Work Text:
Primož receives a thick red envelope a few days before Christmas, addressed in evenly-spaced block letters and stamps stuck neatly in the corner. It’s heavier than he’s expecting, and when he opens it, he finds a slightly-melty block of chocolate and a card stuffed with sheets of paper. He puts the chocolate in the fridge to give it a fighting chance, and examines the rest of the contents.
The card has a cartoonish penguin decorating a tree on it, shiny and tacky. Inside, there’s only a little writing in English around the pre-printed Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year:
Just a little gift - sorry it couldn’t be more.
I miss you,
T.
The card goes on his bedroom windowsill with the handful of other cards he’s received this year - from his parents, from the directors, from a few friends in Slovenia, and from a handful of other riders who went through the rigmarole of mailing their cards despite living just down the street from him. It takes a prime position, the shiny penguin occasionally reflecting the light onto his floor.
There are only a few pages of letter this time - sometimes, particularly when they first started this exchange, he’d receive enough paper to bind into a novella.
His Dutch has gotten a little better from reading the letters side by side, and he can pick up the odd word here and there, but he still scans the pages and emails the file to the expat he’s befriended.
It comes back a day later, and Primož takes the chocolate out of the fridge, unfolds the original next to the PDF on his screen, and begins to read.
Dear Primož,
It is already so strange, the idea of spending Christmas without you. We have known each other like this for such a short time, and yet it feels natural to miss you, like you not being here with me is an uncommon occurrence.
Maybe I’m not as smart as you think I am-
“Lies,” Primož says aloud to himself.
-because I have been thinking, planning, spinning errant fantasies of how to pull you away from Monaco and home to me, all the while knowing that for now, they are impossible. And yet I entertain these thoughts, because, aside from your letters and your calls, they are all I have of you.
Primož, lovely Primož, I miss you so dearly. I want to steal you away in the dead of night, like some sort of tragic hero, but I know how much you would hate that.
Primož laughs, and breaks himself off a piece of the chocolate - it tastes of ginger and honey and spices and something he can only describe as toastiness. The taste feels nostalgic, like rewatching a childhood favourite film many years later as an adult and being delighted to find it's exactly as good as when you last saw it. He’s not often sentimental - more out of necessity than anything, more than willing to part with something once it’s outlived its use - but this chocolate bar makes him feel as though he should be.
The flavour feels very Tom in this sense - Tom has fantastical dreams, thoughts of the past and promises for the future, that he describes in pages and pages of detail to Primož, down to the way waking up felt. There is a particular favourite one of his that just flows prosaically, quicksilver-molten and beautiful, and Primož interrupts Tom’s voice in his head to find the letter for later re-reading.
When he reads the next line, he chuckles - it’s as if Tom can predict where Primož will end up on tangential thoughts, and what lines those tangents will follow.
You know I'm a romantic - hopelessly sentimental. I can't help it, for you make me so. I keep all the original copies of your letters alongside their translations, read them side by side, imagine you saying those words to me in that soft, earnest voice of yours. Whenever I need to fall in love with you again, I pick one, and I think of you and how easy yet difficult it is to put words to paper. Sometimes I think it would be easier to show you rather than tell you what I say in these letters, but even if I did so little as give you my podium flowers, you would think yourself undeserving as ever, no matter my insistence.
But you, I am still unsure. You aren’t one for grand anything - grand victories, perhaps, but nothing grand off the bike. You have these beautiful words, but even if you were able to say them the way I am sure you want to, they would still be said softly and earnestly.
Let me meet you in the middle one day. Let me win you over, as a lover would, properly - with no dramatic shows of affection, no fairytale grandeur, but with myself. I'm still astounded that that is what you love me for, but if you having me as I am will make you happy, then I will remain this way and yours always,
T.
There is a slight residue on Primož’s fingers from where the chocolate melted with his body heat, and he tries not to smear chocolate on his laptop as he scrolls back to the top and reads again. Tom has lovely words - they aren’t meandering and full of metaphor like his own, they are to the point, sometimes blunt. Perhaps that’s a virtue of the language, but Primož isn’t sure, and he reads it again.
He glances to the clock on his screen, and realises it’s getting late - he should probably not have chocolate for dinner, even if it is almost Christmas.
Can I call you? he texts Tom, and gets a reply when he’s putting what remains of the chocolate away in the pantry.
Give me a few minutes, unless you want to hear me chewing down the line at you.
So Primož waits, searching around his apartment for one of the pads of paper he keeps around and a pen. He doesn’t have any thoughts that are fully-formed enough to make it onto paper just yet, just the odd word or phrase with no sentence to contain it.
By the time his phone rings, all he’s managed to get onto the paper is Dear Tom.