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♞
I should warn Lewis, Charles thinks, first thing in the morning, as he stares himself down and brushes his teeth. As he scrambles eggs for breakfast. As he takes a shower. As he calls his mom and lets her scold him for how scruffy his hair looks.
He doesn’t.
Charles, let it be known, is a petty little shit.
Nobody warned him.
♞
Well, no, that’s a lie.
He was an Academy Driver. The too sharp, too perfect corners of Maranello didn’t shun him and spit out something in the shape of a sacrifice. Everywhere he walked, that little town stared at him with indulgent fondness, their lovely boy saint, and desperate hunger.
Charles knew there was something wrong with Ferrari; he just didn’t care.
Not with the promise to his father ringing in his ears. Not with the taste of glory dancing on his tongue.
He couldn’t afford to care.
He could’ve asked Sebastian, or even Kimi. A part of him knows that they would’ve said something if he did — softened as they were by winning, age, loss.
But Charles would rather die than miss out on Ferrari.
He might die anyway.
The day he’s supposed to sign, though, he almost asks. Almost breaks.
Maranello stirs him into a blood frenzy. The mechanics and the engineers and the janitorial staff all seem fervent, delighted — Carlo, they whisper-shout-croon, and Charles doesn’t mind being Carlo, Carlo, welcome home. He clasps so many hands and takes so many pictures he gets dizzy with it.
The crisscross of Maranello’s halls reminds him of a cathedral, Gloria in excelsis Deo on every mouth.
He feels cold despite the Italian summer.
Hollow and light, dragged this way and that by the building mania.
Seb plasters himself at his side, keeping a hand on the crook of his arm to steady him. A gentle touch, a lifeline in that storm of red and freely given, underserved adoration. Golden and down to earth, Seb is a pillar. In retrospect, Charles would call him a pillar of salt.
“Not too late to run,” Seb hums. It could be a joke.
Charles looks at him like he’s spat on a cross.
Seb sighs.
“Things here can get a little… intense,” he meanders, voiced pitched to a whisper, face trained to smile at everyone who gets close to them. Seb’s presence and picture of sage advice is a good shield as any. “But you’ll fit right in.”
“I want it,” Charles butts in. He feels defensive and over-warm suddenly.
“Of course you do.”
It’s there, burning on his tongue, the incriminatory question. If he asks, if he just asks, he doesn’t think anyone will judge him for getting out screaming, Seb least of all. The press will hound him forever, his family will hound him forever, but if Charles asks, he won’t stay around. He’ll know, even if he won’t share.
Why the air smells metallic and slicing. Why leaving makes shells of everyone who doesn’t retire and goes to race in other teams, the ultimate betrayal. Why the sun coats Maranello like it’ll make a halo out of his neck.
“Tell me about Kimi’s mechanics,” he asks instead. Seb briefly looks heavenward with his mouth twisted in a thin, marmoreal scowl.
Charles can claim plausible deniability.
♞
Charles and Max, they aren’t friends.
And they are, of a sort. You can’t lead the circus life they lead thus far and not feel some camaraderie.
The room is spinning ‘round and ‘round and ‘round, tinted neon with the city lights bleeding inside. It makes him want to throw up. He rolls on the bed to bury his face on the pillow, the one that smells like Max’s shampoo. Just another reminder that he’s sore and sticky and sated and that sleeping with Mr. Three Times World Champion is a bad idea as always.
Friends or not-friends shouldn’t do this, but oh —
Too late.
Charles isn’t drunk. Not anymore at least. His stomach feels empty and scorched raw by vodka anyway.
“Think we can order the breakfast menu already?” Max slurs.
He thinks he’s sneaky, inching closer until he’s tucked against Charles’ side, his face hidden on the crook of his neck. His breath is warm and damp.
They both smell like a brewery. And a cheap porno.
Charles squints to the dark sky outside, letting Max play with his hair. Is it five AM? He has no idea. He should; his team leaves at nine.
“It’s too late. Too early. Whatever.”
“I need to eat something decent. I’m, like, thirty three percent alcohol right now.” Max looks at him with those wide, watery eyes. Charles snorts, because he’s not one bit funny and his puns are terrible. Only then Max giggles, pleased with himself. “Want to get you tiramisù.”
“Andrea is going to kill me,” Charles hums. It’s not exactly a protest.
“He doesn’t need to know.”
It’s very hard to tell him no.
Max is surprisingly cuddly and gentle under his temper. Under his terrible tendency to win win win until the rest of them become idiots. He just wants the people around him to be happy.
So yeah, Charles is going to eat that damn tiramisù, even if Andrea will flay him for that and every shot he drank last night — tonight, same difference.
It’s the least he can do, after two years of letting Max comfort him what feels like every other weekend.
Max gets up to call — sweet talk — the reception.
He looks stupid, wrapped up in a wrinkled sheet with dozens of little bite marks littered over his pale chest.
Charles smiles.
When he comes back to bed, they tangle around each other. It’s much, much better than the sharp-toothed pretense of a couple months ago, that strained show of a decade and a half of distilled anger. When he still wanted to throttle Max for humiliating them all. When Max still wanted him to give in or give up or bend over.
“You know,” he idles, with a crinkly-eyed smile, “Helmut talked about you last night. Said it was a ballsy move you pulled on Checo.”
Charles winces at the choice of words related to Marko. “Yeah?”
“Your Ferrari chain runs up next year. It’d be crazy to not try to get you in navy.”
“No way in hell,” he says. He sounds faint, breathless.
Max must interpret it as something else. He laughs, not unkindly. “As if. I bet you’d kill to be in a Red Bull.”
Any of them would.
But Charles —
There is an immediate tug inside his chest. Cruel and sharp, a fishhook’s grasp. His entrails will spill out his ribcage of spite to prove to Max that they are rosso corsa. His heart beats out of rhythm, an arrhythmic, sickening press.
This is unfair. He wasn’t the one to suggest leaving.
He doesn’t even want to leave.
MY BOY, someone rattles inside his skull with the voice of a fire and brimstone preacher. His head spins, and it has nothing to do with the hangover building his eyes. Every color is a knife. His temples throb with a dull, distant pain.
Charles hasn’t been anyone’s boy in so long. Or anyone’s young man.
He feels old. Heightened down by legacy, by triumph, by the stories he tells himself to sleep. Schumacher’s years are a lullaby. Lauda’s accomplishments wash over his skin like liquid gold. Charles wants to be Kimi Raikkonen, John Surtees, Alberto Ascari. He wants to be Charles Leclerc, champion at last.
Yes ma’am, he thinks.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to —”
“It’s fine. I… I can never leave, though.”
Max looks at him strangely, with a displeased, little frown etched on his forehead. “Seriously, is there someone sucking off for that loyalty? Or threatening you? Blink three times if they’re making you sign at gunpoint.”
That rosso corsa thing sulks under his breastbone.
Charles, hysterically, wants to laugh.
“I like it there,” is all he can muster. “You wouldn’t leave when you had to retire every other race because of the Renault engines.”
“It was different,” Max insists.
It really is.
Red Bull is a new team. A clinical team. They have no History except for Seb and Max. No superstitions lining every brick of their factory. They weren’t born out of that relentless, warping love for racing — Red Bull is for cash and for winning, and they are excellent at both. There is no singularity of a man, of a mythos.
Lando might get it. Or Alex.
But no, he doesn’t think so. McLaren and Williams are limping too much. Changing too much. And Ferrari was already old and proud when they came around, a colossus in open artery red. It will outlast any of them.
Light doesn’t get out of black holes, and Charles won’t get out of that team.
Max, bless him, steers the conversation to how surreal and over the top this weekend was. A safe topic, so they can bitch together. They eat in comfortable pettiness, complaining about every little thing they were made to do, and Charles lets himself be fed the tiramisù.
When he does his walk of shame back to his hotel, his sleep schedule fucked to hell and back, he isn’t thinking about his team.
Until his phone pings with a notification.
maxverstappen1 sent you a video
It’s a cult identification index. Because of course it’s a cult identification index. Max is either the funniest motherfucker alive or the cruelest one.
Charles replies idly, wearily.
im not in a cult mate
Max answers the same second.
That’s what you say.
Charles doesn’t tell him he’s pretty sure he’s a religious icon, though.
♞
You are hungry and sharp and washed in champagne.
You will break a hundred good boys if it means a single one of them will be great and glorious and gnawing, will be able to shoulder the weight of you.
And he is — a lovely thing.
Enough to make you stutter.
It’s all very Renaissance bold colors and religious zealotry, every model a whore about to be turned into Mary. He’s a walking tragedy. He was born for red, born for you, born for the adoration you’ll make people pile at his feet.
Oh, his eyes, the slope of his nose, his dangerous little mouth.
You’re half in love before he even becomes a junior driver.
You could just shatter him on your teeth.
He knows how to suffer and does it well — he was raised Catholic, even if he doesn’t acknowledge God anymore. He will acknowledge you soon enough. And he will remember his lessons on blood drawn out, offered and accepted.
Hook, line, sinker — he wins in Monza, in Monza-home-of-your-dreamers, and you know he is yours. Yours forever. Yours to the death.
There is no child in the world who doesn’t adore you. It’s a heavy thing to bear. He above all is fragile to how sweet and light and golden that weight tastes.
There is a crowd in redredred and they’re screaming for him, crying for him, praying for him. Deliver them from defeat, they plead. He can’t hear anything else through the drum of your love, of their love, of the pop of champagne bottles. The sky is colored green-white-red, and there are flags high in Maranello.
He will be your martyr, your little love, your saint.
And he’ll look marvelous, gutted on the altar of your glory.
♞
So, about Lewis —
Charles doesn’t warn him. It won’t wreck his mind and his heart and the architecture of his bones like it wrecked Charles’, he tells himself. He’ll retire after Ferrari. Retirement is safe. If you don’t come back to race and taunt the team, it’s the one way you get out with your head on your shoulders and not washed in blood.
He only feels marginally awful about not doing it.
♞
Charles feels sullied and corrosive when he doesn’t tell Carlos, though.
He likes Carlos in a distant, dispassionate way — they were never friends, never close, but they have enough people in common to run around the same circles. To trade a meme once or twice and congratulate each other on good results.
The knowledge drums on the tips of his fingers. Charles calls Carlos an excellent pick for the team and smiles a close-mouthed smile on every debrief.
It sits heavy in his stomach.
Seb picks at his cuticles and doesn’t talk much.
He has nothing left to say. He came here a savior, the pinnacle of red hopes and red dreams, and he leaves humiliated. Beaten to submission by waves of bitterness. Beaten to submission by Charles. His every smile is tired and rehearsed, and though the people love him, Maranello doesn’t love him.
Ferrari doesn’t love him.
Not like it should. Not like it once did, no matter how much Seb tears himself apart to fit its many cruel twists inside his chest.
I won’t be you, Charles promises, the starkness of the vow scorching the insides of his mouth. It wouldn’t matter much to Seb if he knew. He’s leaving. Or he’s being left behind. The optics threaten to swallow them hole.
It leaves him the problem of Carlos.
Hard-working, passionate, sharp Carlos. He looks like a bronze statue of old, polished to perfection — the press says he’ll fit right in, Mediterranean and sophisticated, with a teasing lilt to his tongue and observant, intelligent eyes. Fernando reincarnated; this time, more personable, more palatable.
Wrong on all accounts, they are.
Carlos isn’t an Academy kid. Carlos has no idea what he’s getting into.
A couple days before he comes around to sign the contract and be introduced to the team, Charles wakes up from a dream of gold and red and Modena yellow. Monza, he thinks, sucking in wet breaths, wrapped up in a sheen of cold sweat. There was something hulking and looming on the horizon, watching him, cradling him, wanting him. He picks up his phone in a daze, hands shaking.
Dials Carlos’ number, finger hovering on the call button.
DON’T, the pictures on his walls hiss. He drops his phone on the floor with a clatter. Spiraling cracks bloom on the screen.
He leans with his head balanced on his knees.
It’d be very odd to call him at four AM.
So Charles waits until a respectable ten thirty. The minutes crawl by him like ants, prickling at his skin. His trophies seem to sulk. Every picture has eyes that track his movements, hawkish and displeased. A nervousness large and nameless and rattling takes its place behind his eyes.
He calls Carlos and hopes he doesn’t sound deranged.
They make stilted small talk.
Charles can hear Carlos’ confusion, his eagerness to finish this awkward conversation, so he leaps into action. DON’T DON’T DON’T, his own heartbeat orders. He wants to throw up. His hands are shaking as he clutches his phone.
“When you announce your contract, let me give you a tour of the city.”
“Oh — alright.” It sounds like a question.
“It’s easier this way,” he laughs. He doesn’t feel one bit like the personable press trick he’s supposed to be. “There’ll be hundreds of people to meet. Dozens of places to show your face in. Maranello cares a lot about every detail.”
Carlos shouldn’t accidentally offend something he doesn’t even know exists.
And the first days feel like a knife slipping between your bones and tendons to make place for a second soul. Seb led him to the slaughter, sure, but he was very kind about it. About making sure he shook the right hands and built the right mythos. When it was time for Seb to go, Charles was ready to become king in his place.
“I have to get a picture with that cook, I think.” It’s the first time Carlos has sounded less than practiced, less than practical, about his move.
He must suspect something.
It’d fit Seb’s long-held rebellion, to let it slip. It’d fit Fernando.
“We should wait until the testing in Fiorano. People here love it when you show up in overalls.”
“Alright,” he repeats, stilted. Carlos must think this is a fever dream. “Thank you. I need to go, but I’ll take you up on that. Bye.”
“Bye.” Charles knows a dismissal when he hears one.
Well, that won’t last.
HE WON’T LAST, it comments, idle, with a lion’s casual cruelty. It isn’t the lion’s fault when it eats the zebra in the nature documentary. There is no malice in instinct.
Shhh, Charles shushes it. He hopes Carlos does.
♞
With the length of his contract, Charles will have to not tell a rookie one day.
Baby-faced and hopeful and starving for glory like himself. He knows about the hopes that one Academy kid will make the lethal cut. Knows about the chess of expectations and appetite going on in the feeder series.
He will have to be Seb, playing an oblique game.
You can’t spare a man a doom of his own making. You can’t spare a lovelorn driver from Ferrari.
Halfway through his morning run, he turns back around and goes to his apartment. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to do this later, or worse still, face to face. Charles fishes his phone from his pocket with clammy hands.
There is a lazy tug on his guts, just a reminder.
“When you announce your contract, let me give you a tour of the city.”
Lewis sounds odd — odd, yes, that’s a good description. “When the season ends,” he corrects.
As if he’ll be able to resist it.
It’ll be complicated, getting him around without anyone noticing, without the press making a fuss. Charles wants to laugh.
“Tell me when you have time. It’s easier if you have a guide.”
They make stilled, disjointed small talk. Lewis finishes the call like he’s tempted to call Charles insane and call this whole thing off. Charles, on his end, feels hysterical. It looks like he has a teammate ritual now.