and... time! stop the timer on how long it took between me learning about max's enjoyment of mafia docs and me implementing it into an angst fic
what can i say. it's my passion.
1.1k; mostly below the cut
(oh yeah cw for mild suicidal ideation)
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For your fifth birthday, you spend the day at the racetrack. Finally done driving dizzy circles in parking lots, Papa drives you all the way to a proper karting track, and you drive until sundown, learning the turns, getting faster and faster.
At the end of the day, you don't even realize how exhausted you are until Papa has loaded your kart into the car and you get into the back seat. You fall asleep the moment the engine starts up.
-
Another reporter shoves a microphone under your nose, asking if the reason you performed so badly today was because you didn't get enough sleep last night.
You can barely hold back your snort of laughter. What a stupid question. Any sleep at all is more than enough. You've driven through worse.
-
You lose pole position, you lose the race, you lose the championship.
Papa pulls out his stopwatch and tells you you're not getting out of the kart until you've beaten pole by two seconds.
By the time you crash into the wall, your hands are shaking so badly you can no longer turn the wheel, and you can't stop the steady stream of tears soaking into the fabric of your balaclava. You're so tired it hurts.
You find yourself wishing you'd crashed harder. Maybe an endless sleep would be better than this.
-
Kelly doesn't love the documentaries you watch, but she's still curled into your side, scrolling through her phone on the couch. You have the subtitles set to Portuguese, and every once in a while you'll ask her how to pronounce a word, and she'll snicker at the prospect of you ever needing to know how to say loan shark to her family.
There's a section about interrogation, and the narrator, in his slow, calm voice, lists sleep deprivation within the same breath as pulling out people's fingernails with pliers.
You pause the documentary and can't find the words to answer Kelly when she asks you what's wrong.
-
After all the fireworks have fizzled out, and the champagne stops spraying, and the golden confetti is being swept away, all you can think about is how tired you are.
You get on the first flight home, but though you close your eyes, you don't get a moment of sleep the whole way.
-
After Silverstone, a lot of people ask a lot of stupid questions. But if they're dumb enough to ask if you're alright after a 51g impact sideways into the wall, then they're dumb enough to believe you when you say yes.
Besides, what is alright, really? You can still drive.
GP asks you in Abu Dhabi, voice jittery even though he's clearly trying to hide it, if you slept alright last night.
You stare at him. You haven't slept a full night since you went into the wall, even though it feels like your eyelids are always on the verge of falling shut. You don't let them.
You tell him yes. What is alright, really?
You've driven through worse.
-
You close your eyes down the straight—just for half a second, long blink—and when you open them, the front of your kart is colliding with the rear of another. Your foot finds the brake too late. You can still barely hold your eyes open as you careen into the grass.
Your race is over, but you still have to force your heavy limbs to move—to clamber out of the broken kart. You don't want anybody thinking you're terribly injured and have you sent to the hospital. Papa would kill you.
On the other hand, maybe if he does, you can finally get some rest.
-
For your fifteenth birthday, you spend the day at the racetrack.
Papa shakes you awake before dawn, and you barely have time to grab a banana on your way out the door.
You start your first lap as the sun rises.
You finish your last one as it rises again.
On the drive home, your head wilts towards the window, and Papa snaps at you to keep your eyes open. You've forgotten what it feels like to have them closed.
-
Papa yells, but he sounds underwater. His nails dig harshly into your arms as he drags you back to your tent, but it feels far away. Everything is tingly and numb.
Papa is good at what he does, though. He's good at making you learn. And by the time you're loading your broken kart into the back of the van, he's found a way to make you feel his hands.
You wipe the drops of blood off your kart before shutting the boot.
-
You stop blinking behind the wheel.
-
When Papa doesn't accompany you to races, he never pays much attention to time zones. He'll call you at 2am, or 3, or 4—whatever works best for him.
When you were younger, you set a special ringer for him so you'd always wake up when he called.
Nowadays, the only people allowed through your phone's Do Not Disturb are Kelly, Vic, and Mama. Even so, they never interrupt your sleep.
-
Your definition of alright, for as long as you can remember, has been based on your ability to drive.
Sometimes, you think that you'll only stop being alright when you're dead.
-
Standing on the second step, you scowl, sharp contrast to the smiling faces to your left.
Down below, parents and team members cheer and clap, with pride and politeness both, but your eyes find the one man out of place. In the middle of the crowd, Papa's steely eyes are locked onto you, even as he speaks on the phone.
No doubt, he's cancelling your hotel reservation. You'll be driving the van home across Europe instead of sleeping tonight.
-
The moment your head is in Mama's lap, and her hand is carding through your hair, you're out like a light.
When you wake up, creases pressed into your cheek, sleep sticking to the corners of your eyes, you feel more rested than you have in twenty years.
-
For your twenty-fifth birthday, you spend the day at the racetrack.
The sticky Singapore heat cradles you, suffocating even as the sky goes dark.
You don't finish either practice session in the lead, but once the day is over, a chauffeur drives you back to your hotel room, and you go to sleep.
-
Sometimes—rarely—Lily's cries wake you up in the middle of the night.
You don't mind. The tiredness isn't painful when it's for her.
And besides. You're much more well-rested these days.
sorry but once you notice how often ppl use a southern accent as shorthand for being unintelligent you can never unsee it. classism is baked so deeply and why are you acting like anyone who talks the way my grandfather talks is stupid.
2016 was kind of like. brocedes were a couple endlessly getting into arguments. seb was the unlicensed therapist deliberately stirring them up. and max was the kid that kept breaking into the room to show off his hot wheels
I Will Always Love You — Dolly Parton // Always Only You — Chloe Liese // Down in the Delta — directed by Maya Angelou // You Deserve — Olya Barnett // Moony Moonless Sky — Fatima Aamer Bilal // The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova // Essays in Love — Alain de Botton
dailybridgerton
snowghoul
janainaart
theartofmadeline
origamiaround
