Work Text:
It starts with one of those little snow globes from Monaco.
It starts with Nico unpacking his bag, finally home, the rush of the Championship win still singing in his veins. There’s always been a difference between him and Vivian’s friends’ husbands and it isn’t exactly a subtle one.
Vivian is drinking a glass of red wine, looking out their bedroom window, her mouth twisted down again. She’d got paint splashed across her knuckles, her nails clipped short, and her hair pulled back. He doesn’t expect her to understand everything, not anymore, but he doesn’t get why she doesn’t understand that, at least.
Nico smirks, anyway, because he’s got friends that do. He isn’t sentimental by nature. You can’t play a game like it doesn’t matter if you lose if you try to keep things close.
He sticks the snow globe up on the top shelf on his side of the closet, lines up his shoes, and hangs his jacket. He keeps smiling until he takes the glass out of Vivian’s hand and she won’t meet his eyes. He keeps smiling after that, too, it’s just for a different reason.
---
Nico leaves the house before nine the next morning. The sun is shining big and bright in the sky. There are a couple of kids playing in the yard across the street, their nanny attached to her cellphone. Birds are singing, dogs are barking, and Vivian is twisting her mouth the way she does when she’s trying not to ask where he’s going.
He buys Vivian flowers again, the yellow ones she likes because they complement the paint in the kitchen. He buys three red apples and two green, a head of lettuce, a random pint of Ben & Jerry’s, two steaks, and a padded envelope.
He doesn’t put a return address on the envelope when he addresses it using block-style Sharpied letters; it’s not like Lewis won’t know who it’s from.
---
Nico walks around the neighborhood twice a day. He thinks about getting a dog, and he’s mentally debating breeds—something small and fluffy that Vivian and the girls would like, the kind of dog prissy enough to fit in with the Johnsons and the Jaegers; or something bigger, like a bulldog, that way Roscoe would have a friend to play with during race weekends—before he remembers that there are no race weekends anymore.
The Johanssons decide to upgrade their car, and bring in a brand-new Mercedes and Sarah asks him, laughing, with her fingers on his elbow at her kid’s birthday party, what he thinks of it. He grins, and compliments her choice, and watches Vivian roll her eyes over Sarah’s shoulder.
He watches qualifying in Sochi, notes down the corners where Lewis is losing time, and by the time Q3 is done, he’s texting Bono his thoughts on how to rectify that. Bono sends back a thumbs up.
Lewis wins the race.
Vivian taps her fingers on his shoulder, and sighs like she’s disappointed in him again.
---
The package comes about a week later, with his name written in green crayon. There’s a stuffed polar bear inside, soft, and white, and wearing a scarf the color of the Hungarian flag.
Nico doesn't laugh—as a rule—but his mouth twitches, and his breath hitches dangerously in that direction.
He grabs his keys. He addresses the envelope with glittery stickers, and drops a Belgian flag in Lewis’ mail box.
---
Nico imagines Lewis laughing, head thrown back, fingers curled in polyester. That’s not how Lewis laughs, of course, and he wouldn’t give Nico the satisfaction even if it was. It's a fake laugh, one Lewis uses in interviews, or when he’s trying to get someone to do something for him. That laugh, it’s part of the game. It’s part of a different game.
Nico counts back at the red sign just to check his reflexes. He drives past the circuit for whatever reason, even if it is way off his route to the grocery store.
He buys milk, eggs, pasta, and salmon, without looking at the list shoved in his pocket.
A Sinatra song is playing softly into the background and Nico hums along absently. He catches two men staring in front of him and fixes his hair automatically. He imagines Lewis laughing at him, and he grins.
---
Nico bought tickets to Barcelona online on a whim, stock prices pulled up in one window and Priceline in another. He booked a room at the Hotel arts in his real name, smiling down the line because Julia took his reservation. One time he’d been there, she’d made fun of Lewis for losing his room card and asking for another one in the middle of the night, and had politely declined his advances. Both events were rare enough to stick in Nico’s memory, along with smirking afterwards, shoulder to shoulder with Lewis in the elevator.
He prints out the flight information, erases his browser history just because, and boots down. It’s a slow and painful process, sometimes. He pushes with the heel of his hand against the desk and swivels his chair left, then right, then left. The sunlight coming in from the window makes his shoes shine.
He watches dust motes float around, listens to the kids play in their bedroom with their high-pitched laughter, listens to the computer hum as it powers down, and Vivian splashing water as she cleans brushes. Every time he peeks in, she’s got her eyebrows pulled together tight, her mouth drawn, like she’d got a calculus problem in front of her instead of another blank canvas. The ceiling is white, and the walls have been at least three different shades of beige since they moved in.
They don't go to Barcelona, because Vivian already made plans.
They stay home and play board games with their neighbors. Nico’s driven fast cars for a living since he was ten. He plays jungle speed with a glass of wine in the other hand. Vivian serves mini desserts as a distraction from the unfairness of it.
---
The next day, he gets a pair of racing gloves from Lewis.
There are Koala heads drawn in the Os in his name on the envelope. He smiles, already planning, clutching the gloves in his fist.
He smoothes them out before he puts them on the top shelf of the closet, though, because he doesn’t like wrinkles. Vivian looks at him funny when he steps out, his thumb hooked in his pocket, wearing a black hoodie, a leather jacket, aviator sunglasses, and a beaten-up brown leather messenger bag over his shoulder.
She raises her eyebrows, and twists her mouth again, and doesn’t ask.
He goes to two different vegan bakeries in Nice, walking down the aisles slowly, observing every cake with attention. He asks the cashiers, gets rewarded with a shake of a head, adjusts the glasses he’s wearing and sighs.
In the third vegan bakery—a semi-rundown vintage tea place called The Hour Glass that Lewis would love without shame, that smells like old people and incense—Nico finds what he’s looking for. It’s not exactly a strauben, but it’s not like Lewis knows the difference.
They’ve got mood rings up by the register, and he tries on one with little inset hearts while the cashier finishes reading an article in a TV Guide from the eighties before she checks him out. The ring goes from black to brown to red to orange, as he twists it on his finger.
He puts the pastry in a Tupperware, wraps it in paper from the adult toy store next door. He spells Lewis’s name backwards and drops the Tupperware on his doorstep.
When he gets home, he tosses the mood ring with his aviator sunglasses in a shoebox, and reading glasses he only kind of needs.
---
Nico walks around the neighborhood after a cup of black coffee. The weather’s starting to turn, the leaves fading to yellow and orange and red, the wind making him shiver. He waves to the old man on the corner, who sits on his balcony in his fuzzy robe and slippers every morning to read the paper, coffee cup steaming beside him. He steps over the cracks in the sidewalk, hands shoved down in his pockets and shoulders hunched against the cold.
Vivian moves on from fruit bowls to the trees outside her workroom window.
Lewis sends him an evil eye Greek bracelet, and the O in his name is now the Mercedes logo. He considers dropping it in the shoebox, before slipping it on.
Everything is digital now, and Nico spends three hours going from store to store in order to find an old-fashioned alarm clock, the kind with the bells on top. He places it in an empty Frostie’s box, duct-taped shut. He writes Lewis’s name, and then badly draws the Championship trophy underneath.
Nico walks around the neighborhood, and waves to the hold man on the corner, and steps over the cracks in the sidewalk.
Lewis sends him a vegan cookbook, the “i” of his name turned into a middle finger, and Nico burns dinner, because he’s too busy flipping through the dessert pages to pay attention to what’s on the stove.
He steals a disgusting vegan crab cake from a black tie party he’s forced to attend, and spends an obscene amount of time convincing the landlord to let him in Lewis’ flat, even going as far as showing him an old picture of them together. He tries not to look around too much as he makes his way inside towards the fridge, places the cake wrapped inside white cloth napkins between a salad and what looks like restaurant leftovers. He writes Lewis’ name on a post-it, the H of Hamilton laid back and fishing.
Vivian moves on from the trees to flower arrangements, her mouth always pulled tight. She makes coffee in the mornings, and sells a painting to a stranger. Nico buys her flowers again—the ones she likes—and brings home takeout so dinner’s edible. She wears her hair down, washes all the paint off her hands, and relaxes more than she has in weeks. She touches her fingers to the nose of the polar bear in the closet before she comes to bed.
Lewis sends him a bottle of Ricciardo’s wine from Australia. Nico’s smiling at the package, tapping the side of his thumb against the box and already planning his next move, when Vivian leaves. His name is written inside of grapes, and Vivian meets his eyes for the first time in a week.
Nico doesn’t bother to be surprised. Lewis always said retirement wasn't really in the cards for either of them.
He goes to Barnes & Noble, buys a book on French sculpture and rips a picture of a Mercury Attaching His Wings, and slips it under Lewis’ door, addressed with calligraphy he’s pretty sure Lewis taught him once.
Nico goes home, cleans out the fridge, walks around the neighborhood, and packs a bag. When the time comes, he locks the door and doesn’t look back. Looking back has never really been his style.
---
The Melbourne airport is crowded. Nico taps his fingers on the armrest to the rhythm of Sinatra. He tugs the sleeves of his jacket over the Greek bracelet on his right wrist, and breathes in stale air steadily. The kid in the seat behind him is listening to her headphones with the volume so high that Nico can hear the tinny pop she’s playing. Two rows ahead of him there’s a couple arguing.
“How’s retired life?” Lewis asks, putting a baseball hat on Nico’s head and sitting down in the seat beside him. He makes it look easy. He relaxes into the seat like it’s comfortable. Nico relaxes too, a habit that had been ingrained years ago.
“Don’t you hate it when people in airports suddenly want to be your best friend?” Nico returns, grinning against his will and better judgment. Once in a while, he can’t help but give Lewis a victory. He pulls the hat on more firmly, without looking at whatever monstrosity he’s ended up wearing.
“Lucky for you,” Lewis says, tapping his fingers against the outside of Nico’s wrist, “I’m not people.”
Nico laughs, takes off his jacket. He catches Lewis looking at the bracelet and smirking, the corner of his mouth that Nico can see turned upwards. That’s how it really started, of course, when they were kids, sunburned and sticky and sick on too much sugar and too many hours awake, laughing together in the backseat of his dad’s car, planning big. They were always going to end up right here.
“I thought I was going to have to send you a written invitation,” Nico says slowly, wrapping his fingers around the back of Lewis’s neck. He breathes, and it feels like it’s for the first time in months.