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Sebastian thinks he might have disliked Charles, once upon a time.
He’s never been one to hate, but dislike? Certainly. When he was younger and stupider and had more to prove, he’d envied boys like Charles. Boys who seem to have been born for the spotlight. Charles seamlessly performs the personality balancing act between PR-trained racing driver, coquettish starlet, and overwrought small puppy in a way Sebastian—who has only ever been just Sebastian—has never been able to. That, with his talent, good looks, and tragic backstory of sorts—it’s no wonder Charles is a veritable media darling.
Charles had asked him to come back to his driver’s room. They’d still been in the media pen, so Charles’s face was carefully cool when he’d said it, but Sebastian knows well enough not to use Charles’s media face as a gauge for his emotions. It had unsettled him, in the early days, how easily Charles slipped between masks; now, he’s used to it.
Sebastian doesn’t bother to knock when he opens the door. Technically, Sebastian isn’t supposed to be anywhere near Charles’s driver’s room, especially with the whole Monaco fiasco of last week, but here he is. Charles is sitting on the sofa staring at his phone, but his eyes shoot up when Sebastian walks through the door. Charles shuts off his phone and stands up to greet him, which is one of his more endearing habits.
“Seb,” Charles breathes out, wringing his hands together. “I’m sorry.”
Small puppy isn’t an entirely inaccurate way to describe him. He looks like he’s going to vomit under the weight of being a disappointment.
“You said as much already,” Sebastian says. This, too, he’s used to.
“I don’t know why I—I don’t know what I was thinking,” Charles says. “It was such an amateur mistake, I haven’t fucked up that badly in years, probably. There wasn’t even a chance of a gap.”
“I was also surprised, for the record.” Sebastian had thought it was a Haas, initially, for no other reason than the unbelievability of the move. “They didn’t tell me it was you until I got out of the car.”
Charles goes a little more wide-eyed, a little more desperate. “I’m sorry, it won’t happen again. I swear.”
“They’re going to crucify me in the media,” Sebastian says. It’s a little bit mean, sure. Ideally neither of them would get such treatment, but there are no ideals with Ferrari. Not unless you’re the #1 driver, and even then, they’re nothing more than a facade.
“Please,” Charles says. “Please believe me. I don’t ask for them to treat you like that, I hate that they do. I’m sorry.”
It would be patronizing, or unbelievable, from anyone else. With how slippery Charles can be, he ought to assume he’s being lied to at any given time, but he can’t. If he thinks about it, it’s the base of why he really can’t bring himself to dislike Charles in the first place. Whatever Charles is or thinks he is, more than anything else, he’s a child. Naive, eager, and hurt.
“It’s okay,” Sebastian says. It isn’t. “If this is the worst mistake of your career, we’ll consider ourselves lucky.”
Charles shifts on his heels. Sebastian opens his arms wordlessly.
Charles doesn’t seem like the type for hugs because he usually isn’t. When he gets like this, though, he’s a moth drawn to the flame of other people’s bodies. Charles needs to feel forgiven, even though Sebastian hasn’t forgiven him, and Charles likely knows that to be true. But it’s not much of a hardship to pretend. Sebastian likes hugs.
Ferrari will eat him alive. Sebastian could try to save him, has tried, in the past, but there’s only so much he can do. He knows from firsthand experience how impossible it is to see the nature of the monster before you’re already halfway into its mouth. Besides, the thing that disturbs him the most about Charles is that he already seems to know the inevitability of the pain and refuses to run. In a way, he craves it.