Work Text:
Niki hears the door of the next room open, then a bit of uncoordinated thumping, and then silence.
The silence unnerves him. Ever since Richard Burton took on James’s formidable Suzy, whenever Niki’s roomed next to James, it’s been a non-stop orgy on the other side of the wall. One girl, two girls, too many girls to count (What would an orgy with hundreds of girls sound like? James might know...), toss in a few guys (Niki doesn’t like to think too hard about that), the odors of alcohol, hashish, vomit slipping under the door, loud music, loud talking, loud fucking…
Niki goes to the door, hoping that James hasn’t locked it. (But why would he even think this? James never locks the door, and makes a point of reminding Niki all the time, usually in public. “Come on, the door’s always unlocked, just like we agreed, we’ll loosen up your little ratty face!” And even Niki only locks it when Marlene is with him, or he’s especially in need of sleep. So far, since they made this arrangement, James has refrained from bringing the party into Niki’s room. So far.)
But the door isn’t locked. James is sitting on the floor, long arms wrapped around long legs, like a miserable little boy.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.” No friendly bluster, no laughing it off. Just I don’t know.
“How can I help?”
James lifts his head for a moment. The water in those blue eyes isn’t from over-indulgence. “I don’t know.”
And then Niki remembers a long-ago miserable little boy. Yet another horrible day, getting in trouble again for fighting back over the taunts of „Niki! Ratte! Niki! Ratte!”, with his Papa too busy to notice, and his Mama too distracted to figure out what to make of her small, scrappy son’s troubles.
But there was Josephine, the new nanny. She was young, unlike all the previous nannies, who were older women, war widows. She laughed a lot, and was beautiful and lively, and she didn’t just watch her young charges play, she played with them.
Niki was sitting on the floor, his skinny arms wrapped around his skinny legs, his toothy face tucked behind his knees. And Josephine came to him and said, “I made you a nest, Niki.” She reached out her hand and asked, “Do you want to come?”
He thought for a moment that she was teasing him, that she’d made him a nest because she agreed with everyone else, he looked like a rat. But she was smiling, and so he took her hand and she walked him to the playroom, where there was a pile of blankets arranged for him. He wiggled into the center and Josephine covered him over and sat on the floor by him and stayed with him all afternoon, until he he was hungry enough for dinner to forget his peers’ teasing.
Josephine was his nanny for only a few months; one day there was another old widow, sitting on a chair in the corner of the playroom with her arms crossed and a frown on her face, and Mama just said, “Of course Mama liked Josephine. And Papa liked Josephine.” And as she left the room, under her breath, she added, „Zu viel.”
Niki now understands what liking a woman “too much” means -- after all, he’s currently standing in the room of the man who demonstrably likes all women “too much” -- but that day, he made himself a nest and wouldn’t come out for hours.
James doesn’t lift his head as Niki gathers all the spare blankets and carries them into the next room. Normally, this would be worth a crack -- “What now, my ratty pal, do you need all my blankets to warm your cold heart enough to make it beat?” -- but there is only silence.
James is still sitting on the floor when Niki returns, looking even more miserable. Niki offers, “OK. I’ve made you a nest,” and stretches down a hand. “Do you want to come?”
James’ “OK” is nearly too quiet to hear, but he rises and he doesn’t let go of Niki’s hand until he’s in Niki’s room, nestled in blankets on Niki’s bed.
Niki sits in a chair by the bed and asks, “Does that help?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Suzy, isn’t it?” Niki asks. He gets the tiniest nod in return.
All the things he’s already said to James about Suzy rush into his head: “You asshole, why did you think you’d keep it in your pants for her? All you really want is to fuck around, and Suzy’s too busy with her own life to keep you satisfied in any case. What did you think, that you could go from playboy to Mr. Family Man just because your team’s PR people wanted to improve your reputation? Suzy deserves better than an asshole bad boy, and Mr. Burton’s cool million dollars helped, yes?”
He knows that James has all those same things in his head, plus a good helping of tabloid scandal. Niki’s noticed the headlines and turned away from them. It reminds him too much of what he owes James for having a big, public, messy break-up with Suzy at the same time as he left Mariella for Marlene. James keeps handing the media money quote after after money quote, photo after photo, like it’s just another part of his job, while the uproar over Niki and Mariella is largely confined to F1 insiders and their women.
The silence -- the oh-so-wrong silence -- stretches on. Without James’ boisterous teasing, Niki realizes his usual angry script for dealing with James is useless.
James sighs, just once, and Niki takes it as an invitation to engage again. “Are you ever coming out of there?”
“No.”
“OK, hang on.” Niki slips off the chair and onto the blankets. He moves right up next to James, rests against the blankets draped over James’ torso, and takes James’ hand.
---------------------------
What a night it was, after the Canadian Grand Prix. The after-party was superb -- a feast of drinks and coke and good company -- and the after-after-party even better, with three tasty Canadian girls who put on quite a show while James recovered, and recovered again, and again. He’d shooed them out in the wee hours and even slept for bit, wasn’t the slightest bit hungover, and with another win was starting to think that Niki Lauda’s unbelievable comeback wouldn’t be enough to keep him from the Grand Prix Championship.
James wants it, but dammit, doesn’t Niki deserve it? Eighth place -- mostly due to car trouble, but Niki doesn’t make excuses -- must have the Austrian spitting mad.
James decides that he’ll risk a torrent of abuse and knocks on the door to Niki’s room. There’s no answer, but he pushes through anyway.
There’s no abuse forthcoming. Niki acknowledges James with a nod, followed by a wince. He looks like he’d be crying, if the accident hadn’t wrecked his tear ducts. He looks like hell, actually, bandages only partially covering his burned skin, each breath catching a bit. James has broken ribs before, and knows how they can surprise you with stabs of pain, weeks or months later. Having chemically-seared lungs can’t make it any better.
James starts to feel at loose ends, without Niki’s normal critical banter for him to riff against. He was expecting, at the very least, some grumbling about “being kept up by your orgy.” He asks, “Hey there, buddy, you all right?”
Niki winces again as he shakes his head. “No.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.”
James doesn’t believe it. For starters, Niki must be wondering if Monza was a fluke, the luck of the damned. And Marlene isn’t here; she’s stayed behind in Europe, and there are rumors that she wants Niki to stop racing. Niki’s enjoyed no after-party for this race, not after climbing from his car and almost collapsing, blood leaking out of his helmet, while Clay, a couple of Ferrari mechanics, and a medic surrounded him and hauled him out of the pits and away from the clamoring press. Niki’s having to adjust to people recoiling from the sight of him, to children being told “don’t stare at that poor man” a little too loudly, to rude questioners popping up at random moments and asking him very personal things about life after the accident. And because he’s Niki Lauda, he’s coping with it all without any chemical help, legal or otherwise. (James thinks it would be a good idea if Niki smoked a joint occasionally, but then, James has believed that about Niki since they met.) So, there’s plenty wrong, and James’ list off the top of his head is just the obvious stuff.
He asks, “How can I help?” only to get another “I don’t know” from Niki.
And then James remembers the nest, from earlier in the season. A pile of blankets, a boyish thing for sure, but Niki had brought James through a bad time with that simple ritual.
So he grabs the extra blankets from Niki’s closet, goes back to his room, makes a phone call to postpone his flight to the US by a day, and decides that Niki’s probably in too much pain to “nest” on the floor. He arranges the blankets on his bed, and just hopes that Niki remembers how it helped him.
Niki’s still curled up, and each breath he takes still catches a bit. James leans close in and says, quietly, “OK, I made you a nest. Do you want to come?” Niki raises his eyebrows -- except he hasn’t got any eyebrows -- and James knows his idea is a good one.
Niki gets out of his chair very slowly, almost staggering as he rises. James catches him under the elbow -- luckily not the burned one -- leads him to the next room, and gets him settled onto the bed. He picks up a wool blanket first, but Niki shakes his head and points to a soft fuzzy one, and James realizes that wool and burnt skin wouldn’t be a good combination.
Once Niki’s surrounded by blankets, he seems to be relaxing. James asks, “Does that help?”
Niki sighs a big sigh, and says “Yes…” but then goes silent.
After a while the silence is getting to James, and he asks, “Are you ever coming out?”
“No.” Niki sounds quite definite.
There’s such an undertone of loneliness there. “OK, hang on,” James says as he stands up and moves toward the bed. He has no idea why he’s doing this, really, how the hell can he, James Hunt, party animal and F1 pilot extraordinaire, possibly help his rival? Except right now, Niki isn’t his rival. Niki’s his friend. And Niki is dealing with the most impossible shit, mostly alone.
So he lifts a few of the blankets and stretches out next to Niki -- not touching, he doesn’t want Niki thinking there’s any funny business going on -- and adjusts the blankets to cover both of them. And -- remembering Niki’s own actions -- he carefully places his hand over Niki’s.
--------------
A few hours later, a medic comes to Niki’s room for a scheduled change of dressings and a run through the exercises Niki does to keep his healing skin from contracting. He doesn’t see Niki, but notices the open door to the next room. He decides that what he sees there is worth postponing his session with Niki: a pile of blankets over two still forms, a small hand red with new skin held in a larger, rougher hand, and a bandaged, quietly snoring head next to a blond-haired one.