so...any chance for a courage wip snippet? 👀
Using this as an excuse to share an entire completed sequence from this fic because uuuuuuuuu i'm proud of it :) I think this bit is gonna go somewhere more towards the middle of the story but i wanted to write it first to get grounded inside lully's head and feel a little bit more of his perspective:
Chris started simracing for Max in 2021, just in time to watch him eat 51G in the wall at Silverstone before going on to seize his maiden title that same year. On the ledge next to his sim rig at home, Chris keeps a little model of the car that Max did it in- the RB16B, pride of Newey. Also, the RB18, the beloved RB19; and even the RB20, a mutant horse of a car that held out until the end and became beautiful when Max stood on top of it in Interlagos. At night, the footage plays in his mind. Max’s cars, Max’s wins, his overtakes. Max shares his screen to show Chris his telemetry and says, “here, look. This is how-” Chris smooths his fingers over the toy version of the Ferrari they’d shared at the Eifel, and runs the simulations until his eyelids grow heavy, and he is asleep.
First, there is Blanchimont. Max was still in Toro Rosso at the time. Chris had just gotten his first slew of pimples, and was too naive to care. The first time Max showed him the clip, Chris gasped out loud. On Max's tablet, little Max shoots through the outside line like a bullet from a gun. The car thrashes. Max gallops over the curb and emerges from the chicane having successfully snatched away the position. In the Toro Rosso garage, cameras capture the mechanics all throwing their hands up in relief. In Max’s telling of it, no one was happy with him that day. Jos gave him an almighty earful. Helmut Marko came straight to Max's room and made him promise to never ever pull that shit ever again. “I wouldn’t try it now, of course,” Max says blithely. But Max, of course, lies. Because Chris had seen what he’d done in Mexico, and the way his car snapped in Zandvoort, and he sees, too, the things Max practices when they race together online. He’d seen what Max had done at Yas Marina.
Then there is Brazil. Last year, Lando Norris had the better car. Lando Norris was starting from pole while Max was back in p-Narnia, having been shot down during qualifying that very morning as dark clouds pooled on the horizon. At the Mugello test, Max told Chris, “listen, don’t expect. Just feel the car.” He'd said it like it was easy; because of course, to him, it was. As a boy, Max practiced driving laps in the cold and wet and slashing rain until his fingers were frozen and blue. Then, his father told him to thaw them out against the exhaust, and made him run again. Max was one of the finest wet weather drivers since Ayrton Senna, everyone knew. “If I could go back,” says Lando Norris, “I would also have a mum and dad who were racing drivers.”
It had rained in Mugello. Chris’s laps were within three tenths of Max’s by the end of the day but no closer. Max had been beaming like he was impressed.
In Brazil, Max dances around the outside of turn one just as he’d done in 2016, finding grip where no one else would dare to even look. He'd stood on top of the RB20 with his fists raised to the sky in defiance, and he threw himself into the arms of his team, and was held, and looked as if he would have surely been carried off by them, if it weren’t for that pesky barrier. Lando Norris could cry, “luck,” all he wanted. Lando Norris had had the better car. Lando Norris had started on pole only to come in sixth, while Max roared seventeenth to first through the violence of a hurricane.
Next, Imola. Three cars dive into Tamburello very close together, and one comes out ahead. George Russell was picked off. Oscar Piastri had been mauled. The thing that Chris always gets stuck on is this- just how easy Max had made it look. Like seeing a magic trick, or watching nature happen in real time- all Max had to do was guide the car onto the correct path, brake only that small fraction of a second later, and he was through. Chris had been thinking of it while they were together at NLS9. He couldn’t do what Max could, not yet, but Chris knows. That move at Imola had been decades in the making. It was Max’s life’s work, the product of his heart and mind and the awful talent of his hands. No one else could have done it. After Abu Dhabi, the pundits all said the same thing. No one else could have done it.
It wasn’t enough. Max spent all of 2025 fighting savagely in an inferior car as his teammates failed, one after another, on the other side of the garage. Max had shared his data and said, “here, look,” so that Chris could see as he did. He’d said, “focus, Lulham,” and the racing line revealed itself through Wipperman as it had at Tamburello. When Chris stumbled out of the car afterwards, he’d felt nothing but relief. Max took him into his side, and helped to bear some of his weight, and was pleased but not surprised. His eyes had glittered then, flashing ferocious and warm. Blanchimont, Brazil, Imola, and the Nords. At night, Chris pores over them and tries to find answers. In most cases, there is no answer, because the answer is- Max. Max’s sensitivity, his talent, his insatiable appetite. No one else could have done it.
Then. The answer to Abu Dhabi.
There was no way to avoid the strike. If there were, Max would have done it.
The realization doesn’t stop Chris from speculating. It hadn’t stopped him from screaming out loud, alone in his flat when it happened. At night, Chris sets up the pieces: Max, Lewis, Leclerc, the mean cut of turn five, and he tries to find a way. If Max had been just a little further back, if Leclerc had been further ahead, if Lewis had moved to defend instead of trying to outrun them, maybe then the contact would have happened. Maybe if the debris had been bigger, it could have been caught on Max’s halo. If it had been any heavier, they said, it would have killed him. Chris goes to sleep wondering and he wakes up sweating, nauseous, convinced that some irrevocable calamity has taken place. He lunges for his phone, fumbles through his emails until he is able to locate the generic message that all of Max’s drivers had received in the wake of the accident. “Thank you for the well-wishes,” he'd said. “Currently working towards recovery and feeling better already. Please continue to CC Winward on any coms, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you need me (might be a little MIA, but I’ll respond to voicemails as soon as I can).”
He stares at the tiny, too-bright font and tries to hold the image in his mind. He pictures Max in recovery, resting with his cats and his baby and Kelly and P. He imagines Max’s warm eyes, the living, hungry heave of him as they’d stood together at the Eifel. He imagines Imola, Blanchimont, Brazil, until at last he manages to fall back asleep, and to dream of nothing at all.
It doesn’t always work.
