Heyy, hope you’re doing well! I was wondering if you had any more thoughts on Brake Balance gewis? Do they start dating eventually?
I’ve tried to answer this like three times but tumblr kept deleting it, then it sat in my drafts for 8 months because you know what, it's been a year, it really has.
Brake Balance, my longest fic, for anyone new here, and probably what I'm best known for? I dunno, 25k of porn-age gap-one night stand-trans-fic tends to define people.
Originally the fic was actually supposed to have a mildly different ending. It really was meant to end with a much more open question as to what they were- I even wrote that ending! The plan was to delve into a sequel all about how their fling would continue across the following season as George adjusted to his Williams seat, Lewis winning his 6th title, and how their friends with benefits style relationship would continue and effect those things, while Lewis pined quietly and George also pined, but handled it much better.
But as I was finishing up the original I realised just how much I was committing to with that, when this fic had already months to wrap up, and that writing the open ending actually made me kinda sad. It just felt a bit cruel, to leave them hanging like that, especially when a sequel actually happening was a bit of a low likelihood. So I changed it and made lewis kind of lean instead into a more open ended acceptance. I didn't really need to define WHAT they were going to be, because...don't make major life decisions post coitus, but they're going to be something.
Eventually they'd sort of start texting over the off season very casually, and let that evolve into hanging out casually when the season resumed and Mercedes has them in the same place. It would be weird! George is so young and Lewis is uncomfortably aware of that at times, he feels excruciatingly aware of how he has routines and things he follows through a decade on the grid and George is fresh and new and just.. not accustomed to that. Lewis feels a bit like he's not letting George develop on his own, and George worries somewhat that Lewis find him cumbersome or a drag. They'd talk about it, because you kind of have to, and Georg would reinforce firmly Lewis can't make his choices for him, but also that he accepts he's gonna need to do some stuff on his own.
The more he DOES go out and seek on his own, the more relaxed they actually start to feel. George has stuff to share and talk about when they do fall into bed together at various races, and Lewis doesn't feel like he's robbing a cradle or... grooming George in some way. It works better. They don't really have a label for what they are, but Lewis stops sleeping with anyone else, much to the general surprise of the paddock, though nobody is sure why (and they won't figure it out for a long time, bc I think those two know how to keep a secret and I hate that trope). At most Valtteri knows, because he's watched George go tumbling out of Lewis' motorhome at 5am in Silverstone, but frankly he wants to know as little about what's going on there as possible. He just rolls his eyes when Lewis asks Shov casually not casually where George finishes in any given race in debrief.
And it continues like that! Casual until it's not casual anymore, and the older George gets, the more comfortable Lewis feels. Until they do eventually have to tell Toto, and he turns a colour Lewis has never witnessed before eventually telling them to be adults about it. Neither of them tell him quite how long they've been together.
