. You’re on the cold floor of a hotel somewhere in France, hands twisted into his sleeves, cradled in his arms the past hour against the foot of the bed. 

The Leclerc’s, the Hubert’s, the Gasly’s— all of you had returned from the funeral. Charles has to remind himself, sometimes, that you’re not as familiar with saying goodbye as he is. 

So he holds you instead, like he always did when the both of you were younger; familiar and delicate and full of love, like you were a porcelain doll cracking at the seams, because you were. For a moment, it feels like it’s 2015 again, leaning into each other's pain the summer Jules had gone.

“I don’t want to race, anymore,” you’d whispered into his shirt, utterly defeated. It’s soaked in your tears, and still, still, you can practically taste the scent of Charles through the wrinkled fabric. He’s had a growth spurt last you saw him; he’s grown into the fat of his cheeks, more angular in the jaw and mature in the eyes— but boyish all the same, in the wide-eyed way he looks at you like you’re his whole world. 

(You’re not sure if he’s even aware he does that. The better half of you would have crawled out this embrace, save yourself whatever dignity remained after falling apart in the arms of your ex— but you think you’ve buried your better half along with Anthoine that dark morning.)

“You have to,” Charles says. He doesn’t make the mistake of saying, Anthoine would’ve wanted this, or Anthoine would hate to see you this way, because it would’ve been unfair. You and Pierre had always been far closer to him than he ever was. “You need to prove everyone wrong,” he says instead.

The crying tires you out, eventually, but you’re quick to catch him by the wrist when he slips out the bed to leave. The touch alone sends a wave of homesickness through the both of you. You didn’t want this to end, not yet. 

“Stay,” you plead, and omit the rest of the sentence. I’m scared. I need you. I miss you. It isn’t a good idea, you know this, because he has a girlfriend now for Christ’s sake, and Charles had hurt you once before, so you’re sure this would be taking a path down the same road, but— 

—No matter anything exists between you two. Maybe, maybe, you can hold onto that, if nothing. 

“I don’t want to sleep,” comes your confession, when the clock hits midnight and the stars and satellites dot the sky. I can’t, would’ve been the better way to say it, in hindsight. 

That you couldn’t even close your eyes sometimes, because you’ve yet to erase the sight of the aftermath in front of you that turn in Spa, that you couldn’t shake the post-race anxiety that still nestled deep in your marrows like an ache long after you’d exited your cockpit in the garage that day. You figure he understands. 

So he stays. This is the crest. The fall will come after. He knows it. He deserves it.

He brews coffee just how you like it, just like how you both used to share in the early mornings back in his apartment, and slides under the covers by you. He tells you about his Winter breaks because he knows you won’t want to hear about anything that has four wheels and an engine, and drapes an arm around your shoulder, your head on his chest, where you can feel him play with the strands of your hair just like once-upon-a-time ago. He talks, and you listen, ears pressed against his ribs, distract yourself from the horrors of the world by basking in the rumbling nostalgia of his voice, and the hum-drum of his heart, instead. 

You want— need— to carve this into memory, as badly as it hurts, knowing he’ll disappear come morning.

Hm? you murmur, eyelids heavy.

Rien, he dismisses, and you’re too drowsy to register that it’s his lips you feel ghosting across your forehead. Bonne nuit.

The coffee on the table is stone-cold by the time you wake, alone. 

He’s still with his girl come New Years. It’s a late celebration; January 3rd, 2020. 

You wonder if she knows. If she knows Charles had slipped into bed and kept you company until you slept, that he’d kissed you goodnight on your forehead; that you’re still helplessly, hopelessly—

You’re not drunk enough, but Arthur is; you’ve been trying to pep-talk him after you’d caught him swooning over a pretty blonde named Carla across the room, with a cute accent to match. “Fais-le, ‘Turtur. She’s been staring at you too.”

“Ah bon?” he gapes, and repeats himself in English, for some reason, “Really?”

You shoot Charles a distressed look. 

“Ouias! Oui,” he covers for you, instantly, and the both of you cringe as you watch Arthur shake his tipsiness off and dust his corny button-up shirt designed with tacky fireworks. 

“He’s going to embarrass himself,” Pierre groans into his drink, but you notice there’s a glint in his eyes— the same one he always got whenever he schemed with Anthoine. It’s been awhile since you’ve seen it again.

“I don’t see you stopping him,” you say, and the three of you descend into laughter at the sight of Arthur fixing his hair at every reflection he passes on the way to the other end of the club.

“Ça suffit pour l’instant,” Pierre chastises, once you’d reached your fourth glass of… whatever that was. 

“I’m not drunk,” you insist, trying not to slur your words. Charles had long disappeared from the space beside you to dance with his girlfriend, somewhere. Summer is gone, but you think you can still see it through the flash of strobe lights; your eyes instinctively searching for the tousled hair, the half-lidded eyes, the rosy cheeks and stupid, stupid dimples. That’s him, actually, you realise. And— oh. 

“For your sake, don’t look,” Pierre says, and nudges you enough that you blink, and you lose track of the ugly scene playing in front of you. 

“I…” I miss him, you almost say. He used to kiss me like that. 

Pierre watches you carefully. 

“I think I’m gonna throw up,” you blurt.

“What.”

You do hurl, a minute later.

Pierre complains the entire time, and of course he does, but you know he doesn’t actually mind because he’d tucked your hair behind your ears and held it up into a ponytail despite it all, and ordered a glass of water for you when you’d finally washed up. Ever the gentleman.

Oh my god, you’d laughed, at the curbside of a random street for fresh air, I’m unlovable, before descending into tears at an alarming rate, burrowing your face into the white linen of Pierre’s shoulder. You want to apologise for ruining his night, for putting him through hell and back, for fucking everything, but words are impossible, clumping like a ball in your throat. 

It must be so difficult, you realise: to be the in-betweener, the neutral party. To have to stand at the crossroads, and be stretched thin between the two people who matter the most to you. 

“You’re not,” says Pierre, patient yet rough in his own brotherly-way, and pulls you closer to his side, pats you on the head. “I love you.”

You sniffle out a laugh. “You know what I mean, Piccolo.”

He beams at that. That nickname had been the bane of his existence for the brief moment of time you’d been taller than him as children. “I do,” he agrees, after a moment of pained silence. Then, after careful consideration, adds, “Il t'aime encore, tu sais.”

That sobers you in an instant, and you inhale sharply, sit back up proper. “Pierre,” you sigh. “Arrête.”

 “J’suis sérieuse,” he shoots, and says your name for good measure.

“He loves her, and he loves Ferrari,” you argue, in hopes of steering the conversation elsewhere. “Talks about them with all the love in the world.”

But Pierre scoffs, much to your chagrin, and does that thing where he raises his eyebrows with a smile, shakes his head in disbelief. “Then you’ve never heard him talk about you.”

Congratulations, Pierre had texted you, later that year in the Autosport Awards. You’d won the W-Series driver’s championship with three races to spare, and he’s never felt prouder of you, watching you appear in the screens. You deserve it. 

Say it to my face, comes your reply, because even after all this time you could never quite change the way Pierre turns you back to your younger self— playful, soft, hopeful. He just laughs, peeks at the buzz of notifications from his phone when you continue. We’re having a party. Bring Charles. I miss him.

Ouch, he writes, and fails to send the I missed you too in his textbox. 

Their plane doesn’t touch down in time for the party, but you manage to squeeze in a Christmas dinner in Mallorca before the end of the year. I want you to meet someone, you’d said, and Charles had felt his heart drop in his chest.

This is Emilio, you introduce. You try to brush off the arrested look on Charles’ face, try to convince you'd just been imagining the pass of… something in his eyes, out of self-indulgence. Charles has moved on, surely. Why shouldn’t you? Why couldn’t you?

Emilio. Right. Him. Charles had heard of your supposed attachment through the grapevine mid-season, but they’d never held any ground (or maybe he just refused to believe it). That Singapore weekend had been spent trying to convince Pierre not to message you about the rumour; claiming out of privacy’s sake, but Pierre knew Charles long enough to understand it’s mostly because he wasn’t even sure if he wanted to know the truth.

He’s a Doctor, you smile, proud, lay a hand on his bicep and look up at him like he’s your universe, like the Mallorcan view around you isn’t literally right there to gaze at. Charles might have to take a seat before he collapses, at this rate. Not really, Emilio says, humble— because of course he’s fucking humble too, Christ; what else does this guy have that holds a candle against Charles? I’m in my second year of Residency.

He’s everything good, Charles concludes, by the time the night had winded down and dinner was beginning to come to a closing end. Emilio had held the door open for you, for everyone; he’d pulled the chair for you and translated the Spanish dishes for everyone patiently, and took his time to learn about him, and Pierre, and Lorenzo, Arthur, Carla. He’s affable, naturally charming, effortlessly funny, and managed not to squirm under Pierre’s doberman-like size up: the perfect type to bring home to your parents and get an immediate stamp-of-approval on. He’s everything Charles isn’t, hasn’t been, hadn’t been, could’ve been—

CRACK.

You yelp. 

Lorenzo curses.

Charles blinks, then blinks again, at the shard stuck in his palm. He’d crushed the thin wine glass in his hands.

He can’t tell if this is a crest or a fall.

“Force of habit,” he dismisses later, after he subsequently becomes a patient of Emilio— the Doctor— your boyfriend’s— care for the next five minutes. It didn’t make sense at all, but an answer was better than awkward silence. Carla hands him a spare plaster from her purse. Charles thanks her, excuses himself from the restaurant for a breath of fresh air.

He doesn’t notice you’d trailed to follow him until he feels you brush by his shoulder. You’ve got Emilio’s blazer over your shoulders. He wonders if it would’ve been his jacket instead, in another life. “You okay?” 

“Yeah.” He raises his palm to show the bright red Lightning McQueen plaster. “Never better. Kachow.”

You scoff, amused, and tuck your hair behind your ear. Mallorca in December is high-strung in Christmas lights and bathed in Winter markets across cobblestone streets; if you listen closely past the hustle and bustle of the restaurant, you’d be able to pick out the local buskers singing festivities and dancing with one another. “The view is beautiful.” 

“It is,” he replies, instinctively.

He’s not looking at the scenery. You know, because you can feel the burn of his gaze through your peripherals, like a brand on the side of your face.

He’s watching you, waiting for a sign in your expression, waiting for the shift in your footing and the bloom of your cheeks. It would mean something. It would mean it isn’t too late for him yet, as fucked up as it would be for him to think. It’s wrong. Charles knows this. But he couldn’t leave Spain yet without letting you know, someway, somehow, that you’d always have a key to the backdoor into his heart. 

“You kept bringing up the past,” you ignore. She likes the Fritillaries in my Grandmother’s backgarden when they’re in season, he’d told Emilio. When you made a passing comment on your dinner being one of the best you’ve ever had, Charles had went; The best dinner I ever had was a burger in Pau, France.

He was being childish. Is. He didn’t have the right. He’d been the one to break your heart, been the one to give up, to act like nothing ever happened; been the one to make sure the space between you two felt like a million miles apart, and now— and now? Now he wants to do this? 

“Is that so bad?”

“In front of ‘Milio, yeah.” It’s delusional, but he clings onto the fact you’d said Emilio, instead of my boyfriend. “You did it on purpose.”

“I didn’t.” ( He did. He’s self-destructive like that. It’s a trait he could never shake— Sebastian had told him. )

“Oh my god,” you sigh. “Could you for once just be true to yourself?”

“True to—?” His voice pitches there, but he’s quick to reel himself back in. 

“There. That,” you gesture. “Just say it how you want to.” How you used to.

“I’m not going to yell at you,” he says, strained. He’s well above that. His father had taught him better, and he’s made that mistake before. “Just tell me what I did wrong.”

“Don’t, don’t act like you don’t know, Charles. The glass breaking—” you raise your finger before he can cut you off, “—Chalk it off as an accident, why don’t we. But my favourite flowers? Our first date? Wh— I don’t understand why you would even do that!”

He makes a dry sound from the back of his throat, and it irks you. It irks you because he’s looking at you, glacially calm yet looking as if he wants to spill every word that’s latching onto his tongue, like he wants to scream at you, like he wants to kiss you, all at once.

“I think you do,” he says, finally. 

That stops you short. 

No. No, no, no, no. He couldn’t possibly be doing this to you; here and now. After all this time. Not when you’re finally putting your pieces back together and trying to live a life, not when you’re finally trying your best to move on.

“Oh, you are so fucking selfish,” you snarl, and Charles visibly flinches at that. You’d always told him to be more selfish. To take the wins he gets in each race and carry it with pride, and to not do the same with his losses. Now, he’s not so sure. “I don’t know, Charles. I don’t. No.”

“Yes.” He reaches for your wrist. It feels like Summer of 2014, when you’d leapt off the boat, feels like Fall of 2015, when you’d held him in your arms in Monaco, feels like Winter of 2016, when he’d been pressed into you that early Christmas, feels like Spring of 2017, wh—

“No, I want you to tell me,” you snap, snatch your arm away. 

It’s easier this way. It’s easier to hear it openly from him, so you can still come out on top of this argument in your own rotten metaphorical way; so you can spit out the script you’ve drafted in your head time and time again, so you can still manage, at the end of the day, to blame him, and move on, move on, move on. 

“Go on, Charles. Tell me.”

“You’re lost,” he says, instead, and it’s in part the truth. You hate that he’s right. You hate that you still notice how his cheeks dig in when he speaks. You hate that at the end of the day you’re always going to be caught in his orbit one way or another. You hate him. But you don’t. But you do.

“I’m… lost,” you parrot, throwing your hands up. “What the fuck is that? Where am I supposed to be then, Charles, huh?” And then you blurt it out for him before you can even stop yourself. “Back in your arms? Back with you?”

He’s silent. Even after all this time, you could always read him like an open book. ( It’s a yes. A yes in the gentle breeze of the night, a yes in the buzz of the amber lantern lights, a yes in the way he’s watching you with that sad look in his eyes. Concession. Admission. Confession: No matter anything. )

“No. No, you don’t get to do that. You of all people—” you choke up, grit your teeth when your face twists, and look away. “You are being so… you are so mean, Charles. So mean.”

And then you’re running your hand through your hair and down your face, chasing the flush away, the burn at the back of your eyelids. Emilio, Pierre, Clara, and the brothers have appeared around the corner. One of them must have paid the bill. 

“Tout vas bien?” Lorenzo says, by way of polite intrusion. Pierre’s got his hands in his pockets, and he’s staring Charles down colder than ever. He looks two inches away from snapping his neck. Pierre knows. Ofcourse, he knows. 

“Nothing,” you sniff innocently, leaning into Emilio when he sidles by you with a comforting hand. You didn’t have the heart to look at anyone, afraid you might just burst into tears. You feel like a porcelain doll again, fracturing, losing your pieces with every pained breath you take trying to swallow down the disgusting churn of resentment in your throat. “A fan just wanted a picture with Charles.”

“I wouldn’t want one with you,” Arthur jokes, and you’re laughing with them, carrying the joke forward. Had Charles not known you, he would’ve fallen for it. You’re an excellent liar. 

I’m sorry, he messages you that night, even though he wasn’t. Not, at least, for telling the truth. 

A text bubble appears, then disappears. Charles waits, and waits. Holds out on hope. 

You never do reply him.

Are you coming for Léon’s wedding? you receive, mid-season in 2021. You’re just about halfway up to zipping your racesuit when you see the screen flash. It’s Pierre. Don’t think so, you reply. I’ve got a contract thing coming up then.

In an airport a thousand miles from you, Pierre pauses mid-sip on his coffee, narrows his eyes at your text. What contract thing? 

Secret, comes your reply, followed by a string of emojis. Gotta race. Ciao.

Congrats on pole. 

Don’t curse me, Piccolo.

You don’t see his middle finger emoji until after the race, where you do, in fact, pole, despite a questionable start under even more questionable weather conditions. It bumps you up to lead comfortably in the Women’s Championship. 

Charles won’t be there, is the final text he sends, last seen one hour ago. You roll your eyes at that, wipe your champagne-soaked hands on your towel. Your world doesn’t revolve around Charles. Not anymore, you hope.

Doesn’t change my answer. 

I need distance. 

Pierre leaves you on read with a knowing laugh. 

(You do end up going, in the end. That had been a fleeting weekend in Malta, alone mostly with Pierre, where you had time to reflect on the whirlwind that was your life after witnessing the wedding between two of your good friends.)

Distance doesn’t work. 

Distance doesn’t work because you’re two halves of a whole Universe as much as you don’t want to admit it, because your world is small and Monaco is smaller, because there’s always been that divine, gravitational pull you have towards each other; celestials caught in each other's orbit.

You know it never will, not when it comes to Charles, who always made you weak, always made it so difficult to stay mad at him, so easy to forgive. You’re sure you’d forgiven him the day you turned your back on him in Mallorca— just didn’t want to admit it to his face, give him the satisfaction. In retrospect, you’d been just as childish as him.

“Pink looks silly on you,” you comment, when you see each other again in a mutual friend's baby shower. That’s a flat-out lie. The champagne has you loose-lipped. Charles looks good in anything; and he always seemed the doting girl-dad type.

“Blue isn’t your colour,” he replies. It’s a blatant lie. Any colour is your colour, in his opinion. You could dress in a rainbow potato sack and he’d still find you the most beautiful person in the world. “I thought you’d have bet on a girl, too.”

“I grew up and competed with boys my entire life,” you shrug. His model-girlfriend isn’t around, and your doctor-boyfriend isn’t around. Neither of you dare to comment on it. You just skirt around each other and talk about the races, and of Arthur in F3, now. 

You drift between circles of friends, talk until the clouds clear and the balloon bursts and the couple announce that It’s a Boy! And the blue-and-white petals scatter in the yard, and you’re laughing, and he’s laughing, because; vous gagnez, cherie. 

You hand him a too-sweet cupcake in navy sprinkles, from one of the sidetables in the kitchen. “For the loser.”

It’s a peace treaty. A proverbial apology. No matter anything?

Charles picks it from your hand, and takes a bite.

I’m sorry, too. No matter anything.

Come 2022. Carla asks, half-whispering, “Are you two okay, now?” as she clasps her sunscreen shut. She peers at you carefully through the mirror. 

“Uh.” You’re mid-dip down into the mess of bikinis and sundresses that was your luggage bag, digging through for an appropriate outfit in the Maldives weather. You don’t know why she’s whispering, it’s just the two of you in the hotel room right now. Right. Okay. What is okay, to you and Charles? 

Okay had been elbow nudges and shy hand-holding once, had been open-mouthed kisses and thumbs over knuckles and around wrists, had been distance and tolerating each other’s presence, pretending everything was fine when it clearly wasn’t. Okay had been balancing the tight-rope of something and nothing, of too-familiar-strangers and ex-lovers who bet their everything on no matter anything.

If okay is pursed lips and friendly smiles, there-and-away glances that aren’t decipherable to either of you anymore, and keeping each other within a comfortable distance, then, yeah. Okay. The both of you are okay, you guess. Enough time has passed.

“I, uh, never actually asked him.” 

Carla makes a face when you pull two bikinis up, points to the non-printed one draped over your left forearm. “You should, though.”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” you say, picking the conversation back up once you’ve settled comfortably in the beach hammocks. Carla wriggles her feet and claps her hand to dust the sand away, hopping in beside you with a squeal when the cords nearly twist and throw the both of you backwards. 

“Just, ask,” she says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. 

Maldives has been kind to all of you, the weather bright and the clear water gently lapping on white-shores. The atmosphere is good. Perfect, even. It’s Summer break and again it feels like you’re under the sun in Southern Italy. The brothers, and Pierre, are here and happy. Race season has paused, and for now you can set the weight of the world down at your feet if only for a little while.

“Easier said,” you answer, with a tone that signalled you aren’t really in the mood to debate it. Carla nods, and lets go of it with a final:

“Okay is easy, but not love. Love should never just be easy.”

You mull on it. Churn it and digest it and try to pick it apart in your brain. Loving Charles had been so easy. As easy as breathing. Loving Charles feels like instinct, second-nature. You decide you don’t understand her, not completely, atleast. 

“Amour.”

Your head whips up at his voice. Easy. Instinct. Second-nature. 

It’s Arthur. He always sounded horrifyingly similar to Charles. Pierre, trailing behind, catches your mistake, and pins you with a knowing look.

Fuck off, you shoot back a glare. When Charles arrives not long after to pass you a freshly broken coconut, umbrella and swirly straw in, you try not to stare at the sheen of sweat on his chest and arms. It’s near sinful.

“Did you bring it?” Charles says, digging greedily into your tote.

“Yeah. Go put some on, you’re turning into a fuckin’ Ferrari,” you chide, even though you’re already setting your coconut down, and squeezing the sunblock on your hands to do it for him. (Summer as teenagers. Old habits. The fact that moving around Charles is as unconscious as a heartbeat.) 

“Turn around. I’ll draw a dick on your back.”

“Bitch,” he swats with a laugh.

You’re smiling as you lather your hands and swallow down the instinctive, Love you too.

The rest of the day is spent frantically running in the sand as everyone argues over volleyball rules and whether or not “it went over the line!”; followed closely by a chance golden hour photoshoot with everyone, where you try not to let the compliment get to your cheeks when Charles tells you, you look beautiful, as the sun melts into the horizon.

“I think I just drank seasalt,” you hiccup, wading back inland, beer in hand. The ripples light alive in bioluminescent plankton as Charles meets you halfway, one hand outstretched, as always— ever-ready to steady you when you need it. He’s a gentleman, like that.

“Seawater,” corrects Charles. He can tell you’re already beginning to slip deeper into the planes of tipsiness when he hands you a roasted marshmallow, and you miss grabbing the skewer by an inch. You make a face at him when he laughs before settling down onto the shoreline, wiggling your toes into the wet sand.

Then the silence comes, and it’s comfortable. It’s just stars, now; and the cold, and the water, and Charles, beside you with his elbows propped on his knees, fingers rolling on the lip of the empty beer bottle he’d offered to hold for you. Ten-year-old you would have found it hard to believe that it hadn’t always been like this— that there’d been a point in time when you’d leave from every room he enters, that you couldn’t bear to even think of him.

“I think I knew you,” you say, and you’re half-surprised you’d blurted something out.

Charles looks at you funny. “I sure hope you did.”

“No, no,” you amend, looking up from your feet in the tide. “I mean. Knew you. Before all this. It makes sense.” 

He’s got a boyish smile on his face, sweet and dimple-y as he reaches to adjust the beach towel he’d swept over your shoulders earlier. “I think you’re drunk.”

“No, no, hear me out. I think..” you look at him, straight in the eyes since he’s first sat beside you, and Charles finds himself pinned under your loopy gaze. “I think we're soulmates, you know?”

You say it with the kind of conviction that could convince even the Devil himself.  “… Yeah?” he asks, feels a creep of warmth somewhere in his ribcage.

A nod, slow. “Yeah.” His eyes hang onto the movement; the curl in your lips, the flutter in your eyelashes, the wet hair sticking to your forehead. You’re sunkissed. You’re beautiful. He wants to tell you, again. He can’t, he thinks.

“What were we, then, before this?” Did I love you the same? Did I hurt you the same? Did you let me back into your life as you are now? Did we get our happy ending? 

“Maybe we were… strangers. We meet by pure accident, like those cheesy Hallmark movies where the girl accidentally spills coffee on the guy, and then he looks at her as if she hung the moon and the stars.” 

You don’t notice it, because you’re busy wading the water with your fingers, picking at a seashell— but he’s looking at you right now, that way. The bioluminescence of the water glows and glitter neon in the reflection of your eyes, and the distant moon and firelight is painting you like a saint off the tinted glass windows of a church— some sacred thing he probably doesn’t deserve, but selfishly wants to keep for himself forever.

“And then?” He can barely conceal the desperation in his voice. He hides it with a small laugh. “Then what happens?”

“Then we fall in love,” you tell him, softly. You think back on Malta. The vows, the shift in the air, the way colours seemed to saturate around the presence of intimacy. “Get married. And grow old together. Then we find each other again, in the next life.”

A next life. You’re thinking of a next life, with him. “You’d like that?”

“Ouias. I’d like that.” You remember telling Pierre something similar to this— that you’d like to settle down, somewhere sunny and slow and beautiful; perhaps Tuscany. He had teased you for it.

“And… what about this life?” 

You glance at the sand between his fingers. The droplets of water on his skin. If you didn’t know Charles so well, you wouldn't have recognised him with how small he’d sounded. But you do, so you did.

“What about it?” 

The tide laps. It bathes you in a moonglade of blue. The implication hangs in the air, and it’s frighteningly tentative. Charles lets the words tumble before the regret can haunt him. “Do you see it? See us?”

Concession. Admission. Confession. It feels like Mallorca, all over again. 

“I…” I don’t know.

You look away. Down. Up. Down. Then back up to his eyes. He looks torn, but patient.

“It’s okay,” he says— smiles. It’s sincere. It’s sincere because it’s digging into his cheeks, and you can finally translate the looks in his eyes, again, after all this time apart: I will wait for you. No matter anything.

“Just— as long as we’re okay.” The hope in his tone phrases it like a question.

“Of course,” comes your answer, easily. It’s okay. We’re okay. Nothing has changed between us, even when I thought it did. You are still Charles. My Charles. In every way; In the only way I’ve ever known you. No matter anything. 

Your fingers brush against his. You can feel his bracelets pressing against your wrist. “Always.”

Sobriety comes with the five slices of watermelon that Pierre had supposedly ‘fought tooth-and-nail’ to keep from Arthur and save for you. 

“Y’shaid y’had to tchell me shomething,” you remind him, clawclip in your mouth as you gather your hair up. It’s two in the morning. The overwater-bungalows are a distance from the shoreline, but the boardwalk is a welcome stroll to clear your mind. You’re still at the beach though, busy shaking the sand off your sandals while Pierre puts the fire out. It’s getting dark. Everyone has already gone off to disappear into their rooms.

“Nah,” Pierre dismisses, after a lengthy, contemplative pause. “It’s nothing. Just— Hey, is that Arthurs?”

You clip your hair, hook your fingers to the straps of your sandals, reach with a free hand to the white square that’s bending the hammock out of shape. Airpods. You flick it open. Only one earpiece is in. 

You snort.

At half past 2 in the morning, someone knocks on Charles’ door.

“Idiot,” you say, when he opens the door to find you standing outside, bleary-eyed, holding his airpods up. “You left this at the hammock.” 

“Oh shit.” He takes it from you with a sheepish smile. “Thanks.”

In hindsight, you should have left, afterwards. Or maybe just handed it to him the next day. But— but. He’s leaning against the doorframe, topless, one hand busy rubbing the sleep out his eyes. You hang onto the movement, flick your eyes from the way his wrist twists, arm flexing. He looks good. Too good, for someone who just seemed to have rolled out of bed. You’re growing alarmingly warm under the thin material of your cover-up, suddenly violently aware of how you must look standing at his doorway with half your skin showing in a bikini of all things.

“Can we talk?” 

“Can we talk?”

He laughs. It’s a soft, boyish rumble deep in his chest. “Yeah, uh— come in.”

“Désolée,” he apologises once you step in, “C'est en désordre.”

But you don’t mind. If anything, it’s familiar. Nostalgia finds you between the clothes strewn by the edges of his bed and the luggage burst open at the corner of the room, looking like it’d been kicked to the side at the last minute. He’s never been able to keep his rooms clean for any longer than a few days— never in his apartments and never in his hotels. You remember. You always remember.

“What’s so funny?” he asks, hurrying to clear the floor.

“Nothing,” you reply, try not to focus on the way the cord of muscles on his back pull when he bends to reach for a stray t-shirt in the way. “You just. Haven’t changed alot.” 

He dimples at you over his shoulder. “Yeah?”

You kick up a towel at your feet and hand it to him. He tosses it into a messy pile in the corner. “Yeah.” You’re still Charles. My Charles. I’m still helplessly, hopelessly, in love with you. You’re still the same because we move the same, breathe the same, look at each other the same. 

“I think I’ve changed,” Charles says, shuffling further into the room. He places his airpods down a side table, by a bowl of complimentary fruit from the hotel. “I’m a better man than I was.”

“Less of an idiot?” you tease, if only to deflect the unspoken implication. ( We’re all idiots when we’re teenagers and in love, anyway. ) Charles turns to you to find his other missing earpiece in your forefingers, dug out from God knows where. “Highly unlikely.”

You toss it. Charles catches it easily without breaking eye-contact, just smiles. The motion shouldn’t have been that attractive to you. 

“I can try,” He clips it back into the case, sets it down. “If you will let me.”

The sliding doors facing the ocean waves are curtainless, and left ajar. When a breeze blows through, you can smell the salt winds, the smell of Charles; feel the way your skin rises with goosebumps— but only because he’s gazing at you with that dopey look he has; doe-eyed and green and twinkling with hope. 

“Let you do what, exactly?” Your mouth is dry. You take the pause in his answer as an opportunity to walk into the kitchenette, ground yourself by paying attention to the grooves of the wood beneath your bare feet as you pour yourself a glass of water, sip slowly to occupy yourself.

The kitchen island works as some border between you both. Charles closes the distance, slow, like he’s testing the waters; until he reaches the corner where you stand, and sidles his hip on the edge. He runs a hand across his day old stubble. You’re one reach away. He doesn’t close you in. If you wanted, you could walk right past him and out the door. It’s an option. A choice. Don’t go, he means to say. But if you must, I’ll spend the rest of my days wondering where I went wrong.

“It’s. I mean,” he says, twists his rings as he usually does when he’s nervous. “I— Need to apologise. Properly.”

The sentence is stilted, and it’s impossible to not remember how he’d stumbled over his words all those years ago— A first date; Somewhere at a hotel lobby; Calling you pretty in a messy, albeit charming way. “There’s no need,” you say, because it’s the truth. You’re okay with it now, as far as okay can be. “We’re past that. We’re past all of it.”

“Even Emilio?” He waits for the recoil, the affronted look on your face, but nothing comes. 

“Emilio was…” you shrug, end it off there. Was. It’d been a mutual break over breakfast, admittedly a lovely thing of the past. Not the right person, and definitely not enough time seeing each other to make up for it. “You did apologise, though,” you remind Charles. He’d texted you on a flight back to Monaco, and you left him hanging. 

“So then it’s just… now. What happens now?” That’d been what he wanted to talk about, after all. What are we? I need to know. I need to hear it. I need you to tell me. Tell me to leave, and I will. Tell me to stay, and I will. Tell me to follow you to the ends of the earth and I will. 

“You asked what I’d like in this life,” you repeat, and you can feel your heart swell with the tide. If he noticed the warble in your voice, he didn’t comment on it, just relishes in the closeness, the proximity. It’s been so long since he’s been this near you. “I was going to say that I—” you trail off to inhale, gather your thoughts, exhale. “I want you. I always have. In this life. In all of it.”

There. There. Your heart laid out on the cutting block waiting for the final strike. Tell me you feel the same. Tell me something. Anything.

“Me too.”

Charles shortens the remaining space between you, hopes you don’t notice him shaking, fidgets at the tassels of your cover-up idly. It’s chiffon; sheer. He’s been trying not to let his eyes wander at your silhouette beneath it. His fingers curl at its threaded fringe; quiet permission. May I, May I, May I? 

This is the crest. Fall be damned.

“Tu n'as pas froid?” he asks.

You shake your head, honest. 

“Can—” he swallows. His Adam’s apple bobs, and you want to mouth at it. “Can I kiss you?”

“Yes,” you whisper. Your pupils are blown wide, bright and inviting, and he drops his gaze. It falls on your mouth, the curl of your lips— then he’s reaching forward to kiss you.

Charles’ palms fit to your face like it’s always meant to be there, perfect, slots together like a puzzle piece. He tilts your head up, feels your hands scrape up from the nape of his neck, and he hums in response, until you can feel the vibration from his chest run into yours. He wants to breathe you in, kiss you impossibly deeper, hold you tight like this forever, until he could hide you into the spaces of his heart. 

He winds his arms around your thighs to lift you with alarming ease— and maybe that shouldn’t have turned you on more than it did— setting you gently on the countertop so he could gaze up at you like a goddess come to grace the earth. He says your name, hushed and spoken into your lips, and it sounds like a prayer. “I never stopped loving you,” he confesses, reverent, and kisses you again for emphasis, for good measure, for the sake of tasting you. “Never. No matter anything.”

You keen into his touch when he kneads at your hips, can’t stop the giggle from escaping you. It’s ticklish. He remembers. “I love you too,” you whisper, his five o’clock shadow scratching at you when he nips at your bottom lip, nudges his nose against yours. “No matter anything.”

A kiss, again. Hungrier and more eager, this time, because Charles tastes like an aphrodisiac— warm and honey sweet in all his flushed-face, bare-chested, dark-eyed, glory— and because what you wanted from him is simple. His face gleams under the wash of moonlight. Angelic. You’re half-sure you’re dreaming this, half-sure if you run your fingers down his spine you’ll feel the bump of where his wings should be.

He breaks away, rests his thumb on your lip, where you take it between your teeth.

Je m'emballé, he pants, almost wistfully, unable to resist smiling. It’s the kind that dimples deep, makes him laugh quietly under his breath, makes him duck his head down into his bicep in embarrassment. You can feel the tufts of his hair tickle your jawline, and you skim your palms up, press at the indents of his cheeks when he finally looks up at you, half-lidded and so, so, in love. “I, ah, need to…” he pulls his thumb from your mouth, pantomimes spinning a thread with his index finger. “I should.. Reel it in. Take it slow.”

“Tomorrow,” you shake your head, breathless, dizzy, half out of your mind and intoxicated by the taste of him, him, him. Slow can come tomorrow. Right now— “Just kiss me, Charles.”

And he does. He presses himself between the bracket of your thighs and undoes the buttons of your cover-up, running his lips down your throat and feeling like a live wire when you hum in content, purr in his ears. 

He kisses you, urgent, but soft, because it’s the only right way to treat you after all he’d put you through, and lets his hand slide across your buzzing skin. The tangle of your legs with his when you reach the sheets is unceremonious, bumping knees and ankles, where you slip a comment on how untidy his bed is, and he just laughs into your neck, giddy, because I’ve missed you so much, amour.

How much? you dare, trace the cupid's bow of his lips, count the freckles across his collarbones like you used to. How much have you missed me?

I’ll show you, he promises, holds your wrist down to feel your rapid pulse just like he did all those years ago, and dips his moon halo-ed head to kiss you, again and again, deep and desperate until he got you to arch, to croon his name into his ears.

And if anyone heard the both of you, well— the tide had long since been crashing in, wind soughing against the windows, where no one could possibly hear.

Pierre finds your sandals inside, on the foot of Charles’ villa door, the next morning.

“Have you seen her?” he asks, even if he knows how stupid it is to ask. (He has to check. But if the sandals, or Charles’ hair— tousled and sticking out in all directions— isn’t enough of an answer, the figure ducking just out of sight in the bedroom behind him is.)

“Uh,” Charles begins, eyes flicking down to where he’d left his slippers by yours. He blinks multiple times, tries to come up with something. He’s never been a good liar. “She’s—”

“Breakfast is in fifteen minutes,” overrides Pierre, already walking away with a grimace. “Be presentable, oui?”

You come as presentable as can be.

Everyone’s excited for the next activity of the day— a short boat trip out from the lagoon and into the sea where the manta rays would come now that they’re in season.

Carla compliments your sundress, pokes at the eyelets, and doesn’t realise you’d chosen it because the halter neck covers up the marks Charles had left on your chest. You don’t think anybody notices— anybody but Pierre, that is. He’s sitting beside Charles, looking slightly green, glancing uncharacteristically between everyone and the food but you. You would’ve laughed, but. Well. It’s awkward. Charles had told you, anyway, the moment he’d slammed the door shut and started cursing like a sailor earlier in his room. Pierre knows. He knows.

It’s fine, you’d laughed, drowned tiny in his linen button-up, squeezing toothpaste on his toothbrush for him. He won’t spill. You know him. If anything, he’ll hold it against us.

Charles had just smiled, relaxing, took the brush from your hands. Then he’s combing aside your hair in favour of nosing a kiss to the juncture of your neck, your shoulder, thought quietly to himself as the déjà vu hit, so this is what it’s like to love you freely, again.

“I’ve been keeping a secret from all of you,” you announce, when breakfast winds down, and Arthur had finally come back with his third glass of juice in hand. 

Pierre’s neck must’ve gotten whiplash with the way he’d snapped towards you. But, no, that isn’t what you’re going to be talking about. God forbid. 

You squirm in your seat as all eyes fall on you. Charles, beneath the table, nudges his ankle against yours in a silent show of affection. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. He already knows. ( You’d told him sometime last night, a final chance for him to take it all back if he wanted. Charles had simply kissed your doubts away. )

“I’ve got a contract,” you say, after a momentary beat. Then, with a heavy inhale— deep enough you could feel the sting in your diaphragms: “I’ve signed into Williams for the next Formula 1 season.”

2023. Fanfare is, obviously, as bad as it gets. 

It’s exhausting, most of all unfair, but Charles is there every step of the way, and so is Pierre. They try. They try, so you try, too.

Your debut is either controversial or progressive, the last resort or the perfect choice, a diversity seat or an earned seat. You know you won’t win against the media, much less the fans that had dug up your past and aired out whatever dirty laundry they could find in hopes of tearing you down. Your history with the drivers— Charles, specifically— has become an open secret amongst the sport. The headlines and bylined articles run wild. You’d called it, Williams called it, Ferrari called it. Hell, even Netflix called it. Talk about adding bittersweet, romantic spice into the pinnacle of motorsport, hey?

It’s a PR team's worst nightmare. The first half of the season is spent dismissing, denying, disregarding. We’re friendly competitors now. I’m here to race just like everybody else. Charles is in Ferrari and I’m in Williams, that’s what matters to me. It’s making sure you arrive into Paddocks either earlier or later than Charles, and to keep a measure of distance between each other in the off-chance you do appear at the same time. 

It’s making sure your congratulatory hugs and comments about each other are kept at a minimum after races so that no one can string up a story from those moments, that you don’t sit too close to one another during race conferences, or that you don’t get caught in pictures with each other when in airports or hotels, because it’s impossible for Charles to just be friends with a woman.

Then the death threats escalate, and the team bumps up security, and sometimes it feels like you’re eighteen again, jokingly debating the consequences of deleting all social media until Charles shuts your phone off for you. The FIA makes a late stand, exactly three races later, condemning the misogyny that surrounds you as one of the first débutantes of Formula 1. You and the other drivers just laugh at the irony of it all, over an afterparty celebrating Lando’s podium finish, because the FIA had only spoken up on it when Lewis had commented on it, but never when you did. 

“I’m sorry,” Charles had said once, after your first points had been overshadowed by hate. Baku had been one of the most exhilarating races of your life. “I want to—” he sighs, runs a hand down his face. He’s about to cry. You can tell. Not because he pities you, but because he feels helpless. “I don’t know.”

I want to protect you. I want to love you freely. I want you to be happy. No matter anything.

“I want to help,” he tries to be firm, fumbles with his words and the mess of languages in his head. “But most of all I want you to be happy.”

The pang in your heart sears like a bolt of lightning. You remember the last time you’d been in a situation like this. Except this time no one’s baring teeth and rearing for a fight. This time he’s choosing you, you, you. 

You come to the vanity he’s leaned his palms on, tuck yourself into the space between his arms to look up at him. “I’m the first female driver in decades. I scored points on debut. I very nearly had a podium finish,” you list down. “I’m in a good team, and we’re scoring. I have a supportive boyfriend. I have my family. Who says I’m not happy?”

“Charles,” you call out, half-laughing, kissing the red of his eyes away and letting your fingers scrape up from the back of his head the way he likes. “I’m happier than I’ve ever been.” This is how it should have turned out years ago, you realise. Instead of turning your backs against each other; instead of pretending the both of you weren’t horrifically in love with one another; instead of swallowing the ache. Maybe then the both of you wouldn’t have wasted so much time finding each other again. 

But you’re both here, now. Neither of you would give it up for the world.

The next year, your driver’s parade car— a 60’s vintage Corvette— unfortunately breaks down mid-way, and you find yourself clambering into Pierre’s so you don’t get left behind the cavalcade. The shutter of cameras grow louder; you can already picture the comments fans will leave behind.

“My car just shit itself,” you laugh. Pierre offers a hand to lift you into the seat, but you ignore it. He doesn’t comment on it. He knows why. “I’ve missed you,” he teases, blunt and honest, like he usually is, too distracted with waving at the grandstands to notice your surprise. Miami is always overwhelming.

You adjust the Williams cap on your head. “We see each other every race weekend, Piccolo.”

He shrugs, turns to see you eyeing the back of the Ferrari rolling ahead. Charles has his whole-hearted attention to the fans, as usual— a loyal sea of red that follows him everywhere he goes. “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah.” You dish out a smile and a wave when the fans scream for you at the next turn. “But you know how it is.” Pierre, or any driver— any male presence, really— could offer a ‘bless you’ when you sneeze and the fans will still find a way to give you flak for it. You still remember the one time Skysport had zoomed in on you at the weighing scales post-race in Australia, asking Daniel to help you pry open the cover of a glass bottle screwed too tight— fans flooded your comments telling you off for flirting with a man who’s attached.

“But you’re okay,” he says— asks? He can’t tell if he’d said it for himself or for you. You’ve become this unwarranted extension of Charles, now, and sometimes of Pierre too— he didn’t want you to be reduced to just that. An extension. You’re not just the girl who grew up with Charles, and Pierre, and Anthoine. You’re not just a pretty face for Formula 1. You’re brilliant; talented. You deserve your seat. The data, the achievements, speak for itself.

You smile at him, all cheeks, skip the concern in his voice as you answer humorously, “S’long as I finish the race ahead of you.”

Imola is, unfortunately, not yours to win. 

The race syphons the spirit out of you: tyre degradation, marbling, poor weather, and an even poorer pit strategy, only to end with a grand ending of a DNF thirteen laps from the finish line. Media duties always feel more stretched out in the hours afterwards, and you suppose the only silver-lining that could come out of a bad result like this is the fact that you’d—  for once— get interesting questions about the car and it’s set-up instead of your alleged ‘friction’ with Jamie Chadwick or Logan Sargeant or Nyck De Vries after you’d ‘stolen’ their Williams seat.

Your press-officer and ever present shadow warns you the coffee machine back at the motorhome is down. You wonder if your day can get any worse, descend from the pen, and make a beeline for the Ferrari motorhome next door instead. To hell with the rumours or the tiktoks— you’ll be in and out, anyway. 

“Joris,” you blink, when you finally fill your cup at their hospitality. He should be back at the paddock with his other ragtag group of friends, or supporting Il Predestinato from the pitwall himself, cheering for the red boy in the red car in the red team. “What’re you doing here?” 

“Hey, you are the stranger here,” accuses another voice. It’s Charles, appearing with hair still damp from sweat, looking as raceworn as you are, but somehow glowing, still as pristine as ever. He fidgets with his racesuit, re-tightens the sleeves into a knot around his waist. You try not to let your eyes fall to it. “What is a Williams girl doing in Ferrari?”

Moreso who, Joris coughs, only to earn an elbow into the ribs from Charles.

“Stealing iced coffee,” you reply, honestly. “Sorry I didn’t stick around. Were you P2 or P3?” You look to the screens playing highlights of the race behind him. Verstappen and Norris would be taking the 1-2 podium.

“P3.” He shrugs, cards his fingers through his hair the way he does when he doesn’t have the energy to talk about something. His press officer nudges at him, and you understand— Lord Perceval, the little boy in red, their Predestined, is needed elsewhere. “A plus tard à l'hôtel, hm?”

Charles, you nearly blurt, and tilt your head instead, raise a warning brow— he had instinctively leaned forward for a kiss. 

He fumbles through the motion by awkwardly reaching for an empty cup instead, where you turn to leave, swallow back a laugh when Joris runs a hand over his face, exasperated. Mate, you’re a shit actor.

“He’s right,” Charles admits, much later, ahead of the Monaco race day. And perhaps it was the thrill of a pole in Quali, or the adrenaline from being surrounded by support in his home race, that brings him to say, in the peace of his apartment: “Amour, when I win, let me kiss you for the world to see.”

You shut down the idea, ofcourse, with a cringe and a scrunched nose. “Lando’s shown you that side of tiktok, huh? He’s poisoned you, I fear. Also, it’s if I win, doofus, not when.”

He laughs out from his piano— the stiff kind, the one where he tries to lighten the air and gauge where the conversation will head— and motions for you to come. “Don’t girls like romantic gestures?” he hums, once you’d sat on his lap. 

His hands are gentle atop yours, ghosting over the keys to a new song he’s composing (“What’s the title for this one?” you ask. “M’not so sure, yet. But the inspiration will come.”). You both play and stumble over the chords, until you can feel the way your hearts sync in tandem, until each of you have drafted what to say to each other.

“I love you. Why should I hide it?” This will not turn into an argument. Charles won’t let it. 

“You know why,” you say, leaning into the kiss he plants on your shoulder. “Besides, the fans already sort of know there’s something.”

“Exactly.” He murmurs, steadying you as you shift in your seat. You have a perfect view of his profile, now. He looks busy in his head. “It won’t be that big a change.”

“But it will.” It will for me. For a woman. For a female racer in a sport that’s spent its decades rigged against anything but men. “Let’s get to bed, hm? We can talk about this another day. You’ve got a lot on your shoulders tomorrow.”

You don’t talk about it, in the end.

You chalk it off as timing; that you should let the days pass with celebrations before confronting him with anything. You both celebrate his first Monaco win, remember his Dad, and of Jules, of the entirety of his home country rallying in support, and of the bells that will sing in Maranello for him. 

You don’t talk about it, because there is always the crest and the fall.

You don’t talk about it when Perez clips your rear-left tyre in Baku, Azerbaijan, and sends you off at 200kph to meet your maker. The crash is so violent it practically strips your car clean, save for the survival cell. You’d sat terrified and kept watch at the turn, helpless in the middle of the street circuit, praying to God that no other car turning the high-speed corner would T-bone you straight into your side. (You finally understand George’s horror from his crash in Australia.)

You don’t talk about it even when Pierre pulls you into a hug at the Medical Centre, and your boyfriend is nowhere to be found.

You don’t talk about it until Charles is holding you in your hotel room, and you admit to him, irrational and as petty as it seems: Where were you? Where were you? I feel safer with you. In your arms, than I ever would in even the strongest survival cell in the world; that you’re not quite sure you’ve ever felt pure fear sitting in that car since Spa, when An—

“They didn’t let me into the medical centre after the race,” Charles says, furious. He’s venting the stress, you realise this. He isn’t fighting you; he’s fighting the contracts that stand between you two. “If it wasn’t for Albon, I would have knocked someone’s teeth in.”

You don’t know what to say. You don’t think there is anything to say. It’s nobody’s fault, you remind yourself. Sometimes, repetition breeds comfort and it makes you forget the danger of this sport. You just sit in your aftershock, rattled to the core, and let him hold his head against your heart as you both lay in bed, so he could listen to your heartbeat as a reminder you’re alive. 

“They’d have let me in if everyone knew about us,” Charles comments, off-hand. He hadn’t intended to nor realised he’d steered the topic back to that night in Monaco, but you pick up from where the both of you left off the conversation regardless. You owe it to him, you suppose. Or perhaps it’s simply something else to think about other than a brush with Death.

“December, then,” you finally relent. It isn’t grand— the world already suspects the both of you, and it was a matter of publicly announcing it— but the weight that lifts off your shoulders surprises you. There’s nothing to be ashamed about, afterall, and you’ve always wanted to love Charles as openly as any other person in the world; Screw the politics of it all. The both of you have learned from your pasts; things will be different. Better. “After the season ends.”

He nudges his nose against yours into a lavish kiss. It grounds you, makes you beam and break into a laugh and press close to him. Thank you, he breathes, because he recognises the sacrifice. I love you. I’m glad you’re okay. I love you, I love you, I love you. No matter anything. He’s not quite sure he could have held all the love in his heart any longer, much less how the both of you managed to fly under the radar these past years. Sooner or later, he would’ve slipped.

No matter anything, you mirror. You don’t linger about the accident. You dash the thought of bringing up how you could have sworn you’d heard his voice calling to you through the radio when you’d crashed; dash the thought of Anthoine, of Jules and of the radiostatic.

You let Charles wipe a tear from your eye and kiss you from your lips and to your neck and to your stomach, instead. You let him curl over you under the sheets, remind you you’re alive throughout the night.

It’s euphoric. You’re happy. This is the crest: You’re in love, and the world will know it soon. No fall can possibly break this. 

When Fall comes, Charles’ grandmother would seed Fritillaria bulbs for the next Spring. They’re bow-headed bellflowers once completely bloomed, so he always wondered why you took a liking to them instead of the Carnations or the red Spider-lilies by the flagstones leading from the backdoor and down the garden.

“The spider-lilies always bloom too late for me to see,” you remark, defensive. “Besides, sometimes there is no reason to like something.”

His Grandmother laughs. She always had a soft spot for you. “And if you try to find one, it’ll just drive you crazy,” she adds. “Never seek reason where there is none.”

Charles will think he understands this. He thinks he will understand this after Jules, after his father, after Anthoine, after his Grandmother. He never really does.

(It takes 15 years before he truly understands.)

“Come, Charles,” she waves him over. “Enough with the--

--chatter and radio-static in your in-ears. It’s hard to distinguish words, much less what was left and right or up and down. The air is rushing around you, sounding like flags in the wind. Something is crackling between the pelt of rain. Searing. 

“—epeat, can you hear me?” It’s your race-engineer. He sounds urgent. You can’t remember why. You can’t remember where you are, really; it’s just flashes of black and orange as you nod. How many G’s had you taken? “Yes,” you relay, unlocking your seatbelt instantly, feeling around your halo and sidepods. The steering wheel is gone; one less concern.

“Can you move?”

You try. You try in all possible directions; You really, really, do. But it feels as if you’re pushing against a concrete barrier, compressed into an impossible box— or cage? Your muscles hurt; it’s getting hard to breathe. How long had you been out cold?

“Get me out of here.” You’d meant to yell, but it comes out in a croak. Your throat is stinging. You want to remove your helmet, as irrational as it is, though you don’t have space for that either. 

“Marshals are working as fast as they can. Stay calm. They’re on--

--the way to Brignoles, there was a pop-up shop selling nomination bracelets,” Charles says, as cool-headed and cavalier as a 13-year-old kid could possibly say in front of their biggest crush ever, “If you don’t like it, you can give it to Pierre. Or. Whatever.”

Lorenzo, in the distance, laughs. He debates telling you how meticulous Charles had been at the booth as he picked out which charms you’d like. (He brings this up over Christmas years later, and the brothers still laugh over it. A classic of the Leclercs.) “You can rearrange and choose the pieces, by the way. Looks like the bracelet is a little too big for you.”

“I’ll give this one to Anthoine, then.” You clip off a charm— a little four-leaf clover coloured in gold and embedded onto the metal— and tuck it away into your pocket. You don’t know it yet, but Anthoine will come to wear this for the remainder of his life. “Merci beaucoup, Charles!” you fawn, rotating your wrist and listening to the tinny sounds it makes, “C'est très joli!”

You’re prettier, Charles doesn’t say, because he’s timid for his age, and God forbid he admits something like that within earshot of his brother, no less. But he admits it years later, when you both visit Brignoles to kart again. The circuit is holding a racing event in memory of Jules. “Were you actually?” you laugh, bright and resounding as you thread through the streets. 

“Ouias, I was thinking it!” He squeezes your palm. “What can I say? I’m a romantic at heart.”

“You’re a flirt,” you roll your--  

--eyes are tearing up from the fire. The helmet is designed to protect your head and keep the fire out, but only for so long. You’re sure the tear-offs have begun melting in its layers— it’s getting hard to see. “Please,” you manage. The strength in your body is fraying completely. Your words are weak; you aren’t even sure you’re speaking loud enough for the comms to pick up.

The silence lasts so long that you think you might have lost connection after all, when a voice comes through, serene, “They’re with you.” 

It might be your race-engineer. It might be Charles. It might be Pierre. Voices are a blur and you’re slipping by the second. You know it. You feel it. “Just stay with us. Stay with us, you understand? You’re going to be okay.”

The world is melting away, and the thin air has you locked in a plummeting tailspin. Your fingertips scald from the metal of your car as you try to breach from any angle, gloves singed and bitten through from the flames, while your mouth tastes like smoke with every harried breath. You can’t for the life of yourself figure how long you’ve been trapped. Longer than you should, probably. “I’m sorry,” you breathe out. You don’t know why you’re apologising or to who— perhaps everyone, or yourself—? but it feels right. Everything feels…

You feel yourself sink into your seat.

There’s fear, still, stirring low like whitenoise in your heart; the same kind of feeling you get when you’re swimming in the ocean, and you’re starkly aware of how your feet can’t reach the ground. 

Dread, perhaps, is the word. But bigger and more quieter. All racers feel it atleast once in their life. 

But this… peace? You’re not quite sure you’ve felt this boneless with relaxation in your entire lifetime. (Had this been what Grosjean meant about ‘Benoît’?)

“They’re right on you. They’ve got you,” they call your name. It’s distant. The car— this living, breathing machine that you’ve become one with for the past year— seems to shift in its weight with a metallic groan. “Are you with me?”

Yes, you answer them. I am.

They call your name--

--again,” Charles dimples, gentle and polite as he rubs a thumb at the back of your palm. The sun is setting, and it’s turning your skin liquid gold before his very eyes. He wonders if it’s possible to get drunk off of the sight of you alone.

“You know what, I give up,” you huff, half-hearted as he noses a kiss into your neck. He breathes you in, murmurs some comment about how you smell like fresh laundry. “You should quit racing and become a full time musician.”

“And leave the fun of racing to you?”

You lay the back of your head to his chest. If you focus, you can feel the pulse of his heart. You want to fall asleep to it; to the lull of his voice as he speaks. “I’ll win the championship for the both of us.”

“We can both be world champion.” Charles descends across the chords again, the melody slow and graceful. “Me first, though.”

You laugh. It’s punched out, yet delicate. Charles thinks he could never compose a piece as beautiful as that sound you make; could never find an art piece as striking to his heart as the sight of you sitting warm between his arms. “What will you title this one?”

He makes a noise, and cocks his head. “What about…” he pauses. You wait patiently, tuck your hair behind your ear as you watch the gears in his head turn. “No matter anything?”

“No matter anything,” you assent, breaking into a grin. He presses a kiss into your hair, and you take his hand up to your lips to return the gesture. “You’re so lame. You’re lucky I love you.”

“I love you too.” He bumps his cheek to yours, where you catch the tail-end of that boyish laughter you’ve grown to cherish. “C’mon, let’s try again. Give me your--

--hand, amour. Don’t be scared. It’s okay. 

And you may be having trouble reconciling left to right, but this voice, the vowels and Its lilting cadence— Charles, your beloved, your heart, your soul— you have no trouble remembering, at all.

I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

No matter anything.

So you’d followed It obediently; led hand in hand through rain and across asphalt, and kept walking somewhere in-between the margins of what felt like a waking dream, until you settled on the evergreen grass of his childhood home, overgrown and tickling your ankles, beside the purple-dotted bellflowers his grandmother tends to so carefully.

You follow the carnations all the way to the flagstone path that’s twisting in ways that defy logic, take the time to admire the spider-lilies that are finally blooming for you, until you reach that familiar Coast off of South France, a thousand miles away from home.

A boy a lot like Charles dimples at you, carrying Blue Coasts in his hands.

Then, someone else offers you a hand up to the boat.

Hey you, says the boy with the clover charm on his wrist.

You smile, and rest.

Fritillaries, Charles is reminded. He’s paralysed with fear, watching the screens in the garage document everything:

Your body dragged out from underneath the fiery pile up— bow-headed like bellflowers in riotous bloom.

This. 

This is the Fall.

It— the situation— doesn’t quite hit his brain yet, but his heart has caught up somehow; the tears haven’t stopped falling. He thinks this is some twisted catatonia— stupor— his body is putting him through. (Shock, he remembers the correct term, later.) 

He hasn’t felt like this before; not for Jules, or for his father, or for his grandmother. He had time for those. He had time to brace for the end, like headlights you see at the end of a road, before it hurtled towards him. 

But this? This is a band-aid ripped without warning. This is antifreeze running through his veins. This is the abyss at the bottom of the ocean, come to swallow him whole. This is standing outside the ICU on a Sunday evening, with the best minds and Doctors that Singapore has to offer, declaring: We tried our best, and feeling the earth open up beneath his own two feet.

The Williams personnel— your team, your work family— take the reigns. They smother the pain because that’s what they need to do for everyone right now, and tell Charles to just take a seat, or go home, mate. We’ll handle it from here. It’s okay. If you want, I can contact someone. Do you want me to contact someone?

Maman, Charles calls, sounding lost and frighteningly like a child. Ma mère— my Mama.

Then he roots himself outside the unit, stills himself from the crown of his head down to the soles of his feet, and… waits. He doesn’t know why, though. It’s not like it’d change anything. His mother is a thousand miles away, and the phone call they eventually share does little to comfort him, and it’s not like he’s expecting you to exit the room and jump into his arms. 

He isn't sure. He hasn’t kept track of time, or what has been happening around him. He hasn’t even—

“Charles, precious boy, let’s go back home, yes? You must be so tired.”

He’s quick to bow his head. Andreas must have sent her his way. “Ma’am—” He hasn’t called your mother that in a long time, “—you shouldn’t have troubled yourself.”

“Pascale w— Your mother would hate to see you like this,” she says, thin and doting and worried for him, of all things. Who is he to deserve this patience, when she’s just lost her daughter? “Pierre is waiting too.”

“Pierre,” repeats Charles. My best friend. 

He blinks and breathes and blinks again. “Okay.”

“Yes,” she says, and gently leads him by the hands. She’s not quite sure Charles notices he’s still in his racesuit— they’d red-flagged the race and called it then and there following the shunt, 4 laps away from the end. Charles had bolted straight out the garage and skipped every media duty, fines be damned. “I think it’d do you two some good to be around each other, okay?”

“Okay.”

An aside on the strange thing we call grief: it can be a rampant, demonic, abysmal thing— so it goes for Pierre— or a quiet, quiet, stillness— so goes for Charles. 

(It should be said they will both experience the same things in due time, since the journey is never quite the same for either of them; or anyone involved, for that matter. Grief is just the unsaids and the excess, anyway, of every kind of love one can uniquely share with a single person. There is no existence of a baseline or foundation or limit. It simply is.)

And if you’d brought the best in Pierre, then losing you brought his worst—

So it’s no surprise that when he crumples, he tears everything else down with him.

That’s not to say his breakdown happens during the funeral, though. Yes, there had been something about the fritillaries and the hydrangeas and the knell of the church bells; Something in the arid, clotting smell of frankincense and myrrh, and the distant thin drift of smoke up in the chapel that had sent his guts curling up at the thought of that black, forsaken night back in Si— 

He shoves off someone’s steadying hand.

“Don’t you dare fucking touch me, Charles.”

—but the funeral had gone fine, other than that. Hell, Pierre drifted through the rest of the season, albeit like a ghost of himself, racing against Colapinto who’d replaced you. He managed to power through the annual driver-dinner despite wanting to throw up from seeing the empty seat they’d left in your name, and powered through the choking grief during the 2024 FIA Awards Ceremony where they did the same in your honour.

It’s only when he gets shitfaced at Alex and Lily’s wedding. 

In hindsight, Pierre thinks it might not have been because of Charles playing that piano-piece he’d made with you for the newlyweds, but the fact that everyone had been— happy. You would have been grateful, he thinks. To have your memory lived on in love. 

Surrounded by silken, pastel gowns and white, floor-length veils and perfectly-timed petals sailing down from the lavender sky, Pierre has to remind himself that he’s not back in that dreamy Malta wedding he had been in with you three years ago. Three. Fuck— had it been that long? 

(Life had gone on without you.

Ofcourse, it did. Ofcourse, it does.)

And so Pierre drinks.

He drinks the overpriced champagne, and the aged Riesling, and the Jameson Malt whiskey, and the bespoke St. Hugo wine that Danny sponsored cartons of for the wedding. He drinks and drains and downs until Charles had to tug him aside and into a washroom, telling him to take it easy, you’re embarrassing yourself, piccol—

“Ne t’avise pas de me toucher, putain,” Pierre hisses, snatching him up by the collar. “And don’t fucking call me that. You don’t get to.”

“What the hell is up with you?” Charles snaps, wrenching out his grasp. There’s no malice in his words; he’s simply never seen Pierre shoot a glare so savage that it physically makes him recoil at the sight. There had been the absence too: Pierre’s sudden severance from his life, avoiding him like the plague and cold-shouldering him like a child acting out a tantrum. Charles had gathered it'd been the grief, but now this—?

“None of this is fair,” Pierre waves, stumbling to lean onto the basin with a growl. “None of it. The fucking flowers and the dancing and the singing. They…” But then he’d shaken his head abruptly, and looked up at Charles in the reflection of the mirror, looking pristine as ever in his Spring Collection Armani suit— or whatever the fuck it is he’s wearing.

“You,” Pierre amends his words. “You don’t fucking deserve. You never did, but I…”

“Deserve what, you asshole?”

“Her.”

A beat. 

Charles seizes. Pierre turns to face him.

“What is it you say, again, Calamar?” he hiccups. “No matter anything—?”

Something sobers him in an instant.

Charles had struck him.

“What the fuck did you just say to me?” 

There’s a ringing pulsing all around Pierre’s head. Dizzying. The world ripples into painful clarity: he’s been shoved and pinned against the bathroom wall. “I told you not to touch me, you basta—”

“Fucking answer me, Pierre!” 

“I said!” he snarls, now in full command of his senses. “That you never fucking deserved her.”

The scuffle is vicious—

—but it doesn’t last long. Lewis had intervened before the fight got too bloody and out of hand, prying them off each other like wild strays. Charles comes out with a nosebleed; Pierre recovers from drunken bruises and a split lip. Neither Alex nor Lily, fortunately, ever hear a peep about what had gone down that night.

By 2025 pre-season testing, they still don’t talk. 

Not since the wedding in early January, to pre-seasons in February, nor when they shared a podium in the first race of the year that mid-March in Australia. “Whatever the hell it was I stopped that night… You gotta talk to him, man,” Lewis had even counselled out of the blue. “Don’t wanna end up like me, Charles. You don’t.”

He doesn’t listen, ofcourse. He’s petty like that, and Pierre is stubborn.

(Charles does, however, ask during a 20-second elevator ride down to their shared Melbourne hotel lobby:

“For how long, Pierre?”

There’s no need for thought. The answer is too easy.

“For as long as I knew her.”)

So it doesn’t take much before the fans put the pieces together. There had been that pianissimo lament Charles had released, after all, damningly titled ‘SIN24(1:4)’ like something out of a melodramatic movie, alongside a heartbreaking interview that tore the entirety of motorsport asunder from the sheer grief it carried. Couple that with existing connections over the years with you and Charles’ rekindling relationship— 

Well.

Perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of all is that the world doesn’t fully learn about Charles' love for you until after your death.

Or, no. The greatest tragedy, perhaps, is that no one knows—

“I loved her first,” Pierre laughs, meanly. It’s childish and immature and nonsensical. But what can he do? What can he do? This is Pierre, who has been so polite with his longing, who has carried so much love in his heart for you and never found a place to put it down.

This is Pierre who couldn’t begin the next day without you, because you took the sun with you when you’d gone and selfishly left nothing but a cavern in his soul; because his heart was still pulling through every yesterday he had to endure without you.

“So who are you so angry at, Pierre. Charles?” Over the phone, he can hear his mother set her mug down, resolute. “Your best friend?”

“He’s—!” Not my best friend, he’d wanted to cry out, but the words taste rotten. My best friends are 6 feet beneath the earth; in a place I can’t reach. He kicks the leg of his hotel vanity instead, hard enough to rattle a perfume bottle down to the carpet. “Pierre,” he hears his mother chide. 

“You need each other. Now more than ever.”

“I can’t,” he says, face twisting into frustration as the tears blur his vision. “You don’t understand. How can you?”

“Unless, dear boy, you’re angry at her—”

“Non! No!” he cries, furious. “For fucks sake, I can never be angry at her. I loved her. Love. Maman, I love her. I can’t— I don’t—”

He’s looking back on it all now. It feels like remembering how you left someone through the rearview mirror. The months since your death had collapsed into a shrinking gap in his memory. He had only ever been placing one foot in front of the other, day by day by day by—

When did you become this? Something he couldn’t think become possibly worse? Worse than an agonising pain that screamed in his chest, a twist in his gut, a— a memory. Memory. Someone he could only cry or scream and never just talk about. 

You who’d held his heart in such an relentlessly tight fist  (unknowingly too, so how could he ever blame you?); paralysing, breaking— And then: you up and fucking went. You’re gone. Yet somehow, still, he thinks he’s never felt you haunt him now more than ever. 

“I’m— It’s me,” he crumbles, choking in his tears. There’s that harrowing, daunting feeling gripping Pierre’s entire body again; makes him want to curl in on himself and squeeze into the tightest, darkest corner of the room and disappear. It’s the same pit of dread he’d felt that night they broke the news to him that you’d died from asphyxiation, and not upon impact.

(Slow. You had died slow. You must have been terrified.)

“I’m so fucking angry at everything. At the world. At me. I wish I never took on this pain. I wish I learned to let go easier. I wish she was here, because I miss her. I miss her so bad, Mama, I fucking miss her. Do you understand me? Tell me you do. Because I think I could die. I think I am dying. I want— To, I— I can’t— I can’t breathe. Not without—” 

My boy, his mother weeps over the line, because sometimes that’s all a mother can do to console their twenty-seven-turned-seven-year-old child, halfway across the world. My sweet, darling boy. I’m so sorry.

It’s Doohan who he goes to, heaving and red-faced and trembling out of his skin like a cowering dog. They sit together for a long while; long enough for Jack to realise it’s not him who Pierre needed, but — Charles, Jack texts, He’s having a panic attack. 

I’m already boarding my flight, the Monegasque answers, bitterly. It’s the truth. The thing about having Lewis Hamilton as a teammate is that you can leave as early as you wish for the next race. Just keep me updated. Tell him to pick up my call.

Charles calls once, ten minutes later.

Pierre doesn’t pick up.

He doesn’t bother calling again.

— I miss her too, is all he allows via text, and isn’t even surprised when he sees Pierre’s phonescreen has earned a new crack on it the next time they cross paths.

A shunt in Shanghai rattles something in Pierre again. 

“I thought you—” he swallows, mouth dry, “—would’ve been at the Medical Centre. I looked for you.”

“They cleared me,” Charles explains, blankly. It had been a gnarly crash, but barely ranking in any of the worst ones he’d ever suffered. “Pierre?”

“I owe you a drink,” Pierre blurts, before thinking. The scar on Charles’ nose from when he’d punched him back in January is invisible to everyone but him (and Lewis).

“Ouias. You do.”

They don’t get their drink in Shanghai, but back in Monaco, where Charles had to be taken on a detour to for some APM photoshoot. It doesn’t take long for another argument to spring up between them again, borne from the tension in the air, and—

“You threw them away?” Pierre frowns, looking at the remaining PR boxes stacked at the corner of Charles’ apartment. Every single one of them had cards with your name on it. They must have been from last year, sent by brands and companies long before your accident had happened. 

“Not all of it. Not yet. I…” he huffs when Pierre shoots him a sour look. “I didn’t have the time.”

Pierre sets the Whiskeys he owed onto the kitchen island with more force than necessary. “She would have wanted you to give them away, Charles. C'est du gâchis.”

“Don’t tell me what she’d want,” he bites, instinctively. He snags one of the bottles and doesn’t bother with taking crystals, just goes to slump at the foot of his living room sofa. (Not on it, because you’d laid there last, and he wanted to keep your scent on the throw rug for as long as he could.) “And I know. I gave most of it away to Lily, back in January. She wears the pieces to paddock sometimes.”

“Does she know that it’s—”

“Yeah. Ofcourse. The first time she went to wear one she took the time to ask me if I was okay with it.” She’d been kind. He forgets Lily had lost a dear friend in you, too.

“What about her other things?” Pierre asks, eyes scanning Charles' shared apartment with you. Your possessions have remained in time, caught and clung frozen in a glacial, eerie stillness: the slippers by the door seemed to wait to be worn again, and so did the half-empty bottle of perfume by the keys. “Did you throw those too?”

“Pierre,” Charles warns, before sighing. The weight of the day had suddenly crashed down on him. “Sit the fuck down.”

There’s an anger and sadness swarming up and threatening to choke him, but beneath that, something hurts him more. It feels a lot like a betrayal– which makes no sense, because Pierre has never made him any promises. Despite having a ringside seat to the relationship Charles had with you, Pierre has never interfered; has only ever protected you; and above all else, had been considerate about his love for you.

(And Charles knows intimately what that’s like, however brief his experience had been. The white-hot pain; a burn that smoulders continuously under the skin like embers. He can only imagine how much longer Pierre had suffered in silence compared to him.)

Pierre sits. Takes a swig after Charles does. There’s something in his mind begging to resurface— he might’ve done something like this with him before, sharing a bottle amongst each other like teens. There are 4 people in that distant memory. He shakes it away in favour of another thought.

“I almost deleted my chat with her,” Pierre says.

Charles had pieces of you everywhere he went. Charles had Pau, France; had the bungalows in Maldives, had the chords of your song in his fingertips when he plays the piano, had the handwritten chicken-scratch writings you’d left behind in his little notebook he carries into the Ferrari garage. He had a song he made for you that’s unfinished, the chords in his laptop frozen in time from when you’d sat on his lap to listen to what progress he made.

(It’s a song unfinished, he’d explained, when it’d been pointed out in an interview. A lot like her, he couldn’t bring himself to say, eyes catching on the polaroid of you stuck at a wall.)

Pierre only had you, and you alone. A museum of text messages in an old chat, or a photo album of you in his gallery, or your bright voice in an old voice message over the phone, sent from a million miles away, once upon a Tuesday. He scrolls them as far as the app allows him, and calls your number (hoping, irrationally, that you’d pick up) so he could hear your cheesy pre-recorded voicemail.

“You have no idea how much better I could have loved her, Charles,” he says, and it’s so soft that the Monegasque nearly misses it. “I could have loved her better than you. I did love her better than you. I’ve loved her all my life, you know?”

The air is dead silent between them. Charles rests the back of his head to a cushion, and can feel the world warp between the tipsiness. “But I loved her.” I did. I did. I loved her. I love her. Je l’aimais. Because what is there left to say? To argue about? What would it change?

Pierre nods. “Yeah.” He can recognise it; recognise himself. What Charles had was true— and above all, real— so Pierre couldn’t have a say on it. Who was he to do so? He of all people had no right. “I know,” he agrees, and tries to tamp down the waver in his voice. “I know you did, Charles.”

“Did you ever think to tell her?”

“No,” he flinches, lightning quick. “Why would I?”

“Tell me the truth, Pierre, or I’ll crack this bottle at your head.”

“Never, Charles.”

Something savage ignites in him. You fucking liar, Charles thinks— knows. Harsher words snap in his mind. They taste disgusting. Maybe it’s the alcohol.

He doesn’t force him, in the end, just scowls and sets the emptying bottle down with a disappointed thud. It would’ve been unfair, anyway. Everything about this is unfair. He figures Pierre is keeping the truth for his sake. He isn’t even sure if he’d have been able to take it, and he’s not sure if he should even be grateful. He’s just angry. And it’s so much more easier to be angry at Pierre than it would be to whatever divine being that decided to take you away from him.

“I hate you,” Charles admits. If he said it any louder then Pierre might’ve heard the lie in his voice. He probably knows, anyhow. If there’s one thing grief had gifted them, it was clarity in the off-moments. 

(Charles briefly closes his eyes. What is it Mémère had told him again? Never seek reason where there is none.)

“I understand,” Pierre says, and then, with little malice: “I hate you too.”

Now, this may be a good place to worry about another fall: 

A fault line driven like a crack between their childhood friendship, a petty amount of years spent ignoring each other, or a farce held up to the media that everyone can very clearly see through. But this isn’t Lewis or Nico; this isn’t that kind of story— animosity over competition is different to animosity over heart, even if the outcome could be the same. 

No; Pierre and Charles will eventually come to the ugly realisation that out of the original four of their childhood friend group, only two of them are the last ones standing to achieve this godforsaken dream— and nothing brings two people of shared history together like all-encompassing grief.

There is no crest or fall here. There is only that plateau you feel in your soul after losing someone dearest to you; a vast ocean of Nothingness; Doldrums. They’re both sinking in it. 

What an inconvenience it is that they happen to be each other’s lifelines, too.

“Will you drink with me?” invites Charles, on the second bottle he goes to take. (Will you drown with me? More like.)

Ofcourse, the louder part of Pierre doesn’t say. You are my greatest friend, and I am not that cruel. 

“Okay,” Pierre nods, resolute, and resists to tag Calamar at the end of his answer. 

They’ll be fine. They will be because they have to be, now that four has turned to three has turned to two. 

To put it all simply: they cannot lose each other. They have no one else. 

You have made sure of that.

The Universe has made sure of that.

“I wanted to plant fritillaries,” Pierre quietly says. “I couldn’t make it past the cemetery gates.”

A hum. “Let’s go together.”

“We will never be the same, after,” Pierre warns, after a long drawn out pause. “Calamar, I need you to know. I won’t apologise.”

“Bien sûr,” Charles confesses. “I don’t want you to.” 

Something unspoken in the air lifts as they pass the bottle again to each other.

“Okay. When should we plant it?” 

Charles thinks of your sunshine smile in the evergreen garden, again. 

“Après la saison d'automne,” he mumbles. Then, lucidly: “Fritillaries are planted after Fall.”

* Footnotes, regarding the story.