↻ FLIP FLOP: send me a scene from one of my fics and I’ll describe or write it from another character’s POV!
I would like to know Carlos thoughts when he realized:
"Lando is… this is it yes?" and Lando confirms:
"I told myself… that it had to end or I had to ask you to choose me. And I know you can't. So…"
Keep the Car Running
Is this a good time to mention I am on my period? I am going to fucking cry writing this AHHH okay
Carlos is very aware, as Lando guesses, that this is the last time they will see one another.
"I have been knowing this is coming," Carlos says quietly, but with purpose, each syllable carefully pronounced. "You have been so far away this last year."
And they are very much on the same page of not wanting to talk about it until the end of the trip so that they don't both spend four days crying. So that final night, Carlos is packing his bag just wondering when it is going to happen. If one of them will say something tonight or they will wait until the morning for any sort of goodbye.
And then Lando confirms:
"I told myself… that it had to end or I had to ask you to choose me. And I know you can't. So…"
And Carlos gets emotional, not because he didn't know it was coming (he has had months since Mallorca to come to terms with the fact that he knows Lando is being torn apart, planned this trip knowing it was their last, etc) but simply because it's an end. If his reaction to leaving Ferrari was anything to go off of--and because I am always going to put a bit of myself into characters--Carlos is a crier at a final moment, doesn't want to end a chapter. And this a significant chapter end, the end of the greatest love affair of his life.
Part of his tears also come from the confirmation that if Carlos was able to choose Lando, that Lando would want him too. And of course that was all insinuated when Lando told Carlos ily and Carlos said it too in Mallorca, but sometimes hearing something spelled out makes it have so much more meaning than just knowing.
They don't say "I love you" at all in this scene, but it's in every piece of dialogue and every moment and action from the two of them, really beginning with Lando saying:
"This was… everything. You have to know," Lando chokes out past the lump in his throat.
And this is sort of the beginning of Carlos's undoing in this scene, how he crumbles and needs Lando so badly. This night is sort of Carlos's final breakdown, and Lando keeps it together-ish until the morning when he has his own.
Across the fic, Carlos changes a lot (they both do). Carlos goes from just being the sugar daddy that Lando is so hot for, to having this deeply emotional arc. After his drunken break down in Amsterdam, his character changes a lot and he will show Lando so much more of how he cares and how much he's tortured by the predicament he is in with his wife and family. This scene when Carlos cries himself to sleep on Lando is the culmination of that, the character who started off as a suave business man broken down to the characterization a lot of people give Lando. But Carlos has demons, is bent and tortured and backed into a corner. He knew this day would come even though he of course doesnt want it to, but he doesn't fight Lando because he understands it is what they both need given the fact that they can't truly be together.
