your suffering isn't holy, it's just suffering : casey/pecco, 2.5k words [1/?]
With the towel over his head in this room without windows, Pecco can pretend he doesn’t exist. Or that he’s the only thing that exists, with the smell of his own sweat and salt trapped in the fabric, nothing but his body heat for warmth; fingers cold where they’re dropped between his knees and brushing against each other and toes hot where they’re still crammed hard into his boots.
He takes a big breath in for I’m not here, this isn’t happening, and lets it out on but I am, and it is. The debrief he’d just been released from was maybe the shortest in a too long line of too long debriefs: hours spent looking at data and lap times and his replays and others’ replays to no productive end. Gigi had uncrossed his arms only long enough to squeeze Pecco’s shoulder on the way out.
The touch lingers, heavy.
Pecco wants to scrub his skin till it’s raw.
He’s not — fitting in his body. And it happens sometimes, after a bad race, a bad weekend. Leaves him feeling like a hundred metres of rope coiled into a palm-sized bag; a race horse in a stable where the walls are closing in, clipping his feet and squeezing all the air out of him — eyes wild, heart thundering in his chest.
A ragged breath drags out of his airway, whistling on its way up. The noise, high and terrified, snaps him back to the moment and to the panic attack that’s started to grip him, sinking iron claws into his lungs.
He manages a wheezy, “Fuck,” and scrambles to rip the towel from his head, opening his eyes to the dim room and the patter of rain against the roof. He’s still in his fucking leathers — can’t breathe properly, can’t get off the ground.
He needs Valentino. Christ. He’s going to suffocate.
“Hey, thought I would come chat before I — Pecco?”
Pecco recoils at the widening flood of light pooling over him. He blinks frantically, eyes struggling to adjust. The voice is — he recognises it, the Australian accent, but he’s heard so fucking much of it this weekend that he just can’t tell.
Whoever’s standing in his doorway steps inside and closes the door, and then says, “Shit, Pecco,” which he just doesn’t need. The fucking pity, that — that awful way people say his name lately.
He scrubs at his eyes and tries again, better in the near-dark.
It’s Casey. Casey, who kneels in front of him, hands hovering like he wants to touch but doesn’t want to risk making anything worse. Making Pecco worse.
He takes another choked breath.
Casey catches his bottom lip between his teeth and then moves himself till he’s sitting like Pecco, knees up against the wall. He takes Pecco’s far arm by the wrist and drags it over to place his palm over Casey’s heart.
His pulse is steady. Strong. Pecco feels it beat beneath his fingers and tries to form a sentence.
“Just see if you can breathe like I am,” Casey urges, careful, soft like socked feet around broken glass.
He breathes in, and Pecco breathes in too.
They breathe out together.
Pecco’s chest shakes, so they do it again, and again, until it doesn’t.
It feels like hours. It might be minutes. Casey’s fingers keep Pecco’s hand pressed firm into his chest. Pecco wonders if Casey will be able to feel it for long afterwards, once they aren’t touching. If the heat of Pecco’s hand will keep; if it’ll warm the tissue of Casey’s heart all the way through.
He hopes it does. He can't be the only person walking around like this.
“You hurt?” Casey asks.
Pecco swallows, tongue dragging away from the backs of his teeth.
“No.”
His eyes drift to Casey’s other arm where they’re pressed together. The sleeve of his sweater is cuffed at his elbow. It’s the same colour as the swathe of ocean that Pecco can see from his AirBnB window. And Casey doesn’t even call this place home. Pecco thinks he could be made here. Shaped by the waves and coloured by the sun. He takes another breath when Casey’s chest inflates under his hand.
He doesn’t smell like Pecco, like a rider. He smells like cologne and linen and the inside of a thundercloud.
“Something happen in the debrief?”
Pecco says, “No,” again. Casey’s watching him. Eyes like storms. The rain backs off for a second and then returns tenfold.
It’s not — it’s not something he can explain to Casey. Not without dying, without sinking through the floor.
Only Valentino knows. Only Vale.
If Valentino were here instead of Casey, if he’d walked in without knocking, he wouldn’t have worried. He would have walked past Pecco without looking at him. He would have sat down in the chair at the table and pulled his phone out. And Pecco would have stayed, hyperventilating on the floor, until Valentino levelled him with a dark look and said, “Francesco, if you can’t even do this,” and Pecco — Francesco, now, a boy, admonished — would have crawled on his knees across the room, awkward in his leathers, and stopped at Valentino’s side with his legs folded beneath him and his face tipped to the floor.
He would be close enough to feel the heat coming off Valentino, but they wouldn’t touch. Valentino would be on his phone, and he wouldn’t look at Pecco again, and he wouldn’t say anything to him, and Pecco would stay there for two hours until he was no longer a person, until the ache in his knees turned into an absence of any feeling at all.
And then, when Valentino figured Pecco was good for it, because he always knew, somehow, could just tell, he would finally fucking touch him. Scrape his nails against Pecco’s scalp and turn his face up with a hand on his chin and say, “We will figure it out Francesco, sometimes you just have to hurt for a while.” Then he’d hoist him up, catch his weight when Pecco’s legs, dead, fail him, and the circuit would be nearly dark and nearly empty as they stagger down the steps towards Valentino’s car.
“Hey,” Casey whispers, because Pecco’s slipping again, he can’t even breathe right, can’t do fucking anything right and Valentino isn’t here and he doesn’t know how the fuck he’s going to get off this stupid island before he falls apart completely.
“Casey,” he rasps, because at least he’s not alone but fuck he should be alone because he can’t be seen like this. He can’t. Not by Casey. “I need —”
He breaks off, and Casey’s swallow clicks in the silence.
— you to leave, please, and I’ll be fine in three hours and I’ll rebook my flight and we can forget you ever saw this —
“I know,” Casey says, voice so awfully gentle like he really cares, and Pecco hates that because he knows he does care. Casey takes a breath. Pecco tries to copy.
“Valentino told me. What he does for you.”
All the air sucks out of the room. Pecco’s lungs flutter and he shifts away like he’s been struck, dragging his arm from Casey’s grip.
Casey lets him flee. He says nothing and watches as Pecco slides, frantic, along the wall until he’s far enough away that he can see Casey whole, until he can search for the disgust turning his face sour.
Casey rolls his bottom lip in and then he sighs and Pecco wants to die, a little. Which must show on his face, because Casey says, “No, hey. It’s okay.”
Pecco’s swallow sticks around the lump in his throat.
Casey knows.
No one — only Valentino, and he hasn’t trusted Marc with it yet, but he could, and he thinks about it for a second; Marc’s big hand on the back of his neck, how anchored he’d be, and then he’s back with Casey and it’s Casey’s hand on his nape, Casey finally easing him out of himself, telling him he’ll get through it and letting Pecco just shut his fucking brain off.
The want surges up across his molars like a tidal wave. Casey would — Casey isn’t sharp edges the way Valentino is, the way Valentino tells Pecco he needs it. Valentino has always thought that. Tough love, the dog with the shock collar. A jolt when Pecco’s not working hard enough, not doing well enough.
Casey rocks forward onto the balls of his feet. He’s still down low, still at Pecco’s eye line.
“Can I help you, Pecco?” he asks, like he wants to. Like this isn’t just something for Pecco; some inconvenience because he can’t pull himself together on his own like an adult.
Pecco doesn’t — he doesn’t know if he’d be able to handle it.
If Casey was like Valentino. If he was hard and sharp and pulling the choke chain.
And then Casey stands up and panic lances through Pecco in an instant, seizes him up so that all he can do is watch Casey leave.
Except Casey moves to the chair at the table and spins it to face the room. He sits, legs falling open, and ducks his chin.
Pecco feels his heart in his mouth. Casey finds his eyes, staring up through his lashes.
“I’m here if you want,” he says, not more than a whisper.
Pecco wants.
His gaze drops to Casey’s hands, clasped loose over his lap. He thinks about Casey’s fingers in his hair and his palm on his neck. If Casey’s on the bike enough for his hands to be calloused like Valentino’s are. If he’d been nervous for this weekend, and if that means his nails are bitten down to the quick.
“Francesco,” Casey murmurs, viciously tender. Valentino must have told him that, too. Something inside Pecco starts to bleed.
He shifts, fighting the heat boiling in his veins and crawling up his face, and rolls onto his knees. Casey speaks again, freezing him in place.
“Leathers first, hey?”
Pecco moves on autopilot. He commits. This is — this is just the hard part.
Casey watches him strip. There’s only the creak of his suit and his own breathing, and inside his head, the rush of blood. His leathers get tossed to the ground, forgotten as soon as he’s out of them because he’s hard, and he’s — he’s never been hard at the start of this. Shame flushes his cheeks even hotter.
Casey smiles at him, soft and without teeth and not mocking, not mean, not at all. Pecco’s knees go weak so he drops to them again. He lands too hard, and it hurts, and it's good.
His head is pounding. Spit pools thick on his tongue. He crawls one pace forward and then another, eyes focused on the spot of carpet by Casey’s leg. Casey’s stare on him is too much, too heavy. Pecco can’t bring himself to meet it.
When he stops, Casey shifts. The sound of fabric rustling is like a waterfall in his ears.
“Do you want to come here, instead?”
Pecco has to look up to see where he means. Casey’s watching him still. His legs split open wider, and Casey pats the inside of his thigh.
“Easier for me to reach you,” he follows, and — God. Casey’s going to touch him.
Pecco goes. Parks himself, shaking, knees already protesting, in the V of Casey’s legs.
“Good,” Casey soothes, and then his hand lands in Pecco’s hair and Pecco hasn’t done fucking anything to deserve that yet, but Casey’s dragging his nails — not bitten away — across Pecco’s scalp, sharp little lines of pleasure, and then his other hand is curling solidly around Pecco’s neck, palm on his carotid, and he pushes Pecco gently against his thigh, till Pecco’s head is cushioned there.
Everything goes quiet.
Pecco can breathe again.
Casey has him, and he says it, says, “I’ve got you,” and, “tell me if I do something wrong, yeah?” but Pecco doesn’t think Casey could ever do anything wrong, in fact Pecco could probably die here and be totally fine with it.
Seconds blur into minutes before Casey speaks again.
“Don’t say anything back,” he murmurs, and his legs close a little, enough to press against Pecco’s shoulders, caging him in. “You have to stop carrying so much. I know Ducati, and I know Valentino Rossi, and I think the combined weight there has pinned you to the cross, and I think the way you’re hurting feels like something so much bigger than it is.”
Pecco doesn’t start shaking, because Casey has him.
“You’re good, still. It’s one year. One season. And it says nothing about anything else you’ve done. Pecco. Look at me.”
Pecco cracks his eyes open and turns his face up. The hand in his hair slides down to cup his cheek, and a thumb brushes through the falling trail of a tear. He hadn’t realised he was crying.
“You believe me, don’t you?”
Ice spears through him. Casey’s thumb drifts down, down to Pecco’s mouth. He presses on Pecco’s bottom lip and says his name again.
Pecco nods. He can try to believe, if Casey believes.
Casey smiles again.
“Good boy.”
The cold thaws in a sudden rush of heat. Pecco’s eyes flutter shut and he careens back against Casey’s thigh. Casey drags at the corner of his mouth as he returns his hand to Pecco’s hair, fingers tangling in the roots and pulling gently.
God. God.
Valentino’s never like this. Pecco didn’t — he didn’t know it could work for him. He thought he needed hard. Cruel.
“Okay,” Casey says, and Pecco tenses, waiting for it to end, for his hands to leave and for the cold to come back.
But Casey doesn’t move other than to lean back into his chair.
Pecco lets himself relax. Lets his face roll against Casey’s thigh, nose pressed into denim until he can smell skin beneath the scent of laundry detergent.
They must sit for an hour, at least. The dark space of Pecco's mind is velvet, rather than swirling void.
Pecco falls off the face of the earth, and when he comes back to solid ground, Casey is staring down at him through lidded eyes.
“Hey,” he whispers, fingers stilling in Pecco’s hair, “how’re you feeling?”
Pecco unsticks his tongue from the roof of his mouth. For a moment, his voice fails him. The come up always leaves him dizzy.
“Better,” he manages. Casey’s teeth poke through in a gentle grin.
“Good. Wanna stand?”
Casey takes most of his weight to help him up, and it only takes about a minute for Pecco’s legs to wake up. There’s no light coming from under the door. Maybe he was down for longer.
“We’ll go back to yours,” Casey says, “Valentino’s booked you a flight for tomorrow morning.”
Casey says all of this without taking his hands off Pecco. Even as he manoeuvres them to the door, picking up Pecco’s things as they go, and it’s so — anchoring that Pecco can’t even find it in himself to feel sick about that information, even though it means Vale probably knows about this.
Pecco will have to deal with that later.
Right now, Casey has him. A hand firm on the back of his neck, walking him down the steps into the night. His head is quiet. His lungs work without protest. He fits within himself — fits right in Casey’s palm.