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It wasn't the sky that killed Icarus, but the ocean.
Charles is drowning in a post-race haze, chained within the liminal boundaries of a random party and shackled with the wings of people's expectation. Everything feels and tastes like a mirage but he can't be too sure about that. His senses are busted, overloaded and his insides are spilling over in glorious technicolor.
He's not sure where he is in the way that a friend of a friend pulled some strings and now he's slingshotting whatever is given to him with no chasers, merging with the crowd and ignoring how his vision is all red, red, red - in his kingly drapes, in anger, in blushing cheekbones. He has won so much, he has lost even more and throughout it all one thing stands true - nothing ever truly settles in your gut if you give too much of a fuck about it.
Charles' relationship with racing is complicated at best, simple at worst. He can explain in detail every single aspect he is drawn to, how it rejuvenates him, how it fulfills this cavern inside of him bearing the shape of a path constructed with marble and ritual sacrifices. The simplicity of it, on the contrary, is what becomes too big for his body. Sometimes racing is nothing more than himself, the car and the weight of everything else bearing down upon him like a biblical storm. He has dedicated everything to racing; he breathes it and when it becomes corrosive it eats him up from the inside, mercilessly and all-encompassingly.
He can dissect his heart with surgical precision, pinpoint and compartmentalize what aches and how it burns and turn it into birdsong. As such, he is immune to the enchantment of the words he puts out towards the world. That's why Charles has a first-place seat to the tempest of his unfiltered emotions - he can taste the bitter tang of defeat, can smell the metallic projection of stale rage, can cut his feet on the eventual repentance his team has prepared for him. Everything feels directionless and simultaneously constricting. Predestined.
God, Charles should've eased up on the shots. He shotguns another.
He made the rounds - he curled his fingers in belt loops, he licked salt off of fingers and hands and wrists, he slotted his limbs in the sea of endless others but he still feels restless. Charles isn't stupid nor naive to think a concoction of getting blackout drunk and artificial closeness will purge the causticity in his arteries but usually it will accommodate it, expand the borders of what his body can endure, make it feel justified and euphoric when indulged.
Charles wishes he could say fuck you with his whole chest to the person who just dislodged his shoulder blade. Charles wishes he could press the throttle and it will give in, indefinitely. Charles wishes he knew what he's searching for but it's not here, in this suspended pocket of time with the neon gaze of the strobe lights refracting teeth and bite marks and empty husks of nitrous oxide. It's not here where there's too little space, too much distance. His surgical precision is failing him and that almost feels like an omen.
Someone's hips bump into his and Charles finds himself suddenly navigating a crowded hallway, holding onto the slowly disintegrating walls around him and feeling the peeling wallpaper under his nails. He is searching for something, he is escaping something, he is suspended in abeyance. He ends up half-slumped against a door, carrying the cloying scent of giggles and belonging from beyond what feels like a steel veil. Charles' forehead hits the door with too much naked resignation and he runs a careless hand through his messy hair, takes in his static feet and his cherry liquor soaked lips and realizes he can't really pinpoint where his limbs end and this haze begins. His body feels light like a feather, heavy like a crown and he distinctly ponders what's worse - to spin with the world or to be a fixed point.
Suddenly, Charles snaps taut like a wire. He's reminded of his feet on the ground and it's so jarring and disarmingly foreign. He doesn't hear any steps but their presence is loud, cutting through the overarching haze and it's —
"You know," starts Max, almost off-handedly, "I'm pretty sure it's bad manners to let people scrape the remains of their hearts all by themselves," he points a thumb behind his back, angling his body like he's pretending to analyse the crime scene he's referring to. "The least you can do is help them with it" he turns back to face Charles and smiles, effortlessly, welcomingly.
In the entirety of their lives, Charles has never truly found his gravitational center around Max. He feels terribly off-kilter. He can't show it.
"At least I'm kind enough to leave something behind," he finds the clarity to respond, to prolong.
Max's smile grows, but sharpens. "Not much of a kindness, is it?" he moves closer anyway, unbothered with his casualness.
Charles finds himself clutching everything closer to his chest like a reflex when Max leans his temple on the same door, slotting himself into Charles' orbit, belonging even without the champagne and the accolades. Charles' life feels so tragicomic in this exact moment he can almost hear the Greek choir lamenting his prophesied demise in the proscenium of a drab hallway with too many bodily fluids.
Charles makes it a point to not catch Max’s eyes. He's aware enough to not present the flint to the spark on a silver platter. He keeps his eyes on the periphery - Max's jaw, his neck, the hair strands curled around the crowns of his ears. He doesn't notice Max's gaze slipping briefly to his lips, a moment lost to the time and space vacuum they've stolen for themselves.
"What are you drinking?" Max asks, eyes still slanted downwards, allegedly.
Charles doesn't have to think about it. He wishes he had a different answer simply to avoid the obvious implications.
"I don't know. Something red?” Cherry, he vaguely remembers.
Max lets out a quiet laugh but that feels too sharp again, derisive, a honeysuckle on a blade. Charles is almost tempted to ask if he wants a taste, just to caress the cutting edge with his bare fingers. He doesn't.
Charles’ restlessness does not cease. Arguably, it gets worse - so close to being tempered it trashes around in the prison of his ribcage. It doesn't help that it feels like him and Max keep on missing each other, asynchronous, a dissonance that feels too daring to be bridged. But Charles is nothing if not a study in courage and desperation and he will take a page from Max's book and bulldoze his way to shared ground, even if all he has to work with right now is a vague sense of reality.
Charles rolls his shoulders, relaxes them and settles into a well-worn posture, moulded like a second skin, ready to tackle the usual battle - convincing whoever he needs to that he's in charge of the narrative. "How did you find me?" Charles asks and the wall which he is propped against feels like it's giving in, like a brown spot on an otherwise ripe fruit.
Max has never had much consideration for the lifespan of any fake armor. "Just because we aren't racing doesn't mean I magically lose the ability to keep track of you," he says with a casualness everyone could envy. His smile is almost too effortless, the angle almost too welcoming.
For Charles, this should've been his first clue.
"Wish I could say the same but I almost didn't recognize you without your signature white party shirt," Charles parries, focusing on the sage of Max's t-shirt and how lovely of a backdrop it probably makes for his eyes. "Are you feeling particularly adventurous tonight, Max?"
This is how they operate - Charles prods, Max pushes and they find themselves in a continuum of retaliation. A ritual tested against time and spare parts.
Max juts his chin out slightly, temple drilling even more into the wall, "I'm here talking to you, aren't I?"
Charles laughs, almost letting something violent scraping in his throat out. "Don't make it sound too exciting. What, this is chore number three on your preppy to-do list?" Charles catches himself before he comes off as too bitter. He needs to recalibrate. He needs to remember this is fun, lighthearted. He has nothing riding on this.
Max lets it roll off of him like running water nonetheless, "What, you think you're only third on the list? Come on," he drawls, throwing a lopsided smile just to boot, "start cutting yourself some slack.”
“I don't know, you're the one with the list and the fancy shirt.”
"It's Louis Vuitton, actually.”
Charles has a passing thought about how much French can Max speak exactly and a lone desire grows to have his words thrown back at him with the familiar cadence of home.
But he also knows Max is full of shit and makes sure he knows it. "I believe you" Charles nods, solemnly, "Am i supposed to be on the lookout for some kind of signal? Blink twice if you need help and all that?"
Max laughs and the sound of it reverberates in Charles' skull, splintering his synapses. "What, you offering to get it off me?"
Charles' brain shortcuts with the inadvertent image of the low synth of Max's laugh overexposed against the high synth of his breathless moans.
“I'm just thinking about your wellbeing.”
"Oh pretty please, don't start now.”
And it is not so much his clothes or his shitty infuriating attitude as it is him, flesh and blood and bone. Max feels so real to Charles in this moment and that should've been his second clue. Charles wants to dissect him, to take a chainsaw and cut through bone, to rip him at the seams. His attraction goes beyond the conventional and into the carnal, a devolution of a heart caged. He could never quite sever the carnage from it.
Fuck, he hopes that Max stays none the wiser. Charles is usually immaculate in his impulse control but this man manages to bypass the citadel of his rational thinking, sink his claws right into his hindbrain and pull. There is a whole dossier of admissions, from a few days ago, from last year, from before Val d'Argenton, which reveal that Charles isn't capable of knowing better when it comes to Max.
Charles is roused by a touch on his chest, nebulous like a ghost. He didn't see it, he almost didn't register it but he feels the scorching brand left behind, throbbing in tandem with his running heartbeat.
"Besides," starts Max, fingers culpable, drawing back like the tide, "I'm not going to take shit from someone with half their chest out." Charles feels his eyes on him like pinpricks, like nails from a toolbox trusted for inspecting the deep crevices of his psyche.
He looks down and sees the tattered remains of his shirt, resolutely askew with half of its buttons missing. He can't really remember when that happened and how he ended up disheveled as all hell but Charles mirthlessly thinks that it's expected when he throws himself in a crowd full of carnivores.
Charles cannot afford to slip now. He tries to turn that mirthlessness into coyness, into gasoline. He looks up, letting his eyes set on the lowlands of Max’s collarbones. "Maybe someone had a more pressing need for them," he says breezily, through a demure facade.
"Leaving your conquests with souvenirs?" Max scoffs, finally without any derision that Charles can detect, and indulges his little game, "How delicately valiant of you.”
"Don't sulk, I still have plenty left for you."
Max grins, stretching out his canines and his eyes are not so much boyishly scrunched up as narrowed like slits.
"Aren't you feeling like a little shit tonight?"
He moves closer, infinitesimally but Charles is too attuned to Max's frequency to not have the smallest details amplified to an avalanche.
Charles raises an eyebrow, leans the same infinitesimal amount forwards and almost looks him in the eye.
"You get special treatment."
Like this their feet almost touch, their breaths mingle and the beads of sweat he feels on the nape of his neck crystallize. He is too aware of the tendons in Max's neck, the violence he could unleash on them. His teeth feel liquid with the realisation that he probably wouldn't get away with it.
He can feel the particles settle down anew around them, trapping them in a latticework of exhaust fumes and bad decisions.
"Since when do I qualify for it?" Max asks and uncaringly jostles them around, leaving everything and Charles in disarray.
Charles has stretched his patience beyond its last dying thread. He hooks a finger into Max's sleeve, almost subconsciously, stretches the fabric, curls it leisurely around it before cutting it loose. Imagines it disintegrating along the trail he is tracing, imagines it being enough leverage to forcefully yank Max closer and out of balance. He drags two fingers down his forearm incrementally, experimentally and grazes his knuckle.
"Since when do you engage me in conversation?" Charles parries back.
He doesn't quite remember if he leaves his fingers there.
Max clenches and unclenches his hand into a fist almost deliberately, the one not fallen prey to Charles' topographical crusade. The smile on his face is still easy, always easy.
"Since when do you initiate a conversation?"
And Charles thinks back to a time when he stopped.
It's never easy to navigate the epos of clashing teenage egos but it's even harder when you are pitted against each other since what feels like the dawn of time. They were so young when the gold and laurels and visions for the future began. At that time, Charles still thought he could have everything he wanted at the palm of his hand and he saw a boy who acted like he already did. He remembers Max then, all round eyes and sharp edges, vicious and leonine, with a cutthroat attitude that to everyone else but Charles would seem incongruous with the stakes at hand. But Charles has always understood him on a molecular level because they share the same chemical composition, the same ardour for excellence and belligerence. But where Max was insistent on being untouchable, Charles did not.
He knows better now when he is old enough to understand that they have lived vastly different lives behind the scenes but to that boy with scuffed knees and a football under his arm who got turned down and brushed off time and time again it felt personal. ‘Why wouldn't he just look at me?’ exacerbated from a thought into a mantra that got itself so twisted around the fissures in his mind that it became poisonous and reactive. It turned bitter and acidic and into 'I'm going to hate him as much as he hates me.’
Charles feels Max’s silhouette enveloping him now and he thinks how they found each other again, different versions but still destined to bleed asymmetrical colours. How this Max does not let the fire consume him but controls it, lets it loose in strategic maneuvers without sacrificing any of his nuclear grandeur. How Charles himself has learned to traipse the fickle balance between being a commodity and a person, sharing just enough for people to dip their toes into the surface but leaving the depth to himself.
They simultaneously mean so little and so much to each other. It's an oxymoron that Charles traverses in its entirety, takes in his mouth and attempts to chew into something he can swallow without choking. They don't travel together, they don’t share their summer break plans over overpriced coffee, they don’t breathe the same air at parties. But Charles still imagines the knobs on Max’s spine giving out like piano keys under his fingertips and Charles makes peace with the fact that he will sink unreservedly into Max if the stars somehow align in their favour. He imagines giving in, giving up the chase and something about that leaves a bitter aftertaste along the sweet treacly feeling.
This thing spanning the distance between them has its own twisted brand of irony that punctures his sanity and leaves too much debris in its wake. For Charles it's easy to adhere to a repertoire when it's dictated by the masses - he knows how to act like a rival, a winner, a loser, a Shakespearean archetype. He doesn't quite know how to exist around Max like this, with no blocking, no script and only uncharted waters with a broken compass for circumnavigation. At least he doesn't know a way in which he wouldn't crack clean in two.
They have existed longer as Verstappen and Leclerc to the sport than as Max and Charles to each other.
"Come back down, Charles."
Max's voice drifts through the haze. Charles tries to assess himself, his surroundings but he can't get a complete picture. He knows that he should feel a crippling panic in the face of his control on the situation slipping but he can only register a sinister lethargy and someone’s bergamot cologne. His eyes refocus on the fringes of Max's outline. It almost feels like if Charles extends a hand to grasp at Max now it will phase right through him., grasping onto vapour and leftover yearning.
"I’m nowhere you can't reach me," he blurts out and immediately regrets the unreserved sincerity.
The edges of Max soften in Charles’ periphery. That should've been his final clue.
"I couldn't today."
Charles feels, simply said, bitchslapped. He feels Max’s words pulsate inside his skull, metal grating across metal until the cacophony breaks through the static and the shaking spreads to his extremities. He gets forcefully dragged down to his own body again and it's so uncomfortable, feeling tethered and solid and aware of his limits again.
“That wasn't my fault,” snaps Charles, decidedly off-kilter now and unable to keep it in line.
"I know that," says Max, his timbre like Goliath but his voice so amorphous that Charles almost can't distinguish where it's coming from. "Do you?"
Charles’ knuckles crack with the force of his balled-up fists, the little pieces he collected from the peeling wallpaper under his nailbeds scratchy and foreign on his skin. He feels the wall turn into a hostile force, a sinkhole that drags him down rather than a loose embrace. He wishes Max’s question would've offset some dormant spark of clarity but this whole fiasco is too tangled for this to offer any catharsis.
Charles wants to be remembered. He wants the people he loves to be remembered through him and he has spread his dreams like a doormat before the world, cracked the soft pulpy parts of his center open for everyone to feed on against his better judgment. He wants this so fucking much he will do what he needs to, say what he is expected to, self-immolate and be reborn again and again just to stand on the revered high ground, a promise to him from others and a promise from him to others. And if he could embark on this crusade with only his ritualistic devotion by his side he would but he is well aware that he cannot win this by himself.
He thinks about Imola and France but he also thinks about Monaco and Canada and Silverstone and fucking Hungary and he feels like his nails could actually splinter the chalkboard. For all his fate in the symbol, in the red seal emblazoned on his chest and soul he has seen how it transforms itself from a blessing into a curse. He has seen it happen firsthand, he has discerned the pattern but the tragedy contains itself in the belief that Charles himself will break the cycle of violence, that he will emerge victorious. And it's not about being naive or gullible or quixotic, it's about ambition and ego and hunger. It’s about not having a choice but to make it happen, to grab this untamed opportunity at the throat and squeeze until it stops trashing at his feet.
“Of course I know that,” Charles vocalises almost indignantly, tone acerbic but uneven, too shaky. “But that doesn't change shit.”
He needs to pull whatever is left of him together before the skin he glued together starts falling off in platelets and marring the ground at their feet.
“There won't be shit to change if they pulverize you into an early grave,” Max fires back, his posture not even tensing up, like you would just lay down the unwinding of one’s fall like a tablecloth before the martyr himself.
Of course for Max it's a normal Sunday evening to glimpse at a house on fire and keep walking when he himself has ascended from ashes like a mythos and now burns so bright that the cinders left in his wake bear the shape of homecoming.
What Max doesn't, can't understand is that Charles is not Ferrari the same way Max is Red Bull. Throughout their lives they have both been ceremonially adorned with severed men’s crowns and titles bigger than their bodies but Charles knows that this faith, this reverence for him is conditional. He can't afford to be mouthy, to swim against the tide, to gamble with finding out how much agency he actually has. So yes, he will negotiate with the rational parts of his brain and pull at every string available to convince himself that he has to share at least part of the blame. Because the alternative is this natural disaster breaking out from its confines and spilling over and he doesn't know if he will have anyone left standing in his corner. He doesn't know how he could possibly deal with that and there is too much at stake for Charles to ever choose to find out.
“It's not that simple. Don't insult me and yourself by pretending —
“Isn’t it?” Max has the typical gall to interrupt him, knocking his temple on the wall in time with the cynical lift in his cadence, “Because it's the same fucking thing that I’ve always seen - you surrendering pieces of yourself to everyone else for the greater good and not taking what you're rightfully fucking owed. Who is going to be left standing when you give everything away, huh?”
Charles can't register where he focused his sight previously and he feels more than sees the rise and fall of Max’s chest, the slight acceleration. The air is so volatile that any deviation, no matter how minuscule, feels like a paradigm shift.
“Why the fuck are you telling me this?” Charles hears himself ask and he immediately want to clasp his hands around the other man’s neck and squeeze all the air out, wants to see Max’s lips fall open in dislocated piety, in desperation so he can stop talking and Charles can stop cracking open against his will. His eyes zero in on exposed flesh and the red curtain that fell in front of his eyes earlier today grows claws and howls.
Charles should've known what all the omens pointed towards. He cannot bear with the rate at which his mind, body and soul feel like they are fracturing right now. He doesn't know if he wants to scream, sink to his knees or start ripping out his blood vessels like copper wires from a faulty circuit board. He wants to knock on the door even if he can't hear anything beyond it. He wants the walls to take him down with them. He doesn't know if that will help and he feels pulled in so many different directions he doesn't know where true north could possibly be.
He wishes the air around them prickled and burned but it stills ominously when Max pushes all the game pieces to the ground.
“I don't want one of us to go where the other can't follow.” I don't want us to lose each other again.
And isn't that fucking rich coming from Max Verstappen, one year of single-seater racing experience before being thrown into Formula 1. Max Verstappen, youngest race winner ever. Max Verstappen, the 2021 World Champion.
Charles has to breathe consciously, manually feeding his shriveled lungs and filtering the radioactive waste trying to set down roots in his mind. He doesn't blame Max, he doesn't but it's so difficult to reconcile with everything the other man is throwing at him when Charles doesn't know what Max wants from him. It feels like all his life he has had to make peace with only grazing fingertips in rushed hand clasps, with the fact that Max will be a masterpiece of baroque naturalism hung just outside his reach. And now, all of a sudden, he's everywhere, his presence swallowing Charles whole and it feels fatal. Why is Max here?
“Charles”
The hard ‘ch' grates and the potent ‘s’ scrapes and all together it makes something visceral tremble and try to reach outwards. Max’s idiosyncratic lisp lifts it into something jejune, almost angelic, completely in contrast to how he appears to Charles in this moment - imposing, inevitable, larger-than-life. He imagines his name said in the middle of a scrappy fight, in Abu Dhabi, in the dead of night where the air is thin between them and the distance thinner. He tries to convince himself that this is all he needs.
Charles thinks about how winning and feeling that you've won are two different concepts and they both feel as abstract and unreachable as reality does right now. Charles knows that Max will win the way he wants to and if not he will destroy himself before he accepts fate at someone else's hands. It's impossible to be omnipresent as judge, jury and executioner but Charles yearns to at least have a say in his own demise. The scale of his desperation scorches his capillaries and snaps his ribs in two. He still feels the anger perforating his eye sockets but now it’s tainted with bone-crushing grief for so many things he cannot possibly categorize. He feels emptied out, like a cartridge void of ammunition, running on fumes.
Charles feels disenchanted, disemboweled and whatever this inebriation is intercepts his usual defenses enough to look at Max dead on, right into the eyes that have been the bane of his existence the whole night, the whole time they have known each other. Charles’ receptors are short-circuiting but the weight on his shoulders feels as tangible as ever and he is not going to ask, he doesn't want to ask.
“Max,” he doesn't realise it was him who said his name, who cradled the syllables and joined them into something detrimental until it is too late. “What are we doing?” Charles demands exhaustedly and a silent plea echoes, roaming the familiar trajectory of a cul-de-sac.
If physical contact is a tribulation, then eye contact is a pincer and Charles can only see a nameless grave in the azure of Max’s eyes that he's pretty sure it's his.
He resigns himself to his downfall, lets his eyes roam fully and unapologetically, and he's taken aback by how surreal he looks. Max is no less leonine and no less a predator now than he was then but the angles that delineate him in this very instant are too blurred, too experimental. They don't resemble the brutalist strokes Charles is comforted by, they can't quite craft the sincerity he is haunted by. His hair falls upon his forehead softly rather than haphazardly, his jaw doesn't cut but cradles, his eyes do not burn but resemble a siren’s call. Charles doesn't know his next move, doesn't know if he expects a brawl, an entente or time to not go past 3:51.
What Charles gets is this - him a fixed point while the world keeps spinning.
The last thing he sees is Max’s head tilted against the mush he’s been steadily sinking into, an ambiguous smile laced with empathy, motive and so much more that a smile cannot be made to contain and there is nothing to say.
Charles blinks and Max is not there. Max would never be here and Charles would never ask.
Charles turns around on feet that cannot be his and pushes this body further onto the wall like an offering. The static in his head feels surgically removed and everything around him is laughably filled with noise. He doesn't feel like his strings have been cut and can't decide if that's a good thing or not. As he tilts his head up to the ceiling and finds it surprisingly solid, Charles wonders what would happen if Atlas shrugged, if Sisyphus stopped, if Tantalus drowned himself.
He gets no answer. The door remains closed.