if you’re like me and you only watch f1 for free, here are some free sites you can watch it live at:
sportshub.stream - this is my personal favorite
totalsportek.pro
sportsurge.club
thehomesport.net
weakstream.org
there are also free apps you can watch it in:
Live player
strym tv - you need a code to watch in this app so you just press the + sign on the upper left corner, choose “Import playlist from URL” and paste this url http: //movitv. pro just remove the spaces
all of these have ads and if you have access to VPN, you might want to use it but i’ve tried all these links and app last season and hadn’t gotten a virus.
A/N: I'm sorry for the terrible updating schedule. Life's been too crazy recently, which made me contract a severe case of writer's block and I'm trying to break it by writing stuff. So my deepest apologies to all of you if my writing isn't like usual, but I hope you guys enjoy!
Word Count: 1.8k
The physio's name is Markus, and he doesn't mean to say it.
Lewis is passing the medical bay after a debrief that ran long, already half-distracted, when he catches the tail end of a conversation through the half-open door… something about hydration levels, about not being able to keep up with the deficit, about how the numbers haven't looked right since Barcelona. He wouldn't have stopped except he hears Nico's name, and something cold moves through him.
Markus sees him in the doorway and goes quiet. The silence is its own answer.
"How long," Lewis says. Not a question, really.
Markus looks at his clipboard. "I shouldn't—"
"How long."
A pause. "Since pre-season, we think. Maybe before."
Lewis walks to Nico's motorhome and doesn't let himself think about what he's going to say.
Nico opens the door already annoyed, still in his race suit half-unzipped, and when he sees Lewis the annoyance sharpens into something more guarded.
"I'm busy."
"I know." Lewis doesn't move from the step. "Can I come in?"
A beat. Nico steps back, which isn't the same as an invitation but Lewis takes it anyway.
The motorhome is neat in that precise, controlled way Nico has always had. With everything in its place and nothing wasted. Lewis notices the kitchen counter. A bottle of water. Nothing else.
He doesn't say anything about it yet. He sits. Nico stays standing.
"Listen, Markus already called me… whatever he told you—"
"He didn't tell me much." Lewis keeps his voice level. "He didn't have to."
Nico's jaw tightens. He crosses his arms and looks out the window, at the paddock moving past in the late afternoon light. "Then what do you want, Lewis."
"I want to know you're okay."
The laugh Nico gives is short and hard and doesn't reach his eyes. "I'm fine."
"Nico."
"I said I'm fine." He turns then, and Lewis sees the angles of his face more clearly in the direct light that weren't there in winter, the way his collar sits differently, the hands that are too prominent at the ends of his arms. Lewis has known this face for twenty years and he knows what it looked like before. The difference sits in his chest like a millstone.
"You need to take care of yourself," Lewis says, very softly.
"I'm taking care of myself."
"Nico—"
"I will do whatever it takes." Nico says it quietly, which is almost worse than shouting. "Whatever it takes to win this championship. You don't get to come in here and tell me how to do that."
"I'm not talking about the championship." Lewis stands. He crosses the small space between them slowly, carefully, the way you'd approach something breakable. He reaches a hand out toward Nico's arm, and Nico steps back like he's burned.
The space between them holds.
Lewis lets his hand fall, his heart breaking in his chest.
"Is a championship worth your health," he says, barely above a whisper, eyes filled with memories that took the form of tears. "That's all I'm asking you. Is it worth this."
Nico looks at him for a long moment. Something moves across his face that Lewis can't name.Grief, maybe, or anger that hasn't finished deciding what shape to take.
"Why would you even care." His voice has gone flat. "It's not like we're friends or anything."
Lewis opens his mouth.
"You lost the right to tell me to take care of myself," Nico says, and now the venom is there, bright and hot, "when you started hating me."
"I never—" Lewis stops. Breathes. "I never hated you."
"Don't."
"Nico, I never hated you, what I felt was—" He breaks off, and something cracks loose in him, something he's been holding down under layers of competition and pride and two years of carefully managed distance. "This is dangerous. What you're doing is dangerous, do you understand that, not just for the season, not just for your performance, for you, for your body, for—"
"That's easy for you to say." Nico's voice rises to meet him, two decades of something finally splitting open. "Mr. Three Time World Champion. You already have everything, you've already won, you just want to see me fail like you've always wanted to see me fail—"
"That is not true—"
"I am fighting for this," Nico says, and his voice breaks on it, just slightly, just enough that Lewis hears it. "I am going to earn this, Lewis Hamilton, and you don't get to stand in my motorhome and tell me I'm doing it wrong."
Lewis stands there with his mouth open and nothing left to say.
Nico grabs his keycard from the counter. He doesn't look back.
The door closes, and Lewis is left in the neat, empty space with the single bottle of water on the counter. He thinks about a word he read once, in some magazine Nico's mother had left lying around the house in Hamburg, twenty-something years ago. Anagapesis. The falling out of love. He'd thought it was the saddest word he'd ever seen, had said so, and Nico had laughed and said that was very dramatic of him.
He looks at the water on the counter. The absence of anything else.
He doesn't feel like he's fallen out of love with Nico. He feels like he's been loving him into a wall for two years, and he doesn't know what you call that. the love that has nowhere to go, that turns up anyway, that stands in a motorhome and reaches out a hand and gets nothing back. Maybe that's worse than anagapesis. Maybe that's what anagapesis actually feels like from the inside, and the falling-out is just the story you tell yourself so the love has somewhere to go when it can't go to the person anymore.
The millstone in his chest doesn't have a name. He leaves it there and as he slowly exited the motorhome.
The heat in Bahrain was a living breathing thing, straight out of the furnace of hell.
It presses down from a sky that has gone white with it, and by the time the podium ceremony is finished the paddock is shimmering at the edges ofNico’s vision.
He knows he should go inside. He knows this the same way he knows a lot of things lately distantly, academically, the knowledge arriving several seconds after it should. His body feels translated. Like something is running a version of him and the signal keeps dropping.
He'd qualified third. Finished fourth. Toto had been careful with his words in the debrief, which meant the words underneath the words were less careful, and Nico had sat in the seat and felt the room tipping very slightly to the left and told himself it was the adrenaline coming down.
He's told himself a lot of things, lately.
Outside, the sun takes him apart. He's walking toward the hospitality building… he tells himself that he can make it. It’s just twenty meters, thirty meters away, the door is there, the shade is there.
But somewhere around the halfway point something happens to his legs. They continue moving but the information stops arriving correctly. He's walking and then he's listing and then—
Lewis is just there. Lewis is simply present, the way he sometimes is when Nico hasn't been paying attention, appearing in the periphery of things. He's been talking to someone from the press, maybe, and then he isn't, because Nico's legs have finished their consultation and reached a conclusion.
Lewis catches him.
It isn't graceful. Nico's full weight goes sideways and Lewis takes it without hesitating, both arms, and they end up half-crouched on the hot tarmac with Nico's back against Lewis's chest and Lewis saying something. His name, maybe, or something else, it's hard to tell through the buzzing in his ear and the sky above them is still very white and very hot.
Nico tries to tell himself that he is perfectly alright. He just needed a minute and he would be back up.
His body disagrees. His body has been disagreeing for months, quietly at first and now loudly, now undeniably, and somewhere in the narrowing white of his vision he understands that this is what it looks like when the story you've been telling yourself runs out of road.
The story was that he didn't need Lewis Hamilton anymore. He had moved cleanly into the future without the complicated grief of what they used to be, had shed the whole history of them like something he'd outgrown. He'd told himself that so many times it had started to feel true. He'd built his whole 2016 on top of it. The discipline, the focus, the stripping away of everything soft and extraneous. He didn't need Lewis. Not the way he used to. Not anymore.
Lewis's arms are still there.
They're holding on, and Lewis is calling for the medics with a voice that sounds like someone who is genuinely frightened, and Nico thinks about the story he told himself. The one about how he didn't need Lewis anymore.
That he'd put the feeling down somewhere and walked away from it clean. He hadn't. He'd just renamed it rivalry, called it resentment, called it the cold clean freedom of not needing anyone. He built a whole identity out of the absence of Lewis Hamilton and here is Lewis Hamilton, arms around him on hot tarmac, heartbeat fast and unsteady against his back.
You can't fall out of love with something you never stopped loving.
The medics arrive in a rush of voices and Lewis's arms loosen, slowly, the way you put something down that you're not sure you should, and the sky is very white, and Nico is aware of efficient hands on him, not Lewis's. Somewhere at the edge of things Lewis is still there. Nico can feel it without looking, the same way he can feel the heat of the tarmac, the way certain things just register.
Anagapesis. The word drifts in from somewhere deep, from a house in Hamburg with the windows open and someone's mother's magazine on the floor. The falling out of love. He'd thought that was what happened to them. He'd been so sure he'd worn it like an answer, and he'd waited for the relief that answers are supposed to bring. It never came.
He understands now why it never came.
He's very tired. The kind of tired that has settled into the bone, that makes him feel ancient, that has nothing to do with the race or the heat.
Lewis was scared. The heartbeat said so. And Nico's body has finally stopped lying, even if his head is still trying, still reaching for the shape of the old story. It keeps going sideways. It won't hold together anymore.
Anagapesis never happened. That's the thing. He'd named what was between them and called it that and built a whole year on top of the word, but the word was wrong. You can diagnose the wrong illness and still take the medicine. He took it for twelve months and it nearly killed him.
The word that fits this moment is not anagapesis. He doesn't know yet what word does. But Lewis hasn't let go, not all the way, and the tarmac is warm, and that's somewhere. That's somewhere to start, Nico thinks to himself as the darkness claimed him completely.
