Work Text:
They had flocked to the stairs as he climbed them, the mechanics, a crescent of restless bodies and eager eyes and the afterburn of spent fuel.
Give us a smile, they urged him. Give us a smile, baby.
Curious of them to ask, really, because he gave them time and flesh, from the better part of every passing year to his very life whenever he eased into the cockpit, willing his body to inhabit the car and his psyche to steer it. Why was it a smile they especially wanted?
He’d waved them off, he’d tried. A casual greeting, a practiced bob of the head. They kept insisting, near cooing, a desperation belying the innocence of the moment. It was a smile they wanted, and they wanted it from him, and he thought he could understand—if the team was a ship, then he was its figurehead, mounted at the bow, holding serene through the splitted, breaching waves.
Of course they would look to him when the seas grew ill-tempered. Should he smile, they might succeed in pretending that the lashings against the hull were salt erosion, nothing more.
And when had he not given them everything? He met them as they reached for him, an obliging tilt of the lips, a laugh to follow. It would fill their sails with winds enough, but in the brief snatches of quiet the hospitality afforded him he would revisit that moment and come to recognize the wretched gulf between what they chose to say and what they didn’t.
Give us a smile, it was.
Give us a win, it was not.
When they force the engine to life—because there is no coaxing it, not as it is, not as it had been—he stands by, racesuit undone, looking on in silence as it pulses out a wailing shrill. Its roar is gone, and not even by halves. The absence of that defiant, snarling sound may jar him to the bone if this is his first time hearing it, but this is the third round going, an exacerbation of past miseries made still more apparent.
Melbourne saw Max with an unfortunate snap of the rear that, compounded with Isack wringing out a second-row start, meant they departed with their true pace somewhat unknown. Singapore was a horror of its accord, but could have remained an anomaly. Suzuka takes these hopes and dashes them against a cragged shore. The circuit is no longer loyal, in his mind’s eye its turns made languid where they once were blinding, chafing at the overlay, a stumbling-block.
It had been another weary night for the engineers, he knows, another frantic effort to cobble together a balanced setup, pitching from one extreme to its opposite. The ordeal sapped them, yet that agony is meager compared to what seizes them now, seeing for themselves what little difference the upgrades make—so promising, so pitiful.
Max’s hands drift to settle at his hips, brushing the line of his ribs through the fireproofs as they do. He’s getting narrower, people whisper, can’t you see it the jut of his clavicle, the cut of his shoulders? Is the hollowing of his face in response to the car, woefully heavy?
Subtle of them. Max scoffs. If hollow is what they want, they should look him in the eyes. The catch with that is the press are more hounds than lapdogs, ragdolling and riling him in equal measure for clarity, jests, a slip of character, if they and their payrolls are fortunate. Should they stumble across an open wound, they pry the gape further rather than stitch it shut, soldier over nurse. To blame them is foolhardy—their coffers are fuller if they do, that is all it is, but it just as much means they have no interest in looking him in the eyes; rather, the closeness of his mouth to their microphones is their honest concern.
No matter. He will sharpen if the car refuses to, and even if it eventually does. They cannot afford to be mismatched, each the other’s blade, and in better times they were a blistering comet, a tongued flame trailing whitened coals, a bane of the prancing horse and the three-pointed star. In recent years, the orange speedmark. The script tends to write itself.
By God! they seethe.
What god? he asks.
Those had been the early days, the winning days. Such things are beyond few and far between now. Their garage, third in the pit lane, falling short of its place in the order. A rising sun and its twin bulls caught between the three-pointed star, the prancing horse. The orange speedmark far ahead, tipping the spire.
What is it their rivals say? We approach every season as if we lost the one before, or something like it. Not the best phrasing, surely, and safe to say hadn’t landed well at the time, but if it softens the blow of losing their crown, then they won’t see reason to take it back.
All of this to say that no, he doesn’t cover his ears as the car awakens. Why should he? The sound is that of a butchered creature, not a dangerous one, there is nothing worth shielding himself from.
It no longer roars as it was meant to, and on his helmet the lion and stars are a hammer blow, a brand at the crown of his skull. Max refuses to flinch, but something must leach into his gaze regardless because suddenly there is a hand at his nape. GP, sidling near.
“You look as if you’re standing vigil,” he informs Max, even-toned and unreadable. At least that alone will never change.
“Am I not,” Max replies, lilting downward just enough that it can be a question or a statement. He will let GP interpret it as he wants.
“You’re offering chum to the sharks, mate. Sending signals. They’re already on you for—well.”
Well, indeed. Max turns the matter over: a fair question spoken with malice, a smirk behind a notepad and lens. He’d been as frank as possible about the whole situation, but framing was framing and the press often protected their own, censorship and flagrant and toys out of the pram. That script is old and also writes itself—he, Max, a lit fuse of splintering patience that torches bad inquiries to ash. Like the slash-and-burn method used on pockets of tropical forest.
Perhaps he is baiting the reporters again, badgers to honey or cavalrymen to a dragon or better yet, he is the actual flame, red skies and savaged fields in his wake.
But their plight will get out whether he covers his ears or not. The process is hastened because he does not, yes, but the signs are already there. To flee smoke is to fall into fire.
He considers telling GP this, but they share thoughts as they do air. There is no need to speak in place of quiet understanding.
Instead, he unfurls himself from the corner, says, “It is, of course, not up to me what they choose to do.” Then adds, “I am here to race. They know that, or should.”
GP’s fingers, still cupping the fine bones of his concealed throat. They press in once, then lift away.
“Right,” he says. “Chin up, then.”
At the mouth of the garage, the engine’s clamor rises to a nocturnal, drawn-out wail. In the room beside theirs, another car, accented teal, a snarling wolf on its wing—but this one is meant to howl.
Here is the thing about Mercedes: it assumes many forms and plays them equally well. To him, it appears as a vengeful ghost. It steps as he does, prowling on with hope and mulish persistence in its breast. In truth, it’s another ship charting a course in his direction, his face in its spyglass. If it is to have its way, Max will agree to be their figurehead, but then what does that entail for George and Kimi? Are they ill-suited for the task, two cabin boys squabbling in the captain’s quarters?
Ah, but there isn’t any doubt who the captain is.
So the three-pointed star trails after him, it a compass and he its lodestone, but it has a child’s enduring petulance. Max isn’t blameless for this. He’s led them on as much as they haven’t let him go. Courtships go unanswered, but also unrejected, and to them that is enough. So long as the vision of him in black—throat-to-ankle and embellished with silver, his radio transmissions teal in place of cornflower—does not die, they will cling to it like prophets.
Of course, they’ve gotten better at hiding their eagerness, occasionally denying it outright: when things seemed at their worst last season, his home race reduced to damage limitation and the championship lead a hundred points adrift, Max had waved a dismissive hand to the rumors, but so had Toto, the both of them insisting with equal poise that there were no negotiations, each content where he was.
A lie, and a convincing one, even as Max felt his shoulders still glistened with sea foam and gin, the yacht in the waves and potential contracts on every speculating tongue. Even now he can peer into the reflective glass of a washroom or vanity and glimpse the freckles across his nose from the Sardinian sun.
Toto is good at lying, to a fault. He may be deceiving the tabloids again with claims so bold they go beyond cheap fabrication. He’s pleased, he says, pleased with his car, his team, with his boys. With George. The man drives like a dream, and Toto wants to sign him until 2037, if he can. There would be nothing better, and he isn’t looking for outside names, no matter the reputations they carry.
But what of Max?
What of him?
Surely you have to consider signing him, after all that’s happened. All this time and especially since—
It is not on the table for now. I am happy with what I have, who I have.
Toto is good at lying, but he isn’t perfect. It’s impossible to say for certain whether it’s a mistake, that ‘for now,’ or an asterisks and footnote for Max to read into, to be watchful of. In rattling the latch but not quite closing it, Toto is letting the window hang open.
There’s an odd sort of poetry there, the team vying for his attention offering him a way in, while the team that lays claim to him is careful to leave him a way out. Helmut and the regulations and that much-discussed exit clause. We can’t keep him here if the situation worsens, or something like it. They say, the skeptics, that he’s selling his soul to Red Bull, answering to the wrong Oracle, but they cannot understand that if he cuts his heart out for them, they do the very same for him. The exchange is not one-sided; never has been.
It doesn’t take a storybook fable to tell Max that the loyalty he has with them and they with him, so effortless that it borders on the instinctive, is an oasis in the rough. For all the talk of him being an unpolished gem, it is the mechanics and engineers and strategists and bosses that whittle him into something gorgeous and sought-after. They grant him wings, he braves the leap. The feathers he sheds either track his fall or flag his ascent.
Oh, yes, he’s an investment—that is as good as scientific fact. But the bond goes deeper than shattering expectations. He’s called it family before. If given the chance, he will do so again, until the end, after and always.
But how to explain this to an outsider? Can it even be done? Shall he go mad trying? It’s an honorable thing to accept a strenuous fight, but sometimes it’s best to leave the improbable to those who have yet to learn to pick their battles wisely.
Toto is a wise man, Max thinks. Either he can see the situation for what it is or he simply doesn’t care, assumes that if he asks at the right place at the right time with the right words, he can sway Max to his cause and keep him there for a good while yet.
Hardship is no foreign thing. Max doesn’t spook when it rears its head, digging in his heels to outlast the storm. He knows how to hold down a fort. Toto knows just as well how to siege it, beginning with that ‘for now.’ Saying he wants George for the next decade means nothing because he’s lied before and Max won’t even be around by then, he’s said as much. George’s contract is set to unspool by the year’s end.
Max’s face, kissed by the sun, the gulls and the sea and a wife’s laughter as her husband moves toward him, stands by him, suggests a barebones negotiation. A perhaps in the air, maybe two, maybe ten.
Mercedes is a vengeful ghost. Toto is a wise man. Max has bound his own hands. They each have unfinished business.
In the eaves, Sardinia is impatient, he’s sure of it.
To love something, to love it truly, is to refuse to be blind to its faults.
When Max visits the factory it’s out of sorts, in a way. It wasn’t in anyone’s plans for him to return so soon, but they reach for him and let their touches linger as adoring masses caress a living saint or a passing coffin. When the year was young and no one knew where their rivals were at and liveries were consigned to dubious show cars, he most resembled the saint, but now, stagnated in the midfield and sparring with past bottom-feeders, he feels their hands at his shoulders, his waist, the small of his back where his coat tapers in and the emblem of the twin bulls sits, blotting out the rising sun. They smother him.
He can sense their grief, a souring haze, and leans into their gentle, insistent fingers—almost as if they are trying to apologize through skin-to-skin contact alone: sorry on his hair, sorry on his nape, sorry on his thighs. Perhaps they are too unsettled to say the shameful part aloud, fearing his discouragement. It reminds him of Abu Dhabi, abrupt and vivid. Lando, fists aloft. Kimi, silent on the comms, realizing that it came down to two points in the end, blaming himself. GP at the pitwall, head bowed, face salted with tears.
It is more than a bit ironic that Max, who at that moment had lost what he had fought an entire season for—bleakly at first, ruthlessly by the end—was the voice of comfort to them all. Don’t be too disappointed, he’d said, and then, I’m definitely not.
Make no mistake, Max was saddened, too, but it was because of the sight of a familiar navy-saffron-crimson sea of faces he’d grown to love as he would family so dejected because they simply dared to hope for miracles.
And if they felt they failed him then, they most definitely feel magnitudes worse now.
He doesn’t contest that their car is wretched, doesn’t bother. He doesn’t lash out, either. He says his piece, offers suggestions when he can, and pointedly does not mention how hard the ride is on his hands. At his hips, his wrists are coy and unassuming. Instead, he looks Laurent directly in the eye and takes a stab at a joke he heard once, the French more foreign that he would like. Ah, but Max ought to expect that if he only speaks it when drunk.
In turn, they collectively pledge to make headway, to wring performance out of unexpected places, to deliver him the package he deserves. Max gives them crinkled smiles, listens with patience, and believes them, but leaves still feeling rather like a wanderer who doesn’t recognize the stars he was taught to navigate by.
There’s a myth that goes like this: Gaia, tired of Zeus’ unchallenged rule, pours her wrath into a final, monstrous child, and that many-headed bringer of strife descends on Olympus and her king with a fury unmatched. His name is Typhon, and he does what none before him have managed to do—he defeats Zeus. Tears out his sinews, stripping him of his thunder and bolts, paralyzes him. It looks for all the world and the worlds within the world that Gaia has finally triumphed, and she has—then in flits Hermes.
Do not underestimate this god, or at least, do so at your own peril. He is a trickster and messenger, yes, but also far, far more—protector of thieves and orators and shepherds and athletes, boundaries and language and wit and commerce, escort to the departed and patron of speed. His son, famed for reversing death. His mother, famed for outfoxing a queen. Ingenuity runs in ichor and blood, so long as part of it is his.
Hermes is a god who is everywhere, omnipresent, noticed only in his absence, for he seems inevitable, forgone, a constant stirring of air, everyplace and noplace at any given instant.
It is Hermes, face kept in shadow by his helmet, that retrieves those sinews, seizing lightning in his bare fists, restoring the might of the storm to his weakened father. It is Hermes, with his winged sandals and ruthless, cunning mind, that prevents the palace in the mountains from crumbling to powdered marble.
Max is no god. He wouldn’t be a good one, anyhow. It is already strenuous to be a figurehead, ravaged by salt and pounded by testy waters. Yet he looks at the slogan emblazoned on his sleeves, the flowers on his booties, and cannot help but imagine those winged sandals, swift and dependable, only it isn’t enough.
He misses out on pole by a lifetime, his streak of four in a row withering away, just as a different streak of four came to an end in Abu Dhabi not so long ago. In this myth, Zeus stays defeated. Hermes does the unthinkable, stumbling as the lightning scorches his palms until he cannot stand the pain and forfeits them to the vastness below. Typhon shapes a throne from the ruins of the mountain, settles in, and gloats. In his place, who wouldn’t?
Toto intercepts Max on his way to the hospitality, and he’s—quite cordial. It shouldn’t be surprising, but it is. In past days, when Christian still wandered the pitlane, it was business as usual to catch him trading blows with Toto as the crowds parted around them, two bats out of hell locked in a squabble. Both are gifted orators, but fiercely petty.
Max is, of course, not Christian, but when Toto approaches and it becomes clear that he’s after Max, not the paddock exit, the staff around Max bristle, but give the two of them a wide berth. To meet Toto’s gaze is to cant his head back, but Max does so without complaint, falling into step beside him as they amble together by parc fermé.
Toto doesn’t immediately speak, but he doesn’t have to. It’s made plain enough when, still walking in tandem, they pass the Mercedes garage with its twin cars, still wolf-winged and dominant. Toto’s brows arch faintly, and Max obediently glances over them, prototypes of a cycle he loathes, but admittedly, getting on top of the regulations well.
Well is sandbagging, really. They have been near-perfect aside from the race starts, and when half the garage stumbles, the other is there to collect.
But while Mercedes’ progress is surely vindication for Toto, that is not what he has brought Max here for; no, if he were to rub salt in anyone’s wound it would be Christian, but Christian isn’t here and probably won’t be, if the rumors about Alpine’s stakes are true.
Max briefly remembers Pierre, sighs. Even he has something to be delighted about.
So they regard the cars in silence, Toto and himself.
“Congratulations,” offers Max at length.
“Yes,” Toto says. “I am sorry about your . . . retirement.”
In this context he means the Ford unit and not anything else, yet he still treats the word like it’s poison. It probably is. Max just shrugs.
“It is nothing we cannot fix,” he says, because that is what you are meant to say to an opponent, to the press, to anyone who will pounce if the façade threatens to split apart. “And the point is, of course, that there can only be one winner at the end. Kimi’s earned this.”
“He has. We’ve made sure he knows how proud we are.”
“That’s good,” Max says, and ignores the strangeness in Toto’s gaze. The boy deserves his place in the history books, and if Max were able, he would have radioed in to say his piece, to sing some praises himself. Anyone would do the same.
But that’s the actual dead ringer, no? Toto sought him out and led him here to remind him, unspoken: This could have been yours. Max supposes he can understand. Even more so if Toto has also seen the freckles from Sardinia. Would he mention them, or leave that unspoken, too?
Instead, Toto wants to hear what he thinks, and Max assumes that it’s the cars he’s asking about, sleek-bodied and star-flecked.
“Lovely,” he says, admiring the silver fletching behind their cockpits, arrows in the quiver.
“Lovely,” Toto echoes, but his gaze is elsewhere.
Max thinks he feels the heat of it, but does not turn to meet that warmth.
It’s Kimi who finds him, because he always does, and it’s Kimi who is soaked to the bone with champagne instead of them both, the way it had been at the tail end of last season when Max had carved swathes from his deficit and Kimi had put his midway slump behind him. They had fallen into a sort of routine, Max taking the checkered flag, Kimi nipping at his heels somewhere behind, then bounding over to him when the race is done to chat, to clasp hands, to blow kisses to the crowds. It was like that in Brazil, Vegas, Qatar and the ire that saw Kimi emerge from the onslaught to be despondent in their private messages. Max had sworn a little, cheering him up before Abu Dhabi began to strangle him again.
They walk as he and Toto did, their steps in tandem, Kimi’s unoccupied hand resting on Max’s waist, chaste and instinctive. The boy was tactile—perhaps since he was so young.
“I saw your onboard,” Kimi admits, as if they all don’t watch each other’s recordings, dissecting them, sifting for clues. “That lunge you were doing on Pierre, on that last lap. It would have worked.”
Would, not should. Max peers at him, says, “It was a long shot. Then I locked up and it was over.”
“You timed it so well,” Kimi goes on, “and you said it yourself, later, that you were faster than Pierre, even if by a little. It would have worked, you would have passed him, and then—”
“And then what?” Max prods, gently. “A seventh instead of an eighth? It is not so great of a difference when you are in the pack, not ahead of it.”
Kimi takes a lurching breath. “A lot can change in the last few laps. I really thought it would happen this time.”
His eyes are round, earnest, his protests well-meaning, but Max cannot shake the inkling that Kimi is somehow ashamed of his victory today. Why that is so is beyond him. You cannot be expected to make sense of what is not meant to make sense.
“Getting on the podium wasn’t possible for me,” he explains. “Not even close. If I had managed to pass Pierre, I still would have to clear two McLarens, a Ferrari, and your teammate before I could get within range of Charles, and that wasn’t possible, either.”
It’s rather frank of him to say the hard part aloud, that there are three frontrunning teams, not four, but Kimi had led them all today—he knows that better than anyone. He doesn’t need Max to break it to him, but is acting like he wants that to be the case, or at least—
“It would have been nice if it was,” Kimi murmurs, wilted shoulders and curled fists. His blunted nails dig into Max’s hip where his hand stays anchored, but it doesn’t bring pain. He’s cautious.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Max replies. “It would have been one more thing for you to worry about.”
At that, Kimi shakes his head, vigorous and spattering them with champagne foam. “I wouldn’t have worried,” he insists. “I wouldn’t have worried a bit.”
Max snorts and it isn’t very dignified but it does the trick somehow and Kimi perks up, expression brightening, then he grins at Max, melon-wide so his canines can be seen, and Max is thinking of wolves, again.
If Kimi is an open book, then George is a partial inscription kept under lock and key. He’s been ambivalent to the limit, headache-inducing, and the two things Max has bothered to be certain of are these:
George had complained of rotten luck during and after Suzuka, but really, what would he know of bad fortune?
George had wanted to take the title fight to Max, not Kimi or Lewis or Charles or Oscar or even Lando.
It isn’t as if George tells him any of this, but some things are easy to parse out, a breadcrumb trail in the woods. It also isn’t as if Max will—how to put it?—lash out if he isn’t afforded a worthy package. They will fundamentally never comprehend each other. George has been chasing a shot at the championship his entire career, clawing his way from one team to another, sniffing out competitiveness like a bloodhound. Max is proof of reversed expectations, a driver staying instead of leaving, despite the direness of the situation, long after the rest of the team is gone.
He had spotted George earlier, stalking off and away from the media pen, cap pulled low over his face; beneath its brim, the stern, even set of his mouth. A closed, tight line. For a beat, he remained unnoticed, then George had flinched his head upright and spotted Max right back, his stare flicking in a triangle between the leaping bulls at the hollow of Max’s throat and wrists, pupils slitting.
George isn’t necessarily a wise man, but he is an envious one, and envy makes fools of men more than it does men of fools. It takes those who dream of preying on greater things and deafens them to what will ruin them, eventually.
When he affixed Max with that almost-glare, George was probably picturing a racesuit that is black-teal in place of navy-cornflower. It’s a detrimental state to house his mind in, but he appears to be like Toto in that sense—neither can bring themselves to let go.
Oh, and Isack is upset, too. He’s snappish and discontented and rails against the world with barbed shouts and outraged hands. He feels betrayed that his promotion is not what was sold to him.
It’s a curious thing, that his case is arguably the least appalling compared to those who braved the second seat before him.
He faces the press, of course he does. They are not nearly as ginger with the word retirement as Toto was. Toto is there, in fact, there at the far side of the pen, and quite by chance Max meets his eyes over the gulf of the masses. He doesn’t look away as he fields questions, adopting a what will come will come and we shouldn’t fight it when it does sort of attitude. He probably also advises them not to pity him, but no one will.
During this, Toto hasn’t moved. He is still where Max left him, in myriad ways, and it’s like a pendulum suspended mid-swing—one man contemplating his future’s end, and the other, for all intents and purposes, insisting on the security of his. They are standing by an avenue that either is closed or tapers into a fork, a choice to be made.
The questions shift; they want to know what can be done to ensure that he stays, and if the changes he preaches for are too great.
Max reckons that if he were given somewhere to stand, he would move the earth.
They know what to do, is what he tells them. It is all he can tell them—salt first stings the figurehead, and he swears he can taste it, nestled in his teeth.