cw: a lil angsty but not so much.
Daniel does his best to believe Max when he says, “with us, nothing of course will change.”
It’s like, 90 per cent of the reason he can go out with Max in Suzuka, where he couldn’t last year, in Abu Dhabi. That, and the fact that there’s been a whole year of Daniel being shit and Max loving him anyway, like maybe being a race winner wasn’t a big a part of his appeal as Daniel first thought.
Except, he knows, okay. He was there, standing on the top step alone, feeling like some kind of god as champagne showered down on him, and Max beamed up at him from the crowd, mouth split in a smile. In the driver’s room after too, sweaty, Max on his knees kissing the arch of Daniel’s foot, like his own kind of shoey that he wanted to drink straight from the source. In the paddock and in private, both times looking up.
Daniel has fuck all reasons for people to look up to him now.
Yet, Max still does.
From his knees in the bathroom stall, the third club of the night, right after he lets Daniel taste a WDC victory the only way he’ll ever know it; as champagne sucked from Max’s skin.
Three months later, from his exercise mat, rolled out on the porch of Daniel’s ranch. Daniel poking his side with a socked foot, asking why he isn’t ready for the barbeque at Michelle’s house.
Four months after that, sat on their couch with his head in Daniel’s lap, eyes fond as he lets Daniel explain for the fourth time why, ‘no Maxy, Daenerys can’t just ride her dragon to kings landing and kill the queen who fucks her brother.’
Max keeps looking, and keeps seeing something that Daniel thinks faded from his reflection long ago, because each time he looks in the mirror all he sees is that he’s older. Daniel keeps waiting for the day he falls from the pedestal of Max’s desire, for the moment sense outweighs devotion.
It doesn’t come.
Daniel keeps designing merch, keeps feeding Jimmy and Sassy too many biscuits, keeps hiking with his friends and Max keeps coming home to him after races.
They still fuck, they still fight, but more than anything they still laugh. Maybe even more than before, when they shared a grid, and it makes Daniel’s head spin to think about, because flying home from Abu Dhabi, he wasn’t sure he ever would again.
“I am glad, of course, I found you very early,” Max tells Daniel from a balcony in Ibiza, the beginning of summer break two weeks behind them, the end two weeks in front. Daniel has wondered, idly, if it wasn’t for Max, would he still track the calendar so closely.
“Oh?” He asks, taking a sip of wine. Max is drinking a beer, and Daniel has been enjoying watching him lick at his wrist where the beads of condensation run each time he lifts it to his lips.
“Yes,” Max says, and sometimes with him, that’s all you get. But he’s tipsy, so he’s continuing, “to spend your life with the person you want most, it is special.”
And when he says things this way, so earnest, so Max, Daniel is a fucking believer.
