… starring charles leclerc x f!reader
... 2.2k words
... soundtrack for me formidable by charles aznavour
... in which you're sick of not understanding what charles says when he sweet talks you in french, so you take matters into your own hands.
... features fluff, summer vacation charles, accurate french
... author notes i watched monsieur aznavour (2024) the other day and got this tiny baby idea. hope u enjoy & as always pls pls tell me what u think !! :)
F1 MASTERLIST / ASK BOX
Dating Charles Leclerc comes with many perks.
Patient, sincere ears that listen to your every two a.m. thought, no matter how nonsensical, and respond with equal folly until you’re both giggling under the covers like little kids at a sleepover. Hands, slightly calloused from the leather of steering wheels, massaging the knots out of your back or twirling your hair absentmindedly, like they could invent a new sort of braid if they tried long enough. Whispers of lovestruck French slipping from his lips after races, when he can’t quite believe you’re real, the confetti is real, anything is real; or irritated, foreign expletives, when someone cuts him off on the road, that make you chuckle every time.
And—sure, yeah, the glitzy palaces and dolce far niente are an added bonus, too.
But dating Charles Leclerc has its share of losses. An absence like a gaping void every other weekend, wherein his dead-of-night laughter comes to you frazzled by static and time zones. His maddening tendency to speed down the A8 between Fréjus and Monaco when he’s driving alone (he always lifts his foot off the pedal when you’re in the car), as if the winding freeway, wedged between rock and foam, were a forbidden circuit. And most infuriatingly, your sheer inability to understand half the loving words he tells you, or the jokes he tells his friends; to witness him, in his barest form.
You don’t understand a word of French, and to you it is as serious a crime as not understanding Charles at all. So, over the course of your first year together, you set out to learn.
It was never really meant to be a secret, per se: Charles is away a majority of the year, leaving you many a too-long morning to spend in a too-big Monégasque apartment. All the books on his shelves, the newspaper on his coffee table and the children’s cartoons you flick through at breakfast—all of it is in French, abstruse and taunting. Like vaults in his heart whose keys you’ve misplaced. Put away.
There is no real necessity for you to learn the language: Monaco is used to its international residents and thus perfectly navigable with English alone; all his family and friends, the crust of motorsport and the odd journalist observing you a little too keenly, are all perfectly fluent. Still, you download the green bird app and tap through your lessons religiously when Charles is away. To kill time, and the unpleasant impression of sticking out.
You are on day seventy-four of your Duolingo streak when Charles FaceTimes his mother and brother from the hotel in Barcelona. From outside the bathroom you can hear heartfelt laughter and the specific, defenseless groan Charles makes when he’s being scolded for forgetting to do something he expressly was told to. Just as you exit the bathroom and wave hi to the camera, however, the warmth in the air slightly thickens—not malice, or callousness (you know Pascale loves you like a daughter because she offers to cut your hair every time you visit), but rather the chopped-up words and involuntary hesitancy that comes with expressing love in a foreign tongue. The very next day, you’re trading the owl app notifications for French notebooks and colorful highlighters.
By that point, you reason it’s too late to tell Charles of your linguistic ambitions, and the habit of practicing when he’s away has gotten too etched in your memory. Besides, there’s a little part of you that fantasizes about the moment you blow his mind by replying to the car valets at the casino in fluent and elegant French.
Following through with your French lessons without getting busted by Charles proves a little difficult on the yacht. It feels like your boyfriend can sneak up on you at any moment, appear from any corner of the boat and snake his arms around your waist, press a quick kiss to your neck or the crown of your head and then jump back into the sea. Still, you manage; when your ears are absorbed by French pronunciation tutorials or old-timey songs your nose is on the lookout for his smell of sunscreen and iodine. When he’s out for a swim, you talk to Leo on deck, ask him what he likes to do in his spare time or where the train station is. He may not be the most objective conversation partner, because he barks excitedly regardless of how many errors you make, but at least he’s the only one who won’t snitch.
Mondays are the only days you spend on land. Errands to run, friends to see, leisurely strolls on unmoving ground. The sun is already thundering in the milky sky, heralding a day of unrelenting heat, when the yacht plunges through shimmering waters to moor at the Antibes harbor.
“Do you mind going to fetch breakfast, love?” Charles asks once he’s joined you on the pontoon. He stretches his arms out over his head, as if awakening from a very long slumber like the Mediterranean breaking out of its nightly torpor. “I need to talk to the captain.”
He points to a bakery further down behind the sailboat masts, its striped-blue pediment bathed in morning light. You do your best to look as equal and unexcited as possible as you head for the Boulangerie du Port—this is the perfect opportunity to test the fundamentals you have so duly worked on during all your days at sea. A plunge into the deep-end, under real-life conditions, with no safety net—the only way one can learn! You can absolutely do this and not freak out or cause a diplomatic incident. Nevermind the pounding of your heart as you push the cedar door open, and the tinkle rings out.
The smell of freshly baked pastries coaxes your nostrils and awakens a faint rumbling in your stomach. Behind the glass case laze about all colors of tarts, choux, pralines and éclairs, lightly tinged with the light gold of early morning; and on wicker shelves at the back the baguettes gild like beachgoers basking in the sun. Your mouth waters, so quickly you don’t immediately notice the young woman in a hairnet and apron staring at you from behind the counter.
“Bonjour,” she chippers in that sing-songy tone all boulangères master, and you reply as rapidly and cheerfully as you can. First social crisis averted.
You can do this, you steady yourself. Buying bread is the most codified interaction in the history of France; the unmoving pillar from which all other customs flow, like a play everyone knows by heart. You’ve rehearsed it, you know your lines.
“Je voudrais deux traditions, pas trop cuites, s’il vous plaît,” you enunciate, and though there are unnatural stops between your words you surprise yourself with your accent. Much more convincing than your impromptu soliloquies to Leo.
She nods, and turns around to grab two baguettes. Excellent sign. At least you made yourself understood and did not insult the whole nation.
“Et avec ceci ?”
She’s asking if you want anything else. You’ve rehearsed the script before, you know its slightest intonations. This is the point when you turn to the display of succulent pastries and let your stomach do the thinking. Quatre pains au chocolat, you add, and Douze chouquettes, and every time the appropriate S’il vous plaît as punctuation. Maybe it makes you sound cartoonish, but you reckon it is always preferable to be too formal than not enough to a French woman.
She types the total into her handheld calculator and you reach for your credit card with the thundering thought, I am crushing this French thing.
Is it actually this easy? Did you just unlock the ability to bullshit your way through any simple conversation with French strangers? Oh, the face Charles will make when he hears you order next time you dine out in Nice. Or Arthur when he cracks a joke in the Ferrari garage and you bite back with an even cleverer joke.
“Ah, non, le terminal de carte ne fonctionne pas aujourd’hui, désolée, on prend que les espèces !” the boulangère says in one breath.
You freeze, lips parted, tongue stuck behind your teeth. Widen your eyes slightly, then frown. This isn’t in the script you rehearsed. This isn’t in any script you’ve heard ever, not even when you listen to Charles order. In fact, you haven’t caught a single word other than what you think might be today and sorry.
Okay, don’t panic. Stick to what you know. Try to put it back on familiar rails.
“Erm… oui ?”
She giggles, good natured, and you swear the heat bubbling up your throat and cheeks comes from a pit of the earth that must’ve opened up beneath your feet to swallow you.
You’re about to try and salvage the situation when a familiar voice speaks from over your shoulder. Though Charles’ words are foreign, there’s a distinct edge of amusement to his tone that echoes the mischievous tinkle of the cash in his hand when he hands the coins over to the boulangère. She thanks him, and you thank her, grab the paper bags, and bid her goodbye and a good day twice on your way out, which only fuels your distress more. At least Charles has the decency of waiting until you are out on the seaside street to chuckle.
“I didn’t know you knew French,” he muses, and rummages in the bag for a chouquette. You pout.
“I was doing great before you got here.”
“Really?” he chuckles. A seagull hovers in an updraft, its shrill cry awakening the harbor’s tiny houses. “You didn’t need my help at all?”
“No.”
Your grumbling stomach won’t let you pout for long, however—he holds out a chouquette at eye level with the tip of his fingers, and you bite into it. You could swear you see those same powdered sugar flakes in Charles’ eyes when you meet his tender gaze.
“So what was that about? Was that a personal challenge?”
“I’ve been learning French for months,” you admit at last, and Charles stops. A light breeze spilling over from the jetty rustles his mousy brown hair. “I wanted to surprise you! And to finally belong for real.”
Charles frowns ever-so-slightly, as if hundreds of thoughts were rushing through his head like waves lapping at the docks. You lick the sugar off your lips, then bite them absentmindedly.
“Do you feel like you don’t belong?” he asks eventually, in a voice so uncharacteristically small it rattles you a little.
“No! I mean, of course I feel welcome with you and your family. You’re all so kind to me. But it’s the least I can do to meet you halfway, right? I just want you all to be as comfortable as possible with me, too. So you and your mom and your friends don’t have to accommodate me all the time in your own home country.”
Charles’ chin lifts a little, and his mouth breaks into a large grin. Without much thought, he resumes his stroll, and you follow with slow steps, cutting a pain au chocolat in two to give him one half. Languidly, the town of summer idylls awakes.
“You really are learning French? For me?”
“Yeah? Why else?” you chew the words out through pâte feuilletée (some of the best you’ve ever had, to be honest—or maybe it’s only because you’re sharing it with Charles). “With all due respect, your language is damn hard. I wouldn’t learn it if I didn’t have a really good reason.”
Your boyfriend laughs then, something delicate inside his chest that still sends crumbs of puff pastry tumbling down on the sidewalk.
“T’es adorable,” he mumbles. Or you hope that’s what he mumbles.
“Oh I know that one!” you triumph. Stealing a glance over at him, you notice his cheeks have reddened. Surely he didn’t realize his cheesiest lines can no longer hide behind the cover of language.
“Va falloir que je me mette à la poésie,” he says after a long beat of thoughtful mastication, “pour te faire uniquement des compliments qui méritent que tu les traduises.”
You stare blankly. He’s an insufferable little idiot, but you’re afraid the mystical charm of his sultry French, though completely incomprehensible still, works on you like on day one.
“Yeah, I’m not that good yet, and I bet you’re using fancy words you don’t even use normally,” you groan.
Charles laughs again, the sound making you beam from within, and drapes his bicep over your shoulder to pull you close. Again that scent of iodine, mixed with the undertones of fresh laundry from his clean shirt; they envelop you like his strong hands and the smell of warm bread as you lean your head into the crook of his neck.
“Nevermind, it’s not important,” he sighs. His fingertips drum random little rhythms on your collarbone, while the first fishing boats of dawn dock in the harbor, returning laden with their writhing cargoes. “Je t’aime,” he breathes against your skin.
… starring oscar piastri x f!reader
... 5.2k words
... in which your good samaritan tendencies, and some loser forgetting to show up on your first date, lead you to the most bizarre yet exhilarating nyc commute of your life.
... featuring fluff, humor, meet cute, some forced proximity. female reader (wears 'feminine' clothing). language, reader gets stood up on a date, suspension of disbelief for manhattan geography and the logistics of the mta (please forgive me new yorkers i went ten years ago). english is not my first language.
... author notes tadaaa oscar piastri debut who cheered!!!! not me because i'm scared to death of getting him wrong lowk. i was bemoaning the absence of oscar pictures at the f1 premiere and thought, "i know he just couldn't be bothered to go, but wouldn't it be funny if he'd just gotten lost?" and thats how this fic happened. ngl this is very much out of my comfort zone, i know oscar less than other drivers + much more romcom than i'm used to and idk how i feel about it so feedback would be VERY appreciated! very much open for a part 2 if you'd like that tho!!! enjoy ヘ(≧▽≦ヘ)♪
MASTERLIST / ASK BOX
There was no valid reason dating in New York City should have been this complicated.
Yet you prided yourself on being quite smart—smart enough to survive in the hostile urban jungle as a twenty-something on her own; definitely smarter than the national average judging by the (frankly depressing) headlines you heard pinging on your phone every morning. Outstanding high school GPA, reading comprehension way above your grade as a kid, and still no damn clue how to score a date in Manhattan.
Well, rather, how to score an agreeable date. Or perhaps just one that turned out to be real.
Monday morning had risen with a yawn from the sun, as though it were remembering only now that June was well underway but the streets remained chilly. Weak light shimmered over the fire escape when you’d drawn your curtains open. Ramen was sitting on the railing, licking his cream paw and staring at you with unimpressed nonchalance, and you’d grinned. Ramen—your downstairs neighbor’s cat, a sandy little imp whose real name you’d never found out but had baptized so after he’d stolen your instant dinner right off your kitchen counter—only showed up on mornings with importance. Like the day you’d aced Introduction to Statistics with nothing but two hours of sleep and five Monsters.
This was a good omen.
So yes, you were enthusiastic by the time you got home from class, scrambled together an omelet, and disemboweled your apartment looking for your favorite earrings. You were optimistic, and that sometimes sounded like the worst thing anyone could be in New York City.
But this first date promised to be nothing like the others, your inner voice hammered home as you tried to cram your feet into shoes half a size too small. He was cute, funny, not a fascist, he waited exactly the right amount of time in between replies—neither psychopathic nor disinterested—, and he’d told you to dress up because it was only fair that real-life art should match the paintings on the wall. After half a dozen insipid dinners at every other pizza place in Little Italy, and as many ghostings, a museum first date sounded more promising than you’d dared to hope.
Even though he dropped off the radar at ten p.m. the prior evening. Even though you shot him a bubbly, “you said 2:30pm right? can’t wait!” at eleven (the appointed time was but a scroll away, but you just needed to say something, diffuse the nerves somehow). Even though you double-texted him at two fifteen, “omw!”.
But Ramen was there this morning, blinking his slow blinks at you. The date had to go well.
The sun was fully awake, undeniable, blazing above the trees and endless spires piercing the sky beyond Central Park, by the time you sat down on the steps in front of the museum. Alone.
It wasn’t until two fifty-seven that you accepted to face the glaring truth.
First miss for Ramen.
You collected yourself in a clumsy torpor. Nothing to do with your heels, or the stupidly long dress you’d picked out and whose skirt you now had to lift with every step—this was the inescapable, crushing feeling of disappointment.
Of course New York City would punish the optimistic. The naïve. The superstitious, who put the outcome of their days into the hands of some feline apparition, scan the sky for four-leaf clover clouds. Served you right for still believing in things falling into place.
Your face burned from the sun and the humiliation, eyes prickling from unshed tears as you stuffed your phone into your purse. Pretended not to notice the group of tourists snapping shots of you, perhaps thinking you some roaming Millais muse. Disappeared into the shade of 103rd Street station, green gown flowing behind you like a pennon.
Every step down the long stairway stung more than the last, but you kept your gaze firmly to the ground, careful not to trip—and bury any ounce of dignity left in you for good. Blend in with the jaded city folk, you thought as you swiped your Metrocard; act as if you know exactly where you are going and go there with purpose, even if you could not be more stranded. Where to now? Back to your disordered, sweltering apartment, its haphazard pile of dishes in the sink and Ramen gauging you silently from the windowsill? Or to the campus library, trying to glean whatever productivity lies within heartbreak? And risk bumping into your friends, who’d teased you all day about the giddy bounce to your step, and having to explain you weren’t even worth showing up for?
“Excuse me?”
You looked up and met hazel. A mop of chestnut hair, that he had manifestly tried to arrange before giving up; discreet moles on an otherwise pale face, and brown eyes where danced flecks of gold and the most gripping kind of urgent resignation. The stranger was cute, and for some incomprehensible reason he matched you: he, too, was dressed to the nines like he’d run off from some wedding, and he also distinctly looked like he wished more than anything for the Earth to swallow him.
“Are you going to the F1 movie premiere?”
“What?”
“The, uh, the F1 movie red carpet thing? Are you going there right now?”
You were starting to worry your foreign-accent (British, or perhaps Australian?) comprehension skills had gotten alarmingly bad, or maybe the shrieking of MTA wagon brakes had finally rendered you deaf.
“No, uh... I…” Oh, what the hell. Like there was any use lying to a beautiful stranger who seemed like he was somehow having a worse afternoon than yours. “I got stood up by my date. F1, you mean like Formula 1?”
What a formidable and ridiculous scene you two must’ve painted—two kids in formalwear, standing in the middle of a New York City subway platform, stuck amidst the pungent smell of piss and nonsensical conversation.
“I’m sorry about your date, they sound like a bit of a dropkick,” the stranger replied, and although you weren’t entirely sure what a dropkick was you were surprised to find him genuine. “But, uh… I think I’m lost, and I hoped you might help me, or else I’m gonna be the one doing the standing up. On about two thousand people.”
You had no time to furrow your brow, or chew on his words. Suddenly everything clicked with an audible bang, right in sync with the train doors closing to your left. The reason you’d felt so familiarly drawn to that cherub face, and why he had mentioned Formula 1… None of the downright lubricious Instagram edits your best friend had ever sent you featured him in a suit, but he was unmistakable.
“Oh my god, you’re Oscar Pia—”
“Please don’t tell all of Manhattan,” Piastri interrupted, grimacing as he glanced around the platform. You suffocated your voice, though found his dread of being heard a little pointless. Two people standing idly in black-tie garments as metros passed them by were eye-catching, for sure, but nowhere near NYC eye-catching standards. “It’s already pretty bad how late I am to my own premiere, I don’t want to have to take selfies in the subway.”
A million questions jostled about inside your head, but all you could do was stare at him, mouth agape in incomprehension. You didn’t keep up with Formula 1, hardly saw any point in cars going in circles, and perhaps a McLaren (was it McLaren or Mercedes?) superfan might have known better than you what the fuck Oscar Piastri was doing there. Not the film premiere gimmick, you were willing to believe that was the kind of fanfare F1 drivers spent their off-days doing—what the fuck he was doing alone at three in the afternoon, asking for your help in some acrid station on Lexington Avenue.
“Couldn’t you just drive to the damn premiere?”
“Oh, right, so I should just steal a car off the street?” he deadpanned.
“No, I mean… don’t you have a chauffeur? An… an agent or something? A team? How do you even end up…” you trailed off, finding no words that wouldn’t bring you to astonished frustration. Instead, you opened your arms wide, encompassing all of New York’s rickety railways. “Here?”
Piastri parted his lips to retort with one of his impassive quips, but his whole face fractured then with tremendous vulnerability.
“I’ll tell you if you help me find my way. Please?”
He did not look like the type of man who’d ever begged anyone to do anything for him—you expected a high-adrenaline junkie like him to pray for neither forgiveness nor permission—and the contrast made you consider. That, and the sheer absurdity of the situation. And the fact the only other way you could see your afternoon ending was with an onslaught of messages from some guy assuring you life had gotten “sooo hectic” in the last ten to twelve hours.
Piastri was much cuter than him anyway.
“You know what, yeah, sure, what the hell,” you shrugged with a growing smile. “I’ll help you. I could use the good karma. I’m Y/N, by the way.”
This whole plan was utterly ridiculous, and you had no idea how you’d possibly explain that to your friends when they’d ask how your date had gone, but the way Piastri deflated with relief, like his whole body was exhaling, had you convinced you’d made the right call.
“Thanks, Y/N.” He said your name with the slightest of accents, and you caught yourself wishing he could say it again. “Maps said this was the shortest path to Times Square, but I think it’s a little confused—”
“Times Square? Oh, you’re not getting anywhere near that on the 6. We need to get to Central Park North. You coming?”
You tilted your head to the side, to the staircase drenched in hazy summer light, and Piastri seemed to be weighing the pros and cons for a split second—you couldn’t fault him, to be fair; you could’ve been a stalker, or a lunatic, or the lowest echelon to a weird MLM scheme. Still, he must’ve decided whatever you were recruiting him for was less dangerous than missing this premiere, because he took off after you.
When he billowed out of the station and back into the city, Piastri winced, and at first you assumed it due to the piercing sunlight reverberating on glassy panels, or the cacophony of horns and engines. However, you quickly noticed him glancing at the passersby with frantic interest… and looking puzzled at their utter disinterest in him.
“Relax, no one’s looking at us,” you reassured him, striding down the street on autopilot. He jogged two steps to catch up.
“You sure?”
“Certain. There’s so many people in New York City, and so many of those people do weird shit, that practically anyone can go unnoticed. I assure you that this,” you gestured down at your long dress, catching the light like rippling topazes, then at the silver cufflinks on his jacket, “does not even make the top 5 weirdest things any of these people have seen today.”
But the Australian looked unsure still, twisting his thin lips in a crooked zigzag, so you stopped in your tracks and hailed a young lady passing you by on the sidewalk, Airpods firmly bolted inside her ears.
“Excuse me, do you know who this guy is—”
She strode past you with the most furtive glance biologically possible and a mechanical Nothankyouhaveagoodday. You turned back to Piastri.
“See? No one cares.”
He chuckled, face breaking like dawn, and you chuckled too with no real reason. You weren’t too sure what was funny about typical New York callousness, but the way Piastri’s eyes crinkled, still somewhat strained from stress but illuminating all his features, made you all fuzzy inside. Up close and under sunlight, he looked even younger than you’d thought, no more than twenty-five, and the shadows on his face had lifted, rounding the angles and softening the corners. Like he’d been oil-painted on canvas, ochres and whites melting into each other at the edges.
“Okay, I guess you’re the local,” he conceded, and you resumed your brisk walk.
Maybe you really were at the museum, after all.
“So,” you spoke up after a bit. “I was promised a story.”
“Right,” he clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, clearly regretting his bartering skills.
“How do you, Oscar Piastri, end up late to a movie premiere and alone in a subway station?” You stepped across a grate on the sidewalk, careful not to wedge your heel in the holes. “They just left you behind? Did you oversleep or what?”
No reply, but his dry laughter morphing into a cough was a flagrant enough response.
“Oh my God, Piastri,” you gasped merrily. “Did you seriously sleep through your movie premiere?”
“No! … It’s not over yet. I’m just late for the red carpet part. I can still make it to the screening.”
You stared, unconvinced, and he stared back, unconvincing. Biting the inside of his cheek, he watched your smile grow wider until he couldn’t take your teasing anymore. For heaven’s sake—you’d known him a grand total of five minutes and were already tormenting him!
“What?”
“How do they let you get away with this?”
“I was racing in Canada yesterday! God forbid a guy wants a nap,” he stressed the last as though it were some capital punishment and rolled his eyes.
Something in his demeanor was fabulously amusing. He was all relaxed tension, calculated coldness akin to what you’d expect from a person who’s constantly scrutinized; yet there was something more, a sort of agitation bubbling within, under the pores of his handsome face. Feeling so deeply and letting a stranger see so much was not in his nature, that much was clear. Every microexpression, in the lift of his brows, the curve of his lips, the arc of his eyes betrayed a kind of imbalance. He was losing his footing, like a glacier abraded from the top by the sun.
New York City had trained you for all sorts of people, including still waters like him. How to ripple their surface.
“Does this happen to you often?”
“No. Never.”
“Never missed a flight?”
“Just once. My mom woke me up screaming one hour before boarding the second ti—watch out.”
Swiftly, he grabbed your elbow and switched your spots on the sidewalk, pushing you closer to the wall. Before you could open your mouth to protest, the ground rattled from a firetruck barreling past you, ruffling Piastri’s hair and the lapels of his jacket.
“But I set three different alarms on my phone and I figured, Lando will probably break my door down if I sleep through them, so I’m safe,” he resumed, entirely unfazed. You looked up at him like he’d just performed actual magic. “But… apparently not. I woke up… twenty minutes ago?” That explained the slim, red pillow mark on his face you’d mistaken for a fading sunburn. “I wanted to call a taxi, but they’ve cut off traffic. It’s a big deal, you know? Brad Pitt’s gonna be there.”
The way he said Brad Pitt, with a tone so level it became thick with meaning and the littlest of jazz hands, made it abundantly clear there were few people on Earth Oscar Piastri would’ve been less excited about than Brad Pitt.
“Are you in it?”
“What?”
“The movie. Are you even in it?”
“Uh, my elbow is. Minute fifty-three.”
“Wow,” you giggled, arching your eyebrows in a playful wave. “So am I talking to Oscar Piastri the pro athlete, or Oscar Piastri the movie star?”
“Eh, just Oscar Piastri’s fine,” he shrugged, non-committal, though the glint of a smile now flickered uninterrupted on the corner of his lips, almost real enough to remark upon.
Your steps had carried you to the subway entrance north of Central Park already—too soon, far too soon, you thought with a faint ache in the chest. Piastri stirred in your body some kind of early-summer warmth, soft and shimmering like a drowsy morning. As soon as he would vanish to the far side of the platform, only the icy wind would remain, howling endlessly through the corridors…
Piastri, however, did not seem set on giving you up. At least judging by the tiny, tentative steps he took as he walked up to the turnstile, as though the machine could eat him the way it did cardboard tickets. You saw him take out a small, green-lettered card from his pocket… and stopped him.
“Wait, that’s not gonna work.”
“Huh?”
“Your ticket, it’s a single ride. You used that back there on Lexington, right?”
“Uh, I guess?”
“You don’t have a Metrocard?”
He turned to you, puzzled, and almost slammed into a hurried businessman in the process. Thankfully for Piastri, even assault was too inconsequential to reroute the average New Yorker, and the man just breezed past the turnstile and into the guts of the Earth with a nasty glare and a taunting beep!
“Why would I have a Metrocard, Y/N, I’m in this city about twelve hours a year.”
You glanced toward the entrance, where a faint trickle of light still seeped in. A flock of little old ladies, perhaps en route to a high-stakes bingo showdown, had laid siege to the terminals. Judging by their furrowed brows and squinting eyes, no one else in the station would be seeing so much as a hint of a ticket anytime soon.
Goodness gracious. Your helpfulness would be your undoing.
“How late are you to this thing?”
Piastri checked his watch. “Very.”
“And how much do you care about being late to this thing?”
“Normal dude Oscar Piastri? Not so much, to be honest. Formula 1 driver Oscar Piastri…”
“Say less.”
Veritable horror surfaced on Piastri’s face at your confident strides, as if he imagined you were about to vandalize your way through the gates.
“Come on! Hop over,” you signaled.
“Uh…”
“Or we could wait in line. Your call.” Like trying to get a puppy to jump through a hoop. What was he waiting for, a treat?
Or perhaps the patrol of inspectors coming down the hallway at the exact same second as Piastri gathered momentum and jumped the turnstile. That, too, seemed like a sensible thing to be on the lookout for.
The two men cried out right as his dress shoes hit the ground.
“Oh come on!” you whined. “They’re never here!”
“What do we do?!” he cried.
“What do you mean, what do we do? Just book it!”
You heard a cacophony of footsteps behind your back, promptly echoed by lighter sounds as Piastri ran down the corridor. Without a second glance, you pushed down on your hands, swung your legs forward, and… came to an abrupt halt mid-air. Looked down. Sage green fabric had wrapped around the metal blades of the turnstile, like snakes constricting their branches.
“Oscar!” you yelped.
If you’d had any doubt Oscar Piastri was the real racing deal until now, they were all silenced at once from the way he spun on his heels, ran back to you and, without a split second’s hesitation, not even the span of a breath, picked you up from your perch and took off. Instinctively your arms wrapped around the taut base of his neck as you felt his clammy hands slide down your back: the glossy fabric offered no grip to hold on to, yet his strong arms held you into place as tightly as they could. You gritted your teeth, prayed to God your heels would not fall off, and watched in stunned silence as Oscar raced down the stifling hallways.
It seemed like but an instant had passed when Oscar threw himself into the belly of the train, its imminent departure chime his very own chequered flag, and the old doors rattled shut behind you. For the first time, New Yorkers shot you strange looks. Finally you had crossed their threshold for urban bizarrerie.
And you were still in Oscar’s arms, flushed and panting even though he was the one who’d done all the running. And had barely broken a sweat.
You were about to clear your throat and kindly—begrudgingly, perhaps?—request he put you down… when the announcer’s perky voice began chirping out the next stops through the loudspeakers. You snapped your head at the line map above the doors. No matter what language she said it in, your next stop was always wrong.
“Oscar,” you murmured.
“Yeah?” he breathed out.
“We got on the wrong way.”
“There’s no oil in New York City.”
Oscar remained silent for a few seconds, as if in a trance. His jittery leg did not.
“What?” he mumbled when he broke out of his reverie.
You simply pointed at his knee, bouncing up and down since he’d sat.
“I don’t know what you’re trying to drill a hole in the ground with your shoe for. There’s no oil in New York City. If there was, Trump would’ve sucked it dry already.”
Oscar sighed, throwing his head back against the glass panel, but your heart swelled with satisfaction when you caught a glimpse of his smile.
Rippling anyone’s surface had seldom proven as easy as it was fun.
You leaned a little closer to him, and he closed his eyes with a faint grunt. His leg, however, was now still.
“Why are you so nervous about being late? You’re the main attraction, it’s not like they’re going to hold it against you.”
Hearing his reply proved difficult over the train’s thundering racket, glass windows and moist handles vibrating within their sockets like charged electrons. His eyes, mercifully still closed, allowed yours to linger on his mouth—to decipher each word as it formed, and to savor the quiet contemplation.
“Being fashionably late usually draws more attention than I like to get.”
“So why bother going? You don’t look like you enjoy being in the public eye that much anyway.”
Only one eye opened, tentatively so, and met your small, expectant smile, chin resting on your fist and your crossed legs imperceptibly brushing his. Any story he could’ve told you right then would’ve been riveting, it seemed, and for the first time in weeks Oscar found that for you, he did not mind sharing one.
“I told Lando I’d go. We collided yesterday on track and they thought it would maybe look bad if one of us showed up and not the other. Like we’re avoiding each other or something. I don’t know, PR stuff. But I promised Lando, so.” He pursed his lips then, and blew air through his nose, holding back a giggle. “Also, I don’t know, I felt like I had to go. I had a… a premonition.”
“A premonition?”
“Yeah, I don’t know, some kind of hunch. In my cereal.”
You stared at him long, assessing him and the likelihood of a lie, but he was a master of the unreadable smile, the one that could mean anything from I’m one look away from bursting into laughter to I have never dissociated more than I am currently, and even, perhaps, I wish this train ride with you would never end.
“In your cereal?”
“This morning, at the breakfast buffet, I had cereal and there was this kinda cornflake clump that looked like a clapperboard. You know,” he mimed it with his hands and the click of the tongue to match. “So I thought that was some… sign? The universe was telling me to go to this premiere, or something.” His neck tensed abruptly as he suddenly remembered himself. Who he was, and what he believed in. “But uh, that’s a little stupid. Forget it.”
The subway doors opened and closed, chimes rang and accordion tunes from the platforms faded in and out of the background chatter. You had close to lost count of how many stops were left until Times Square. The incessant ballet of New York’s illustrious unknowns would still play out, with or without your attention.
When Oscar looked down at you, almost entirely hunched over his lap and taking him in like he was an August rainshower, he found you beaming.
“No, I totally get you. This date I was supposed to go on before I ran into you… I went because Ramen showed up, even though there were so many red flags that I could’ve seen coming.”
“Who?”
“Ramen.”
“Who’s Ramen?”
“The neighbor’s cat. That’s not his real name, just what I call him.”
Oscar stared at you, expression frozen in one of delightful incomprehension, the one you get when you are not entirely sure a miracle is destined for you just yet. And you stared back, awaiting his next words for as long as it’d take them to come.
“So you went on a date because a cat told you to?”
“He didn’t tell me anything, silly, he’s a cat,” you retorted like it was the most obvious thing in the universe, to which Oscar rolled his eyes and muttered Of course. “He just stared, and every time he does it, I know I’m gonna get lucky that day. He’s never failed me before. Well, until today.”
A beat passed, during which you refused to elaborate further out of fear you’d betray the words lingering at the front of your mouth. Maybe this hadn’t been a miss for Ramen, after all. Maybe his magic had worked in unexpected ways. Oscar, on the other hand, just basked in the whole of you, and his lips slightly parted without a sound, as though they didn’t quite know where to begin.
“What?”
“It’s just… My job, this whole universe I live in, there’s no room for good luck charms or silly little superstitions. They’re just… distractions. All the answers are in the data. Our only faith is in the numbers.” And you sensed him about to say something else, something he had to wring out of the very cloth of his ribcage, but suddenly the deep wells in his pupils were sealed off with his favorite lid of deadpan humor. “Well, except the Italians. But they suck, so I wouldn’t take them as an example.”
“Oh my God, Oscar,” you gasped, “you can’t say that, do you know how many Italians there are in New Y—”
A sudden jolt shook the entire train, knocking the carriage back onto its breathless tracks; the momentum sent a teenage girl flying into a tall gym guy, who in turn crashed into you—your hands were too slow to catch you, not lighting-fast and gloved in greatness—you fell on top of Oscar, your nose buried against the open buttons of his shirt.
You were upright in less than a second, locked in a litany of Oh my God sorry’s to which Oscar replied his own recitation of No worries it’s not your fault’s. The train resumed its journey through the depths of Manhattan as if nothing had happened, and truthfully nothing had—except you were now a little closer to each other than you’d been before, and you hoped with all your might that he wouldn’t notice the way your eyelids fluttered, or how your fingertips had started burning up, or how the air was now thicker, or maybe you hoped he did, so you wouldn’t have to speak it aloud—nothing had happened, and truthfully everything had.
“Why did you think I was going to the F1 premiere back there?” you asked softly, not sure why that was the question you’d elected to go with now.
Oscar’s face was impassible—he’d found his calm, collected control back. But he didn’t know, or didn’t care to know, that you could hear his heartbeat louder than the railroad racket below.
“You looked funny.”
“Okay, you’re literally wearing a bowtie, and it’s crooked, by the way.”
“No, I mean, you looked pretty.” The faintest flick of his tongue showed above his bottom lip, undoubtedly accidental. “You looked really pretty, so I assumed you were a guest or something.”
Maybe what you’d heard and thought was his heart pulsating in sync with the wobbly tracks had not been his, but yours. Somewhere indistinct, the lady’s mechanical voice crackled something about Times Square.
“Thank you,” you smiled, with no mischief attached, this time.
“I’m… pretty glad that your date didn’t show up in the end, huh,” he laughed half-heartedly.
“Oscar, Times Square,” you sprung to your feet, nearly twisting your ankle. “That’s you!”
The doors almost chewed down on the hem of Oscar’s pants when he jumped out of the train. Without so much as a glance back or a single word of forgiveness, all the carriages vanished into heavy shadows, and the world was back to normal again.
Or almost. If there was anything even remotely normal about Times Square.
Every single light blinded you—no matter how many times you came you could never wrap your head around how the place managed to dazzle you even in broad daylight—as you both exited the metro station. Summer lay heavily on the commotion of cars, police whistles, loud music, and… screaming bloody murder?
“Ah, I think that’s my cue.”
Oscar held his hand over his eyes as he took in the scene, and only then did you notice the race cars parked in the middle of the street, some fifty meters ahead. It was probably a fair assumption, then, that the thousands of people massed near the makeshift stage, underneath gigantic screens, were all waiting for him. A fair assumption, and an incredibly odd one; to think you had spent such a mundane moment with the man they would soon shout themselves hoarse for!
“Yeah, good luck with that, I’m not going any nearer,” you forced between clenched teeth. “I hope you don’t get into too much trouble.”
When you spun on your heel, you found Oscar extending his hand out for you to shake, squinting his eyes against the sun. Or maybe it was an excuse not to have to look you in the eye more than absolutely necessary. In the same way you couldn’t tell whether your hand was slightly clammy from the heat or the nerves.
“Thanks for saving the day. Or at least mine,” he said, a little too solemn, a little too final. Like this was a farewell rather than an acknowledgment.
“Thanks for saving mine,” you replied, hoping the little smile you forced on your lips looked appropriately warm, and not inexplicably aching. “Maybe I’ll see you around?”
To anyone else Oscar would’ve replied the truth—Probably not—but that was not what his bowl of cereal would have wanted of him, so he said:
“Maybe.”
He gave you a wink half a second too long, and immediately looked horrified at what he’d done, which made you double over in a flurry of giggles. When you opened your eyes, he was a few steps ahead, waving you goodbye, and you returned the salute. You watched him jog the distance to the first cameras until he was but one more black and white dot in a sea of elegant millionaires, your throat hollow save for a funny kind of longing.
Then you walked back the way you came, carrying the end of your skirt down the stairs of the metro station.
Thirty minutes later, as you rummaged through your purse for your keys in front of your apartment complex, you noticed your phone lighting up. Usually, when you went on a date, you’d put it on Do not disturb so as to not be tempted—basic education, you reckoned, and something not many dates of yours had had the courtesy of reciprocating—, but you always sent your best friend your location beforehand and allowed her and only her to go through. She knew better than to text you unless it was life or death.
Clearly, this was of the utmost importance, and the fact there were only three messages instead of the fifty-seven you were expecting did not reassure you one bit.
“bitch”
“who tf is that with oscar”
“and why tf is it you??????”
A link to a TikTok came up mere seconds later.
The sage green gown was unmistakable. Anything else could’ve been explained otherwise, maybe blamed on some uncanny resemblance, a fortuitous angle—it looked like the video had been shot from very far away, and the protagonists not at all aware of the recording; but you would’ve recognized that lilypad-bright dress anywhere. Just like you knew that the blurry mass of pixels near the man’s face was a pathetic excuse for a wink, and the woman doubling over for no reason was actually laughing. That she’d watched him disappear into the crowd, immobile and longing, to commit to memory the very way his bones moved when he walked.
“Oscar Piastri’s Mystery Date Gets Cold Feet Right Before Red Carpet Debut?? 👀”
You stared at your phone even as it kept going off, its vibrations tickling your palm. A series of interrogation marks, each its individual message, popped up one after the other on your notification bar, and all you could do was clutch the screen as though you could shatter it with your bare hands.
This meant nothing, you calmed yourself down. This would blow over soon, you swore. As soon as they realized Oscar Piastri would never be seen again with this mysterious woman, and that it was never anything serious. Anything at all, even. That the New Yorker in apple green was just a mirage on his path, pertaining only to him and for a split instant.
And even if things didn’t smooth over… you had a feeling Oscar’s team would have no problem tracking you down.
… starring carlos sainz x f!reader
... 2.0k words
... in which you usually come find carlos at the airport when he gets home from races, but this time he comes to you instead.
... features fluff, established relationship, hurt/comfort (comforting carlos after silverstone ☹️)
... author notes just a self-indulgent little something because im SOOO sleepy it's ridiculous and carlos looked so so sad after the british gp... free my man please god
F1 MASTERLIST / ASK BOX
You had gone to tremendous lengths to make sure you did not fall asleep.
Past six p.m. coffee was off the table, since you did want to wake up a fully functioning human for work in the morning, so you’d had to get a little more inventive. Borrowing a drink from Carlos’ secret Red Bull stash, that he’d fill back up at the beginning of each European leg with cans stolen from motorhomes—“it’s not like they’re gonna run out of them anyway”. Putting some cardio dance workout on TV to get your blood pumping, and giving up halfway through out of fear the neighbors would break your door down and demand a halt to the ruckus. Drinking again, water this time, and hoping the urge to pee would keep you awake. Turning the TV brightness all the way up to play the first reality TV episode you could find, and when even their escalating drama had you dozing off dangerously, you flicked an old newspaper open to the sudoku page and devoted yourself to that, so your brain would not go one second understimulated.
Each message strung out like hours of the night spreading across the sky.
“The flight is delayed. At least one hour.”
“We still haven’t boarded, they’re saying 9:40 now”
“I thought this wasn’t supposed to happen with jets 🙄 I’m going with ryanair next time”
Carlos was usually much more verbose than this—especially after a race, when you’d practically hear him bounce on his feet from the way he’d recount every detail of the GP, every sensation on the wheel, until boarding cut him off and he invariably signed off with a promise to tell you all the rest on the other side of the flight and a can’t wait to see you. That was part of the ritualistic Sunday night, when he had nothing to stay overnight for; so was you driving to Nice and waiting for him at the gate.
And no matter how jet-lagged or sleep-groggy Carlos was, or how well or horrendously his race had gone, he always beamed like a little kid when he saw you jogging down the tarmac. Someone who ran to him while he let his aching muscles rest, for once.
It was a ritual, and you and Carlos could never do without those. He was a man of repeatability. Of obstination and carefully unchanging variables, lest the simulations run all wrong. A little superstitious, you’d tease him, and he’d scowl, No, conscientious. Very different.
So when you got the text at 11:52 p.m. Monaco time, you knew right away the weekend had been bad enough that Carlos did not mind sacrificing conscientiousness anymore.
“Boarding now, I think we should land around 2am. Go to sleep love I’ll take a taxi”
Your phone flickered back to sleep, untouched, taking its notification with it. Two sudokus and an Italian word puzzle had already tested your patience, and you’d tossed the newspaper off your lap with a staggering yawn. On the coffee table, Carlos stared up at you from the Gazzetta dello Sport cover, immortalized mid-laugh beneath the red-hot Mexican sun.
Your boyfriend needed you more than ever. He’d sounded dejected over the phone and you’d watched enough of his recent Grands Prix to understand his apathy. It was absolutely imperative, tonight of all nights, you stay awake and drive the forty-minute drive along the coast to be the very first person who’d embrace Carlos Sainz on French soil.
But you were so exhausted… your bones so crushed… your vision so blurry already—wait, had that guy been in the villa all along, or was he a new contestant?
Maybe if you laid your head on the armrest time would tick by quicker. Maybe you’d finally figure out who the hell was cheating on who if you watched the show sideways. You’d even remembered to line up your shoes at the foot of the sofa, and the car keys locked tight in your fist, ready to bolt out into the Riviera night at a moment's notice...
The clinking of keys tumbling out of your lax fingers and onto the floor did not wake you.
Neither did the rustle of them in the door.
Soft footsteps, the distant swish of a door across the floorboards, even the very faint roll of small wheels; but it was the hand on your cheek, with its callouses you could place even in slumber, that woke you up.
“Love?”
Carlos’ warm accent dripped from his whisper, trickling down over your ears like honey. You blinked repeatedly; he was there, overhead, flickering in and out of focus in the pitch-black room; bone-weary, his tan almost a shade lighter, but rumbling from within with the purest relief. Like all his joints had unbent the second he’d felt your skin.
“Carlos,” you croaked, “you’re… oh crap, I really wanted to pick you up.”
“I told you to go to bed,” he mused gently. “And I’m always the one who drives on the way home, so it’s more like I’m picking myself up anyway.”
“Hey,” you pouted, “you love when I come meet you at the airport.”
“I do,” a small chuckle escaped his throat like second nature.
You were barely now sitting up on the sofa, while Carlos was tidying up the room with devoted diligence—picking up cushions and discarded car keys and the corpse of an energy drink. He must have switched the lights and TV off as soon as he’d entered, because the tropical villa and its melodramatic heartbreakers had succumbed to the night too. All the router read instead was 2:56 a.m.
You knew the man inside out. The way his shoulders bent and his eyelids fluttered as he crouched around the living room. There was not an ounce of his marrow that was not begging to be relieved from the plight of being awake.
“Leave it, Carlos,” you spoke, voice quiet like the ruffle of bedsheets. “Let’s just go to bed.”
Those words made him look up, the candle he was about to blow out still in one hand; his entire frame sagged, curling on itself like he’d just been freed from the torment of a malevolent spirit, billowing out of his parted lips.
“Yes, please.”
The sea shimmered like a gaping void beyond your wide-open window when you nestled into bed. Monaco’s night time chill finally descended upon the rocks, after an interminable day of sweltering heat, and you breathed a long, deep sigh as the cool marine breeze tickled your skin. Light filtered from beneath the bathroom door, where Carlos was showering. The steady, placid purr of the water was enough to lull you, and you closed your eyes within your haven of silence overlooking the marina. Minutes later, you sensed him more than you saw him—the scent of fresh cotton and aftershave filling your lungs as he sank into the mattress by your side.
He spoke no word as he snaked an arm around your waist, the other grazing your shoulder with feather-light touches. Bringing you closer to him, in the crook of his chest as though you’d been carved from the very same block of marble. Just an exhale, of the most battered sort, that Monaco caught in its glittering hands and threw out to the waves.
“How was your weekend?” you murmured after a minute or two of utter quiet, only half expecting an answer.
This, too, was a post-race tradition; when you were separated over the weekend you would take turns telling each other everything that happened, especially the most mundane things—the ones too quiet for razor-sharp cameras were your favorite to hear. He made it a point to ask you then, in the dead of night, because he believed you hold things to be more sacred when they are immanent; when night has lifted its blanket and slumber has played its tricks on things they lose some of their vitality, he swore. But Carlos had already disregarded the airport tradition tonight, and the weariness he carried seeped heavy in your hands as you held him. Maybe he’d need another derogation.
“Really bad,” he said eventually, after you’d thought him asleep already.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Outside the window, a flock of seagulls cried out for one another, nose diving down the cliffside. Carlos’ breathing slowed, but grew more profound, his thumb running deliberate circles on your collarbones.
“Honestly, I don’t even know what to say.” His words were slightly muffled, as though he were speaking them through tight lips, and a shiver of surprise ran up your spine when you thought he might be crying. “I should feel relieved that it’s got nothing to do with me, that it’s always something external coming up and fucking up my whole weekend and not outwardly my fault, that I can’t do any better, but…”
He swallowed with difficulty. His strong neck vibrated against the back of your skull.
“That’s exactly the thing. That I can’t do any better. What if… this is as good as it gets? As good as I get?”
“Carlos.”
Careful not to hit him, you turned around, tangling your limbs and breaths until the beginning of you faded into the ending of him. With one hand, you cradled his handsome face, on which fatigue dug new crevices every week. Scanned his eyes, glistening with something more fragile than tears.
“I would follow you to the ends of the Earth, not because I like doing charity work, but because I believe in you. I have no doubt in my mind that you are promised to so many successes with Williams. You’ve been down before and you always made it out on the other side stronger. Things aren’t working out right now because there’s so much at play and that means so many parameters that can go wrong, but you… you are so much faster than this. You are one of the fastest. Hey, look at me,” you gently guided his cheek back to you before he could roll his eyes and shake his head. “Don’t give me that look, I know you think that too.” He smiled, something timid but good enough for now. “You are an incredibly skilled, hard-working, and intelligent pilot. I’m not worried about you at all. And neither is James, by the way. So no room for doubts, okay? Look, I’m gonna laser zap all your doubts.”
You scooted your fingertips up, so they were resting on both his temples, and made a show of squinting in intense concentration. ‘Fzzzt!’ you hissed through your teeth, and released his skull.
“Done. All your doubts have been evaporated.”
He chuckled delicately, as if the shake of his throat were exhausting what little energy he’d conserved, but the sound rang familiar, impossible to forget and devastatingly easy to miss. Gentle streams of heat lapped at your belly when he pressed a kiss to your nose and pulled you flush against him.
“Thank you, my hero.”
“Anytime, Carletes.”
He allowed his lips to linger against your forehead, not quite a kiss but something unhurried, less intentional. You looked up at him through your lashes. After months upon months of mapping out the valleys of that face, you’d think you’d know every ridge of it. Yet every time he relinquished control like so—not passing it over to you, but surrendering himself entirely to nothing at all—you discovered new fractals and hues on his caramel skin. Each one a little bit more of him to fall in love with.
Carlos let out a long breath, his last before slumber, just as Monaco did. Summer air, breaking free from the surf below, drifted up to your bedroom and wrapped around your still forms. Soon, your eyes began to droop, then closed, and refused to open again.
Your heartbeat matched the Spaniard’s, and the night hushed entirely.
oooh may i request a 17 + 24 for charles x reader? 🤭
17. tracing tanlines under a fingertip && 24. balcony views — charles leclerc
"JESUS CHRIST, CHARLES, when you said Ferrari was getting under your skin I didn't think you meant that literally."
"What?"
He turns around, quizzical, and the fading light of day catches more irregular motifs on his pectorals and clavicles than you'd even noticed. You can't help snorting at the sight.
"You're lobster red!"
A beat passes, during which Charles stares at you like a fish out of water, and then he's wiggling around, trying to catch a glimpse of every patch of skin on his torso, and when he cranes his neck to inspect his upper back he almost trips on the shirt he's just discarded to the floor.
"Putainnn," he drags out, a defeated moan that slumps out of his lips just like his shoulders. "Argh! C'est pas vrai..."
"That's what happens when you try to apply sunscreen yourself like a big boy." Your laugh is soft, your head shaking gently as you observe your husband, crimson stripes all over his back and shoulders like the brushstrokes of some tropical Van Gogh. "Come on, go sit on the terrace."
He does as he's told, shuffling his feet over to the chaises longues on the large, roofed balcony. When you step out the hotel room, favorite assortment of aloe vera ointments in hand, you find him sitting on the edge of the chair, pressing two fingers onto the red gash on his arm. When he lifts them and they reveal white skin that immediately fades back to carmine, he sighs.
"Not to say I told you so," you drag one of the chairs over, "but..."
"You told me so."
He grumbles like a toddler proven wrong—the swirling shapes of his sunburns are certainly reminiscent of a kindergartner's drawings. Even so, your smile is delicate, easy like an evening shower when you coax a ribbon of aloe vera cream onto your palm and rub your hands together.
"Tell me if it hurts."
Instead, Charles lets out a long, blissful exhale as soon as your cool fingertips press against his bare back.
Slowly, gently, you trace the outline of his burns, where a nascent tan fades into red patterns; you study the confines of skin he overlook in the morning, cajole the corners of him where even his fingertips won't go. That's when the gentle breeze picks up, born out of the Atlantic's froth, and dishevels the Brazilian foliage below and Charles' salt-kissed hair.
You feel him melt beneath your touch like so many times before.
"This is nice, actually," he murmurs, low and deep like the rumble of the ocean somewhere over the railing.
"Yeah, well, if you want a massage, just ask next time, there's no need to fuck up your skin like that, alright?"
"This never happens to me in Monac—aouch," he winces, but the sound is soon lost to the breeze, too.
"We're not in Monaco right now," you reply with a peculiar reverie, as though you aren't really here either, but someplace else, in the valleys that stretch out between Charles' moles.
He, on the other hand, looks over your hunched shoulders, to the late-afternoon that sprinkles golden lighting over the jungle. In the distance, he thinks he can make out a flock of tropical birds spinning in the milky sky like dancers, though it could be a trick of light. How to be sure, on this island where life commences anew, but oh so different?
"Yes, that's for sure," he concedes, pensive. But his eyes tear from the sprawling view and travel up to your concentrated face, and he scrunches into a solar grin.
"I think you should be good... though you should probably keep your shirt on for the next few days. Even if it pains me horribly to say it," you release him from the cooling balm, and are about to step back and put the tube away when he grabs your hand and pulls you back to him. Into the radiating heat of his body and the midday brightness of his gaze.
"Thanks for taking care of me."
"Of course, Charles," you reply in a genteel hum. The Monégasque rubs his thumb across your wedding band. "That's what I signed up for."
Neither of you makes a move; only your heads turn to the magnificent ocean, and, very far, its horizon where heavy clouds gather. All of the sunset's oranges and pinks ricochet off of their dark gray, and somehow you are certain they end their course back with you. Curled up in your promontory.
The rain, after a while, scatters off into the ocean, quietly.
… starring carlos sainz x f!reader
... 9.5k words
... in which there are seven billion humans on earth, maybe three billion girls in the universe—but carlos sainz only loves one.
... soundtrack dans l'univers by nekfeu ft. vanessa paradis
... featuring angst, fluff, second chance romance, language, alcohol, lando norris & carlos sr. as supportive characters, suggestive content, one mention of smut, carlos dates other women (Not Cheating), thalassophobia (? there's one scene on a boat at sea), reader is some kind of space scientist (left vague). english is not my first language.
... author notes this fic is full of physics because physics is the secret poetry of the universe. a girl's gotta use her engineering degree somehow! requested by and dedicated to the talented brilliant showstopping @ivyquity ‹𝟹
MASTERLIST / ASK BOX
MERCURY.
SÃO PAULO, 2019.
Carlos wasn’t sure why he was reminded of the planets all of a sudden.
No evening could have been more different from this than the last time he’d seen the planets, though. The treacly heat of the nightclub, funk basslines snarling through the floor and into his ribs, the relentless procession of limbs twisting to the pulse; nothing of that other night remained. The planets had dissolved. And yet—
the tint of the lights, bleeding from mauve into wine into the deepest cosmic blue—
(What had she called them, those shimmering spectres of space? Redshifts? Blueshifts?)
—rays of false stars, tumbling from the ceiling and spinning at the edge of his vision…
Fucking hell. He looked down at the glass in his hand, where the liquor was swaying with him. No planets there. This was intoxication of a lesser kind. Mundane.
It should have been anything but, he thought, lips curled in a half-scorn. It wasn’t every day one partied in Brazil; not every day one earned a first podium in Formula One.
And it wasn’t every day one counted one hundred and eighty days since a breakup.
A face peeled from the blur of the crowd, eyes alight, lips drawn in the pull of laughter, and Carlos swallowed back the bile before it could rise to his throat. On anyone else, a joy so unchecked would’ve felt jarring, but he had learned young Lando’s agitation was to be received whole, not understood.
“Smoooooooth operatorrrrrrr,” the Brit slurred, wrapping a sweaty arm around his teammate’s neck. “How you doing, podium sitter?”
“Landooooo,” Carlos replied in the same sing-songy manner. “You abandoned me. You were out there… DJing.” Carlos wasn’t sure who was drunker now—him, whose speech was definitely more accented and slurred than he’d imagined, or giggly Lando, for whom every accented and slurred word he spoke was the peak of hilarity. “What’s your problem?”
“That’s not even a word, mate, that’s… it’s mixing. Mixing,” he repeated, self-important.
“How about you mix your racing with some overtakes?”
“Arsehole.” As always, the swat he gave his stomach packed no punch, just affection. As always, Lando evaded Carlos’ chokehold to ruffle his hair, just barely, and the sudden doubling over had the Spaniard’s head spinning dangerously. No play fighting four cocktails deep. Got it.
“No, but for real, how are you doing?” Lando took advantage of the lull between songs—a transition almost less awkward than what he could’ve come up with—to yell the question above the noise.
“Great! How could I be anything else than great?” Carlos laughed, genuine enough, thankfully, to fool Lando.
“No, I mean how are you do-ing,” he pressed, sweeping his gaze over the dance floor below, the tables and bursts of champagne fireworks.
It took one more chin-jab, cartoonish and anything but subtle, at a group of women by the bar for Carlos to finally catch on.
“Come on! There’s got to be someone who caught your eye. This place is literally swarming with hot girls.”
“I…” Again those galactic lights burned into his retinas, blotting out the crowd, the dancers, their gold and emerald jewelry, until only remained the smoldering unease of the void. Like leaning over the edge of the Milky Way. “Yeah. I don’t know. Not sure I’m in the mood tonight.”
“When are you ever gonna be in the mood if not when you get a podium? In Brazil?”
“When I win in Brazil?”
Lando chuckled, but shook his head. “Mate, I get it’s been rough, but that was—when did you guys break up again?”
“May.” The twenty-first.
“Right, May. So that’s like…” One, two, three, four, five fingers and a furrowed brow. “... six months ago, no?”
One hundred and eighty days, on the dot. He’d been counting every last one. “Yeah, more or less, I think.”
“Don’t you think it’s time to get back on the field? Dip your toes a little? I think you’re just, like, out of practice, mate.” Carlos must’ve pulled a face right then, because Lando held up both his hands, almost knocking over some guy’s drink. “I’m not saying she has to be the love of your life or whatever! It’s just about moving on. And not… ruminating like you are.”
“Ruminating? What am I, a cow?”
“No, a bull,” Lando beamed. “What was it again? El Matador?” His gaze trailed off to the side, where two young women, long straight hair and leather miniskirts catching the club lights, had been stealing glances at the drivers since the beginning of the conversation. Carlos followed. The brunette he locked eyes with did not look away first. “So get back to the ring.”
There certainly was some merit to Lando’s reasoning, however unwilling Carlos had been to see it. At least, not right away—not when Lando vanished back into the crowd and he was swept up by his team. Not when they paid him a line of shots and carried him into a euphoric whirlwind of Spanish shouts. Not when they hoisted him onto their shoulders in front of the DJ booth and, from the height of his newfound apex, he locked eyes again with the dark-haired girl. Unyielding. Alluring.
Dip your toes a little, had said Lando five shots ago. Those same feet now tingled with a new kind of electricity as they carried him toward her. She’d seen him coming from afar, was already watching him with the ghost of a smile playing at her lips well before he’d found the nerve to approach.
He wasn’t thinking of planets anymore, even though the supernova-colored spotlights on her ochre skin shone brighter than ever. Like watching the same scene play out from the far end of the galaxy.
“Hola,” he huffed out. “I’m Carlos.”
She giggled, biting her lip, “Eu sei quem é você.”
She was gorgeous, exposed neck like the bronze he’d just won and dark doe eyes begging to touch him and… and blurry features melting into one another and the darkness of the club, a faceless dream you remember so long as you don’t blink.
She didn’t say anything more, just smiled at him like the sun, and the next second his mouth was on hers, one hand pressing her waist flush against him. She’d opened her lips before they’d even met his, and her warm tongue distilled the aroma of alcohol into his mouth when she moaned into the kiss. Her fingers tugged slightly at his disheveled hair, settling at the nape of his neck; slowly, so slowly, his hand snaked down her back, cradling the curve where her miniskirt ended.
He thought it was the leather, cold and callous under his fingertips, before he realized he really was touching her skin. She was cold. Not even cold, really, but—lukewarm. Tepid. Like her very skin held back, uncommitted; yet her hands caressed his neck, her kiss grew famished. No—she wasn’t cold. She wasn’t hesitant. He was.
He forced his eyes shut, pleading, begging the spiral of thoughts in his head to wane, to relax—enjoy it enjoy it enjoy it you want this; scanning the flow of his own veins, every part of him she grinded against for a flush of heat, for a glimmer of desire—and came up short. Not even the coarse rumble of lust. Nothing.
The smoldering unease of the void.
Jupiter, he thought then like a drowning man breaking the surface of the ocean. That’s what her big brown eyes reminded him of. Jupiter.
He broke the kiss with a retch. She stared, with her head tilted to the side and blinking fast—to avoid those Jupiter eyes Carlos had no choice but to look at her swollen lips, but this was unbearable too, so he unfocused his vision to an indefinite point over her shoulder.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he repeated louder, not hearing himself over his tinnitus. “I have to go.”
“Está bem? Are you okay?”
“Sí, sí, yeah, I—I have to go. I’m sorry.”
If he stayed one minute in the club—with his mouth dry, his body adrift in a tangle of other bodies, hot then cold and spinning like tops—he was going to throw up. Eyes fixed on the floor, he pushed his way toward the exit, but he hadn’t made it ten steps before stumbling into Caco, thank God. A steadying pat on the shoulder, a look hovering somewhere between scolding and concern, and then they were out on the street, scratched raw by the cold breath of the Brazilian night.
Carlos was still panting when he drew out his phone. 4:59 in São Paulo—and just beneath, though the difference had long since etched itself into habit, Spain’s time. 9:59. She would be awake. She would be at work. She would be lost in her solar kingdom…
He turned his back on his cousin slightly as he scrolled through his contacts, like he knew this was a mistake he was intoxicated enough to make. Letter by swaying letter, each keystroke a lurch through an unstrung chicane, he typed the name until it surfaced.
One hundred and eighty-one days now.
His thumb hovered over there, heavy. Above the name he hadn’t dared to summon aloud in all that time. Like a fault line you don’t name, afraid it might finally split.
Headlights split the night, and a sedan slid into the curve at the end of the elegant marble drive. Someone took him by the arm; he nearly dropped the phone as he stuffed it deep in his pocket. All the planets and their ink-dark sky were swallowed by leather and gasoline.
Like many Madrileños before him, Carlos has never visited his city.
Through no fault of his own, he would retort somewhat defensively when asked. That’s just what happens when you’re the child of a sprawling city; you have no time for her as she has no time for you. How many Parisians have never climbed the Eiffel Tower, or New Yorkers the Empire State?
So your wide eyes and catastrophized gasp do not come as a surprise when he admits he’s never sat on the velvet cushions of the Lope de Vega theater. Never had his breath stolen out of his chest by the immensity of the Guernica. Never even slumped at a marble-topped table in San Ginés, worn out at dawn, cradling the chocolate con churros of the capital…
“Do you even live here?” you question after he confesses his one and only visit to the Catedral de la Almudena dates back to a decade.
“Of course I live here, that’s why I don’t do all that stuff. It’s for tourists. And I do know Madrid,” his voice perks up. “I’ve been to the Prado and the Royal Palace and the Bernabéu a million times.”
“Because your dad is always getting invited places! You’ve never lazed about the city, seen her just for the sake of seeing her. Twenty-two years on Earth and you’ve spent them all looking for cheap thrills all over the world instead of discovering what’s right in front of you.”
Those kinds of conversations always end with that little pout of his, and the way you look at him: insistently, already dreaming up some wild plan to fill in the gaps of his illustrious little prince education.
He’s walked thousands of streets with you, seen thousands of landscapes in the years he’s known you—beautiful and remote and sometimes crass and adventurous and accidental—but his favorites are always the ones you choose. Gravity in those places feels more supple. Soft enough to make him forget the smell of scorched rubber; botanical gardens full of sickly-sweet flowers that seem to bloom open in your wake, following your laughter; hidden restaurants tucked away between sun-warmed stones in the Mediterranean…
and above all, the planetarium.
It’s your most revolted reaction yet, and it starts with a game of Trivial Pursuit at his parents’. A question about the first manned mission to the Moon—and, frankly, not even that easy of a question, may he be forgiven—has Carlos grimacing and his mother throwing her head back with a hopeless, “Ay, hijo, how do you not know this!” Carlos Sr. interjects with his good-humored tone (Come on, Reyes, I don’t think he was paying too much attention to that in school), his son attempts to defend himself (I don’t even know the order of the planets! How am I supposed to know this?), but the damage is done.
Carlos Sainz will not go one day longer without knowing everything there is to know about the planets.
Lucky thing you are assigned closing hour the following Monday.
The planetarium’s main room is long deserted by the time you shoot Carlos a text message—“you can come out of hiding now, tonti”. All the school excursions and strolling pensioners have kindly been kicked out by your little white lie, something about the projection room closing early for maintenance; and there is no way any other staff would investigate the lack of visitors at 5 p.m. instead of quietly scurrying home. Still, Carlos waits five long minutes before he slips out the side door, his fist tight around… a balaclava?
“What the hell is that?” you giggle as his head swipes the room, cautious. “Do you think we’re robbing a bank?”
“I don’t know, I thought there might be cameras in here,” is all the defense he has, and you snort.
“I can tell you’ve never done anything slightly rebellious,” you roll your eyes, but he wraps his arms around you from behind and you melt like you always do. “No, the nose ring doesn’t count.”
“I could’ve gotten expelled! They were super strict!”
“You, Carlos Sainz Junior, could not have gotten expelled from anywhere.”
He chuckles, an unhurried thing rumbling against your back, and buries a kiss in your hair before freezing up.
“This isn’t, like, illegal, though, right?”
You whip around, stealing the balaclava from his grasp and dangling it in front of his face. Daring him to reach for it. “What if it is?”
“Well I’d probably lose my job.” He can’t stop smiling, despite the seriousness of his words, like your closeness chisels the bronze of his lips into a perpetual grin. “I don’t think McLaren would like that look on one of their drivers.”
“For guys whose job is literally speeding, you lot sure are booooring.”
“Sorry I’m not exciting enough for you, miss astrophysics.”
You click your tongue in mock outrage, and he leans in for a forgiveness peck but you’re quicker to push him away, grabbing him by the shoulders and turning him around.
“Nuh-uh! Time for the conference now. Hope you brought something to take notes, cause there’s a surprise quiz at the end.”
He mutters something about bringing it on and not being scared when you sit him down in the front row’s deep-blue cushioned seats, palms outstretched in front of you and a half-stern glare like you’re trying to get an unruly puppy to behave. Surprisingly, he shuts up, and you miss the fond gaze he drapes upon you as you type commands away into the computer—until suddenly all the lights in the room flicker to sleep, like inhabited by a more secret kind of life… and slowly at first, then like silent starbursts, planets and constellations and comets emerge from the void, as though beckoning the curious closer. It’s a spectacle you’ve seen hundreds of times, colorful reflections sprawled across thousands of enthralled kids’ faces… but you know no star that shines brighter than Carlos’ eyes as you take the stage just for him.
“Welcome to the Madrid planetarium,” the words come out chipper, though unmistakably rehearsed. “You are about to embark on a voyage across the cosm— Carlos!” your shoulders slump, pouting at his wheezes. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Sorry, sorry, it’s just… I never thought I’d see you like that. At work. It’s a little funny.” His gaze roams over your body, from the pin to your breast pocket and the corded card around your neck, to the tight updo you’ve locked your hair in—you never do them that way at home, nor do you paint your lips so. He’s thought about it before—how you’ve been to a few races, witnessed him don the fireproofs and the helmet and disappear into the car, as though swallowed by the higher existence of the team, the speed; but he never returned the favor. Until now. “You look smart. I mean I know you’re smart, but now I can tell just by looking at you.”
An intense blush creeps over your cheeks, though thankfully the ambient night obscures it.
“Please save all your remarks for the end.” And, very softly: “Thank you.”
You know his smirk is not going anywhere anytime soon, so you carry on, comically louder.
“So! As I was saying…”
The usual lecture is forty-five minutes: enough to cover an introduction to planetology and crack a few jokes with the audience without boring the kids to—literal—tears. With Carlos, though, time dilates. He’s quiet at first, bewitched by your ease as you recount all the things the planets have whispered to you. Slowly, though, his timidity wanes, and he asks more questions, surprisingly pertinent (though he can’t help slipping in a cocky “What planet is the hot guide from?”), until Carlos, the riotous kid who used to race past the world, takes the time to bask in it. You show, you tell, you open the vault for all the little things you know about astronomy; tales and figures spill out of you like a solar flare, and each ray touches Carlos’ heart with an overpowering sense of warmth.
By the time you suggest you move on to a more immersive part of the exhibit, he is a hundred times more in love with you than he was before he met Mercury.
And so it may be an hour, or perhaps two, after Carlos snuck into the planetarium after hours, and you’re both lying on the night-dark carpeted floor—“No way I’m letting my hair touch that, you really don’t wanna know when this was last cleaned.” “Well lay your head on me, then.”—with your eyes fixed on the spherical roof where celestial shapes parade. Lazily, like dust shelling off the sky.
Neither of you have spoken in what feels like centuries, and the rise and fall of Carlos’ chest beneath your neck almost matches Antares’ pulsating glow. Over your heads, numerical meteors ignite and vanish.
“How did they manage to send rocketships and satellites so far away?”
He shimmies a little underneath you, like the sudden question wiggles within.
“All these distances you mentioned, they’re all so huge. How do we send and pilot stuff so far out there? Wouldn’t they run out of fuel?”
You smile like the break of dawn.
“Not everything is about gasoline, racer boy.”
“That’s not what I implied,” he groans with a little shake of the head, the citrus of his shampoo enveloping your nostrils.
“I know. Well, most spatial vehicles don’t run on fuel. Only rockets do, for brief minutes. The rest are solar or nuclear-powered, and besides… engineers know a trick or two.”
“Like?”
He speaks with the rising inflexion of a diligent student, the one you’ve heard him get with Tom Stallard once or twice before, and you laugh to yourself at the idea he might be hoping to draw inspiration from astromechanics for his car’s next breakthrough.
“Like… You ever hear about a gravitational slingshot?”
“Mi vida, one hour ago I had no idea that half the planets don’t actually have solid ground.”
His chuckle sounds exactly how you imagine the Big Dipper does, when she shakes off her morning dew before disappearing into the rosy horizon, so you chuckle back.
“Okay, well, a gravitational slingshot is… a way for probes to travel to the ends of the solar system with minimal energy. You throw your satellite into the path of a bigger body, say, a planet, and use the momentum from its orbit to propel it forward. Somewhat like swinging from vine to vine in the jungle.”
“So is it a bit like using the slipstream from the car ahead of you?”
Of course he’d find a way to tie it back to the cars.
“In a way, yes.” One of his hands nestles in your hair, scratching it softly. Overhead, Saturn preens its rings like a peacock’s feathers. “But think of it more as… galactic hitchhiking. You use it to adjust trajectory more than speed. These planets, they’re on their invariable course through the universe, and you’re meeting them for a fraction of an instant to redirect your path. Get you where you wanna go. The calculations have to be exact… or else you might be too late or too early for the rendezvous. Like Voyager I,” you straighten up slightly, careful not to elbow Carlos, and draw imaginary lines across the ceiling. Too absorbed in your explanation to notice he’s only staring at your fingers and the golden threads they weave. “They launched it precisely at the right moment, on a slightly offset path, so it would meet Jupiter. And it did, and it got caught in its orbit, and that’s when they gave it just a little extra power boost and boom—off it went into the void and on its correct course.” You angle your head up to meet his face. “Isn’t that romantic? How they were interstellar soulmates?”
“It’s just a big box of metal and an even bigger ball of gas,” Carlos chuckles.
“Oh come on, I’m sure you have a lot to say about the poetry of big boxes of metal.”
His smile remains on his face long after Saturn has dipped below the artificial horizon, making way for constellations with names he can barely read. His voice comes out a little subdued, though, when he asks after a while:
“What would’ve happened if Voyager I had missed its shot and never met Jupiter?”
You shrug. Perhaps the tragedy of it all doesn’t weigh on you the way it does Carlos.
“Maybe it would’ve met another planet, and that would’ve sent it in a totally erroneous direction. Or maybe it would’ve just drifted off into the void forever. Who knows? The only important thing is they did find each other, and it did work out.”
Pensive, Carlos plays with your hair, wrapping and unwrapping it around his finger. As always when he’s entirely surrendered to you, he forgets. He forgets about the smell of charred rubber and unimpressive lap times cascading one after the other—forgets the omnipresent roar of the engine and inhumane shriek of the crowd. You alter gravity, make it more bearable; alleviate the g-forces.
In a year or so, he will make the gravest mistake of his life—he will confuse lightness with lack, bliss with distraction. He will panic, for the very first time in his life, and he will cut you off. At once so it hurts less—so he doesn’t get the time to hurt and you to hate him—because when you are standing in Mattia Binotto’s office and he offhandedly mentions Sebastian Vettel doesn’t want his red seat next year, you cannot ever afford to forget about the rubber and the lap times and the engine and the crowd.
For now, though, he lets the beams of your sun bathe him in the tranquil glory he’ll forget later.
“I feel like you’re a bit like my Jupiter at times, aren’t you?” he murmurs against the crown of your head. “Putting me on the right track when I stray too far.”
“Hope that means you’re always staying in my orbit,” you reply, tummy fluttering with love at his words.
But you know it better than anyone, don’t you?—
All it takes is a just a little extra power boost and boom—
off he goes into the void.
VENUS.
MILTON KEYNES, 2022.
It wasn’t raining the very first time Carlos Sainz climbed the top step of a Formula 1 podium, though until the end of time he would remember it that way.
Perhaps the champagne droplets Checo drenched his race suit with left a more striking impression than he thought, colder than he remembered. Perhaps it was his sweat, dripping from his helmet and down his temples. Or perhaps he needed something external to explain the vague gloom he’d felt that day, and he’d decided to blame the sky.
The celebrations themselves had been dizzying: a whirlwind of cheers and congratulations and crimson fists raised in the air; his father hugging him tight, and Lando, excitable, loving Lando running up to congratulate him for his first victory in red. His first victory ever—¡lo conseguiste, cabrón, y con Ferrari!
Never had he ever heard a sweeter Marcha Real than the one lauding him on English soil. The sound etched itself in his mind, like all the Tifosi’s adoring eyes lifting toward him.
A tiny serpent wrapped around his ear murmured that one pair of eyes was missing. The drums of Fratelli d’Italia drowned it out.
Later, after he’d answered every question and taken every picture, when he reconvened with his father in the quiet of his driver room and unlocked his phone to zero missed calls, the indefinite malaise he’d felt rising all weekend came growling back. He braced himself as he dialed the number and pressed his phone to his ear.
He should’ve been feeling anything but weighed down by those wormy nerves in the pit of his stomach. He should’ve been triumphant and invincible and…
“Hello?”
“Hi, love,” he said, bracing himself for an outcome he already knew would not be different than every other time. “Um, just calling to let you know I won the race.”
“You did? Oh, wow, congrats!” her voice was shiny with enthusiasm, genuine and gentle, just like she always was—charming and polite and chipper—, but there was an edge of confusion to it that Carlos could never miss. “But, um… I thought it was yesterday?”
“I…” he scoffed, bit the inside of his mouth as he wondered if this was worth feeling defeated over. Probably not. Not today, at least. “Yesterday was the qualification round, remember what I explained to you? So I won that too, but that just means I started first for the race today. And that’s what I just won right now. That’s the important part.”
“Oh! Right.” At what point did her flippancy become too frequent, too intentional, to be excused by her sweet and kind disposition? How long until he’d start resenting a partner who did not shoulder anything of the world alongside him? “That’s great! Proud of you.”
“So… I take it you weren’t able to catch the race on TV?” Like she’d said she would. Then again, had he attended any of her fashion shows lately, or had he been furiously cycling down some bumpy slope in the Alps?
“No, sorry, I was out for brunch with the girls and then since I thought it was yesterday and all—” she droned on and on, but Carlos was already out of it, struggling to avoid the knowing, empathetic looks from his father. “But that’s okay, I’ll watch it on YouTube or something. Right after I get my prediction for Cancer season,” a little giggle escaped her. “You know, I might be more emotional than usual this summer, because—”
Astrology was always her favorite cheat sheet to look at the world, its deepest secrets and inner workings unveiled by the fantastical movements of planets and constellations. Carlos didn’t believe much of that—to be fair he didn’t believe much of anything that wasn’t computable, solvable, and repeatable—but for her he had been willing to give it a try. He’d jokingly asked her to intercede for him, pray that the twelve houses trace a clement path for him at Ferrari, but she’d looked terribly offended about the implication you could ask anything of the planets, and he hadn’t uttered another word about the cosmos since.
“I’m a Libra, right, so that means I’m ruled by Venus,” she’d excitedly rambled on one of their first dates. “So that means I’m really lovey-dovey, sensitive to aesthetics, and all that. My modeling career and all; that was all written. Predestined. Because of Venus, cause it’s the planet of love and beauty. You know anything about Venus?”
And to anyone else he would have answered the truth—what Venus had whispered to him years before. I know a day on Venus is longer than a year. I know Venus is so bright it was originally believed to be a star. I know astrophysicists debated the possibility of life in her clouds but she was ultimately ruled out as “too hostile”.
“No, I don’t. I think I’m a Virgo though?”
When he hung up, after a “Bye, love you” he’d hoped was earnest enough, Carlos turned to his father and his shoulders fell. The older man was already looking at him, decades of careful love swimming in his eyes.
“I know what you’re gonna say.”
“What am I going to say?”
Now his son was taller than him, but if he could have, Carlos Sr. would have crouched down to the floor and patted his little head gently. As though he weren’t a two-time world champion, but simply a dad with the answer to every question in the world.
You’re gonna say that she’s not Y/N. You always wished I’d never broken up with Y/N.
“That I’m not right for her and she’s not right for me and you have no idea why we’re even together? It's been months and she can’t even remember how a race weekend works.”
Young Carlos drooped against the wall with a soft thud, muscles still sore from fighting gravity and lifting gold trophies, and threw his head back to stare at the ceiling. Unable to look at his father, who replied in the soft, measured tone he’d use when his son would lose hope in karting.
“Well, I never said that, and I think you’re putting words you believe in my mouth to legitimize yourself. And you’re being harsh on her. Do you know what her workday is like?”
The race winner sighed, a long, thick breath escaping through his nose like it had been trapped in there for thousands of years.
“It’s just… I can’t connect with her. I can’t connect with anyone. We’re so… mismatched. But she’s kind, and she’s so patient with me. That’s kind of all I can ask of anyone, with the life I lead.”
“No, Carletes.” Slowly, Carlos Sainz picked up his son’s Silverstone trophy and handed it to him. Just like he would the stuffed animals thrown off the bed by a frantic nightmare. “It’s precisely because you lead this life that you need the best copilot you can find. Someone who’s there for you through thick and thin, and challenges you, but keeps you on track.”
A small beat. Then muscle memory kicked in, and Carlos’ head dipped against his father’s shoulder, like a mighty willow bending to the tempest. The father cradled the son, wrinkled hand caressing the bark of his strong neck.
“Things will make sense, hijo. They always do in the end.”
Like planets locking into place, on the same orbits until the end of time and long after that.
“What’s this one?”
“That’s Vega.”
“That’s Vega,” he mutters in a mocking tone, slightly muffled by your head on his abdomen.
“What?” you chuckle.
“You say that like it’s obvious! Like it’s sooooo easy.”
“It is obvious, it’s my job, Carlos! It’s like if I asked you what the yellow line on the edge of the tire means.”
“Okay, okay, well…” He cranes his neck, scanning the animated ceiling for just the speck of stardust that will end your streak. “Ooh, and this one?”
Squinting your eyes, you try to make out the small dot Carlos is pointing at… before your lips melt into a knowing smile.
“You’re taking the piss, Carlos, there’s nothing there.”
He swears, and the slight contraction of his stomach sends tickles down your spine. How long have you two been floating in that vast expanse of universe, moored to nothing but one another?
“Wow, why is that thing over there so green? Is it like that in real life?”
“That’s the emergency exit sign, amor.”
Carlos groans, trying to cook up a reasonable defense, but he’d ridicule himself a million times over if it meant hearing your wind chime laughter, like fairy dust speeding through outer space.
“And that one over there? The red one? Is it also the emergency exit sign?”
“No, that one’s real. It’s a galaxy.”
“Is it actually red?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because of redshift.”
You stay quiet, and he doesn’t press you further. He knows the explanation is just one carefully collected silence away. Instead, he stares at the star cluster, immobile unlike most of the planets on display, faint crimson clashing with the infinite mauve around. Like a watchful creature lying in wait.
“You know that the universe is expanding, right? It’s growing right now.”
“Yeah.”
“So the light that’s emitted by this galaxy must travel a huge distance to get to us, and in the time it takes to reach Earth, the empty space between us has grown. Stretched out, like someone is pulling at the ends. From our perspective, it looks like the galaxy is moving away. Farther from the observer. So the light’s wavelength increases, because of the Doppler effect, and that’s why the galaxy looks red to us.”
“So when something expands or moves away from you…” he recapitulates slowly.
“It turns red, yeah.”
The words will haunt him far longer than he expects. They have no reason to—out of the thousands of shattered promises and declarations of love and ineffable vulnerability and jokes and harsh truths and supplications—yet they do. They linger like a mist as he sits in his bedroom, two years later, cradling in his lap the very first helmet Carlos Sainz will wear for the Scuderia Ferrari. His belly, swollen with pride earlier from the fifty-five on the side and the red star on the back—all so unbelievably him, side by side with the prancing horse at last—, grumbles with bile. His phone lights up with the notification he’s been avoiding all day.
A year and a half or so—he stopped counting the days. His mom said that meant he was healing?—without a word and on the morning of the announcement, you text him “Congrats on the move”.
Like you couldn’t keep it in, like no rough breakup and unbearable radio silence could prevent you from cheering your champion on. Watching him expand.
He texts back a sober “Thanks. hope you’re doing well”, and deletes your number before he can catch himself dialing it once again.
MARS.
MARANELLO, 2024.
For the first time in his life, the last thing Carlos Sainz longed for was combat.
Little Carletes had been born pugnacious, tiny fists that closed around no claws. Not a troublemaker, per se, but rambunctious, like an inexhaustible volcano. What he lacked in sharpness, he’d made up for in belligerence, for he could never be half the raw talent his father was at everything but he could bleed twice as hard on the jagged rocks of greatness. For every kid that ran him off the track in go-karts he could push two more; for every hour his teammate would stay in the sim, he’d spend one night. As if, far from deplenishing him, the fight gave him energy.
He was always outrunning something, it seemed. The clock, his father’s shadow. At the end of the 2024 season, after months of trying to outrun the end, Carlos was so unfathomably tired.
The end came as a roaring tornado on February first, and all he could do was turn the ignition on and speed away. To no avail, of course. Ferrari never regrets a decision, no matter how fast you are, when the decision comes with seven world titles.
Therefore, when Carlos Sainz heard the loud footsteps stomping down the hallway, he knew with immense lassitude that he would not be combating today.
“Care to explain what the hell this is?”
She was fuming, arm outstretched toward him with an accusatory glare. She stood taller than ever before in their almost-bare bedroom, a giant among piles of moving boxes and polystyrene. They’d barely had the time to touch ground in Maranello before being uprooted again.
“That’s… your phone,” Carlos sighed. Wrong answer, he knew as much, but at least he’d delayed the battle for just a few instants.
“Yeah, right, play dumb all you want,” she scoffed, shoving her phone right under her boyfriend’s nose. “What the fuck were you doing with her? It’s all over Twitter.”
As soon as his eyes had gotten used to the sudden brightness, Carlos recognized the pictures; him, strolling down the streets of Madrid, a lifetime ago. Unmistakable. On his arm, looped around his bicep, was hers. A lifetime ago indeed.
He would’ve frozen even if he hadn’t wanted to. The afternoon came back to him in a kaleidoscope of memories, colors, and smells—the ozone of Madrid’s thousands of exhaust pipes, the faint scent of frying oil from some churrería, and how she’d drop his hand to press her nose against every bakery’s window display. How many years had it been? How many artifacts of that era had he neatly wrapped up and stored away in cardboard boxes, traveling around the world with him because he couldn’t throw them away?
“Love, these pictures are old. See how my hair is totally different? That’s from, like, 2018.”
“Why are they making rounds again then?” she spat, distrustful. “Your fans won’t stop posting them. Tell me the truth.”
She’d always been combative, irascible—she never backed down from what she wanted, even when it simply didn’t exist, and perhaps that was the reason Carlos had been drawn to her when they’d first met. Someone to challenge him, to spar with. Someone who’d stand by his side because they know what it means to fall and rise again.
But for the first time, all Carlos Sainz wanted was peace and familiarity. A soft bed to crawl into, and not one he must cut through thorns for.
“I’m telling you the truth, I have no idea why they’re posting them. They do weird things sometimes.”
That was a lie, but one he could stomach without batting too obvious an eyelid. Carlos knew exactly why fans kept posting old pictures of his very first love to social media, the same reason he had never been able to delete them from his phone, but instead kept them in a passworded folder inside a folder inside a folder. The formidable and harrowing impression of unfinished business. A story you keep adding chapters to, yet stray away from the epilogue of.
She didn’t buy it. She never did anything he said. Was she this wary of him when they’d met, or had fame and scrutiny made her paranoid? He toyed with the inside of his cheek. Was she paranoid? Or could she read him better than he could, and he’d been a horrible person—a horrible boyfriend—to her this whole time?
“And you’re not even fighting for us! Gosh! If you still love her so much, why don’t you just find her?” she cried out, throwing her arms in the air.
She didn’t leave him time to say anything; not that he would have anyway. She turned on her heel and slammed the door, sending flakes of white paint flying into the barren bedroom.
“So what happens when something gets close to you?”
His question cuts through the surreal silence that has curled up between you; in the soft space between your bodies, slouched together on the carpeted steps of the planetarium. Slowly, you lift your head from his belly and look at him, attentive.
“Hm?”
“You said that when an object moves away from the observer, it turns red. That’s redshift. So what happens if it’s coming closer?”
The corner of your lips lifts into one of those half-moon smiles only you know how to wear.
“Blueshift.”
Violet light floods the craters in your eyes, as though an angel had filled them to the brim.
“When an object comes back to the observer, it turns blue.”
JUPITER.
NICE, 2025.
Damn you and your punctuality.
With all the years you’ve been working at the Nice Observatory, you know very well by now the inescapable ballet of convertibles cruising down the coast in the summer months—rich Parisian families on vacation and English retirees enjoying the last days of tolerable Riviera heat—, but you have grown particularly wary of the month of May. When the Cannes festival and Monaco Grand Prix draw closer, the city and its surroundings bubble up with a sort of effervescence that makes everything unbearable. Tourists and kids and journalists swarm about the streets; the sea itself becomes more dazzling, like it’s dressing in its finest garments for the season; and you’re just trying to get to work.
(Of course, that’s the sole reason you hate late May in Nice. Nothing to do with the Monaco Grand Prix itself, nor the faces you see plastered at every damn bus stop and on every damn television every year. Well, face.)
Thus, to avoid traffic, you have taken the habit of leaving home earlier in the morning. An invigorating springtime promenade, with the Mediterranean as your sole neighbor… as far as you can remember, you have always found comfort in the still nooks of early dawn and late dusk, after all.
Had you been just a little less conscientious of your work… held up just a little longer on the beltway… you wouldn’t have made it to your office in time to check your emails before you’re whisked away for day-long observations and meetings. You wouldn’t have opened your inbox, you would’ve only read the message tomorrow, after the fact. Too late. Or late enough to play the Sorry-I-missed-it card.
But you don’t, and you do, and you find the email sitting there. In bold letters, as though mocking you. No subject—of course he wouldn’t know private correspondence in an office is supposed to say, well, PRIVATE—and a sender address that looks too stupidly obvious to be real.
The sun blinks for an instant, and gravity holds its breath, pinning you against your chair. That’s probably the second where you open the email, because you don’t remember moving your fingers.
“Hi. Sorry, I had no idea how to contact you, and no idea where to start either. I might have looked you up on LinkedIn and found your work email. You’ve been doing amazing I see, you have a PhD now! But I never doubted you or how smart and cool you were. I knew you’d get here.
I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately and all the things I did wrong. I was young, but that doesn’t cover everything. It doesn’t cover almost anything, actually. If you’re willing to hear me and let me apologize properly, even if I’m really really late (I can’t be the fastest all the time), can we meet up in Monaco tonight? I’d be the most grateful man in the universe.
C”
It’s all in Spanish, and the font isn’t the same size across all the text, and you can tell he doesn’t send emails too often because instead of sending the pictures as an attachment he pasted them directly underneath the paragraph, but they’re of two concert tickets wrinkled with brown stains—your favorite band, and he’d dropped his coffee on them the morning of and you’d sworn to every god that’s ever existed you’d flail him alive if the security guard’s scanner couldn’t read their barcode.
The first thought that comes to your mind, somehow, is “Of course it’s real. What a loser.”
You shouldn’t reply—of course you shouldn’t reply, your boss is calling you over from outside the office to go down the observation room and if your best friend were there she would tell you to delete the message and never speak of it again.
“I don’t go to Monaco anymore. Too much traffic and parking’s a nightmare. Also I feel stupid over there with my Clio IV.”
You only catch his reply late in the evening, when the sun is slowly descending behind the Mercantour and you’ve awkwardly evaded your coworkers’ offers for celebratory drinks downtown. Sure, the tests were a resounding success today, but you just need to run something by your office real quick. Just one thing, and then you’re going straight home, because you’re exhausted, but thank you so much for offering, you’ll join them another time—
If the timestamp is any indication, the reply came two minutes after your first email.
“I’ll come to you then.”
Your heart is pounding like a quasar when you step out the Observatory’s main entrance and into the Southern night, seemingly the only person in the whole world. The only person, except for the silhouette you notice immediately just a few meters ahead, draped in night and leaning against a Vespa. He looks stronger than when you last saw him, a little wider and buffer; a soft breeze ruffles his dark hair, and you spot the faintest hints of white within. Something he probably hasn’t noticed yet, but observing details has always been your life’s work.
Six years after shattering your heart and disappearing into the gaping mouth of a race car, Carlos Sainz stands before you, and he beams the brightest grin this side of the Mediterranean when he spots you. And you, as if no minutes had passed at all, cannot do anything but smile in return.
“Where’s your Ferrari?” you ask, pointing at the little scooter with your chin.
“Didn’t you hear? I had to downsize.”
He sounds more mature, less boyish; maybe all the furious air he ingests has eroded his vocal chords too, or maybe his throat is thick with emotion as he takes you in. Neat shirt, tight bun, ever-so-slightly painted lips. Taking the stage of his life just for him, if only for an evening.
A moment passes where you’re both too dizzy to say anything. The first shooting star of many pierces the sky millions of kilometers over your heads, though neither of you see it. Then, Carlos extends his arm and hands you one of the two helmets he’s carrying.
“Do you still trust me?”
Of course you don’t. He told you a life with you would be incompatible with his other goals—he once dreamed of a life in which you were not, and it matters little whether that thought existed in him for a tenth of a second or a whole year, because he’d said it, burned it into your ears like tinnitus.
But he would make you laugh to tears, and he held you for eight hours straight when you sobbed yourself into exhaustion the day your childhood dog died, and he took pictures of you sleeping in a pile of limbs with Piñón, and your fingers once dug into his ribs as his rental bike drove you down a secret cove, where he made love to you like waves lapping at the shore.
“Yeah.”
You have yet to find a single planet, by some faraway nebula, where you don’t trust him.
The ride down to the harbor is perfectly quiet. Not only do you not exchange words—no use over the small engine’s agonizing screams—but the whole city falls silent, from the groups of twenty-somethings hitting their first bars of the night to the seagulls shrieking and descending upon unsuspecting gelati. Like Nice’s narrow, treacherous streets bow their heads to Carlos and you, shrinking and moving and shifting to open a perfect path. Eventually, he stops the scooter by the docks, in front of a yacht that would probably fall under the small umbrella in his circle; to you, it looks like a mansion.
“That’s new.”
“You’ve been gone a long time,” he shrugs, but you can tell by the glint in his voice that he’s proud of his trick.
He helps you up on the boat, disappears into the cabin—busying himself, as always, only at ease when in control—and the yacht rumbles to life in a harmony of swells, then casts off into the Mediterranean night.
“I’ll admit I didn’t check the weather,” Carlos breaks the silence long minutes later, after you’ve helped him drop the anchor in the middle of nowhere, just a tiny dot kilometers from shore. Your unbreakable bubble, suspended outside of time and reality. As far from any asphalted road as can be. “Sorry. I thought it would be a little nicer.”
“This is very nice,” you reply.
And it is—you don’t need to slip into fake courtesies with Carlos, not even after so many years. In the half-decade since you’d parted ways, you’d imagined this meeting a million times under a million circumstances and a million watchful planets, and every time you feared the awkwardness of silence; the one thing that would betray an irrevocable destruction of what you once had. But there’s nothing close to it here, on the deck of his yacht, each sitting on a banquette and eating olives in the middle of the sea. Only the inexplicable familiarity of those who know every inch of each other’s soul.
You throw your head back and prop your knees underneath you. Sure, the sky is a little cloudy, but every milky spot you expected to find is perfectly visible. You smile at them, like old friends on a school photo.
“This is really beautiful, actually.”
Carlos is only staring at you from the port side.
Yeah, yeah it is.
“I’m sorry.”
“You said that already, it’s okay,” you chuckle, but he interrupts, voice trembling slightly from the solemnity.
“No, I mean sorry for six years ago.”
You bite your lip. Turn your head to face him, slowly, but his nose is pointed at the sky, his arm lazily grazing the waves from over the gunwale.
“Is that it?”
“Well, I could say sorry for being such an asshole. Sorry for being a coward and not knowing how to deal with your expectations and the expectations of the world, and choosing to cut one off. Sorry for hurting you and not even allowing you the time to grieve. I tried to numb it with the racing, and the parties, and that kind of stuff, but honestly I don’t think there’s been a day where I don’t regret that decision. But I don’t know, I don’t want you to think I’m making up excuses for myself or… or rubbing salt in the wound, so I’ll just leave it at Sorry. It’s not even a tenth of what you deserve, but… I wanted to start there.”
Your next words, after long, languid moments of silence, are carried over to shore by the salty breeze, so soft he barely catches them.
“I forgive you.”
When you look up and your eyes finally meet, they are shiny with tears. Like the diamonds that rain in the heart of Jupiter’s storm.
“I forgave you the second you walked out.”
“Why?”
“Because I loved you.” It’s self-evident, and you almost giggle at the admission, disbelieving of how disbelieving Carlos can be. How does he not get it? The core principle upon which all of the world’s mechanisms were built? The barest, rawest axiom to ever befuddle science? “I think some part of me will love you till the day I die. I know you’re a logical person, Carlos, but surely you can understand that…”
He nods. Mutters to himself more than to you, to the moonbeams that caress the tide. “Yeah, yeah I can understand that.” You stuff your mouth with olives to swallow back a sob.
Your lashes are still wet—from tears or the boat’s lull gently splashing your face, you’re not sure—when you breathe deeply and attempt to defuse:
“How was the race?”
“Awful.”
His response is so instantaneous you can’t help giggling.
“I heard you and Alex both scored points though!”
“Yeah, but it was ugly raci… hold on, have you been keeping up with me?”
“No,” you blurt out hastily. Actually, yes, you have, indirectly; through a colleague of yours, fifty-something and red-faced, who’s been a diehard Williams fan since childhood and excitedly talks your ear off every week about the team’s historic revival. Needless to say, you don’t peg him the type to know much about the drivers’ personal lives from ten years ago, and see no elegant way nor immediate utility in telling him you are Carlos Sainz Jr.’s ex-girlfriend.
“Are you a Williams fan, Y/N? Or maybe more of a Tifosa?”
“Shut up,” you groan, but he wiggles his eyebrows at you, so you throw him your olive pins. One, and two; he jumps to his feet with an indignant “hey!”; the third one hits him square in the forehead, and you burst into incredulous laughter as he jogs up to you.
“Stop it! You’re on my boat, I could—” in just a few steps he’s towering over you, lying on your back on the cushioned seat and spraying him with pins and peanuts between giggles. He grabs your machine-gun wrist, devoid of ammo, and you yelp when his charcoal eyes bore into yours. “—throw you overboard whenever I want.”
“Try it.”
The words come out on their own, taking you both by surprise. Carlos’ breath catches in his throat, and his eyes travel from your parted lips, breathing in ragged little pants, to the lines of neck your crumpled up shirt reveals, then to your whole frame, pinned against the seat, with his knee between your legs—he doesn’t even remember setting it there, the same way he never remembers downshifting six gears at turn 1 in Bahrain. The shadow he casts on your face conceals the acute flush to your cheeks when you notice the proximity of your faces.
“What is this for, Carlos? Why did you invite me here? Just to apologize?” you murmur.
“No,” he breathes out.
He needs no further explaining. You read it all, in the earthly browns of his torrid eyes, consuming you entirely like a hearth. All the desperate wondering if this dull ache ever goes away, or if it is only alleviated when its source is near—if a planet’s core can ever be replaced by another gemstone, of another chemical composition, a placeholder, anything to make the solar system spin again.
Of course it can’t. You get the feeling he’s known this for a while. That he knew this before you even taught him anything about the Moon who answers no prayers, or Jupiter who sets explorers on their right course.
You could kiss him right now—but you don’t. Neither does he. Instead, he releases your wrists, not without the faintest of caresses to your cheek. If you knew him any less, you’d think it accidental. But the outline of his orbit is no mystery to you.
Carlos sails the yacht safely back to shore a few hours later. What happens between you on the high seas during those hours will remain a secret that only early-rising constellations know.
Slowly, in deliberate movements, as if to dilate time and space further than physics will allow, he clasps the helmet on your head, and drives you back up to the Observatory, where he picked you up a lifetime ago. His driving is prudent, uncharacteristically so, as if he could fracture reality by hitting the brakes too hard, yet the pang of despair that creeps up your stomach all the way up the hill is so strong you fear you might puke.
Up there on the hill, at the foot of the slumbering dome, another shooting star slices the atmosphere, but Carlos is unclasping your helmet and you are staring into his eyes, so neither of you miss it, per se—you just see it elsewhere. For the first time the silence threatens to suffocate you, so you suffocate it first; you throw yourself in Carlos’ arms, and cradle his furious heart for an eternity. He parts first, but his hands remain on your shoulders. Then, with a reverence you’ve only seen in a scientist when they handle a meteor, he kisses your forehead.
“See you soon?”
“I hope.”
You part ways. The sidewalk is blurry, though it hasn’t rained yet. A Vespa’s engine roars to life, waking up the barking of every dog on the street.
When you reach for your car keys, your fingers graze an unfamiliar piece of paper in your blazer’s pocket.
By holding it against the light, you discern a phone number, an address. And just as you unwrap it, you hear the unmistakable click of the universe falling back into its axis.
“Pick you up same time, same place tomorrow?
Hope I’m not a little too late or a little too early.
omg for the valentine's prompt echo: sender leaves a voicemail, confessing their feelings with charles, u decide if receiver or sender :) (drgnsfly)
· · · · ♡ YOU WIN SOME, YOU WIN SOME (cl16)
… starring charles leclerc x f!reader
... 2.1k words
... in which losing an offhanded bet to pierre gasly never felt so good to charles leclerc.
... lol i know this was supposed to be short but im a chronic overwriter and i got carried away by this idea <3 piarles have my very heart and soul
𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐋𝐄𝐒 𝐋𝐄𝐂𝐋𝐄𝐑𝐂 𝐒𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐋𝐃 know better by now than to make pacts with Pierre Gasly.
To be fair, it began so long ago—years upon years of late-night dinners after disappointing races hammering the habit in. Muscle memory, like corners of a track. Pierre says something outrageous to get a laugh out of Charles; Charles answers he'll gladly do it when he hits some impossible milestone.
"I think you should do a video with Squeezie, mate. You'd be aaaall over Twitter." "Yeah, right! When you beat me in chess, maybe."
"So are you ever gonna release an album where you sing or?" "When I'm world champion, sure. I'll let you do the adlibs."
And it always works, always does get a laugh out of Charles, even after the most botched races, once again powerless victim to Ferrari's fads, and somehow even after his very first breakup. Charles must've promised the moon and then some, in the sacred outline of a conspirational grin; things only the Norman can get out of him, it seems, and things he's already forgotten all about.
So it isn't that weird, truth be told, that he forgot about you too.
The pact is sealed on a charter jet. Charles can't remember where from and where to; somewhere between Europe and the Americas, because the flight had seemed eternal to him, gripping the seat's leather armrest every time the small plane jolted up and down from turbulence. For a second he'd thought the soft wheezing sound was an impending mechanical failure, precipitating them all to their death into the cold, unforgiving Atlantic... until he'd opened his eyes and noticed Pierre sneering at him.
"I don't understand how you're still not used to it with how much we fly."
"I don't understand how you get used to it," Charles had retorted. "It's just not natural! Man was not made to fly."
"Yeah, 'cause man was definitely made to go three hundred kilometers an hour in a big carbon box."
His exasperated sigh, arms crossing over his chest and eyes fluttering closed should be enough for Pierre to understand the conversation is over and out, but Charles can still feel his amused gaze on him. The Monégasque's pursed lips melt into a smile.
"Stop it," he groans.
"I'm not doing anything!"
There's a mock offense in Pierre's tone, quickly replaced by honeyed mischief when he speaks again.
"Just imagine you're sitting with Y/N instead of me."
Charles' eyes snap open.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Obviously he knows what that's supposed to mean, but he still has to brace himself for the conversation that comes next. For the high-pitched voice and offensively bad Southern accent.
"Oh no, Y/N, I'm so scared! The plane is going to explode! Hold my hand or I'll cry!"
"Okay, first of all, I'm not Marseillais," Charles' eyes narrow, "and second, I don't... need her to hold my hand or anything."
"But you'd like that," Pierre replies pointedly.
From the way Charles shifts in his seat, turning to face the window and muttering a "whatever", the Frenchman knows he's struck a nerve. He's more gentle when he speaks again, after a few seconds of silence.
"So when are you gonna tell her you're madly in love with her?"
"I'm not madly in love with anyone."
"You told me you think of her every time you pass Ascari because the little flowers that grow down the side of the track are her exact favorite color."
Of course, there's nothing to retort to that. Not that it would do much anyway; Pierre is Charles' closest friend on the grid, and has been for more years than his hands, now calloused from the gloves, can count; he doesn't need any word from the younger man, just the twitch of his eyelid and the shadow of his dimple, to know Charles is irrevocably enamored with his old friend.
"I'm just saying, if you're gonna be whipped for someone, at least make it your girlfriend."
"Ferrari is enough of a girlfriend to me," Charles snorts, but he doesn't miss how talking about you evaporated all the flying fright in his belly.
"Okay, hear me out," Pierre leans in conspiratorially, "if you win Monaco... you have to tell her."
Charles stares him down for long, long seconds. It's another one of those mindless pacts they sign together, a purely recreational agreement they'll both have forgotten by the time they hit the tarmac... and Pierre's eyes and slight smile are so familiar and enticing, and it's not like Charles has got any chance of winning Monaco soon, anyway, not after adding yet another DNF to his streak—by the time he stands on the top step before the marina, you'll have found someone, and perhaps even he will have, too, and all will be forgotten.
"Yeah, okay. Promise."
Promises to the wind. Utterly inconsequential.
Especially because Charles doesn't win Monaco the next year, and watches his teammate prowl on the podium instead. Nor does he even come close the following.
So by the time 2024 comes around, he's completely forgotten about his promise—more of a bet, really—to Pierre Gasly in that jet all those years ago. Although, of course, in the gaps left by the deep rumble of the engines, the only thing he hears is your voice from when you wished him good luck over the phone just an hour ago.
"This year's yours, champion! I'll be watching you on TV. Make me proud!"
Charles has never been more thankful for a boring race than the moment he races past the chequered flag, barely making out the mechanics' triumphant fists behind the tears clinging to his lashes. The walls he'd leaned against, catching his breath climbing Monte Carlo's steep hills as a child, kiss him one last time, beckoning him forth into the pitlane where he eventually comes to a halt, dizzy like only Monaco winners are.
Most of the celebrations immediately after are a blur. From the garage's bone-crushing embrace to the roaring crowd and a billion adoring eyes on him, like he is their god—it all clouds into one gigantic red and white haze and the immeasurable, euphoric lightheadedness of being on top of the world.
Charles is still in his drenched race suit, dripping from Mediterranean waters, when Pierre Gasly finds him in the harbor, beaming head to toe, and hugs him as tightly as his sore arms will allow.
"Bravo ma poule," Pierre laughs, and the vibration against Charles' chest makes him laugh too. "I knew you'd do it."
If this were a usual race they would debrief it right then and there, and Charles would no doubt hear detailed, explosive accounts of every act of vehicular manslaughter Esteban has attempted against his teammate; but this is no usual race, this is Monaco, its trophy now bearing Charles Leclerc's name until the end of time; so Pierre grabs his friend by the shoulders instead and looks him straight in the eye.
"So, you won Monaco."
"I did," Charles giggles.
"And you remember what that means, right?"
Charles doesn't like the sly smile he sees on Pierre's face—he knows it too well.
"That means we're gonna party?"
"That means you have to tell Y/N you love her."
For some crazy reason, Charles doesn't flinch at the thought, doesn't even try to argue against it, pretend he does not remember the pact—because it seems like a perfectly good idea, the most logical course of action to take. He's a Monaco Grand Prix winner—he's just won Monaco! He's drunk on the adrenaline, traversed up and down by a million lightning bolts; he could run a mile, or skydive into the sea, or even tell you he's been dying of love for you since the day you met.
This year's yours, champion! Make me proud!
"She's... she's in Paris right now, for work," he replies. "I'll have to do it when she comes back—"
"Call her."
"What?"
"Call her!"
"Like—now?"
"Yes, now! If you don't do it with me right now you're never gonna do it. You're not getting off easy."
Charles hesitates for a split second—so much for lightning-fast reflexes!—and then his hand reaches for his back pocket, and he goes to your contact like some higher being is piloting his every move.
One tone, two tones...
"Voicemail," Charles breathes out, frantic, looking over at Pierre like it's an implacable fatality only he can get him out of. Pierre opens his palms, widening his eyes with a shake of the head, his every muscle screaming, "So? Are you dumb?", and Charles nods, clears his throat.
"Ahem! Erm... hi. Hi! Hi Y/N. I'm calling to say I won! I won the race, I won in Monaco... at last," he smiles into the phone, somehow oblivious to the fact he's about to pour his heart out in front of his best friend. "And I, uh... I also wanted you to know that I'm... really sorry you couldn't make it to the race, because... the truth is I—I like you. Like, more than as a friend. I like you so much, and I've liked you for so long, it's... you've given me so much strength over the years, so much confidence and resilience to bounce back and I never expected to fall for you like this when we met but sometimes it just... happens! And I wanted to dedicate this victory to you. To thank you for sticking with me even when I suck horribly, or when I'm in a bad mood because I suck horribly... you're among the most important people in my life, and that's why I want you to have the most important day in my life too. At least if you don't feel the same way, you know, I still get... one victory. Uh, yeah! Bisous, bye!"
He misses the hang-up button once and then buries his phone in his pocket to never ever hear from it again. Pierre stands dumbfounded as his friend grimaces tentatively.
"Too much?"
But Pierre can't stop chuckling and shakes his head.
"Honestly, brother, I don't even wanna make fun of you, that was genuinely cute."
And the Frenchman grabs the Monégasque by the shoulder, whisking the little prince away into the fervent clamor of his Principality.
Charles' hands don't start shaking until well into the night. The rest of the evening passed in the blink of an eye amidst congratulatory kisses, unending interviews, and the grandest, finest dinner he's never had to pay for. But now Charles is sitting on the edge of his bed, trying to tie his nicest shoes for the afterparty, with the utmost certainty his eyes will burn out of his skull if he glances at the lit-up screen of his phone. No use putting it on Do Not Disturb, chucking it across the room, opening and closing the calculator app like a mad tiger pacing inside a circus trailer... the notification taunts him; three missed calls from you, and two voicemails he will never, ever open.
At least never ever sober.
He barely even remembers the exact words he used in that voicemail. Maybe it wasn't that bad, maybe there's still room to save face, salvage his ego. Pass it off as mere gratitude from a friend to a friend. He didn't say I love you, after all—right? Could he have?
The electric chime of his doorbell snaps him out of his reverie. Surely the taxi. It's a long way down to the first floor—dammit, Charles, who even needs a house with this many stairs?—and he's a little flushed by the time he rushes out the front door to the iron gate, distracted enough to forget to check the security cameras.
A gust of wind picks up just as he opens the gate... and stops dead in his tracks. You're only wearing a frilly summer dress, of course the night chill would make you shiver... you? At his doorstep?
You look up at him, all parted lips and disheveled hair in the night, and he swears your eyes light up the tranquil street a thousand times more than the car lights in the distance. He takes you in, you, you! So splendid and breathless like a comet made woman—your suitcase in your hand, the French taxi driving off behind, and he pieces it all together.
"Y/N...?"
"You had something to tell me," is all you answer, your face pure, gleaming, like the trophy he kissed facing the sea.
hello beloved I hope your shoulder surgery goes well!!! as a little distraction can I please ask for a franco colapinto x driver!reader, enemies to lovers? love u and thinking of u always xoxo
· · · · ♡ BOOM, CRASH! (fc43)
… starring franco colapinto x f!driver!reader
... 2.4k words
... in which you get into a nasty crash, and the first person to visit you in the hospital is the last guy you'd ever imagined being worried about you.
... warnings for crash, hospital, injuries, blood, nothing too graphic i think! reader is a bit of a bully tbhh but it is a cutthroat sport 😌
... if you haven't noticed already, these are all very self-indulgent for me, and this is no exception.
Ironically, the last words you remember telling Franco Colapinto before you barrel into the wall at turn 12 were “Don't crash it.”
“What?”
“Don't crash it,” you repeat pointedly. “Logan wasn't exactly irreproachable in that regard. Budget cap's drawing closer.”
Your smile is wide but dulcet, not quite reaching your eyes, and your teeth are sharp and gritted. To any inopportune cameras that would be pointed at you right now, you only look like a well-meaning driver giving your rookie teammate advice before his second-ever F1 race... but neither you nor Franco miss the electricity crackling in the hallway outside the driver rooms.
“What makes you think I'm gonna crash it?" the Argentinian bites back, all fluttering eyelashes and wolfish smile. Unfazed, as always. Grinds your gears like little else can. "If anything, you be careful to not crash into me. Since I'm starting ahead on the grid and all.”
“Right, I forget it's your first time in Baku. You'll see what I mean soon enough, anyway.”
Your steps lead you down the hallway and to the garages mechanically, a path you've taken dozens of times, wearing different colored suits, following behind different teammates in stride. And this year's Williams blue would've suited you perfectly... if it didn't come attached with the pretentious goofball traipsing behind you.
You don't even bother looking back when you speak again. You raise your chin and brace yourself for the artificial lights of the pitlane.
“Good luck, or whatever.”
“It wouldn't kill you to be nice, you know?”
“Wouldn't kill you to know your place.”
The door handle creaks beneath your gloved hand, drowning out whatever it is Franco mutters in Spanish on the other end of the hall—”re amargada la piba esta” he mumbles to no one but himself—, and at last you are safe, at peace in the nervous bustle of a garage entirely devoted to you.
Sure, getting a new teammate midseason is a tough predicament to find oneself in: a whole new dynamic to establish, a whole routine to fall into. And newbies always get the chance to make good first impressions; not the girl who’s been sitting in the car for two years. You’d told yourself you wouldn’t mind it—Carlos Sainz will be snatching your first driver privileges next year anyway—but it would be easier to comply if the aforementioned new teammate wasn’t an annoying pain in the ass, flirting and laughing his way through the paddock with that detached nonchalance that believes everyone must be wrapped around his finger, and then having the gall to outqualify you on one of your favorite circuits. On his first-ever time there!
So yes, maybe it’s your ego taking up too much space in the tight cockpit of your Williams, obscuring your vision. Maybe it’s the disastrous grip you’ve reported twice now on the radio—Okay, Y/N, we heard that and we’ll get back to you.
Whatever it is, somewhere around lap 20, your car oversteers into a wide spin right as you enter the rapid turn. The steering wheel snaps out of your hands, and it’s like a giant strangles you with all its might for a blink of an eye, barely even a second.
You only know you’ve hit the wall—hard—from the ringing in your ears and soreness of your jaw. What used to be your front right tire lies in front of your smashed wing, rubber and carbon scattered pitifully. Your finger shakes when you lift it and press the radio button.
“I’m OK… I think.”
A flash of red catches the corner of your eye. You’re not sure if it’s from the flag being waved outside of track limits, a Haas zooming past in the corner, or… it’s hot, and viscous on your eyebrow, dripping into your eyes. You bring your hand to your forehead, where your helmet is crushed inward, just above your left eye. Smashed into your forehead.
Then everything kind of blurs together. You vaguely feel someone helping you out of the wreckage, their distant yapping about concussion symptoms not helping your light-headedness at all. You think you slip out of consciousness for the first time then, on the track still, because your next memory is of an ambulance—or what you assume to be an ambulance, you’ve never ridden in one before, and you even think to yourself this new procedure is pretty excessive from the FIA, the medical car was quite sufficient—and then it’s back to nothingness until you wake up for good on a stretcher, hooked to some sort of medical tube—perfusion?—as you’re being ushered into a quiet hospital room.
The nurse who visits you is sweet, filling in the blanks in slow, accented English. The gash to your forehead is pretty deep, but nothing the surgeon doesn’t see at least once a week! (At that, you lift a groggy hand above your brow bone, where you feel a thick bandage.) A few stitches later and you’re good as new, though the blood loss and concussion combined left you pretty weak, and justify keeping you in observation for the night. It’s just protocol, you’re probably used to hospital visits in that line of work of yours, she jokes—and you know you’ve recovered almost all your mental acuity because you get offended at that. No, you don’t usually crash. In fact, you haven’t all season…
And it had to be today of all days, in Baku… after you told Franco to not crash it.
When the nurse leaves the room with the promise she’ll be back in an hour, you let out a long, dreary sigh. Fernando Alonso’s grainy voice over the radio comes to mind. ¡Karma!
Night falls quickly outside your window with nothing to kill time but your phone. After catching up on the race results—somehow you’re too exhausted to feel irritated at Colapinto’s points finish—and posting a reassuring Instagram story for your followers, you’re left to the mercy of your ruminating thoughts. Sleep is impossible to catch; the adrenaline of the race hasn’t worn off yet, and you’ve been knocked out so long now you’re desperate to leave this stretcher.
You’ve just about decided to call the nurse for an early discharge when a shadow appears behind the door’s little windowpane, hesitates for a second, and then knocks. Medical personnel wouldn’t bother; it’s probably your family, or maybe even Vowles, or…
“Hey, how… che, estás hecha mierda.”
You tense immediately when you catch the brown waves of hair and unmistakable accent as Franco walks into your hospital room. He looks genuinely stumped, like he hadn’t expected to see you in such bad condition, so much so he forgets to shut the door behind him.
For some reason, the sight endears you. Makes you want to take him in your arms, feel his realness in this hallucinatory evening. What a ridiculous thought!
“Stop it with the Spanish,” you protest, devoid of your usual fire however. “Maybe it works on your fangirls, but not on me.”
“I said you look like shit.”
“Oh.” You look him straight in the eye, the silliness of the situation dawning on you, and against all odds you start to laugh. A real laugh, more than a chuckle, one that sends phantom pains stabbing through your sore abdomen. “Well if that’s all you’re gonna say, you can stick to Spanish! I don’t want to hear it.”
What did the nurse say about the anesthesia’s side effects? Do they include feeling a little glad and relieved to see your detested teammate? To know he’s the first person to check up on you?
Whatever the reason, you’re laughing, absurdly, and so is Franco, chuckling to himself as he closes the door and drags a chair closer to your bed. His eyes crinkle like a little kid’s, and that’s when you notice his disheveled appearance. Cheeks a little flushed, hair tousled like he’s just run a marathon, he’s wearing a crumpled-up Williams shirt, no doubt the first thing he could get his hands on after the race. It hits you then that he’s probably just off media duties, and the fact he’s alone, with no team delegation in tow, indicates he left early. Just to get to you. To make sure you were alright.
You are a competitor, but you aren’t a monster. The idea Franco couldn’t be bothered to wait for James, or anyone else, tugs at your heartstrings.
“Thank God you told me not to crash it, huh?” he teases between chuckles.
“Shut up.”
“Careful, Y/N, the budget cap is coming for you,” he wiggles his fingers over your face like a looming ghost.
You turn your head away to face the wall, huffing in exasperation, but a throbbing pain traverses your skull, and you wince. Franco’s eyes darken, smile fading into a grave expression.
You rarely see him like this outside of the helmet. It’s novel, but it’s welcome. Almost attractive, in a way.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I… My helmet smashed into my forehead. I was bleeding pretty bad, apparently, they had to stitch me up. I got concussed too. Aren’t helmets supposed to absorb these hits?”
“Concussed?” he repeats, and holds out his hand in a peace sign. “How many fingers?”
You stick out your tongue at the Argentinian, flipping him the bird.
“And now?”
“Ah, come on, don’t be so mean,” Franco chuckles, scooting a little closer to your stretcher with his chair. Unfazed, as always. But this time it doesn’t peeve you; you’re rather thankful for his cheeky banter, actually. For a moment, in the blur of cold white lights and carbon fiber debris, you’d started to fear you could lose it for good. “We were just starting to become friends!”
“That’s because I’m concussed. I don’t want to be friends with you, we’re rivals.”
“Well the whole rivals thing isn’t working very well for you lately. Maybe you’re better off being friends with me.”
You roll your eyes, but the gnawing anxiety that roars in your stomach whenever someone pits you against the rookie stays quiet for once. Perhaps you’re still under the influence of the tranquilizers… or perhaps those brown eyes holding you in their light, tender in a way you’ve never seen them before, make it harder to get mad at him.
“I’ll consider it.”
And you don’t mean it just yet, but you don’t don’t mean it. What do you even hate Franco Colapinto for? Stealing the spotlight from you just two weeks into his career? Flirting with every living being on the paddock except you? Or forcing you to up your game and face your fears?
A stabbing pain crushes your skull all of a sudden, and you shut your eyes, teeth gritted and muscles taut, to try and breathe it out… to no avail. When you open your eyes, Franco is staring at you, brows furrowed in that same serious, concerned expression that sends a wholly different type of pins and needles through your body.
“Everything alright?”
“No… The painkillers. I need another ketoprofen,” you whine, squinting your eyes against the harsh hospital lightning.
“Should I call the nurse?”
“No, they’re on the table over there,” you gesture blindly. “There’s a glass too.”
Only sounds inform you of what’s going on once you close your eyes, faint lights and colors barely piercing through your eyelids. The rustling of fabric, then someone fumbling with cardboard and pills, your sink opening, and then cautious footsteps stopping at the edge of your bed.
“Here.”
You take the pill between weak fingers and fight with all your might to sit up straight in the bed without moving your head… but the soreness and exhaustion from the race and surgery overpower you. So much for neck strength.
“I can’t,” you huff out in defeat. “I can’t tilt my head.”
“It’s okay. Take the pill,” Franco orders softly, and you put the drug on your tongue, too tired to raise the outrage of him bossing you around.
Slowly, carefully, Franco brings the rim of the glass to your lips, and you drink all that you can, training your attention on the medication going down your throat—and not on your teammate’s intense gaze fixed on your mouth, nor the proximity of your bodies or his slightly ragged breath.
“Thank you,” you exhale when you’re done.
Luckily for him, he has his back turned to you when you speak, setting the empty glass down on the table, so you don’t notice his bashful smile. He’s never heard you so docile, affable, even, and though he likes it when you bite back… it feels great, too, to know there is a way to pierce that armor of yours.
“Franco,” you call out to him, neither of you missing how this is one of the first times you’ve called him by his first name. “Do you mind… staying? Just until James or someone else gets here. It gets so boring.”
He spins on his heels in disbelief, scrutinizing you in search of mockery, or irony, or your usual callousness… but all he reads is earnest and the slightest hint of embarrassment, all he sees is your outstretched hand. So he brushes it with his, not daring to hold it purposefully just yet. Like he doesn’t want to overstay his welcome into your bubble.
“Yeah, sure. But only so you won’t get bored.”
“Of course,” you smile faintly as he sits back down on his chair. Your eyes meet in newfound amusement, maybe even temporary fondness. “Don’t go around thinking I like you.”
“Me? I would never. We’re rivals.”
You give a small appreciative nod, and after some instants of silence, clear your throat and ask him to recount the end of the race. Just as you expected, his storytelling is dramatic and entertaining, interspersed with words he doesn’t remember how to say in English and the unmissable zest of grid gossip Franco always brings to his tales. You chuckle, gasp, and pester even, as much as you can with your aching skull and limbs… and barely notice the minutes ticking by, or how you wish the rest of your team would never show up, your distaste for Franco slaking.
Maybe you can be persuaded into liking his presence, after all. So long as he stays out of the car, though… and remains your personal nurse.
… f1 taglist; @retvenkos @giuseppe-yuki (want to be added? send me an ask!)
… starring carlos sainz x f!engineer!reader
... 4.4k words
... in which carlos is an effusive, self-assured lad to every member of his team... except ferrari's head software engineer, making her wonder if he secretly hates her guts.
... based on this request
... warnings for language (minor)
... my first ever (posted) fic for carlos aaaaa (i have written A Lot More about this man because he occupies my every waking hour, but i shan't share it yet). in honor of me missing my communication networks final last week i made the reader a software engineer, but you would Never catch me willingly coding anything in c++ outside of my mandated assignments. no not even for carlos sainz jr. i have morals.
this is open for part 2 if you guys enjoy it <3
He speaks the language of princes.
It's not in anything he says, no, he's much too industrious to waste time boasting, but rather in all that he doesn't. Carlos walks into the Ferrari motorhome, with that good-natured smile and that slightly disheveled hair from the morning's cycling session, and heads bow. Not out of plight, or even obligation, but mostly because it's hard not to. His warm greetings to everyone—Ciao's and even Come stai?'s to his team members strolling down the hallways before the weekend—, his keen interest in remembering little things about engineers' and photographers' lives, his nonchalant stride around the parc fermé all force camaraderie at least; reverence to most.
Wherever the red car goes, Maranello or any other corner of the world, religion follows, and though Carlos Sainz has never quite fit into the nooks they keep for their idols—their walls are carved for Monégasque shoulders—, he's at least always carried the air of a rebel leader on unforgving land.
But if Carlos is Ferrari's bastard prince, then clearly you are a subject he would not go to war for.
Or so he makes you think, once again, on that hot Singaporean afternoon.
You hadn't meant to interrupt, really, but with only one hour to go before FP1, you needed to talk to Riccardo Adami; something about the software updates, optimization of the data acquisition systems to account for Marina Bay's sweltering heat—run for half a second too long, overheat half a degree too much, and everyone's calculations would be going to hell. So of course you'd corrected it, supervised a brand new version of your code for the weekend, for that tenth of a Celsius; competition drove you. Almost just as much as those solar eyes boring into you when you walk into the room.
"Riccardo, about the softw—oh. Carlos. Hi," you timidly trail off when Carlos' eyes meet yours.
The room gets quiet, and it is only then that you notice how much space his laugh takes. Usually, you would've recognized the accent from outside the door, the boisterous voice regaling the Fifty-fives with another funny story—how could you not, when it sends shockwaves down your stomach? He seems to have been in an animated conversation with his race engineer, but as you get closer to the two men you notice the crinkles lengthening Carlos' eyes are fading with his smile. You aren't sure he's even said hi back.
"We've changed the code for acquisition, but some loops could still cause problems with overheating, particularly the engine oil temperature sensors…" you explain, though half your attention is directed to your peripheral vision, in which Carlos sways on his two feet, averting your gaze at all costs.
But you're not a college girl with a crush, you're Scuderia Ferrari's head software engineer and so you go on with your precisions to Riccardo. What to expect during free practice, how to overshoot any nonessential sensors that might fuck up the data analysis... until, mid-sentence, Carlos excuses himself awkwardly, pats Ricky on the shoulder, and walks out of the room.
You will your face into not betraying the sudden ache in your throat. How he simply acted like you weren't there... didn't even inquire about the updates. About the race. About your flight, about how much you loved Singapore's twinkling lights, about... you.
"Xavi and Charles know this already, but we really gotta test it all now before it gets cooler for FP2," you conclude with a too-hard swallow. Back firmly turned to the door Carlos just disappeared out of.
Riccardo thanks you, offers his own insight, some banalities about the risks of rain—no, you shouldn't consider them banalities. Nothing, on a Friday, is a banality anymore; yet everything is when you remember how Carlos' entire face shuts close when you're around, how his tone quietens down, how he repeatedly and stubbornly conceals all his rays of brazenness from you.
Does he hate you? Despise you? Are you not worth his effrontery?
This is ridiculous. You're not a college girl with a crush, you're a damn senior member of the team with responsibilities and he doesn't owe you anything more or less than you him—
"Riccardo," you neither ask nor plead. "Has Carlos... said anything about me?"
"About you? Like what?"
"I don't know... but you did see he just... left while I was in the middle of talking, right? And he looked annoyed as soon as I came in." And for all that's holy, try to pass this off as mere politeness and not a heartache that is eating you alive.
"Maybe he was just bored."
"So I'm boring?"
"No," Riccardo wheezes, in uncharacteristically high spirits for the conversation. "But I've worked with a ton of drivers, and you know, they're all the same. Less time discussing boring analytics is more time they spend in the sim. Or on track. What, you think he's angry at you or something?"
"I just... don't get why he's always so guarded and distant with me but so outgoing and confident with you guys. Charles isn't like that either. It makes no sense. We're a team, all of us."
The Italian looks at you for long seconds, amusement noticeable on his features, and you would shake him up and tell him to stop giving you those pity eyes if you lacked the tiniest bit of respect for the man; instead, you frown and cross your arms.
"He'll be in a good mood tonight when we top free practice," Riccardo assures you before you can ask him if he needs anything else. "and even better tomorrow after getting pole. You can talk to him then if you want."
A smile creeps its way on your lips without you conjuring it. There it is, that loyal veneration that only men and women of the Scuderia possess. Something in those southern eyes Carlos shares with legend has made you religious, too.
"I'll hold you to that... we could all use a Singapore miracle."
Singapore is a miracle.
Surely any other team would scoff at the word, bragging that a pole position has nothing to do with miracles, that it's all meticulous teamwork and endless iterations on calculators, but Ferrari is deeply supersitious at its core. You—the centenarian team, its red-hot beating heart—don't shy away from thanking divine intervention. Maybe that's the reason why it still works.
After Carlos' last pole in Monza, the whole Scuderia had dared to dream of something different, a glimmer of scarlet in the season's overwhelming orange. Of course, an uncatchable Max had put a dampen on the fervent Tifosi's mood, but the formidable hope machine had revved back to life...
and now it's roaring in Marina Bay.
Leclerc's side of the garage claps for a hard-earned P3, but it's the Spaniard's team that erupts into cheers and rushes out into the pitlane to congratulate their hero. You stare at his lap time on your monitor with a grin—1:30.984, not even a tenth faster than his teammate—as cheerful screams, in Italian and Spanish, fill the garage; they get louder when Carlos walks back inside, grinning ear to ear and not even bothering to dodge the strong-arm pats on his head and back.
"Twice in a row, cazzo!"
"And this time you won't have Verstappen underfoot!"
"Perfect lap, Carlos, that was a perfect lap..."
"Grazie a tutti," Carlos beams, fire suit down to his waist, running clammy hands through his hair—he parts the red sea as he walks deeper into the garage, close to where you are. "I think we all did a very good job today, and now we gotta finish the job tomorrow..."
He laughs with the mechanics, a sun of fire and victory casting its rays onto the tarmac, and maybe it's the euphoria of the moment, but a sudden wind of courage rushes through your blood, and you walk up to him.
"Bravo, Carlos."
Your voice hits him like the purr of an engine in the ruckus, overshadowing any other sound; he whips his head in your direction, shiny eyes colliding with yours, and for the first time you don't back off but hold them in awe, and his smile doesn't fade, but rather shifts. To surprise, or... coyness?
"You were incredible out there, we're all so so proud of you," you praise, and the more you look at him the wider your smile grows, and the quieter the rest of the world gets.
"Thank you, Y/N," he rubs the back of his neck, his free hand fiddling with the hanging sleeves of his fire suit. "We... I couldn't have done this without you. Because, you know, the overheating, or what you were saying to Ricky before? I didn't understand everything, but at least I didn't cook to death."
Coyness? In Carlos Sainz? When he's still sweaty and panting from qualifying first? What a bizarre sight, one that makes you giggle.
The way your nose scrunches up beneath sparkling eyes is so endearing, Carlos almost feels his breath hitch in his throat, almost reaches out to lightly brush your arm, hold the steady coolness of it.
"Great, that was what we were going for, pretty much," you reply, and for a second you could've sworn he wanted to touch your arm and changed his mind, but...
you bury the idea before a craving for his warmth can nestle in your chest.
"Great," he repeats. "So, I'll... see you later," and with that he leaves you there, stranded in the middle of the garage, to be lauded by the press and fans.
You'd be lying if you said his shadow disappearing out the backdoor as quickly as it had come doesn't slice a gash in your heart—always whisked away to some important obligation, and you, like everyone else, duty-bound to pick up the pieces behind him. But this time around the cut doesn't run as deep, doesn't bleed as red; because for the first time in months Carlos talked to you, joked with you, and looked the tiniest bit glad to be doing so.
If that's how good of a mood a pole puts him in... then clearly you'd better make damn sure he wins this race.
Ferrari is deeply superstitious at its core. Maybe that much is true in any sport—when victory eludes you, athletes find obscure laws to trick themselves into believing they still retain control—, but a team so old, on which glory has rained so often, does not withstand the passage of time without a few pillars of faith. And so it makes sense that Ferrari drivers, of all people, would have their pre-race traditions.
Leclerc plays the piano on Saturday nights; you hear him every time you pass by the team hotel's lounge, his melancholy tracks grounding you in a precise time and place. Now the car is out of bounds, the comfort of your object-oriented programming and optimized lines of code off-limits; now's the time for withdrawal and rest.
Typically, you like to hang out in the lounge while Charles plays, trying to distract yourself with a book or simply basking in the music. The predictable, calculated flow of Charles' arpeggios soothes you, like lines of code running one after the other. So does the Monégasque driver's easy conversation. Although it doesn't shoot butterflies in your belly like Carlos' does... but you're not supposed to play favorites.
This Grand Prix eve is just like any other, save for the unordinary trepidation that carpets the hotel. With one of their own sitting on pole, it's obvious strategists struggle more than usual to drop the words "tire management" and "pit stops". Eager to escape the nervousness, you excuse yourself from the dinner table, and make your way to the lounge.
Charles is already there, if the usual pieces echoing in the distance at dessert are any indication, and you barely even get lost in the elegant halls before you find the lounge... though there is no piano to be heard. Maybe this hotel has two music rooms—maybe Charles went to bed early—or maybe...
maybe he's sitting on the piano stool and chatting with Carlos, wet and sleepy from his evening shower.
Neither driver notices you at first, and you stop dead in your tracks, wondering if you should just leave. You wouldn't want to intrude—intrude on what, the rational part of your brain says, but with Carlos I always feel like I'm intruding on something bigger than myself, the rest of your body answers—, but you really enjoy this unspoken tradition with Charles... and, well, this is everybody's lounge, and...
"Y/N," Charles sees you eventually and beckons you over. "Sorry, I don't think there'll be a lot of music tonight, Carlos is distracting me."
"You could kick me out anytime," Carlos remarks good-naturedly, but you don't miss how he angles his body away from you ever so slightly. The sight sends a dagger through your heart. So he actually hates you then. So you didn't breach any barrier earlier at the circuit, didn't melt any ice. So he didn't look pleased and a little excited to be talking to you.
"That's okay, I'll just head to bed then—"
"Oh no no no," Charles interrupts, "come sit with us. I was trying to convince Carlos to give the piano a go, maybe you'll be more successful than me."
"Absolutely not, mate."
"Come on Carlos, it will relax you!"
"No, you're the musician, not me. One of us has to be the sportsman, no?"
Unsure, you flick between the two men, Charles' inviting face and Carlos, who's still doing everything he can to avoid looking at you in the eye. And then you decide—fuck it. You're just as much a member of the team as he is. He cannot drive you away with his... stupid cold shoulder tactics any longer.
You take a seat on the sofa opposite Carlos, and watch in half delight, half annoyance as he turns his shoulders away from you. Though his body language appears relaxed, one leg strewn across his knee and elbows hugging the backrest, he is, as usual, going to hell and beyond to not acknowledge your presence.
Charles has the merit of lightening the mood with his jokes and fan encounters of the day: some bizarre, some endearing, because he seemingly never has a boring day in the paddock. His easy laughter mixes with the distant voices down the halls when your attention drops—too fast, too soon, as always, it's irremediable—to Carlos, the soothing scent of his shampoo and the little droplets that run down his temple whenever he shakes his head in amusement... before you know it, you're staring again, eyes shining with undisclosed heartache. Something Charles sees, and recognizes very well, with a jot of curiosity.
Charles may not be the most perceptive when it comes to these things, but he is in love too, and he'd know the signs anywhere. That's why after a little while he lets silence blow his last words away like wind does the mist, and stands up from the piano stool.
"Well, I'm going to bed," he announces with an air of conniving finality, and he smiles his crooked smile at Carlos. "Gonna need all my energy to take the lead in turn 1."
This snaps you out of your reverie. Half-gone, you bid him goodnight at the same time as the Spaniard does, and you brace yourself for his own excuse... but it doesn't come. Carlos lazily watches as Charles leaves the lounge. You don't dare to move, as if your slightest sound could remind him you're there and trigger his fight.
You would've thought a tête-à-tête with you to be Carlos' worst nightmare... but he makes no sign of leaving. And sends solar flares up your chest and throat. "Whatever problem he's got with me, he'll have it sort it out with me like an adult" sounds much more intimidating when it's so plausible.
"You think he has the slightest chance of overtaking me in turn 1?" Carlos chuckles.
You look him straight in the eye and read no resentment, not even that sheepishness from before—just relaxed delight, and the slightest hint of reddened cheeks against tan, damp skin. It takes you a second, maybe even two, to realize there's no one else in the room. He's talking to you. Joking with you.
Why is the script running without error all of a sudden, even though you changed no variables?
"Maybe," you give a noncommittal shrug and a smile. "Why not? It all depends on you."
"He can lead the first lap if he wants. That will just make it more fun to cross the finish line ahead of him after."
"You better win this one, Sainz, because I..." you start, and midway through your sentence are hit by how absolutely ridiculous you're about to sound, but he's leaned in already, intrigued by your words, and his burning gaze and strong hands fiddling in his lap have you losing all notions of propriety. "I've... coded a little something for you. If you win. A surprise. It's not much, but... yeah."
Your whole face burns deep scarlet as you trail off... and the light in Carlos' eyes darkens, then goes out completely. His smile fades back to the usual professional grimace he reserves for you. Distant. Cold. He rises to his feet.
"I should get some sleep."
Terror strikes you. Incomprehension too.
"No, Carlos, wait."
He turns his head to your outstretched hand... your pleading eyes almost rip through his heart.
"Why do you dislike me so much?"
And then his shoulders slump, like crushed by an immense weariness, and he sighs, long and hard, before his gaze falls back to yours. Those big brown eyes, gentle, compassionate, and those fingers tapping against his thigh like they're waiting for an invisible cue to reach out for yours.
"... Can we talk about this after the race?" he says, shooting daggers through your stomach.
So he didn't deny it. Didn't reassure you, tell you it's all a misunderstanding, that he bears no ill will towards you, that you're imagining things as usual and that you two could be on the best of terms if you just got out of your head a little bit.
One more time, he's running away. Sweeping everything under the rug, for just one more session, one more race, hiding behind the excuse of concentration and professionalism.
But who are you to revoke him that? It's a damn good excuse. You need to win. He needs to win. Not be bothered about... interpersonal relationships while clipping walls.
"... Alright," you concede, voice and bones all broken, glistening under your frozen skin. "But if it's something I've done, then I'm sorry. I really do... enjoy your company. And you."
"It's not something you've done," he speaks quietly. Gosh, your frailty in this moment—you, so proud and unshakable on the pit wall, so dedicated and thorough on TV, so immeasurably devoted to Ferrari, to Charles, to him... "Or, well, I guess not directly..."
If he looks into your confused, imploring eyes one more second, almost brushes your arm with his one more time, then he's done for. But he thinks he knows this already.
"I don't dislike you," he starts speaking and as soon as he opens his mouth he knows there's no stopping himself now, so he blurts it all out as quickly as he can to get it over with and hopefully bury some meaning in the pits of his accent. "Not at all. In fact I really like you. I think you're gorgeous, and smart, and clever, and fun, and every day I wish I could spend more time with you outside of races and get to know you better but then I remember that can never happen and it's so frustrating and I have the hardest time concentrating. So I just avoid you. It's easier."
Silence thick as a thundercloud tethers you to one another. He runs a hand over his face, sighing deep, and you blink. Once, twice.
You've always prided yourself on your brains—not everyone gets to be in charge of all the computing for a Formula 1 car—but right now, you are all utterly lost.
"Carlos, I... I don't get it." Or maybe you do, heart thumping in your ears, but you're too scared you might be wrong.
"In any other life I would've asked you out on a date." This time he speaks more slowly, more purposefully, too. Like he's imbuing every syllable with the depth of his confession. "But it kills me that it can't be this one."
"... Why not?" you tentatively ask after an instant, feigning not to notice how his hand is now resting on the back of your sofa, right next to your ear and neck.
"Because you're a senior engineer! That would be like... like dating Ricky. Even if you're much prettier than Ricky. But you don't need to tell him that," he adds with a nervous laugh, which you mirror; though you fall silent as soon as his hand comes to rest on your shoulder, right where your collar ends, millimeters away from your skin. His body's warring with his own words... one wants to resist, the other to give in. "What if I leave Ferrari? That's a crazy conflict of interest."
"That's a silly idea, you're not leaving Ferrari anytime soon. Are you?"
"I don't know, it's... hypothetically... you know what I mean," he exhales in defeat. His hand clasps a little tighter on your shoulder, his scent dizzying, closer than ever before. Can he feel your frantic heart thumping underneath your skin? If he keeps licking his lips like this, will he sense your breathing getting more erratic?
"I do. But... the problem is I like you too, Carlos."
If embers could burn back to life, light a hearth out of nothingness... they wouldn't shine as bright as Carlos' eyes just then.
"Don't mess with me."
"I'm not messing with you. Why wouldn't I like you?"
"Because you're not supposed to have a favorite."
"I won't tell Fred if you don't."
He laughs, a brittle but adorable little thing, like a small bird taking its first flight. If you could hear the sound more often, see that bashful smile on his handsome face more every day... you wouldn't need any other prince to die in war for.
His hand runs down your arm, his thumb lightly caressing your skin through the fabric of your shirt before he grabs your shaky hand in his.
"Now's not the best time, but... I think we've got to have an important conversation after the race tomorrow," his deep, soft tone pacifying you just as much as the abstract shapes he traces on the back of your hand.
"After you win, you mean."
"Right. After I get my surprise, no?"
"After you win," you repeat with a grin, and he squeezes your hand, smiling too. Something, deep down, tells him he'll win regardless of the race result.
"Cosa diavolo sta facendo?"
Even in spite of the roaring crowd and the bellowing V8s speeding down the straight, the dumbfounded voices around the pit wall come to you clear as day.
"Russell 1.4 behind Lando," Ricky, sitting on the other side of Vasseur, speaks into his headset.
The team principal keeps quiet, eyes fixed on the cascade of numbers and brackets on your screen. He understands before the rest of the wall what his driver is doing; and as you relay all the information you get to the race engineers, you understand it too.
"Lando .8 behind, .8 behind with DRS—Russell no DRS... Copy that."
He's doing it on purpose. Keeping Norris just close enough to shield him from the Mercs while making sure he can't catch up. You'd laugh in triumph and disbelief if you weren't gritting your teeth so damn hard, heart on the verge of exploding as the last laps tick out in a blur.
Just a few more minutes. Just a few more seconds, and the night sky over Marina Bay will explode in crimson lights...
Mechanics spring to their feet and climb the wall to the track, bumping their fists in the air. Cheers, claps, exclamations, a bouquet of red roses swaying in the wind to greet its champion at the finish line. And then, the unmistakable roar of a racecar speeding past the chequered flag at three hundred kilometers an hour. Liberation.
You spring to your feet right as the fireworks go off, yelling to the sky. Carlos won. Carlos won! Your Carlos—in the middle of Red Bull's flawless season...
"¡Vamos Fred! ¡Vamos Ricky!" Flashes of red and gold pass his high spirits by, diligently braking into the first corner.
He laughs, he screams it all out, unclenching all his muscles, woozy from the G's, from the adrenaline, from the win... from you, watching him from the pit wall. From the memory of your skin against his, your adoring eyes and the formidable lightness inside his chest that has him feeling like he's the king of the world.
In a few minutes, he'll be posing with his trophy and the team in front of his P1 plaque for the group photo, and he'll drench you in champagne—your lively laughter will fill his heart with the gold of medals. And later in the evening, before the afterparty, he'll pull you aside and tell you maybe this victory has made him reckless, and he'll kiss you senselessly like a prize he fought for.
For now, though, he's nodding his head at Lando who gave him a congratulatory wave from his car when his on-board screen lights up with an unexpected message. Glowing red letters read, "Great job, smooth operator! 🌶️" Laughter escapes him as small virtual fireworks go off on his screen... and he presses the radio button on his steering wheel.
"Did she have one of these ready for Charles too?"
A few seconds of white noise, and then, your mischievous voice, dripping with joy.
"You know me, Carlos. Never play favorites."
… f1 taglist; @retvenkos @giuseppe-yuki (want to be added? send me an ask!)
