Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“I don’t want to believe anything,” I said. (But I was lying.) “And I have nothing to prove.” (Lying again.) “I just like to travel into the world and stop, noticing what is under the sky.” (This, in fact, is true.)
— Anne Carson. Plainwater

It happens quickly—this.

Later on, Max won’t remember details, won’t remember what happened. Won’t remember the end of his season and won’t remember the reason why he loses the championship.

There are other things he remembers, though. Laughter before the race, GP squeezing his shoulder, his team wishing him luck. He remembers getting into the car, the start of the race. Rain. A Safety Car, the restart. He remembers the RB20 coming to life, the rumbling of the engine. A car next to him on track, a flash of orange in his mirrors. There’s not a lot more, no memories of the accident, of shunting into the barrier, of a red flag.

Maybe it’s better like that.

(“It’s been terrifying,” his mum says after he wakes up, the first time he’s fully lucid. “I was—” she stops, doesn’t say what she’s thinking, but Max doesn’t have to be able to read minds to know what it is, doesn’t have to remember the drivers that came before him and the drivers that inevitably will come after him.

He wants to tell her that he’s not dead, that he’s fine. That everything will be okay, that things will go back to how they used to be, but he can’t. His throat is dry, his eyes burn. He doesn’t get a word out, can’t do more than squeeze her hand.

Max has never been one for optimism.

(He wants to ask if she’s still lighting candles and doesn’t.))

It’s his sister who sits beside his bed when he wakes up.

She’s pale, her hands shake. There are dark shadows below her eyes, and Max wants to tear at his hair, wants to scream, wants to tell her to leave. She shouldn’t see him like this.

“Hey,” she says, it’s quiet, weak. She doesn’t meet his gaze, not really; instead, her eyes are focused on Max’s arms, the IV. Bruises discolour his skin. He doesn’t want to know how much worse the rest of his body must look like. Whenever he’d crashed before, he’d been bruised for weeks afterwards.

“Vic,” Max tries to reply, but his mouth is dry, his voice won’t cooperate.

It makes her look up. “How are you feeling?” She reaches for the glass standing next to his bed, offers it to him. It’s cool, pleasant against his throat.

He shrugs. He’s not in pain, not currently, but his mum explained to him that he’s on painkillers, that he’s been ever since he got out of surgery. Though his vision blurs, spins, and it reminds him of the aftermath of Silverstone years ago. When he could barely see straight for multiple races after the crash, when the banners on the side of the track made it impossible for him to take notice of what was going on around him.

A concussion, then, he decides, even if it doesn’t explain all of this.

“Fine,” he says. He still doesn’t know what happened, why he’s still in the hospital or why he was in surgery. His mum hesitated before telling him to wait for a doctor to ask, and he fell back asleep before he’d been able to.

Victoria nods, her back is rigid. “I think,” she starts, lingers, “I should call the nurse. Mum’s talking to the doctors, and Charles has gone to the hotel to shower and change clothes,” she says before Max even has the chance to ask. “So far, you have always managed to only wake up when he is not here.”

Max almost laughs.

When he wakes up next, it’s Charles instead of Victoria. His eyes are red-rimmed. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days.

“Charles,” Max croaks out which makes Charles’ eyes snap to him.

“Max!” he exclaims, and it has Max wince. His head hurts. He can hear the blood rushing through his ears, the lights burn in his eyes, and Charles looks fuzzy, hazy. Something seems off about him.

“How are you?” Charles asks, frowning. “Should I get a nurse? Your mum’s getting us something to eat. Should I call her? Wait, let me—”

“Charles,” Max interrupts him, coughs. His throat still feels dry, rough. “Slow down.”

Charles looks apologetic; he presses a kiss to Max’s hand he’s seemingly been holding the entire time Max has been unconscious. “Do you need anything?” he asks instead.

Max can only barely make himself stop shaking his head. It doesn’t feel like a good idea to move. “No,” he says. “When can I leave?” He’s never been keen on spending more time in a hospital than is absolutely necessary, and he’s not going to make this an exception.

Charles’ face twists, his eyes leave Max’s face, glance at the door like he’s hoping someone else is going to come in and absolve him of this situation.

“What is wrong?” Max asks. Dread pools in his stomach.

He’s been lucky, they say. The doctor doesn’t smile. Her face is stern, her hands tightly wrapped around a clipboard, but she looks Max in the eyes and waits for him to react to what she has said before she continues.

His mum sits next to him, clutching her hands, and she’s as pale as Max’s blanket. Her eyes are wide, and she looks like she hasn’t slept in days. Charles is on his other side; he’s still holding onto Max’s hand, and Max doesn’t dare to properly look at Charles, to see his face, to know his thoughts.

He feels sick. His head is pounding. The blood rushing through his ears is so loud he can barely hear the doctor talk.

An incomplete spinal cord injury, she tells him like he should be happy about a diagnosis like this, like he should be glad. (The worst part, maybe, is that he knows he should, that he knows it could, that it could be worse.)

And yet—

He’d started racing in Formula One before the halo was made mandatory. He’d always known what it meant, what could happen, what happened. After all, he’d watched his dad climb out of a burning car.

The new technology was never supposed to prevent crashes, was never supposed to stop accidents. They’re part of racing, part of Formula One. He’s always known that. It’s been a risk he’d been willing to take, a risk that he’d deemed acceptable, that all of them know about, that they all acknowledge. And he’s crashed, crashed often enough to have had multiple concussions and bruises covering his entire body for weeks and broken bones that made it impossible to race for months.

But this—it’s something that shouldn’t have happened, that shouldn’t have been possible, that the safety and technology of the new cars should have prevented.

And yet, here he is. The exception. A freak accident. Something unexplainable. People had also said that about Romain.

He’s not sure he feels lucky.

He tries standing up—maybe it’s spite, maybe he’s trying to prove the doctors wrong. Maybe he doesn’t believe what they tried to explain to him.

They told him about a surgery; four hours they’d said. It hadn’t been life-threatening, but his mum’s face had been white when they’d said, “The chances for recovery are the better, the sooner the injury is stabilised.”

Sitting up works fine even if the room starts spinning, even if there are black dots creeping into his vision. His arms shake underneath his weight as he pushes himself upwards. But he manages. He sits up, leans against the pillow behind his back.

No one else is in the room because he knows they would stop him, would tell him to lie down and take it easy. He’s not supposed to start physiotherapy for another few days. “The stitches, Max,” his mum would say, trying to get him to listen. Charles would have that disapproving frown on his face that always manages to make Max feel guilty.

No, he doesn’t need an audience for this, doesn’t want one.

So, he sits up, breathing through his nose and the pain in his back. He should call the nurse, ask for more painkillers, but he won’t. Not until after. It makes him tired, has him fall asleep within minutes. He can barely keep his eyes open without them.

He closes his eyes for a moment, concentrates on his legs. He can feel the blanket covering them. The rigid fabric is cool against his skin. It doesn’t mean much.

Carefully, he moves closer to the side of the bed. His arms protest the movement, his shoulders ache. Getting his legs over the edge of the bed isn’t an issue even if his back burns, even if his hips strain. It’s slow and takes patience. He needs his hands more than he’s expected, moving his entire body instead of just his legs, but it works.

The soles of his feet hit the ground as he pushes himself upwards. He can’t feel the cold of the floor.

He barely catches himself on the nightstand next to his bed.

(He doesn’t make it back to bed. He doesn’t even manage to get up on his own from where he’s lying on the floor.

His legs refuse to cooperate even if he can feel the ground against his skin. His feet are worse. He can tense his thighs, but his calves won’t move. He stares at them, wills them to act accordingly to what he wants. It makes his head start hurting again, his ears buzz, and his legs still don’t budge.

His hands shake.

They don’t stop, no matter how hard he tries to get them to.)

“You’re stupid,” Vic says, and he can’t even refute it. It’s not like he hasn’t had more than enough bruises before that already. His skin burns. He balls his hands into fists and doesn’t look at his sister.

Max takes a deep breath. His back throbs with each inhale. He deserves it. “You are not wrong.”

Victoria glowers at him. “Of course I’m not wrong! Just be glad, Mum and Charles aren’t here right now.”

Max groans. “Don’t remind me.” His mum would’ve lectured him for the next thirty minutes while Charles would be fussing over him even more as if he isn’t doing enough of that already.

“How are Luka and Lio?” he changes topics quickly. It earns him another glare before the expression on Vic’s face smooths out. He hasn’t seen them in weeks, months even. He was supposed to visit during summer break, and they’d planned to go on vacation together. It would’ve been the first time in years since Luka and Lio would have finally been old enough to fly abroad.

“They’re doing well,” she entertains him. “Lio has found some new friends, and…Luka always wants to visit you.” Luka has started to show interest in karts and racing. He’s always been excited about Max’s trophies and helmets, but the last few months, it’s been getting more and more. He’d even asked to come to a race, to visit Max in his garage, and Max had asked Red Bull for invitations for Zandvoort. He knows that Victoria is worried about it—they all are.

It wouldn’t be surprising if Luka wants to start racing soon. Max had been the same at that age.

“Yeah,” he says instead of everything else he could. “I am a cool uncle.”

Vic laughs, rolls her eyes. “Sure,” she says, more sarcasm rolling off her tongue than needed.

Max crinkles his nose and tries not to think about it more.

“Sassy and Jimmy?” He misses them. He doesn’t remember the last time he went this long without seeing them. Usually, his sitter sends him pictures of them every day when he’s away. It’s not something he’s ever asked for to happen, but she’d started it back when Max first employed her, and ever since then, she’d been happy to provide. Max certainly isn’t going to complain about getting pictures of his cats, about knowing that they’re fine and taken care of.

“Last time, I checked in, they were doing fine. They’re getting a bit anxious, but I’ll ask the sitter for pictures.”

Max nods slowly. “Did not expect anything else, of course,” he mutters. They don’t like being alone for so long even if they like the sitter. He’s been hiring her for years now. Ever since he got them, actually. It’s always the best, of course, if they don’t have to get used to new things every time he’s away.

“And dad?” he asks. His head throbs.

“Dad…” She shrugs. “You know how dad is.”

His dad doesn’t come to visit him, but Max didn’t exactly expect anything else. His mum is here, and there’s nothing that his dad can stand less than her. Even now, even after more than a decade since their divorce. But he’s been someone to hold grudges for as long as Max can remember.

He calls instead—Victoria gives him her phone before quietly leaving the hospital room. He still hasn’t gotten his own back; he’s not even sure where it is. He left it in the garage, he thinks, before he got into the car. Maybe his team still has it, or maybe they gave it to his mum. He’s not allowed it just yet, though he could ask for it, but he also doesn’t know if he wants to do that.

“How do you feel?” his dad asks, and Max swallows.

Bad. Worse. He’s still on painkillers. He doesn’t know for how much longer.

His head throbs, and he’s constantly nauseous. (He can’t move his legs.)

“Not great,” Max says. “I have a concussion again.” It’s the least of his issues. He’s not sure how he’s supposed to talk about the rest. His dad already knows the basics, so there’s nothing more to say. There never is. They never have.

His dad hums. “That is to be expected.” It’s not surprising, at least. It’s not the first concussion either. They’re just part of this, of racing, of motorsports. Too common for comfort. The reality.

Max wishes it were just that.

“I guess,” he says.

Then there’s silence.

They’ve never been good at feelings. Max doesn’t remember the last time they’ve spoken about something like that, the last time his dad asked how he is, the last time it was detached from Formula One and his career. He knows his dad is worried about him, of course he is, but his dad has also never been interested in talking about these kinds of things with Max.

It was always easier with his mum. Or even with his sister.

“What are people saying?” Max asks instead. His hands curl tightly around the phone. It’s not something he wants to ask Charles, something he knows would make him frown, would leave him unhappy. Charles has always hated talking about the media even if he doesn’t mind media duty.

It makes his dad scoff. “They say you should take as much time as you can to recover.” Max can picture the way his dad grimaces—eyebrows drawn together, lips pressed into a thin line. Even in his imagination, his dad looks annoyed. “Obviously, McLaren is hoping to win both championships now. Of course, they would say that.”

Of course.

It makes the nausea worse. He’s not sure why he even bothered asking. It’s been nine years since his debut, he knows how teams usually react, what they say. What they really mean.

“I see,” Max says. He wants to throw up. It’s been a good season, an adequate run. It’s been a good car with a better team. It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s not something he’s ever going to tell his dad.

“You should start physical therapy quickly,” his dad continues. “Raymond said he’ll arrange a physiotherapist for you.”

“I have Brad,” Max says quietly although he hasn’t exactly talked to Brad about this. He’s not even cleared for physiotherapy yet.

They’ve talked to the doctors about it—that they want him to start physical therapy as soon as possible, that he’ll start working with the ones at the hospital first. He doesn’t want to work with someone he doesn’t know, but he gets it, that as long as he’s still in the hospital, nothing else is possible. That doesn’t mean he wants another physiotherapist after he’s discharged.

He’s never liked for things to change, and Brad knows him. Max doesn’t want to have to figure out how to work with someone else, not ever, not now.

“I’ll mention it to Raymond,” his dad says, but he sounds stiff, like it’s not what he wants, like he already has a different person in mind. Brad and his dad never got along well. In his dad’s eyes, Brad had always left Max too much freedom, never pushed him far enough. He’d always preferred Jake, but it’s been years since then.

(“You’re too close,” he’d always said. “It’s not good, Max.” It’s one of the only things where Max hadn’t listened to his dad.

The other time had been his and Charles’ relationship.)

“It would be easier,” Max says, forcing his voice to be steady, “to have someone I know.”

“Okay,” his dad replies, and he still doesn’t sound happy, but he doesn’t argue. It’s the least he could have done.

“Will you come visit?” Max asks.

“Once your mother isn’t there anymore.” The annoyance in his dad’s voice is evident even through the phone. Max shouldn’t have asked; he knows better. He knows his dad, and he knows how he can be. He also knew the answer before he had even asked. There was never another possibility.

“Get some rest,” his dad follows up. It’s short, clipped. It’s obvious that his dad isn’t happy, maybe about Brad, maybe about his mum—it’s not like Max expected anything else, not like he would ever expect anything else. His dad is stubborn; it’s something that Max has from him, but normally, Max also knows when it’s better to back down and let his dad decide and proceed how he sees fit. It’s usually what he does when he notices that his dad gets annoyed, frustrated, angry. Most of the time, arguing with his dad is not worth it.

Before he has the chance to reply, the call has already ended.

Max bites on the inside of his cheeks until he tastes blood.

So, his dad doesn’t come to visit, and maybe it’s better like that.

It’s a bad night.

It’s still quite warm outside, and he would have preferred to end his day on the balcony at home in Monaco instead of being forced to stay inside and watch the sunset from his bed.

The sky is red, a deep colour that spans the entire horizon, but his view gets covered by tall buildings that reflect steel and concrete in their windows. Soon, the streetlights will be turned on and make it impossible to see the stars from Max’s room. It would’ve looked nicer from the beach.

But it’s a bad night, and his head hurts, his chest burns, and he can barely move his legs.

He should be sleeping, he knows. His mother always tells him with a frown on her face that the best thing he could be doing currently is sleeping, that it’ll help him recover quicker. But he’s in pain even after he’s gotten the last dose of painkillers from the nurse, and he doesn’t want to ask for more. Shouldn’t. He’s been asking too often, for too much.

So, he can’t sleep. He can’t sleep, and there’s nothing else to do. Because he’s not allowed his phone, isn’t sure when he’ll get it back, isn’t sure if he wants it back. He’s seen a glimpse of everything that happened, of everything afterwards, before his sister turned off the TV like she thinks he can’t handle it. Maybe she’s right. He’s never been good at nonchalance.

The blanket is cool against his skin, but it’s too stiff. The pillow is too small. He’s not been able to get comfortable ever since he woke up.

It’s a bad night.

He’s been having a lot of them lately.

They still don’t allow him to have his phone, but it’s the one thing he won’t complain about. He’s learned quickly to stay away from social media after bad races, and he’s learned even faster that with his phone, it’s impossible to keep away despite his avoidance of social media, despite the fact that he’s deleted Twitter years ago and just lets the social media manager take care of everything.

Usually, he’s good at distracting himself—by playing padel or sim racing or because he actually has a job to do. It is harder now. Here. When there’s nothing else to keep him occupied. Charles doesn’t leave his side, but it’s not enough to keep Max’s mind from wandering.

He doesn’t want to see what everyone is saying. He’s not sure he even wants to know what people have texted him, the wishes, the questions about how he’s doing.

Sooner or later, he will have to face it, he knows. Maybe he will be able to convince marketing that he won’t have to speak to the media, that either Red Bull or his dad and Raymond deal with it. He doesn’t need all that, not when it already makes him want to rip his hair out during race weekends.

They’re usually lenient, don’t force him to do more than he has signed up for, than what’s necessary and required, but he doesn’t know how they’ll handle this. If they’re going to use it to their advantage, to create a narrative.

No matter what they’ll decide on, it won’t change anything about the fact that people will keep talking about it.

It doesn’t help, of course, that he’s the championship leader.

(Was.)

One night, when Charles thinks he’s already asleep, Max catches him on his phone, listens from where he lies in his bed, unable to move.

“I cannot lose him too, maman,” Charles whispers, a sob wracking his body.

Max bites on his tongue until he tastes blood and curses every single god he has ever known.

“When will I be able to go back to racing?” he asks eventually when he sees his doctor again. It’s casual like he doesn’t care about the answer.

He’s not sure who he’s trying to convince.

She pinches the bridge of her nose instead of answering before she finally meets his eyes.

“Returning to competing this year, Mr. Verstappen will be impossible,” she starts slowly as if she’s taking her time to choose her words. “I have my doubts about next year, but I can’t look into the future and tell you for sure. We will have to find out.”

For a moment, the world seems to stop. Black spots dance in his vision. He doesn’t think he’s breathing. His ears are buzzing, and he can barely hear her over his heartbeat echoing in his head.

His fingers dig into the flesh of his calves. His nails are sharp—he imagines they’re painful as well. They leave half-moon-shaped prints when he finally gets his hands to uncurl.

She didn’t say anything about his future, he tells himself. There’s nothing been said about his future.

He pinches himself.

The skin underneath his fingers is dry, flaky. It’s pale, almost as white as the hospital sheets. He knows his face doesn’t look better.

It’s been raining for days. It must have been days since the last time he saw the sun. The summer has been quite rainy so far; he’s not sure anymore when the last race weekend was that had been completely dry. Miami, maybe.

He pinches himself again.

He can’t feel it.

Charles won’t let go of his hand—Max pretends it annoys him, teases Charles for being clingy, but he doesn’t pry his hand away, and by now, Charles knows better than to take it for the truth.

In fact, he doesn’t want to let go of Charles’ hand either.

It’s easier to focus on the warmth of his hand than on his burning eyes, the throbbing of his head, the lack of feeling in his legs.

He starts physiotherapy. It’s entirely unspectacular apart from the fact that he can’t move his legs, that he gets dizzy with every movement, that his head is trying to kill him.

He dislikes everything about it. It’s irritating and slow, and it almost has him appreciating the workouts Brad used to do with him.

The first time he comes back from an hour of pure frustration, he throws up. His back burns, and the nausea has been bothering him for most of the day. It’s normal, he’s told like they’re trying to calm him down, and it makes him grit his teeth, makes him ball his hands into fists until his knuckles turn white. It’s by far not the first time he has dealt with concussions. He’s not worried about that.

But no one really talks to him about what he’s actually worried about. Charles’ hands are tightly wrapped around Max, and he doesn’t look at him. His mum and his sister throw each other secretive looks when they think he’s not paying attention. His doctors barely tell him the minimum of what’s going on, of what the plan is, of what he should do. And his physiotherapist shrugs and only says, “It’s too early to tell.”

It’s ridiculous, he’s not five, and yet, everyone seems to be worried that he’ll not be able to handle it, that he’s too fragile to hear the truth, that it’ll set him back and just make things worse.

Sometimes, it makes him wish his dad were here with him instead of his mum. At least then, he would know more. (More than he would like, more than he would ever ask for, more than he would ever want to know. But it has him wondering sometimes, if it wouldn’t be better. If it would be easier to deal with. If he were able to handle it better, then. If the progress were faster.)

They get him a wheelchair because his legs won’t hold him up, because his arms shake too much to support himself, because crutches will just aggravate the injury even further.

He mentions it once to a doctor who just lifts an eyebrow. “Don’t you still get dizzy, Mr. Verstappen?” he asks. “What if you fall, then what will you do?”

So, he grits his teeth and uses the wheelchair.

Charles doesn’t want to leave him. Of course, Charles doesn’t want to leave him. It’s not a surprise, nothing that is overly shocking to Max. Charles has never done well with distance, with being away from each other for too long. Max can’t imagine it starts now, like this.

Still, Charles can’t just give up his whole life because Max’s has ended.

“I am not even fighting for the championship,” Charles points out, and Max can’t even argue with that. Charles is too far away in the standings, and the car is too bad for it to still be possible, but that doesn’t mean Charles can just start neglecting his job for Max.

“But you will need to work on next year’s car,” Max says, knowing that it’s not an argument he can win with.

“Fuck that,” Charles mutters. “You need me. Ferrari has development drivers who can handle the brunt of it.”

Max looks at Charles. His head starts to hurt again. “And then what? I have my mum here and Vic. I can take care of myself.” Because he can. He hates the wheelchair, but he gets along with it just fine, and he can use his hands like he always has. Logically, there is no reason for Charles to stay with him while the season keeps on going.

Charles’ face twists. “It is not that I don’t think you can take care of yourself. I just do not want to leave you.”

“I get that,” Max sighs because he wouldn’t have wanted to do that either if it were him in Charles’ position, but where would it stop? Where would it end?

Ferrari doesn’t need a driver who prioritises his private life over his job. For that, they have too many drivers waiting in line.

“I will be fine,” Max says, “I promise. I just really need you to go to this race.” I just really need you to continue with your life, he doesn’t say. I do not want you to regret this, to regret me. He could never forgive himself if Charles loses his future for Max.

Charles’ eyes are glassy, his nose red as he sniffs, and Max feels like the worst person alive to make Charles do this, to convince him to fly to the next race and leave Max behind.

But that’s more important than staying here to take care of Max.

His mum mentions in an offhand comment to him that the other drivers visited after the race. The first few days. When he wasn’t awake yet.

Max doesn’t ask where they are now, why they haven’t been here since he woke up, doesn’t ask about the following races or what the championship looks like. (If he’s still at the top, with a seventy-point difference between Lando and him. He doesn’t want to know more, doesn’t want to watch as his advantage dwindles away while he’s stuck in the hospital.)

There are races to win, still weeks left until the summer break. By now, they’re countries away from where he is.

Everything goes on—whether he’s there or not. No one is going to wait for him, no one will stop a season because of him. None of it matters to Formula One or the championship.

He’s never expected anything else.

He still hates it.

He gets transferred to a hospital in the Netherlands. He’s not entirely sure how he feels about it. It’s easier, of course, being able to talk to his doctors in his first language, in theirs, too. They’d considered Monaco before, but Charles has to go back to his job, and there is no one else who could help. Pascale had told him that she’d be there, always, but it feels weird, without Charles there, too. So, they’d settled on here to be close to his mum but also his dad.

And he does love the Netherlands, and he’s always enjoyed coming back, but now…

It’s a weird feeling. He’s almost happy that he can’t go out—the last thing he would be able to handle currently is seeing his own face. The constant reminders. People recognising him.

He’s always hated that part of being a Formula One driver, hated marketing and social media and hated people filming and following him wherever he goes. He hates it even more now.

Every time he leaves his room, he feels eyes on him—there’s a small boy who asks for a picture, a man who comments on the last race, a girl who doesn’t look at him while she asks for an autograph.

So, he stays in his room unless his mum or his sister force him to go outside, watches the sunset from his bed when it doesn’t rain and wishes he were in Monaco instead.

It’s better like that anyway. The sun makes his head hurt, and the walk to the elevator pushes his pulse up like he isn’t racing cars for a living. He hates how fast his condition has deteriorated.

He’s always talked about how he wouldn’t stay physically fit like Formula One requires him to be, but he’s never meant it like this.

It’s slow. Everything is so incredibly slow. It’s everything Max has never been. He’s never taken things slow; he never took breaks and carefully contemplated his next step.

It’s all he can do now.

The physical therapy starts with stretches and muscle strengthening when he’s itching to get on his feet. His therapist forces him to do the exercises slowly, to make sure to follow through with the entire movement instead of just moving on to the next, better exercise that seems more promising in getting him back to his feet as soon as possible. He tells Max not to push through the pain, to take a break and slow down even more if it seems necessary to him.

It’s obvious that the therapist has never worked with athletes before, that his job has never been to get joints and broken bones to work quickly again, to hold up against the pressure of muscle strengthening and G-forces.

It makes Max grit his teeth, but he swallows down any complaint he has. He knows it’s better like this for the long-term rehabilitation, that it’ll allow his injuries to fully heal. His doctor had been quite clear that Max won’t be able to return to racing this season, no matter how hard he’ll push himself.

Max still isn’t entirely convinced about it, but even if he’s able to go back this season, it won’t be in the next few weeks. Not as long as he can’t even stand on his own.

So, he does his exercises, carefully making sure to follow through with the movements until the last step. So, he slows down to the speed his therapist wants from him. So, he takes a deep breath and tells him that it makes sense, that he’ll go back, that it’ll be better for the long-term recovery. He’s not interested in being in pain for the rest of his life.

He continues to avoid the world outside, racing, the fans. The other drivers.

He knows he shouldn’t, that he should contact them even if it’s just a WhatsApp message, just a quick I’m fine in the group chat. It’s what they all do when they come from the medical centre—or worse, the hospital—after a crash. It’s what he did after Silverstone, after Jeddah, after every single accident he’s had. He should do it now, too.

But it feels impossible, to take out his phone and type those words when it’s not true, when he doesn’t feel fine, when he isn’t fine. When he doesn’t know when he’ll be fine ever again, when he’ll be able to return to racing.

So, he doesn’t. He keeps letting Raymond deal with the communication with his team. He lets his dad talk to the media to tell them that things are fine, that Max is doing well, that he’ll come back sooner than they think.

Max doesn’t believe any of it. He knows better than to.

(His dad would laugh at him if Max told him this, would shove his shoulder and say to him that he’s already given up, that he won’t know if he doesn’t fight for it. He would tell him to do better, to push himself beyond his limits because if he never does so, then he won’t get better, then he can’t do better.

And Max keeps his mouth shut and never mentions it.

It’s easier to do so when his dad isn’t with him.)

He stretches his legs, presses his feet to the floor. He still can’t feel the ground beneath him.

There’s nothing, no tingling in his toes, no cold seeping into his bones. It’s like his feet don’t belong to him anymore, like they’re someone else’s.

He bends his knees.

Even if he could control his lower legs again without pain, without exertion, even if there were no issues with his range of motion anymore, he still wouldn’t be able to race.

He barely makes it to the bathroom before throwing up.

Shortly after the transfer to the Netherlands, his mum has to return home. She still has work, responsibilities to attend to that won’t just disappear because he’s in the hospital.

It still takes a few more days until Max sees his father again. He’s not sure what to expect—anger, maybe. Anger that Max destroyed what his dad spent so many years working for. Anger that Max failed even at the one thing he was supposed to excel at.

Instead, his dad is silent. Silent, and his face is cold, and Max doesn’t know whether this is any better. It reminds him of when he was fifteen and alone in Italy, waiting for his mum to come pick him up.

He takes over Max’s training plan, pushes him to do more, to do better, and every evening, Max is so exhausted that he barely manages to get back to his bed.

His legs hurt, and his back burns, and he can feel the blood pulsating in his head, but he doesn’t complain because his dad fixates him with cold eyes and tells him that if he ever wants to go back, he can’t start relaxing now.

It’s true, of course. It doesn’t stop the pain, the frustration, the fatigue, though.

(At least, it has advantages. Every day when Max comes back from physiotherapy, he’s barely able to keep his eyes open, worn out and exhausted to the core. But this way, he can’t endlessly scroll through his phone, can’t go searching for news articles he knows better than to read. He can’t look at WhatsApp or the call history, and he can’t watch the race either.

It also doesn’t leave any time for him to think.)

“How do you feel?” Charles asks, and for a moment, Max closes his eyes and imagines that Charles is sitting next to him, that his warm hands are wrapped around Max’s, that he can feel the comforting presence of his boyfriend.

But Charles isn’t here. Charles isn’t here because he still has a job to do, because Ferrari could win the Constructors’ Championship, because Max told him that he doesn’t need Charles, that he can handle it on his own, that he has his mother and his sister, because Ferrari wouldn’t have understood anyway.

Max should be somewhere else, too.

“Better,” Max says.

Charles hums; he doesn’t sound convinced.

“No,” Max insists, “it is fine. I have physio every day currently, and I think the progress is going well.”

He doesn’t tell Charles about his dad, that it’s not just the physiotherapist at the hospital, but also his dad pushing him forward. Charles has never been his dad’s biggest fan, just like his dad has never liked Charles too much. But they’re civil; most of the time, they manage to stay civil, and the rest of the time, Max tries to keep them apart from each other as much as somehow possible.

It’s working better than Max has ever imagined it would, but it helps that they don’t live in the Netherlands, that his dad despises Monaco.

“Have you already called Brad?”

Max groans.

“You are stupid,” Charles says affectionately; Max just crinkles his nose. He does not need Brad with his physiotherapists at the hospital; they’re great, nice to work with. Of course, they also know how to deal with injuries like his; they know his doctors, too. Although he can’t disagree that it would be nice to have someone working with him who knows him.

“How are you?” Max asks.

“The car could be better,” Charles says, allowing for the change of topics to happen, “but it was worse.” Max snorts. “The team—” He doesn’t finish his sentence, but Max can imagine the way Charles twists his face into a grimace. It makes Max glad, sometimes, that he’s never cared much for Ferrari, to drive for Ferrari.

“I am sure next year will be better,” Max says even if he doesn’t believe it. Sometimes, he isn’t even sure anymore if Charles still believes it, that it will get better, that he will finally get a car that can challenge for the championship, that the team can become what it used to be.

Charles huffs out a laugh. “The mechanics seem optimistic.”

The mechanics are always optimistic, but maybe that is what you have to be when you work for Ferrari. Max doesn’t say anything. He is not going to make Charles’ day worse.

“I will come visit soon,” Charles says, and he sounds regretful, like he isn’t flying over during each free day. It has been easier during the European leg, of course, and as much as Max wants him to be here, he also told Charles to go.

The first time, he attempts to stand with crutches, the pain is so excruciating that he has to sit down before he’s been up on his feet for ten seconds.

It’s with his physiotherapist rather than with his dad, and he’s glad for it.

The physiotherapist smiles at him encouragingly, pats his arm as Max tries to catch his breath.

“This is to be expected,” he says, “it’s been barely any time since your accident.”

Accident. Like he was driving a road car. Like he’d been involved in a normal road accident. He wonders if it would’ve been easier to accept.

Max just presses his lips together and starts another attempt.

It’s as much of a failure as the first time.

“Maybe we should stick to other exercises,” the therapist suggests. “To build more muscles before we attempt to stand.”

Max shakes his head. “No,” he says, voice steady, teeth gritted. “I need to do this.”

He’s always hit the ground running—it was like this when he karted, in Formula Three, when he got to Formula One before he even had his driver’s license. He’s an athlete. He races cars for a living. There’s nothing slow about him or his lifestyle. He’s not sure how to explain it to someone who’s never been part of it.

There aren’t a lot of people he knows outside of racing, but none of them ever understood. They didn’t get it, not like any of the other racing drivers do.

It feels even harder now, to explain it. To make people understand. That it’s impossible hard to stand still.

The bruises start to heal. They disappear from his skin as time moves on.

Max doesn’t.

Vic looks tired. Her face is almost as pale as their mum’s, her knuckles are white, and when she speaks, her voice is scratchy, rough like she’s been crying.

She helps him from his wheelchair to his bed—by now, he’s practised it often enough to be able to do it on his own, but she’d fidgeted like she hadn’t known what to do with her hands, like she hadn’t known what to do with herself.

He knows she’s always hated when she wasn’t able to help, when she wasn’t able to do anything about a situation. And she can’t, not here, and he also knows that Luka has been speaking more and more about karting, about racing, and it’s something she can’t do anything about, either.

So, he lets her clutch his arm until her hands turn white and doesn’t say anything.

His therapist has him practice standing on the parallel bars.

Max asks, once, how it helps, what the use is. It feels weird, unnatural, unintuitive to have to depend on his arms to stand.

It has his therapist shrugging his shoulders. “Well,” he says, “I’m not just going to put you on your feet and demand you walk without help.”

His dad would have done it, Max thinks and keeps his mouth shut. His dad would have pulled him to his feet and told him to walk until the sun goes down, and then he would’ve told Max that he can’t get dinner unless he’s managed it on his own, unless he walked a kilometre and back.

His therapist smiles at him. “We’ll start slowly. Obviously, we’ve been focusing on leg strength to keep your legs moving, but we’ve already started with gait training, like the supported standing?”

Max nods.

“Basically, the first steps are just an extension of that. We’re going to use parallel bars for this since you can use support on both sides of your body. And then”—his therapist shrugs—”and then we’ll go from there.”

It sounds easy. Walking is easy. It’s something he’s done his entire life, and it shouldn’t need all this, shouldn’t be exertion and taking extra effort. It’s just one foot before the other, but when he stands between the parallel bars, he feels frozen. His thighs tense, his knees bend, but the rest of his legs won’t cooperate. He moves forward and can’t feel the floor beneath his feet.

He takes his first step in weeks, clutching the parallel bars while his therapist grips his arm—like he’s a baby and learning how to walk. It reminds him of his nephews when they were younger, still only hobbling forward whenever he came to visit, and he was hovering behind them, ready to catch them if they fell.

Maybe the comparison is not entirely wrong, he thinks and scoffs.

He hates everything about it—the clumsiness, the lack of feeling in his legs, the nausea that follows, the pain that never leaves.

He gets it now, why babies always scream.

They don’t talk about where he’ll live after he gets discharged—his dad expects that he’ll move back in, at least for the beginning. But Max isn’t sure.

He’d prefer to go back to Monaco—he likes his apartment, the atmosphere, the sun, the weather. It’s easier there, too because Monaco is filled with celebrities. No one cares about him. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t want to go back to the Netherlands, because his face is everywhere. Because too many people know his name.

And there’s a reason why he moved out as soon as he could, as soon as it was possible. It’s not something he likes to think about.

He doesn’t want to go back to the Netherlands, and he doesn’t want to move in with his dad again.

In the end, his mum offers, and Max accepts.

He still would prefer to go back to Monaco, but he knows better. He can barely move. He gets dizzy from sitting up. It wouldn’t make sense. It would just complicate everything when he should be focusing on getting better first and foremost. And Charles isn’t there to help out—he’s still all around the world, busy with racing and other responsibilities. He wouldn’t want to burden Charles with all this during the few days he is back home, the few days he has available to rest.

Charles calls him stupid, but Max doesn’t budge on it.

He doesn’t tell his dad either until it happens, until he gets discharged, and it’s his mum waiting for him in front of the hospital.

He still has his room from when he was a child. Back then, he’d barely ever occupied it, too busy with karting all around Europe. He’d visited sometimes when he was in Belgium for races, but most of his childhood after the divorce, he’d spent with his dad in the Netherlands, and then once he’d been old enough, he’d moved to Monaco.

If he’s honest, he doesn’t remember the last time he spent more than a few days at his mum’s.

It looks different now—the old posters he’d hung up during one of his few visits have been taken down years ago. There aren’t any of his clothes in the closet, and his former desk is crammed with plants that probably would prefer any other place in the building.

It feels like a guest room—it’s too clean, too clinical, too white to feel comfortable—but he’s not sure if it was ever something else.

“I’ll put the plants somewhere else,” his mum says. Her hands are clutching each other tightly like she doesn’t really know what to do with them, like she wants to reach out to him and knows better than to.

“It is fine,” Max says. He can live with plants in his room. He doesn’t care about the plants.

His mum nods; her knuckles are white, wrapped around her own hands. She always looks pale nowadays. “Maybe we can ask someone to send your clothes, so you don’t have to buy new ones.”

It’s not something he’s even thought about yet. He still had his clothes packed for the race, enough for his time at the hospital, at least.

He just nods. “The cats,” he says instead. “I am not sure what to do about them.” His cat sitter offered to take care of them as long as needed, but he doesn’t want to leave them alone for even longer. They’ve never been this long without him. A move, though, might just be as stressful for them. He doesn’t know if it would be better.

Slowly, he readjusts the way he sits, grimaces. Any sudden movement makes the pain flare up again, but even so, his back twinges.

“But I do not know about them here.”

She shrugs. “I don’t see why not.”

Max glances at the plants on the desk. His mum mentioned once that the dogs were constantly trying to eat them, that she had to remove almost all plants from the living room because they simply wouldn’t stop even after getting sick one time. Sassy and Jimmy have never been in contact with any other animal than their littermates. “It might be an issue with the dogs.”

“It’ll be fine,” his mum says, and her voice is steady.

Max doesn’t look at her. It’ll be fine. Just like anything else has to be as well.

His dad is mad, of course. He tells Max that he’s destroying his future, that he sacrificed everything for this and that Max can’t even try to pretend to care.

His face is red, and his eyes are narrowed, and spit lands on Max’s face.

It’s wrong, though, his dad is wrong, and Max doesn’t say anything. It wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t change a thing. He just knows that he doesn’t want to move in with his dad ever again.

But it’s not something he wants to explain to his dad. He’s not even sure how to.

“I am sorry,” Max just says, and it’s not enough. Of course, it isn’t.

He still hasn’t contacted Brad. Instead, he keeps going to the physical therapist his doctor recommended. He’s nice. He listens to him, explains the exercises he has Max do, and changes things accordingly to his goals.

But he’s not Brad.

It feels weird not to be sure how to approach the situation. He’s been working with Brad for years now. It should be easy. He should know what to say. He doesn’t.

In the end, Max texts instead of calling. Hey, do you have a minute? the message says.

Brad calls back almost immediately like he’s been waiting. Maybe he has. Max isn’t sure if he’s started working with a different client since it happened.

“Yes?” he answers the phone. He feels groggy, his head is pulsating.

“Max!” Brad exclaims. Max grimaces, turns down the volume. “How are you?”

“It could…let’s say it could be better.” He could be busy preparing for the next race, or maybe he could be sim racing with Team Redline, or maybe he could take a quick dip in the Mediterranean Sea. “But— I wanted to talk to you about it.”

“Yes?” Max imagines the way Brad always raises his eyebrows—the left one a bit higher than his right one because that’s also the one he can’t lift on its own.

“I was wondering,” Max starts slowly, the words feel weird, “if you would be willing to…uhm, to help out with my physiotherapy.” He coughs. “I understand, of course, if you cannot, but—” But Max hasn’t worked with another physiotherapist in years, but Max doesn’t want to work with anyone else, not right now.

“You’re an idiot, do you know that?” Bradley asks. And that’s that.

Max tells him that he can’t move back to Monaco just yet, that his mum doesn’t want him to, that his dad wants to live close enough to keep an eye on his progress, that it’s easier like this because he’s not sure he could manage this on his own.

Brad agrees easily to come to Belgium instead.

“Are you sure?” Max asks. “Do you not have other responsibilities?”

“I would’ve been with you anyway,” Brad says, and it’s not wrong.

Max just tries not to think about it.

Summer break has just started, and there are more than twelve races left. If things had worked out, if it hadn’t happened, if—

He swallows.

There’s no use thinking about this.

Half of the season is over. The season has been over for him for weeks now.

“When do we start?” Max asks instead of asking if Checo was able to catch up, whether Red Bull is still winning the Constructors’ Championship. How Liam is doing—because he still doesn’t know who exactly is replacing him, but it would make sense. Daniel in the Red Bull, Liam with VCARB. It wasn’t how things were supposed to go, but it also has never been the plan for Max to spend the rest of his season in the hospital and at home.

“I’ll book my flight for Saturday,” Brad says.

Max bites his lip. “Thank you,” he finally says.

He can hear Brad breathe out. “Not for this.”

The weather in Belgium is nice for once. It’s rainy and stormy in the night—there’s always a thunderstorm brewing during the evenings, but the days are warm even if humid.

It’s nowhere near close to the weather in Monaco or the vacation he’d planned for the summer break, but it’s nicer than he’d expected. He’s already feared that it would rain throughout the whole summer.

Most of the time, he’s not busy with physical therapy or the exercises he gets as homework, he spends time outside on his mum’s terrace. There’s not a lot else to do for him. Looking at screens makes him nauseous, and he can’t concentrate enough to read a book.

So, he just stays outside, always carefully making sure to wear a cap. The sun makes his eyes hurt, and he’s not very interested in ending up looking like a crab.

It’s not very different from what he would do during his time off, and yet it feels like a completely different life.

Eventually, he calls Christian.

It’s not necessary, not exactly because his dad and Raymond are in contact with Red Bull, have been ever since everything happened, but as much as he can ignore everything else happening around him, he can’t ignore his job. Can’t ignore his responsibilities, can’t just disappear for the rest of the season even if he’d preferred it.

“Max,” Christian says, and he sounds so surprised that it makes Max cringe. “I hadn’t expected you to call me.”

“Yeah,” Max says. “Sorry about that.”

“How are you?” Christian asks. The expected question. The dreaded question.

“Better,” he says because it’s not a lie. He does feel better ever since he’s woken up. He can stretch his knees, stand on his own, but—

He’s in pain. Standing gets exhausting fast, and he can barely walk with help. He gets dizzy when he’s upright for too long. The nausea still isn’t gone. And the feeling in his feet isn’t back yet.

But things are getting better. There’s progress. It’s still not enough.

He doesn’t tell Christian any of that because he already knows. Maybe not the details, maybe not everything—because these aren’t things they’re going to be interested in, because his dad and Raymond won’t want to share them—but they know all they need. They’ve already taken care of everything. Obviously. They have a replacement for Max and a backup plan because while everyone always hopes that something like this won’t happen, people know better than to not expect the worst.

“I am sorry,” he says again because he doesn’t know what else to say. “I know you are already aware, but…I just— I wanted to tell you myself.”

He can hear Christian sigh. “I know, mate. You should just focus on getting better,” he says. “It’s okay.”

It’s not. And they both know it.

Whenever Charles has to fly out again to the next race or Maranello, it is impossible to get him to leave, and Max doesn’t know how much longer he can push Charles to do so, how much longer he can force down the want for Charles to be with him. But he’s not allowed to, because this is his life now, and it is not Charles’.

Max buries his face in Charles’ neck, takes a shaky breath. It would be selfish when he has his mum here, when his sister comes over almost every day. He likes to play with his nephews now that he actually has time for it. He’s so rarely seen them the past few years, and he enjoys it, too.

It’s not the same.

“I don’t want to leave,” Charles whispers against his hair, and Max bites on his lip until it starts to sting.

“I do not want you to leave,” he doesn’t say because Charles would stay, and Max cannot let that happen.

His mum refuses to let him do anything on his own. She always hovers behind him, ready to catch him if he stumbles. It’s lucky that his room has always been on the first floor and that he doesn’t have to try to get up to the second floor where his mum’s room is. Of course, he can’t use a wheelchair to get up there.

Sometimes, he just stays in the living room. When the pain gets too bad, and his vision keeps on spinning, it doesn’t make sense to force himself up from the couch and get back into the wheelchair. It’s always stored right next to him, and it’s barely ten meters from the living room to the guest room. It should be nothing. It feels like a lifetime.

His mum hates it when he does it, fusses over him with a pinched expression on her face and iron knuckles. She always tries to make his life easier, to help him with things he doesn’t need help with.

The wrinkles on her forehead won’t disappear, worry is edged into her face. He’s not sure it’ll ever get better.

“How do you feel?” Brad asks because, of course, he does.

“Bad,” he says. “Everything sucks.” It’s not something he can tell his mum. Or would. It’s not even something he tells Charles even though Charles knows.

It’s different with Brad because he’s honest with Brad, and Brad doesn’t mind it either if Max gets a bit more grumpy than he knows he should be getting.

Brad snorts quietly. “Understandable,” he says.

Max shrugs. “The physiotherapist was fine,” he continues because this is easy, easier than talking about how he’s feeling or how his progress is or what his chance of recovery looks like. “Of course, he is not you, and it has been very obvious that he has never worked with an athlete before.”

It has Brad lift an eyebrow. “Slow progress?” he asks.

“So slow.” Max rolls his eyes, but he’s joking. The physiotherapist was great to work with. He’d been nice, accommodating. Obviously, he wouldn’t have been prepared to work with an athlete, and maybe that’s Max’s fault. Maybe they would’ve allowed him to have Brad come to the hospital after the first few weeks if he’d asked again. If he’d contacted Brad sooner.

Brad laughs, shoves against Max’s shoulder. “They’re not trained to get someone back in shape in two weeks,” he says.

Max scoffs. “Of course,” he says because Brad wouldn’t have been able to do that either, not this time.

“Let’s see what we can do.” Brad winks at him.

“I am not sure,” Max says, staring at his legs. It’s still warm enough to wear shorts—although he is not sure how well he could even feel the cold—, but his legs are so pale they look bloodless. He almost wishes he had worn long trousers. “The physiotherapist has not said much.”

In fact, he hasn’t said anything at all about Max’s condition or a recovery timeline. Not even his doctors have said much. It’s mostly been We’ll have to see and It’s too early to tell. And though they don’t feel like lies, there’s nothing useful about them.

“It’s hard, especially in the beginning,” Brad acknowledges. “Obviously, you can say more the more time passes, and sometimes, it gets obvious in the first few weeks already, but”—he shrugs—“everything is possible.”

It’s as helpful as what the doctors have told him, but he trusts Brad. And he trusts that Brad will be honest with him.

Max picks at the hem of his shorts. He can feel his hand hit the skin of his thighs, but he knows better than to press his fingers into the flesh of his calf. “When do you know if a full recovery is still possible?” It’s a question he’s not sure he wants to be answered.

For a moment, Brad hesitates. “That’s the most difficult to say. Usually, you get most of your abilities back within the first eighteen months.”

Carefully, Max doesn’t meet Brad’s gaze even though he can feel his eyes on him. The doctor had mentioned something like this. He just doesn’t really remember any of the details anymore. He barely remembers anything they’ve told him. He only remembers Returning to competing this year, Mr. Verstappen, will be impossible. I have my doubts about next year.

“Yes, they did tell me that,” he says, “but they have not said much more.”

Brad snorts. He doesn’t seem surprised. It probably isn’t. “No doctor wants to provide details too quickly.”

“Of course,” Max agrees, jokes, “The less they say, the less they can get wrong.”

“Right.” Brad tilts his head. “But it probably gets even harder if it’s an athlete, you know? Most of their recovery timelines are for daily errands. Getting back as much of your range of motion as they can, not the exertion levels of a professional athlete.”

It’s quiet.

It makes sense, of course. Normally, doctors don’t have to get someone back to competing on the highest level of their sport after a spinal cord injury. Normally, they have them back to walking, maybe running if things go well.

He takes a deep breath.

“Do you think I could go back to how things were— were before?” he asks before he can stop himself. One day, he promises himself he won’t ask questions anymore he doesn’t want to be answered.

“I doubt it’ll be possible to go back exactly to how it was before, but—” Brad squints. He’s not looking at Max anymore. “Close could be.”

Max nods slowly. Close. Close would be good. It’s unrealistic—this much he can admit to himself—to go back to how things were before. But close would be acceptable.

His head throbs.

Close would be great, actually. It’s more, perhaps, than he’s dared to hope for.

But Brad has never lied to him.

His lower back is trying to kill him when he finally sees his dad again.

It’s worse than usual, and normally, Brad or his mum would prepare a hot bottle for him, but it’s his father, and he’d rather die than let his dad see him with this and the wheelchair.

The disapproving glares he gets when he slowly comes to a stop with the wheelchair are already more than he wants to deal with.

It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s just a few hours, and even though his back feels like it’s on fire and his legs won’t properly cooperate, he doesn’t need it. He’ll survive. It’s just pain, anyway.

“I want to talk to you about the crash,” his dad says the moment Max comes to a stop at the table. “You’ve watched the race, right?” He says it in a tone that makes it obvious he doesn’t allow a no, that he expects Max to have watched it.

Max doesn’t confirm.

He probably should—should lie to his father, that yes, he has watched the race; yes, he wants to talk about it; yes, please point out the mistakes he’s made during it.

He doesn’t. He doesn’t want to watch the race, and he doesn’t want to talk about it, and he especially doesn’t want to listen to his father point out any mistakes.

And he doesn’t need to say anything, it seems, because his dad’s eyes narrow, and it’s obvious that he knows that Max hasn’t watched it yet.

His dad shakes his head, sighs. He looks disappointed. At least, he doesn’t seem angry. It’s better these days, better than it was a few years ago.

“How can you learn from your mistakes if you don’t try to do better?” his dad asks. “This can’t happen again.”

This won’t happen again, Max thinks and doesn’t say anything.

Whenever Brad has him stand, his legs shake and his arms barely hold him up, still not used to having to carry most of his weight.

It feels ridiculous. He can’t even remember all the muscle-strengthening activities anymore that they did for his arms, and yet they’ve still not been enough to hold himself up.

He practices on his own as well, of course. Sometimes, he rolls himself up the stairs that lead to the second floor he still hasn’t seen and clutches the railing before hoisting himself upwards. He hates the parallel bars Brad got for him, but he knows better than to not use them, so he forces himself to practice with them instead, dares to make a step forward when his arms don’t shake underneath his weight.

It makes his back ache, and his legs never cooperate, and far too often, his vision blurs and leaves him dizzy.

It helps, though. The days before he’d been discharged, it had been barely ten seconds he’d been able to handle. Now he’s managed to work it up to thirty, has managed to take three steps on his own, but it doesn’t feel like progress. He still gets nauseous. His dad would laugh at him.

The nausea, at least, has been getting better. He doesn’t constantly feel sick and queasy anymore—now, it only seems to happen when he pushes himself too much or if he stares at a screen for too long.

He’s raced with worse; he knows that. He’d raced when he’d barely been able to see straight, when the cars blurred together and the track was barely visible. But the concussion also hasn’t been his problem, hasn’t been since he woke up with a throbbing back and no feeling in his lower legs.

If it only had been a concussion, he would’ve been back in the car by the next race, would’ve forced himself through meetings and social media videos, would’ve answered stupid questions by journalists and would’ve done his best to protect his championship lead.

But it hadn’t been only a concussion. It hadn’t been, and he hasn’t seen a Formula One car from the inside for months now, has barely seen any Formula One car even from the outside, because he has to pull himself up on the railing of his mum’s stairs to be able to stand, because he needs a wheelchair to get around, and sometimes he’s not sure if he’ll ever see one again.

Somewhere between the second and third week after summer break, he makes the mistake of opening Instagram. Later, he doesn’t remember why. He just knows that he’s been bored all summer—Charles is gone again for another race, his mum is busy with work, he still hasn’t talked to any of his friends, not even the few he still has in Belgium and the Netherlands, and his sister is on vacation with her own family.

The first thing he sees is a post by the official Formula One account. It congratulates Lewis on the win in Spa before the feed refreshes. Not that the rest of the posts on his timeline are any better.

He bites his cheeks until he can taste blood.

There’s Lando celebrating a victory, Daniel talking about being back with Red Bull, cars standing next to each other on a track he vaguely recognises as Silverstone. Flashes of red and orange and blue as he scrolls past the different videos and pictures.

That should’ve been him, he thinks. It tastes bitter and ugly, and Max has to grit his teeth to stop himself from screaming.

“Careful,” his mum says as he puts the pot down on the table. Like he isn’t 26 and hasn’t been living on his own since his eighteenth birthday. Like he hasn’t been setting the table ever since he was discharged from the hospital.

“I know,” he sighs and rearranges the cutlery. It’s never something he bothered with when he lived alone, but it’s important to his mum.

She looks caught. “I’m sorry,” she says, a sheepish smile on her face. “I know I worry too much.”

“It’s fine,” he says. It’s not.

The wheelchair is too low for the kitchen table his mum chose more than a decade ago when she’d moved out shortly before the divorce. He still remembers her standing in an Ikea store, despair on her face after her lawyer had called her to tell her he wasn’t sure if she’d be able to get the restraining order against his dad.

He brings the wheelchair close to the chair he’d chosen when he’d been thirteen, breaks so it doesn’t roll away while he switches to the chair. It’s tedious, annoying, but it’s necessary, and there’s nothing to do about it.

His mum reaches out as if to help him before she takes her hand back like she’s thought better of it. Something flashes over her face, but before Max can recognise it, it’s already gone.

It makes him look away, instead focusing on the way his hands shake.

It’s on the TV. An ad, something he usually can’t be bothered to care for.

But there’s a blur of red, and it has him look up, straighten up—his back protests the movement, but he ignores the pain that shoots up his spine. He watches as two cars fill out the screen.

One of them is a Ferrari, the other is a Red Bull.

The room spins. It makes it impossible for him to see whether the 1 is on it.

He grits his teeth and turns off the TV before he can see what the advertisement is for.

He’s not sure what would be worse—if they still used his car, or if they acted like he’d never even raced this year.

Victoria is watching him, and slowly, Max gets the feeling that there is something she wants to talk about, something she doesn’t know yet how to approach. It doesn’t make him very confident that it’s something he wants to hear about.

“Does Red Bull have therapists?”

It’s blunt in a way he’s not used to from his sister.

“Yes. I think they are required to have them.” But it is not like Max has ever talked to them. Christian always wanted him to do so, back in 2018 and then in 2021 again, but Max had never been forced to do it, so he’s never gone. He doesn’t see the point of it.

He handles things just fine.

“Hm,” Vic makes. “Do you even know who they are?”

Max snorts. “No.” It doesn’t really mean anything considering how big the team and the company are. Of course, he doesn’t know every single person working for Red Bull, and of course, he doesn’t know people he’s never had anything to do with.

“Obviously,” his sister says drily.

Max just shrugs. “There has never been a reason for it.”

Victoria squints at him. “There might be now,” she says casually. He’s not sure he trusts her tone. It doesn’t feel casual.

“For what?” Max decides to entertain her. It’s probably a mistake.

“This?” she says in a way like she can’t believe Max is even asking for context.

Max makes a face. He needs his neurologist and Brad for this, not a psychotherapist. Things are going fine, and he’ll be back on track as soon as possible. A therapist can’t help with that.

“I do not feel like I need it,” he says.

“That doesn’t mean that you don’t need it,” she points out which might not be entirely false. Their mum talked about it once, after the divorce when she started therapy, when she told him that she’d never felt like she actually needed it until after she went.

But that’s not the same. Max isn’t going through a divorce, and he’s never needed to apply for a restraining order either.

“Maybe,” Max allows, “but I am not sure I see the point for it at the moment.”

“Just so you can talk to someone about it,” Vic suggests, and Max can’t imagine something worse than that. He doesn’t need to talk about any of this, and he especially doesn’t need someone digging through his brain.

He hates that all of this has happened, but it won’t mean anything, it won’t matter once he’s back.

“I do not really need to talk about it,” he insists.

Victoria doesn’t look convinced, and her gaze feels like a glare. Max is not going to buckle under it. Giving her some of his stickers because she used to pout when Max had others than her is something entirely different from this. “That’s what I mean.”

Max groans. “Sure, I will think about it,” he says, just so she stops talking about it. All he wants is peace and quiet.

Vic crinkles her nose. “You will not.” He will not.

One day, he looks at the calendar, and it’s a Sunday at the end of August. It doesn’t mean anything to him anymore, not really, not when every day looks the same as the one before, except that it’s the 25^th of August, and he still remembers the Formula One calendar better than he should be able to.

He’d never seen Belgium as his home race even if his mum had been from there, but he’d always raced under the Dutch flag, had always spoken about his dad’s heritage and the Verstappen name. As a child, he’d never had an emotional connection to Belgium, and as an adult, it only made sense to continue driving for the Netherlands.

After all, it had been the reason why Zandvoort had been brought back to the calendar, why Formula One finally re-added a Dutch race more than thirty years after it had been abandoned.

The victory in 2021 had tasted sweet. It had been a dream come true, the perfect weekend. A home win, the first. 2022 had been a repeat of it, while 2023 had been a home win in a consecutive streak of wins—just as sweet, just as triumphal, just as victorious—although Max doesn’t think it’ll ever be possible to beat 2021. The first time, the time before he’d been crowned World Champion.

It should have been all that.

Instead, Max sits at home in his mum’s kitchen, looking at a paper calendar. Instead, he hasn’t been in contact with any of his fellow drivers for weeks. Instead, he’s confined to a wheelchair, unable to get past the stairs to the second floor.

Instead, it’s nothing.

He goes on Instagram again, opens the official Formula One account because he’s an idiot, and then, for a moment, he just stares.

He’s not sure what he expected, not sure who he expected to win because he hasn’t kept up enough with the last few races for that. He can’t tell which teams are up at the front, only knows that it would’ve been him fighting for the win, but it doesn’t feel completely out of the blue that it’s Lando on the top step.

McLaren had been fast the last time Max had participated in a race. They all knew that it would’ve made the championship fight difficult.

It almost feels acceptable, this, that Lando won Max’s home race. It’s almost an okay substitute. Almost. He knows he should be happy for a friend.

It still leaves a bitter taste that has him get out of Instagram as quickly as possible and shut his phone off.

In the end, his sister never flies down to Monaco and gets the cats like they had planned for her to do.

A week after Zandvoort, he makes up his mind.

He’s always liked Belgium, always liked coming back to his mum to visit, always liked cycling through the countryside, but he misses Monaco and its strand, the sea. He misses Charles, his own apartment and the cats, and sometimes, he misses being on his own as well.

The slowly approaching cold doesn’t help the pain either.

The reason why they hadn’t wanted Max to live alone after the discharge from the hospital had been because they hadn’t been sure how well he’d be able to get around on his own, if he would be able to handle himself, if it would become too much. It had always been just in case.

But he gets sufficient with the wheelchair, knows his way around. He only has an apartment in Monaco, so he doesn’t have the problem of having to get up stairs.

He doesn’t see reasons why he shouldn’t move back, why he shouldn’t let his mum go back to her own life while he tries to deal with his.

“I think,” Max says carefully, making sure not to look at his mum, “that it might be best to go back to Monaco.”

For a moment, she doesn’t say anything, doesn’t look at him, doesn’t even seem to breathe. Her eyes are on her hands that are lying folded on the kitchen table. “I know,” she says, sighs.

So, he moves back. So, he returns to an apartment and a life he’s not sure he knows anymore.

His father doesn’t hug him when he leaves—of course, he doesn’t. He doesn’t wish Max a good flight either, doesn’t tell him to take care, and Max doesn’t know why he’s wished for it, why he’s wanted this, why he’s hoped for it.

His father has never done any of these things, has never even wished him luck for any of his races because you’re a Verstappen, and Verstappens don’t need luck.

(He shakes his head, disappointed. “If you need luck to win a race, Max, you’re never going to become a World Champion.”

It’s why he forbade his mum from lighting up a candle for every race. It’s why his mum is still doing it.)

So, Max bites his tongue and says, “Bye, Dad,” and moves back to Monaco without another word to him.

Just like it had been when Max had turned eighteen and left the Netherlands without looking back.

Chapter Text

Yellow, yellow, gold, and ocher.
We stopped. We held the field. We stood very still.
Everyone needs a place.
You need it for the moment you need it, then you bless it—
thank you soup, thank you flashlight—
and move on. Who does this? No one.
— Richard Siken. Detail of the Hayfield

It only really starts after 2021, after Silverstone—this, them. After Max has returned from England and the hospital, after he’s been thoroughly checked by the doctor, after his dad told him to keep quiet about the more severe symptoms of the concussion.

“Max!” someone calls, but Max doesn’t look up, doesn’t want to. There are enough people here called Max, so maybe they don’t mean him.

Of course, he is not this lucky.

They call his name again, closer this time, and Max finally looks up when he sees waving arms in the corner of his eyes.

It’s Charles. He waves with both his arms like he wants to make sure that Max can’t overlook him for any longer and slowly jogs towards him.

They have been neighbours since Max left the Netherlands at eighteen and Charles moved out of his family’s home some odd years later, but it’s not something Max thinks about, not something he has to. They don’t use the vicinity to visit each other, don’t ring on each other’s doorbell to talk. They don’t even really ever see each other outside of race weekends despite the fact that they live on the same street.

Charles and Max aren’t friends. He doesn’t think he would call them that. They get along just fine now, but friends is a bit too far, a bit too much.

Back before they’d both driven in Formula One, back when they were still karting, long before the cars and the fame and the glamour, their relationship had always been tense. Charles had been fast. Max had been faster. They’d challenged each other like no one else had been able to. It hadn’t always gone well.

With Max in Formula Three and finally Formula One, they’d barely ever talked. Their relationship had mellowed out, had died down to nothing even though Max had recommended Charles to his former team. But it also hadn’t really been surprising to Max—there are not a lot of people from back then that he is still in contact with. Some of them are still from his early karting days; boys his dad hadn’t seen as competition.

“Don’t worry about them,” his dad always used to say, back when Max was six or nine or eleven. “Half of them aren’t going to make it to the feeder series.” And then, after Max moved up to F3, it had been, “They’re not going to make it to Formula One. You’re wasting your time, Max.”

It had been true that most of them didn’t make it to Formula One, that most of them didn’t make it out of the karts. And things between him and Charles had only really changed after Charles signed with Sauber.

Things had been better, then. They’d warmed up to each other to the point that Max invited Charles to take the jet with him, sometimes they saw each other outside the paddock and outside racing duties—until Austria, of course.

It had taken Charles’ first win for them to start speaking to each other again, but their relationship had never really evolved. Colleagues, yes. Friendly, definitely. He likes Charles, but they don’t speak outside of the paddock, don’t hang out unless it has to do with their jobs. The only times they meet away from races, it’s because of fellow drivers.

No, friends they surely are not. Even if they are neighbours.

Max isn’t sure why Charles seeks him out now, but maybe Silverstone has changed things.

“Max!” Charles says again as he comes to a stop in front of Max. His face blurs in Max’s vision, but he can still clearly see Charles’ dimples cutting deep into his cheeks.

Suddenly, Max has the urge to wrap his hands around Charles’ neck and squeeze.

Instead, he forces a smile on his face. “Oh, Charles, hi,” he says, “I, of course, had not seen you there.”

Charles still smiles. “Yes, no wonder,” he says, “you were looking in the other direction, after all.” He says it like a joke, like Max is being silly.

Max’s cheeks hurt. Maybe he should’ve looked harder.

Charles’ gaze lingers on him, the sweatpants Max is wearing. He knows what he must look like. The last time he’s shaved was two days ago.

He hates being unshaven.

Luckily, Charles doesn’t comment on it, doesn’t ask how Max is, instead he just sits down on the bench next to Max and stretches his legs out. He’s wearing those ridiculous pants with the white print that he so often shows off in the paddock as well. Max has never seen such ugly jeans before.

“What are you doing here?” Charles asks with a quick glance at Max.

Max raises an eyebrow at the question. “I live here?” Although he can understand the question—he’d been supposed to stay in Milton Keynes after the race, hadn’t planned to come back to Monaco before Hungary because he was supposed to work on the sim, but that had fallen through after they’d gotten back from Silverstone, certainly not with the result they had wanted.

“No, sorry, I mean—” Charles scratches his neck; he looks sheepish. Max almost feels bad. “When did you return?”

“A bit ago.” It’s not even been a couple of days. Days in which he’s done nothing but stare at his apartment’s walls. Brad had been there, of course. Sometimes he’d seen his doorman when a package for him had arrived, but other than that, it’s been boring.

There is his sim rig—he itches to get his hands on the steering wheel again, but the doctor back at the hospital in England had told him that he shouldn’t be trying it, that it could make the concussion symptoms worse. He can’t risk it, not when the world keeps blurring in front of his eyes, when looking at bright screens makes his head hurt. He needs to race in Hungary; there’s no other option.

“And now you are just...out here?” Charles sounds incredulous.

“Oh”—Max gestures with his hands towards the parking lot and the other apartments; between the buildings, the sea is visible—“just enjoying the view.” But his voice is too flat for it to sound like a joke. He can feel Charles’ eyes on him, but he stubbornly keeps his own on the Audi parked in front of him.

“The view?” Charles asks like he can’t quite believe what he’s just heard.

“Is that so hard to believe, Leclerc?” Max turns his head to look at Charles—he snorts. Charles looks as if he isn’t sure whether he should believe what Max is saying or if he should call bullshit.

“I have never seen you do that before,” Charles notes, amusement obvious in his words.

“You have not seen me do a lot in general, I think,” Max says and forces his voice to adopt a joking tone this time.

Charles nods solemnly. “That is true.”

It’s quiet for a moment, then Charles clears his throat. “So you just”—Charles waves to the parking lot—“enjoy the view.”

“Exactly,” Max says as flatly as possible, and finally, Charles laughs.

Charles looks at him, then towards the sea before he turns fully towards Max. “You did not want to go to the beach?” He’s smiling again, his eyes crinkle, and he sounds almost excited, like it’s a great idea, something he would like to do, and not just something to offer because he’s being nice and polite and everything else, the world seems to think he is.

Max flattens his hands against his thighs to stop them from trembling. “No, no fucking way, mate.”

He’s just come from his physician here in Monaco, had listened as he was told to not race next week, to sit out at least for one weekend, that it could damage his eyes permanently if he pushed for too much too quickly. But he knows what his dad would say if he told him that he’s not going to race in Hungary, that he’s not fighting.

This is his chance for a championship. He can’t let it go, can’t let Lewis just have this.

Afterwards, he had just wanted to quickly get the stupid crêpes from the small shop two blocks away where Lando and him sometimes go when they’re both in Monaco. Of course, it had been closed, so he hadn’t even been able to get that before Charles fucking Leclerc had to ambush him right in front of his apartment block.

He’s being mean. He knows he’s being mean.

He simply hadn’t been expecting—and even less so wanted—to meet anyone he knows today.

Charles frowns at him. “I could— I mean, if you wanted to, it could just be a short promenade?” he suggests.

Max forces a smile on his face, shakes his head and immediately regrets the motion. “It is really not necessary, don’t worry.” His head starts throbbing again.

“Are you sure?” Charles is still frowning, but at least, he’s not looking at Max anymore. “The summer has been good, and the sea has been nicer than usual.”

He can imagine that, but it’s not like it has any use for him. His eyes hurt. He can barely see straight, and he really just wants to go to bed now. “No, I am fine,” he says, then after a short pause, “Thank you.”

Charles nods. Max tries to ignore that Charles looks disappointed. They’re not friends—why would they even hang out with each other outside the paddock?

“Okay, but...” Charles hesitates. “If you ever want to, you could text me?”

Max doesn’t sigh, but it’s a near thing. “I will think about it,” he says eventually. It’s a nice gesture, he tells himself. It’s not Charles’ fault that Max can’t handle all this. “But I also really have to go now, mate. You know how it is, of course. Brad is going to come in a minute.”

It’s a lie. They’ve set out the training as long as Max’s entire upper body is black and blue, as long every movement sends shock waves through his body. It’s unnecessary, of course, but Brad had insisted and the team doctor had been glad to hear it. Max had been able to see it on her face.

Charles is smiling again, but it looks off, not quite right. It’s not the usual charming smile he puts on for the media. “Oh, of course.”

“So, I guess...” Max trails off.

“It was nice to talk to you, Max.” It sounds stilted, unnatural. It’s not how they talk to each other—they never have, not when they were still karting and especially not during Formula One.

“Right,” Max says and even to his own ears, he sounds disbelieving, but Charles doesn’t call him out on it.

“You will race in Hungary, yes?” Charles continues.

Max blinks up at him. “Yes,” he says, and it sounds surer than he feels.

Charles nods. There’s something pleased about the smile on his face. “I will get going, then,” he says, and his eyes twinkle.

When he turns around to leave, Max can only look after him, bewilderment growing in his chest. Whatever just happened there. Charles has never sought him out like this.

(It’s weeks later when him and Charles meet in the middle of Monaco again.

Charles is waving at him. His cheeks are flushed from the cold, but he’s smiling. He’s standing next to his car—the 488 Pista Spider Max has never seen parked correctly. Sometimes, he wonders how Charles ever managed to pass his driver’s license exam.

“Charles,” Max says. “Fancy seeing you here.” He forces a smile on his face, but his cheeks feel stiff and his lips are too pressed together to seem natural.

“Max!” Charles is smiling at him. “Enjoying the view?” His eyes crinkle at his own joke.

“Yeah, yeah.” Max rolls his eyes at him, but he cracks a smile. He’s not sure how much he’s enjoying the view when he can barely see it—but Charles doesn’t know about that, and Charles is never going to learn about it either.

“Enjoying your days off?”

“Yes, I finally had time to catch up on some sleep.” Charles shakes his head. “This schedule is going to kill me.”

Max snorts. “Tell me about it,” he says.

“Stupid triple headers,” Charles grumbles before his whole face lights up again. “We should catch up over coffee,” he suggests.

Max can’t remember the last time they’ve caught up on life with each other. If he’s honest, he’s not sure this has ever happened before.

“I, of course, do not drink coffee,” he jokes. It’s mostly to be difficult; although he isn’t quite sure what there is to catch up considering they’ve just talked during the last weekend. Those are the important bits about his life. He doubts Charles cares about what Max’s cats have been up to this past week.

“Over Red Bull, I obviously mean.”

Max laughs. “Sure.” Maybe he can be convinced with a Red Bull.

Charles is smiling at him—the dimples cut deep into his cheeks. His keys dangle between his fingers. “Great! I sadly have to go now because Lorenzo is expecting me for lunch, but we really need to catch up soon! I am calling you?” And before Max has the chance to decline, Charles is already beaming so brightly that Max would feel bad to do it.

“Okay,” Max agrees, not sure when he’s started to care about not hurting Charles’ feelings.

Charles looks suspiciously smug as he gets in the car. “I will now stop bothering you,” he says, and it sounds like a joke.

But Charles doesn’t stop bothering Max, doesn’t stay away, doesn’t let himself be deterred, no matter how prickly Max is. Suddenly, he’s always there.

(It starts with a crash. It makes Max wonder if it’s going to end with a crash, too.))

Sassy tilts her head at him, hisses, then she prances away without looking at him a second time. Clearly, she’s mad at him for being gone for months.

Jimmy, though, jumps on his lap and rubs his head against Max’s stomach before he’s even had the chance to close the door behind himself. Max pets his ears the way he knows Jimmy likes it.

At least, he thinks, biting his tongue, the wheelchair has advantages for someone.

Slowly, Max closes the door behind him. For once, he’s glad that Charles took Leo with him, that he doesn’t have to fear for him to bolt out of the apartment. Max wouldn’t be able to go after him. He’d barely fit through the frame with the wheelchair when he’d first unlocked the door.

His doorman had asked if he’ll be back more often again, whether he would need help with getting upstairs, but other than that he hadn’t reacted to this new development, hadn’t even batted an eyelash at the wheelchair, and Max is glad for it. Despite all the cameras that always follow him through the paddock, he’s felt the eyes on him now.

Max breathes out, thuds his head against the door. His ears are ringing. There’s no one waiting for him here except for the cats—he’d planned for it, had wanted it like this, but now he does regret it, regrets that Charles isn’t here, that he can’t just bury himself in his arms and forget about everything for a few hours.

But Max hadn’t wanted to bother Charles with something like this, not during the last stretch of the season, not while he’s stressed and high-strung with everything going on in the team and on the track.

At least, everything looks the same—the jackets hung up on the wall, the shoes next to the door, the various trophies from both him and Charles all over his apartment. There’s his 2023 championship helmet on the cupboard.

Home, sweet home, he thinks, fingers buried in Jimmy’s fur.

His sister calls him in the evening.

“How have things been?” she asks. “Settled in well?”

Max hums noncommittally. He’s settled in, certainly, but whether he’s done it well or not is something he doesn’t know either.

Jimmy and Sassy settled in better than he did, by a lot. He was worried about that, after being gone for so long with barely anyone ever in the apartment at the same time as them, but as it turns out, he shouldn’t have needed to be.

“Everything well with Charles?” Victoria asks.

Max stares at the wall in front of him. It’s white and empty, and they still haven’t managed to find something to decorate it with. “He only arrives tomorrow.”

“I thought you said he already is there?” Victoria says, and he can hear her frown through the phone. He hates how much she worries, how much she worries about him.

“He had to stay a bit longer in Maranello,” Max lies. He’d never planned to make it home at the same time as Charles, had always wanted to come home a bit quicker so he’d be able to settle in without anyone watching him, without anyone following his every step.

He didn’t tell his mum and Victoria that, knew that they would have never agreed to it, that they would have worried far too much otherwise. But he doesn’t need their worry. He doesn’t need their concern either.

Victoria hums. She seems to accept it, but there’s also not anything else she can do about it now. “Have you talked to some of the others?”

Max sighs. “No. I have not seen them so far.” Which is the truth. Most of them are probably still somewhere all around the world, and to see the others, he would have needed to leave his apartment first. He’s not since he’s come back. He even ordered the groceries for next week even though he’s always told himself he would never do it, but times have changed, and he’s not been overly interested in talking to any of them, in having to answer questions he doesn’t have answers for.

He’s not told any of them that he’s moved back, so it is not like he will get unannounced visitors either. It might be a bigger issue once Charles is back, too. Charles has always been far more excitable about these things than Max has ever managed to make himself be.

“You’re neighbours with most of them,” Victoria says, amused. It’s never meant much that they are neighbours. Outside of race weekends, Max barely sees any of the others, although that might have to do with the fact that Max has never been interested in any of their prestigious events they get invited to.

Max shrugs despite the fact that his sister can’t even see him. “They are busy.” That’s not a lie, either. The season is slowly coming to an end, but Max knows far too well how busy it can get. The last few years have been worse, and soon there’s not only a new season to prepare for.

Vic snorts. “You just did not want to talk to them,” she says.

“Not true,” Max argues even though it’s very much the truth.

“Yes true,” Vic argues back.

“No,” Max insists.

“Whatever,” Vic says, and he can hear in her voice that she’s rolling her eyes at him.

“Whatever,” Max echoes and also rolls his eyes. “Why did you call anyway?”

“Can I not just call my favourite big brother?” She’s grinning at him. He just knows it.

Max gags. “Sure.”

“Okay, fine,” Vic says. “Did you think about what we’ve talked about?”

Max grits his teeth. He shouldn’t have pushed for it.

Before he left, they talked. Because she’s worried. Because he doesn’t seem like himself. Because it is affecting him more than he wants to admit. It’s not the first time it came up in a conversation they’ve had. She’s been trying to get him to consider it for years now.

He’s fine, though. And he doesn’t need therapy.

It is not affecting him. It’s just a setback. But he’s fine, and he will recover, and it doesn’t mean anything.

Silverstone 2021 also happened, and he didn’t need therapy, and it didn’t affect him in any way. He was still able to get back in the car and perform like he was supposed to do, even with the concussion lingering.

Once he’s physically recovered, things will be exactly the same. He doesn’t see why it shouldn’t be like that. Why this is in any way different than 2021.

“I, of course, do not need therapy,” he finally says, curling his fingers into a fist.

“Max,” his sister says, and he hates how serious she sounds. She’s his younger sister, and maybe they’re not children anymore, closer to thirty than he really cares to admit, but it’s still weird. It’s still weird, and he hates that sometimes, she forgets that he’s her older brother, that she doesn’t have to spare any of her concerns for him, that she feels like she has to take care of him even though she has other things to worry about.

He breathes out. “I do not,” he repeats.

“I just think it could be helpful for you,” Vic says. “Even if the crash”—Max grits his teeth—“doesn’t leave any long-lasting problems, talking to a therapist might be beneficial.”

“The— it doesn’t mean anything,” he presses out.

“Max,” his sister says, “you can’t even name it,” and her voice is unbearably soft.

Max dreams that night. He dreams of the track, of a karting circuit. He doesn’t recognise it, but the pressure against his helmet is familiar, and if he squints, he can see his dad in the distance. He’s yelling, Max thinks. He’s always yelling.

He takes a curve too quickly, the kart wobbles over the curb, and before Max can react, there’s a second kart next to him. Too fast, too close, he knows what will happen next, can feel the tar beneath his fingertips. But before they collide, Max wakes up.

His breath stutters in his chest, sweat covers his face. He feels sick.

When he gets up in the morning, he feels more tired than he did when he fell asleep.

His dad calls once a day. To check up on his recovery, to check up on his progress—it’s always the same, it’s never something new. He rarely asks how Max is doing, but maybe that’s nothing new either.

Without fail, he asks, “Have you started walking on your own yet?”

Without fail, he asks, “When does Brad think you’ll be ready?”

And then, without fail, he asks, “What about sim racing?”

Back when Max started in Formula One, when he started to take sim racing seriously, his dad didn’t think highly of it, didn’t think that it was having any kind of advantage. Most of the drivers at that time had shared the same sentiment, hadn’t seen it as a proper way to train, as a real way to race.

He’d come around since then, has realised that it helps, that it keeps Max focused and his abilities honed.

Sometimes, it makes Max wish he hadn’t.

But it’s nothing he can’t deal with, nothing he hasn’t dealt with since he was a child. It’s still the same since then, still his dad and his harsh caring and rough love. Max knows how to handle it, has learned how to once his mum hadn’t been able to anymore. He had needed to know, or he would’ve never become a Formula One driver, a Formula One winner, a Champion.

So, he grits his teeth and answers the calls.

He tries the sim.

It’s stupid, probably, but Max has never been known for making smart decisions.

His doctors told him not to look at screens too much for too long, but this isn’t supposed to be a proper training session. This is just a trial. Testing the waters.

It doesn’t mean more, isn’t supposed to mean more. It’s just sim racing, simply something he’s done hundreds and thousands of times during his career. Something he likes, something he’s always enjoyed. It’s a hobby, and it’s something he’d like to pick up again.

Nothing more.

It can’t be more.

But his hands are itching—it’s been weeks since he last was sim racing. He doesn’t remember a time where he took a break longer than a week. It feels necessary, to get rid of the itch, to prove a point.

He can’t stand hearing his dad ask every few days whether he’s tried the sim already or not. He can’t stand the disappointed sigh every time he has to answer with “No” either.

If all of this was up to his dad, he would’ve been back in the car two months ago, so maybe he should be grateful that it’s just long-suffering sighs and lips pressed into a thin line.

It’s almost nice, he thinks. Because as much as he might loathe and dread the almost daily calls, it’s not as bad as when his dad is breathing down his neck and personally planning out Max’s training and future.

He turns the computer on. His steering wheel has been collecting dust. It makes him cough, but then the screen finds his attention, then his hands curl around the steering wheel and then he feels normal.

He doesn’t have the same fine motor skills as before, can’t feel how much he accelerates or the pressure he applies to brake. Instead of his feet, he has to use his knees and thighs to push down. It doesn’t feel natural, but it works, better than he’s expected it to.

It goes well, at first. He chose a good day, a day with limited pain, one on which he felt good, fine, almost healthy.

His headaches have subsided in the past few weeks—they’re not as consistent anymore. Nowadays, they only really bother him when he moves too quickly, when he grips his hair too tightly. For the most part, it’s manageable. It’s fine. The headaches aren’t as bad as they were in the beginning, and his vision is rarely ever blurry anymore.

It’s stupid, in hindsight. Of course. Because that’s exactly what his doctors have warned him of. That’s what Brad had talked about earlier this week.

But it’s not even been thirty minutes, and his jaw is aching, and his head is pulsating, and his eyes are teary and burning.

And when he tries to get up to switch to his wheelchair, he can barely move his legs—even less than normal. His knees are stiff, and his back is throbbing, and when he finally wills his legs to cooperate, he almost collapses the moment he takes his hands off the chair.

He doesn’t yell, and he doesn’t punch the wall like he wants to do because his neighbours are sleeping, and the cats are in the other room, and he doesn’t want to scare them, doesn’t want to be like him, and—

He balls his hands to fists, so tightly that his nails press into his palms, but the pain is still not enough to focus on anything but this.

(The next day, he barely manages to force himself out of bed.)

Max stays buried in his bed, blanket drawn over his head. His back throbs and his eyes burn, and he falls into a restless sleep that leaves him bleary and disoriented whenever he wakes up.

He doesn’t realise that Charles has come back until something warm and heavy settles down next to him; the mattress dips under the weight of an additional body and a hand settles heavily into his hair.

Max stirs, forces his eyes open. “Charles,” he whispers, but his throat is dry and his voice barely works.

Charles shushes him. “Go back to sleep, chéri,” he mutters, presses a kiss to Max’s forehead, and Max falls back into a dreamless sleep.

“I hate this,” he tells Brad the next time they see each other.

He wants to yell, and he wants to scream, but he doesn’t have the energy to do neither, so all he can do is complain.

He hates this. He hates all of this.

He hates how slow recovery is, and he hates that he can’t push himself more, and maybe, he hates Formula One as well.

“I know,” Brad says quietly. “But—” he hesitates; Max knows what he’s going to say anyway.

On average, people with spinal cord injuries find out the extent of functionality fully returning within two years. It’s impossible to make predictions, to know what your progress and your recovery will look like. For all the technology they have, there is still nothing that can make the human body more predictable.

Two years. Two years until they know more. Until they know for sure, and until then…

He scoffs.

Two fucking years.

Ever since he’s been a child, he’s not been very keen on celebrating his birthdays.

(On the evening of Max’s eleventh birthday, his parents fight so badly that his sister comes to find him. His dad’s words echo through the entire house, and Victoria is crying.

Max knows that they normally try to keep their voices down, to not fight on birthdays or Christmas, but it’s happening more and more that the only words they exchange are yelled, that they don’t look at each other otherwise.

Nowadays, all they do is fight.

Together, Victoria and him hide under his blanket until heavy footsteps stump on the floor, until the front door slams, until his mum knocks on the door three times like she always does and looks inside.

She’d been crying—her eyes are red and her cheeks are wet, but she sits down on the edge of Max’s bed and strokes his hair and kisses Victoria’s forehead.

“I’m sorry,” she says, voice heavy. “I’m not— I’m not going to let this happen again.”)

(It’ll be the last time until Max turns eighteen and moves out that he’ll see his mum and sister on his birthdays.

A year later—when Max turns twelve—, his mum lives in Belgium again, and Max travels all around Europe with his dad.)

His 27^th birthday is a quiet affair. In the years before, he sometimes went out clubbing or maybe invited his team to dinner. Neither of them is really an option now.

His mum offers to fly down, to come visit, but Max declines. His dad calls, wishes him a happy birthday and then asks the same questions he always does. Victoria FaceTimes him, and he spends an hour talking to his nephews.

Brad brings him dinner instead of breakfast like usual. He doesn’t stay for long, leaves when Max starts making up excuses about being tired.

Other than that, Max wouldn’t know if anyone has tried to contact him. He’s deleted Instagram, and he isn’t keeping up with his WhatsApp messages. But it’s fine. It’s fine. He doesn’t want to see them anyway.

Through it all, Charles just frowns at him. He doesn’t like it, Max knows, but he can’t do it, not today.

“We could go to the beach,” Charles muses. The sun is bright, and there are no clouds in the sky. It’s still surprisingly warm outside, and normally, Max would always like to go on a nice afternoon walk.

“You should go,” Max says. He doesn’t meet Charles’ eyes.

Charles only raises his eyebrows. “Without you?”

Max scoffs. “What else?”

“We could go together.” Charles almost sounds offended, like Max has just insulted him. “Maybe take a stroll on the boardwalk, get some ice cream or a crêpe.”

“I only get crêpes with Lando,” Max almost says, but he swallows the words. It’s not even true anymore. He used to only get crêpes with Lando because otherwise he wasn’t able to stick to his diet and his weight. But now neither of that is necessary. He hesitates. Both are still things he has to consider.

Charles pouts. “Please?” he asks, and Max almost caves.

But there is no way he’ll be out like this, there is no way he lets people see him like this. It’s already bad enough when he has to go out because there is no other option, because there is a doctor’s appointment to attend.

He doesn’t want even more people to see him in this stupid wheelchair.

“Later?” Max tries to placate Charles who just sighs, disappointment settling on his face.

They both know they won’t talk about it again.

The calendar seems to mock him.

September bleeds into October. The leaves are slowly turning red, the nights are getting colder and stormier. He looks out of the window, and suddenly it’s autumn.

Last year around this time, he’d been celebrating winning his third championship, had already been celebrating winning the Constructors’ as well.

He glances at the World Driver’s Championship Trophy on his fridge and bites on the inside of his cheeks until he tastes blood.

There had been a lot of things he expected after last year—he’d known that a repeat of the last season would be impossible, but this had never been one of the options.

Sitting at home, doing nothing. He’s not sure the last time he did nothing. He’s not sure there was ever a time where he did nothing.

Not as a child, certainly not as a teenager. He’d always felt angry when he was eighteen. But he’d slowed down, started to live more of his life, and yet he never stood still. It simply hadn’t been possible, hadn’t been something he would do.

And now—

Now he’s sitting in a flat in the middle of Monaco while his boyfriend is around the globe, and there is nothing he can do.

Can’t walk, can’t drive, can’t do anything.

There are people at the beach. When he closes his eyes, he can hear them yell and laugh. It’s been months since he’s last felt like that.

His entire body aches. There are bruises on his knees, sores on his palms. His fingers hurt from how tightly he’s been grabbing the bars.

It’s been days, weeks since he took his first steps in the hospital, since he’d been discharged and started training with Brad, and yet it doesn’t feel like anything’s changed, like he’s made progress since then.

His body feels sluggish, and his vision spins, and his lower legs won’t move. No matter how much he tries to will them into bending, they won’t cooperate, and Max isn’t sure what more he can do. If he can do more.

Brad tells him to have patience, to take it slow and relax, to not force things that don’t want to happen.

And he gets it, he understands why Brad says it. It still makes his teeth grit and his fingers tighten around the bars—it’s the same thing his neurologist says, the same thing his physiotherapist at the hospital said.

But he’s done his research, he knows that the first six months are the time when the most progress is made, when it’s decided whether he can return or not.

And if he wants to return, there’s no time to take it slow.

He can’t stop now.

Even if he’s a World Champion.

His eyes burn.

Three championships, he thinks, staring at the World Driver’s Championship trophy on the fridge across from him. Three.

It’s three championships more than most drivers will ever win.

Three.

That’s one less than Seb’s, one more than Fernando’s. It’s the same number that Senna won.

Three.

He’s always said that he doesn’t care about records and numbers, that the only focus on his mind is to win. Back when he’d been younger, more naïve, he’d wanted seven championships, as many as Michael, but the older he got, the more he realised that it’s not what he wants, that ultimately, it’s not what he strives for.

After he started winning, he started to stop caring about the numbers, started caring about the fun, which sounds ridiculous considering winning had always been the fun. Why would he be happy about a second place?

It’s different now, maybe. He loves winning, but it stopped mattering whether it was the 60^th or 61^st win of his career. As long as he kept on winning, he never cared because it was turning into a 62^nd win soon enough anyway.

It feels different now. He has three championships, three more than most drivers will ever have.

It should be enough, should be acceptable. He should be able to settle, to smile and accept that he’s a three-time World Champion.

Three.

It should be enough.

But he’s a racer, he’s a Formula One driver. No one ever got successful and won multiple championships by accepting one, two, three championships, by losing their hunger and their drive. By saying, “This is enough. I can stop now.”

He’d thought about it after the third, had wondered if it was enough, if he’d be happy with three, if he could turn away and not regret it. He hadn’t been able to.

But Lewis hadn’t either; otherwise, he wouldn’t have left the team he’s won six championships with to chase another one with Ferrari. And Michael hadn’t; Max still remembers his quiet voice, his stern face after the offer from Mercedes, two years into retirement. And Marc hadn’t.

He bends his knees and imagines how cool the floor underneath his feet must feel like.

He knows that Marc had thought about retiring after the crash, the surgeries. More than a 30° rotation, he thinks Marc mentioned once. They haven’t really spoken about it, but Max knows, knows about the worry, the consideration.

Marc hadn’t, though, hadn’t retired, had switched teams and motorcycles, and now he’s winning again. His 60^th Grand Prix victory, Max has seen.

Marc hadn’t settled for eight championships.

“Ah, Mr. Verstappen, good afternoon,” Dr. Freyer says. “How do you feel?”

Like shit, Max thinks and doesn’t say. It probably would be a lie anyway. He feels better than he did a few months ago. He’s still in pain, and he’s still dizzy far too often, not even mentioning all the issues he has when it comes to walking, but…it’s better. Probably.

So, he says that.

Dr. Freyer nods, scrolls through something on his computer. “Things look okay,” he says slowly. “You still have headaches?”

They’ve gotten better, thankfully, even if they’re still not gone. But now, even if he does have a headache, he at least doesn’t want to claw his eyes out anymore. Most of the time, anyway.

“Not as often anymore,” he says.

“And the blurriness has lessened?”

Max nods, careful not to put too much force behind it. He doesn’t want to make things worse now. “I only really have that anymore when I have a bad headache.” But when he has a bad headache, then everything is bad. It always feels like every single issue just suddenly has increased tenfold.

“That sounds good…” Dr. Freyer mutters, quickly typing something. “Still dizzy?”

Max grimaces. Brad had already told him that it probably will stay like this for a bit longer; it’s just incredibly annoying. He still regularly forgets that he can’t stand up too quickly, and it’s been months.

It also worries him extremely that it won’t disappear. He’s going to be fucked if he gets dizzy at random times and especially if he were to drive a Formula One car—and if he’s honest, as long as he gets dizzy because he moved a bit too quickly, he doesn’t want to be in one himself.

“Yeah, especially if I move too quickly,” he says.

“Okay.” Dr. Freyer looks at him again. “Anything else you want to talk about? Is there anything that’s gotten worse? Something that’s gotten better?”

Things have gotten better. Things aren’t as bad anymore as they used to be. He is making progress, and his condition looks better with each passing week. But it still doesn’t feel like it’s enough, and he hates that every single improvement is the tiniest of tiny baby steps.

He can look at screens now without getting nauseous immediately—that doesn’t mean he’s more often on his phone or even that he’s capable of doing some sim work, but the last time, he watched a documentary, he’d been able to go through almost an hour without any problems.

It’s something. It’s not satisfying, not enough, not really, but it’s something.

“I can look at screens for longer periods of time again. Still not for a few hours and mostly just TV, of course not anything where I need to focus.”

Dr. Freyer squints at him. “You do sim racing, you said?”

He wishes he could. He would love to join Team Redline and actively participate—he’s been more in contact with them again, has watched some of their streams for background noise, sometimes he joins their VCs when they play other games, but there’s not anything else he can really, properly do. He can’t support them by participating in any races, and only hanging out on the discord while they sim race, is depressing.

He doesn’t want to just watch them race, and he doesn’t want to just listen to them race either.

And there’s also the fact that he’s not shown his face in public in months, and joining a stream immediately becomes less attractive when he thinks about that.

“Not anymore,” he manages to get out.

If Dr. Freyer notices anything, he doesn’t mention it. He just nods, says, “Ah, yes, that might be an issue for longer.”

Of course. Max can’t say he’s surprised.

He looks at the computer screen, then back at Max. “Other than that?”

Max hesitates. Dr. Freyer hasn’t implied anything regarding his future yet, and Max doubts that he’ll bring it up either, and maybe, he should just let it be. He doesn’t want to know, so what’s the point of talking about it?

At the same time—

“My dad,” Max says carefully before he can think about it any longer, “is not really happy with the progress I am making.”

Dr. Freyer blinks. “Are you?” he asks.

Max frowns. “Am I what?”

“Happy with your progress?”

Max tilts his head. What kind of question is that? Of course, he’s not. He doesn’t think he can be until he sits in a goddamn Formula One car and is able to race like nothing has ever happened.

“I mean…not really, no?” he says, still frowning. “I still cannot race, and I, of course, want to go back as soon as I can.”

If he can.

He takes a deep breath. “To be honest, I want to know whether that even is possible.”

For a moment, it’s quiet. For a moment, he can just hear his heartbeat echoing in his ears.

Max doesn’t look Dr. Freyer in the eyes, and Dr. Freyer stares at the computer screen instead. Max also would prefer to not sit here and talk about this. But alas, he would also prefer to never have crashed, to have won 2024 and to get ready for Australia.

“I can’t tell you that,” his doctor finally says. “There are a lot of different things that will influence this. Your progress is steady if a bit slow, but it’s not stagnant which is a good sign.”

Max didn’t really expect for anything else to come out of this. It’s the same answer as always, and he gets it, he really does. They know as much as he does, and they don’t want to promise him anything in case things go wrong, and he gets it.

It doesn’t stop him from wishing he could just get a straight answer.

It would make things easier, sometimes, he thinks, even if the answer was that he will never be able to race again.

At least then, there would be certainty, and he could prepare himself for that. He could move on, could try to find something else. He wouldn’t be stuck in this state of nothingness, of maybe he can race again and maybe he won’t.

But he would know. He wouldn’t have to hope and wish and pray.

Max clears his throat. “What exactly does ‘slow’ mean?”

Slow could mean anything, really. It could mean that he’s barely making any progress even if he does make a bit of it, and it could mean that he’s progressing just a bit slower than what would be the optimal outcome, that it doesn’t matter,  that Max can just focus on the things he’s already doing, the plans Brad has already figured out for him.

“It means that your recovery is on the slower side of a possible progress, but that can be worked on with your physiotherapist,” his neurologist starts. “But I am mostly worried that you still do not have any feeling back.”

Max swallows. He knows what it means, has had this exact worry for months now. If he doesn’t get the feeling back, he’s not going to step foot in any car ever again.

He won’t be able to drive.

His finger hovers over WhatsApp. It’s the end of October—and Charles is somewhere across the world, preparing for the next race, getting ready to fight for the Constructors’ Championship. Normally, he would text or call without hesitation; just a normal activity that he doesn’t have to spend time to think about.

He wants to hear Charles’ voice, wants to get reassured, wants to hear, Nothing is too late. Everything is still possible.

But he can’t, not when Charles is stressed more than enough already, when he has to fight a car and Ferrari on top of that.

He considers texting Lando or Daniel instead, but alone thinking about opening WhatsApp, thinking about seeing all the messages he’s been ignoring for weeks, thinking about the questions and well wishes, makes him not want to open the app. It’s stupid, and he can’t run away forever.

It’s just a quick message and nothing more. It should be easier than it is.

It isn’t.

He shuts his phone off.

Someone is ringing on the doorbell.

Max has been napping—it’s something he wouldn’t have seen him do just a few months ago. If he’d told himself he would spend his free time sleeping, he would have laughed at himself. But now— now, he barely makes it through a day without getting some more sleep in the middle of the day.

He slowly sits up. His back cracks. It’s easier even if he still has to use his arms for most of it, but he gets his legs over the edge of the couch without help now.

His head still feels foggy, dizzy. For a moment, he closes his eyes and wills the room to stop spinning. When he opens them again, the doorbell still hasn’t stopped ringing. His vision has gone blurry.

Whoever it is, they’re quite persistent, but he can’t think of anyone it would be. His family hasn’t mentioned anything—his dad had told him he might come visit him in the next few weeks, but he hasn’t really heard more about it, and his mum and his sister haven’t made plans yet. Brad had been here earlier, and if it was something important, he would’ve called first.

He pulls the wheelchair closer. By now, he’s figured out how to get himself into the wheelchair rather quickly. In the beginning, it had been impossible to do it on his own, but with a bit more mobility in his legs, it’s been getting easier. It’s still slower than he would have liked.

He loosens the brake. The doorbell is still ringing.

“Fucking hell,” he mutters, but he gets to the door. For a moment, he considers ignoring the person before he starts to fear that they would just never stop ringing the bell. Maybe they would just continue until he would get his doorman to kick them out. He grimaces. Perhaps not.

He slowly opens the door, swings it fully open so that his wheelchair doesn’t catch on it.

“Fuck you,” Lando says instead of a greeting. “Genuinely, fuck you, dickhead. What the hell?”

And then, before Max can even react, Lando is already hugging him, squeezing him so tightly that he can barely breathe.

It takes a second for Max to catch on what’s happening, then he tentatively wraps his arms around Lando, too. Lando is warm, and he smells familiar. Max breathes out, closes his eyes.

“What are you doing here?” he finally asks when Lando wriggles out of the hug.

“I had to find out through Charles that you’re back in Monaco! After not hearing from you in months. What the fuck, Max?” Lando sounds genuinely upset even though he doesn’t look particularly angry. His eyes are red-rimmed and puffy, and there’s a frown on his face.

“Through Charles!” he repeats, disbelief in his voice as if he still can’t believe it. It makes Max wonder when Charles mentioned it—since when Lando has known. It’s been a few weeks, but maybe it didn’t come up until the last race weekend. He catches himself before he grimaces. Or maybe they just didn’t manage to make it through a conversation without fighting until now.

“I know,” Max says even if he knows it’s not enough. “I am sorry.”

“You’re—” Lando stops, shakes his head. “Whatever,” he says although it’s obvious that it’s not just whatever. Max lets it go—he doesn’t particularly want to deal with it. It’s bad enough that another person sees him like this.

Lando breathes out loudly and rubs over his forehead. “Sorry for…for calling you a dickhead.”

Max snorts. “That was kind of deserved.”

Lando squints at him, but then he lets out a soft laugh.

“Uhm,” Max says after a beat of silence, “come in?” He rolls back a bit so that Lando can get in, but the movement seems to have grabbed Lando’s attention for the first time since Max had opened the door.

His eyes widen, but he doesn’t immediately mention it. Instead, he gets into Max’s apartment behind him, closes the door with a soft click.

“Charles mentioned it,” Lando says; it’s quiet, almost timid as if he isn’t sure whether he should mention it.

Max faces Lando again. It’s annoying—having to look up. He’s never needed to raise his head to be able to look Lando in the face. “The wheelchair?” he asks and lifts an eyebrow.

“Yeah,” Lando says. He still sounds unsure. It’s not like Charles and Max talked a lot about this whole situation, so he probably couldn’t even tell Lando how to act, and Lando has never been great at this. Not that Max is any better.

So, he simply shrugs. “It is better now,” he says because it is. Things are better than they already have been. He isn’t confined to the wheelchair at all times, he’s able to walk a few steps on his own, taking the crutches gets easier and easier.

None of it feels like it’s enough.

But Brad has been telling him that he can’t just expect miracles, that it’s progress, that things are getting better.

Lando bites his lip. “We have heard a few things, but it’s not a lot. Red Bull is rather tight-lipped about all of this, and otherwise…” He trails off, but he doesn’t have to end the sentence for Max to know what Lando is talking about. Especially not after he called Max a dickhead for it.

He grits his teeth, takes a deep breath. He almost regrets that they’ve agreed on not giving too much information out to the public—at least then, he wouldn’t need to explain much. Now they just know the basics, the least amount Max had been able to handle then. (Now.)

“Yeah, I know,” he says. “It has just been— it just has been bad.” It’s an understatement, but he isn’t sure yet how much he really wants to talk about it. Having to talk to Brad about it is already bad enough; this is worse.

“Bad?” Lando asks. His eyes are still darting between the wheelchair and Max’s face.

Max waves with his hands. “Cannot feel my legs,” he grits out, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible. He knows he’s not succeeding.

Lando blinks at him. “But you will—” He gestures with one hand like he doesn’t want to say it aloud.

Max doesn’t even bother to force a smile on his face. “I have been working on it with Brad. It is…there is development.” It’s the truth. It’s not a lie. It doesn’t mean anything. He doesn’t know how to say anything else, doesn’t know how to say more.

It’s the most he’s willing to offer.

Lando hesitates. “That’s good, right?”

He bites his tongue until he can’t feel it anymore. “Sure.”

Lando stays until it gets dark outside and Max can feel the exhaustion settle into his bones again.

He yawns twice before Lando looks at the clock on his phone and decides to go home.

“I hate autumn,” Lando grumbles as he puts on his jacket. “It’s only six. Why is it already dark outside?”

Max snorts. “Shouldn’t you be used to it?” If there is one thing he doesn’t miss, it’s England, and he’s Dutch. He’s used to rain and shit weather. Somehow, England is still worse at it.

Lando rolls his eyes at him. They both only fly to England when it’s necessary.

Max slowly rolls after him to the door, but before he manages to shut the door behind Lando, he turns around once more.

He glares at Max even if any heat is missing. “Don’t you dare to disappear on me again, you muppet.”

Max laughs. It almost feels real. “Of course,” he says. “Promise.”

Lando is still glaring at him. “You better.”

Then, Max is alone again.

It doesn’t get easier. It’s something he’s expected to happen—the dizziness has gotten less, the headaches fewer, the pain subdued. But it doesn’t change anything. His arms still shake under his weight, he can’t feel the ground beneath his feet, his body protests his every movement.

He takes ten steps, and it doesn’t feel like anything.

Spending a whole day in his bed is a weird thing. His days were always too packed as a child for this, and after he made it to Formula One, he’d been busy with everything else in his life. There’s never been the time for it. There was always something to do, always something that had to be done.

If they weren’t on a track, they were working on the karts, and if they weren’t working on the karts, his dad would train with him.

His dad.

They’ve spoken a few days ago—his dad had checked in with him about the progress he’s making, about the new training plan Brad made. He hadn’t been overly impressed by it, but that’s nothing new. He’s not impressed by anything that doesn’t have Max back in the car.

But the plan works even if it’s slow, even if it’s tedious, even if it takes so much longer than Max would prefer.

He doesn’t think his dad agrees with that.

“You would make so much more progress with me,” he’d said, voice gruff, and Max is sure he was still able to hear the annoyance about the fact that Max not only moved in with his mum, but then also moved back to Monaco.

“Brad works with the suggestions from my doctors,” he’d tried to appease, but that’s not the important part, is it? Who cares if you stick to the doctors’ recommendations if there’s no progress? If nothing gets better? If you’re stagnant?

It’s all about bettering yourself, about pushing yourself, about doing as much as somehow possible in the quickest time. It’s always what his dad has lived by. To be efficient.

Max stares at the ceiling.

And now he’s probably spent more time in his bed than anywhere else the past few months, spent so much time resting that he sometimes fears he will get bedsores.

His dad isn’t entirely wrong. They both know that he would make more progress with him, that he’d be back sooner in the car than any of his doctors would have dreamed of. His dad has always managed to get out the sides of him that only racing has ever been able to do.

Maybe he should have stayed with his dad, maybe he shouldn’t have moved back in with his mum, maybe.

But the thing is—

The thing is that he’s not as angry as he used to be when he was younger and more inexperienced and immature.

He has it from his father, he thinks. His mum can be angry, too, obviously, will curse and fight and not back down until she’s got what she wants, but she’s also gentle and loving, and Max sometimes isn’t sure if his father even knows what either of these words mean.

He’s never been gentle—loving, maybe, Max knows that his father loves him. Of course, he does.

But whereas his father has remained angry and impetuous throughout his entire life, Max has grown out of this constant state of anger after he entered Formula One, after he’s achieved his dream, after he’s won and then won even more and then became world champion.

Winning more championships hasn’t really been his goal, isn’t really what he wants to do for the rest of his life because it’s always the same in the end. It doesn’t exactly get boring because racing is still fun and will always be fun and so is the rush of winning and the adrenaline of finishing a race and the blood pumping through his ears, but…it gets repetitive. It’s not what Max is chasing, what he wants to achieve.

He wants to push himself, and he wants to go to his limit, and he always wants to win, but he thinks now he would also be happy to do other things, to try the things he’s wanted to do—first when he was a child and then when he became a Formula One driver—and was never allowed to.

He doesn’t want to lose, ever, but there’s not the same anger, the same frustrations that pushed and pushed him when he was younger, that spurred him on to win, that made him get into the car and drive with a recklessness that he’s long left behind.

It’s what had made him get back in the car and race after Silverstone—even though his vision had been blurry and he’d gotten dizzy and he’d been barely able to see straight. But if he’d told anyone, if he hadn’t pushed through it, he wouldn’t have been allowed back, would have been forced to sit out races and lose the championship.

It makes him wonder now, though, if he needs that anger back, if winning three championships has made him mellow and too gentle, if that, in the end, will be the reason why he won’t step in another Formula One car again.

It makes him wonder now what would’ve happened if he hadn’t won a championship yet, if he had stayed with his father, if he hadn’t listened to his doctors and to Brad, if he had forced his way back into the car even if it meant disregarding his health and permanently ruining his body.

(Maybe he would’ve succeeded. Maybe it would’ve just killed him.)

His legs shake beneath him.

“Fuck,” he grits out. It’s been weeks. Walking with crutches shouldn’t be as difficult as it still is.

“You’re doing fine,” Brad says, but his fingers dig into Max’s forearm like he’s afraid that Max might fall at any moment. “Just focus on your breathing, mate.”

Max breathes out. “That is really not that easy,” he says. Brad pinches him for it.

“Your breathing,” he reminds Max.

Max rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah,” he mutters. Brad pinches him another time.

“C’mon,” Brad says.

Max grits his teeth and stares at the wall in front of him. He’s realised quickly he can’t look at his feet if he doesn’t want to fall.

In; he takes a step.

Out; he steadies himself.

In; he drags his right foot forward.

Out; he’s standing again.

In; he slowly lifts his left foot, stumbles when it catches on his trousers. His right leg buckles underneath him.

Brad’s knuckles are turning white where they grip Max.

“Fuck,” he says again.

Brad pats his arm, smiles at him. “Things are steadily progressing,” he says like it’s a good thing, like Max didn’t just almost fall, like his recovery looks better than it does.

Max bites on his lip. Steady doesn’t mean fast.

“How is your progress going?” his dad asks before Max has even the chance to answer the phone properly.

He suppresses a yawn, rubs his eyes. He’d not been able to sleep a lot last night because his back was bothering him too much, and now—he checks the time—it’s barely seven AM. Nowadays, he’s barely ever awake at that time.

“What?” he says, slowly sitting up.

“How is your progress going?” his dad repeats, and Max isn’t sure if he imagines it, but this time, he sounds annoyed.

“It is fine,” Max says slowly, trying not to think about the fact that he still hasn’t talked to Brad. He really needs to, he knows, but—

But.

Well, there’s not really a but.

Max just hasn’t yet.

“The doctor said it’s steady.” It’s not a lie. He did say that. He also said that it’s slow. It’s not something he’s very keen on telling his dad. He should, probably. His dad should know about these things because they’re a team, but it’s also seven AM, and Max isn’t interested in getting lectured right now.

“I was talking to Raymond,” his dad says. “He said he would talk to Red Bull regarding a contract.”

Max frowns. “A contract?” Christian hasn’t mentioned anything about that, and Max wouldn’t even know what that contract would exactly entail. He has a contract, and it also covers injury-related issues. Surely, Christian would have mentioned if the situation right now made any problems that would need to be fixed by a new contract.

“Yes,” his dad says, and Max doesn’t have to see him to know he’s rolled his eyes. “We need to make sure that we protect your seat since it looks like you’re going to not be able to race for a bit of a longer time.” Max bets that his dad’s lips curl in disgust right now.

It’s still something. That his dad has finally accepted that Max will have to sit out for longer than what his dad would have liked. Then again, his dad would’ve wanted him to participate in the next race afterwards, so there’s that.

Although Max doesn’t know whether his dad sees him back in Formula One for 2025.

“Oh,” he just makes.

His dad scoffs. “Yeah, oh,” he mocks.

Max presses his lips together and doesn’t say anything.

“Anyway,” his dad continues. “Raymond and I will take care of this while you…”

There’s a pause.

“You’ve been slacking off,” his dad says, and it doesn’t sound like a question. “This needs to change. Do you hear me?”

Max grits his teeth. He hasn’t been slacking off. It’s not his damn fault that his body won’t heal like it should. He’s trying. He’s working on it. He’s doing his goddamn best.

Things haven’t been going as great as they had hoped for, but it’s not his fault. It’s not his fucking fault.

His dad isn’t even here. There’s no way for him to know.

“I have not been slacking off,” he says quietly. His head hurts. He thinks his eyes are burning. It’s hard to tell sometimes when your entire body is always hurting. “It has just been slower than expected.”

He should just shut up. It’s the same for his dad anyway. In the end, it doesn’t matter why things aren’t progressing as quickly as his dad wants them to do. For him, it just means that Max hasn’t put in the work that he was supposed to do.

It used to be like that when Max was a child, and it won’t have changed now.

“You should ask yourself why it is like that,” his dad replies, and his voice is cold.

Of course.

Max isn’t sure why he even bothered saying anything. His dad is never going to change his opinion on that. And that’s fine. That’s just how his dad is. That’s how it has been possible for Max to make it so far.

So, he says, “I will talk to Brad.”

It won’t be enough for his dad. Nothing will ever be enough until he sees results. And Max doesn’t know when he can show his dad results. It’s not for a lack of trying. It doesn’t matter, though, when there’s no progress and no goal and no result.

“You should look for a new physiotherapist,” his dad says. Again. Like they haven’t had this conversation a million times before.

It won’t happen. His dad knows that. There’s no point in always bringing it up. Max isn’t going to change his mind on that. Brad is great, and Max trusts Brad, and he isn’t sure he could start working with a new physiotherapist when his issues look like that at the moment.

“Brad is familiar with everything. It would just set me back if I started to work with a new physiotherapist,” Max says.

His dad doesn’t reply to that, and Max knows that his dad knows that he’s correct.

It always sucks when he has to work with a new physiotherapist as it is because they don’t know, and Max doesn’t have the patience to go through everything again. The problems they are working with right now, make it even less possible for a quick and easy switch.

Not even mentioning that Max doesn’t want to.

Then, his dad huffs. “Fine,” he grits out, “but don’t say I didn’t tell you.”

He won’t. Because there won’t be anything to regret about it. If he never returns to Formula One, it won’t be because Brad failed him. He knows that much.

“Okay,” Max easily agrees.

“Okay,” his dad echoes begrudgingly, and then he hangs up on Max without another word.

Max lets his phone fall on the couch, stares out of the window without seeing anything. That could have been way worse, he tries to tell himself.

He takes a deep breath, leans back against the headboard of his bed. He didn’t need that. Especially not at seven AM.

But it’s fine. It’s fine. It’s whatever. It’s nice knowing that both Raymond and his dad try their best to make a return possible. He doesn’t think he would be able to do this without them.

Max drums with his fingers against the soft fabric of the couch. “How is it?” he asks, and he isn’t sure he really wants to know.

“You mean Daniel?” GP sounds incredulous, but his voice is always distorted and weird over the phone. Max should be used to it by now—their radio is always distorted, and this isn’t really different at all—, but somehow the phone calls are worse than any of the radios could ever be.

Maybe he can get Red Bull to develop a new phone for him.

Max shrugs. “Sure,” he says because he’s still not been entirely certain which driver took his place, but he’s happy for Daniel if it’s true. He knows how much it meant to him when he’d been able to come back to Red Bull.

“You could talk to him,” GP suggests, and that’s so typical that Max sometimes wonders if GP had forgotten that Max isn’t a lanky, moody teen anymore.

Max rolls his eyes. “But I am not talking to him currently. I am having a conversation with you.” He also doesn’t think he wants to have a conversation with Daniel. It makes him shudder just thinking about the way Daniel would chide him for ignoring everyone the past few months, only to then get weird about all of this.

Max can’t even blame him for either of those things. He would react the exact same way.

“You’re a brat, Max,” GP sighs, and Max knows that if they were talking to each other in person right now, GP wouldn’t hesitate to slap the brim of Max’s cap.

“So,” Max draws out, “how are things?”

“I’m not race engineering for Daniel,” GP just says and doesn’t offer any explanation.

Max freezes. “Mate, what?”

“I told you I wouldn’t continue without you,” GP says. He doesn’t follow it up with anything else, but he doesn’t need to because Max knows what he’s talking about, had been there when GP had said it for the first time, had read about it the next times. It doesn’t explain anything. Max doesn’t think GP even had it in his contract that he could simply step back from this position. He doesn’t want to know what buttons GP had to push and what people he had to put under pressure to make this happen, and to make it happen this quickly, too.

Max had expected for things to stay the same for the last part of this season.

Then, he frowns. Max has worked with some of the other mechanics before to prepare them to race engineer one day, but none of them is GP.

“I thought you were joking,” Max hisses.

“Not about this,” GP says, and Max hates how fond he sounds.

“You are ridiculous,” Max states, and GP simply laughs.

“Maybe I am,” GP offers, “but no one else is you.”

Before he fully takes notice, it’s already December. It’s been harder—keeping track of the days and weeks that have passed. It’s always like that during summer break, during off-season. It’s even worse now.

Days bleed into each other, and then it gets cold enough that he actually has to turn on the heater.

The cold makes his knees stiff, makes the pain worse. He can see his breath in the winter air, and his hips ache.

He’s never cared much for the cold or winter, but before this, he’d also never realised just how much worse it would end up making everything in his life. It makes him glad that he’s moved back to Monaco before the winter—it’s not even truly cold here, not like Belgium and the Netherlands can be, but even so, he isn’t very keen on going outside, isn’t keen on leaving his bed or the warm blankets behind.

It doesn’t make it better that sometimes, there is no way around leaving his apartment, even when it leaves his hips stiff and his hands red and his nose burning. His dad would laugh at him if he could see Max like this.

He just wants to get back inside and eat some of the tomato soup Brad got him. The doctor’s visit has been exhausting and downright annoying, just like they always are, and if he remembers the pitying look on his neurologist’s face for a second longer, he might start screaming.

Max’s fingers itch. It’s been months since he’s driven one of his cars.

He doesn’t do it a lot—hasn’t even before. He’s not particularly keen on the attention that comes with it. And there’s no point in Monaco. But now—

He forces his eyes away and rolls back into the safe walls of his apartment.

His sister and his nephews and his mum announce that they come to visit for winter break. Luka’s kindergarten isn’t open during the turn of the year, and Max misses them.

He doesn’t pick them up from the airport because even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t be able to. Charles offers to do it instead, and Max isn’t sure about it, feels bad for constantly having him do more things than he already has to take care of. But Charles insists, so Max accepts.

So, he waits in his apartment, aching and irritated, and when they arrive, he hugs his sister and ruffles his nephews’ hair and tries to ignore that his mum still looks like she’s barely sleeping, like worry is consuming her, like she still fears that Max is going to disappear the moment she looks away.

Luka tries to find the cats after Leo gets enough of him—Jimmy lets him pet him, but Sassy hides somewhere in Max’s office and he carefully explains to his nephew that Sassy doesn’t do well around new people. It wouldn’t be the first time she’s scratched someone because they got too close too quickly. Luka nods, eyes wide and asks if he can see Max’s collection of trophies instead, and Max lets him, of course, and this is so much easier.

Easier because he can pretend that things are fine, even if just for a few hours, easier because Luka asks questions that Max can answer, easier because as long as he spends time with his nephews, his sister and mum won’t ask questions that Max can’t answer.

His mum takes over the apartment within two hours.

“You don’t have to,” he tries to stop her when she’s filling the washing machine. Cooking is one of the few things he gladly lets her do—he doesn’t particularly enjoy it and even if he does, it never tastes quite right. But this is one of the few things he’s still actually capable of doing. He doesn’t let Charles do this either.

“I know,” his mum says. “But I want to.”

“I can do it myself,” he protests, and it makes her stop.

She stands up to look at him, settles her hands on his shoulder.

“Oh, Max,” she sighs. “Of course, you can. I just feel like this is the only way I can help you in any way.”

He bites on his lip, refuses to meet her eyes. It’s something they’ve talked about once, but that had been years ago—long before any of this had happened.

‘I feel like you won’t let me help you,’ his mum had once admitted, and Max hadn’t been able to argue with that. He hadn’t. He still doesn’t like to. He likes not having to depend on anyone, he likes to just do whatever he wants to do, and he likes being able to take care of his problems himself.

“You should not visit me just to do that, though.”

His mum smiles at him, tucks a strand of hair behind his ears where it refuses to stay whenever he moves. His hair has gotten quite long, and he really needs to cut it soon again.

“Obviously,” she says, “but I’m also your mum.”

Luka pulls on Max’s sleeves.

“Yes?” Max asks, reaching out to ruffle Luka’s hair. He’s gotten taller again—it hasn’t been long since they’ve last seen each other, but Max always remembers how he’d held Luka the first time, how small he’d been. It’s hard, imagining it now.

“When can we go karting again?” he whispers as if it’s a secret that they have to keep between them. For a short moment, Max wonders how often his sister told Luka to not mention it before he forces himself to shrug it off.

It’s something they’d been worried about—his sister, mainly. But he also knows that his mum expected it to happen, that she hoped it wouldn’t. Luka hadn’t shown much interest in karting in the beginning, but after they’d come to visit one of the races last year, Luka had begun to ask to start racing himself.

Vic had asked once, years ago—long before Luka had even showed interest in karting or cars or racing—if he’d be willing to coach Luka just like their dad had coached him, and back then, he hadn’t been sure, didn’t know whether he would be able to do it, whether he’d be the perfect fit for it. He’d known he would never want to coach his own children, would never want to train them.

It doesn’t matter now. It’s just an innocent question, an activity Luka enjoys, something he can do with his uncle.

Max takes a deep breath, forces a small smile on his face. “You know how I told you I cannot race this year, right?” he asks even though he knows the answer. Of course, Luka knows—it’s not the first time they talk about it, not the first time Luka asks him to go karting, not the first time that Luka asks why he’s not at the races. When he’ll become World Champion again.

Luka nods, eyes wide.

“Once I feel better,” Max says, “we can go karting again.” It tastes like a lie.

“Promise?” Luka asks.

He holds out his pinkie. “Promise,” he says before he lowers his voice. “Just don’t tell your mother.” Vic would kill him.

“Are you sure?” Charles asks as he pulls on his jacket. He’s frowning, clearly unhappy.

Max just nudges his shoulder, pushes him towards the door. “Yes,” he says. “Have fun with your family.” It’s not exactly new that they spend their Christmases separated—it’s difficult after all, with Max’s family in Belgium, with Charles’ family here—, but it’s only this time that Charles doesn’t seem sure of it, that Max has spent the last few days and hours convincing him to go to his family instead of staying here.

He doesn’t want Charles to miss out on his family’s celebrations because of him, and it’s not exactly that he needs him here, that he won’t survive the next few hours without him. They’ve thought about splitting their time, about visiting Charles’ family first before coming back to celebrate with Max’s mum, Victoria and the boys, but Max doesn’t feel up to it. It’s more stress than Christmas should be, and it puts more pressure on everyone else than he feels comfortable with.

“Go,” Max says once more, using his wheelchair to threaten driving over Charles’ toes.

Charles jumps out of the way, laughs. “You are a menace,” he says, but he does put on his shoes.

He presses a quick kiss to Max’s forehead, then kisses him properly too. “I will miss you,” he murmurs.

“You are gone for a couple of hours,” Max deadpans, rolls his eyes like he’s annoyed with Charles, but he doesn’t mean it. Of course, he doesn’t mean it. He never does.

Charles gaps at him. “I will still miss you!”

“Tell your family a Merry Christmas,” Max says, pushing Charles out of the door. In the background, he can hear his nephews laughing. They’ve been busy playing with the play rug Max has gotten for them.

Charles pouts. “See you later.”

“Too bad we don’t have snow this year,” Vic comments.

Max snorts. “For that, we, of course, would have needed to stay in Belgium.”

“Eh,” Victoria says, still looking outside. He’d not exactly chosen the apartment because of the view, but it’s an advantage he isn’t complaining about. “We did have a bit of snow, but it didn’t stay for long. The boys were sad, obviously.”

He still remembers the first time, they didn’t have snow during winter, the first time they didn’t have snow on Christmas. It had sucked—they’d always gone out to go sledding on Christmas Eve. He can imagine how much it sucks for Luka and Lio now that they’re finally old enough.

Sometimes, he misses being ten. Most of the time, he’s glad he isn’t anymore.

“Have you thought about it?” Vic suddenly asks.

Max blinks. “About what?”

Victoria narrows her eyes at him. “Therapy.”

He grimaces and turns away from her. He hadn’t, if he’s honest. They’d talked about it, yes, multiple times at that too, but he doesn’t need one, so there’s nothing to think about. His sister has never been so adamant about something, and he isn’t sure why she’s starting with it now.

“I’m serious,” she hisses quietly enough that no one but them can hear it.

“I am, too,” he says, gritting his teeth.

“Sports psychologists are normal, you know?” He knows that, but just because it’s a thing, just because other athletes have one and go to therapy doesn’t mean he also has to do the same. Nico does, he knows so much. But he’s not Nico.

“I do not need one,” Max says. “I never have.” If there had ever been a point in his life where he’d needed one, it would’ve been back when he’d been a child. But even then, it had been unnecessary, had been nothing that was required for him to succeed and make his way to the top.

He’s a three-time World Champion now. He’s not sure why he’d need one now of all times.

He tells her so much.

“Maybe that was the mistake,” Vic mutters. “Just seriously think about it, Max. You know, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

He’s not sure of that.

It’s already past midnight when it’s just the two of them left. Vic and the boys went to bed half an hour ago because they had slowly gotten sleepy, and neither of them had been very keen on dealing with cranky kids.

His mum has been cleaning the kitchen while he’s collecting the last few pieces of gift-wrapping paper left in the living room. Sassy bares her teeth at him when he snatches a piece out from underneath her.

He smiles at his mum when she finally leaves the kitchen. She looks tired. The bags below her eyes have been getting darker, but she’s smiling at him, too.

She hugs him tightly.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers so quietly he almost can’t hear her as if any of this is her fault.

New Year’s Eve is weird. He can’t remember the last time he celebrated with his family—the last few years, he’d always been out clubbing with friends. He offers it to Charles, tells him that he can go out with the others, have fun. He knows how much Charles had to give up on in the past few months, but Charles had been indignant, had refused to listen to any of Max’s offer until he’d given up and just accepted that Charles wouldn’t go anywhere without him.

“I want to spend New Year’s Eve with you,” Charles had said like there was no other option. “Why would I want to celebrate it without you?”

They do gourmetten with a side of tomato soup and oliebollen as dessert; just like they always did when Vic and him had still been children, before the divorce. After the divorce, he hadn’t often stayed with his mum for New Year’s. He regrets it now.

They eat a lot, play the same games they had when they were younger. Charles spends half of his evening confused by most of them which Victoria finds hilarious. His nephews play on the rug for longer than he thought it would be able to entertain them. It’s a dull ache when he drinks the alcohol-free champagne his mum specifically had gotten for today.

Last year, he’d been too drunk as midnight rolled around to remember the fireworks—this year, they allow Luka and Lio to stay up and watch them from the balcony. The whole sky lights up, and Lio drops his sparkler when the sparks get too close to his fingers.

(But last year, he’d won the championship, had hoped to continue the momentum in the following year. Last year, he’d become a triple world champion. Now, there is nothing.)

When he checks up on their pets, content settles into his bones. Jimmy butts his head against Max’s hands. Sassy watches from the back of the sofa. Leo gets his saliva all over Max’s fingers.

“Next year,” he whispers like it’s a secret to be kept between them, “will be a better one.”

Chapter Text

Ich fühle mich so falsch an
Wie lösche ich einen Waldbrand?
— JAS. Straßengraben

Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s Daniel’s face that greets him when he opens the door. A grin stretches across his face, and it’s so bright, it manages to make Max feel bad. He can’t even remember the last time he spoke to Daniel.

“Hi,” Max says, smiles. He does swing the door open to let Daniel in—his mum would kill him otherwise—and rolls a bit away from the entrance. To Daniel’s credit, he doesn’t even blink at the sight of Max’s wheelchair.

“Maxy,” Daniel greets him, still grinning. Sometimes, when Max was a lot younger and they were teammates, he often asked himself how Daniel managed to smile so much without his cheeks starting to hurt—he still doesn’t know the answer, but he also never ended up asking for it.

As soon as Daniel has closed the door behind himself, he starts looking around. Max raises an eyebrow at him. “Where are Jimmy and Sassy?” he asks.

Max snorts. “I see,” he jokes, “you only came for them.”

“Obviously,” Daniel says. Jimmy likes Daniel more than Sassy does which isn’t surprising at all. Sassy, though, likes Daniel more than she likes most other people which is surprising. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s just the effect Daniel tends to have on everyone. He certainly had that effect on Max as well.

“They are probably hiding,” Max says. He’s only seen Sassy when he fed her in the morning—Jimmy has been around more, but sometimes Sassy tends to get moody. He gets it. “I think they want a bit of calm after my nephews.”

As much as he loves them, they are still small, and neither Sassy nor Jimmy spent much time around children. And even though Jimmy likes people, both of his cats aren’t very keen on a loud apartment. Especially now, in the last few months, when it’s gotten even quieter than before. It doesn’t change much that he’s more home now.

“They came for Christmas?”

Max nods. “And New Year’s,” he adds. “I, of course, have not been able to go out this year.” He goes for something casual with his tone, something unimportant, just a bit of additional information that doesn’t mean anything.

Daniel coughs, looks away. “Right,” he says and doesn’t meet Max’s eyes. For a moment, Max doesn’t regret the decision to stay as far away as possible from everyone he knows.

It’s quiet until Daniel seems to find his footing again. There’s a smile on his face once more, and he pats Max’s shoulder like he’s always done. Sometimes, though, Max remembers, he used to pat Max’s head instead, but that was long before he left for Renault, and he’s not done it ever since. It makes sense, of course, since Charles and him got together years before Daniel came back.

“Well, mate. It’s nice to see you again. I’ve heard from Charles and Lando that they talked to you, but,” Daniel says then, gestures. “With how good your ghosting skills are, it’s definitely started to feel like you’re a ghost.” There’s no bite to it, but Max still looks away. He knows. He knows. He isn’t ready yet.

“Fuck off,” Max grumbles, then, “Sorry.”

Daniel shrugs. “It’s whatever. I’m not angry.” The ‘anymore’ is heavily implied. He definitely was—was angry with Max and his choices and his stupidity. It’s not like he can blame Daniel for that.

Sometimes, he thinks, it’s impressive with how much of his bullshit Daniel has already put up without losing his mind.

But it’s not like Daniel has any room to talk, not really.

After Daniel left, they didn’t talk—didn’t talk for months and years afterwards. They’d greeted each other on the grid, said ‘hello’ and ‘how are you?’, but there was nothing more, not like it was previously. It’s never been something that Max took personally because they are—were—competition. Max gets it, he does; friendships in Formula One don’t last, and he’s not sure they were ever actual friends during their time as teammates even with everything that happened between them. The first time, anyway. So now, Daniel really has no room to talk.

“I get it,” Daniel says then, quieter. He doesn’t say more than that, but he also doesn’t have to.

They never talked about it—about why he left, about McLaren and the way it ended. About Red Bull and the way he came back. About AlphaTauri and what happened there. The constant discussions, the fear of losing the seat, of not being good enough anymore.

Daniel had gotten the contract after last year, but it hadn’t changed anything—the discussions had stayed, the meetings and the scrutinising had continued.

Max’s last race must have put a stop to it. There aren’t any other viable options that Red Bull has seriously considered before; he can’t imagine they’ve changed their minds now. Their junior drivers are too inexperienced; they’re not going to want to put a rookie in the Red Bull seat. Not even Max had done that. And if they ruin them now by doing that, they won’t have any options for the future left.

Even so, he has no clue what they are going to do next year—he doesn’t think Daniel knows either, isn’t sure they know yet. Even now, the worry isn’t gone, even now the fear stays. Max isn’t even there anymore, and yet nothing has changed.

Maybe Daniel gets it more than Max has ever considered.

It doesn’t get less frustrating, but it does get easier.

Within his apartment, he doesn’t need the wheelchair as much anymore, focuses more and more on using his crutches instead, but sometimes, he still has to rely on it, has to fall back on it—when the pain gets too bad, when his entire body is burning and he can barely see straight. The headaches have lessened, but they’re still not gone, and with them, there is always the dizziness he can’t shake, a certain blurriness that makes it even harder to navigate his apartment.

It’s not new, not exactly. He still remembers Silverstone three years ago when he could barely drive because of the lights and the uneven tar, but last time it hadn’t lasted this long, had stopped bothering him after a few months. This time, he hadn’t deemed the concussion as important, had tried to push past and ignore it, but he’s not sure whether it was a mistake or not.

He’d had other things to focus on.

Now he can’t even look at a screen for more than a couple of minutes.

It’s obvious that Charles is antsy, that he tries to give Max as much space as he needs, that he tries to not hover, to not stick too closely to Max. He doesn’t exactly succeed, but Max can appreciate that he tries.

But the fourth time, Max reaches for a cup, and Charles is immediately by his side to pick it up and give it to him instead, Max threatens to drive over Charles’ toes with the wheelchair. He doesn’t do it, and Charles doesn’t even react with outrage at it, but Max frowns at him.

“You are making me nervous,” Max says. It’s not exactly the right word, but it’s close enough to get the sentiment across.

Charles pouts at him, the glass still in his hand. “I am not even doing anything,” he argues.

“You are so—” Max gestures, unable to find what he wants to say without hurting Charles’ feelings. It feels mean to tell Charles that he’s doing too much, so Max doesn’t do that, but he still presses his lips together, tries to figure out a way to make Charles understand without making it seem like Max doesn’t appreciate everything Charles does for him.

“Go out,” Max tells him, and Charles just frowns.

“But I am already gone so often,” he points out which is true, of course. But Max is going crazy if he has to sit through another hour of Charles’ hovering. He’ll have more than enough of that during the rest of winter break, and if Charles doesn’t stop, then the few times Max can escape by walking Leo won’t be enough. And he doesn’t even like walking Leo in this stupid wheelchair.

“You are only gone for work, right? When was the last time you saw your mum? Your brothers? It would do you good.”

Charles hesitates, but it’s obvious on his face that he agrees with Max. Christmas was the last time, he visited them, and even before that it’s been rare. Whenever Charles has been back from work, he’d spent his time with Max, and Max hadn’t felt up to visitors that weren’t his mum or his sister. They have gone over to Pascale’s every now and then, but it’s rarely just Charles alone.

Max shrugs. “I am not frail, and I am not dependent on your care. You can go out for a few hours and have some fun.” Max has managed just fine without Charles around—whether that be before or during recent weekends. He can manage it now, too.

Charles pulls a grimace. “Yes, but we can also have fun here.”

Max snorts, wiggles his eyebrows. “What kind of fun?”

Charles flicks Max’s shoulder. “You are a child.”

“You said that!” It’s not Max’s fault that Charles had to phrase it like this.

Charles sobers up quickly, sighs as he runs a hand through his hair. “I know you are right, but—” Charles doesn’t finish his sentence, and Max doesn’t want him to.

He has tried his hardest to forget that one phone call. He presses his lips together, grabs Charles’ hand. “I know, but I will still be here once you come back, okay?”

“Okay,” Charles agrees. He still doesn’t look happy, but Max doesn’t know how he’s supposed to explain that Max won’t just disappear, that he won’t just be gone. He is not even sure how this is different to when Charles has to leave for work, but it obviously is for him.

Max presses a kiss to Charles’ hand, and Charles offers a hesitant smile.

Twenty minutes later, Charles is still in the bathroom getting ready. Max rolls over, raises an eyebrow. “You are still here.”

“Yes, Max, I am.” Charles rolls his eyes. His hair flops down, covers his forehead, and Max doesn’t even want to know the amount of hair gel he’s already used to get it to stay. “Don’t try to get rid of me this obviously.”

Max scoffs. “If I wanted to get rid of you, it would not be this obvious.” He would certainly not announce it.

Charles pokes Max’s chest. “You cannot get rid of me this easily.” He always sounds far too fond.

Max shakes his head. “And here, I thought we were talking about murder,” he jokes.

“You are ridiculous.”

Max squints. “And you are still here. You are going to be late.” In fact, he would need to start walking now if he wanted to get to his mum’s on time. At least, Pascale doesn’t care too much about it.

Charles crinkles his nose. “I need to fix my hair. If maman sees the way it looks, I will be immediately losing it.”

It’s taken far too long to convince Charles to let his hair grow out more which does make Max feel like a hypocrite because he certainly won’t let his hair grow out this much even when Charles tells him to. He just can’t stand the way he gets too hot and sweaty under the helmet, and Charles isn’t as bothered by it, so Max doesn’t feel too bad.

“Tell her I said she cannot cut your hair.”

Charles frowns at the mirror. His hair still refuses to work with him. “That might be enough to convince her.”

“I know. She loves me.” Max tries to not sound too smug, but it doesn’t really work.

Charles sighs. “Sometimes, I think she loves you more than she loves me.”

“Her favourite son-in-law,” Max nods in agreement.

“Her only son-in-law,” Charles argues which isn’t wrong, but Max is still her favourite son-in-law. Max could have also ended up as her least favourite son-in-law.

Charles certainly is, though that probably has more to do with the fact that Max has started dating a driver instead of everyone else he could have and less because of Charles.

Max scrunches his nose. “Don’t ruin this for me.”

“Technically,” Charles says, and for a moment, Max feels the urge to point out that this is his job and not Charles’, “we are not even married.”

Max rolls his eyes. “Then, get on it, so I can be her actual favourite son-in-law.”

“You are so demanding,” Charles says, but his voice is besotted, his eyes are too gentle. Sometimes, Max doesn’t feel like he deserves it.

Max doesn’t fake a gag like he normally would. He just pushes Charles towards the door—for that, the wheelchair is very useful when you don’t want your toes to be run over, again. “And you are late.”

“What is the verdict?” Max asks, more a joke than an actual question, as he stretches his legs out.

His thighs and back are burning, but it’s not painful in the way training has been the past few months. It’s satisfying, a reminder of what he’s achieved since then.

He almost feels good.

He’s still not anywhere near where he wants to be, by far not, but for the first time in ages, he doesn’t feel frustrated in the way that almost every past therapy session has left him feeling. His range of motion still isn’t great, but it’s better than it was just a few weeks ago, and that seems like a good thing.

Maybe he is improving, maybe things will be better, maybe—

He looks up when Brad still hasn’t said anything after a minute.

“Brad?” he asks.

Brad pinches his nose; he doesn’t look happy—there’s something on his face that might be frustration or even pity—, and Max’s stomach clenches. He tightens his hands to fists to stop them from trembling.

“It’s fine,” Brad says, “you’re doing great, mate. Your— uh, you’ve been improving quite nicely.”

But there’s something in his voice, something in his wording— Brad isn’t even looking at him.

Max can’t place it, not properly; all he knows is that it’s worrying, that it’s not a good sign. Brad has never openly shown that something is wrong, that something can’t be fixed. He always told Max to go slow, and that improvement is improvement, and that that’s the most important thing.

He narrows his eyes. “What is wrong?” he asks.

“Nothing,” Brad says, but it’s too fast, and— Max trusts Brad. Max trusts Brad like he doesn’t trust a lot of people, but he doesn’t believe Brad for even a second.

The more days pass, the closer the next season gets, the more he feels a restlessness settle into his bones he hasn’t experienced since he was 16 and close to being signed by Red Bull.

It’s silly—it has been almost a decade since then, and he’s older now, more experienced. He has three championships under his belt and a contract to fall back on.

Only that none of this means anything if he doesn’t make a full recovery, if he doesn’t get back up and push himself. If his legs continue refusing to work. If he can’t even do sim work.

Brad doesn’t seem happy. His doctor pinches the bridge of his nose every time Max comes in for a checkup. His dad calls him daily to ask about his process, and his mum tells him to take it easy. To be nice to himself.

What is the point of being nice to himself when it’ll ruin his entire future?

Pascale brings food over despite Charles not even being home. He can smell it through the bag and the food containers, and he can’t wait to actually eat it.

“Thank you,” Max says, “but Charles is not home yet.” He won’t be for another few days, and Max hates how much he misses Charles even though they call every day. He’s never been this dependent on someone, never even felt like this after he moved out at 18 and started to live in a foreign country with an official language he doesn’t properly speak.

“I know,” Pascale says, and her eyes crinkle when she smiles in the same way Charles’ do. “But I thought you could do with a home-cooked meal. My boys don’t cook either, you know?”

Max does know. There is nothing worse than letting Charles into the kitchen, and Max isn’t even a very skilled cook either. He’s just better than Charles because he knows to try the pasta before he pours out the water. The time Charles undercooked the pasta was the first and last time, he let Charles do this.

“Thank you,” Max says again. “Always getting takeout, of course, cannot compare.” Maybe, now that he’s home, he should start to look into a cooking class because it is getting embarrassing that he can manage a sauce or two and not a lot more.

Pascale nods in agreement.

“Do you want to come in?” Max asks, but Pascale just smiles at him.

“I just wanted to bring this over,” she says. “But I have a client soon.”

Max frowns at her. “You should not have to feed me when you are already working.” Takeout is fine. He doesn’t want to have her even more stressed when she’s already working normally.

“You sound like Charles.” Pascale shakes her head in amusement. “Take care of yourself, yes? If there is anything you ever need, you can just ring me or just come over.” It’s not the first time, she’s offered this. He knows that she means it. Max is not going to take her up on it.

“How is testing going?” Max asks, trying to sound as nonchalant as somehow possible.

“Good,” Charles says, finally. “Why are you asking?” His eyes are narrowed like what Max has said is suspicious, like he’s trying to figure Max out. He’s not sure there’s anything to figure out.

But he gets it. They have not talked much about Formula One or the new season. Max stayed clear of it for the past months, and Charles didn’t seem comfortable being the one starting a conversation about it.

“Of course, to keep an eye on the competition,” Max jokes. “Spygate 2.0. Imagine what the tifosi would say if they found out that you are fraternising with the enemy.” That’s what his dad used to be worried about; first when Max tried to befriend other drivers, and then, when he brought home Charles.

Charles laughs; it makes his eyes crinkle and highlights his dimples. “The simulation looks better than the SF-24.”

Max snorts and doesn’t try to think about the simulations of the RB21. It would be embarrassing if they had somehow managed to make an even worse car. It’s not possible to say a lot yet, of course, not before the official testing has begun, until the first race—and even then. 2022 looked promising for Ferrari until it hadn’t. And 2024 had looked easy for Red Bull until the car had stopped working.

“It reminds me more of the F1-75 again,” Charles continues.

Max leans forward. “Interesting,” he says, takes a sip from his Red Bull he probably shouldn’t be drinking. “A championship-worthy car.”

Without McLaren, that is. He’s heard they’re going to be rapid again, that they’ll continue the trend from last season. They’d been ridiculously quick at the end of the year, and Max fears that Red Bull hasn’t been able to keep up with it. He doubts Ferrari has been able to.

Charles rolls his eyes. “Sure,” he says, and then, “You promised me a title battle, though.”

Max laughs and says, “I will see you on track in 2026.” And the moment, the words leave his mouth, he wants to bite his tongue and swallow them again.

2026.

Because it’s certain he won’t race in 2025. Like it’s certain he will race in 2026. Like he knows anything yet.

Charles just regards him with a look through narrowed eyes and doesn’t continue the conversation.

Max doesn’t particularly want to, doesn’t want to think about next season, because he doesn’t want to think about everything it means, everything he can’t have. He feels tired and worn-out, and he also knows that these reminders are necessary, to keep going, to keep trying, to keep hoping. What kind of athlete would he be if there’s no goal to work towards? If he would just give up?

It’s by far not the worst thing he’s heard. It’s so mild compared to some of the things he was told when he was a child.

And if he hadn’t wanted to hear about stuff like this, then it’s his fault, anyway, for even bringing the topic up.

It’s silent for a few heartbeats, and then Charles clears his throat. “Will you fly to England?”

“I do not know yet,” Max says, shrugs. “I have not decided.” He stretches his hands, looks at his fingers instead of Charles. “Maybe I will fly to Milton Keynes in a few days.”

Christian asked him to, just for a few days. He also told him that he wouldn’t have to do anything, just be there, look over a few things, maybe talk to the other drivers—it’s not like he could. He can’t even do sim work at the moment, so he’s really not sure what Christian even hopes to come from it.

Still, Max hasn’t agreed, but he’s also not rejected the offer. He never rejects an offer until he’s made a different decision. He’s learned that from his dad.

He misses the team, though, the banter and the lighthearted jabs. It must have been ages since he’s talked to most of his team personally. GP and him had planned to go on vacation together, but that had been impossible last year.

Charles nods slowly. “Will you come to the races?” It sounds stilted, unsure. They’ve talked about it before, and Max hasn’t told him yet, that he doesn’t want to, that he’d rather stay as far away as somehow possible. He isn’t sure either how he’s supposed to say it.

It’s his job. He’s always loved Formula One. He doesn’t think he can explain it.

“Christian invited me,” Max says because, of course, he did. Helmut had also told him to. And his dad. Especially his dad. “But I am not sure.”

He should, he knows. It’s good publicity, it might help to cement his position in the team, but—

But.

He doesn’t remember the last time he sat out a race and watched it instead. Probably because it never happened.

It would be weird, and he’d hate it—to be on the sidelines, to have to watch instead of race himself. And he wouldn’t be able to hide in the Red Bull hospitality for the entire weekend either.

He just knows that someone would find him and try to interview him, and he really, really doesn’t want to do that. He should, probably; after all, it’s already been months since he’s last spoken to the press.

He’d prefer it if he would never have to speak to any journalist ever again, but he knows it’s futile to hope for.

“If you decide to go,” Charles says, and he’s grinning now, “I think I could convince Fred to invite you.”

Max snorts. “Is that your plan to win 2026? By getting me thrown out of my team?”

“Yes,” Charles says, sagely nods, “this has been my plan all along.”

It would be funny, of course, if he just appeared in the Ferrari garage instead of turning up in the Red Bull one after half a year of not showing his face at all.

He’s not going to do it, obviously, even if it would be funny; his loyalties run deeper than a simple contract, but contracts are easily dissolved, and loyalty doesn’t mean a lot in this sport. In fact, it doesn’t mean anything at all.

He looks away, the smile on his face fading.

“What—” Charles starts, and he sounds surprised by the sudden mood change. “Is everything okay? Are you in— are you in pain?”

“No, I am not. I—” Max clears his throat—he used to be better at this even if he’s never liked hiding things, acting like someone he isn’t. “I just remembered that Brad has planned some special workout for tomorrow.” It’s a bad lie, and Charles knows him better than he’d need to for this to work.

For a moment, Charles just looks at him. Max knows that look, knows that Charles is trying to assess the situation, is trying to properly read him, but then he lets it go. “Oh, the worst,” he agrees. “As grateful as I always am for winter break, it does make the training in the new year worse.”

Max grimaces. Maybe that’s one thing to be grateful about—now Brad, at least, can’t force him to go for runs. “Tell me about it.”

Charles laughs.

Max shakes his head. “When will you leave for Australia?”

“Are you trying to get rid of me?” Charles asks, clutching his chest in fake exasperation.

“Of course,” Max says. “The sooner you leave, the sooner I can tell Christian about the SF-25, and how they can sabotage you.”

Charles laughs, showing his teeth as he throws his head back, his eyes form into half-moons, and Max doesn’t bother to resist the urge to poke his dimples.

Physiotherapy has been shit.

Brad hasn’t acted unexpectedly since that one time Max still can’t make himself forget about, but the same weird feeling has stayed ever since.

Things are slow, even slower than usual, and therefore things are shit. His dad continues to call him too often, and Max’s mood has been getting worse and worse. He isn’t sure how to fix it—not as long as he’s barely capable of walking, not while his ears ring and his head hurts, not as long as he can’t do anything but stay home and wait.

He does his exercises, uses his crutches, has the wheelchair for backup when the pain gets too bad, and he can barely see straight.

None of these things feels like he’ll ever be able to make it back to Formula One.

Sometimes, he wonders if it’ll already be enough of a miracle when he gets back on his own feet, when he’s capable of walking without having to rely on anything else.

He chastises himself for it as soon as he catches those thoughts, can hear his dad scoff. If you think like this, he would say, you’re never going to make it back.

So, he grits his teeth and pushes on.

Daniel looks unsure. It’s a weird expression on his face. It doesn’t seem to fit, and Max doesn’t remember the last time he looked like this.

Maybe after McLaren, when he’d still be in talks with Red Bull about a potential place in the team.

Max squints at him. There must be a reason why Daniel is not only calling him this early in the morning—for Max anyway— and with a look like that on his face. It doesn’t seem like just a friendly check-in call that a friend might do because they’re worried.

“What is it?” he asks, but Daniel doesn’t immediately react to the question. The connection is good enough for him to have heard it, so it can’t be that.

“How are your nephews?” Daniel asks instead, and Max only barely doesn’t roll his eyes. Fine, Daniel can keep his secrets.

“Good,” he says. He’s not sure there’s more to say to it. They’re great, but Max isn’t going to rehash any of their conversations. He doesn’t think he wants to.

“I haven’t seen them in ages, it feels like,” Daniel muses. “The next time, it’s probably going to be insane how much they’ve grown.” The last time must have been last year, during one of the race weekends, probably. Vic doesn’t love to bring them to the races, especially not Lio.

‘It’s too loud,’ she always says, and Max tends to agree with her. Luka loves going, but for Lio, it seems redundant.

“Yeah, they grow so fast,” he agrees.

“It’s always the same when I’m home,” Daniel continues. “I could’ve sworn Isaac and Isabella were just born, and now, they’re already so big.” Daniel laughs. “I guess it’s the same for you. I still remember your first season.”

Max grimaces. “No need to bring that up.”

He shudders, remembering the pictures and videos the marketing team love to pull out every year. They always remind him too much of a time when he was seventeen and stupid, when he thought he’d knew it all. It is weird sometimes, looking back now, that he’d thought he was mature, practically an adult with nothing more to learn just because the team had put him in a racing car and let him drive 300 km/h for a living.

A lot has happened since then. A lot of great things. And a lot of shit things.

“Oh, right!” Daniel’s whole face lights up. “I’m supposed to tell you mum said hi.”

Max smiles. “Tell her hi back.”

“I will, I will,” Daniel says, hesitates. There’s that look again. It can’t get more obvious than that, that Daniel has something to say.

He sighs. “Okay, spit it out,” he says. It doesn’t have to be anything bad. Maybe it’s just some typical Daniel idea that he only didn’t want to bring up because he doesn’t know how Max is going to react to it.

Daniel shakes his head. “Eh,” he makes, “it was just a stupid thought.” So, a typical Daniel idea. Now Max is curious.

“Just tell me.”

“I mean it was kind of…that you get out of the house and all that, but I doubt—” Daniel gestures. “How do you feel about flying to Australia?”

Max blinks. “What?”

He’s not sure what he expected. He doesn’t think he expected that. Maybe he should have—considering the way Daniel brought up his family, but that seems so out of nowhere. He hasn’t seen Daniel’s parents in ages, not since the Australian Grand Prix two years ago, and even then, it had only been a hasty affair because of COVID.

It’s a nice gesture, of course. Max likes Daniel’s family, and they have always been welcoming when he visited them. It would be a change in his life, would bring some excitement, but if he’s honest with himself, he doesn’t think he wants to be in Australia during a race weekend. Not only would Daniel barely be home, but they would also probably speak about nothing but the Grand Prix. It’s not really something he wants to do.

Normally, he would love to, but now is not normally. Or maybe that’s the new— He shakes his head, refuses to keep thinking about it.

“Not for the race,” Daniel says quickly like he knows exactly what Max is thinking. “If you don’t want to. I know how you— whatever. It was just an idea my mum had that it might be nice to get out, be somewhere else for a bit. I know how your dad can be, so I guess the Netherlands wouldn’t be, like, any more relaxing.”

Max smiles apologetically. “It is nice of your mum to think of me,” he says slowly, “but I don’t really think I can make it.”

Daniel schools his face quickly, but it’s not fast enough for Max to not see the disappointment. He bites his lip. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Daniel says, “I already told her that such a long flight would probably suck for you right now.”

He nods. He hasn’t been flying since he came from Belgium back to Monaco, and that was an incredibly short flight and with his private jet, too. If he went to Australia, he would probably need to fly commercial.

“Yeah, and of course, I also have…doctor’s appointments and all that. It would be quite hard to just go at the moment.” Max clears his throat. “I am really sorry. Tell your mum thanks, though.”

Daniel nods, smiles, but it’s thin-lipped and disappointed. “How’s that going, by the way?”

Max doesn’t sigh, but it’s a near thing. “Fine,” he says. It’s short and clipped, and it’s obvious that nothing is fine. He’s never been good at lying. He’s especially never been good at lying to Daniel.

But it’s a thing he doesn’t really want to think about. He still hasn’t managed to bring it up to Brad, and with each passing training session, he feels sillier. It can’t be all that important to him if he still hasn’t asked.

It just never felt like the right time, and the more he’s thinking about it, the more he’s unsure about how he’s supposed to bring it up. Every time, he goes through a potential conversation, it seems stupider.

‘You seemed off three weeks ago,’ he imagines himself saying, ‘what was that about?’

Daniel raises an eyebrow.

“Recovery steady but slow, whatever, whatever,” he says, unwilling to go into more detail. It’s not necessary knowledge for anyone, Charles doesn’t even know, and Max doesn’t want any pity either if he actually brought up how bad things might be.

“They do not know more, or they don’t want to say anything, so it is just…”

“Shit,” Daniel finishes for him, and Max nods.

“It could be worse,” Max amends even though it doesn’t really feel like it at the moment.

Daniel doesn’t look like he believes it. Max has never been a good actor, and Daniel has always been good at looking through him. He guesses it comes with having Daniel as his first long-term teammate, as the person who had been there when Max had been eighteen and barely being able to keep his head above water.

“It could be,” Max tries.

“Okay, Maxy,” Daniel says even if he still doesn’t sound convinced. He settles back, watches the video call with raised eyebrows.

Max rolls his eyes. “And what have you been up to apart from your job?” He really doesn’t want to talk about himself anymore, has done more than enough of it in the past months.

It’s obvious that Daniel isn’t really done with this topic yet, but he does indulge Max instead. “Fine,” he says. “Been spending some time with my family. It’s always nice to be here before the season starts, but you know that already, and—” He clears his throat.

“The car is shit?” Max asks.

“The car is shit,” Daniel agrees.

People always say that it’s impossible to say after testing how things are, that it needs the first Grand Prix to gauge a proper judgement, but every driver knows that it’s wrong. They know. They’ll hope they’re wrong about their assessment and the car, but they still know.

It’s a Sunday like any other. He wakes up at eight AM like he has done for the past months, gets up to feed the cats and make himself the breakfast that Brad dropped off a few days ago.

He doesn’t turn on his phone or his TV, doesn’t look at the news or read the newspaper, and yet he still knows what day it is.

A Sunday, like any other. A Sunday, on which he shouldn’t be in his flat in Monaco, on which he should be across the world, on which he should have gotten up hours ago to get ready.

But he is in his flat, and he’s not across the world, and there’s nothing to get ready for.

He doesn’t watch the Grand Prix; he doesn’t think he could.

Charles texts him later, some hours after the Grand Prix, asks how he’s doing, doesn’t ask if he watched.

Fine, Max types, then, How did it go?

The nausea is crippling when he clicks send.

He thinks about it—about actually flying to Milton Keynes and helping Red Bull with whatever they want him to help with. Christian has invited him months ago, GP mentioned it once again, and he does miss them, does miss talking to them. But what would there be to talk about?

Still, he knows he should go, knows he shouldn’t burn bridges and should keep in contact to secure his contract and his seat, should smile and wave and act like this doesn’t bother him.

But then he wakes up one morning, a few days before he’d have to fly there, and the sunlight is blinding him because he forgot to close the blinds before he fell into his bed, and he just—

He just can’t.

He can’t bring himself to get out of bed beyond feeding the cats, and then he collapses in his bed again, feeling exhausted to the core like he drove through 40°C for four hours straight.

His head hurts, and his back is throbbing, and he wants to sleep for twelve hours. But it’s already past ten, and he needs to get up and he needs to—

He needs to pack.

Only that he doesn’t think he can deal with any of this at the moment. He doesn’t want to do so. He doesn’t want to fly to Milton Keynes, and he doesn’t want to be at the Red Bull Racing headquarters, and he doesn’t want to see the other team members, doesn’t want to get asked about how he’s doing and how he’s feeling.

He doesn’t get up. And he doesn’t pack his things. And he doesn’t ask his usual neighbour whether she can feed his cats and Leo while he’s gone.

In the end, he makes up some bullshit excuse, tells Christian that the nausea and dizziness are worse again and that he doesn’t want to fly like that, and he only feels a bit bad about it.

(Christian texts him back a few hours later, asks him about his progress and tells him to take it slow and easy, to not rush things, that they can catch up later

GP sends him a message that it’s understandable he won’t come, that he’s going to visit Max instead.

It doesn’t take long for the guilt to settle in.)

It’s hard to ignore the sim rig.

It’s still in his living room, of course. He doesn’t have the strength to move it, and it feels weird asking someone else to put it in a different room. Maybe he should—he doesn’t have any use for it currently, and Charles doesn’t like it; he still can’t use it at all, although he hasn’t tried it again ever since the last time. But he also doesn’t see the purpose of it; even now, he gets dizzy from watching TV for too long, gets headaches and feels his eyes burn.

If he’s honest, he doesn’t dare to try again.

It still doesn’t feel like the right time, but when Brad helps him stretch his legs, he can’t stop himself from blurting it out.

“Things are not going great, are they?” he asks.

Brad doesn’t immediately react. He massages Max’s thigh where he’d had a cramp the last time they did these exercises. He hasn’t had another one so far, but Brad had also been a lot more careful.

“Brad?” Max asks quietly.

He looks up; his lips are pressed together, and there’s a pinch to his eyebrows that definitely tells Max that he’s not happy about something.

Maybe about the question. Maybe about the progress. Maybe it’s something entirely else.

“Please tell me the truth,” he says, and his voice is barely above a whisper.

Brad breathes out. His hands settle in his lap.

“You’re not hitting your goals quite the way we wanted you to,” he says, finally. He isn’t quite meeting Max’s eyes.

Max expected that. He knew that it would be something like that after Brad was so off.

But there’s a difference between suspecting something and getting the confirmation.

He isn’t sure how he feels.

“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” Brad continues. “You know how it is, and I’ve told you often enough that every single body is different, and that you can’t just make a blanket statement about how every recovery will look like. Some people are faster in the beginning, some people pick it up after some more time.”

Brad doesn’t end with a but; his words very much seem like there should be a but, though.

So, Max prompts, “But?”

Brad sighs. “But the issue is that you’ve only scraped past your last few goals. And the latest—”

“I have not met at all?” Max asks before Brad can finish his sentence. He hopes it’s not true. That he assumed too quickly. He sometimes does that, when he thinks that a sentence will take a certain direction, only for it not to.

It might be the case here, too.

That he assumed too quickly. That what he said isn’t what Brad actually planned to say.

Brad doesn’t look at him. It’s not a great sign. It doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything.

“Yes,” Brad finally says.

Between China and Japan are two weeks, and Charles has finally enough time to actually fly back to Monaco instead of staying in Maranello. The car looks like shit, so it hadn’t really been surprising how much time Charles has needed to spend in Italy.

Max is never going to admit that he’s missed Charles.

Charles doesn’t have such qualms. He almost smothers Max with his kisses before Max even has to chance to usher him into the apartment.

Max takes one of the bags out of Charles’ hands, suppresses a grimace as he tries to ignore the pain that flared up from moving so suddenly.

“I brought food,” Charles says, lifting a plastic bag.

“This is the only reason why I am letting you in,” Max says when Jimmy darts past him towards Charles.

He butts his head against Charles’ legs, meows loudly. The cats always get grumpy when Charles is gone for too long.

Charles laughs softly as he bends down. “Hi, Jimmy. Where’s Sassy?”

“Sassy is”—Max looks around as if he doesn’t know that Sassy isn’t anywhere near them—“somewhere.” Sometimes, he’s sure she hates everyone who’s not Jimmy or him. She tolerates his mum and his sister and even Daniel, but everyone else? No chance. And she holds grudges; it’s not going to help Charles’ case that he’s gone this often.

When he looks back at Charles again, he’s still petting Jimmy, but then he stops, straightens his back.

Max grimaces as he watches Charles take his shoes off. “It’s gotten a bit messy,” he says, reaches out to take the plastic bag from Charles, and then he turns around to go to the kitchen already.

Although “go” might be an overstatement of what he’s capable of doing today. His back is burning, and his legs are shaking, and he’s just glad he’s not dizzy as well.

It feels like his limp is worse than it has been in ages, and when he reaches his kitchen—which is barely twenty meters away from the front door—, there’s sweat all over his forehead.

He sets the plastic bag on the table and before he’s able to get cutlery and plates, Charles is already by his side. Max really, really doesn’t want to think about how pathetic he must look.

Charles clears his throat. “What if you just sit down? I can—”

“I don’t need help,” Max grits out before he can think of anything else. Because he doesn’t need help even if help is appreciated at times, even if it makes things easier. But he doesn’t need it because he’s very much capable of doing all these things himself even with his injury, and he knows that Charles doesn’t think he’s incapable of doing them on his own. He just noticed that Max was struggling and was offering and—

“I know, I know,” Charles says quickly as he lifts his hands. “I should not have.”

Max closes his eyes for a moment. “Sorry,” he says. “I just—” he stops, doesn’t finish his sentence. This whole issue isn’t something that concerns Charles or something that he wants to concern him with. Charles is just trying to do something nice for him, and he needs to get over himself. Easy as that.

He doesn’t need to add to all of this, doesn’t need to tell Charles about Brad’s worry and the slowly sinking feeling that things are worse than they should be.

“It is understandable,” Charles says quietly.

“Maybe.” It doesn’t help with the fact that he feels like a fucking asshole. He’s so great at this, truly.

They stare at each other for a moment, then Max slowly sits down. He could have done it, too, could have just taken out the plates and the cutlery, could have told Charles to not worry about it, but he sits down. And he accepts Charles’ offer.

For a short moment, there’s satisfaction visible on Charles’ face before he turns around to examine their kitchen. Max has only had the strength to maintain the most basic tasks, and it only makes him feel stupider for snapping at Charles. He can’t do it. He can’t do any of these things.

Charles gets them the cutlery and the plates and something to drink, and Max tries to move as little as somehow possible. The entire backside of his legs feels like it’s on fire.

It’s quiet, but it’s not uncomfortable, and once Charles has sat down, Max tries for a grin.

“No engine failure yet?” Max asks, and Charles hits his shoulder for that.

“Do not jinx it,” he threatens, but there’s an amused smile on his face.

Max laughs.

“Things are better than last year,” Charles continues as he opens the bag. “I went with your usual order.” Charles shakes his head, mutters, “Picky eaters.”

Max is not picky. He just has his foods he likes and food he doesn’t. In fact, he’s quite open to trying new things; it’s just when he’s decided that he doesn’t like something that there’s no chance in hell that he’ll try it again.

He tells Charles so much like he’s done a dozen times before. Charles obviously doesn’t believe it.

“Whatever.” Max rolls his eyes. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” Charles says, and he’s still smiling. “I cannot complain yet.”

“Not even about the strategies?” Max teases. He hasn’t watched the races, but he’s heard bits and pieces, had listened to Charles rant after Australia. He’s not sure how Charles deals with it.

Charles snorts. “It is...fine. It could be worse.” Max isn’t sure it could be worse; Charles certainly doesn’t sound like it’s fine. Then, Charles groans. “Maybe we can wait a bit to talk about work.”

Max rolls his eyes. Perhaps even Charles can reach a point where even the most optimistic person can’t do anything about the situation anymore. “Lando said it has been fine,” he jokes.

Charles crinkles his nose like he always does when McLaren gets mentioned. Max doesn’t even want to know how he manages to keep his expression under control for the media. “Don’t start.”

Max settles back into his chair as he laughs, and his back only slightly twinges in pain. He can deal with this, he tells himself. He can even deal with talking about racing for Charles’ sake.

The more his neurologist looks at Max’s file, the deeper his frown gets.

“How is the prognosis?” Max asks. “My dad has been haunting me for updates about returning to motorsports.” It’s been a few weeks since he’s last seen his neurologist, and his dad mentions it every single phone call. Maybe he’ll finally have some good news. Maybe his dad will leave him alone for a bit, then.

His doctor raises his eyebrows, looks at the file, then back at Max. There is something unreadable on his face that Max can’t quite place. “Mr Verstappen,” he says. “Have you ever considered getting a sport psychologist?”

Max almost scoffs. “No,” he says slowly, “why would I?” Nico had one, he knows. But he’s not Nico.

He doesn’t need one, never has. Of course, Red Bull has sport psychologists that he could have gone to. Back when he’d been with Toro Rosso, Franz sometimes mentioned it. Because of his age. Because of his dad. Because of the pressure of skipping the junior series, but Max had never wanted it, and so it had never happened.

Christian mentioned it again a few years later, and some of the other people on the team during 2021, but he’d never felt the need for one. He doesn’t feel the need for one now either.

His doctor nods slowly. “Is there anyone on your team that has talked to you about your injury before?” he asks.

Max frowns. He has, obviously. It’s quite hard not to talk about it when it affects not just him but the whole team and maybe even the entire company. “With my team principal and my physiotherapist, of course,” he says. “A few other people on the team. Why?”

“But no psychologist?” his doctor asks again, and suddenly, there’s a weird feeling pooling in Max’s stomach.

His nails bite into his palm, but he forces himself to stay calm, collected. Focused.

“No,” he says finally. “I do not really see the need for one.” He’s not sure how a psychologist is supposed to help here, and he’s not interested in someone rummaging around in his brain either.

His doctor accepts it. “Have your other doctors been in contact with your team?” he continues instead.

“Mostly with my physio,” Max says because that’s how they’ve always done it. The team knew when it affected them, but even then they didn’t get anything beyond what was most important. Back after Silverstone, the team had only known bits and pieces, had known that he’d been concussed, but hadn’t known the extent of it. It’s no different now. He doesn’t see the point of it—either he can drive or he can’t. “A lot of the other things are handled by my manager, though.”

“So I assume you also never had a conversation with everyone involved?”

Now Max is frowning. “No?” Of course not. There hasn’t been the need for it so far. He trusts Raymond to deal with the majority of it, and as long as they don’t know how things are and what his prognosis looks like, there is simply no need.

“Mr Verstappen,” the doctor says, a weird emphasis on his name. “Has anyone talked with you about all your options yet?”

Max raises his eyebrows. “My options?” What options? He’s slowly starting to feel like people are withholding information from him that he should be aware of and isn’t, that everyone just assumes he knows.

“About your future, to be specific.”

Max blinks. “My future? Of course, the goal is to return to racing, but that has been communicated.” Multiple times, with multiple different doctors. And so far, every single one of them had told him that they simply couldn’t know yet, had cited different athletes with traumatic injuries that had been able to return even when everyone had thought they wouldn’t have any option but to retire.

Two years, he’d been told back at the hospital. That within those two years, he would have recovered most of what would be possible. It’s only been months since then.

“So anything else has never been talked about, then.”

Max shakes his head, regrets it when his vision blurs and fades before it goes back to normal. “Not really. I talked with another doctor and my PT about the progress and while we agreed on it being slow, there has not really been anything beyond that.”

“Okay,” his doctor says and doesn’t elaborate.

“Why?” Max presses.

“If I can be frank with you,” his doctor starts, and this doesn’t sound good at all, “your prognosis doesn’t look great. The chances that you will be on the same level as you were before your accident are very low. Of course, I cannot know for sure, and I don’t want to say things are for certain, but there is a possibility that you will not be able to return to racing.”

His phone is ringing. For a moment, he considers ignoring it, considers going back to bed, but then he glances at the screen of his phone and sits up so quickly that the entire room starts spinning.

His dad, fuck.

It doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. His dad has been calling him almost daily, but it still makes him jump, has his heart race and his breathing quicken. It’s stupid, and it doesn’t make sense, but he can’t get himself to stop, can’t make it go away. He feels sick to his stomach.

It’s just his dad, he tells himself. Just his dad.

He doesn’t want to tell him about what his doctor had said.

“Dad, hi,” Max says, willing his breathing to slow down. “I was just exercising,” he adds as if he hopes to appease his dad with it, like he needs an explanation why he seems out of breath—and it’s not wrong. His dad would ask, and he knows that.

“Exercises?” his dad questions. He sounds unimpressed—because it’s expected, a necessity that Max simply has to do. Just like it had been a necessity to drive in the rain and in the cold until he couldn’t move his fingers anymore, just like it had been a necessity to train instead of being able to play with his friends. Just like it had been a necessity to keep his helmet on after a bad race.

“From Brad,” Max says. “To help with balance.” It sounds silly when he says it like this—help with balance. He’s not a toddler. He knows how walking works. His body just hasn’t gotten the memo about it.

“That’s good,” his dad says, but it sounds so neutral. Like he’s disappointed that Max can’t offer more, like he’s expected more. He probably has. Max doesn’t want to know what he’ll sound like when he has to admit to his dad that his doctor mentioned retirement.

That he won’t be able to return.

“I’ve been talking to Raymond,” he says, “and we both agree that you need to be more forward in keeping yourself relevant to Formula One and the teams.”

“I know, dad,” Max says tonelessly. He should, he does know that. He just isn’t sure whether it’ll be pointless.

Then he grits his teeth, squares his shoulders. If he starts thinking like this, then of course, nothing will ever come out of this, then of course, nothing can get better.

Other people have made it back, had been able to return to their top form even after devastating injuries. It’s possible for him, too. It could happen. It could. His doctor had explicitly not excluded this possibility.

“Do you? Because in the past few months, you have not been doing anything to keep in contact. It’s almost like you don’t want to go back, and I certainly hope I have raised you better than this.”

“Dad—” Max starts, but he immediately gets interrupted.

“So, we have been coming to the agreement that you should be more active this season,” his dad continues unperturbed. “I’ve cut you slack last year, but it’s been months, and you need to do better. I’ve been coddling you for long enough.”

Max breathes out. This doesn’t come as a surprise—if anything, it’s surprising that it has needed this long, that his dad hadn’t just forced him to do more, to do better like he did when Max was younger. But Max also isn’t thirteen anymore.

“You should go to the races,” his dad says as if it’s the most obvious answer to all their issues.

Max scoffs. “With the wheelchair, you mean?” The last thing his dad would want him to do is be seen with the wheelchair in public. But what other options would be there? He’s by far not secure enough on his legs even with the crutches—not to mention that it would require him to walk around for hours.

“Max,” his dad grinds out, and Max imagines the way his dad’s head slowly turns red, the pulsating vein on his forehead. “You should be able to walk by now.”

He should. He can’t.

There’s nothing that will change this fact.

He still can’t walk.

“What would you—” Max hesitates.

“What would I?” Brad says, ever so patiently, as he helps Max stretch his legs.

“If I retired”—he chokes out the word more than he says it—“what would you say?”

It’s only been a few months, he knows, and there’s a good chance he’ll recover, that he’ll bounce back, that things will be just like they were before. His neurologist isn’t the only doctor Max has, and no one else has said anything.

He knows that Grosjean is still dealing with the consequences of his crash, and Max doesn’t think, doesn’t expect that he himself will recover completely, that in a few years, he won’t be having any problems, but despite his injuries, Grosjean managed to race again, even if it’s not Formula One. But he’s managed to race again.

Max isn’t a pessimist. He’s a realist, probably. He doesn’t like to think too far into the future, likes to take day by day instead of planning his entire life, but he can’t stop thinking. Can’t stop thinking about what ifs and maybes because—

Because what if it ends like this? What if his neurologist is correct? What if he’ll have to retire? What if he doesn’t have any other choice?

Brad lifts his eyebrows. “Do you want to?” he asks.

“I—” Max licks his lips. “No, I do not want to.”

Maybe it would be the better decision. Maybe it would make things easier. Retire now, and once things get better, once the doctors have cleared him that he can go back into Formula One, he can come back. Fernando came back. It’s not like it would be the first time someone did it.

Brad shrugs. “Then I also have nothing to say,” he answers instead of saying Your progress is too slow, instead of Your goal is out of reach, instead of It will be impossible to come back. It’s not decided, of course. Sometimes, it just feels like Max doesn’t have much of a choice left.

“But hypothetically,” Max presses. “If I wanted to.”

Brad doesn’t stop with his movement; he just tilts his head as he examines Max. “I would tell you that if it’s what you want, if it makes you happy, then it should be what you should do.”

Max bites his lip. He’s not exactly surprised that this is what Brad says; in fact, maybe this has been expected.

They might work together, but they’re also friends.

“Do you think— what if I have to?” he asks quietly, and this time Brad stops what he’s doing.

“What if you have to retire?” Brad asks. “Because of your injuries?”

Max nods and doesn’t say anything because he doesn’t trust himself to speak. Once he starts, he knows he won’t be able to stop.

Brad runs his hand over his face. “It’s still too early to tell,” he says, and Max knows. He knows.

It’s been barely more a few months, and he has been improving. He’s not as unsteady on his feet anymore. He can walk larger distances than just two weeks ago. The dizziness has slowly but surely been disappearing.

Still.

He’s not reaching his goals, Brad has said that himself. His neurologist isn’t happy with how things are going and tried to get Max to consider going to a therapist. It doesn’t sound anymore like it’s too early to tell.

“I know,” Max says impatiently. “But what if? If it’s too early to tell whether this will make it impossible to return to Formula One, then it is also too early to tell if I can.”

His dad likes to remind him of that like Max isn’t aware of it, like he doesn’t know. Like this isn’t about him.

“Have you talked to Charles?” Brad asks instead, and Max glowers at him.

He has not talked to Charles about this. He does not plan to talk to Charles about this, at least not in the next few weeks. He doesn’t really want to talk about this to anyone.

Brad sighs. “Mate, you’re annoying, do you know that?” But there’s no real bite behind his words. “Alright, so—” He shakes his head. “Hypothetically if your injuries led to a retirement…” he trails off.

Then what? What would he do then?

Formula One has been his goal, his life since he’s been able to think. There hasn’t ever been a time in his life, racing hadn’t been part of it.

And maybe that makes it worse. Because if he can’t return to Formula One, he also won’t be able to return to racing in general.

In the end, it’s not just about Formula One. He’s talked about it before—about retiring from Formula One, but that never meant retiring from racing entirely because there are so many things he still has planned, still wants to do that are all related to racing.

He wants to drive the Nordschleife and Le Mans and maybe, he wants to go for the Triple Crown, too. Indy 500 has never really been a goal of his, but if there was the possibility, he wouldn’t say no. And there is still the GT3 project that is waiting for him.

Only that none of these things would be possible if he can’t return to Formula One, if driving a Formula One car is beyond his abilities.

The worst part is that this might affect sim racing as well. It might not be the same as actual racing, but if he won’t be able to concentrate, if he can’t look at screens for longer periods of time, if he doesn’t have the physical abilities—

What will he have left?

“Max,” Brad finally says. “I have been telling you that you should pick up more hobbies.” It’s not an answer at all.

Max snorts. Brad has before. Multiple times. Because apparently, video games and racing aren’t enough hobbies.

(“They aren’t,” Brad had said, “because both of these things are connected to your job and therefore aren’t proper hobbies. Except for FIFA, perhaps.”

“You’re what?” Max had laughed. “The hobby cop?”)

He’d been right, of course, but back then, Max had been happy with his lack of hobbies because the hobbies he did have, had been more than enough.

Maybe, though, he should have listened to Brad before both of those things had become impossible.

“So, you are saying I should just find a new hobby until I find out whether I can race again?”

Brad shrugs. “You’ve been bored out of your mind for months now, and since you don’t want to interact with humans either, it might be time to find a new pastime.” He squints at Max. “And maybe you can find something new you’re passionate about.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Max mutters. “But that doesn’t help with a possible retirement either.”

“I’m just saying,” Brad says, “that you should start to think beyond racing.”

And isn’t that funny? Hasn’t that been the dilemma all along?

When Seb retired, it was obvious that he wouldn’t be bored. He’s always been passionate about Formula One, but that never meant that he wasn’t passionate about other things as well.

There’s so much going on with Seb that Max can’t even keep up—there was something with a German team for SailGP, he thinks. The bees, of course. Things that aren’t tied to Formula One, things that aren’t even tied to racing.

It’s even the same for Charles. He won’t stop now, won’t stop until he has a championship or until he has to, but Charles has his music and his fashion and his plans.

Max doesn’t have that. He doesn’t have any of that.

For Max, racing has always been the focus. His entire life. And he hasn’t made plans beyond racing because there was never anything supposed to be beyond racing.

There still isn’t.

His finger hovers over the WhatsApp icon.

It doesn’t particularly make a lot of sense—he’s not really spoken to Seb since before he retired, except for a text every now and then, even if Seb offered his help the last time they saw each other. Max is not Charles. He’s never been Seb’s teammate, and Seb had left Red Bull before Max even debuted with Toro Rosso, so he doesn’t think he’s ever been extremely close to him, even if they’d shared the grid for eight years.

Then again, Max doesn’t think he’d been close to any of the older drivers when he’d first debuted. They’d all been a decade older than him, and he’d not even been an adult yet, so it’s not like there’s no reason for it.

Still, Seb might be the person he’s closest to from the older drivers, and asking Lewis or Fernando wouldn’t make any sense.

Fernando would probably laugh if Max tried to talk about retirement with him. There’s a reason why he came back.

And maybe Seb would understand him the most. It’s not the same, of course, but Max knows that retiring for Seb wasn’t easy, that not racing isn’t easy.

It’s worth a try, probably.

Hey, Seb, he types, deletes the words before retyping them again, this might be a bit random, but I have a question if you don’t mind.

He stares at the words, wonders if he should text Seb in German instead, but Seb’s last message hadn’t been in German either. He hesitates, deletes the period and adds an emoji instead.

Maybe he could just put it off. It’s not like he would need to contact Seb. He could just not. He can figure this out himself, can make his own decisions without having to talk to other people when he’s not even talked to Charles about it, and it’s possible that Seb can’t help or doesn’t want to help, or maybe he’s emotionally not available for that right now anyway.

It feels stupid either way to even ask about this when nothing is set in stone yet, when Max won’t retire, when he doesn’t plan to. And it’s probably useless, too.

If Seb told him that retiring sucks and that he plans on coming back to Formula One in the next season, then it’s not like Max could just force his body to heal and get ready for a Formula One car again.

Jimmy jumps onto his lap.

“What am I supposed to do, Jimmy?” he asks, and Jimmy just meows.

He sighs. “If it was just so easy.”

Then, he sends the message. His hands shake.

He lays the phone next to him on the couch, closes his eyes to take a deep breath. It’s probably going to take some time until Seb will reply. Max has never met anyone who’s as offline as Seb, and he’s sure that Seb only got a smartphone because of the F1 group chat after everyone got sick of email threads.

It’s admirable, honestly. As much as Max has been keeping away from social media, it’s practically still impossible to avoid anything, and he’s sure that Seb has somehow managed to do that for years…until he made that Instagram account.

His phone vibrates.

He doesn’t pick it up immediately; instead, he continues petting Jimmy who’s by now curled up in his lap.

Sure! it says.

Max doesn’t click on the notification. He could tell Seb that it doesn’t matter now, that he’s found a solution and to just move on. He could still back out of this, act like it never happened. Seb wouldn’t call him out on this obvious lie, wouldn’t ask how he’s found a solution in the past ten minutes when it’s apparently been dire enough for him to message Seb.

His fingers are trembling. How do you deal with retirement? He has to backspace at least five times, and maybe that’s the sign that he shouldn’t send this message. He’s not even asking this because he plans on retiring, because he wants to. But.

Jimmy’s head bumps against his arm, and he’s staring up at Max.

Brad is right, of course, that it can’t continue like this. And if his doctor is correct—

“Fine,” he says and sends it. If this doesn’t work out, he can just blame it on Jimmy. Even if Jimmy just tried to get Max to pet him again.

He sees Seb typing before it stops again. Then, after another minute, it finally resumes.

Maybe he shouldn’t have jumped Seb like that. It’s a loaded question, he knows that especially because this isn’t just about a normal retirement. If it’s even a retirement at all. Maybe he’s making himself look like a clown when he returns to the grid.

It takes another two minutes for a message to finally arrive. Are you in Monaco at the moment?

Max frowns. He’s not entirely sure what he expected; it’s certainly not that. Yes, he texts back.

This time, Seb replies quicker. I’m there in two weeks, the message reads. Do you want to meet?

Chapter Text

My hopes
dying slowly
rose petals falling
beneath an autumn red moon
will not adorn your unmarked graves 
My dreams
lying quietly
a dark pool under the trees
will not carry your name
to a forgetful shore
And what a pity
— Maya Angelou. No No No No

“Max?” Charles calls out, and Max presses his hands to his ears, curls into himself. He feels sick, nausea wracks his entire body. His head is pounding, and he can barely hear Charles over the blood rushing through his ears.

He’s not sure why it’s so bad today—he’s been staying away from screens, hasn’t even looked at the sim rig in their living room, and yet he’s needed to take two of the painkillers he’s gotten from his neurologist, and it’s still not gone away.

The bed dips next to him, and hands brush his hair out of his eyes. Charles doesn’t say anything, and Max is grateful for it. He simply combs through Max’s hair, and for a short moment, Max lets himself feel bitter about this, the fact that they barely see each other, that the one time Charles is home, Max can’t keep his eyes open, can’t do anything but lie in his bed and pull the blanket over his head to block out any light.

He presses a hand to his mouth, gags. He catches a glimpse of Charles’ wide eyes as Max pushes his hand away.

He barely makes it to the bathroom.

Everything feels too warm, too close, too confining. He rests his head against the cool wall of the bathroom and swallows a sob.

Black dots crowd his vision. He tries to squint to focus on Charles in front of him, but the lights burn in his eyes, make his his head throb even more, so he screws his eyes shut and tries to breathe. His chest hurts, and his lungs burn, but it’s easier than keeping his eyes open. It’s easier than having to look at Charles.

“Fuck,” Charles says, and Max can feel him kneel down next to him. A hand presses against his forehead, and Max can’t help but shake against him.

Charles still doesn’t know about Silverstone, the concussion, the following vision problems. They didn’t get together until much later, so Max never bothered telling him, but now with Charles being a warm weight against his side, he wants to tell him about it.

But he can’t, he knows he can’t. There’s a reason why Charles doesn’t know about it, why barely anyone knows about it.  There had been a reason why he hid that; why he can’t hide this now.

It’s hours later after Charles has moved them back to the bedroom again, when Max swallows, when he forces an eye open and then, before he can stop himself, before he can pause and think, he says, “Do you think I will lose my seat?” He blurts it out like the idiot that he is, and he seems to catch Charles by surprise with this question as much as he surprises himself. He can taste blood.

Charles looks at him with wide eyes and an open mouth, and in any other situation, Max would have made fun of him for looking like a fish. “What are you talking about?”

He wants to tape his mouth shut, wants to erase the past five minutes, wants to travel in the past and stop himself from asking Charles such a stupid question. They’ve wanted to spend a weekend together, just them and their cats because they haven’t done it in ages, and instead, Charles not only has to deal with all of this, he also has to deal with Max asking stupid questions.

“Max, what?” Charles asks again, as if he’d never even considered the possibility that Max might not return, that he’ll just retire and leave Formula One to the younger generation.

No, he thinks, this is not something that sounds remotely like him. To just give up.

But Charles hadn’t been there for the past few doctor visits, hasn’t seen any of the physiotherapy sessions Max has had. He’s been keeping things from Charles, he knows, and he’s not very proud of that, but he also didn’t know how to tell Charles about it, about what his doctors have been saying, about the progress, about the possible outlook on Max’s future.

“I cannot race this year,” he says slowly, closing his eyes again. He can see stars flashing. The nausea almost makes it impossible to speak. “And we do not know more. By the time, I can come back, the team will have changed.”

They already have changed. They will have changed even more by then, and they probably will have a new star driver that they can build the team around. It’s not like Red Bull is lacking drivers, and it’s not like those are lacking talent or skill.

“Just because the team has changed,” Charles says carefully, “does not mean that you cannot come back.”

Other drivers came back from retirement, he knows that. And other drivers came back after accidents. Fernando did. Michael did. But.

Just because others did, doesn’t mean he will. That he can.

And maybe that’s the biggest issue. Because he wants, he’s trying, but as long as his body doesn’t allow for it to happen, it doesn’t matter how much he pushes himself. If he can’t, then he can’t. It’s as simple as that.

Max presses the heels of his palms against his eyes. His back is throbbing. “I will probably never be able to race on the level as before the— as before. They have more than enough talented drivers who can all take my place.”

They have more than enough drivers just in Formula Two, not even mentioning the ones who have already graduated. And, if the other drivers in Formula One know that he won’t be on the team, then it’s not exactly unlikely that they’re more prone to accepting a contract with Red Bull. No one wants to be the second driver, and if the team now does not have a clear distinction anymore...

“But they are not you,” Charles points out.

Max grits his teeth. “I am not me.” It makes Charles flinch.

But it’s simply the truth—because he’s not. Because he doesn’t know when he will be again. Because he doesn’t know if he ever will.

They’re going to expect to see a Max Verstappen who’s a three-time Formula One World Champion, and instead they’re going to get a Max Verstappen who can’t walk, who can’t look at screens or lights, who can’t even deal with a stupid migraine on his own.

Charles tilts his head. “Did they say anything?”

“They did not,” Max concedes.

They didn’t, but they also didn’t have to. He knows how all of this works, knows how Red Bull works. He’s seen it happen far too often to not to. He’s gotten his seat that way, after all. It would be stupid to think that he’s excluded from it.

He has exit clauses in his contract if Red Bull doesn’t deliver, and they have exit clauses if he doesn’t deliver, and then they have the injury-related clauses, and none of them are going to save his place in the team.

Charles is frowning now, and Max wonders for a moment if Charles reads more into this than there is. “But someone else?”

He shrugs.

“Your father?” Charles asks, eventually, and there’s something weird in his voice that Max can’t be bothered to figure out. He knows that Charles isn’t a fan of his dad—most people aren’t. It’s really not a secret.

Max grimaces. “He, of course, is not happy with the speed of my recovery, but he is sure I will go back to Formula One.”

He’d been quite clear about what he expects, and anything less than Formula One is not acceptable. Max has made it to Formula One once, he can do it again—especially with the connections he has now. Especially with the contract he still has.

“Just…” Max rubs his forehead. “People were fired for less.” It’s how he’s gotten his own seat, it’s what has always worked best for Red Bull. He’s been there for longer than most other drivers even if he’s not been part of their driver academy, and he has a better relationship with both Helmut and Christian than anyone else can say about themselves, but he’s still just a driver—one of thousands. He’s still replaceable. All this means nothing if his health doesn’t progress, if his injuries don’t get better.

Charles raises one eyebrow. “But people are also not a three-time World Champion.” It almost makes Max snort. Is this the kind of positive thinking you have to develop when you drive for Scuderia Ferrari?

“That is true,” he allows. He doesn’t mention that people aren’t going to wait even for a three-time World Champion if said World Champion can’t race anymore.

“It has only been a few months,” Charles says, his face unbearably soft. “You said you cannot know yet.”

And he wants to believe it, wants it to be true, but he can still feel his head pound, can barely look at screens without wincing, can barely keep himself upright. His eyes burn, and his shoulders ache, and he still can’t feel his legs.

“I cannot walk,” he says, harsher than he wanted, more emotions slipping out than he intended.

They don’t really talk more about it—Charles wants to, Max knows. It’s the first time he’s heard all of this, the first time he’s realised how far everything reaches; of course, he wants to talk about it again.

But Max doesn’t, not now. They should—it’s unfair to unload all of this on Charles and then refuse to talk about it again, but every time, Charles brings it up, his stomach cramps, and his head throbs, and he feels like he can’t breathe.

They’ll have to talk about it again, at some point, but it’s not now. Max can’t.

Charles just looks sad, a deep frown between his eyebrows, but after the first few futile attempts, he leaves Max be even if he tells him that they’ll have to talk about it at some point.

Max can accept that—once he’s collected his thoughts, knows what he wants and what he doesn’t, knows what he can and what he doesn’t.

Currently, Max just feels sick.

Maybe he should call Marc, get an opinion on all of this from someone who used to be in a similar position.

But alone thinking about it, having to admit out-loud once more that he can’t drive, that retirement might be an option, that he won’t return, makes his insides constrict.

Work, Max notices quickly, is not something Charles likes to bring home anymore, now that Max isn’t part of it any longer. Charles has mentioned a few things about Maranello, of course, he has, but Max doesn’t know any details—he’s also not very keen on knowing them. In a way, he’s glad for it. In another, he just feels guilty.

As it turns out, though, Lando doesn’t have the same qualms, continues their conversations and relationship as though nothing has changed. And maybe nothing has, for him. Lando doesn’t know yet, not that Max knows, not really. Not that it has to mean much—everything that’s been said, everything that could be true, everything that might not be.

“It was shit,” Lando tells him when they meet again, fork in his hand as he gestures. It almost makes Max worry that Lando might stab himself. It wouldn’t be the first time, after all.

Originally, he didn’t want to go outside of his apartment—he still isn’t very keen on having anyone spot him in public, especially if he needs his crutches, but Lando convinced him by promising him to pay for the crêpes.

Lando put on sunglasses and a non-branded cap before they left, and Max laughed because it’s March, and him being dressed like that probably just means more attention on him, but they haven’t been interrupted by anyone—neither fan nor journalist—, so maybe it’s working.

Max snorts.

“First corner, boom. Race over.” Lando sighs as he stabs his crêpe with his fork. “Whatever. Wasn’t my fault, and things can’t be changed now. At least, the rest of the season has been quite good.”

The ice cream on Lando’s crêpe is suspiciously green. Not the kind of green that pistachio ice cream would look like; it’s…a lot brighter. Max wouldn’t trust it.

Lando always loves to try different dishes. By now, he’s probably tried half of the menu, and so far, he hadn’t had anything that he didn’t like. Max didn’t pay enough attention to know the details of what Lando ordered today because he knew he would just eat a crêpe with Nutella like he always does. Lando’s looks okay. Not good enough to try, though.

“What have you been up to?” Lando changes the topic. He only spoke about the race because Max asked. Max doesn’t know why he did. (That’s a lie, probably. It’s for the same reasons as when he looked up the Australia results after promising himself not to.)

“Not much,” Max says, shrugging. And then, “Brad wants me to find a hobby.” It’s something he’s been thinking about again—that he’s got so much free time on his hands that he’s not using at all, that it almost makes him feel useless.

He likes relaxing. He just doesn’t think he likes not doing anything.

Technically, technically, there are things to keep up with, things he has to do. He feels guilty just by thinking about Team Redline and how much he’s been neglecting them, about Verstappen.com Racing and Thierry. Raymond has been taking care of most things, but that should be Max’s work, should be Max’s responsibility. It feels impossible.

Lando frowns at his crêpe. “Probably a good idea.”

“Yeah.” Max sighs. The issue isn’t that he doesn’t know that he needs more hobbies. The issue is finding something. He likes racing. He likes FIFA. He can’t do either. And there’s not really anything else that he enjoys or that he can imagine himself enjoying.

He doesn’t hate watching TV shows, but that’s not something he’s interested in all too much, and it would also only be possible for short periods of time.

He’s not very musically talented. Or all too creative. Charles would laugh at him if he found out Max was trying his hand at creative endeavours.

And other sports are not going to be much more possible than racing. He’d kill for a round of padel.

And what’s there really left after all that?

He can only memorise so many flags.

“You sound excited,” Lando jokes, but they’re sitting in the same boat. There’s racing and not much more. Lando likes to joke about it, but they still both know it to be true, and they know it to be true for both of them.

“I mean,” Max says, shrugs, “what even should I do? Everything I am interested in is something I cannot do. I don’t even think there are a lot of things I can do right now.”

It’s hard to concentrate—it makes his head hurt, and he’s gotten far too often nauseous.

He’s never been great at most sports, and now, he wouldn’t be good at any of them because he’s not in the physical condition to do anything. Not if he’s still struggling to walk, whether that be because of the pain or because his legs refuse to move. It doesn’t matter, not really, not when it makes the crutches and the wheelchairs a necessity.

He doesn’t like to depend on them, but he likes to meet the ground with his face even less.

He stabs his crêpe.

Lando tilts his head. “Have you considered doing some voluntary work or something?” he asks.

Max actually hasn’t. But Max also can’t think of anything that he could help with. Anything too physical is off the table, and anything else doesn’t seem like something he’d be interested in, or something he would be able to do.

“Mate”—Max rolls his eyes—“for that, I would need to be useful for anything else.”

Lando doesn’t laugh; instead, he squints at Max like he’s trying to figure something out. It just makes Max raise his eyebrows.

Lando hesitates. “I mean, I don’t know how much you’d like to do that because it would require you a lot to, like, I don’t know, heavily deal with racing and stuff, but have you ever thought about coaching kids? Like in karting.”

It’s something Max has thought about doing—long before this year but doing anything with karting would never be possible as long as he’s actively racing, so sim racing had always been more feasible.

But that’s off the table now.

Though the problem is that he wouldn’t have been a coach or some sort of trainer. He’d just be there, help discover and support new talents. Not…not more. He doesn’t think he would be good at it. He doesn’t want to coach his own nephews; he certainly doesn’t want to coach strangers.

He can give tips about mistakes and honing skills, but it’s different when he’d be an actual coach, a proper trainer, when people would start to depend on him, if he became their key to success. His dad had been good at coaching him, but Max doesn’t want to train little kids like he’d been trained. It makes him nauseous just thinking about it.

He’d needed it. It’s not the same for other kids.

“I don’t know,” Max says honestly. “I am…not sure I can deal with that right now.”

Lando nods slowly. “Yeah,” he says. “Makes sense.”

“Thanks, though,” Max replies after a few moments. His eyes are burning. “For the idea.”

Physiotherapy continues to be shit. Sometimes, it makes him wonder why he even continues to entertain it, why he continues to push when it’s already obvious that he’s never going to get back to how things were before. But then, he hears his dad’s spiteful words, imagines the way his face always turned red when he yelled at Max when he was still karting, during the first few years of auto racing, and it makes him straighten his back, makes him grit his teeth, makes him participate in the next physiotherapy session, too.

Max doesn’t want to imagine what his dad would say if Max just decided to give up, to simply retire when there is still hope and a chance to return left. When nothing is certain yet.

(“You don’t need hope,” his dad would say. “You just need drive and to push.”

Keep pushing, Max thinks, stomach twisting. It feels like a twisted dream, like a reality that will never come true again.)

Eventually, Charles has to leave again, and it’s obvious that he doesn’t want to. There’s a frown on his face that has been accompanying him far too often lately, and he hugs Max so tightly that it makes it obvious that he doesn’t want to ever let go again. Max doesn’t want him to do either.

“It’s only a few days,” Max points out, but Charles pouts.

“But I won’t see you,” Charles says. “How will I survive without seeing your pretty face?”

Max gives Charles a nudge away from him, crinkles his nose. “You are ridiculous.”

“It’s the truth,” Charles complains.

Max snickers. “You’ll be fine,” he says even though he feels the same. He’s not particularly interested in letting Charles go, in letting him leave and not seeing him for multiple days. He really, really doesn’t want to let go of Charles’ hand.

But the cab driver is already waiting for him, and Max considers coming to the airport just so he can spend some more time with Charles before Charles smothers him once again with far too many kisses. Max barely manages to get some air in.

“Good luck,” Max says quietly, and Charles miserably fails to wink at him.

The next day, Max feels groggy and bitter when he wakes up, when Brad rings his bell before letting himself in. His head hurts, and he just wants Charles with him here, but that’s impossible because Charles is across the world, and Max shouldn’t be this childish, shouldn’t be so dependent on someone else.

Brad raises both eyebrows when he notices Max’s mood, but he doesn’t say anything. He just puts down the smoothie he’s brought with him. “Maybe a simple session today,” he says, and Max swallows his tongue.

He doesn’t want an easy session today, doesn’t want to take it slow. He wants to push his body until he feels the familiar ache in his joints, until his legs shake and pain crawls up his spine, until his thoughts are drowned out by the blood rushing through his ears.

But Brad won’t agree to that, won’t let Max push himself until his vision spots black dots, so he grits his teeth and pushes himself to his feet, holds onto Brad’s hand and the back of the sofa and tries to take a few wobbly steps.

He can barely support himself standing.

It only makes him angrier.

He calls Christian. He’s not sure why. Maybe he just wants to hear a familiar voice—he’s not exactly lonely, but it’s weird in a way. Going from constantly being surrounded by people to being alone too often, feels off in a way he’s not expected it to do.

He likes being alone. He likes being able to do things he knows he can’t do during race weeks, but it’s different now. Of course, it’s different now.

It’s also been some time since he’s talked to Christian anyway. It must have been a few weeks already—he sent a text to wish them luck for the new season, but the last time they called, was before that.

Christian picks up quickly. It’s nothing less than what Max expected. If there’s nothing important going on, it’s almost a given that Christian will be on his phone—Max has never seen anyone this bad, not even a lot of his younger friends and colleagues. It’s impressive in a way, but he also already has a bad feeling for Christian’s children.

“Max!” Christian greets him. “How have you been?”

The dreaded question. Max doesn’t even pull a grimace. It’s unfair, probably, to expect everyone not to talk about it when it’s such a big part of his life is right now. It’s changed a lot. It influences the way he lives even more. Of course, people want to know how he’s doing.

He still doesn’t like it.

“It has been okay,” he says because that’s not a lie, “but I think the cats like it the most that I, of course, am so much at home.”

Sassy has been a lot clingier the past few weeks than she’s ever been before, and it makes Max wonder if he accidentally gave his cat abandonment issues by constantly being gone. It’s never been an issue with Jimmy, and Sassy has always been a bit aloof, so he’d never even considered it, but it makes sense. At least, it couldn’t have helped.

Christian laughs. “I can imagine that.”

“How are things going?” Max asks. He tries to keep his voice casual but still interested and desperately hopes there’s nothing else. Then again, maybe it’s useless anyway. Christian knows him well enough to know that Max isn’t happy about having to sit out and not being able to drive. He’d understand if Max didn’t seem happy or excited.

“Okay so far,” Christian says, but there’s a certain hesitance to his words. Max isn’t surprised. It’s just the same old. “We haven’t been able to fix the issues so far. I’m sure you’ve talked to Daniel about it?”

“Ah,” Max says, “not so much.” Considering how Daniel’s season must go, they really haven’t talked a lot about it. Max knows more about the season than he really likes to know, but it’s also his own fault. And well, maybe that’s also exactly why they’re not talking about it.

Max asks. Sometimes. And Daniel doesn’t go into details. Sometimes, he deflects, talks about how badly Ferrari has fucked up this time. Sometimes, he just straight-up tells Max he doesn’t want to talk about it, and Max isn’t going to force anyone to do anything even if it’s obvious that this is more about Max than it is about Daniel.

Charles doesn’t really talk about it either, and after the scene in the bathroom, Max knows that he’s trying to steer clear of it as much as somehow possible. Max still asks, knows they can’t avoid it completely—it’s still Charles’ job, after all—, but they don’t dwell on that topic, focus on other things instead. It’s not fair on Charles, Max knows that, but there’s not much he can do when it’s Charles deflecting, when he complains to Max about the worst strategy calls Max has ever heard about in his life and then moves on to their weekend plans like it means nothing.

“About the races? Or to Daniel?” Christian asks like he doesn’t know that Daniel and Max talk. The last few times, he’s told Daniel to say hi to Christian, and unless Daniel forgot every time, Christian must have gotten at least one of them.

“The races,” Max says.

Christian is quiet, and Max isn’t sure why. Maybe it surprises Christian that they’re not talking about Formula One considering that the past few years, Max didn’t know how to shut up.

Max knows more about it than he’d like to admit, and he also would never admit that he’s memorised almost all the World Champions by now. That he’s studied them. It’s not even been hard, and he’s not sure why he didn’t do it earlier.

“I was told to focus on recovery first and foremost,” Max says because Christian is still quiet, and it’s uncomfortable. It almost makes him feel like he has to come up with excuses why he hasn’t been keeping up with the current season.

Christian hums. “It’s a bit unexpected, I’d say,” he says finally, and Max can certainly agree with it. But he also doesn’t know just how surprising it really is.

He knows that a lot of the retired drivers don’t keep up as much with Formula One anymore, but he guesses, he’s also not retired. And if he plans to return to the grid next year or the year after that, then he definitely has to stay up to date with everything going on in Formula One.

He also just really doesn’t want to. Not at the moment.

He hopes his dad never finds out about that.

“I guess,” Max says. He’ll have to disappoint Christian here.

“Have you thought about flying to Milton Keynes?” Christian asks, and his topic change skills are by far not as smooth as he likes to think they are. “I’m not sure what you’re yet allowed to do, but if you want to, you could do a few runs on the sim. Nothing serious, of course, but just to get a feeling.”

He stares at the ceiling. It’s nice that Christian thinks of him, that he’s still trying to make Max feel like he’s part of the team, like there’s use for him when there’s obviously not. He wouldn’t need to do it, and Max knows that other people would’ve kicked him to the curb already.

He can appreciate so much. The advantage of being a World Champion.

But there’s no use when he can’t do it.

“I…don’t know,” Max says.

And then it’s quiet again like Christian has to digest two shocks. It must be surprising—to hear both of these things coming out of Max’s mouth. But circumstances have changed, and as much as Max would love to do it, he also can’t. He doesn’t think he can.

“I am still getting quite dizzy,” he says, and it shouldn’t be a lie as far as he’s aware, at least, but he’s also not tried sim racing since then. Maybe he’s still too afraid that his apprehensions will come true, that he’s going to learn something about his skills and abilities he’s not interested in, that it’s going to confirm what he fears his future will look like.

Christian makes an understanding noise. “You can also just come to say hi if you’re interested. I’m sure the team would love to see you.”

He’d also like to see the team. He misses them, and it’s definitely weird to go for so long without GP’s voice in his ear. He almost immediately accepts, then he thinks better of it. He’ll have to sleep a night—or maybe two—to think it over, and then he can decide. Not that it ends like last time.

“I will think about it,” he says.

“That’s great to hear.” Christian sounds satisfied. “Any plans for the next weeks? Maybe visiting the family? The weather there should be better now, no?”

It might be. It also might just be a bit warmer with just as much rain as before. But that’s just how home is, and even with how much he’s sometimes complaining, he does like it. And he’s not made out of sugar.

“Not really,” he says. “I was thinking about flying to Holland. My mum and Vic visited, but it has been some time since I last saw my dad, so no plans yet.” It would be nice. He’s not seen his dad in person since he left Belgium to fly back to Monaco, and that’s already been a few months ago. He just doesn’t know if his dad is going to feel the same about it, not when Max has to take his crutches with him.

“I am meeting up with Seb, though,” he adds like an afterthought.

“Oh!” Christian exclaims because he always likes to talk to and about Seb. It’s just something that comes with being a Team Principal’s first World Champion, Max muses. It makes him wonder, sometimes, if Christian also talks about him like this. “He’s in Monaco?”

“Yes, I do not know why, though.” He didn’t ask. He could have, but they just decided on a day and a time, and then they haven’t really…texted since. Seb isn’t using his phone enough for that, and Max also has been trying to keep away from his own. And it’s not necessary when they’re going to see each other in a few days anyway. Then, at least, he has something to start with, so he doesn’t have to immediately start with the hard questions.

“Pass on greetings to him then,” Christian says, and Max imagines him smiling.

“I will.”

“I have been thinking about a barbecue in the summer again,” Christian changes the topic again. “What do you think?”

Max frowns. It’s barely spring. Surely, the planning of a barbecue during the summer break can wait a few more weeks. Months, really. He’s pretty sure Christian didn’t even think about it last year until a few days before it was supposed to take place. He still remembers that Geri had joked about Christian’s far too spontaneous ideas.

It was nice, though. It also was the nicest thing to happen for quite a few months afterwards. He grimaces.

“It is still quite a bit until then,” he says.

Christian laughs. “True, but you can never start planning too early, can you?”

“That is true,” Max compromises because that’s fair enough. Plans are great, and not having to change them because something came up surprisingly is even better. “Will you invite the whole grid again?”

Not everyone came last time because a lot of them were also busy with preparations or simply hadn’t been in England yet, but there were still quite a few drivers—it’ll probably be similar this time, and he’s not seen most of them in months. It could be nice to catch up a bit with them.

“We would have enough space for that at least,” Christian says.

It’s certainly a big property they have, but that’s also expected from a popstar and a CEO. Maybe he should also get one of those—not in the UK. Somewhere else. Maybe even Holland or Belgium. Maybe he should just do both. He snorts.

“Sounds like a good idea, then,” he says. “Last year was fun. It is always nice to see Geri and the kids.” He sees Geri more often than he sees the children, but it’s already been some time since the last time. He wrinkles his nose. Of course, it has been.

“Speaking of Geri, she says hi.”

It makes Max smile. “Say hi back! And to the kids, of course.”

“Will do.” Christian sounds like he’s also smiling.

Max bites on his lip. “And I, of course, will think about flying to Milton Keynes,” he says eventually. “Sorry again for cancelling on you so spontaneously last time.” It’s probably fine. No, he knows that it’s fine. He didn’t plan to go to Milton Keynes to do any work, and it was supposed to just be a quick visit anyway—it’s not like it could have been more—, but since it was so sudden that he cancelled on them, it also wasn’t the nicest thing to do.

Christian tsks. “Don’t worry about that,” he says. “It’s not like there was some super important job that you needed to get done.”

Max grimaces again. “Right.” He stretches his fingers. It’s true, obviously. And he’s not sure he’s ever going to do some super important job ever again. Maybe. Possibly. But that’s also not something he’s going to tell Christian. It’s not something he has to know just yet, not something Max even wants to think about.

At some point, once he knows how things are, once he’s made his decision, once things are a bit more certain, he’ll tell Christian, but until then…

Max takes a deep breath. There’s no use. It just makes everything a bit more complicated, and Max doesn’t need that. Not right now.

Sometimes, he wants to bash his head in, wants to hit it so often against the wall until he can feel blood running down his face, until he can spot red on the pristine white walls of their living room, but he knows it would scare the cats, so he never lingers much on that thought.

But sometimes, his hands start to shake, and his lips go numb, and he can’t stop grinding his teeth until his jaw starts to hurt, and the headache returns with full force.

Then, he thinks, it would be easier to do that, to just go out with one more well-placed hit to the head. He’s taken enough of them over the years, anyway. What does one more matter?

Instead, he forces himself out of the wheelchair, placing stubbornly one foot before the next one until his hands stop shaking and he can barely keep himself on his feet any longer, until black spots encroach on his vision, until there’s nothing but all-consuming pain.

It doesn’t make the anger, the frustration, the urge to go away, but it helps enough that Charles won’t have to find a dead body in their apartment. He can’t do that to him. When it comes to this one thing, he won’t be selfish for once.

His phone pings. He glares at it from the other side of the bedroom, watches the way its screen lights up and dims again. He’s still in bed, knows he shouldn’t be, but it’s hard to care when there’s no one forcing you to get up.

Brad had been here earlier, of course, but afterwards, exhaustion had hit him, and ever since then, he’d been in bed. It’s one of the few things he allows himself to have—what else is there for him to do anyway? Maybe Lando is right, and he should find something to volunteer for.

He sighs, buries his face in his pillows. They still smell like Charles, and he’s not going to change the pillowcases until Charles is back even though he really should. And it’s still weeks until Charles comes back. He hates triple headers, had hated them when he had to race them, and he still hates them now. Maybe he hates them more now.

His phone pings again. He really, really doesn’t want to get up. His back is still killing him from his earlier session, and the muscles in his legs are spasming. Maybe it’s something important, he considers. But if it was important enough, they would call him.

His dad always calls him. Helmut and Christian do, too. His doctors as well. Charles does if it’s something important; otherwise, he’ll just spam Max with messages until he’s annoyed enough to look at his phone—he’s annoying like this.

Max pulls the blanket over his head and ignores it.

Max can hear Charles’ pout through the phone. “Why did you not answer my messages, chéri?”

“I was sick of you,” Max deadpans. He doesn’t say, Because I didn’t feel like getting up from bed, because it felt too exhausting, because my limbs were weighing me down, making it impossible to move. It would only worry Charles for no reason, would make him want to come back home when they both know it’s not possible. Max won’t ever tell Charles that.

Charles gasps on the other end. “Max,” he complains, and Max can just quietly giggle.

He can hear people talk; somewhere a wheel gun goes off. His stomach twists.

Max takes a deep breath. “How are things going?” he asks.

Charles just groans.

“This bad?” Max teases.

“Worse,” Charles says. Max isn’t quite sure what could be worse than a double disqualification, but he’s sure Ferrari can still surprise him. It’s a special talent of theirs, after all.

“How is that even possible?”

He can hear a dull thud, then another groan. Someone is chiding Charles in Italian, maybe Silvia, for destroying all of his very much needed brain cells. Charles ignores it. “Please do not ask.”

“Okay,” Max agrees easily. There is a reason why he’s never entertained the thought of driving for Ferrari for very long; he doesn’t think all of them would make it through even one weekend alive. Sometimes, it’s hard to reconcile Charles from their karting days—who was hot-headed and filled with rage and who had an entire box filled with destroyed controllers—with the Charles who is driving for Ferrari, but maybe that’s just what happens when you have a dream team.

Max never cared much for it—he’d always only wanted to drive in Formula One, to win races and championships. He’d never cared for which team he would win them.

“Give Jimmy, Sassy and Leo kisses from me,” Charles says, and then, “Are you sure we can’t get another dog?”

Max squints his eyes at that. “We are not getting another dog,” he says because he really isn’t sure when it started that Charles wanted to have even more pets. Max doesn’t bother to remind Charles that it had been him who originally hadn’t even wanted to get Leo. Max is not sure they can handle another young dog.

“But, Max—”

It’s nice, to talk to Daniel. He’s missed this during Daniel’s Renault—and then McLaren—days. They’d always gotten along as teammates, as friends, but the pressure and their relationship had gotten too much, Max knows that, and they’ve not been able to keep up as much after Daniel left.

But Daniel has always been one of those constants in his life that Max hadn’t had anywhere else.

And it’s been Daniel again who has been insisting on it, who had texted Max until Max finally gave in and agreed to video calls when Daniel is gone, to meetings in Monaco when Daniel is home.

Though now that means that Daniel will have to deal with Max’s questions.

“How are things?” Max asks, and Daniel grimaces.

“The car is shit, mate. 2018 was also shit, but then at least, it’s been mainly the engines. Now we just have shit results with good reliability.”

Max pulls a face. “They did not want to listen to me,” he says. He’d told them, at the end of 2023, at the beginning of 2024, and then it had been too late for things to change.

Daniel shrugs. “They see it in the results now.” They hadn’t with Max. Well, they had. And they’d ignored it.

“Tell Christian that for me,” Max mutters. He could fly to Milton Keynes to do that himself. Maybe that would work even better.

Daniel laughs. “I’ll do that for sure.”

Max sighs, rolling his shoulders back. Sometimes, he has to squint at the screen to properly see Daniel, but most of the blurriness he explains with Daniel’s shitty internet. He’s not moving fast enough to make Max’s vision problems worse.

“How have you been holding up?” Daniel asks. “Charles hasn’t said much except that you are looking to adopt another dog? Are you planning to have a zoo?”

Max blinks. Is that how Charles plans on getting a second dog? By mentioning it to everyone he sees? Amusement fills his chest. “He is lying,” Max says, snorts.

Daniel raises an eyebrow. “Lying?” he asks, his tone suggesting that he can’t imagine why Charles would lie about something like this.

Max bends forward so that he is closer to the screen, lowers his voice even though Charles isn’t even home. “He wants that dog,” he whispers.

“I thought he hadn’t wanted a dog at all,” Daniel says.

“He hadn’t. Now he wants another one.” He shakes his head. “Who is even going to walk them? Because I cannot,” he jokes, bitterness blossoming on his tongue. A joke, he tells himself. Nothing more than a joke. It doesn’t feel like a joke.

Daniel hesitates. It’s visible in the way he rocks forwards, stops in his movement, the way his eyes flicker over the screen like he’s trying to find something that Max doesn’t know about, the way he opens his mouth and closes it again. “How’s that, by the way?”

Max presses his lips together, and Daniel seems to get the hint just fine.

“Okay,” Daniel says, and his usual grin returns to his face. “Let’s talk about something else, hm?”

“I meet Seb in a few days,” Max says, thankful, but Daniel has always been good at this, at understanding Max, at knowing what’s helpful and what isn’t. Somehow that hasn’t changed over the years.

“Oh, that’s nice,” Daniel says, surprise obvious in his voice. “I haven’t talked to Seb in some time. He’s just in Monaco right now?”

Max shrugs. “I texted him, and he said he would be here.” It’s not very uncommon to find former Formula One drivers in Monaco even if they don’t live there, and there’s no Grand Prix, and Max didn’t bother to ask if he can just ask Seb once they see each other. If he went out more, he’d probably spot familiar faces every couple of blocks. He’s not very keen on that.

“You reached out?” Daniel teases. “Is that something Red Bull champions have in common? Be a fucking cryptid?”

Max rolls his eyes. “Oh, shut it,” he mutters, ignoring the twinge of guilt. “I had asked him about retirement and if he has any tips regarding—” He clamps his mouth shut before he can say more. Fuck. He hadn’t meant to say that.

Daniel is frowning now. “Retirement?”

“I don’t—” Max takes a deep breath. “I am just curious what he has been up to.” It’s the truth. He is curious. He just doesn’t need people to know that maybe he wants to talk to Seb about this for himself.

“Wait, Max—” Daniel sits up straighter; his eyes are wide. “Retirement?”

“I am not— I’m not retiring,” Max says faintly. Not…yet. He’s not retiring if he doesn’t have to.

“Jesus, you scared me.”

Max laughs bitterly.

“I guess I can just need some…some suggestions what to do with all the time I have,” he says, and it’s not wrong either. It’s also not really why he’s asked Seb for advice.

“That guy’s going to tell you to start breeding bees,” Daniel jokes, but his voice is off. It makes Max wonder whether it would be a total surprise for the other drivers if he does need to retire. They probably can’t imagine him doing anything that’s not racing.

Max can’t imagine himself doing anything that’s not racing.

He snorts. “Maybe I should. Just watch; it will become my new passion.”

Daniel grins. “And then both you and Seb come to the races to build bee hotels.”

Max presses his lips together, forces his mouth into a smile. He doesn’t think he’d want to come to the races if he retired—if he was forced to retire. But he doesn’t mention it. There’s no point anyway.

The next appointment with his neurologist doesn’t go any better. He asks again—about a sports therapist, about what Red Bull has to offer in terms of mental health. Max just wants to scream.

“We cannot know for sure,” he says, and it reminds Max far too much of various Ferrari radio messages. We are checking. “But—”

Max gets it. He does. His doctor doesn’t have to say anything else to make it obvious what he wants Max to realise.

(He punches the door frame when he’s back at the apartment, winces when his fist makes dull contact with the wood, when pain shoots up his arm, and he grits his teeth when he sees Sassy stare up at him with wide eyes.

The guilt hurts far more than his throbbing hand.

(This, he thinks, is why he will never coach children.))

Charles’ eyebrows are furrowed. He’s been weirdly subdued ever since he got back home, and Max can’t figure out what the issue is. He’d been overjoyed when he’d first seen Max, but it hadn’t held on for as long as Max had expected it to do.

Now they’ve settled down on the cough; Max is leaning against Charles’ side, so he can stretch his legs out, get rid of some of the discomfort in his joints.

It’s silent. Max isn’t sure he likes it.

“You have been quiet,” Charles comments.

Max shrugs. “Just thinking.” He has been—knows that he should be talking to Charles about this, too, but something is stopping him, makes him unable to open his mouth and spill everything that has been happening the past few weeks. The doctor visits, the physiotherapy. The bad and worse news.

He should; he knows he should.

He doesn’t.

“You have been quiet, too,” he says instead. Distracting has always been the easiest way to get away from things he doesn’t want to talk about—that he knows Charles wants to talk about.

“Yes,” Charles says slowly.

Max raises his eyebrows. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I have just been worried,” Charles starts, and Max tenses.

“About what?” he still asks even though he has the feeling he knows where this is going.

Charles hums. “Everything. You.”

“Me?”

Charles shrugs. He obviously wants to say something, but he’s hesitating like he’s not quite sure how to approach it. Max fears for the worst. “Have you ever considered going to a therapist?”

Max sits up which makes Charles’ hand on his hip fall away, turns to Charles to properly look at him. “Mate,” he says.

Charles looks back; there’s a stubborn set to his mouth. It’s the same when Max has won too much, and Charles gets sick of his shenanigans. “I think it could be a good thing.”

“Not you, too,” Max groans. “It is enough that my sister and my neurologist are annoying me with this.” Maybe, he considers for just a second, there’s a reason why three people have told him to do it.

“Max,” Charles says.

Max stares back, squares his shoulders. He’s not just going to roll over because Charles bats his eyelashes at him. “Charles.”

“Just think about it, please.” And Charles just sounds so sad now. Max wants to rip his own hair out; instead, he digs his fingernails into his skin until his palms start to sting. “It is normal, you know? And it could help you.”

Max knows that it’s normal, but that doesn’t have to mean that it’s something that he has to do, something that he wants to do. He deals with all of this just fine.

“I will think about it,” Max concedes—lies. He knows he won’t think about it, really doesn’t want to.

“Thank you,” Charles says, but Max has the feeling that Charles doesn’t entirely believe him. He leaves it be, though, like he has hope that Max will think about it even if he’s not entirely convinced yet.

It makes Max feel bad. It doesn’t change how he feels about this topic. But maybe for Charles, he will think about it.

He stares at his hands—they’re smooth, pale except for the bruises around his knuckles, the white scar across the back of his hand where he’d cut himself while working on one of his dad’s karts. Sometimes, when he shuts his eyes tightly enough, he can still hear his dad yell, the curses he always hurled at Max whenever something didn’t go the way he had wanted it to.

How bad would it really be? To retire and leave this behind and move on?

He wouldn’t need to go back to Formula One, could work on getting better and then try to move to one of the other categories—like Romain did. He wouldn’t go to Indy, no, but WEC could still be possible. After all, it’s been something he’s been considering, something he’s wanted to do anyway.

Giving up one doesn’t mean giving it all up.

He could still always come back.

His mum’s voice is soft, gentle. It’s nothing like it used to be when Max was eleven and hiding under a blanket while his parents screamed at each other. For a heartbeat, it makes him wonder if it would make him come to his senses, would make him get rid of that ever-growing idea in his mind, would set him straight and focus on training once more.

But his mum’s voice is gentle now, and he’s not very interested in being yelled at. His dad does enough of that already. His mum wouldn’t do it anyway.

“Mum,” he starts, stares at the wall in front of him. Helmets and trophies look back at him.

“Yes?” she prompts.

“What would you say if I retired?” It reminds him of the conversation he’s had with Brad a couple of weeks ago—only that now, he’s more serious about it than he ever was then. He feels sick, and for a moment, he has to close his eyes. They’re burning.

It’s quiet. He can only hear her breathing. Maybe this was a bad idea, maybe his neurologist wasn’t entirely wrong with the idea to talk to a sports therapist, so he wouldn’t constantly spring this on people without any preparation. But it’s too late for that now.

And he’s wanted to talk to her because he knows that she gets it, that she understands it better than anyone else in his life, better than his dad and better than other drivers. Beyond the marriage, beyond Max and Victoria, beyond her first retirement.

He remembers a crash, an injury, a broken vertebra. He remembers people telling him that his mother had been the better driver of his parents, what a shame it’s been that her career hasn’t been cut short just once.

“Max,” she finally says, “you have to do what’s best for you, and if that’s retiring, then it’s that.”

He doesn’t scoff, but it’s a near thing. The best thing he could do for himself would be returning to Formula One, winning another championship with Red Bull and then retiring on his own accord—it wouldn’t be considered retiring because he has to, because he’s been injured in a stupid accident and now can barely walk.

But maybe retiring is what’s best for him in this situation, in these conditions. Because there’s no point in trying to bully his body back in shape when he’s not going to be able to keep it up, when his body is resisting his every move.

He pointedly ignores the trophies on his way out of the living room.

They decided on a Saturday. It’s a sunny day—warmer than most of the past few days, and definitely warmer than Belgium. His mum had sent him a picture of fresh snow just yesterday, and Max really doesn’t miss that.

He’s not exactly late—in fact, he’s five minutes early when he looks through the window into the café they chose—, but it doesn’t surprise him when he sees Seb already waiting.

It’s a hassle, opening the door. He still hasn’t learned how to do it with the wheelchair—he can’t quickly move it, can’t get out of the way of the door when he’s managed to pull it open. He’d wanted to take his crutches instead of the wheelchair, but then his legs had refused to cooperate like they always do nowadays, and it would have been even more embarrassing if his face had made the acquaintance of the ground.

Seb gets up to greet him, and it’s a bit of a weird hug because he has to reach down, and Max can’t remember the last time he had to look up at Seb.

Seb doesn’t mention the wheelchair, doesn’t even really look at it, and that almost makes the fact that he still needs the wheelchair a bit more bearable.

He places himself next to the wall, as far away and out of the way as possible. He doesn’t want to have to move if someone doesn’t make it past him later, and he wants even less for someone to touch the wheelchair.

When he finally sits at the table, he lets out a breath. This has taken more out of him than he’d like to admit—it’s not even that far from his apartment, so it really shouldn’t be as strenuous as it is.

He quickly orders a lemonade, and while it might not really be warm enough for that yet, it’s definitely not cold enough to get him to drink something that’s warm, not that he would even if it was that cold.

“It’s been some time,” Seb says, smiling.

“You look good. The new hair”—Max points—“suits you.” It does. His hair looks shiny. It’s still longer than what Max is used to from Seb, but it’s not bad, and it doesn’t look anymore like Seb is constantly pulling on his hair because of Ferrari’s fuck-ups.

Seb laughs. “People begged me to finally get a haircut.”

Max frowns. But Seb’s hair doesn’t just look healthier, it also looks fuller. “Did you get a hair transplantation?” he asks, and maybe that was a bit too direct.

“Already struggling with hair loss?” Seb teases before Max has the chance to even think about taking his words back.

Max nods solemnly. “The helmets are a lot worse than I expected.” It’s not even a lie, and it was a lot worse before Max switched to a different company. He still remembers how disgruntled Adrian had looked when Max had come to him to ask how bad the aerodynamic situation would be.

Worse, apparently, but salvageable.

“Tell me about it.” Seb sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “But this is just what two years and some without does to you.”

“Impressive,” Max says because his hair didn’t do that—hasn’t yet. It’s not been that long for him. “What have you been up to?”

Seb leans back. “Oh, you know. A few things here and there. I’ve been getting more serious about the bees, and I help manage the German SailGP team.”

Max has definitely heard about that, and he’s even pretty sure he might have seen a bit of it on TV. It seems random, but he also probably isn’t close enough to Seb to really know about his interests beyond Formula One and sustainability.

“A busy man, I see.” Definitely busier than Max. But that’s also not that difficult at the moment. An elementary student is probably busier than him.

“No time to relax,” Seb jokes. “No, Formula One was worse in that aspect. Mostly the travelling, of course. It’s nice to see your family more often.”

“Yeah,” Max agrees and grimaces. “It is not getting better either.” He’s not even sure he likes more than twenty races a season, but twenty-four is just incredibly over the top for everyone involved. Maybe it’s not too bad that he’s sitting this season out.

That thought almost makes him laugh. Not too bad. He’d do almost anything to get back into a car even if that means he’ll have to do thirty races a season.

Seb scoffs. “Multiple triple headers a season is quite…an idea.”

“At the end, especially.” Max huffs. “As if one in the middle of the season was not bad enough.” The first one is at a time when it’s still more doable—people are still very motivated and have a lot of energy, and they’re still motivated at the end, but it’s not really the same. Everyone is exhausted and overworked and definitely in need of a break for their bodies to recover.

Seb nods slowly. “And we are not getting younger. Ah, I guess the rookies are.” He stops, snorts as he looks at Max. “Or not.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Max rolls his eyes. Lando always likes to point out that Max wouldn’t have been able to make it to Formula One so early if he’d had to match the new rules. But without him, there wouldn’t have been some of the rule changes, so he would have never needed to meet those requirements, which means that the whole thing doesn’t even make sense, and Max likes to point out that.

Seb picks up his mug. Coffee, presumably. He swirls it, once, twice before he looks back up at Max. “As nice as it is to catch up with you, that isn’t why you contacted me, is it?”

It’s quite obvious that Max contacted Seb because there was something to talk about. And there still is. Otherwise, there would be no real need for this—of course, it’s nice to see Seb again and catch up with him, but Max hasn’t really done a lot of that in the past few months. And he probably would’ve never reached out to begin with.

“Not really, no.” Max sighs. He’s thought about what he wants to say, about what he wants to ask, but now that it’s actually come up, his mind is blank. He’s not sure he even wants to talk about it now, but he’s also not going to waste Seb’s time more than he already is doing. “I thought that you could help me the best, I guess? Because I think we are quite similar when it comes to Formula One. I know that it was not an easy decision for you to retire and I—”

Max stops, takes a second to collect himself. He doesn’t think Seb is interested in knowing all of that. Normally, he doesn’t have a problem with it. He likes to talk, and if no one stops him, it’s their own fault. But he also knows that there’s no way he’ll ever get to the point now if he doesn’t get to the point immediately.

“You?” Seb prompts gently.

Max takes a deep breath. Then another one.

“I don’t know if I will return,” he says, and it’s so quickly that he’s not sure Seb has even understood him.

Seb tilts his head. His eyes are narrowed like he’s trying to get a read on Max, then he nods.

“I already expected something like this after your text, but also not really. It’s still a bit of a surprise if I am honest.”

“That is how we felt about your retirement,” Max says. They knew, kind of. Some probably knew more than others, but he also knows that a lot of the other drivers didn’t actually expect it until the announcement dropped. On Instagram, out of all places.

Seb laughs. “That’s fair.” Then he sobers up quickly; there’s a frown on his face. He sets the mug back down on the table.

“Is that your own decision, or is it—” He gestures like he expects Max to understand. He does, of course. He wishes he didn’t.

“I”—Max hesitates—“am not sure if I will be able to race again.” It feels weird, saying it out loud, even if he knows that it’s true. It feels wrong, and he knows he shouldn’t say it, shouldn’t even entertain this thought.

It’s what his dad always told him. If you start thinking about this, if you start to believe something, then of course, it’s going to become true. If you think you can’t do it, then you won’t be able to.

If he says—believes—he can’t return, then he won’t.

But there is also no point in acting like everything is fine when nothing is.

“I’m sorry,” Seb offers, and Max sighs.

“It is fine.” It’s not. “I think…the longer I am aware of this possibility, the easier it gets.” The words still taste bitter, still taste like defeat, still taste like he didn’t do enough, like he didn’t try hard enough, but it gets easier to accept. It’s a thought he actually entertains now. Maybe that’s the mistake.

“To be honest,” Seb says slowly, “I don’t know a lot about your injuries and the extent of them. Red Bull has kept rather quiet about that.”

It’s something they decided would be for the best—that the public shouldn’t know about all the small details and the steps of Max’s recovery. They knew it would lead to a lot of theories and speculations, but Max didn’t want the public to take him apart and analyse every little part of him.

It makes it easier the few times he dares to look at his social media accounts when people don’t know for sure, when all they say is purely based on speculation and not the truth. When their retirement theories are nothing but that, theories.

Although—

Max rubs his eyes. His head hurts.

“We decided it might be the best for now since everything has been quite uncertain,” he says.

Seb nods.

Max smiles. It feels stiff on his face, like his muscles are refusing to cooperate, like they don’t remember anymore how a smile works. “The goal was to come back after I recovered, maybe the 2026 season. But now, things are worse than expected.”

2026 was pushing it, he knows. He’s known for months that 2026 wouldn’t have been possible, not with the speed of his recovery, but that had been the goal. That had been the goal Max had set himself, and that had been the goal with which Brad had made the training plan, and that also had been the goal that had been communicated with Red Bull.

Not that it really matters now.

2026 isn’t going to happen, not with how things look. He doubts anything will.

Seb frowns. “It’s your…back, mostly?”

The biggest, most annoying issue. His doctor told him a few weeks ago again how lucky he’d been, that he’d seen less severe injuries that ended in a paraplegia.

Sometimes, he’s not sure that it wouldn’t have been better because then, he would have the certainty, would know how things are. He wouldn’t have this stupid hope that he could come back, that his racing days aren’t over yet. That another title is a possibility and not just a delusional dream after some tragic accident.

People have come back from worse, he knows that much, too.

“A few issues from the concussion, but yes, mostly the back and because of that the legs,” he says as he gestures at the wheelchair. “That is why I have this.” He doesn’t look at Seb, doesn’t mention the braces and the surgeries and the extensive doctor’s appointments either. It’s been lucky that the café they decided to meet in is this close to their apartment because Max doubts he could have gone a longer way with just his wheelchair and no help. Charles hadn’t been very convinced.

“I see,” Seb says slowly, then, “Is it sure then?”

Max presses his lips together. “Not really. Nothing is sure, I guess. My dad, of course, expects me back in Formula One, and I think most people do, too, and technically, it is still a bit early to make any decisions yet, but I also have not been hitting the goals I was supposed to reach.”

Seb frowns. “Physiotherapy?” he asks, and Max nods.

“Yes. It is mostly Brad, though, who keeps an eye on that.” Technically, he still has the physiotherapist back at home, but he’s not seen them in some time, so there’s not a lot they could help with, anyway. “My doctors aren’t too focused on this, but I also think they did not expect me to walk again.” It feels weird saying this, but he knows it to be the truth even if no one really says anything, even if this has never been said out loud, but he’s not stupid. He’s seen the doctor’s reports—from the hospital, from his neurologist.

Seb blinks, but he doesn’t say anything, waits for Max to continue.

“I injured my spinal cord,” Max says. It might be the first time he’s said it himself. “Did they not say that?” He isn’t entirely sure what exactly Red Bull has been saying, and what they haven’t. Neither Raymond nor his dad thinks it’s the public’s business, but that doesn’t mean anything.

Seb rubs the bridge of his nose. “No.”

“Oh,” Max makes. “I had not realised they kept that quiet about it.”

Seb shrugs. “I think there are mostly talks about a spine injury, a bit about a concussion. But I also don’t really keep up with…all of that.”

Max breathes out a laugh. “Same. It is simply not worth it.” He has never really been interested in knowing what the journalists says about him—but his dad always tells him it’s important, that it makes it easier to stay in touch, to stay in the loop. It’s not wrong, of course. He still doesn’t like it.

“It really isn’t,” Seb agrees.

“But yeah, I guess…this is why I have been thinking more about…retirement again,” he grits the words out, has to put more force to get them out than he should need to. He doesn’t want it. He knows he doesn’t want it, but none of what he wants matters if he can’t.

“Again.” Seb shakes his head. “Every now and then, I got articles about Formula One recommended, and there was a ninety percent chance it was you talking about retiring.”

It would be funny in any other situation. “I did not have plans to stay there forever, but I have always wanted to do other racing. I mean, of course, that could still be possible. I don’t know.” Max sighs, takes a sip. “Did you not have plans for that?”

Seb nods. “Indeed, but right now, I think I’m too busy.” Max knows that. “So, you think other categories could be possible?”

“At the moment, nothing is possible, so right now, it is just hard.” Max doesn’t choke on those words; his eyes still burn, and he has to force himself to take a deep breath before he can continue. “To think that there might be a life without racing for me.”

“It was similar for me,” Seb considers. “Obviously, it’s not the same because I always had the choice, and I already had a few projects lined up before I ever made the decision to retire, but the thought is…scary, isn’t it?” He pauses, and Max can just nod. It is scary—even if he’d thought about it before. But they’re not the same circumstances anymore, not what he had wanted to happen, not how it was supposed to be. “I was always worried I was making the wrong decision.”

Max frowns. “But you are happy?”

“Very.” Seb smiles, and it looks genuine; more genuine than he’s looked throughout his entire Ferrari days.

Max wishes he could be happy, too.

Seb clears his throat. “I know how important racing is for you, but maybe this break, as long as everything is uncertain, is the best time to…explore a bit.”

The same old thing again. He would—if he knew what.

“I don’t think I would be very good at anything else,” Max says, the same answer he’d given Lando a few weeks ago.

Seb shrugs. “You don’t have to be good at everything. The most important thing is that you have fun,” he says, tilts his head. “And you will never get better if you never try.”

“That is true, of course,” Max says slowly. “But I don’t know if I could have fun if I were not good at it.” Racing was fun because he was good at it, because he won. He doesn’t think it would be remotely as fun if he weren’t winning, if he knew that he couldn’t win.

Seb snorts. “The curse of being competitive.”

“Like, in the first few seasons,” Max considers, “I was not winning a lot, of course, but I also enjoyed a race when I knew I was doing the best I could do with the car I had.” It had been difficult—coming from karting and then Formula Three where he’d won as much as somehow had been possible. He’d not won the championship, in the end, but he’d won more than anyone else, and that hadn’t been enough, of course not, but it had been more than he’d won his entire first season in Formula One.

“I mean that would be the same if you started something new, right? You would do the best you could, and then the longer you are doing it, the better you would get.” Seb smiles at him again. “I wasn’t very good at it when I first started working with wood, and it was frustrating me a lot, but I am quite happy with it now.”

“Hm.” Max bites on his lip. He’s always had a knack for racing even if he also spent hours upon hours training. He cannot quite imagine starting from zero, now, at 27.

“You don’t have to rush anything, you know? Talk to Charles, your family, your friends. Maybe even Christian. I’m sure they all would be able to help you, maybe give you ideas that you haven’t thought about yet,” Seb suggests. “And even if nothing comes out of those conversations, at least, you’ve tried.” He pauses. “That is what I did.”

Max pulls a face. “I guess.” This doesn’t sound very appealing, but it’s not like Max has anything else to do, so he might as well just try that.

Seb laughs quietly, but then he stops, contemplates. His face is serious, but there’s warmth in his eyes. “And it is also okay if you don’t find…ah, let’s say a ‘purpose’. You’re still so young, Max. You basically have your entire life before you. And we all know how much karting and racing can take up your time. Maybe it’s time to just…live a little. Go out, have fun without any goal, to say.”

Seb takes a sip from his coffee. “Not everything that you do has to have a purpose or to work towards a goal,” he says, and Max flinches.

‘What is the purpose of doing something if you don’t have a goal?’ he can hear his dad say. ‘You are just wasting your time.’

He is—wasting his time. He is wasting his best years, his prime, but there is nothing he can do about it, nothing he can change. He cannot fight for wins or championships like this; it’s not a decision he’s made, not a choice he’s had, but that just means he has to use the time has has now, the time he didn’t have before. Maybe he can just do that, do things that he normally would consider to be a waste of time. If there is nothing else he can do anyway, then it might be the best option. Then it might be his only option.

“It’s probably not really what you want to hear, is it?” Seb laughs, and his eyes are kind. They weren’t always kind; Max knows that, has seen, witnessed it. But now, Seb’s eyes are kind, and his words are warm, and for a moment, Max considers he could do it, too. That he could become kind as well.

Then, he shrugs. “I don’t know. I mean, I know I want to hear that I will be able to race again, but…this is— It is helpful, maybe? I have not properly talked to anyone yet about this, yet so maybe I needed to hear it.”

Seb smiles at him. “It gets easier,” he promises. “Just give it time.”

Chapter Text

With a little bit of money, I’ll get gone and I won’t be found
With a little bit of luck, I’ll find a place where I can stay forever
If I get a little money, I’ll get gone and I won’t be found
I don’t want nothing but a lonesome quiet place where I can think
Spent my whole life looking back and wondering who I was
Something changed the day you left, and I’ll never know just what
Spent my whole life looking up and wondering who I am
Something tells me you and I will never meet again
— Lord Huron: Looking Back

Charles looks worried. Max can’t remember the last time, Charles didn’t look worried. It’s almost like the furrowed eyebrows and the deep crease on his forehead have been etched into Charles’ skin and refuse to leave.

He’s just come home from another shit weekend, so it doesn’t necessarily surprise Max, but he wishes he could do something to help, could do something to reduce the stress.

Instead, Charles comes home and has to worry about Max, too.

Max feels sick, feels twisted, doesn’t try to think about the nights he wanted to punch the door frames and the walls, and the nights he did do it, doesn’t want to know what Charles is going to think about it, doesn’t want to fear that Charles is going to think that Max is turning into his father in front of their eyes.

Sassy bumps her head against Charles’ legs, meows at him like she’s miffed about him leaving them for so long before she turns and leaves for their living room—she used to do the same to Max, he remembers. When Charles didn’t yet live with them, when it was just Max and the cats.

“Missed you,” Max mumbles, tightly hugs Charles, and for a few seconds, he simply breathes.

Give it time, he thinks, sneers. It’s easier said than done, easier for Seb to accept than for Max. Seb has had a few shitty seasons before his retirement, had hit an age when most drivers decide to leave Formula One. Fernando and Lewis are an anomaly in modern history, everyone knows that.

But Max has just become champion for the third time, has had a run that might have seen him get a fourth championship, too. He’s still young enough to have a few more seasons in him, had the contract and the skills. In any other situation, he would’ve never considered retirement this early, would’ve never thought about leaving before his fourth championship, would’ve never considered leaving the world of racing altogether.

None of this matters now, though. He can barely move his legs, can barely stand and walk. Most of the time, he needs his wheelchair, but even when he manages to stand for longer than a few minutes, even when he has a good day and can walk with his crutches, he still hasn’t gotten his feeling back in his legs, can’t get his range of motion to return. Like this, he will never sit in a Formula One car again, much less drive it.

Now, he thinks, he doesn’t have much of a choice anymore, can’t make a decision beyond when the announcement will be ready.

One more time, he tells himself. He gives himself one more time. If things aren’t better yet, then there’s no point. If things have changed, then maybe there’s still hope for him.

The sim rig has been collecting dust, but Max hasn’t seen a reason to keep up with it when he can barely watch a Team Redline stream without the nausea coming back. Still, maybe things have changed. Maybe things have gotten better. It’s been weeks since he’s last tried it, since he last felt that he could deal with the disappointment.

He’s not sure about that now.

He slowly sits down. He feels wobbly on his feet, but it’s a better day than he often has. The pain so far is dull, slowly pulsing through his body. It’s barely there, trivial enough to be ignored. It’s the best day to try this.

It’s still difficult to get a feeling for the sim. He’s used to it, has spent hours and hours here optimising his times, but it’s different now that he can’t feel what he’s doing, that he doesn’t know how much pressure he applies. He can’t quite tell how hard he brakes, but he still remembers how it used to feel, how it’s always been supposed to be.

It helps that this sim rig is so familiar to him, that it’s more instinct than an actual feeling for it.

He grits his teeth against the pressure on his body. His hands are already sweaty, can barely hold onto the steering wheel.

When he takes a look at the lap time, he’s almost ten seconds slower than his best time. The next lap only sees him climb up the timing tower by half a second. He tastes blood when he forces himself to go for another lap.

There’s barely any improvement. His hands shake even though he’s gripping the wheel tightly. The seat is already getting uncomfortable, makes his back ache, has it radiating down his legs.

After the fourth lap, he has to stop, has to breathe through his nose to get his pulse to slow down.

He slumps forward, rests his head against the steering wheel. He shuts his eyes to get them to stop burning, but he knows that it’ll take hours until it’s gone. His head has already started to throb.

His dad’s voice comes out of his phone’s speakers, but he doesn’t hear the words, can’t focus on what his dad is trying to tell him.

It might be, he thinks, about next season, about his physiotherapy and his progress. Nowadays, it’s only ever about it.

Instead, he’s staring at the white wall of his bedroom, the window that lets him see the neighbouring building. Charles is in the living room, only threw a worried glance at him when Max excused himself by pointing at the ringing phone in his hands. He only ever leaves the room to accept a call when it’s his dad.

He still hasn’t figured out how to tell his dad, hasn’t even figured out how the approach this subject. He’s not talked to Charles about it either, has been delaying it again and again, but he knows he’ll have to tell either of them soon, won’t be able to run away from this forever.

“Hey, dad,” he says, interrupting his dad mid-sentence which he normally would never do. But his back hurts, and he feels sick to his stomach, and he really just wants to go back to their couch in the living room and Charles. “Brad is coming in a minute. Talk to you later?”

His dad sounds disgruntled, annoyed, but he lets it go. It’s why Max always chooses physiotherapy as an excuse.

He doesn’t say anything during his physiotherapy sessions, doesn’t say anything during his next doctor’s appointment, but he can feel them watching him, can feel their eyes pierce through his skin and bones; it’s like they’re waiting for something, like they know something he doesn’t.

Brad doesn’t push him to talk; his neurologist just asks him once more if he’s thought about talking to Red Bull’s therapist. He has, he tells his doctor; he doesn’t tell him that he’s not very keen on following up on it.

“Whatever decision you make,” Brad says once after physio has ended, and he’s getting ready to leave, “I’ll always be here, alright?” Max can just duck his head as Brad pats his side.

“Zugzwang,” Michael used to call it.

It was back in 2009, just shortly after he’d gotten the offer from Mercedes. Then, they had been on vacation—somewhere in southern France. It must have been the last time.

Max isn’t sure why he remembers this moment so clearly, but when he closes his eyes, he can see the wrinkles on Michael’s forehead, the downturned lips. The way he had leaned against the table as he talked to Max’s dad.

Distantly, he remembers laughter, remembers running through fields with Mick and Gina. His mother hadn’t been there with them, he’s sure of it.

Zugzwang.

Max’s German hadn’t been good enough for him to understand it yet, the word, what Michael meant. Why it had come up to begin with. Back then, it hadn’t been a question for Max at all whether to accept the offer, like it hadn’t been a question at all whether he would accept Red Bull’s offer five years later.

Mick had looked at him with wide eyes, a spark in his eyes. Max wonders if he’d understood what had been going on. They’d never talked about it, not then and not later on. They’ve barely spoken at all in recent years. Max only ever remembers how much Mick had hated the spotlight; maybe he’d wanted his dad to leave, truly leave.

Max settles down on the couch, pulls a blanket over himself as he puts down his phone on his lap.

He gets it now when he looks down at his phone, when he stares at the words Christian Horner on his screen.

It would be so easy to press it, to call and tell Christian everything. It would be. He’s not going to do it.

Hanging out with Redline is easy. He doesn’t do any sim racing anymore, but he still stays around, still joins some of their voice calls, offers help and easy fixes. Gabi has been doing well, and it fills him with a satisfaction he didn’t know he’d be able to get without winning himself.

But it’s nice to just be here; it’s nothing he has to, and they don’t expect anything at all, so sometimes he just lets himself be lulled to sleep with their voices in the background.

Sometimes, it doesn’t feel like he’s living in his body, like his arms and legs still belong to him. When he presses his legs against the cool floor, and he can’t feel anything, when he pinches his arms, and the only sensation he feels is the nausea in the back of his throat.

It feels like failure, like giving up, like he’s done with life and life is done with him. It’s the right decision, he knows, and yet it feels as if he’s betraying himself. He doesn’t want to give up, ever, but what else is there? What other choice does he have? He’s failed. It’s been almost a year, and there are no signs of enough progress. There is no point in hiding it, in convincing himself of something else.

He moves through the apartment, doesn’t speak for entire days when Charles is gone and feels like a ghost in his own body.

He’s not sure how to fix it when he looks out of the window as the sun sets behind the sea, painting Monaco in reds and oranges, when he doesn’t feel anything even as Sassy bumps her head against his thighs and Jimmy purrs on his chest.

It can’t go on like this, he thinks, and doesn’t get up from where he’s sitting on their balcony.

“I have been thinking,” he starts, and Charles turns to him. His eyes are narrowed, he’s frowning. “About my future.”

It has Charles straighten up, lay a hand on Max’s thigh like he expects what’s going to come next. Like he already knows. Maybe he has, maybe he’s suspected it since Max talked to Seb. In a way, Max considers, it’s not as much of a shock as it should be. It has been months, and even if Charles doesn’t know the details, he’s not blind, isn’t ignorant of how things are and what isn’t—if he’s honest with himself, it’s something Charles must have considered before. Even if he’s never talked to Max about it.

It’s something they have all been considering for months. Even if no one has been wanting to say it out loud, to call it by its name.

“Your future?” Charles prompts gently, and Max has to take a deep breath.

He’s thought about how he’ll say it, was lying awake in the bed almost the entire night to find the right words. ‘Charles,’ he imagines himself saying, ‘I’m going to retire,’ and knows it won’t ever come out as easily as this has.

“Yes,” Max says, swallows. “I have been talking to my neurologist, right?”

He feels weird. His hands shake, and there is something stuck in his throat, but Charles smiles at him encouragingly, and Max grips Charles’ hand so tightly, he fears he’s going to cut off the blood circulation.

“Right,” Charles says, nods. “You have not told me much about it yet.” It doesn’t sound accusatory, just a statement, nothing more, but Max still has to bite on his tongue, has to look away so he doesn’t meet Charles’ eyes.

“It—,” he starts, stops, tries to think of something to say. He hasn’t found a way to get to the point yesterday in bed, and he’s not been able to come up with something since then either. “I—”

He takes a deep breath, tries to get the room to stop spinning in front of his eyes.

“Hey,” Charles says, has him look him in the eyes, “everything will be fine, yes?”

Max doesn’t think so, hasn’t thought his way since Brad told him he’s not been hitting his goals, since his neurologist started talking about him seeing a sports therapist and didn’t stop—really, since he’s crashed and couldn’t feel his lower legs anymore.

But he still tries to get his breathing under control, tries to organise his thoughts and get a proper sentence out to explain, to make Charles understand.

“I think I want to retire.”

He doesn’t think he’s breathing. It feels wrong to say it, feels like he’s officially given up, like there’s no way back now. He’s made his decision, and he can’t change it anymore.  His mum will support it, maybe she will even be glad about it, so she doesn’t have to light a candle every race, so she doesn’t have to pray and beg for her son to come home again.

He doesn’t want to think about his dad, about what he’s going to say, about the resentment and hostility that will follow. His dad has given up everything for this, that Max has a good life and a better career, and Max—

He swallows a sob, grits his teeth until they crack under the force, until his jaw starts to hurt. He’s not going to cry. Even if his life has ended, even if everything he’s ever known has suddenly stopped existing, even if everything he’s ever worked for doesn’t mean anything anymore.

Charles just holds him, kisses his forehead. He doesn’t try to force an explanation out of Max, and he’s never been more thankful for Charles, for his understanding, for the fact that Charles simply gets him. “It will be fine,” he says, and Max isn’t sure he believes it.

Things don’t get better after he told Charles about his decision, about what he wants to do. Things don’t even really change.

Sometimes, though, when he pushes himself through another gruelling physiotherapy session, he wonders why he keeps up with it, why he continues like this when there is no point left now, when he won’t return to Formula One anymore.

He knows Charles is worried even if Charles doesn’t say anything, but Charles also doesn’t have to say anything. It’s obvious in the way he always looks twice at Max like he’s worried Max might just disappear, obvious in the way he’s always up first, obvious in the way the crease on his forehead gets deeper and deeper even with wins and poles piling up.

Charles has always worried too much; Pascale told him about it a few years ago when they first started dating, like Max hadn’t been able to see it himself. Charles always worries too much; just never enough about himself.

“I will fly to England,” Max decides when they’re lying on the couch in the living room, Charles’ chest lifting and falling so evenly that it makes it hard for Max to keep his eyes open, to fight against the tiredness that doesn’t come easily to him anymore. Normally, there’s just bone-deep exhaustion that keeps him awake, that has him stare at the ceiling during the night, cursing every single decision he’s made that led him to this point.

“Hm?” Charles makes, only barely awake himself. His arms tighten around Max who can only stare at the over-dimensional TV they bought a year ago, that they have rarely been using in recent months.

“I will fly to England,” Max repeats, his voice firmer this time. There’s no point anymore, in dragging it out even longer when he’s already made his decision.

He doesn’t talk to his father about it, doesn’t even call Raymond even though he knows he should. But there’s something stopping him, so he sits alone in his jet on the way to England. His dad, he thinks, is going to kill him if he finds out about this.

But he can’t continue like this.

He’s not seen most of the Red Bull staff in person in months, has only spoken to some of them over the phone. This isn’t something he’ll be able to manage through a phone call, isn’t something he wants to do like that.

Red Bull has been part of his entire Formula One career, has been by his side for almost half his life. It would be wrong to let Raymond or his dad handle this, would be wrong to not let them know personally.

He knows it’s not that easy, of course, knows that he won’t just be done with this one visit, but it’s the first step, the most important one. It’s the one that will make it impossible to reverse his decision. But maybe it’s better like this, if he doesn’t have the choice anymore.

Charles offered to go with him, but he doesn’t think that Red Bull would be very keen on having a competitor in their headquarters, and it feels like he has to do it on his own, has to take care of it himself. Charles won’t be able to do it for him.

Now, as he stares at the ocean below him, he wishes he had taken Charles’ offer. Charles won’t be able to do this for him, no, but it would be easier, would help in ways he never allowed himself to have.

It’s now too late for that anyway.

He tries to come up with something better than what he told Charles, the simple “I want to retire,” but maybe it’s what they’ll expect from him. He’s always been honest and upfront with them; it would be weird now to distract and skirt around the subject when they all can guess why he’s suddenly called to get a meeting in Milton Keynes. And if that’s not enough, he has the paperwork with him, the progress report from the last few months that sounds even worse than what his neurologist actually told him.

They’ll only have to take one look at it to know that he’s done, that it would require a miracle to get back in top form. Perhaps, after all of this, he simply didn’t have it in him anymore.

He’s not sure if reading the report has made it easier, whether it helps with this decision, with eventually moving on. Maybe it will help to make his dad understand.

It’s GP who greets him first, who hugs him so tightly that Max can barely breathe. He knows that GP refused to continue race engineering for this season, that he’s now solely focusing on his role as Head of Racing. Sometimes, Max wonders if he’s held back GP from what could have been, from all the possible promotions awaiting him.

“Mate!” GP says, and for a moment, Max thinks there are tears in GP’s eyes. “It’s good to see you again.” It’s hard to remember the last time Max didn’t see GP for this long. Sometimes, he wonders if GP still sees the eighteen-year-old Max he’d first met.

Max smiles up at him, promises himself to call more often again. He’s missed hearing GP’s voice.

“Yeah,” Max says, “it’s been ages.” He tries to go for a joke and fails miserably.

GP just pats his shoulder, doesn’t quite meet his eyes. They both know what’s going to come next.

In the end, it’s easier than he’s expected it to be. He stops to talk to some of the engineers on his way up to the conference rooms, tries to not look around the rooms and hallways like he’s never going to see them again, walks past the trophy shelf like it doesn’t even exist.

The other drivers aren’t here, but it doesn’t surprise him. In a way, he’s glad about it, isn’t sure he could face them, too. He knows he can’t run away from them forever, but for today, he still can.

He can feel GP next to him, can feel the way he looks at Max every now and then, silently encouraging him to talk to another familiar face. He’s going to miss this the most.

He stops in front of the room where everything started, where everything is going to end now, tries to take a deep breath and feels like there’s no oxygen filling his lungs. He doesn’t know if he can do it, knows that he can’t go back now, that it’s out of his hands anyway.

He looks back at GP who tries for a smile, but Max knows GP too well for this.

“One last time,” he murmurs and pushes the door open.

“I’m going to retire,” he tells them, plain and simple because that’s always how he’s handled things, and it’s not the shock it would have been a couple of months ago. GP squeezes his hand, offers him a reassuring nod. They’ve probably expected it by now, have completely changed their line-up and their future plans. Max isn’t sure he would’ve been able to fit back in.

It’s quick, efficient. They take one look at the medical files Max has brought with him, and by the time Christian has pushed the documents to Helmut, the decision is done.

There’s a reason for all the clauses in their contracts, the safety net for injuries. It makes it less painful, doesn’t leave him pondering it for a couple more weeks until they’ve managed to break the contract; it’s a quick decision, an even quicker signature. They would’ve waited for him, but there’s no point in waiting even longer.

It’s technically not done until Raymond and Red Bull’s lawyers have looked it once over, but Max knows it’s over.

He’s not going to return.

“Stay in contact,” they tell him. Christian hugs him before he leaves, Helmut offers him a smile he’s so rarely seen. He promises them to call, to reply to their text messages, but he’s not part of the team anymore, and he’s not sure he’ll be able to handle it.

When he leaves through the door, he doesn’t turn around again to look at the place he’s spent most of his adult life at.

It won’t be the last time he’s here, he tries to tell himself.

He knows it’s a lie.

On his way back to Monaco, his phone rings nonstop. It’s his dad, then Raymond, then his dad again. Raymond gives up after the third time, his dad doesn’t.

The public doesn’t yet know about it, won’t until everything has been finalised and the lawyers have given their okay, but Raymond knows now, of course. His dad obviously knows if Raymond does.

He can’t bring himself to pick it up, to look at his phone and face his dad.

It’ll have to wait until Max is back in Charles’ and his apartment, until he has ground beneath his feet again, until he has forced himself to take a deep breath and look reality in the eyes.

Right now, he can’t deal with being yelled at. Sometimes, he doesn’t know if he can deal with it ever again.

He buries his face in Charles’ chest and tries to forget about everything that has happened.

It doesn’t work.

He’s glad, at least, that Charles doesn’t make him talk about it. He’s not sure there would be a lot, anyway.

“There is more to life than Formula One,” Charles said once during an interview, and Max knows it to be true. He’s known it for some time now, has started to work on things outside of work, but he’s always loved racing, and he knows he will always continue to love racing.

Before, back when he hadn’t won his first championship yet, he would have given up everything to win one; it’s different now. He wouldn’t give up Charles and the relationship they have built over the last four years, wouldn’t give up his pets or the quiet life outside the glamour and glitz of Formula One. He has three championships, knows he doesn’t need another one even if four would have been nice, even if sometimes he’d played with the thought to go for seven, but he doesn’t need them, doesn’t need them like he’d needed the first win, like he needed the first championship.

He doesn’t have anything to prove anymore, doesn’t have to pay back his dad for everything he’s done for Max. No, he wouldn’t give up his life for another championship, wouldn’t race with issues that could put his health in jeopardy. He can say that with certainty. He’s not the same anymore as he was a few years ago, isn’t as reckless and generous with his life as he used to be.

He’d promised it to Charles, promised it to himself, too.

But he’s not sure what he would be willing to give up to walk again.

To race one last time. To win once more.

His dad is yelling at him. Max can barely look him in the eyes.

Raymond is quiet where he has all the documents laid out in front of him. He’s never gotten between Max and his dad, and Max wouldn’t want him to do it now either. It’s always been Max and his dad and no one else. There had never been one to get between them, never one to stand in front of Max, straighten their back and yell back at Jos Verstappen.

He misses Charles, misses his warmth and his calming presence, misses the way he’d quietly ask Max for permission to yell back at Max’s dad, misses the way he would crinkle his nose and settle down after not getting it. Now, Max considers, he would give Charles the permission.

His dad is still yelling, still hasn’t lost his stamina. Max knows that it’s going to take a lot more for his dad to quieten down. It’s gotten easier over the years to tune most of it out, to know when to nod or hum or give an answer that’s not specific enough but will still satisfy his dad and slowly have him settle down.

Today, Max isn’t sure how much he’s capable of handling. His head has been throbbing for most of the morning, and he’s not had the time to get some of his medication out before his dad and Raymond stood in his door frame, but he’s not going to get it now, not in front of his dad, not in front of Raymond either.

“I would not have been able to go back,” Max says quietly when his dad has to stop to take a breath, but his voice is firm, doesn’t shake. Sometimes, when he talks to his dad, Dutch feels strange on his tongue, feels like a foreign body that doesn’t belong to him, like something he knows and yet doesn’t at all.

He used to think it’s because he moved to Monaco, because he spends most of his time speaking English or trying his hand at French, but it’s easier, talking to his mum, to his sister or his nephews.

“You can’t know!” his dad hisses, and Max watches the vein on his dad’s forehead pulsate. His face has taken on the same ugly red that always reminds him of his karting days, the times when he lost the win to second place, the times when he won despite the mistakes he’s made.

“The doctor—”

“The doctor is a moron!” Max doesn’t react when spit lands on his face. It’s the nicest thing his dad could have possibly said about Max’s neurologist. He’d called Max worse things when he was nine and barely able to meet his eyes. Somehow, his dad telling him that he’d never become a Formula One champion, that all he would only ever manage to become would be a truck or bus driver, had always been worse than the insults.

“It’s done,” Max continues, not bothering to give his dad a reply. “The termination has been signed, and Red Bull’s lawyers have agreed.”

His dad is yelling again, is trying to have Raymond look for ways to reverse it, and for a moment, Max lets the familiar anger bubble in his stomach, lets it crawl up his throat, lets himself bathe in it. He wouldn’t succeed; Red Bull and Max have made sure of that. But they all know that he is going to try, even if he won’t. That he would do everything to make it happen.

Raymond has always been his manager, but he’s never been his.

“No,” Max says, loud enough that he can hear it over his dad’s voice, “it is done. There is nothing you can do about it.”

Fifteen years, he thinks, not able to keep the bitterness out of it. They were supposed to have fifteen years.

It’s what they had promised to each other after Charles made it to Formula One, after they’d gotten over their first few clashes on track. Fifteen years they would have to race each other, to beat each other on track. Sometimes, Max had worried how it would affect their relationship, them, but after 2019 their fights had mellowed out, had stayed on track far beyond their personal connections, and Max had believed that it would be okay, that it could work.

After all, 2022 had gone well, hadn’t brought the resentment Max had expected to swallow them whole, had brought them closer and made them understand each other better.

But 2022 had only been the start, was only supposed to be the first of many fights and title rivalries. Now, it’s going to be the only one—and it hadn’t even really been one.

Charles hasn’t said anything, and he won’t either, but Max knows he’s as disappointed about it as Max.

They release the announcement on a random Friday although the Friday hasn’t been entirely randomly chosen.

It’s the start of a race weekend, and Max hopes that all the buzz and excitement of a Grand Prix can keep the attention away from him.

Normally, he’d liked to announce things during off-season, during the weeks without a race, but then, he would have been asked about it during the weekend, would have been grilled and not been left alone. It’s different, now that Max does not return to the paddock anymore. When he’s always alone.

He knows it’s futile; it’s worth a try anyway.

He turns his notifications off for this, puts his phone on do not disturb. He’ll have to deal with the fallout at some point, he knows, but it’s not now. Future him can worry about it.

They’d prepared some videos and pictures, so Max won’t need to get involved with Red Bull’s marketing campaigns again—they’d promised it to him, after all, but there are also all the personal things involved, he doesn’t really want to think about. It always makes him glad that at least, he’s not responsible for his social media accounts anymore. He doesn’t know what he’d do if that were also on him.

For most of the morning, he allows himself to pull his blanket over the top of his head and pretend like the outside world doesn’t exist, like his body isn’t tied to him, like the throbbing in his back and the ache in his leg aren’t a reminder of why today had to happen. But by midday, he forces himself out of bed and wishes he could hide in Charles’ arms on their couch instead.

Jimmy lies on top of him as he absentmindedly strokes his head. The sun is still high up in the sky—he’s missed summer. He’s going to miss winning even more.

He’s made his decision days and weeks ago. It shouldn’t be as difficult as it is.

He can still only barely breathe.

When he turns on his phone, he’s flooded with notifications. There are missed phone calls from his dad, but also from his mum and his sister.

He looks at the growing number of WhatsApp notifications and considers shutting his phone off again. He doesn’t want to know how much worse his social media accounts look like, so he continues ignoring them. His social media team can take care of that.

He puts the phone next to him, stares at the ceiling above him. He wonders how long he can ignore the rest of the world until people start to get concerned about him and call Charles instead. Whatever it is, it won’t be long enough.

He takes a deep breath, but it’s not enough.

The sickness has returned. He feels nauseous, like something has lodged itself in his throat, making it impossible to breathe. His hands shake, and for a heartbeat, he lets himself think that his dad would laugh if he could see him now.

“Let’s go to the beach,” Charles says and ignores any protest coming from Max.

He likes the beach, yes, and he likes swimming, sure, but he hates the sand that comes with it, and he really can’t be bothered to clean his crutches or his wheelchair. Charles knows that because he either has to listen to Max complaining about it all afternoon when they come back from the beach, or he has to deal with the dirt and sand being dragged throughout their entire apartment because Charles insisted on going out.

“Brad said it will be good for you,” Charles argues, and Max only grumbles when he lets himself be pulled out of bed.

“You are annoying,” Max says, and Charles scoffs.

“I am making sure that you do not look like a ghost. You should be thankful.” Charles nods like he’s proud of himself for coming up with it. Max doesn’t show him the middle finger, but it’s a near thing.

“Like you are any better,” Max complains, but he takes the clothes Charles has already pulled out of the closet like he wants to make sure that Max doesn’t have a way to weasel out of this. Though maybe that’s wrong. Charles doesn’t look like a ghost, he looks like a lobster.

“Yes,” Charles agrees, “that is why we are going to the beach.”

Max crinkles his nose, but he can’t really offer a different reply, can’t come up with a better reaction. Charles got him there, Max can admit so much.

“It’s going to be cold,” Max tries one last attempt at persuading Charles not to leave the apartment, but Charles just fixates him with narrowed eyes.

“You are Dutch,” he says with emphasis on each word.

Touché.

Later, Max brakes with his wheelchair so abruptly that it throws sand all over Charles.

(Charles complains about it the entire way home.)

(Max makes him clean the wheelchair.)

“Hi, mum,” he says, stares through the window. It’s been nice at the beach even if the wheelchair hobbled over the sand, even though he wanted to use his crutches and knew he wouldn’t be able to.

“Max,” she says, and he thinks he can hear her worry even through this one word. “How do you feel?”

Max shrugs. “Like shit,” he says because it’s the truth. It feels like the right decision; he knows it is, but it still feels wrong, still feels like he’s given up, like he’s not fought enough to come back like he should have. But it’s been the right decision.

It’ll come with time, he tells himself, that he feels better about it, that it starts to feel correct, that it’s not been the worst mistake of his career he’s just made.

His mum just sighs, doesn’t chide him for his choice of words. “I get that,” she says, and Max is once again reminded that she wanted to be a racing driver, too. Until she got pregnant with him, Victoria. He knows they’d been planned children, had been wanted, but he also knows that his mum used to have different dreams, that they hadn’t always centred around her children and a partnership.

Sometimes, he wonders if she’d made a different choice now.

“I know it’s the right decision,” he says instead, “but—”

“But,” she agrees.

He takes a deep breath, glances at all of the trophies on the wall of their living room, the ones that belong to Charles. The ones that belong to him. Maybe he should feel greedy that he still wants more after all of them, that Charles only has a fraction of wins that Max can show, but it’s never been enough. Not for him, not for Charles either.

It doesn’t matter now, doesn’t matter what he wants or what he craves, doesn’t matter that he wants to continue racing, that he wants to win more, that he wants to stand on the top step of the podium and listen to the Dutch national anthem, that he wants to taste champagne for the rest of his life.

It doesn’t matter.

He’s done.

“It’s over,” he whispers.

“It is,” she says, gently.

In the evening, they go out to eat, and Max appreciates how much effort Charles puts into taking his mind off of everything else.

The dinner is lovely, and Max can almost forget that he came with crutches, that he wasn’t even able to walk the short distance from the car to the entrance of the restaurant, can almost forget that they’re in Monaco and that everyone knows who they are, that everyone knows who he is.

Charles has never been bothered by it as much as Max has, and sometimes he wishes they could be anywhere but here.

He feels eyes on him everywhere they go, hears whispering behind their backs and fingers pointed at them.

Charles smiles at him, and Max tries to forget about it for Charles.

The trophies are mocking him. Charles is gone for another race weekend, and Max has picked up the hobby of staring at their trophy wall.

He should feel proud looking at them, should feel accomplished and outstanding. There are the trophies of his best wins on display, the World Driver’s Championship Trophy on his mini fridge, the helmets he’s exchanged with other famous athletes and the ones he wore for each of his championships. It should be the proud collection of an athlete revelling in everything he’s already achieved.

Max has never felt this irritated.

Maybe it’s because it just shows everything he will never have, everything that he can’t have again, everything he should have had and lost. What do any of those trophies and wins mean if he can’t relive them again?

It’s stupid, he knows it’s stupid. Perhaps that’s the worst part. It doesn’t make sense, he can’t explain it, but he can’t stop himself from staring at the trophies, and he can’t stop himself either from feeling like this.

It would be easier if he could just remove them, but Max isn’t really interested in having to explain his impromptu redecoration session to Charles.

So, the trophies continue to mock him, and Max continues to stare at the trophies.

It’s been getting easier, walking with the crutches. Now, he doesn’t use the wheelchair in the apartment anymore, tries to deal with only one crutch at a time. Sometimes, he’s even able to walk without any help at all even if it’s slow and wobbly and feels far too unstable.

Outside, it’s different. Outside, he doesn’t want to use his wheelchair and has to anyway.

He refuses to get pushed when he’s forced to take the wheelchair—if he can’t walk, then, at least, he’s going to train his arms, is going to be as independent as somehow possible. Charles never pushes him on it, and Max is glad that Charles simply gets it.

Progress, he tells himself, even if there’s no point anymore.

His ears ring. He’s not sure why he’s made the mistake of accepting his dad’s phone call. It’s been a mistake the past few times. It’s a mistake now, too.

From the few things he can gauge over the phone, his dad didn’t expect him to actually go through with it, had hopes that Raymond could overturn the termination of contract Max has signed—like Max isn’t an adult, like he’s not been an adult for the better part of a decade. Like he can’t be trusted to make his own decisions.

He sighs, tries to find patience where none is. This is what he has from his dad. Max hates it.

“Papa,” Max says, like it’s going to appease his dad, “I cannot race anymore.” The words taste ashy; they dry his mouth and burn his throat. But they’re the truth, he knows they’re the truth. His dad knows, too. Even if he won’t accept it.

Max didn’t want to accept it either.

“I didn’t raise a quitter,” his dad hisses, “or a loser.”

Max slams his phone so hard on the table that he’s afraid it might have broken.

Max is lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling when Charles comes back home from his daily run.

Something must be obviously off about Max because Charles frowns at him, squints his eyes like he’s caught onto something and now won’t let go until Max has told him what has been going on.

“Did something happen?” Charles asks, and Max shrugs even if it doesn’t really work while lying on the couch.

He’s thought he’d be over it by now, thought that he wouldn’t care about all the insults and accusations his dad always loves to throw at him. It’s not been as bad in recent years as it used to be, not as bad as his dad was when he was nine or twelve or fifteen. It’s gotten better after Max made it to Formula One, gotten better after Max turned eighteen, gotten better after his first win and then his first championship. It was better after Red Bull threatened to ban his dad from the garage.

It never fully stopped.

It shouldn’t bother him anymore, he knows, he’s nearing thirty, has been living on his own for ten years. Most of the contact he still has to his dad is over the phone now that his dad can’t visit Max’s races anymore.

And it’s not even the worst thing his dad has said to him, has done to him. It doesn’t compare to the days he had to walk around with his helmet still on, doesn’t compare to the insults and slurs his dad used to hurl at him, the way his eyes would sting and his hands hurt, the way his skin would crack over his bones.

This doesn’t compare to all the things that happened to him before he turned ten, before he fully understood what was happening and why his dad was yelling at him, why none of the engineers ever comforted him when they helped all the other children, and he should be over it, should get over it, he knows.

But Max doesn’t want to anymore.

“My dad,” he just says, like it explains everything, like Charles will know what has happened.

“Your dad is an asshole,” Charles says, and it’s so unexpected that Max snorts out a laugh. Normally, Charles is better at hiding how much he dislikes Max’s dad although Max is very much aware of it. It’s not exactly a secret. It’s never been one. He doesn’t think Charles wants it to be one.

“Probably,” Max says, shrugs again although he knows it to be true. Everyone knows that. He’s still Max’s dad.

“C’mon,” Brad says, “stretch your legs, Max. I know you can do it.”

Max just groans. His legs have been aching again, and maybe it should be a good sign that the feeling is slowly coming back, but they’ve been aching for weeks now, and nothing has changed.

He isn’t sure, either, if it’s only in his mind, if he is imagining pain that doesn’t exist, if it’s simply foolish hope.

He lets himself fall on his back, ignores the way it stings, the way his vision spins. “Is there even a point now?” he asks, and it’s not really meant for Brad. He’s not even meant to say it out loud.

“What?” Brad says, looks up from where he’s been busy prepping another exercise. He looks confused as if he’s not properly heard Max, like he’s not sure he’s heard correctly.

“I am, of course, retired,” Max says, and it still tastes bitter. He wonders how long it will take to stop. “What is the point?” He’s only pushed himself this much because he wanted to return, because he wanted to go back to Formula One and continue racing. But he won’t be able to—nowadays, he doubts he’ll ever race in any category again.

Brad raises his eyebrows. “To get better, that is the point,” he says, like it’s that easy, like most of Max’s life hasn’t been adjusted to fit racing better. Every single thing he’s ever done was to get better at racing, was for racing. He did physiotherapy for that, did all the exercises and practices to be fit enough. He doesn’t like working out, and he’s never planning on doing it again as long as he doesn’t have to.

He doesn’t have to now.

“Yes, sure, whatever,” he says, trying to move on to another topic as quickly as possible. He doesn’t really want to continue talking about it.

“See,” Brad says, patting Max’s thigh, “your goal now doesn’t have to be to get back in the car, alright? But your goal still can be to get better.”

Max sighs, doesn’t answer. It’s not wrong. Self-improvement, just for the sake of it. Seb said something similar. He’s not sure how to feel about it.

Brad is still looking at him, and Max can’t help himself but to look away. “Keep pushing, that’s your motto,” Brad points out. “It can apply to anything in your life.”

Max sits back up again. “I know,” he says because he does. Because he knows better, because he’s succeeded so far with everything he’s wanted because he pushed until he couldn’t anymore. He can continue pushing himself—even if there’s no goal to get back to Formula One, even if it’s only because he wants to get better himself.

“Do you?” Brad asks.

“Yes,” Max says, and it’s barely a lie.

Brad nudges his shoulder. “Then act like it.”

Max glares at him. “Fuck you,” he says without any heat.

“Fuck you, too,” Brad says, but he sounds smug like he knows he’s gotten Max.

“C’mon,” Brad says again, “let’s keep going.”

This time, Max follows him.

Maybe he can try, he considers, squares his shoulders. Things can get better even if they won’t ever return to how they used to be. It’s a sallow thought.

“You are harder to get hold of than the pope,” Daniel says when Max opens the door. He can just laugh at that.

“Have you tried to contact the pope?” Max asks.

Daniel grins at him. “Of course, mate,” he says, lying Max knows even though it wouldn’t have surprised him if it had been true.

He lets Daniel in, leans his weight on the crutch while he watches Daniel toe his shoes off. For a moment, he wonders how much Red Bull has let slip about Max’s retirement before the announcement. He’s not exactly talked to a lot of people about it before it actually happened.

He’s not exactly talked to a lot of people about it after it had happened.

“How are you?” Daniel asks casually as he steps into the apartment.

Max shrugs. “Good. Worse. Better.” It’s been hard to decide on how he’s feeling, even harder to convey it.

Daniel snorts. “Yeah, I can imagine that.”

“How are you?” Max asks even though he’s heard enough from Charles to be able to guess.

“The car is shit, mate,” Daniel says drily. “Yuki hates it even more.”

Max scoffs. He’s almost glad he doesn’t have to drive that car. “Coffee?” he asks, but Daniel shakes his head. They only have coffee for Charles and their visitors anyway. Max hasn’t touched their coffee utensils a single time since they’ve moved in together, and he’s not even sure he can properly use the machine. Charles would probably kill him if something happened to it.

The entire country of Italy would be after him more than they already are.

He’s not very keen on finding it out.

“Where’s Charles?”

“You saw him three days ago,” Max says, moving to the living room, so he can sit down again. His back has been rather good today, but he doesn’t want to make it worse by standing more than he has to.

“I can still miss my best grid buddy.”

Max raises an eyebrow. “I have been replaced this quickly?”

Daniel grins. “What can I say?”

“Worst former best grid buddy,” Max grumbles. The words stick to his tongue, taste like cardboard. It feels weird that Daniel’s career outlives Max’s. And yet, to his surprise, it doesn’t sting as much as he’s expected it to do.

“I come visit you more often, though,” Daniel says like it’s a peace offering, like Max and Charles don’t live together, but it is true that Daniel somehow always manages to come visit when it’s only Max at home. Although he probably just texts Charles to make sure he’s out.

“We were neighbours first,” Max points out. “I, of course, expect this from you.”

Daniel winks at him. “But you don’t even know what Charles and I do when we’re in the same hotel.”

Max doubts it’s the same things Daniel and him used to do, but he still shoves Daniel’s shoulder. “You are impossible,” he says. “First you steal the seat, and now the boyfriend too?”

All the notifications and phone calls are driving him crazy. He’s not sure how other people keep up with it, can do it. For a moment, he considers deleting everything from his phone like he knows Seb does. He certainly understands why Seb refused to have any kind of social media presence until his retirement although he does wonder if he’d regretted it that he did it for that.

This sucks, he texts Seb who just sends a laughing emoji back because he’s an asshole.

You’ll get used to it, Seb sends afterwards. They’ll move on soon anyway.

Max certainly hopes so. The race weekend did take off some heat from the announcement, but then it ended, and suddenly everyone remembered it again. He just hopes that the next weekend is going to have them forget about it again—and then for good.

He doubts it. He can still hope for it.

Distract yourself, Seb messages him ten minutes later. You like animals, right? I have my bees, maybe you should do something similar like that.

“Mama, how did you deal with this?” he whispers, and he doesn’t think he’s talking about all the calls, the messages, the articles, the journalists waiting for a statement from him. What else is there now?

His mum sighs. “That’s always the hardest question, is it not?” she asks, and she sounds thoughtful like it’s been so long that she’s been asked about this that she can’t remember anymore how it had felt like, how it had changed her and her life.

“It was easier that I had already retired before,” she says after a few heartbeats. “I had not expected much when I came back. And then I got injured, and it was over anyway. There wasn’t anything to do about it.” She’d been excited to go back, he remembers so much even though they hadn’t seen each other a lot at that time. For Max’s races sometimes, but there had still been Victoria and her job, and then she’d started training again to come back to racing, and there had been even less time.

She’d been excited when Max came to visit before the race, had pressed kisses to his forehead and had promised to go karting with him once they’d see each other again. And then, she hadn’t said much at all when Max came to the hospital instead. She’d not mentioned it again after she’d been discharged. It had been like it had never even happened.

Max hadn’t dared to ask his dad about it.

“It was harder the first time,” his mum eventually says, then she scoffs. There’s a tinge of bitterness to it. “I was better than your dad, you know? Everyone knew this, but everyone also knew that there was no way I’d ever make it further.”

Max knows it, too. It’s never been a secret, it’s something people still talk about. People used to ask him, sometimes, if his dad resented his mum for it. Max is sure of it. Max is also sure that his dad still resents his mum.

“It still stings sometimes,” his mum says, though there’s something flippant about it, “but that was how things were back then, and I don’t regret having you and Vic.”

She sighs, falls silent. Max isn’t sure what to say.

“And I am happy where I am now. I didn’t need racing to be happy. I still don’t,” she muses. “But it was different for me than it is for you. I was younger, and it was a hobby more than anything. I wasn’t a Formula One driver, not even talking about being a champion.”

Max scoffs. He hadn’t expected the championship to slip out of his hands like this. It would have been bitter if McLaren had managed to take it away from him on track, but it would have been different, would have meant that there’s another chance to get it, another time to reach for it once more.

It wouldn’t have been like this, wouldn’t have happened because he needed to retire, wouldn’t have been so final.

“But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other options for you,” she says, and he knows it to be true. He does. But it doesn’t change things, not really; it doesn’t make it easier to accept.

“I know,” Max says quietly. “Objectively, I know. It just…it just was not supposed to end like this.”

There’s a choked-up sound from his mum. “You are still so young, Max,” she says, gently. Gentler than his dad has ever been, gentler than his dad would ever be. He wouldn’t say it like this, would have pointed out instead that Max is past his prime, past his usefulness, that he’s wasted it all on his own. “You have your entire life ahead of you.”

“I guess,” he says, but he doesn’t really believe it himself. His entire life has been this. And now it’s not. There’s nothing left, but there is no way back, no way to return to how things were because things have changed, he has changed. His future has changed.

“Just because one part of your life has ended, doesn’t mean there’s not so much more waiting for you,” she chides him, but even now her voice is soft and gentle, and he can imagine the warmth of her eyes. Sometimes, he wishes he would have grown up with her instead, would have shared a house with Vic and the dogs, wouldn’t have lived all over Europe in some van that his dad hated even more than Max did.

But that’s not changeable anymore, just like this is not either. He’s always managed to change himself, to adapt, to fit what was needed of him. It’s not different now. It’s just different circumstances, circumstances he’s not yet managed to deal with, but it’s not different, not really, not in the end.

“You can always go back to school or do something entirely else, Max,” his mum says, and Max can only barely stop himself from scoffing at the idea of going back to school. He’d been glad when he’d gotten it over with the first time. There is no way he’ll put himself through it another time.

“Don’t scoff, Max,” his mum reprimands him. “You have the money, you have the time. It’s not impossible, and it’s not too late either.”

They’re not going to get another pet, Max promised himself that. They have two highly active cats that aren’t used to anyone else and a spoiled-rotten dachshund, and if Charles wants to pet a different dog, he can call Lewis up.

Max just wants to get out a bit, have something to busy himself with. Seb has his bees, Max likes mammals.

That’s, at least, what he tells himself after booking an appointment at the local animal shelter. It doesn’t matter that Charles fell in love with his mum’s dachshunds, that he’s always trying to convince Max to get one, that Max does miss having multiple dogs at home.

“Hey,” Max says, trying not to stare at the sign that the shelter is searching for employees and volunteers. “I have made an appointment with you?”

The employee looks at the computer, then back at him. “Max Verstappen?” she asks. There’s no recognition in her voice or her eyes.

“Yes,” he says, smiles. “I wanted to take a look at the dogs you have?”

She leads him to the kennels, shows him around. They don’t have any dachshunds, but Max also isn’t entirely sure how well it would work with the cats. It’s going to be an issue in general, but he’s willing to try.

“You can take any of them on a walk,” she tells him, shrugs after a glance at his crutches. “Or just spend some time with them. They always love to play with visitors.”

Sitting on the floor while a dog sniffs on his hand as Max tries to coax him to come closer almost makes up for the disappointment that he couldn’t take any of them on a walk. It reminds him of when he was a child, and his mum brought home a new dog. He’d been just as skittish, hadn’t come close for days. It frustrated Max back then, had made him annoyed and impatient, but he gets it now, he does.

The dog, Ellie, nudges his hand, and he can’t help himself but smile.

(The next day, he’s back at the shelter. This time, he’s brought his wheelchair. It makes it easier to walk with the dogs.)

When he calls his sister, he can hear Lio squeal in the background. Luka giggles at something. He should visit them soon again.

“How are things?” Vic asks, and Max rolls his eyes.

“Can we talk about something else?” He’s talked about how things are more than enough in the past few days.

“Sure.” Vic doesn’t sound surprised nor like she really wants to.

“I have started going on walks with the dogs from the animal shelter,” Max says because there is nothing else he can quickly think of, and he did just come back from another walk. Although he isn’t sure, it can really be classified as a “walk” considering he didn’t actually walk.

“I thought you said you don’t want more pets,” Victoria teases. Max groans. Of course, she knows.

“Maybe,” he only says. “Don’t tell Charles, or he will never stop talking about it.” Ever since Max started going to the animal shelter, Charles has mentioned it even more often. Sometimes, Max doesn’t even remember anymore why he’s been saying no for the past months.

Vic laughs.

“Mum’s dogs would love it,” she just says.

Max snorts. It’s probably true. At least, they had been excited when his mum got a new dog last year.

“How are the boys?” he asks, finally.

“Good. They miss you,” Vic says, and he’s missed them, too. Charles’ brothers are great, but they’re not his family. It’s different in a way he can’t really explain—he’d not always been close to Vic. “We have been thinking to come visit you again? If that is okay for Charles.”

“I’d love that,” he says. “Of course, you always are welcome.” Chances are that Charles won’t even be here for it, but even if he is, he’s always gotten along well with Victoria and Max’s mum. It’s only ever been his dad that had been an issue, and Max can’t really blame Charles for that. He’d not really been the most welcoming, hadn’t been excited when Max brought home Charles, had asked, “Why him?”

His dad has never believed in Formula One friendships; it hadn’t been hard to guess how he’d feel about this.

But he’s mellowed out by now, almost four years later, had realised that there is no point in trying to change Max’s mind anymore. Max hopes it won’t take this long for his dad to accept that Max has retired.

Max listens to Victoria breathe over the phone, then, “Luka has been talking more about karting again,” she says, and Max’s heart clenches.

It’s not surprising, has been something Max had been expecting for years now. They’d been the same, him and Victoria, and he knows that both his parents had been like that, too. He’d grown up with only people like this.

He’d just thought he had a bit more time, that he would be somewhere else.

“Do you want to put him in?” he asks quietly, and Victoria doesn’t immediately answer him. It doesn’t help, Max guesses, that he’s constantly surrounded by racing drivers. Luka likes karting, has been doing it for fun multiple times now, mostly when Max has been visiting, but so far, he’d not been interested in karting competitively.

She’s been afraid of this, but she’s also said before that she won’t stop them if they want to—only that it had been before all of this. They’ve not talked about it since.

“I don’t know yet,” she says. “He hasn’t exactly said he wants to start, but he is definitely interested in it.”

They don’t talk about why she’s so hesitant to have him start karting. They never do. Victoria didn’t even mention it when she suggested that Max should start therapy.

“I know you wouldn’t want to coach him,” she says finally.

Max flinches. “No, absolutely not.” This hasn’t changed in all those years since Victoria last asked him. He can handle teenagers and the junior drivers at Red Bull. He can’t handle this. If there is one thing he has sworn himself, this is it. He won’t coach his sister’s children, and he won’t coach his own children either.

“So, maybe I will talk to a trainer,” Victoria considers, doesn’t mention their dad although he used to be a trainer, although he used to be Max’s, “but unless he asks for it, I don’t think I will push it.”

His parents didn’t want him to start karting either, only agreed after he’d been begging and begging to finally start. For a moment, he considers telling his sister to never cave.

But maybe it’ll pass, maybe it won’t ever get to the point anyway. Maybe it’s just the fleeting interest of a young boy who likes fast cars and has heard too many stories about races. Maybe this doesn’t mean anything.

“He is still so young,” Max says quietly. There have been black dots creeping into his vision again, but he doesn’t feel faint; only his heart hurts. He doesn’t want to continue this conversation.

“He is your age when you started,” Victoria points out, and Max just feels sick.

He invites the team to one last round of dinner although he promises himself it won’t be the last time. It’s during their week off; the atmosphere is relaxed, but Max can tell how much the season has already been wearing on them. Still, everyone is laughing, it’s easy in a way he’s not felt in a long time; he’d feared that there would be tears and regret. There is none of it now.

GP nudges his side, offers him an encouraging smile and for a moment, Max lets himself fall; for a moment, Max pretends that everything is still the same.

Chapter Text

He held my head and made me watch
Filled my mouth up with its blood and said,
“Grow up weak or grow up tough.”
— Nicole Dollanganger. Alligator Blood

Charles sounds pissed when he calls Max.

“Chéri,” he greets Max, but there is something in his tone that sounds off.

Max frowns. It’s only Thursday, the race weekend technically has not even started yet; so far nothing should have happened to have Charles be mad. Unless something went wrong with the cargo again, and not everything is where it’s supposed to be.

“Did something happen?” he asks.

“Nothing,” Charles says, but it’s too short, too rough for Max to believe it. Charles is a lot of things, but he is not like that with Max, never with Max.

“You do not sound happy,” Max says. He does not want to force Charles to talk about this if he doesn’t want to, but he also doesn’t want Charles to feel like he can’t talk about it.

Charles groans. “Just the journalists. You know how they are.”

Max hums. Charles had already been complaining about the press conference before he left. It’s the one thing he’s glad about he won’t ever have to deal with again.

“What did they say?” he asks, pets Leo who stares at him with big eyes.

“Nothing you should worry about,” Charles says, and now Max is frowning.

“That sounds like something I should be worrying about,” he notes because normally, Charles is never dismissive; normally, he tells Max what he’s upset about even if he doesn’t want to.

“It is not,” Charles just says, then, “I should not have called you.” Charles has always been like this, to criticise himself, to want to take things on himself, to shoulder problems himself. Charles used to blame himself for too many things; maybe he now blames himself for this, too.

Max bites on his lip, tucks strands of hair behind his ears. He needs to get them cut soon again. “You know you can always call me.”

“I know,” Charles says, sighs. “I am just annoyed, and I do not really want to be when I have time to speak to you.”

“It is fine,” Max says because it is, because they have the rest of time to speak to each other.

“They are just annoying,” Charles finally says. “Always asking stupid questions. They never know when they should just shut their mouths and leave it alone.”

Max snorts.

“Just—” Charles hesitates. “Stay off of social media, yes?”

Max narrows his eyes. He has been staying off of social media for months now, doesn’t want to search up things or get a look at how things are currently. But now, he is not sure he will.

It’s not hard to find what Charles might be referring to. Someone commented, Charles looked ready to kill, and there are multiple people agreeing with them. He turns the sound on, squints at the small screen in front of him.

“Have you been in contact with Max?” a journalist asks whom Max doesn’t recognise. There are always journalists Max doesn’t know, and they are always the journalists who ask the worst questions. They all ask bad questions. Those are worse.

“Yes, of course,” Charles says. He’s not frowning, but he doesn’t particularly look happy. That certainly can’t be why Charles was this annoyed earlier. “We have not seen each other a lot,” Charles lies, “but he has been doing better.”

A standard answer, nothing to write home about. Max can’t quite imagine what is going to follow.

The journalist clears his throat before he asks the next question, “Do you not think he gave up very quickly? It’s only been a few months since the crash.”

Max blinks. He doesn’t rewind to see if he’s heard right. He’s pretty sure he did not.

“What?” Charles’ voice is flat. Max watches as Oscar throws a glance at him. He looks worried. Max would’ve been worried in Oscar’s place, too.

“Do you think he could have tried harder to come back?” the journalist asks as if he’s unable to read the room and get how mad Charles already is, but most people don’t understand, most people only see Charles and come to the wrong conclusions. Because Charles smiles and is charming and well-behaved and nothing like Max.

Because people think Charles has never been the aggressive one of them, has never yelled and spat fire and gone on the radio to curse out the team or other drivers, but it had not been Max with a box filled with broken controllers, who had gone to therapy because of it.

Max knows better, but Max had also been there when they were ten and twelve and fifteen.

Charles lifts the microphone. His eyes are cold. “Tried harder?” he echoes, voice venomous. Max can imagine the panic Silvia is currently feeling. Without a doubt, she’s going to kill him if he gets himself banned. “What do you mean ‘tried harder’?”

“It seemed like a very rash decision that Max decided to retire.” Now the journalist almost sounds sheepish.

“Have you been there?” Charles asks. “Do you know Max personally? Have you asked him?”

“No, I—”

“No,” Charles interrupts, “you did not because you do not even know what he has been dealing with. He could have died and you are asking if he did not try hard enough to come back. It is inexcusable for you to sit there and say something like this when he has done everything and you have done nothing. What right do you have to judge him when you do not know anything?” The more Charles says, the stronger his accent becomes. It wouldn’t surprise Max if he suddenly started swearing in French. “What more would have needed to happen for you to not ask this? Would it have needed another loss in this sport for you to take it seriously?”

Charles stares at the floor. Nothing comes back.

Max turns his phone off.

His head throbs, and he’s barely able to keep his eyes open. He feels sick, his stomach is twisting and churning, and it’s been weeks since Max has felt this bad.

He doesn’t throw up, but he’s lying on the floor of the bathroom, the tiles cool beneath him. Everything hurts.

It feels impossible to get up even though he can hear Leo bark, but his legs refuse to work, and the world is still spinning. The lights flicker in his vision, and he can hear his blood pulsate through his ears.

He wishes Charles were here.

He used to hate Charles. Back when they were ten and twelve and fifteen, there was nothing but hatred and begrudging respect for Charles. He’s not sure when it changed, and sometimes, he doesn’t know either how he’s made it through two decades without Charles by his side.

He presses his hands against his ears to stop them from ringing and forces himself to not call Charles.

“I have been thinking,” his dad starts the call, and Max already wants to hang up on him. “Since you have fucked up your chances in Formula One, you should start looking for other possibilities.”

He really should have never picked up the phone.

“Dad,” Max says and nothing else. He is not sure how he’s supposed to make his dad understand, isn’t sure if it’s even possible.

“Romain Grosjean has started in IndyCar, right?” his dad carries on, and Max can hear the disdain in his voice. He doesn’t like Romain and he doesn’t like IndyCar either, calls it a cheap copy of Formula One, something that will never be more than an imitation with less skill and talent and hard work. “If he has succeeded, you could do that, too. Or maybe endurance racing since you’ve always talked about that one.”

He’d wanted to do it, with Fernando maybe. He still wants to. He can’t.

“Papa, I can’t,” Max says.

He imagines his dad sneering at the phone, the way his face slowly turns red, the vein on his forehead. “You won’t with that attitude.”

“I can barely move my legs, and there is still no feeling in my feet,” Max grits out. “How am I supposed to race with that?” He can’t walk, he can’t do the exercises Brad has him do, his doctor thinks he’ll never get the feeling back in his legs and that the vision issues could come back any time.

“I raised you better than this.”

Max wants to scream and cry and dig his fingernails into his arm until he bleeds. Instead, he just takes a deep breath, tries to remember the breathing exercises GP showed him after Monaco 2018.

“I am simply being realistic,” he points out because he is, because no matter how much he does, it’s never enough, because his body has turned against him and is trying everything in its power to keep him down.

“Verstappens don’t just give up,” his dad hisses like Max is twelve again and standing in the rain after a bad race. “You’ve always taken too much after your mother.”

Max grits his teeth. “Maybe it is better like this,” he says and hangs up. His fingers are turning white where they’re wrapped around his phone too tightly that’s started ringing again. His dad is going to kill him.

Charles is washing the dishes when Max brings it up. Maybe he should not, maybe he should just let Charles do and say whatever he wants in public, but he doesn’t want Charles to get in trouble with the FIA or Ferrari because of Max, and they all know how moody the FIA has been since the end of last season.

“You should not have said anything,” Max says. He doesn’t look at Charles from where he’s still sitting at the table. He had offered to help cleaning up, but since Charles doesn’t cook ever—it’s not like Max would let him do that—, Charles typically insists on cleaning up the kitchen.

“Said what?” Charles asks, confused.

Max tucks his hair behind his ear. “What you said in the press con.”

Charles pauses, and for a moment, Max thinks he’s going to be chided for looking for it when Charles told him not to. “You sound like Silvia,” Charles notes instead.

Max huffs, knows exactly what Anna would have sounded like if he’d been there in the press conference saying something similar. “It was unnecessary.” Because it was, because it is, because Charles doesn’t need to ruin his reputation and his approval from Ferrari for things like this.

Charles turns to him, tilts his head. “I do not think it was,” he says slowly. “He was out of line.”

“He was not wrong,” Max just says.

He can feel Charles staring at him, can feel his eyes burn through his clothes and skin, can hear Charles take in a deep breath as if he’s not sure what to say. It’s quiet apart from the heaviness that comes with Charles’ gaze.

“What?” Max says, and it sounds defensive. He brings his arms up to cross them in front of his chest, looks up to meet Charles’ gaze even though his entire body twists under his eyes.

“You are an idiot if you actually believe this,” Charles finally says. He sounds weirdly calm like Max is just imagining the storm in his eyes.

Max squints at him. “That is rude,” he says, to distract Charles, to move them away from this topic towards something else that is nicer for them both, that they can both enjoy. He shouldn’t have said it—even if it’s true. There is no reason to tell Charles this, to have him worry about it, too.

“It is not rude if it’s the truth,” Charles says as if he’s not always chiding Max for being too blunt and too rude and too direct. Max would not survive for two seconds with Ferrari.

Max snorts. “What are you? Dutch?”

It has Charles crack a smile. “I learned from Seb,” he jokes although Seb managed to rein most of the bluntness in, the more years passed, mellowed out with age and experience.

“No,” Charles says, holding out a hand. Max just raises an eyebrow; he hasn’t planned on saying anything. “Don’t distract me.”

Max smiles innocently at Charles. “I, of course, am not doing anything,” he says, but Charles doesn’t look like he believes Max.

He groans. Charles always wants to talk about it, believes that it will help, that it is going to make things easier, that it will have things run smoother. Max won’t argue that it works for Charles, but it doesn’t help Max. He’s sure of that. He’s tried it, and he’s still very much not interested in anything close to therapy.

For all Max cares, Charles can continue whatever this is, but there is no need to include Max in this as well.

Charles narrows his eyes. Max is not going to get out of this. “Did you talk to your dad?” he asks.

“What? No,” Max lies. Charles doesn’t need to know everything. He especially doesn’t need to know about what Max and his dad are talking. It’s just not necessary, nothing that Charles should worry about, nothing that should put pressure on him.

“Hm,” Charles just makes. His eyes are still narrowed, his face openly suspicious. It’s just never been easy to hide when Max has talked to his dad, and now Charles knows him too well, too.

“What?” Max asks. “Charles?”

But Charles doesn’t say anything. He just looks at Max, eyes gliding over his face as if he’s trying to find something in there that doesn’t exist. Max tenses under his gaze. He likes being the centre of Charles’ attention. He doesn’t like when it’s like this.

“Do you actually believe what he said was the truth?” Charles simply asks.

Max swallows, then he shrugs. Yes, no, maybe. “It is always possible that things could be different if you tried other things,” he says because that is the truth, this is something Charles should understand. Maybe he would be at a different point if he had done his physiotherapy sessions with his dad instead of the hospital physiotherapists or if he had called Brad earlier, or maybe this would have never happened if Max had swerved just a bit more to the right.

It is not like they will know. It doesn’t mean that it’s not possible. It doesn’t mean that it’s not possible that Max didn’t do everything he could have done to get better. It doesn’t mean that it’s not possible that Max didn’t try hard enough.

Charles groans. He sounds disappointed, almost enraged, and Max feels like he’s just failed a very easy test he should have passed with flying colours. He probably did.

For a moment, it’s quiet. Max tilts his head to get a better look at Charles who’s frowning. He seems to consider something as he doesn’t quite meet Max’s eyes.

Charles’ face twists. “If he said the same thing about me, would you still feel like this?”

It has Max frown. “What are you talking about? No.” He probably would have said the same thing—or worse—to the journalist, would have gotten another fine for swearing. But it would have been worth it. He just doesn’t want Charles to get involved in this, knows that Charles wouldn’t have wanted him to get involved either.

“Then why is it different when it’s you?” Charles questions. He sounds gentle, calm, but there’s an attentiveness to him that Max rarely sees outside the car. It’s almost like he’s waiting for Max to explode, like he’s searching for warning signs to calm before it happens. GP always used to do the same.

Max has never liked being read like this.

“It just is.” Max glowers at him, tries to think of something to have them be done with this conversation. “Of course, it does not make sense to ask something like this when it is a hypothetical situation.” He hates these thought exercises. They’ve never made sense to him in the past, and they don’t make sense to him now. It is not like he knows about the circumstances and past events if it was Charles instead of him.

Maybe Charles would have done something else, maybe Charles would have found a way to try harder, to get better faster, to come back and race again.

It’s stupid to ask something like this when you don’t know the details.

Charles doesn’t roll his eyes, but Max imagines him do it; he can almost hear Charles huff out an annoyed sigh. He should ask if Charles did things like this when he was working with his coaches in therapy.

Max lays both his hands on the table, takes a deep breath. It doesn’t feel like Charles is done with this conversation just yet even if Max really, really wants to be done with it.

“You did everything and more,” Charles says gently. He wonders if Charles actually believes it or if he just says it to make Max feel better, if he’s convinced himself of it even though he knows better.

Max scoffs bitterly. “If that were true, I would not still struggle to walk.” If he’s failed, it means he’s not done enough. And he has failed even though he knows that it’s the right decision.

Charles sits down next to him, takes Max’s hand. “This does not negate the fact that you have been doing everything you could have possibly done to get back on your feet,” he says and when Max looks him in the eyes, it seems like the truth, like he actually thinks like that, like he believes it. Maybe he does, but Charles hasn’t been raised like Max was.

What does it matter how much he’s been working if he doesn’t succeed? Anything short of success is failure.

“Marc—” he starts and immediately gets interrupted by a glare from Charles. He swallows the rest of his words.

“Do not even start with that,” Charles stops him. They’ve talked about it before, back in 2020 shortly after the incident, in 2021 after the surgeries, then in 2023 when everyone thought the next race would be Marc’s last. Max still remembers that Charles hoped for Marc to just retire, that he didn’t agree with how things had been handled by him and Dorna and his doctors.

Max can imagine what Charles’ reaction would have been if Max had tried to come back before he’d felt ready to do so, can imagine the fury in his eyes and the deep crease on his forehead, the irritation in his voice. “Are you crazy?” he probably would have said. There’s a reason why he never told Charles about the concussion after Silverstone.

He would have done the same if these injuries had been easier to hide, easier to walk off. If they had been broken ribs and a concussion. He would’ve pushed, too, would have done anything to go back to racing as soon as possible, would have lied and hidden things. It’s what most of them would have done—especially with a championship at stake.

“Well, but it is true,” he says. Despite everything, Marc came back and now he’s winning again, is on his way to win his ninth championship. Max knows better than to believe that Marc is the norm, but Max has never been the norm either.

Charles scrunches his nose. “I do not think that Marc Márquez is the person you should compare yourself with.” No, Max was never someone to compare himself to others, never saw the reason for it. There had never been someone to compare himself with, not back in karting, not in Formula One when his teammates changed too quickly to get a good read. It’s hard now, though, when he’s failed, when there is someone else who didn’t, who didn’t give up, who continued to fight, who succeeded.

“But he did it,” Max just says. “Now— just look at how well he is doing again.” Winning race after race, dominating the season like it’s 2019 again and he’s never been injured before. “He did not give up.”

“And you did not either,” Charles argues; his voice is firm, strong as if he is not going to back down from this point, like he will die on this hill until Max gives in.

Max tucks a strand of hair behind his ear. “Then why does it feel like it?” he asks because there is no other explanation than that it is, that it is failure, that it is giving up and accepting things he shouldn’t be accepting, things that could still change, that will still change.

 Formula One has been the height of his career and will forever be. There has never been anything else for him, and despite all the time that has passed, it still feels like there is nothing else. But he can’t come back, and it wasn’t even his decision, was taken out of his hands and forced onto him. There was never another choice.

He’s 27, he’s still young, he knows, Seb told him that, but how is he supposed to move on when there is nothing waiting for him? When he doesn’t want anything else?

Charles hesitates. “It is not always about returning to where you were before,” he finally says.

Verstappen.com Racing had been supposed to launch this season.

His stomach twists at the thought of all the projects he’s been neglecting, all the projects he’d promised to deliver and failed to do so.

By the time, Max stopped keeping up with them, most hadn’t been far along enough to keep going for the time being. He should change it now—has the time and resources to do so, too. Originally, these projects were supposed to happen next to Formula One, but now Max doesn’t have anything to do, has more than enough of time to actually get them going again.

He should, he knows. It’s been something he’s wanted to do for years, something that finally started to take form the past few years. There are drivers he has, more money put into it than he wants to think about. Now, he could actually finalise it.

Charles would be glad, probably, that Max finally leaves the apartment again.

He turns his phone in his hand, considers calling his dad first. But his dad isn’t as much part of it as Raymond is, and Max doesn’t really want to get a lecture after hanging up on him. They’ve not talked since, but it’s not like it’s the first time his dad has ceased communication.

It rings once, twice. Then the call is accepted.

“Max,” Raymond answers the phone; he sounds surprised, like a phone call from Max was the last thing he’s been expecting. Maybe it is; if Max had shared any plans with his dad about his future, Raymond would have heard it from his dad first.

Max can imagine how pissed his dad has been after their last phone call, the way he let the anger out on Raymond instead.

But maybe this can appease his dad for the time being, can show him that Max still cares even if the same things aren’t possible anymore. He’s not giving up racing completely. He’ll just need a different approach to it now than he used to.

“Raymond,” he says. “I want to pick up the GT3 project again.”

“Verstappen.com Racing?” Raymond asks, disbelief colouring his words. Max doesn’t want to know what his dad has been telling Raymond.

“Yes,” Max says, straightening his shoulders. “I think it is time to continue.”

It’s Charles who picks up Victoria and the boys this time.

He probably should get ready for the last race before the summer break instead, but he’s decided to come home after Spa before flying to Hungary. Max doesn’t ask why, but he is also not going to complain about it. They already don’t see each other enough with Charles all around the globe for half of the year, so Max is going to enjoy this as much as he possibly can.

Of course, it would be easier if he went to the races with Charles, but he isn’t quite sure yet how he feels about that.

If he didn’t have to talk to the journalists again for the rest of his life, it still would be too early.

“Are you sure?” Max asks, worrying his lip between his teeth. “You do not have to.” Max still hasn’t driven a car in the past few months, and he isn’t very keen on trying to do so either. It is not far from Nice to their apartment, so they could find a different solution instead.

Charles just rolls his eyes. “Stop that,” he says. “I am only picking up your sister and your nephews from the airport.”

His dad certainly wouldn’t have done it for his mum considering there are other ways and options to choose from.

Max shrugs with one shoulder. “Yes, but you have been very busy, so—”

“You are silly,” Charles interrupts him.

“Thank you,” Max whispers.

Charles pulls him into a hug. “For you always.”

The cats hate it when the boys are visiting. Max hasn’t seen Leo be this excited in months when Lio runs towards him with open arms.

“How is he already so big?” Max shakes his head, hugs Victoria while he tries to balance with only one of his crutches to stabilise.

“He is going to start kindergarten next year,” Victoria says.

“And you?” Max ruffles Luka’s hair. He’s never been as excited about the pets as Lio is. “Are you already excited to start school then?”

“No!” Luka exclaims. “I’m going to become a Formula One driver like you!”

Max glances at Charles who looks back with wide eyes. Victoria just coughs.

“Right,” she says. “But until then you have to go to school and learn a lot so you can become a good driver, hm?”

Luka’s eyes are big when he turns to Max. “Were you good in school?” he asks, and Max can feel Victoria’s eyes burn into the side of his head. She is going to kill him if he doesn’t get this right.

Max nods very seriously. “Yes, of course. You should listen to your mama, alright? It is very important for you to be good in school when you want to become a driver.” Charles next to him suppresses a snicker. Like Charles was any better.

Max tousles Luka’s hair, tries for a secretive smile as he sits down next to Luka.

“Your mum has said you want to start karting?” he whispers.

Luka’s own smile is wide. It lights up his whole face. “Yes!” Max wonders if he looked the same at that age when he begged his parents to let him go kart.

Max hums. “You really want to?” he asks, casually. He doesn’t want to give Luka the feeling that there is a right and a wrong answer. They’re just not entirely sure yet how serious it is for Luka that he wants to start karting, and Victoria doesn’t seem very keen on finding it out herself. Max gets it. He does.

But just because he wants to kart now doesn’t mean he’ll have to stick to it forever. Max can’t even remember all the boys anymore that used to kart with him before they stopped because they didn’t want to anymore, because they lost interest and moved on to something else.

Sometimes, he hopes he’ll never have a boy just for the sake of expectations.

Luka pouts. “I want to,” he says, and there’s not a hint of doubt in his voice. “Mama goes with us, and I want to go with you again!” It’s not surprising that Luka mentions it again. Normally, they always go karting when they see each other.

Max nods, glances at Luka who is still beaming. “Not just because your grandpa wants you to?” he asks, but Luka just shrugs, doesn’t seem bothered by the question. His dad never wanted him to start karting that early when Max was still young, but he’s changed his mind since then—especially after Luka showed some talent in it, especially now that the chances aren’t very high for Max to have biological children of his own.

“Mama hasn’t been talking to Opa,” Luka says easily.

Max frowns. “She hasn’t?” Vic hasn’t mentioned anything about it, but it doesn’t entirely surprise him. Their relationship has always been quite frosty since Victoria took their mum’s side in the divorce. It’s gotten better now that they’re older, but it never returned to a close relationship.

Max does know that they used to talk to each other at least once a week, though.

Luka nods his head, but he doesn’t volunteer more than that. Max will have to talk to Victoria about it. He doesn’t want for Luka to have to think about this; he’s still too young. They both want to keep Luka and Lio as far away from all of this as possible.

“So you just want to go karting, hm?” Max finally concludes, and now Luka is smiling again.

“Yes!” he says brightly. “Just like Uncle Max.”

Max sighs. “Just like Uncle Max,” he repeats, his stomach twisting.

It’s not surprising. It’s not surprising at all. It’s how he wanted to start karting; it’s how most of them ended up where they are now. He just wishes it was different, that his nephews never showed any interest in racing, that he never started it when he knows he can’t also finish it.

He knows his sister has been trying to talk to him. He’s not entirely sure what she wants to talk about even if he can guess it, knows that he should be talking to her as well.

Ever since Luka told him that Victoria has stopped talking to their dad, he’s been mulling it over in his head. His dad didn’t mention it the past few times they’ve spoken, but Max also can’t quite remember the last time they spoke about anything else but racing. They’ve especially never spoken about family except for Max asking how his half-siblings are doing every now and then.

But even then, he prefers to be in contact with them himself because most of the time, his dad doesn’t know anything, and if he does, it seems so far removed from the truth that Max isn’t sure his dad didn’t just come up with it himself.

He can’t imagine that his dad would want to talk to him about Victoria not talking to him anymore.

But they only manage to talk on their second-to-last day when the pets and children are accompanied by Charles in the living room, laughter filling the entire apartment. He only feels half-bad for leaving Charles alone, but Luka and Lio are usually well-behaved, and Charles gets along well with his nephews.

“I’ve started going to therapy,” his sister says.

Max raises his eyebrows. “You?” he asks, trying to keep the judgement out of his voice. It shouldn’t really be surprising if he’s honest. Victoria has mentioned it before a couple of time, mentioned that some of her friends have started to go but it was usually always only in the context of trying to convince Max to go.

“Yeah, some months ago,” Victoria confirms. “After the crash.”

It’s quiet. Max wants to scoff, but he can’t. His dad would have laughed at them, would have told Victoria that it’s not been her in the car, that it shouldn’t affect her, that she should get over it. No, it’s not like Max doesn’t get why Victoria might have ceased contact with their dad.

“When you first started telling me to go to therapy, too,” Max realises.

Victoria nods. “Yes.”

Max considers it. “Why?” he asks eventually. He can make guesses why she started going, but he doesn’t really. There are not a lot of people he knows who went to therapy, knows that Charles only went to the anger management coaching lessons because Pascale had forced him to go, knows that Charles stopped as soon as he could. They’ve not really talked about it.

Victoria tilts her head. “For a lot of reasons. Dad. The divorce. Raising children,” she says slowly. “I’ve always been worried that I’d start to raise Luka and Lio like dad raised us.” She’s quiet for a heartbeat. “Or worse.”

“Worse?” Max doesn’t think Victoria would be capable of worse. It seems impossible, not his sister with her warm eyes and gentle touches who cried because their dad killed the spider in the corner of her room instead of catching it to let it out.

It’s different for him.

“I don’t see myself getting divorced, right?” Victoria starts, and Max nods. “But it could happen. It is a possibility that something happens that will lead to a divorce, and then we could make the same mistakes mum and dad did.”

Victoria had still been too young to remember the details, to know about everything that went down, but she remembers the yelling, Max knows that. And she remembers the restraining order, the reason for it. It’s hard not to.

He always wishes he could have done more, that he did more.

“I don’t want my children to grow up like that,” she says finally. She looks at him; her eyes are watery, but her gaze is firm.

“Yeah,” Max whispers.

She takes a deep breath, presses the hem of her sleeve against her eyes to dry them. “And I wasn’t really sure about going to therapy, you know? Because dad always said that we don’t go to therapy.” She scoffs; it makes him flinch He doesn’t remember their dad telling Victoria that; he’s not even known that they’ve talked about these things. How much more did he miss? “But I talked to Tom about it, and, I mean, what is the worst that could’ve happened?”

Max swallows. What is the worst?

“I think it’s helped a lot,” she concludes, and he can just nod.

Max opens his mouth, hesitates. It could be the right time. He doesn’t know if it is. “Is that why you don’t talk to dad anymore?” he asks quietly.

Victoria looks at him with wide eyes; the surprise on her face is obvious. He wonders if she would have ever told him about it. “Did dad say something?” she asks, but she sounds so disbelieving that it’s hard to consider that she might actually think like that.

Max shakes his head, snorts. As if. As if their dad would ever admit to be at fault, as if he’d ever admit that things have gone wrong, as if he’d ever admit that he’s made a mistake and failed. Sometimes, Max can’t help but wonder if his dad even knows that he’s made mistakes, that he has been wrong, too, that it’s not just the others. “Luka mentioned it,” he says instead.

Victoria sighs. Her eyes flicker to the door, then back to Max. She doesn’t look happy, and Max can’t blame her. He can guess that this is the last thing she’d wanted to happen, that it’s something she didn’t want Luka to take notice of. At least, Lio is still too young for it. “Yeah. I decided to reduce contact with him. I’ve noticed that it just didn’t have anything positive about it.” She shrugs. “Talking to him just made everything worse, you know?”

He does.

But it’s different for him than it is for Victoria. She doesn’t need their dad’s pressure the same way Max does. She doesn’t need it at all, but she’s never been the type of person to thrive like that, not like Max has, not like Max needed it.

“Hm,” he simply makes, looks out of the window instead of at Victoria. “Has it been hard?” It’s hard, to imagine him doing the same. He doesn’t think he could, doesn’t think he would be capable of doing so.

He owes his entire life to his dad. It seems impossible to leave him behind.

“He’s still my dad,” Victoria says. “But I’ve been happier without him.”

Max only nods.

“Have you been thinking about going to therapy?” she finally asks, and Max huffs out a laugh. Of course, she’d ask it. He’s been expecting this since Charles brought them back from the airport.

“Not really,” he says, keeping his voice as nonchalant as somehow possible, “but Charles and my neurologist both mentioned it.” Red Bull also used to try and convince him to talk to the sports therapist they’d had, but that had been years and years ago, and they’d stopped after Max kept on refusing, after his dad told them to back off.

Victoria shakes her head like she can’t quite believe what she’s hearing. “Maybe you should listen to them,” she points out.

“Maybe,” Max admits. Maybe he should have listened to Red Bull back then, too. It’s harder to admit to than he wants it to be.

For a moment, Victoria doesn’t say anything. She just looks at him as if she wants to say more, like she’s hesitating to actually say it. Then she clears her throat.

“You know,” Victoria says, and there’s a bite to her voice that he isn’t used to from her, “you can’t run away forever.”

At night, he’s lying awake. Charles’ face is pressed against his shoulder, and his body feels heavy; his eyelids feel like he can’t keep them open any longer, but he can’t get himself to fall asleep.

He doesn’t know what his sister is talking about. He’s not running away from anything. He’s just retired because he couldn’t continue, because he had to look reality in the eyes and accept that he wouldn’t be able to come back.

He’s not sure what else he could be running away from because he’s not, because he knows what he can and what he can’t do, because he’s always been able to tell what is too much for him and what he can handle. He’s never overdone it because he’s always known even if he’s taken risks that he shouldn’t have.

None of this makes sense, none of it feels like it’s what she’s talking about.

He’s not running away from anything just because he’s not going to therapy.

“We’ll have a barbecue again,” Christian says. He sounds casual, mentions it in a sub-clause like it doesn’t mean much. “You should come.”

Max crinkles his nose. “You have never invited re— drivers not on the grid before.”

“There’s always a first time,” Christian just says, cheerily.

Max sighs. It’ll be nice, he tries to tell himself. He’s not seen most of the other drivers in months, and it might be nice to catch up with them again. The best part about that, though, would be that it wouldn’t be public and that it wouldn’t be publicised either if he didn’t want it to be. No pressure, he thinks and sighs again. “Can I bring Charles?”

Technically, it’s an open invitation to all drivers on the current grid. Typically, only people that are associated with or used to have ties to Red Bull come. So far, he’s always gone alone, but maybe Charles would be open to it this year. It’s a bit more time they can spend together, and it would only be a day, too.

“Of course, mate,” Christian says and even through the phone, it’s obvious that he’s smiling.

“Then I’ll come.” He regrets it as soon as the words come out of his mouth, but he doesn’t take them back either. He’s promised Charles he would try, and he’s going to keep it.

Max is glad when summer break finally starts, and he can see it on Charles’ face that he also feels like that. The seasons have been getting too long, too exhausting with too few breaks in between. At least, normally, they were able to spend the race weekends with each other, but now they don’t even have that left anymore, and Max doesn’t want to imagine how much more exhausted Charles has to be.

Summer break used to mean long mornings in bed, but since they’ve gotten Leo, it’s not a luxury they have anymore. Though now, Max can spend the evening walks with Charles and convince him to do the morning walks on his own. Charles just sighs and only eventually agrees to it like it’s not him who wants another dog, like it’s not been him who had simply brought home Leo one day despite not even wanting a dog, looking at Max with wide eyes, telling him that he couldn’t just leave Leo.

Max isn’t complaining about it—not when he can use it against Charles to have him walk in the early hours alone and clean the messes up.

Now, though, Leo is simply resting on Max’s lap, snoring quietly while Sassy watches from the back of the couch. She still doesn’t seem to be sure what to think about Leo, but she has never easily taken to new people in Max’s life. He really tries to not remember the ruined clothes Charles often had to show for when he first moved in.

“Christian is hosting a barbecue again,” Max says. “Do you want to come also?”

“You are going?” Charles asks, and he sounds more surprised than he should. Although Max probably can’t exactly blame him for that. But he has been trying, has been in contact with his team and some of the other drivers.

Max shrugs, slowly petting Leo. He’s warm against Max, a grounding force despite the fact that he’s not very heavy. “I want to,” he says, and it seems like a lie. But he’s already told Christian he’d come, and it’s worse to cancel now than to not have even agreed to it. “I think it could be nice to see some of the others again.” It sounds more casual than he really feels.

“Yes, it is a good idea,” Charles agrees, smiles. Max’s heart hurts. “I think I will also go then. It is not like we have anything else planned, no?”

Max grimaces. “We could still do something,” he offers even if he doesn’t feel like it.

They’ve been talking about going to Corsica again, but Max hasn’t really wanted to leave for so long without having physiotherapy, and Charles noticed Max’s uncertainty without him even saying anything. Of course, Charles had noticed; he always does. He’d told Max that it might be nice to stay for longer at home before he has to leave for Maranello again, that all the travel has been exhausting and that sometimes, he just wants to be home for a bit, spend some time with his parents. Max took the offer.

He still feels bad about it.

“If you want to?” Charles says, casual. Max can’t hear anything else, can’t hear want or distaste or disappointment. “But I do feel like it would be quite nice to spend a bit time at home. It has been very busy so far.” He shrugs. “And I only really care that I am with you.”

Max chokes on his spit. Charles always does this. Like it doesn’t mean much, like it’s easy. And perhaps it is, for him. For other people that aren’t Max.

“What? It is the truth,” Charles says, and his smile is gentle and his eyes are warm, and maybe Max can see that everything will be okay.

He takes a deep breath. “Okay, then let’s just enjoy summer break at home,” Max agrees. “And you are sure you want to go to the barbecue?” Leo opens his eyes, and Max resumes petting him. “Spoiled brat,” he mouths.

“Pierre will be there,” Charles says easily. “And Carlos. I am sure it will be fine.”

Max squints at him even though he knows it’s true. He just doesn’t want Charles to feel like he has to when he could do something else. “Okay,” he says softly.

Brad pats Max’s shin, and Max still can’t feel it. It hasn’t stopped bothering him, and he doesn’t think it ever will. It’s always going to be a reminder of what he used to have, of what he could have, of what he has lost.

But there is also no point in lingering on it anymore, in letting the bitterness take over his feelings and his thoughts, to let it dominate his entire life.

Things have already changed. It’s time for him to change as well.

“Max!” Alex immediately greets him when Max steps out of the door into the garden. Charles is still somewhere behind him talking to Pierre. Max only quickly greeted Pierre before he escaped whatever Charles and Pierre have going on.

At least, most of Christian’s garden is tiled, so Max doesn’t have an issue with the crutches. Originally, he’d wanted to take the wheelchair with how much his head has been spinning again the past few days, but then he decided against it. He almost regrets it now when his back twinges in pain with every step.

“You are here, too?” Max asks even if it doesn’t come as a surprise. So far, Alex has always followed the invitation to come to one of Christian’s barbecues although Max isn’t entirely sure just how voluntarily Alex really comes to them.

Alex points with his head towards Carlos. “You know how it is.”

Max snorts. Even if you leave Red Bull, you don’t really leave. He wonders if the Ferrari drivers feel the same or if it’s even worse for them. If there is relief that comes with leaving.

“How is it going?” Max asks. He nods towards Carlos, doesn’t have the balance to free one of his hands to wave instead.

Alex shrugs. “Surprisingly well,” he tells Max. “We get along well. The car has been better. I’m not at risk to get replaced mid-season, so…” Alex laughs when he sees Max’s grimace. It's not like Alex ever held this over Max’s head, but sometimes Max wishes he could have done more.

“But, mate,” Alex continues, “how have you been? Charles hasn’t been wanting to say anything.”

Max presses his lips together into a smile. “Ah, fine,” he simply says. “Of course, it could be better.” But that’s not reality.

Alex nods, but Max can’t spot pity on his face. Somehow, Alex has always known how to act around Max, but maybe that just happens when you know each other for most of your life. “It was a surprise when Red Bull announced—”

“Max!” Carlos interrupts in that moment. “Charles did not say you were coming.”

Max snorts. “Could not miss out on all the gossip, right?” he says, shrugs. “I heard the season has been going well.”

Carlos puts an arm around Alex’s shoulders, grins. “It is weird to be back in blue.”

“A bit too light,” Max jokes. “You are getting along well?”

“Of course!” Carlos exclaims. “We have always gotten along well, no?”

Alex laughs. Sometimes, Max forgets they used to be part of the same junior academy.

“But you both feel well? The team is okay?” Charles hasn’t said much beyond the fact that the Williams have been looking better than last year, but it is also not like Max has asked for much information. He grimaces. Or been in contact with them.

“Yes, it has been nice,” Carlos says. “It is not Ferrari, but…” Maybe he gets better strategies now. Max doesn’t ask.

He looks around, but he can’t spot Christian, and Helmut is never invited to these outings. “Is it true that Christian tried to get both of you back?” he whispers.

Alex snorts. “Maybe.” He lowers his voice. “I escaped Helmut once. There is no way I’m going back.”

Max has always gotten along with Helmut, but he knows about the horror stories the junior drivers tell each other. The glass eye probably doesn’t help.

Carlos snorts. “Agreed. Once has been bad enough.”

Max raises an eyebrow. “And yet you are here.”

“Well, Helmut isn’t,” Alex points out.

Max laughs. “Fair.”

Slowly, he makes his way over to the chairs. His knees are stiff, and his hips refuse to properly move, but he somehow makes it to a chair, drops down on it. Maybe he really should have taken the wheelchair—he’d be faster with it, and ironically, he’d have more freedom. Alex and Carlos follow without mentioning it. It makes Max wonder if Charles told them to not say anything.

“You should come around more often, mate,” Alex says. “We miss you.”

“Maybe,” Max repeats what he’s told Christian, leans the crutches against the back of his chair. “Have not decided yet.”

“It’s never too late,” Alex offers, smiles.

“True,” Max agrees. “One of the European races might still be in it.” He doesn’t think he wants to go to Zandvoort even if he normally loves the atmosphere there, the people. But it would feel worse to see an orange crowd when he can’t drive, when it’s not him on the grid. He’s not going to tell Alex that.

“You totally should,” Alex says, nodding with more force than he probably has to, “it’s not the same without you.”

Max can only offer a polite smile at that, squirms at the words. People didn’t use to care about him on the grid. People used to want him gone from it.

“You should get one of those canes?” Carlos says. Max looks up at the sudden change of topics. “They look very cool, no? They would fit to you.”

Max frowns, reaches for his crutches. “A cane?”

“I can see that,” Alex agrees, nods. “Maybe you can get a bull’s head or get Red Bull to make a custom cane. I’m sure Christian would love it.”

Max scoffs. “Absolutely not.” His entire closet is already Red Bull team kit and AlphaTauri clothing. He doesn’t need even more of it.

Yuki is responsible for the grill when Max makes his way towards him. By now, Charles has made his way out of the house, followed by Pierre, but he’s talking to Carlos, and Max hasn’t managed to greet everyone so far.

“Did Christian force you to do this?” Max asks, but Yuki doesn’t immediately answer. Instead, a frown forms on his forehead.

“The last time,” Yuki says, “I let Christian do this, he burned everything. I brought Wagyu steak. I will not let this happen again.”

Max remembers that. He also remembers how pissed Yuki had been, so he just nods.

“You have been well?”

“The team is fucked,” Yuki deadpans. He doesn’t sound very happy about having finally made his way to the Red Bull team.

Max grimaces. “Shit.”

“You cannot even imagine how shit.” Yuki groans. “You left and everything fell apart.”

Max can’t imagine that happening, but he knows better than to say anything. It’s not like he’s kept up with it all that much.

“Why did no one warn me?” Yuki complains. He glares at the steak like it’s at fault for the state Red Bull is in, then he looks up at Max. “You have to come back, Max. Please.”

Max hasn’t felt this full in months despite the fact that he’d told himself he would eat everything he couldn’t during the season once he’d retired. He’s very glad that they let take Yuki over the barbecue duties this time, that they didn’t let Christian or any of the other drivers get too close to the grill.

He smiles at Isack who looks like he’s going to fall asleep any second.

“How has Formula One been treating you?” Max asks. He’s not had a lot of contact with Isack during his junior career, but he’d been keeping tabs on him, had wanted to offer more support during his first season of Formula One than what he’s been able to do.

“Ah, fine. Everyone is very nice. The car—” Isack’s face twists. Max laughs.

“You will get there,” he promises because it’s true, because it gets easier with each race.

“It’s not that bad,” Isack says, rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s nice to drive, but it’s just very slow.”

Liam scoffs, nods. “True, but it’s easier than the RB21.”

Max’s face twists. “That bad?” he asks, but he’s driven the RB20, and he knows about the issues the car has had, how bad it has become with each race passing. And he knows that there is no way they could have gotten rid of all the issues before this season.

“That bad.” Liam grimaces, throws a glance at Christian. “Don’t tell Christian. Or Helmut.”

Max shakes his head, snorts. “He is not even that bad,” he says. “You are just not allowed to show fear. He can smell that.” It’s what his dad always told him, and by now he’s rather sure it’s the truth. Helmut has never taken kindly to fear, but it’s also never been an issue that Max has had.

“Mate, have you seen him?” Liam hisses. “He looks like he is going to kill me alone with his stares.”

“Just do not get on his bad side.”

“Max,” Isack complains. “That is not very helpful.”

“Well, so far he has not killed me,” Max points out, and he can think of a few reasons why Helmut might have done so. Monaco 2018 for one, Baku 2018 for another.

“That’s because you are Max Verstappen, mate,” Liam says like it means anything. “He probably wouldn’t even be able to kill you if he wanted to.”

Max shakes his head. “You are making him seem worse than he is,” he says, amusement colouring his voice. One day, he’ll have to make the junior drivers understand that Helmut is not going to kill any of them even if he might kick them out of the team. But he won’t kill them—and he won’t eat them, either.

Isack and Liam share a glance. “I don’t know about that,” Isack mutters.

Max laughs. Maybe he should give a course on how to survive Helmut Marko; although he’s not sure how many people would want to learn German just for that. “If you ever need help, just message me, right?” he says, offers them a smile before he pulls his phone out to give Isack his number. Liam already has it.

Isack frowns, his fingers hover over the keyboard of his phone. “Are you sure?”

“That is, of course, why you have my number,” Max just says, and it feels easier than he’s imagined it to do.

Before they leave, Christian grabs Max’s elbow. Max just raises an eyebrow.

“Do you want to come to one of the races?” Christian asks. “The guys would love to host you.”

Max twitches under Christian’s gaze, shrugs.

“I will think about it,” he says because it’s easy. It doesn’t mean anything, not more than it has to.

For a heartbeat, Christian just looks at him, narrows his eyes like he’s trying to gauge Max’s reaction to whatever tactic he’s going to pull. “GP misses you,” he then says, and Max can just gape at him. He always does that—pulls out the GP card and dangles it over Max’s head like it does anything. Sadly, he’s correct and it does something. It always does.

The last time, it had happened, Mercedes had tried to have talks with him again.

“That is just rude,” Max complains.

Like always, Christian knows that he’s gotten Max, so he just has that little grin on his face that he always has when he’s convinced someone to do something. “It’s the truth.”

Max crinkles his nose. “Fine,” he says. “But I will not do media duty.”

Christian doesn’t even blink. “I can promise you that you won’t.”

Max sighs. “Then I will be there.” Charles is going to kill him that at the only Grand Prix he’s going to attend, it won’t be as a Ferrari guest.

But there is no way in hell that he is ever going to wear that hideous shade of red.

“That was nice,” Max says, rolling his shoulders back as he tries to get comfortable in the seat, but his back feels stiff and tense, and his hips are protesting his every movement.

Charles smiles at him. “It was, no?”

“Yes,” Max agrees, wrinkles his nose, “even if you were only talking to Pierre all day.” He’s not sure he’s even seen Charles once, but it’s been nice to be able to catch up with everyone. To most of them, he’s not had a lot of contact these past few months, and he knows he really needs to change that.

“I have not seen him in two weeks!” Charles protests.

“Sure,” Max snorts.

“But you feel okay?” Charles asks, and Max can hear the frown without even having to look at him. “It was not too much?”

“No,” Max says. “It was nice.” And it has been nice. Max hasn’t been sure about it, had been worried that he’d feel out of place and uncomfortable in his skin. He’d known that they would only talk about Formula One because he doesn’t share enough interests with most of them, but despite that, he hadn’t felt off, hadn’t felt bad. It’s weird, unexpected, but it’s not unwelcome.

He doesn’t remember the last time, he’d felt this okay, hadn’t felt the need to change topics and force the conversation elsewhere.

He leans against Charles. The seat is still uncomfortable, and nothing seems to be working. Charles cards his fingers through Max’s hair.

“I love you,” Charles whispers.

Max smiles. “I love you, too,” he says.

The car is burning, fire licks up his arms, but he can’t move, the seat belt refuses to come undone. His hands shake. He can’t feel his legs.

His ears are still ringing, and when he closes his eyes, he can hear the tyres screeching over the asphalt. Somewhere in the distance, the radio is crackling, but nothing comes out of it. It doesn’t matter now though because he has to get out of the car, has to move so that his mum knows that everything is okay, but his head feels leaden. He can taste blood, can smell petrol. There is something warm running down his cheek.

Someone is yelling his name, but he can’t see anyone, can’t hear more than the blood pulsating in his ears and the horror in the screams.

He should get out, he thinks, but his body is too heavy, refuses to move. It’s getting warmer.

When he wakes up, he feels off. His body is being weighed down, sinks into his bed as the mattress swallows him whole. The side next to him is empty, cold, like Charles never lay there.

He pushes his face deeper into his pillow, wraps the blanket tighter around himself. He’s still freezing, wishes that Charles was here with him, so Max could steal some of his warmth, could bury himself in his arms and just stay there for another few hours. He regrets that he told Charles that it should be him to walk Leo in the mornings. Otherwise, Charles would maybe still be here, would wait for Max to wake up to leave.

Although Max isn’t sure, he’d be able to go on the walk today. He can’t move his legs, his body feels too heavy. His back is on fire.

He can hear something shatter in the kitchen, knows that it must have been the cats, but he can’t make himself get up, can’t force his body to move. He can’t. He doesn’t know why he can’t.

His head throbs, but he forces his eyes open and stares at the white ceiling above him.

He glances at his phone on the bedside table. The date blurs in his vision; it stings in his eyes when he squints against the brightness. He feels sluggish, like he’s trying to wade through fog and mud, but when his vision finally focuses enough for him to read the date, something cold fills his veins.

It’s been a year.

He doesn’t get out of bed, stays wrapped up in his blanket, staring at the opposite wall of the bedroom. He knows he should get up, knows that he should force himself to sit up and swing his legs over the edge of the bed. There are exercises waiting for him, and Brad has to come over at any minute, but something is stopping him.

It feels impossible to move.

He’s barely breathing. He doesn’t think he’d survive having to leave his bed.

It’s stupid. He’s aware it’s stupid. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s been a year, and Max has retired. He’s crashed and ruined his career, his future and his life. But it’s been a year, and Max has started to accept that. He’s already retired. It shouldn’t matter that it’s been exactly a year today, and he knows it doesn’t.

Somehow, it does.

Charles checks up on him every now and then, presses kisses to his forehead and his cheeks and nose and lips, but he doesn’t try to make Max get up. He doesn’t say anything; he just makes sure that Max is okay, that everything is fine. They both know that Charles is far more patient than he should be, far more courteous than is expected of him. And despite that, he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t make Max do anything.

Of course, Charles knows. It’s obvious in the way he’s acting, the way his forehead is scrunched up, the way he doesn’t quite meet Max’s eyes. Somehow, it makes it worse.

His dad wouldn’t have let him do this, wouldn’t have accepted it, would have forced him to get up and do his exercises. Charles knows that. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t say anything, why he doesn’t show annoyance with the way Max is acting even though he shouldn’t be like this, even though he should get up and continue with his life, because lying in bed and staring at the wall won’t change anything, won’t bring the feeling in his legs back, won’t have him see in a Formula One car again. Max isn’t entirely sure anymore if it wouldn’t be better, but he knows better than to think Charles would do the same, knows better than to expect something similar.

Sometimes, Max wonders if Charles is still afraid of losing him, like he’d been afraid all those months ago when Max overheard that phone call he shouldn’t have witnessed.

Max would like to be able to take this fear from Charles, to promise him that he’ll never lose Max, that it’s only irrational and nothing that could become real, but it’s still so hard. Now, it still seems like a lie.

The next day, he forces himself out of bed, makes himself get up and dress in jeans and a t-shirt. Max can see on Charles’ face that he wants to protest, that he wants to tell Max to get back to bed if that feels better, but Max forces his shoulders to straighten up, presses his lips together.

“I am going to the shelter,” he says.

Charles doesn’t let anything show on his face; he just nods. “Do you want me to come with you?” he asks, and Max wants that. He does. He doesn’t think he can do it.

He still feels wrong, and he doesn’t breathe correctly, and something is lodged inside his lungs. He wants to bury himself in Charles’ chest to never let go of him, and he doesn’t want Charles to look at him ever again.

“Maybe some other day,” Max forces out. His skin is too tight, and everything is wrong.

Charles nods, hugs him tightly. “Of course, chéri,” he says like it’s okay, like it’s normal, like Max doesn’t want to rip his own skin off and light himself on fire.

There’s a new dog at the shelter, small and anxious, and the shelter employees aren’t sure there’s anyone who would want to get a dog like that.

Max wanders around the shelter, greets the different animals that recognise him by now. It doesn’t take long for him to finally get to the new dog.

He’s still young, maybe two years if Max had to guess. He’s pretty with his shiny black coat and the big brown eyes, and he’s nothing like all the dogs Max has previously had.

“Hey,” he whispers, as he slowly kneels down, ignoring the way his knees barely hold him up to let the dog sniff his hand, but he doesn’t get into the kennel. “Aren’t you pretty?”

The dog whines, retreats and Max realises that he’s never even asked for the dog’s name. There isn’t a name plate on the kennel yet, so he will have to ask once he gets back to the others.

Max watches as the dog looks back at him with those wide eyes, the tail between his hind legs. The distrust is obvious in every single of the dog’s fibre.

Max takes a deep breath, lets his head fall back into his neck, and for a moment, he just closes his eyes. He still feels wrong even if it’s easier than in the closed walls of their apartment. It’s easier far away from people he knows, people that have expectations for him. Maybe he could just stay here forever.

When he opens his eyes again, the dog is still watching him, but he’s closer again, sitting instead of standing. Max slowly stretches his hand out to let the dog sniff it again. This time, he comes even closer although he’s still watching Max with wide eyes and discomfort in every single one of his movements.

Somewhere, a door falls shut with a loud crash.

Max flinches, sees the dog duck, press his ears close to his head.

“Shh,” Max whispers, not daring to move otherwise. “You are okay.” Even if it doesn’t feel like it.

He inches closer to Max although he still doesn’t touch him. Max stays still, doesn’t dare to breathe until the dog slowly starts to lie down again.

Something eases in his chest, makes breathing lighter, has his head stop spinning. “You and me both, mate, huh?”

(Later, they tell him the dog’s name is Rocky. It feels like ice water has been emptied above his head, like the universe has a cheap laugh at him, and yet it feels impossible to leave him behind.)

It gets easier to only walk with one crutch, but he’s still ridiculously slow and inept, and Max doesn’t know if it will ever get better.

“You are doing well,” Brad tells him, and Max can’t quite believe him. Brad won’t lie to him, but Brad also doesn’t know everything.

“Will it ever get easier?” Max asks. He’s hoped it would, that it would get easier once he’s retired without the same goals and expectations and hopes. But it’s not. Sometimes, it feels worse.

“Yes,” Brad says, and there’s a certainty in his voice that makes it hard for Max to see something else.

Charles has been leading the championship since summer break ended.

Max is proud of him. Of course, Max is proud of him. When Charles comes home, Max takes him out for dinner, books reservations for Charles’ favourite restaurant to celebrate the win. He’s glowing the entire time, radiates the happiness of a win every time Max looks at him, and in these small moments, Max feels as happy as Charles beams.

The championship lead doesn’t mean much yet. There’s still half a season left, and Max knows how fast things can change even if he hopes that it doesn’t, that Charles will finally live his dream, will finally fulfil his promise, and yet there’s something heavy in his chest.

It’s unfair, he knows. Because Charles deserves it, because they had an abysmal start to the season, because Max already has three championships, and he shouldn’t be greedy. Charles deserves it, has worked hard for it, has put his trust time and time again in a team that’s continuously let him down.

And yet, Max can’t help the jealousy gnawing on him, can’t force the ugly green down and rip it out like he should, like he knows he should.

He doesn’t know if Charles notices that something is wrong, hopes that he doesn’t realise it, that he doesn’t ever notice it. It’s on Max and Max only, and he doesn’t ever want Charles to think that he can’t be happy for Charles like Charles has been happy the past three seasons for Max, that Max can’t celebrate Charles’ wins and successes like Charles has done.

Because Max is happy, because he hopes Charles wins, because he wants Charles to succeed in everything he does, because he wants Charles to always be happy and content and bright.

But he also can’t make himself stop, can’t force these feelings out, can’t get them to disappear. In the end, he still wishes it was him, that he would stand on top of the podium, that he could celebrate wins and championships.

In these moments, Max always knows that Charles deserves someone better than him, deserves someone who celebrates him like he should be.

There’s nothing that Max could give Charles, not anymore.

Chapter Text

A man with a bandage is in the middle of something.
Everyone understands this. Everyone wants a battlefield.
Red. And a little more red.
— Richard Siken. Detail of the Fire

The next race is Monza, and that’s more doable than Zandvoort is, so Max agrees to go.

It’s close to home, he tells himself, but most fans there are tifosi; the attention shouldn’t be on him as much as it would be elsewhere, especially now that Charles is leading the championship.

He tries not to think about that.

Charles pouts when they fly out together, a lot earlier than if Max were to travel alone. But Charles has never liked to leave as late as possible, and he has marketing activities to attend to, as well. It’s one of the few things, Max is absolutely not going to miss. “And you are sure you cannot come as my guest?”

Max rolls his eyes. “Christian invited me,” he says. People would probably accuse him of trying to spy on them if he suddenly started to hang out in the Ferrari hospitality, not that he really cares about that. But it would mean that people take notice of it, that they speak about it, that the chances are a lot higher that he’d have to entertain the media circus.

Christian promised him that they’d be kept away from him, not Fred.

Charles is still pouting, so Max pokes his cheek. “Fine,” Charles amends. “But next time, I will be inviting you.”

“Sure,” Max agrees. The next time, someone can convince him to go, anyway. He doubts it’s going to happen any time soon again.

“Hi, mum,” he says when his mum finally answers the phone.

“Hi, baby,” she says. She sounds out of breath, winded-up. Her voice is weirdly tight. It’s been ages since he’s last heard her sound like this.

“Everything okay?” Max asks, furrows his eyebrows.

His mum clears her throat. “Yes, why?” she asks, voice light, but it doesn’t seem natural, seems too forced, a bit too much like she’s stressing the lightness of her voice to convince him of it.

“You sound stressed,” Max notes.

“Ah,” his mum makes, sighs. “Just work, you know how it is.”

Max nods even though he doesn’t remember the last time his mum had seemed this stressed about work, but for most of the last years, he’d not seen her much.

“Is something wrong at work?”

“Nothing you have to worry about,” she says dismissively. “Why did you call? I don’t have much time because there’s a meeting soon.”

“Nothing special,” Max says slowly. He typically only calls in the afternoons because she mostly works in the mornings—it’s been like that for as long as he can remember. He’s not sure when it changed. “I just wanted to call to chat.”

His mum hums. “Can I call you back in the evening?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks, Max,” she says, and for the first time since the call started, she sounds like she’s smiling. “Love you.”

“Love you, too,” Max echoes, and before he has the chance to say anything else, she’s already hung up.

Max stares at his phone and frowns.

He’s glad for the little bit of privacy they have with his private jet. He’s not very interested in getting recognised at the airport, and as much as Charles might love publicity, he doesn’t like that either.

They make it to the hotel just fine. Red Bull offered to get him a separate hotel room where they’re staying, but Max declined. There’s no reason for it nowadays—they used to do so when they were still hiding from the teams, but now it doesn’t matter anymore, and now the teams don’t care as much about it as they used to do so even if Ferrari still isn’t happy with it. Of course, Ferrari isn’t happy with it.

Max drops his suitcase on the floor next to his bed and tries not to think about the fact that he’s only travelled with one luggage instead of two like he always used to do. But there’s no point in taking his portable simulator with him anymore.

He sighs, sits down on the bed. His legs ache. It’s dull and easy to ignore, but it’s still there, sending shock waves through his entire body, and sometimes it’s hard to remember that there used to be a time when he wasn’t always in pain.

Charles frowns at him, takes Max’s face in both of his hands. “And you are sure?” he asks.

Max raises his eyebrows. “About what?” he asks even though he exactly knows what Charles is talking about.

“Going to the race.” Charles is still frowning, and Max wants to reach out to smooth out the lines on his face.

“It is fine, of course,” Max says, shrugs. It doesn’t feel fine, but he’s not going to tell Charles that. Charles has other things to worry about—a championship fight, for example, a team that won’t listen to him, as another. And here, they are in Italy; he should be able to focus on things that aren’t Max.

He almost regrets coming to this race. There would have been other Grands Prix than Zandvoort and Monza, races with less emotional attachments.

“You should not lie to me,” Charles says because he always knows when Max is lying, or maybe Max is still as much of a miserable liar as he used to be when he was twelve.

“It will be fine,” Max dismisses it. “I will just stick to the Red Bull garage and you, and run away from any of the journalists.” He should have taken his wheelchair with him, just so he could escape quicker from the reporters than he is able to do with his crutches, but he didn’t think of it when they packed for the weekend.

Charles snorts. “They will not be happy,” he says like that still matters to Max. Now, he doesn’t have a brand to protect anymore.

“It is not like I care about that now,” he points out.

Charles just shakes his head, looking amused. “Then you should hope they will not harass me instead,” he says even though they both know that the journalists are already harassing Charles as it is. He does not need Max for that, especially not here, not in Italy. “Silvia might actually kill me one day,” he mutters.

Max lays his chin on Charles’ shoulder. “Then, of course, you can run away with me together,” he says.

“Sure, chéri,” Charles sounds fond. “Then we will do that.”

It doesn’t come up again until Charles gets ready to leave for the circuit. There are some media duties that Charles has to fulfil, and Max isn’t overly interested in being there for that.

Charles’ gaze feels heavy, piercing. Max doesn’t meet his eyes. “So you still feel fine?” Charles asks casually, slipping on a pair of shoes. It feels a bit too casual, a bit too much like Max is bared open, unable to hide from view.

“Yes, Charles, I promise. If things get bad, I will tell you,” Max lies. Sometimes, he thinks, it would be easier if Charles didn’t know him so well, if he didn’t mention these things, if Max didn’t have any other option but to keep going. His dad certainly never gave him the choice.

Charles squints at him, and for a moment, Max expects Charles to call him out on his lie. “If you are sure,” he finally says. Max can still tell that Charles doesn’t believe him.

Christian greets him with a handshake and a quick hug before he’s called somewhere else again. There’s an apology on his lips and a frown on his face, but they have seen each other during summer break, so Max doesn’t really mind. Instead, he takes the time to go to the hospitality, to have a quick look at the garages.

Nothing has changed in his time away. It’s still the same—the same people, the same equipment. It would be easier, maybe, if Max didn’t recognise it anymore, if he didn’t still know his way around the team and the paddock and the garages.

It’s easy to forget he doesn’t belong here anymore when he stops every few meters for a quick catch-up with people he’s known since he was barely an adult, when Genty shows him pictures of his little boy, when Matt slaps his back. Max calls him Jon for good measure which earns him a hearty laugh and a gentle nudge. (He doesn’t mind it so much, the gentleness, when it’s them, when they’ve only ever been gentle and kind with him.)

GP hugs him so tightly that Max can barely breathe.

“You are crushing me,” Max complains even though he doesn’t move to get out of the hug. GP just snorts out a laugh. It sounds suspiciously wet.

“I missed you, too,” GP tries for a joke, but it’s too soft, too close to the truth.

“How have you been?” Max asks because it’s always been hard to gauge how GP is feeling from the way he looks. GP still looks the same, but he’s always looked the same—even if he used to have hair at some point in the past although Max remembers it vanishing rather quickly over the time they’ve worked together.

“It’s…different,” GP says, gestures towards the pitwall. Max never really thought GP was actually serious about stopping to race engineer after Max, but now they’re here, and Max isn’t a driver anymore, and GP isn’t a race engineer either. “A bit weird after ten years.”

Max snorts. That’s a way to put it.

“Weird to be back like this,” he agrees. “Maybe I will go to Ferrari next time, so it will not be this weird.”

“I can’t believe this betrayal.” GP shakes his head in mock disbelief. “Unless it’s to spy on them, then go ahead all you want.”

Max laughs.

“Come,” GP says, nudging Max’s shoulder. “They have a new chocolate muffin you might like.” He squints at Max, but Max just blinks innocently at him. “You probably haven’t eaten yet, have you?”

“Well,” Max draws out. He never used to eat before coming to the paddock, and it felt wrong to do so today even though it doesn’t matter anymore, even though everything is different now.

GP snorts. “Let’s go, then,” he says. “Charles is going to kill me if I let you starve.”

“He would not,” Max says even if he knows very well the way Charles’ face twists, the way his eyes get stormy, dark and angry.

GP raises an eyebrow. “Oh, he definitely would.”

They slowly make their way to the hospitality. The crutches really help, but maybe Max can ask someone for a chair in the garage. He can already feel pain seep into his bones, can feel the way his muscles are all tense. Brad is going to give him another lecture.

“I’ve been thinking about retirement,” GP says just as they stop in front of the door.

Max frowns. “Retirement?” he asks. GP is still young enough to be working for a few years, but most people his age would probably already prefer to stay in Milton Keynes instead of travelling all around the world. Especially with children. But now that GP isn’t a race engineer any longer, he wouldn’t need to do so anyway.

“I’ve already stopped race engineering.” GP shrugs. “Retirement is the next obvious step.” He says it easily, casually, like it doesn’t mean much. And perhaps, it doesn’t. Maybe it doesn’t anymore.

Max scoffs. “You are getting old, mate.”

GP laughs. “I am,” he agrees.

Max wrinkles his nose. “I feel like Christian would have a few other job offers for you if you told him about that.” It’s not like they can afford to lose even more senior employees than they already have, and GP has been so heavily involved with everything Red Bull is doing, Max can’t imagine they would just let him walk away when there are other options.

“Maybe,” GP says, but he doesn’t sound like he actually considers it, like it’ something he would want. He only looks at Max with a soft smile and warm eyes. “It just isn’t the same anymore.”

Max swallows. “I know.” Because he does, because everyone knows. It wasn’t supposed to end like this, and they were supposed to have four more years together, but now it doesn’t matter anymore. Now, everything is different and everything has changed, and they need to do so as well.

“I always said I wouldn’t continue this without you, and yet I’m still here,” GP says.

“You said that about being a race engineer, not about retiring from F1,” Max points out. That’s what he’s always said, that’s what he’d told Max as well. That he’d like to move up the career ladder for a few more years, that he’d like to start getting into Jonathan’s work more.

GP laughs softly. “I did, didn’t I?” He sighs, doesn’t look at Max, and he doesn’t need to do so. “But—” He trails off, waves with one hand.

“But,” Max just says. He can guess how the sentence would continue. But things were different back then, but things came differently than we expected them to be, but there’s nothing holding me here anymore.

GP breathes out. “Maybe once I retire, we should go on vacation together.” For a moment, Max wonders when GP made this decision, when it was actually final, if the others already know or if that had been another decision GP didn’t want to tell anyone about until he’d told Max.

He raises an eyebrow. “For old time’s sake?” he asks as if this year wasn’t the first time they didn’t manage to go.

“Exactly,” GP agrees. “Just two old retired men.”

Max bristles. “I am not that old!” GP can call him old once Max starts to lose his hair.

GP just laughs at him.

(The chocolate muffin, though, is great. The staff even hands him a bar of Kinder chocolate. There are smiles on their faces, and it hurts more than it should do.)

He watches Yuki climb into the car. He’s expected to feel anger, perhaps sadness, but mostly he expected to feel frustrated, at himself, the situation, maybe even the team.

Yet, there’s none of it. He tries for a smile as he encourages Yuki to go ahead, while he listens to the team debrief. Familiar voices and words wash over him, but he can’t properly focus on them, can’t concentrate and actually take in what is being said.

A heavy hand settles on his shoulder, and when he lifts his head, GP is looking at him. There’s a frown on his forehead, a question on his face. Max isn’t sure how to answer it, so he just shrugs, leans further back against the back of the chair. It’s not comfortable; his back throbs, and he can feel a headache slowly build behind his eyes, but he also isn’t supposed to be comfortable here.

He tries for a smile, a nod, and it’s barely enough for GP to continue with his work, to leave. Max can see it on his face, can see the hesitation in his steps, the tenseness in his shoulders. But GP isn’t Max’s babysitter—even if it used to feel like it.

The car comes to life; Max drinks in the sound of the V6.

He just feels numb.

He hobbles more than he walks—walking with crutches is still harder than it should be, and it really wasn’t the best decision to leave his wheelchair behind in Monaco—, but to his surprise, he’s faster than he’s expected to be.

“Max!” someone calls out, and Max might not have been in the paddock for over a year, but he can still certainly recognise Ted Kravitz’s voice, and he can also still definitely know that he is not down for a quick chat.

He continues walking down the pitlane, not turning around, so that Ted thinks Max just didn’t hear him. The second call is a lot closer and a lot harder to ignore. Life would be easier if he could just run away from journalists again. But there’s nothing he can do now, so he slowly comes to a stop, turns around, comes face to face with someone he really didn’t want to see. It’s not exactly Ted’s fault that Sky Sports is insufferable, but it’s also not not his fault.

“Ted,” Max says, forcing more excitement into his voice than he really feels. “How are you?”

“Good, good,” Ted says. He’s smiling brightly, and Max really just wants to get out of here. “It’s nice to see you in the paddock again.”

The smile feels frozen on his face. All he’s wanted was a quick kiss from Charles, nothing more. Just that. “Ah, it is, of course, nice to be back,” he says. At least, it feels familiar. It’s not another thing he has to get used to, something he doesn’t know, that he needs months and months to familiarise himself with.

Ted nods. “Are you planning to come around more often?”

Max shrugs. “Maybe. We will see,” he says. Anna would be proud of him.

“On what does it depend?” Ted frowns.

“On how many people manage to annoy me this weekend,” Max says, smiles with his lips pressed together. “No, that was just a joke. It, of course, is very exhausting to travel so much, and now that I do not need to, it is nice to just be home and spend time with the pets.”

“Any plans to come back?”

Max blinks. Ted just looks at him, curiosity written all over his face. “I am not sure,” Max starts slowly, “if you have missed the announcement, but of course, I am retired now.” The words aren’t less bitter than they were a couple of weeks ago, but it doesn’t feel wrong, not anymore.

“That doesn’t have to mean anything,” Ted points out.

Max bites on the inside of his cheeks, so he doesn’t say something stupid, so he doesn’t ask Ted if he has missed the crutches holding Max upwards. He wouldn’t have retired otherwise. If there was the chance to come back.

“It would be very hard,” Max says, willing himself to take a deep breath. He can deal with this. He has dealt with worse, has had worse questions and worse interviews. This is nothing. He is going to survive this without making negative headlines.

In the distance, he sees even more reporters with their stupid cameras coming towards him.

He forces a smile on his lips. “I really have to go now,” he says. “Duty calls.”

Ted looks stunned for a second, and Max can still make out a “What duty?”, but by then, he’s already turned around, willing his legs to work and move him away from Ted quicker. Now, he really misses his wheelchair.

Perhaps he can ask one of the mechanics to build a motor in his wheelchair for the next time Max comes visiting, just so it is easier for him to get away from the journalists. For that, he would even willingly use it.

But he doesn’t have his wheelchair here, and walking with crutches is certainly not fast enough to try and get away from overzealous journalists, so Max takes the next best option. It’s not normally one he would have chosen.

“Hide me,” Max hisses, ducking behind George to have him hide from the reporters. It’s easier now that Max isn’t wearing team-branded clothes anymore, but it’s still not as easy as he wishes it was.

George looks startled, a What forming on his lips which is fair considering they haven’t seen each other in months, but Max points at some of the journalists a few meters away from them before he goes back into hiding. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to cross through the pitlane to get to Ferrari and wish Charles good luck, but now there’s nothing he can do about that.

“Still hiding from the journalists, Verstappen?” George asks, not unkind, and Max imagines the way his eyebrows are raised, the judgement obvious on his face.

Max crinkles his nose, catches a flash of red in the corner of his eyes. “Shut up and help me,” he says.

George huffs, but it sounds amused, and he doesn’t move away to reveal Max’s hiding spot. It’s probably not the best one, but it does make it easier to ignore and deflect any potential people getting close enough to them to try and talk to him. Even if it’s George, even if they are standing right in front of the Mercedes garage. Max does not want to stand in front of the Mercedes garage.

“If they see me, they are going to haunt me,” Max says. “Ted was already bad enough.” He’s probably going to complain that Max cut their interview short, but Max also can’t really bring himself to care about that.

“Too late,” Lewis announces when he comes to a stop in front of George. “They already saw you.”

Max glances up to catch Lewis’s gaze who just has an amused glimmer in his eyes. “Fuck,” Max says. He doesn’t move to leave.

George tsks. “Don’t let the FIA hear that, mate.”

Max glowers at George. “And do what? Will they give me negative championship points?”

Lewis laughs.

“Mate, should you be here?” Max asks Lewis. The red is bright enough that it manages to hurt Max’s eyes. There is no way he is ever going to be caught in that hideous shade.

Lewis raises an eyebrow. “Should you?” Which is fair and not entirely wrong, and it reminds Max that he doesn’t want Toto to see him either because then he can forget about getting away quickly.

The last time, they’d seen each other, Toto had managed to talk to him for almost an entire hour, and Max hadn’t been able to find a way out. Charles still laughs at it like he didn’t have the means to free Max and get him out of there. Max doesn’t want to imagine what Toto would do now after they haven’t seen each other in months—if Toto would still be trying to make him job offers and lure him to Mercedes.

Max shrugs, grins. “At least, I am not direct competition anymore.”

Lewis snorts. “Fair.” He then glances down the pitlane again. “You should go now if you don’t want them to talk to you, man.”

Max follows Lewis’s gaze. There are even more people now. All of them have cameras and microphones. Max is slowly starting to fear for his life.

“Thank you, Lewis.” Max glares at George who just laughs. Next time, he’ll get Daniel to help him. “No thanks to you.”

He quickly waves with one hand, both crutches in the other. “See you guys later.” He really needs to find Charles now before the journalists find him.

The car is worse than he remembers it to be. Daniel’s time on the leader board makes Max cringe; Yuki is only a few hundredths of a second ahead.

When he looks at the rest of the team, they don’t look surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised. He’s almost glad he doesn’t have to drive this car. They should have listened to him, he doesn’t say. There is no point in it now anyway, and it’s not really the team’s fault. They’d tried their best. And Max loves his former engineers too much to give them shit for it now.

GP follows his gaze and grimaces. “Things…have been better,” he says which sounds like a euphemism for the car is shit.

“I see that,” Max mutters. “What did you do to the car?” He could swear it didn’t use to be this bad. It was getting worse before, but it wasn’t that bad. There were issues, but most of them had been smaller, had been less of this overall problem the car seems to have. When did they start to go wrong? It wouldn’t be hard to imagine that the issues in 2023 were already the sign for this now.

GP just sighs.

Max frowns. Normally, he’d suggest giving the sim a try—it’s always what he’d been good at—, but that’s off the table, has been for a year; it’s not something he’s still capable of doing, but…

“Can I see the data?”

He never really needed to see the data when he drove himself, knew where to shave off a few seconds, knew what he needed to change, and GP knew how to implement Max’s wishes. It was always like that. It’s always been that easy, but Max can’t drive the car, and he can’t do the sim work either. He wouldn’t be able to give the same feedback he used to give, and even though he never needed the data to know, he still used to be able to work with it.

His dad had made sure of it, just like he had made sure of Max knowing how to repair and build a kart.

GP glances at him. “Are you sure? That’s not why you’re here, mate.” Technically, GP wouldn’t even be allowed to give him the data. But the car looks so bad; Max doubts there would be an advantage for the other teams to get a look at it.

Max shrugs. “I have nothing better to do.”

Max squints at the screen. The track blurs in front of his eyes, and for a very uncomfortable moment, he is reminded of COTA four years ago. “Here you have to take more curb.”

Isack follows his advice and immediately makes his way into the barriers through the next turn.

After he had gotten into contact with Jake and the engineers back at the factory, he’d still had some time to spare until Charles was done with his debrief, had offered to help Isack with his sim work instead.

So much for helping the rookies find some more time on track.

Max sighs exasperatedly. “Don’t—”

“You said I should go flat out through this.” Isack pouts.

“I did not say you should shunt it into the barriers!” Max nudges Isack’s arm.

Isack just blinks at him innocently. Max sighs again.

“At least you are not in the real car.” Max shakes his head. “Don’t do that tomorrow.”

“Max!” someone calls out, and for a moment, Max is tempted to ignore this, too, but the suspicious German pronunciation of his name makes him turn around.

Toto is frowning, but he is waving at Max like he thinks it’s possible to overlook him. Max has not managed to overlook Toto in his entire life, and there were times during which Max really tried to do so.

They’ve not talked a lot in years. Max hasn’t really been interested in it after 2021 even though he knows that his dad and Toto reconciled—he’s still not entirely sure how that happened—, and after Max signed his long-term contract with Red Bull in 2022, there wasn’t really a reason anymore either. But Max has always kept their relationship cordial, welcoming, an opportunity.

“Toto,” Max greets him, offering a polite smile.

“It’s nice to see you here,” Toto says. “I’ve been talking to your dad, and he has said that you are coming back to motorsports.”

Max sighs. It would be a lie to say that he’s surprised by it. Of course, his dad has gone and done something like that without even talking to Max first. He only wonders if that was before Max got in contact with Raymond for Verstappen.com Racing or afterwards. If Toto is actually aware that Max can’t race anymore, that he isn’t the same wonder kid anymore that he was when Toto first wanted to sign him, that he won’t bring them another championship.

He grimaces. “Right now, I am here because Red Bull invited me,” he says, and it’s such a non-answer that Anna would be proud of him.

Toto raises an eyebrow. “That is not a no.” Always the same, Max thinks. Toto has always been the same, and he still is the same. It’s what used to be so appealing about Mercedes—and about Red Bull once—, that nothing ever changes.

“It is not a yes either,” Max says, shrugs with one shoulder, not even bothering with a smile anymore.

“Hm,” Toto makes. “But you have been thinking about it.” He says it like it’s a given, like it’s certain, like he knows Max better than he knows himself despite not having talked in months.

Max tilts his head. “What makes you say that?” he asks. Just how much did his dad tell Toto? His dad has never mentioned any of this, never even told Max that he’s still in contact with Toto, but maybe that’s Max’s fault for assuming otherwise. His dad has always made sure to take care of his relationships around the paddock, long before Max debuted, and now it shouldn’t be surprising that he’s still doing it. He’s just thought that maybe his dad had finally understood, had finally gotten it that Max wouldn’t return after their last call. But maybe that’s also Max’s fault for thinking like that, for assuming despite knowing better.

“They showed you on screen yesterday,” Toto points out, and there’s something in his tone that tells Max that Toto knows he’s gotten him.

Max suppresses a groan. Of course, they did. The few seconds, Max spent doing something else than monitoring the TV screens, the few seconds Max looked at the data provided to him. It’s probably already floating around everywhere, and now the journalists are going to be haunting him even more. Next time, he’ll get a full-body screen to hide behind.

“Helping out my old team,” he says. “Nothing more, nothing less.” Because that’s the truth. There is nothing more, and there is nothing less to it. The RB21 looks horrendous, but that doesn’t mean that Max is going to make a comeback to motorsports in any way. He wouldn’t be able to do so—it’s not like his retirement announcement hadn’t been clear about that.

“You know,” Toto says, and it’s obvious that he’s trying to go for something casual, for something that is only supposed to be a note and nothing of importance, “Mercedes has always a place for you.” But his eyes are too piercing, and his tone too probing for it to be nothing.

Max knows this game—Helmut has always been the exact same. Sometimes Max forgets how similar Helmut and Toto sound, how similar they act. He just won’t make the mistake of telling Helmut that again because then he’ll have to sit through another lecture about how much worse the Viennese dialect is—even though they both know that it’s not what Max means.

Max smiles politely. “Thank you,” he says, “but I am not sure people would be very excited.” He would not be very excited. His dad would be, though.

Toto raises his eyebrows, surprise takes over his face as if he doesn’t know what his employees used to say about Max, what they still say about him.

(For a moment, he considers it, to make his way across the paddock, to knock on Williams’ door, to ask James Vowles, “Did I deserve this, too?”

But it’s been four years, and Max isn’t one to hold grudges.)

“Just think about it,” Toto says. “The offer always stands. We would love you to be on our team, even if it’s not as a driver.” It sounds sincere, like it’s the truth, like he actually means it.

And Max isn’t sure what to do with that.

The car doesn’t look great, but it looks better than it did yesterday, and Max only feels a little smug about it. Blood rushes through his ear, and his heartbeat thrums through his head, but there’s something satisfying about it, something that makes the slowly building headache easier to bear.

“Still good for something, I guess,” he says as Daniel pulls into the garage, and it’s supposed to be a joke, but GP frowns at it.

“A joke,” he adds, but he doesn’t think it really makes it any better. At least, it doesn’t make the frown on GP’s face disappear.

“You shouldn’t say something like this,” GP chides him softly, but Max can just shrug. It’s as close to the truth as he can make himself admit.

“Fine,” Max says, and he only barely doesn’t roll his eyes, but GP still pinches his side like Max is still the same 18-year-old GP first met. He pulls a face at GP who just laughs.

He crosses his arms in front of his chest as Daniel climbs out of the car, pulling off the helmet.

“Good job,” Max tells Daniel who pats his shoulder. His hair is sweaty, sticks to his forehead, and Max crinkles his nose. He’s always hated how the fireproofs would stick to his skin, how disgusting his hair would feel.

“You did a good job.”

Max shrugs. “I only played around a bit.” It’s the truth. He’d gotten a good look at the data and the simulators, and even though it’s not the same car he’d driven last year, it’s still similar to the car he’s helped develop. The development drivers are great, but it’s different when you have the experience of actually driving the car, too. Jake’s data with some of his suggestions had been helpful enough that there hadn’t even been a reason for Max to step in the sim—not that he should have, but he would have. He could have.

Daniel huffs out a laugh. “If that’s what you can help with, then you should come around more often.” Maybe Max should. Daniel has never liked the sim work, always left it to Max or one of the reserve drivers instead, but now it’s not like they need him when they have more than capable development drivers. Max has seen what they can do.

“And here I thought you were happy to see me,” Max complains.

Kimi looks at him with wide eyes, and Max unwillingly tenses under his gaze. He doesn’t think Kimi has even blinked once since he saw Max coming in with Charles.

But so far, Kimi hasn’t approached them, and Max knows that he should go up to him, should start small talk and ask him about his first season so far. It’s what he’d sworn himself he’d do for the rookies—it’s what he’d done for Oscar and Liam and Logan.

And yet, Max feels out of his depth. It seems harder than it should be, like there’s a barrier keeping him from standing up and walking over to Kimi to involve him in a conversation. But he doesn’t belong here anymore, and those aren’t rookies on his grid either.

It’s ridiculous to assume that things have changed so drastically. He’s been barely gone for a year, and he knows the other drivers, gets along well with them, but the grid has shifted. Things are different now. Max didn’t use to belong when he was younger, and it took years and other drivers until he did. Now he’s no longer a part of it. He’s not sure how he fits into this.

Charles follows his gaze, nudges his side. Max turns his head to him, shrugs with one shoulder.

“He has been talking about you since his debut,” Charles mutters. “You should go talk to him.”

Max tilts his head. Maybe he needs to extend the offer he’s made Isack and Liam. “Should he not be a Lewis fan?” he jokes.

Charles scoffs. “This is a stereotype,” he insists, amusement colouring his voice.

Max coughs. “Is it really? He is Italian and a Mercedes driver.” By all means, he should be a Lewis fan, especially now, especially here.

“You won your championships throughout his formative years,” Charles just says. “It makes perfectly sense.”

Max blinks, takes a deep breath. Sometimes he forgets how young the new drivers are, that he’s not that young anymore. Maybe GP wasn’t entirely wrong when he joked about them being old. “Don’t remind me,” Max groans.

“Sure, Mr. Youngest Race Winner,” Charles teases, a grin on his lips. He looks so satisfied that it’s easy to think it was his achievement. He’d looked like this too when Max won his first championship and back then, they hadn’t even been together just yet.

Max gags. “Charles.” He is getting old, he realises with sudden clarity. His back certainly feels that way, but his back has been feeling like this for longer than he really cares to admit. The next time he sees GP he’s going to bring it up to him, so that he’s not the only one.

There’s a glimmer in Charles’ eyes. “How does it feel that it’s been ten seasons since then?” Charles leans in. “Do you already feel old?”

Max gapes at him. “We are the same age!”

“You are still older,” Charles points out. He looks smug. Max narrows his eyes. A bit too smug. Max would absolutely make him sleep on the couch if not for the race tomorrow.

“By two weeks,” Max hisses.

Charles grins at him. “Tell yourself that.”

“It is the truth!” Max insists because it is. Because at their age, two weeks mean nothing even if he did like to rub it in Charles’ face when they were younger. But it’s not really his fault when Charles always used to react to it. He can’t believe Charles is using the same weapons against Max now.

Charles tilts his head, pokes Max’s cheek. “Did you not want to do something?” he asks.

Max catches Kimi’s eyes. “Fine.” He squares his shoulders as he prepares himself to get up. “I am already going,” he says, but it’s a lie because his knees lock up, because his legs refuse to move, because his back cracks, and he has to put his entire weight on Charles’ shoulder to force himself to get up. He really should be looking into cane options before he completely ruins Charles’ joints, too.

Worry glides over Charles’ face, but when Max doesn’t sway on his feet after he lets go off Charles’ shoulder, it’s quickly replaced by a grin again. “You listen so well,” Charles whispers quietly enough that no one else can hear it, his face the epitome of innocence. Max has stopped believing that years ago.

Max glares at him. “Shut up.”

Charles cackles.

Kimi is still looking at him with wide eyes when Max finally makes his way to him. He doesn’t remember 19-year-olds looking this young. He certainly never did.

“Happy belated birthday,” Max says because there’s nothing else he’s found to come up with. Normally, it’s never this hard to find something to talk about, but he’s also never really talked to Kimi before, and he doesn’t want to suffocate him with a flood of words. He doesn’t care when it’s Charles or Lando or Daniel, but he does want to make a good impression, and he doesn’t think either that Toto would be very impressed if Max somehow managed to kill his prodigal rookie.

Kimi opens his mouth, closes it. He looks more starstruck than he should, when considering how many high-profile celebrities are at every race, when considering the other drivers.

“I heard about Verstappen.com Racing,” he blurts out.

Max laughs. This is easy. “You like GT?” Sometimes, it’s surprising how little Formula One drivers care about other forms of racing, so it’s always nice to talk to someone who likes other series, too.

“Yes,” Kimi says, seemingly nodding with a little more force than necessary. “I really want to try it when I am older.”

“Don’t wait too long,” Max says. He had—waited too long. At first, because he’d wanted to focus on Formula One, then because his team hadn’t wanted too much of his attention elsewhere, and then…and then. “But yes, I have not had a lot of time in the past year, so I decided that now I should finally start focusing on all those projects again.”

It’s not like things had stood still; for that, both his dad and Raymond have always been far too involved in his side projects, and for quite a few of them, they had been far too ahead with the development to suddenly put it on ice, but slowly, it feels like he can start caring for those things again, like he himself can get involved in them once more.

“Okay,” Kimi says, still wide-eyed and with enough enthusiasm for the entire grid.

“I saw that your season has been going well so far,” he comments casually, gauging for a reaction.

Max didn’t think it was possible for the smile on Kimi’s face to get brighter, but it somehow does. “Ah, yes, it has been good,” he says, and that’s certainly an understatement from the limited things Max has seen. Charles has been saying nothing but nice things about Kimi so far.

“That is always nice to hear,” Max says, and he means it. “I hope the other drivers have been treating you well.”

“Yes, yes, they have,” Kimi says quickly. “It’s nice that Ollie is here, too, and the other rookies.”

It’s been ten years, and he’s gotten over it since then, but when he was younger, it had been hard not to feel jealous, when first, Charles had debuted, and then Alex and Lando and George, and everyone else after them. He knows he’d debuted during a different time, and he’s glad it has changed now. Still.

Max nods. “That is true, of course.”

“Will you be here more often?” Kimi picks on the hems of his sleeve.

“We will see,” Max says, hesitant, sticking to the truth. He doesn’t want to just say no, but he knows it’s not a yes either, and that would be even worse. It’s a habit his dad has never managed to break. “I am not sure yet.”

“Oh, okay,” Kimi says, but he looks disappointed; there’s a frown on his face.

Max offers him a smile. “Well, if you have ever any questions or other issues, don’t hesitate to reach out. I am sure the other drivers have offered their help, too, but just so you know.” He pauses. “Always, there are people that can help you.”

It hadn’t been like that for him, but he doesn’t want the new rookies to go through the same thing. And even though, it’s not the same anymore now that he’s not on the grid any longer, he knows he would have liked to know that there is someone who could help him, whether that would have been a current or a former driver. He’d only ever had his dad.

Kimi beams at him. “Thank you, Max,” he says brightly, and Max only barely feels bitter.

“Things have been going well, no?” Charles asks once it’s dark outside and late enough that he should’ve been asleep for hours already. Max has always been worse when it comes to staying up late, but at some point, it’s started to affect Charles’ sleep schedule, too, even though Max nowadays normally doesn’t even manage to keep himself awake for so long.

The headaches are worse when he doesn’t get enough sleep.

Max buries his face in Charles’ chest and takes a deep breath. “Better than expected,” he says.

“And so far, there has been no one I need to yell at?” Charles asks, and Max imagines the frown on his face.

Max breathes out a laugh. “No, not yet.” It is not that he doesn’t believe Charles would yell at someone for his sake, but he doesn’t think they can explain to Ferrari why Max has sent Charles to yell at the journalists instead of simply doing it himself.

“Good,” Charles says, satisfied, then, “You will tell me, yes?”

“Of course, I will tell you.” Max rolls his eyes. He will not. He has not fallen so deep that he can’t even yell at people himself even if he knows that Charles would do it more than gladly for him. “You should tell me too if I have to yell at someone.”

“Don’t worry, chéri,” Charles says pleasantly, “I will yell at them myself.” There is no way they have gotten to a point where Max cannot even help Charles do that.

He glances up at Charles. “But I cannot just let you yell at everyone on your own,” he protests.

Charles sighs. “Okay,” he caves, “then we can yell at them together.”

Max can live with that. “Deal.”

It’s quiet after that, and Max’s lids are getting heavier and heavier, but he can tell that Charles is still wide awake, and that it doesn’t seem to be changing quickly.

“You should sleep,” he says, knowing that it’s not really helpful. It’s all he can offer.

“I know,” Charles says, quiet enough that Max can barely hear it despite the fact that he’s lying so close to Charles’ mouth.

Max props him up on his forearms to look at Charles who has his eyes closed as if he’s trying to force his body to fall asleep, and maybe also so that he won’t have to look at Max. “And?”

“I cannot,” Charles just says.

Max huffs. “I see that, idiot.” He squints when Charles doesn’t offer him an immediate reply, when nothing corny comes back, when there’s only a sigh. At least, Charles opens his eyes.

“It is just…” Charles waves.

Max frowns at Charles’ frown, runs a thumb over his forehead, but he doesn’t put enough pressure to actually smooth it out. “Stop worrying. Tomorrow will be fine,” he says. “I know you will do well.”

Charles doesn’t look at Max when he says, “I need to.”

The first one, Max thinks, is always the worst. He doesn’t know what else to offer.

Max’s heart is pounding as he watches the car line up on the track.

His fingers tingle, and his lips have gone numb, and he thinks it has never been this bad before when it was him on the track, too. He never even felt this nauseous when he had his first start in Formula One, the first time he took to the track.

He wants to screw his eyes shut, press his hands against his lids to stop himself from looking at the screen. He gets it now—how his mum always felt about him racing, wonders if it’s ever gotten better.

Instead, he tightly clasps his hands together, digs into the skin of the back of them, barely able to look at the screen as the first red light is shown on the screen.

He doesn’t think he’s breathing.

He barely makes it to the podium. Normally, it’s not very far from the garages to the barriers, but Max isn’t as fast anymore as he used to be, and the crutches are a hindrance with all the people around him. He almost trips a mechanic up, almost trips himself, but he still somehow manages to make it to the podium before the drivers are called up.

He doesn’t think he’s seen the Ferrari mechanics this excited in years. A home win is always something special. A win at home when one of the drivers is leading the championship is something entirely else.

One of them catches his eyes, winks at him, and Max pulls his cap into his forehead even though he knows it’s futile to hide from the press and the cameras.

They call Charles up to the podium, and he looks good up there, looks like he belongs because that’s always how it’s been. Max tries not to think about how he should be also there, standing by Charles’ side, sharing podiums and wins, talking in the cooldown room because that’s how it always used to be.

The Monegasque Anthem starts playing, and Max’s eyes burn. His entire body is cold. He’s freezing, wrapped in ice. His arms refuse to move.

He’s missed this. It doesn’t come as a surprise. It’s something he’s known for so long that it’s not worth thinking—much less talking—about it anymore.

But he’s missed this. He wishes it were the Dutch anthem playing, but that’s not fair either. And it doesn’t matter anyway.

He straightens his shoulders, smiles up at Charles who shines brighter than the sun.

It’s something he’s never going to have again.

Leaving is harder than he’s expected it to be. They’ve waited until Monday afternoon because Charles had something to celebrate—even though he originally hadn’t wanted to leave Max behind on his own—, and in the morning, Charles had been so hungover that he wouldn’t have survived the flight back to Nice.

Some of the drivers have already left, but he says bye to the rest of the ones he comes across.

Ollie is bleary-eyed, and Kimi looks like he’s not slept the entire night, but both of them perk up when they see Max. Gabi hugs him tightly enough that he might be crushing Max’s ribs.

George frowns at him. “Stay in contact,” he says in a tone that makes Max unsure whether he’s been sent by Toto to make Max reconsider the offer.

“Sure,” Max says easily. “Next time hide me better, though.”

George rolls his eyes at him—but he agrees to it, nonetheless.

Once they step into the jet, Max squeezes Charles’ hand that his own knuckles turn white, but Charles doesn’t say anything. There’s just a considered expression on his face.

Max doesn’t turn around when they leave, keeps his breathing even and his eyes on the floor in front of him.

It’s only a race and nothing more, it’s Italy and it doesn’t mean much, but it still feels like he’s saying goodbye a second time. Max has never hated something more.

(When they land, it’s almost like they have never left.)

“Toto wanted to hire me.” Max picks up Jimmy to press a quick kiss to his forehead. Sassy hissed at him when he’d tried to do the same to her. “Not sure what he thinks what value I would add.”

Charles doesn’t immediately answer him, doesn’t even make the move to show Max that he has listened to him, and when Max looks up, Charles is frowning at him. “What do you mean?”

Max hates this expression on Charles’ face. This was supposed to be a joke, not something that would have Charles worry about him again. He only barely doesn’t groan.

“Of course, I am not capable of doing the same things anymore that I used to be able to do,” he says easily. He doesn’t stumble over his words, and it’s easy to say. It’s true; they all know that it’s true.

“Toto is not going to hire you to do the same things,” Charles says.

“Maybe,” Max says, hesitates. “But I am sometimes not sure they are really aware.” He doesn’t think they know. They’ve been rather tight-lipped about everything because Max didn’t want all of his issues plastered all over social media, so Red Bull had honoured it, and Max would never go out of his way to inform the whole world about all of this.

They know the basics. They know more than enough to understand why he’s retired. They don’t need more.

Max won’t give them more.

“Probably not,” Charles considers. “Most do not actually know about everything going on.” Max doesn’t want to imagine all the questions Charles must be getting almost every weekend about this. It’s easy to appreciate these things.

“He is going to try and hire me for something and then he will find out that I cannot do that anymore,” Max says. Toto probably already has a set idea what Max could do, and for all Max knows Toto, he also already has a contract set up that is only waiting to be signed. The advantages of owning parts of your team, Max muses.

Charles scoffs. “He has been trying to get you for the past decade. I doubt that he would be disappointed.”

And Max doubts that it wouldn’t happen. Even if Max never agrees to anything and still tells him about his limitations, Toto will be disappointed because Max can’t be the very thing anymore that Toto has always wanted.

He’s wanted a World Champion, a driver. He’s not going to get that. And Max won’t be much of an advantage for anything else either.

“He would pay a lot of money for nothing,” Max says.

“For something,” Charles argues, and Max twists his face into a grimace. “You could do the same things you did for Red Bull.”

It doesn’t make sense to him why people think he’s done much when everyone else did most of the work, when Max only got a look at the simulations and the data and helped them to find a bit more time, when he won’t be able to do the same for other teams.

He’s already known the car even if it’s not the same anymore as it used to be when Max still drove it. But he knows it. He knows about the issues and the weaknesses, but he also knows the strengths and what can be even further improved. He doesn’t know any of these things about any other car.

“It was not a lot,” Max points out. “I barely did anything. Everyone is always inflating these things for the cover stories. You know that, Charles.” It would be a disservice to all the mechanics and engineers who work day and night to improve the car to say this.

Charles narrows his eyes at him, and Max knows he won’t back down first. “It was still something.”

Max’s lip twitches. “If you think so.”

There is no point in arguing further about this. Max won’t return to Formula One, and he especially won’t go to Mercedes. Toto expects something from him that Max can’t give anymore, and he wants to save both of them from disappointment. It’s better like this.

Charles tilts his head. “Would you even want it?” he asks casually, but it’s casual in a way that makes Max feel like Charles is going to come around the corner with some highly ambitious idea that won’t be possible to fulfil.

“I do not know,” he says to be truthful and shrugs. “It would be nice, I think, to stay in the field.” It’s impossible for most drivers to walk away to find something else. It’s impossible for all of them to walk away forever. Everyone knows that, and it’s always been true.

“You could always try becoming a journalist,” Charles teases.

Max flicks him. “So that I can terrorise Nico again?” Nico would retire for good from Formula One if Max suddenly appeared in the Sky Sports studio to help out with commentating.

Max would also retire for good from Formula One if he had to appear in the Sky Sports studio to help out commentating.

“Exactly.” Charles laughs. “If you were a journo, you could interview me, so we can spend more time together.”

Max feels nauseous just thinking about that. He’s tried his entire Formula One career to get away from media duty as far as possible. There is no way he will return to that willingly. Even if spending more time with Charles is a possibility and a good argument. “Before this happens, I would go back to school to become an engineer.”

Charles is quiet, and when Max looks at him, there’s something in his expression that Max can’t quite figure out. “You could,” he finally says.

They all know more about aerodynamics and mechanics than is necessary, and Max has spent enough time around the mechanics to know his fair share about too many different areas of engineering, but he doubts that’s enough to major in that. He’s never even liked maths. He’d been horrible in physics.

He shudders. “I will not.”

Charles looks at him. “But you could.”

His mum has been stressed. They haven’t been talking as much as they should be, but Max can still tell that something is bothering her. She doesn’t tell him even if he knows that it has something to do with her work, and he doesn’t really want to pry, but he ends up asking Vic anyway.

“Why has mum been so stressed?” he asks without much preamble because there has never been much of a point to it, anyway.

“Stress at work,” Vic says, but she doesn’t sound very sure about it herself.

Max nods. “I figured so much.”

“I don’t know much,” Vic says, and Max pictures her shrugging at the phone, “but they’ve been struggling with money for the past few years because there aren’t as many donations anymore, and apparently, this year, it’s been worse, but she’s not been telling me much either.”

Max frowns. “Why did she never say anything?” His mum has never been keen on accepting money from him, but that wouldn’t be for her. If he’d known, he could have done something, could have helped earlier. But maybe he should have asked earlier, should have asked more than How are you? and How has work been?

“It is really not like money is an issue, of course,” he adds. It’s not been an issue in years—in fact, he’s been helping out Vic ever since his first paycheck. Back then, it had been put on a bank account their dad didn’t have access to, and then he’d told her it’s to help out his nephews.

“I think you should talk to her,” Vic says.

Max rolls his eyes. He’s been able to reach that conclusion all on his own, too. “Thanks, Vic.”

Victoria hums—normally, she’d laugh at it, would give something back. She almost sounds distracted. “I have something else to tell you.”

“What is it?” Max asks, raises an eyebrow.

“I’ve been searching for a trainer,” Victoria says, voice careful, words hesitant, “for Luka.”

Max leans his head against the backrest of the couch. He stares at the white ceiling above him. “Did you find one?” he asks.

“I did,” Victoria says. She sounds unsure, and not for the first time, Max wonders if she would feel more comfortable with Luka starting to kart if it was Max coaching him. “He’s Dutch, and still quite young. But he has worked with some of the older karting boys already.” Then Max probably doesn’t know him. He’s not kept up with the karting world as much as he should have, and there are always too many new talented and well-liked trainers for him to stay on top of it anyway.

His dad might know more about it, but Max really doesn’t want to ask him. He’d immediately know that something is up, and that’s the last thing either of them wants. If his sister wants to get help and tips from their dad, she can get in contact with him herself without Max messing up things.

“And he’s good?” he asks instead.

“One of the best I’ve heard, but…” she trails off.

Max frowns. It’s hard to gauge what more she wants to say. “What do they say about him?”

“That he’s great, nice. He likes to work with kids, and some of the other parents have said, he’s always been great to them.”

“It sounds like a good option,” Max notes. It doesn’t seem surprising. Most of the other trainers he’d gotten to know had been nice albeit strict, but he’d always felt like the other children had liked spending time with their coaches. Max has never had someone else apart from his dad and the mechanics.

Victoria sighs heavily. “I guess.”

“You still do not want it,” Max says, and it’s not a question. It’s been months, and she still doesn’t want it to happen, still hasn’t come to accept it. It’s something they have from their dad. Max still remembers that their mother had caved earlier.

“Not really,” Vic agrees. But she’s not going to forbid it, isn’t going to stop Luka from following through with it; they both know that. Perhaps she hopes that he will stop after a few years, won’t be able to keep up with school and the stress and competitiveness. Now that Max isn’t actively driving anymore, now that Max can’t entertain them any longer by karting against them, maybe the interest will slowly cease.

“Mum has lit candles and prayed for you before every single race,” Victoria whispers. “I don’t want to fear the same thing.”

The worst thing, Max muses, is that she’d been right. She’d been right, and she knew it. She’d known what could happen, what has happened to so many other drivers, what had happened to her as well. She’d been right, and Max can’t fault Victoria for feeling like this.

He would, too.

Max exhales. “I know.”

He can hear Vic breathe over the phone. It’s quiet, and neither of them says anything. In the background, Max can hear Lio squeal. Or maybe it’s Luka. He’s never been good at distinguishing their voices over the phone.

“I have been thinking about it, you know,” Max says eventually. Sassy is purring against his fingers, butting into his hand, and for a moment, Max wonders if they can handle another pet.

“About what?” Vic asks. She sounds distracted and now, Lio is screaming.

Max takes a measured breath. “About going to therapy.” It’s not really that he plans to go, but sometimes, he considers that it could help. It’s helped Victoria. It could help him, too. At least, Charles thinks so, and Brad, and his neurologist, and Victoria as well.

“Have you?”

Max shrugs even though Vic can’t see him. “I have been considering it,” he says. He’s not sure why he even talks to her about it. She has other concerns than listening to her older brother ponder whether he should go to therapy or not, but she knows, knows better than anyone else.

Victoria hums noncommittally.

“I still do not know,” he continues, thinks about Monza and Charles and a life that could have been, a life that won’t ever be again. Maybe it could help at least with that.

“You don’t have to,” Vic says quietly. “You could always try and stop if it doesn’t work for you.”

“I guess,” Max says, but that seems weird, to just stop after he’s actually started. Then he’d rather not do it at all. What’s the point of starting something when you might just stop it again? When you don’t push through it?

Victoria snorts. She seems to know what he’s thinking. “You are always so…all or nothing.”

Sassy blinks up at him. “That is how I got here,” he says. The worse his school grades got, the more he knew he wouldn’t be able to go back. And he’d never wanted to go back. He doesn’t want to go back now either, but now it’s not his choice anymore, and now there’s no other option left.

“Hm,” Victoria makes, and Max waits for her to continue talking, knows that she has more to say.

“Sometimes,” she says, “you just have to let go.”

Max scoffs. He’s done enough of that the past few months, the past year already. But maybe that’s the point she’s trying to make. What’s a bit more in the grand scheme of things? What’s a bit more after everything else?

“Luka has been wanting to start karting,” Max tells Charles. He’s not sure why he shares this with Charles. It’s not like it’s something that actually concerns him, something that has anything to do with Charles, but sometimes Max doesn’t know if he’s slowly going crazy, if he’s making the right decisions, if he’s simply being unreasonable.

Charles squints at him. They’ve never talked about this. They’ve barely talked about having children, and they especially have never talked about whether they would start karting. They both know it’s hard to escape, to follow a different path, but it’s not impossible, and Max would do anything notto see his own kids racing one day. “And you do not want him to?”

“It is not that I don’t want him. I just—” he trails off slowly.

“You are afraid,” Charles states, plain and simple. Like it’s that easy, like there’s nothing more to it, and maybe there isn’t. Maybe it’s just that. Maybe it is that easy.

“I guess,” Max says finally. “My sister has been talking about it for months now. And there is more than enough money to pay for a good kart and a different coach. Of course, I do not want him not to kart, and it would be cool to go to a race of his one day, but it just feels very weird.” He hesitates. “I kind of wish it would have never happened.”

Charles nods, but he doesn’t say anything, and Max forces his shoulders back and clasps his hands together, so he doesn’t start picking on the skin around his nails.

“She has found a coach,” he continues, “and he seems nice she says. She does not expect me to train Luka, and I told her I would not.” That should have been the end of it, he knows. Their dad isn’t training Luka, and no one expects him to get involved with it. There are no expectations, nothing that anyone wants from him, it’s exactly what he’s wanted, and yet it still feels wrong. He still feels wrong. He’s not sure it makes sense, that he can make sense of it.

He bites on his lip, tilts his head. “Maybe I only now realise how young we all had been. I think I can understand why my mum did not want me to start karting until I was older.”

But he’s also been Luka once, and he understands why he wants it now. He’d been the same, and he doesn’t regret it. Maybe that’s the worst part.

Max sighs. His eyes burn, and there’s a headache building behind his eyes. He wants to bury his face in his pillow and never wake up again. “How did it feel when Arthur started karting?”

Charles snorts. “I think I was too young to remember that. He started only a few years after me.”

“True.” Max doesn’t remember either how it felt when Victoria started karting. He just remembers that it had been fun to drive to the tracks together, that they constantly fought in the car, that they ran each other off the track so much that their dad used to get angry at them.

And then their parents divorced, and Victoria stopped karting, and Max was alone again.

“Maybe Luka does not even want to continue karting once he starts,” Charles says, but he sounds as sure of that as Max feels.

“Maybe,” Max just says.

“It is possible,” Charles insists, but there’s nothing of his usual conviction in his voice that he normally has when he tries to convince someone, that he always used to have when Ferrari started to fall apart at the seams again. “Remember all the other people that started karting with us? I wonder where all of them are now.”

Max grimaces. There’s a reason why his dad never wanted him to make friends with the boys karting with him. “Yes, not a lot of them are still around.” Max can feel Charles’ eyes on him, can feel them burn into his skin and through his flesh. He refuses to look at Charles.

“You are not worried about him karting, no?” Charles finally says, his voice is quiet, careful, and Max grits his teeth.

“What do you mean?” he asks even though he doesn’t even want to know the answer. Charles looks so sure, and Max knows he’s not going to get out of this even if he doesn’t ask.

“It is something different,” Charles notes with absolute certainty. His tone doesn’t allow any other option.

Max glances at him. “I do not know what you are talking about.”

Charles narrows his eyes at him. “Is it your dad?”

Max bites his tongue until he can taste blood. “My dad?” he asks then.

“You always look like this when your dad is involved.” Charles looks smug like he’s cracked the case, and maybe he has, but Max doesn’t quite follow him, doesn’t know what case Charles has solved because there is nothing to solve.

Max crinkles his nose. “No, my dad is not involved in this. Vic has been less in contact with him.” It’s been nice to hear. Of course, Vic has always been less in contact with their dad than Max. After the divorce, there had barely been any relationship between them, but they started rebuilding it after Victoria turned 18. Max doubts, knows, it has not done a lot of positives for her.

“But that does not have to mean anything,” Charles says.

Max closes his eyes. “But that does not have to mean anything,” he whispers.

Once his dad finds out that Luka has started karting, he will try and get involved, will force himself back into their lives, and Max isn’t sure if Victoria can stop it when their dad’s entire focus is suddenly on her, when after years and years, their dad cares about her, too.

And then it doesn’t matter what Luka’s choice is, whether he wants to continue or stop, once there is money involved, his dad won’t let go. But now, Max has enough money that his sister wouldn’t need to ask their dad.

Max hesitates. “I guess, maybe, I am worried that he will want to get involved.”

“And you do not want him to do so,” Charles states because they both know it to be true, because Charles has been around Max’s dad for longer than anyone else, because Charles has seen, witnessed it. Max always used to hate it when he was younger and smaller and more naïve.

Max laughs, but it’s short and bitter, and it hurts in his throat. “I really do not want him to.”

It’s quiet. Charles combs through Max’s hair, and Max wants to scream. Instead, his fingernails bite into the soft flesh of his palms. Instead, his head throbs, and his eyes burn, and there’s blood in his mouth.

“I always used to love karting against you,” Charles whispers, and Max shivers.

“It was fun,” he agrees. For the most part, it was fun. Max has always loved the tracks. He still loves them now. It’s fun to come back and relive what used to be their childhood. No, karting had never been the issue. And maybe Charles is right that it’s now not the issue either.

“Do you regret it?” Charles asks, and Max scoffs. He doesn’t think that for any of them it’s possible to regret it, not when they’re the best drivers in the world, when they’ve won races and championships, when they have achieved everything they have ever dreamt of, things that others will never reach.

No, Max doesn’t regret it.

He knows he would do the same again.

He frowns. “I do not regret it, of course, but—” He doesn’t say, I just wish it had been different. I just wish I hadn’t spent half my life away from everyone I know. I just wish it hadn’t been my dad. I just wish I had been happier.

Charles leaves for the next race without him.

He tries with big eyes and a pout to convince Max to come with him, but Max doesn’t think he can make himself go so soon again.

It’s also Baku, and Max doesn’t have the best memories of that Grand Prix.

Charles sighs and pouts and presses more kisses on Max’s face than is necessary for less than five days away. Max accepts them without complaint.

“Stay safe,” Max murmurs, and Charles just smiles at him, hugs him even tighter than he has before.

He doesn’t wink and blow a kiss at Max, with a cocky remark on his lips like he used to do when they were so much younger and more careless, jumping at every chance to show off, when it meant less.

He forces himself to sit down in front of his laptop that’s rarely been on in the past few months to reply to the emails he has been neglecting. Raymond has been keeping him up-to-date with the different Verstappen.com projects, and with a guilty pang in his chest, he realises that he should talk to Lully and Thierry soon.

He joins Team Redline for a voice call when they’re not streaming and although he’s not playing with them, it feels nice to let familiar voices wash over him, to joke with the other guys, to rehash old and stupid inside jokes that still make all of them laugh.

And once, it feels like the ceiling is falling on his head, he decides to head out and visit the shelter. Rocky looks at him with his big, brown eyes, and not for the first time, Max wonders if Charles would be fine with a shelter dog.

His cellphone is ringing. He squints at the screen, frowns when he can read Christian on it. They’ve talked during Monza, and it’s a race weekend. Surely, Christian has more important things to attend to than call Max.

A weird feeling settles in his stomach.

Maybe something has gone wrong.

Max accepts the call. “Christian?”

“Ah, Max! How are you? It’s good to hear from you.” It doesn’t sound like something is wrong, but Christian has always been particularly good at staying calm and collected unless the entire house is burning down.

“It is fine. Same to you, but I thought we had talked about the most important things two weekends ago.” Max cringes. Maybe that has been a bit too direct, but it’s not like Christian isn’t used to this from both him and his dad.

“Mostly,” Christian says and doesn’t elaborate.

“Mostly?” Max really doesn’t think there’s anything they have to discuss—at least, Raymond hasn’t mentioned anything in these emails or messages, and he can’t imagine that his manager wouldn’t know about something important.

“We’ve had discussions with Oliver and Helmut last weekend,” Christian offers, but it’s not really more of an explanation, doesn’t make things clearer.

“You know, I am not actually still part of Red Bull?” Max asks instead.

Christian laughs as if it’s a joke. It’s not. “Yes, we are well aware of that, mate.”

“Then why am I still part of your meetings?” That has probably been a bit too blunt, as well. With Helmut, it’s typically not as much of a problem, and Max can’t remember the last time he really had to look after his words when talking to Christian, but things are different now even if they still sometimes pretend like it’s not.

“Because we have an offer to make to you.”

Max blinks and blinks again, but Christian doesn’t laugh, and he doesn’t tell Max either that it’s some late April joke. He really is not sure what type of offer Red Bull could make him considering the situation.

“An offer,” he says flatly.

“Yes.” It still doesn’t sound like a joke.

Max clears his throat. “Okay.”

“We would like you to get involved with our driver development program.”

“What?” He’s not sure what he’s expected, but it’s not that. Max has not ever really been involved in that part of Red Bull’s work even if he’s talked with Helmut about the drivers more than enough, but he’s not ever really been part of it himself.

“The junior drivers know you,” Christian continues, and he sounds assured, self-certain like he’s expected that Max wouldn’t immediately agree, “and the development drivers like you. It makes sense, of course.”

“Of course,” Max repeats. He knows them, obviously. He’s worked closely with the development drivers throughout the last few years, and he knows the junior drivers because he’s watched them race. But he’s not kept up with any of it the past year, and he’s not talked to most of them either. He really doesn’t know where this is coming from or why Christian thinks this is a great job for him.

Although it’s not like he would mind working with the younger drivers—he’s done so throughout his entire career. He gets along with them well enough, and he probably knows a bit about their racing styles and issues. But he doesn’t think that’s enough to get involved with the junior academy.

“It is not just to help the drivers, but you could also help with developing the car,” Christian says in a tone that suggests he knows he can hook Max with that.

Max squints. He doesn’t think he would be much help with the car. Then he frowns. “Is this because of the last weekend?”

“Well, Max,” Christian says, “you have always shown that you have a big area of expertise. We could need that.” This made sense a year ago, when he was still able to race, when he wasn’t injured yet, when his back and his head didn’t constantly flare up, making most if not all of his former work impossible.

He is not the same anymore.

“I cannot sim race,” Max just says because he’s not sure Christian is really aware of that. He’s used Jake’s sim work to figure and smooth out some of the kinks of the car, and that’s just really not as efficient as it would be if he did the sim work himself. But that’s not possible. He can’t do that anymore. He doesn’t think they get it. He doesn’t think they get what he can do.

Sure, he can look at the data and the sim work and help them with the issues visible there, but so can the development drivers and so can the engineers. This is nothing that would require him.

“We are aware, and that’s not an issue, mate.” Christian sounds fond, but Max isn’t entirely sure if he’s just imagining it.

He raises his eyebrows. “Alright,” he says. Well, if they know…

“It’s less about the car and more about the drivers.”

“I guess that could work,” Max says, but he doesn’t know how to feel about it. He can help them. He likes to help them out and give them tips and tricks to get better, and he also likes answering questions, but he doesn’t want to coach anyone, doesn’t want to train them, doesn’t think he can.

He’s not going to coach Luka. There is no way he’s going to coach some other children.

“We’ll talk more about the exact details once you agree, so don’t worry,” Christian tells him.

Max nods. He’ll have to contact Raymond to inform him about this, and he should call his dad as well. He doesn’t want to call his dad. He really doesn’t.

“Whose idea was this?” he asks finally.

Christian hesitates. “It was Helmut’s idea, but I do agree with it.”

“Helmut’s idea?” Max snorts. This really shouldn’t be surprising. It makes sense that it would have been Helmut. It makes sense that he gets the others to agree as well. “Have the owners already agreed to it?”

“Yes,” Christian confirms. That was a fast decision, then. Faster than they normally are. “It would be just you who is missing.”

“Let me—” Max takes a deep breath. “Let me think about it.” It’s not a no. It’s not a yes either. He’ll have to talk to Raymond and Charles before making a decision. But it’s not a no. It could be something.

“Sure,” Christian says. “The earliest start would be 2026.”

Max coughs. “That is already in a few months.” There would be barely any time to get used to the work and get a good look at the car to be able to help out. With the new regulations and the new engine, it seems like even less time than it would normally be during any other season.

“It is,” Christian agrees.

It seems like a lot of pressure. But Max has always done well under it, has always done better than he normally could have, than he normally would have. His dad has always known that, too.

Though, with everything else going on, with all of Max’s issues, it’s not the same anymore. It’s possible that it won’t work as well as it used to do, that things have shifted now, that he won’t be much of an asset like he used to be.

“I don’t—” Max presses his lips together. He’s not going to tell Christian that he doesn’t know, not as long as he’s not talked to someone else about it first. “Okay. I will call you back, okay?”

“Don’t wait too long,” Christian says, but he sounds like he is smiling, and he almost sounds like he knows what Max’s answer will be—even though Max doesn’t even know it himself yet.

Zugzwang, Max only thinks. Once again, he’s back at this. Once again, he’s here once more. He knows what Michael would say, what he would tell Max to do. Sometimes, he wishes he could still talk to him.

It almost makes him feel guilty that he would prefer to talk to someone he hasn’t talked to in over a decade than to his own dad.

“Thank you, Christian,” he says, sarcasm tripping from his words. “That makes it so much easier.”

“Don’t sass me,” Christian tells him, amused.

Max scrunches his nose. “Don’t make it so easy, then.”

Chapter Text

You are at my feet, we’re by the fire
You’re a healthy, gentle, purring beast, and I’m alive
(If you were easy to kill, I would have done it already)
— Paris Paloma. hunter

Charles pokes Max’s cheek. “You are distracted,” he says, eyes squinting at Max.

“Hm?” Max only makes, not bothering to look up to properly meet Charles’ gaze. His back is burning, and it takes most of his concentration to put his focus elsewhere. Sometimes, it feels like it should be easier than it is, feels like he should be better at it than what he can do.

“Something is bothering you,” Charles says, and there’s something off about his voice. Max can’t pinpoint it.

He sits up, so that he doesn’t bother his back as much anymore, and now he can also look Charles in the eyes, hazy and distant. “What do you mean?”

Charles is pouting. “You are not listening to me.”

“Yes, I am!” Max argues, but Charles isn’t entirely wrong. He’s not been able to put much focus on the things Charles has been telling him for the past ten minutes, and normally, he listens to every single word Charles has to say even if he doesn’t want to.

“Then what did I just say?” Charles asks, and Max almost groans. Of course, he pulls out that now. Sometimes, Max wishes he didn’t like to listen to Charles as much as he likes to talk to him, so that this wouldn’t work, so that Charles wouldn’t know how to prove that Max has actually been distracted.

“Uhm. Something about the race?” he says, but it’s more a question than an answer, and Charles’ eyes narrow even more. There is no way Max is going to get out of this without offering Charles a satisfying answer first.

“Did someone bother you?” Charles tries. “Was it your dad again?”

“Charles,” Max hisses. Talking to his dad does put him in a bad mood more often than not, but that doesn’t mean that he’s only ever in a bad mood because of his dad. He has plenty of bad moods entirely without his dad’s help.

“Fine,” Charles caves, crossing his arms in front of his chest, “but something is bothering you.”

Max sighs. “And what if there is?” It’s as much of a confession as Max allows himself to give. He doesn’t really want to talk about it, hasn’t had enough time yet to think about it himself and come to a conclusion, but he might as well include Charles in this.

It won’t affect Charles, not really, though it’s not a bad idea to tell Charles, to get a different perspective, another opinion.

“You know you can always tell me anything,” Charles says, gentle and soft as he runs a hand through Max’s hair.

“I know,” Max sighs again, pushing into the touch. “It is not that.” He doesn’t ever want to give Charles the feeling that he doesn’t trust him, that he keeps things from him because he thinks Charles isn’t trustworthy, that he’s an outsider who doesn’t belong in Max’s world.

Sometimes, it just feels like Max is already putting too much on Charles, like Charles is not just dealing with his own issues but like he has to take care of Max’s as well, like Max is not quite pulling his weight in this relationship.

Charles looks at him. His expression is open, and his gaze is still gentle; gentler than Max deserves. “Then what is it?”

Max takes a deep breath. “Christian has called.”

“Christian?” Charles frowns. “Christian Horner?”

“Yes.” Max nods. His vision blurs before he blinks, trying to get his vision to realign. Charles’ face looks weirdly distant, the colours draining from his figure. Max takes another breath, blinks again, but the haze doesn’t disappear. Instead, he just closes his eyes.

Charles stops combing through Max’s hair, his hand a heavy weight against Max’s head. “What did he say? I thought you had talked in Monza.”

“We have,” Max confirms. They did. Just not about this, about the actually important things, about what they should have talked about, but back then, they also didn’t know yet, then Max was a visitor and nothing else.

“But?” Charles prompts.

Max shrugs. It feels difficult against the weight of Charles’ hands on his shoulders and in his hair. “He had an offer. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what?” Charles just sounds confused, but it’s hard to focus on this conversation, to collect his thoughts and make it make sense.

“If I take the offer.” If I feel ready to come back, he could say or, If I feel like I can tackle a job like this.

Charles is probably still frowning at him. Max forces his eyes open again. “What is the offer?”

“Something about the Red Bull driver development program,” Max says. “It is…I guess, it has to do with coaching them, something similar to what Helmut is doing, just more hands-on, that kind of thing. Christian has not been entirely clear about it. He said I would get more details.”

It sounds like a nice thing, like something Max would enjoy. He imagines the way multiple people try to find a way to lure Max back in, to find something that’s almost impossible to pass up on. Other people would kill to have an opportunity like this. But it’s just not only about that.

“It would fit you,” Charles says.

“It might,” Max agrees. Or it might not. Or it might end up with him screaming at too young children who don’t know better, with late nights and frozen hands, with tears and frustration and anger. With everything he doesn’t want to be, and everything he might become anyway.

“You like helping the rookies,” Charles points out, which is true, of course. Max likes helping the rookies, and he likes seeing them get better and extract more and more time as they grow more confident.

“But that is not a job,” Max says, “I don’t have to do that. I do it because I like them and because I want to help them. It would feel different if it were a job.” He’d offered to help Red Bull because he could, not because he had to.

Charles doesn’t seem to share the same apprehensions as Max. He just shrugs. But he also doesn’t entirely get why Max doesn’t want to teach his nephews. He understands it, knows, but Max knows he doesn’t get it. Charles would teach his own niblings in a heartbeat if he had the chance to do so, but Charles would also be good at it, would be everything that Max can’t be. “You would still do well, and I do think that you would like it, yes?”

Max sighs. “Maybe.”

“I am sure you would like it, but if you do not want to do it, then it is fine, too,” Charles simply says because it should be this easy. “You don’t have to do any of it even when it is Christian Horner calling you.”

Zugzwang, Max thinks. It always comes back to this, to a summer more than a decade ago.

Charles grasps Max’s hand. “Is it the same reason why you do not want to coach Luka?” he asks quietly, like he is afraid that someone might overhear them, like it is some sort of secret that no one knows about, instead of a fact that everyone is aware of.

Your dad? he could ask, and this time, Max wouldn’t stop to point out that it’s not just his dad. His dad has never bothered to be quiet about this kind of thing, to handle issues behind closed doors. People knew, people still know.

Max will turn out the same.

He hopes he will never have children who want to start racing.

Max is quiet. “I don’t know.” It might as well be.

Charles leaves again, and Max almost agrees to come with him. He clings to Charles more than he has before, and he doesn’t even care about not admitting to it.

“I cannot wait for winter break,” Charles groans, hefting his suitcase out of the door of their apartment. “This is the worst. You are sure you do not want to come with me?”

Max sits back in the wheelchair, stares at Charles, who simply looks back at him. “You are already late.”

Charles pouts. “Fine.”

“Don’t do anything I would not do,” Max says, patting Charles’ arm. “And do everything I would do.”

Charles narrows his eyes at him. “I am not going to start terrorising the grid, Verstappen.” He should, and he should start to terrorise his team as well when he’s already at it.

Max shrugs, grins. Charles has never even experienced him at his worst in Formula One. “I am just saying it would make your life easier.” It’s why they used to work so well together on track, because they knew they would crash each other out without hesitation if the situation demanded it of them.

Charles should start to implement the same level of fear on the rest of the grid. In fact, he should do worse.

Charles levels an unimpressed look at him. “Maybe I can get the FIA to change rules because of me.”

Max nods sagely. “That is definitely something missing on your résumé.”

“You are a bad influence,” Charles says.

Max holds up his hands innocently. “I am just saying.”

 “Don’t— Lully, don’t overtake here,” Max says, eyes glued to the screen. He’s driven this track hundreds and hundreds of times before, and overtaking into this corner is just an unnecessary risk.

Chris has already managed to make it into the back of another car.

Max groans. There’s smoke.

Crane cackles in the background. “Too late, mate.”

“I should run another boot camp,” Max grumbles. “At least, Bubbles listens to me.”

“You should,” Gianni agrees. “They’re all shit.”

“You’re the worst,” Chris argues. “Max, do something about him.”

This time, it’s Seb who reaches out, who tells Max that he’s again in Monaco, who asks if he wants to meet Seb in some small café.

Sure, Max texts back because he doesn’t have anything else to do anyway.

When Max tells Charles about it, he can hear the pout through the phone. “You see him more than me, and he was my teammate,” Charles complains. “Tell him, he should not only come to Monaco when I am not there.”

So, Max finds himself in a café somewhere in the outskirt area of Monaco after a short visit to the shelter. Rocky had been lying at his feet when Max had needed to leave, and he’d barely managed to do so after Rocky started to whimper. Instead, he’d promised to visit again the next day, to actually take him on a walk then.

It always surprises him when he doesn’t meet anyone he knows, but all the other drivers are gone for the race, and Max has always been great at ignoring people he doesn’t want to talk to. He’d gotten especially good at it during his early karting days.

Now, he just wonders how Seb knows this café—until he spots a sign that says everything can be made in a vegan version, and then he doesn’t wonder at all anymore.

There’s a bit of small talk, but Max is impatient, and Seb is German, so there’s not a lot of it beyond a short mention of the weather, a complaint about the horrific traffic, a quick exchange about how Hanna and the children are doing. Seb mentions that the Gotthard Tunnel has been horrible as always, and there’s nothing surprising about that. Max could have told him so much, too.

“Christian made me an offer,” Max says eventually, taking a sip from his Red Bull. A can in a café is ridiculously expensive, but Max decided he could treat himself every now and then to it. His issue is not that he lacks money. For all Max cares, he wouldn’t need to work another day in his life if it were about the money.

Seb raises an eyebrow. His hands are wrapped around a cup of coffee. It’s still steaming, and Max will never not wonder how people can drink it. That’s why he could never have driven for Ferrari anyway. They would have killed him. “About the driver development program?”

Max frowns, swishing around the can. “Did he make you the same offer?” he asks. It wouldn’t exactly surprise him. He knows that they regret losing Seb, and he also knows that Seb will forever be a part of Red Bull. They’re not Ferrari, but it still feels impossible to leave.

Seb grins. “No, but he talked to me,” he says, and he sounds smug in a way Max hasn’t heard from him since his early Ferrari days.

Max blinks. “He talked to you?” He feels like he should be offended that Seb knew before him.

“Apparently, he thought that I would be able to gauge your reaction the best,” Seb says it casually, just shrugs like it doesn’t mean anything. Max bites on his lip. It doesn’t mean anything to Seb.

Max pulls a grimace. “What the fuck?” Christian and him have worked together for a decade. Seb has been around at Red Bull for less than that.

“I told him he’s known you since you were 16,” Seb says.

For a moment, Max just stares into the air. He is getting old.

“15, technically,” he mutters then, glaring at the Red Bull can. He should have ordered something else.

“Exactly,” Seb agrees. “So, he should know better than me what your reaction to this would be.”

Max sighs, takes another sip. “Why did he even call you?” he asks, but it’s more rhetorical than anything else. “It is not like we were ever on the same team.”

“Maybe he thought we’re similar enough.”

Max has seen the way Red Bull used to—still does—talk about Seb. Maybe they really think that. He can admit so much that they are not as different as he used to think, as he wanted them to be, as people nowadays make them seem. He doesn’t think Seb showed his bite to the younger drivers in the same way as he had shown Max. He’s gotten over it by now.

He taps against the table. “Well, if he thinks that. What would you do?”

Seb shrugs. “That is your own decision. I can’t make it for you.” It would be easy if people just made Max’s decisions for him, if they told him what to do and what not to, if there was a GP sitting next to his ear at all times.

Then he thinks about his dad, their last phone calls and grimaces. Or maybe he’s had enough of that for the entirety of the rest of his life. It used to be nice when he was a child, when life was easy, and there was not a lot to worry about except for the next race and the next exam. Now, though, he doesn’t think his dad still knows what Max wants.

Max doesn’t know either.

“That was useless,” he deadpans.

“Thank you,” Seb says, then he pauses. His expression has gotten serious again. “Do what feels the best for you.”

Max just presses his lips into a thin line at that. “You are exactly like Charles.”

“He did learn from the best,” Seb says, sounding smug again. There’s a glimmer in his eyes, and for a moment, Max wonders how much of a good idea it really would be to let Seb know that Charles wants to meet him again.

“Why did I even ask?” Max sighs, shakes his head. When he takes a sip from his Red Bull, he makes a face. It’s slowly getting warm. He puts it back down, lays his fingers against the table instead, so that he doesn’t make it even worse.

Seb follows his gaze. “It’s horrible,” he says. “I know I shouldn’t drink it anymore, but there’s something ridiculously addicting about it.”

Max laughs. “I know,” he says. “I probably should not drink them anymore. Charles hates that I still do it, but…” He shrugs. But Charles is a little hypocrite who very much also drinks Red Bull and various other energy drinks, though Max doesn’t think he likes Celsius all that much. At least, Charles has never ever brought home a Celsius before, and he still buys Max Red Bulls.

Seb rolls his eyes. “I know what you mean. Hanna is the same.” He drops his volume. “I can only drink them in secret now that the kids are older.”

Max snorts. If they had children, Charles would probably force him to remove the small fridge they have still in the living room. Charles hates it, but it’s the perfect place for Max’s championship trophy. If Charles wins this year, Max is going to offer a place next to his, although Max fears, this would be reason enough for Charles to break up with him.

It’s quiet. Seb leans back in his chair, tilts his head. “What do you want, Max?” he finally asks.

Max sits up straighter. “I do not know.” And he doesn’t. This, he knows, is the truth. He could, he knows, he could. He just doesn’t know if he could do well, if he could live up to the expectations people have for him, if he could offer them what they need, to know what will push them forward to do their best, not to push them forward until they break.

“For what it’s worth,” Seb says, “I think you would do well. I’ve seen the way you are around the younger drivers.” He sounds truthful. His face is open, his eyes are warm. Max has rarely seen Seb like this. It sounds like the truth, like he means it, like it might be possible.

Max bites his lip. “But it is not the same, is it?” he says, then. It is not, they both know, it is not. Surely, Seb thinks the same, but Seb just shrugs.

“You’re never going to find out unless you try it,” he follows it up.

Max rolls his eyes. “You sound like one of those desk diaries my mum has.” He hates that it’s true.

“It’s the truth,” Seb points out, and Max has the urge to hiss at him, but he doesn’t because he’s a 27-year-old man and not Sassy.

“What if I fuck it up?” he says, and there’s something vulnerable in his voice that he hates even more.

“You’re not going to be the only one. And even so, you know what it takes. You’ve done it yourself.” He says it so easily, so determined. He says it like it’s the truth, and it is. Max knows what it takes. He’s been there himself.

It’s exactly why he’s so worried about it.

“Just be yourself,” Seb tells him, like it’s not the hardest thing Max has ever done.

Brad is happy to hear that his headaches have gotten less. “That’s a good sign,” he says. “They’ll probably never completely vanish, but…”

But, at least, Max doesn’t have to deal with them as often anymore. It could be worse if he works more with the simulators, if there are too many screens to look at, but he hopes it shouldn’t be too much of an issue. Watching TV has gotten better as long as the screen doesn’t flicker, as long as nothing moves too quickly. Sometimes, though, it still feels like it did in COTA all those years ago.

Chronic headaches, his neurologist had said. Max has never had chronic issues. But that’s just one of the many things he’s never had, one of the many things he’ll simply have to deal with. There’s no other option.

“Hopefully, they will not get worse again,” Max mutters, thinking about the sim racing, the fast cuts and quick movements, then he suppresses a groan. He’ll have to talk to his neurologist first to make sure these things will be fine and won’t actively worsen his issues.

Brad raises an eyebrow. “Don’t overdo it,” he simply says.

“I will not,” Max promises.

He tells his mum that he wants to make a donation; he doesn’t explain to her that he spoke to Vic or that he’s been reading through articles detailing all the money they’d need, all the money they don’t have when he tries to distract himself from the decision he still hasn’t made—he can hear the confusion in her voice when she tells him that he doesn’t have to, and he can’t explain either why he’s suddenly showing interest in it when he has never before.

Max doesn’t know a lot about people in need or group homes, or even social work altogether even though his mum has been working as a social worker ever since she stopped racing. But now, it’s not like he is lacking time—or money.

His mum just accepts it with growing confusion that he’ll take the jet the next time Charles is gone for the weekend.

Charles raises his eyebrows when Max announces that he’ll fly to Belgium, but Max just kisses him and tells him that he has something to take care of. Max does not tell him the details just yet, and Charles does not ask.

It’s stupid, maybe, to fly to Belgium just for a donation, but Max doesn’t know how larger donations outside of the EU work, and it’s nice, in a way, to leave the country for something else than Formula One-related activities. He’s also not seen his mum in months, hasn’t been able to talk much to her except for botched calls that get cut short, calls in which they haven’t been able to talk about most topics because she only asks about him and never lets him ask about her.

If he’s honest with himself, he doesn’t know a lot of her work, of what she’s doing, and it bothers him more than he’s ever realised it would do.

It makes his stomach hurt and his vision spin because he’s not really been asking Victoria either how she’s doing, because sometimes, he doesn’t even know how Charles is feeling.

The administration is on the third floor, and Max has never been more thankful to see a lift than here.

“The other floors are group homes,” his mum says when she notices Max glancing at the doorbell panel. “One for families and the other one for children.”

Max swallows and nods.

It doesn’t take long for them to deal with the paperwork, and his mum doesn’t ask him just once if he’s sure about it. If he wasn’t sure about this, he wouldn’t know what it would say about him.

He leaves first after he signed the cheque because his mum still has a few things to talk about with her colleagues, and he can tell from the way her eyebrows furrow that it’s not something he should be hearing about.

He leans against the elevator wall to take some weight off of his legs, but the ride is too short for it to help, and when he steps out of it, he just hopes no one else has snatched up the bench next to the entrance.

He pushes the door open, comes to a stop. There’s a girl sitting on the bench. She doesn’t look up, and she doesn’t acknowledge him either. He gets it—he does the same in the paddock as well. Sometimes, he also does it when he’s in Monaco and sees an acquaintance he doesn’t want to speak to.

“Hey,” Max says, waves with one hand, his crutches in his other. He feels awkward, but it would be even worse if he ignored the girl.

The child looks up. She looks like she’s twelve, maybe, but Max has never been good at guessing ages, and he’s especially never been good at guessing the ages of children.

“I am Max,” he says, smiles.

“Emma,” she says, not reciprocating the smile. Max gets it. “What are you doing here? Do you work here?”

“I’m waiting for my mum,” he says, grimacing inwardly when he realises that it’s possibly not the best idea to mention his parents to children who have been taken away from their parents.

Emma nods, pulls her knees to her chest. “I’m waiting for my mum, too,” she says. He tries not to show the surprise on his face. He wasn’t aware that they still had contact with their parents—or that they were allowed to visit here. He really has a lot more catching up to do.

“Is she supposed to come visit you?” he asks.

Emma shrugs. “She’s supposed to pick me up. I have therapy, and she always brings me.” She squints at him, then back at the floor. “What time is it?”

Max glances at his watch. It’s one of the few he’s been gifted for the brand sponsorship—it’s tacky and ugly. He doesn’t even know why he still owns it, or why he reached for it. “16:30.”

“She’s late again,” Emma notes. There’s no inflexion in her voice, nothing that could make him believe that she’s annoyed by it, like it’s just a fact, like it’s happened so often it’s not even worth talking about it.

“Is there someone else who can bring you?” Max asks. He can’t imagine that missing her therapy appointment is good.

“I don’t think,” Emma says. Then, she sighs. “It’s always like that.”

Max frowns. “That your mum doesn’t get you?”

Emma nods. “She’s probably at the train station again,” she says, fiddling with her shoelaces. She doesn’t sound bothered by this either.

“The train station?” Max can’t imagine what would be so important at the train station to not pick up your child—but there has to be a reason why Emma is here and not with her parents.

Emma shrugs. “It’s always more important than me,” she says, and once again, she says it like a matter of fact, like there is nothing else to say about it, nothing to discuss. “Everything is always more important than me.”

“I am sure it is not like that,” Max says, but it feels awkward, and it doesn’t feel like the right thing to say. He doesn’t know Emma, and he doesn’t know her parents either.

“It is.” Emma sniffs. Her eyes are red-rimmed, and her lips are raw, and for a moment, she looks like Victoria when she was ten. “She’s only ever cared about my grades and her stupid alcohol.”

Max swallows. He doesn’t want to think about that. “I’m—”

“Max! Here you are,” his mum interrupts, then she notices the girl sitting on the bench, and her face softens. “Oh, hi, Emma.”

“Hi, Sophie,” Emma mutters. She doesn’t look up again.

His mum sits down next to the girl, who immediately shuffles closer. Max’s hands tremble. “Did your mum not come again?”

“Yeah,” Emma says, both of her arms tightly wrapped around her knees. Max just feels nauseous. He’s not sure how his mum can stomach this every day.

“I’m sorry,” his mum says.

Emma shrugs, but now her shoulders are taut and tense and straight. “It’s fine,” she says, and her voice is steady even though her eyes are still red-rimmed and glassy, even though she still looks close to tears. “I don’t want her to pick me up anymore.”

“I’m sure we can arrange that,” his mum agrees, throwing a grimace at Max. “How about we go to the office and see if someone is there who can bring you instead?”

“Okay,” Emma says. Her hands are balled into fists. He can’t tell if she’s angry or sad or determined—or maybe, it’s all three. Maybe she can’t decide either.

His mum just looks sad. “Max, can you stay here?” she asks.

“Sure,” Max says, nods. His stomach hurts. He doesn’t think he could handle walking into the group home now, anyway.

“Let’s go, Emma,” his mum says, holding out a hand for the girl to take. She hops off the bench, clasps his mum’s hand tightly.

“Bye, Emma,” Max says gently.

“Bye,” Emma says. She’s still looking at the floor.

“How long has Emma been here?” Max breaks the silence, finally. They’re in his mum’s car on their way back to her place, and he’s not sure what’s there to say, what’s there to do.

“A couple of years, on and off,” his mum says, sighs. “Normally, the goal is to reunite families, but her parents are still alcoholics, and her mum lashes out when she brings home bad grades. There’s not a lot of progress that we can focus on.”

Max nods, leans back against the seat. His head has started to throb again. “So, she will just stay at the group home?”

“Some of them do,” his mum confirms.

It’s hard to imagine—his dad was always around. He still is.

“Often, I will watch them wait for their parents for hours, and then their parents can’t even bother to hug them back,” his mum says. Her fingers are white around the steering wheel. “Of course, it’s better than the other things.”

Max doesn’t ask what those other things are.

“Seeing how these parents talk to their children scares me,” she confesses. “I never want to talk badly about your dad because you’re old enough to make your own decisions, but seeing the way he talked to you scared me, too.”

Max blinks. He doubts that his dad is anywhere close to those parents, that it’s even remotely comparable. Sometimes, his dad can be an asshole, but he’s always been like that, and he loves Max. He’s sure of that. At least, his dad didn’t just care about him when it came to his grades, didn’t just care—

He bites on his lip until the sting turns into a burn. There is no blood, and his mouth is dry.

They’ve not talked about anything other than racing in months. Max doesn’t even remember the last time they talked about something else—if there was ever something else.

But that doesn’t mean anything. It’s not the same. It’s not even close.

His mum is still looking straight ahead, still has her eyes focused on the streets only, when she normally always glances at him, when she’s normally never this rigid.

“Do you know these parents gave up their children willingly? Otherwise, the court would have forced them to. For some of them, it would have been better, I think, then they wouldn’t have their parental rights anymore,” his mum says, and there is something weirdly hard in her voice. He barely ever hears her like that—he only ever hears her like that when she’s talking about his dad.

“I should have never let him walk away with you.” She doesn’t say it like a confession, like it’s something she doesn’t want the world to hear. Her voice is steady and certain, and Max doesn’t think he’s breathing.

He’s not sure how they got here, how they went from Emma and the group home to Max and his dad.

His mum breathes out heavily. “He’s never been a nice man. I’ve always hoped he would be a better dad, but that didn’t happen, and he didn’t change.”

“He could,” Max says.

She shrugs. “He never has. Not for me, not for you, not for Vic. Not even for his children now.”

It’s not hard to believe that it was one of the many arguments they used to have before their divorce, when their voices were carried through the entire house, and Vic sought safety in Max’s room.

It’s true. Max knows it’s true. Sometimes, the mechanics will tell stories from when Max was a child, and nothing has changed since then. He knows it’s true—it would be hard not to. But it stings. Somehow, it stings. Max doesn’t know why when it shouldn’t.

“He still could,” Max whispers, and he’s not sure whether he’s trying to convince his mum or himself.

“Maybe,” she says. “If he wanted to, but I’m not sure he wants to.”

“I don’t know,” Max admits, because he doesn’t, because his dad has never liked change. But Max has also never liked change either.

And Max had needed to accept change—maybe his dad could, too.

“I don’t know either,” she agrees, but she doesn’t sound hopeful, doesn’t sound like she really believes anything else. “Only he knows.”

Max nods slowly. It won’t ever be a conversation he has with his dad, he doesn’t think. It’s nothing his dad would be open to talk about, nothing that he’d be willing to accept. It’ll be futile and useless. He’s not sure how things could change otherwise. But they could, he’s sure they could.

The rest of the drive is quiet—Max doesn’t have more to say, doesn’t know what else there is to say, and his mum’s face is only stony.

Just before she drives into the parking lot in front of her house, she breathes out shakily. “I couldn’t get you out.”

“Because I wanted it,” Max reminds her, because that’s the truth, because he’d wanted to stay with his dad and chase a dream that was nothing but smoke then. His hands shake, and he just feels cold.

His mum shrugs. “I still wish I had done more.”

“Can you show me how you make the tomato soup?” Max asks as they clean up the last bits of dinner. He manoeuvres easily around the kitchen, and it feels weird now, in a way he didn’t expect it to do after he was here in the wheelchair the last time.

But it’s been months since then, and things have changed.

His mum frowns at him. “I gave you the recipe already,” she says, which is true, but when Max attempted to cook it the last time, he still managed to set off the fire alarm even if that wasn’t fully his own fault.

“It did not really work out?” he says, but it sounds more like a question.

His mum sighs, shakes her head, but she looks amused as if she can’t believe how Max has survived the past twenty years. Sometimes, he’s not entirely sure of that himself. “What didn’t work out?”

“I burned it,” he admits.

“You burned soup?” his mum asks, voice deadpan. He also always used to wonder how it was possible to burn things mostly consisting of water, but that was before this happened.

Max coughs. This is embarrassing. “Maybe?”

His mum laughs. “How did you even manage to do that?”

Max can feel his cheeks burning. It’s not exactly something he wants to be telling his mum about. “Charles distracted me,” he settles on.

“Max,” his mum says, exasperated. The next time, he’ll help out in the kitchen, she’s probably going to give him yet another lecture about kitchen safety. Though, he definitely deserves it this time. “But yes, I can show you how to make tomato soup.”

Max smiles at her. “Thank you.”

His mum shakes her head again and loads the last plates into the dishwasher.

“You know I always ate tomato soup on Thursdays before races,” he says, and somehow it’s easy to say. It’s easier than he would have expected it to be.

“I know,” she says, and when she looks up, her smile is gentle and soft.

Max swallows.

“But I have not had it in ages because of that,” he says, because he’s run out of frozen soup cubes some time ago, and Brad doesn’t look at his diet plan as much as he used to, so there’s no reason for the tomato soup to be prepared anymore. “Which is stupid, of course, because it is my favourite dish.”

“We can’t have that, of course,” she agrees.

“It is really not the same when it’s not yours,” he says, and his mum ruffles his hair, but it’s true. It’s not the same thing—even at the restaurants, it never hits the spot the same way.

“It’s really easy,” she says, but Max did manage to burn the soup.

With the tomatoes laid out in front of them, it certainly feels like something Max should be capable of doing without his mum’s help. But maybe it’s also just nice to spend some time with her before he has to fly back to Monaco. They never really used to cook together when Max was younger, and after that, Max hadn’t been around enough for them to do something like this. Not that he would have wanted to do that. He’d rather preferred to play with his sister.

“Is there a reason why you want to learn it now?” his mum asks.

Max shrugs. “You always made it for me before the races when I was a kid, and it was always kind of part of the race weekend,” he says, carefully washing the tomatoes. She always did it before karting races when his parents weren’t yet divorced, and every time she came to a race after that, she always made sure to have some soup with her.

It’s never changed even if the last years, it was frozen soup reheated or Brad organising some for him.

He misses it, misses it like he misses racing, like he misses Formula One, but he can still have this. He can’t have racing anymore, but this is still possible.

“Like a good luck charm?” she asks.

“I mean, not really? Maybe? I don’t know.” It’s less a good luck charm and more a part of his routine. Race weekends weren’t complete without the soup. Maybe it was a good luck charm, in a way, even though it hasn’t always brought him a lot of luck.

But it’s a nice memory when he remembers Abu Dhabi, when his mum actually came over to make him the soup. Maybe it’s brought him luck, then.

“Do you remember when you made it before Abu Dhabi in 2021?” Max shrugs again. “I guess it would be fun to do the same for Charles, like, as a way to wish him luck, I guess? Of course, not just the tomato soup, I mean.”

He’d been thinking about it—about a date night, maybe home-made food before the last race. Something to calm Charles’ nerves, a way to wish him good luck. Something to say thank you to Charles after everything he has done for Max.

It’s a nice thought to do this for Charles, and maybe, maybe it makes it easier to deal with the burning jealousy in his stomach.

He’s not going to get the best boyfriend of the year award for this, it’s not even anything that should be acknowledged as more than nice, but it lessens the sting a bit, lets him actually be able to look Charles in the eyes.

Max clears his throat. “Originally, I wanted to make pizza, but I think it would be better if I did not.” He’s never made dough himself. This is not going to be the first thing he’ll try.

“You could have just bought the pre-made dough,” his mum points out.

“That is too easy,” Max says. “It also does not taste the same.” It never does. It always tastes worse than it looks, always leaves him disappointed and craving actual pizza. That’s not exactly what he wants to put on the table to wish Charles good luck for his last race of the season.

“So, the tomato soup,” his mum says.

“And pizza,” Max says. “From his favourite pizza place.” It’s a small, family-owned restaurant. It’s tiny, and there’s never enough space to eat out there, but Charles loves it, and Max likes it because it makes Charles beam.

“That sounds nice,” his mum says.

Max shrugs. “I hope he likes it even if the pizza is not self-made, but he probably would rather prefer not to have burned pizza.” Which, probably, would be the result of Charles bothering Max the entire time he is in the kitchen, and then afterwards, too when they are waiting for the pizza to come out of the oven. It is not exactly Max’s fault when Charles distracts him so much that they don’t hear the timer.

His mum laughs. “He probably would eat the burned pizza if it meant that it’s from you.”

Max rolls his eyes. “I do not want to give him burned pizza.” Especially not for the meal before he might win his first championship. Max is not going to let that happen—even if he knows that Charles not only would eat it, but also like it.

“I can teach you the soup today,” his mum offers, “and then the pizza the next time we see each other.”

Max nods in agreement. “Deal.”

His phone is ringing. Max’s head hurts, and his stupid phone is ringing.

He reaches for it blindly, sends a glare at it before a groan slips from his lips. Of course, it’s his dad. It’s always his dad when Max can barely focus, when he’s still half-asleep, when he’d rather go for a run than have to talk to his dad. Max hates running.

“Yes?” Max answers. He feels groggy. He can even hear it in his voice. It’s futile to hope that his dad doesn’t hear it, too. He should have never picked it up, should have ignored it, should have taken care of it once he feels clearer in his head, once he feels like he can actually think, but it’s too late for that now.

“Have you been sleeping?” his dad asks, and if it were anyone else, Max would expect it to be out of worry. He doesn’t confuse it here. The disdain is clear in his dad’s voice.

“No,” Max lies. “I just—” He flounders for an explanation that actually makes sense and comes up with nothing. “I have been busy,” he just ends up saying. Busy with sleeping. Busy with living his life.

“Is it your dad again?” he can hear Charles’ voice say, and Max has never realised before how much he dreads these calls with his dad.

His dad grunts, but he doesn’t say more, and Max hopes that for once in his life, his dad simply doesn’t have the energy for that. Maybe then, this phone call will be better than their last ones.

“Raymond told me about the offer Red Bull made you,” his dad says. He doesn’t follow it up, doesn’t offer more than that, doesn’t give Max an option to hold onto and make his case from there. Max still knows what his dad wants, what he’s going to say. Driver or nothing, that’s always how it’s worked. Max doubts it has changed now.

“She’s only ever cared about my grades,” Emma says.

Max presses his lips together. “They did,” he says. “It is a nice offer.” It is. They wouldn’t have needed to make him one at all, especially because it had been their idea, despite all the issues that would make it harder for him to fulfil his job than it would have been for other people.

“A nice offer,” his dad repeats, and the disbelief in his voice is obvious.

Max grits his teeth. Next, his dad is going to suggest that Max should start driving rally, that he should get in the Verstappen.com GT3 car himself, that he should force his way back in a Formula One car because it’s that easy, because Max should just suck it up. Maybe his sister is right. Maybe it would be easier if he didn’t have as much contact with his dad as he used to have.

“It is,” Max says. “That they give me this option, considering they did not have to.”

His dad scoffs. “If you had taken care of this earlier, you wouldn’t be in need of something like this.”

“Dad,” Max says. “It is a great offer, and it is not the end of it all.” He doesn’t even know why he’s defending this. He’s not yet made his decision, and even if he had, it wouldn’t be his dad’s worry at all. It would be nothing that would concern him. He doesn’t have to like it. Max doesn’t care.

“Did you already say yes?” his dad asks.

“No,” Max says, “but I am going to.” Another lie. Maybe. Max doesn’t know yet. But it leaves his dad with fewer options, makes it clear what Max wants and what he doesn’t. Once, it’s done, it’s done, and then there is nothing that his dad can still do about it.

It’s a satisfaction he didn’t think he’d ever want, but now, for a moment, it feels good.

When he tries hard enough, he can see his dad raise his eyebrows. Even now, he looks judgemental, like he can’t believe this is something Max is considering. Maybe Max can’t imagine it himself.

“That’s what you want to do?” Jos sneers. “A glorified babysitter?”

“What is your idea, Dad?” Max hisses.

But before his dad can answer, Max has already hung up on him. The phone rings once more, but this time, Max just stares at it, doesn’t answer the call, doesn’t even reach for it.

Maybe his mum has been right.

He’s sick of this.

“Shh,” he whispers, holding out a hand to let Rocky sniff it, who just looks at him with big brown eyes. It’s been weeks, and Rocky lets Max actually come close to him now. Sometimes, he even lies down next to Max when he has a bit more free time and can actually spend time in Rocky’s kennel.

He still always offers Rocky his hand first.

Rocky pushes his snout against Max’s fingers, and Max slowly sits down. He grimaces as his knees crack, but there’s no pain accompanying it.

He probably should help out more with the other duties here, but he’d been told that it is fine, that they mostly hire the volunteers so that they can spend time with the dogs. There is no one else to socialise the dogs, to play with them, no one to make sure that they don’t grow lonely in their kennels. Max isn’t going to complain about it.

“My dad is an asshole,” Max whispers like it’s a secret between just the two of them. “Everyone knows that. I know it, too, of course. It is hard not to.”

He knows what the other children used to say about him. He also knows what the adults used to say, how they would look at his dad with disdain, how they were too scared of him to speak out. He remembers walking around for hours with his helmet on, tears running down his cheeks, and no one saying anything. He hadn’t understood why the mechanics would comfort his teammates, but never him. Why they wouldn’t even look at him when they hugged the other kids. He knows now.

He doesn’t blame them for it. He wouldn’t know either how he would have reacted, what he would have done differently, if he had done things differently. Maybe he would have just watched, too. Maybe he would end up regretting it, would end up wishing he had changed things, would have helped. He doesn’t know.

He sighs, presses the balls of his thumb against his eyes.

His mum never talked badly about his dad, but she never needed to. He’d seen it, had seen the way his dad had treated her, had been in court to help testify against his dad for the restraining order, had seen what the relationship with his dad had done to her.

Sometimes, he wonders how his mum can look at him, knowing that Max had chosen his dad for a career that had not yet been certain, that had been nothing but a dream on the horizon. Nothing but a wish easily dispersed by the wind.

“But he is still my dad, you know?” he says finally.

Rocky whines; his tail hits the floor behind him, and Max slowly strokes his head. His fur is silky soft between his fingers, and Max can already imagine the complaining the cats will do when they smell a dog on him. The last time, Max had come back from the shelter, Sassy had ignored him for the entire day.

“Sometimes, I don’t know what to do,” Max confesses.

He breathes out. Now that Max is petting him, Rocky has stopped whining. Instead, he rests his head on his paws, eyes turned to Max. His eyes are big, warm, and there’s nothing but trust in them. Max will never be able to understand how someone could have hurt him.

Max presses his lips into a smile. “But I guess, there is no other way but forward.”

Max calls Christian. He won’t admit to it, and Christian doesn’t need to know about that either, but the phone call with his dad keeps bothering him. 

He’s not talked to him since, and if he’s honest, he also doesn’t really want to. There’s no reason for it, not as long as his dad wants things that are no longer possible, unless he can allow less. But Max knows it won’t ever be enough unless he is back in Formula One as a driver, and that’s something he’s accepted won’t be possible again. His dad hasn’t. Really, there’s no point in talking about this anymore.

Max tried to tell himself that he doesn’t care, but he does, so now he’s calling Christian instead.

“I want to get a better idea of what my job is supposed to look like,” Max says instead of a greeting.

Christian hums. “That’s definitely feasible, mate.” He doesn’t sound surprised at all.

“It is hard to decide when you do not really know what exactly is part of it,” Max continues even though he probably really doesn’t need to, but he doesn’t want to make Christian think that he’s already accepted the offer.

“Do you want to come to a race or just the factory?” Christian just asks.

“A race,” he says quickly, then he pauses, reconsiders. “Both.” He knows the mechanics, has worked with them for more than a decade, but it’s different when he’s not a driver anymore, when his job description entails something entirely different.

“First the factory, then the race?” Christian suggests.

Max shrugs. “Sure.” It’s probably a bit spontaneous to make it happen for the next race anyway.

He can hear a mouse clicking through the phone. “I doubt you want to do Singapore,” Christian finally says.

“Please no,” Max just says. Christian laughs. They all hate Singapore. The car hates Singapore, too. It’s not a great track to get to know the specifics, to maybe get some first experience. “I will do COTA.”

“Are you sure?” Christian asks, and Max would ask why Christian sounds so hesitant if not for the fact that Max hasn’t been in a plane for this long since the accident. Though, he’s sure that it’ll be fine, that it shouldn’t bring any issues. The symptoms have gotten better, and his doctors have cleared him for the last flights as well.

“Yes,” he says with certainty. There’s a pull of determination he’s not felt in a long time.

“Then we’ll do COTA,” Christian says, and Max imagines the way he nods once, like he always does when they’ve come to a decision.

“Great,” Max says. For a moment, he considers asking if Helmut has bet on this, too. He wouldn’t exactly put it past him.

“Then I’ll see you in Milton Keynes, yes?”

Max agrees to it, then he pauses. “Christian, this is not a yes,” he says before Christian can hang up on him. It’s as close to a yes as he can allow himself.

“I know,” Christian says, and Max can hear a smile in his voice. They both know it’s not a no either, that it’s closer to a yes than a no.

“Good,” Max says. “Good luck with Singapore.” They’ll need it. He is very glad that he’s not in the car for that shitshow.

It doesn’t seem any less stupid than it did a year ago, than it did a few months ago, but things have changed. The headaches aren’t as frequent and crippling anymore. His range of motion in his legs has gotten better even if there’s still barely any feeling in them.

Things are better now, but he’s still felt the side effects when he only watched Isack race the car. He rarely makes it out of a Team Redline stream without a growing headache behind his eyes.

He doesn’t know if he really expects for things to have changed, doesn’t know if he’s trying to prove something to himself or to Red Bull.

Red Bull doesn’t even want him in the sim rig. There’s no reason for him to do it.

He has to squint at the screen to make it appear clearer. The glasses are barely helping.

The steering wheel is familiar in his fingers. The pressure is something he’s known his whole life. It’s not enough.

His eyes are burning. His vision blurs and bleeds into shapes he can’t hold onto. His head is pulsating with pain, and he can taste blood. But the nausea isn’t as bad as it once was. He stares at a point above his screens, wills himself to slow down his breathing.

Out of the corner of his eyes, he can see the wreck of the car, can see the smoke climbing into the air from where he’s lost it once the pain got too bad.

It was worse, once. It’s not good now.

It’s Monday evening, and Charles probably should be already sleeping, but instead, they’re tucked away in the corner of a small restaurant.

“What are you going to order?” Charles asks when Max still hasn’t closed the menu, frowning at the sides they can choose from.

“The schnitzel,” Max says, pointing at it when Charles starts to search for it, “but I have not decided on the side.”

“Which sides are you thinking about?”

“The fries or the potato salad,” Max says. It really shouldn’t be a hard decision—just like deciding on the burger hadn’t been. But normally, he doesn’t eat fries because they’re too oily, and maybe he shouldn’t order a side at all.

He’s not on a diet anymore, doesn’t need to be anymore, but it seems wrong to just stop, to not continue when it’s been something he had to be conscious of for his entire life. If he starts letting himself go, then he won’t be able to stop later, won’t be able to return to how things were before he let the grip on himself loosen. It’s always what his dad used to say when Max asked for a second ice cream scoop during the off-season.

But there’s no need for any of that any longer.

And he doesn’t want to listen to his dad anymore either.

Charles hums as he reads through the options. “Just take both,” he says then.

“Both?” Max blinks at the menu. He has never ordered two sides in his entire life.

“You are retired, yes?” Charles shrugs. “I think you are allowed to indulge in your wants.”

“I do not need both,” Max says, because he doesn’t.

Charles tilts his head. “But you want them,” he says, and he sounds so certain of it that Max can’t even argue with it. It’s not wrong. It still feels wrong.

“You are not going to order two sides,” Max points out. Charles always orders a side because he’s never on a strict diet like Max used to be, but even then, he has never seen Charles order more than one side dish.

“But I am also not retired. You are,” Charles says, and Max can’t argue with that either because he is retired, because Charles isn’t. “Is this not what you were always talking about? To eat everything you want?”

He did—it’s always been one of the only plans he had made after retirement, but back then, retirement had also been different, had looked different, had been supposed to be different.

Max supposes it doesn’t make much of a difference now anymore.

“I hate when you make sense,” he grumbles.

Charles winks at him. It’s as bad as always. Max hates being endeared by it. “Don’t lie.”

Max wrinkles his nose. “You are horrible.” He squints at the menu again, forces his dad’s voice out of his head. “Fine. I will order both.”

Ferrari looks good in Singapore, and some of the tension in Charles’ voice dissipates during their call.

“It should be easy enough to keep the McLarens behind,” Charles says. “They look strong, but not strong enough.”

“Good,” Max says, satisfaction pooling in his stomach. Lando might be his best friend, but he’s not Charles. He’s going to apologise to Lando for rooting against him once Charles wins his championship. Maybe. Lando understands, surely. “You got this, Charlie.”

“Don’t worry,” Charles says. “I will win this one for you.”

Max gags. “Why would you need to dedicate this race out of the entire calendar to me?” He doesn’t want Singapore. No, thank you. He’ll take any other dedication gladly, but certainly not this one. Charles can stay away with it.

“I was trying to be romantic, Max!” Charles complains.

Max wrinkles his nose. “And you could not have done that anywhere else?”

Coming back to Milton Keynes doesn’t feel any different from how it used to be. He’s not sure why he’s expected it, why he thought it would be. It’s GP who waits for him instead of Christian, and Max raises his eyebrows after a very long, very needed hug.

“Technically, I’m your boss now,” GP says instead of a proper explanation, and Max scoffs.

“You say this like you have not already been that.” Max doesn’t point out that GP used to have the final call, that he was to make the most decisions. Most of the time, Max only gave his input—and complained about everything else.

GP doesn’t look as convinced about this. “Well, you’ve not exactly always done what I told you to,” he points out.

“I did!” Max argues, then he admits, quieter, “Most of the time.”

“Sure, if you want to tell yourself that,” GP says, pinching Max’s side, ignoring his sound of protest, an undignified squeak. “Let’s go.”

Max follows him dutifully.

GP bumps his hips as he’s shown around the factory as if he doesn’t know every hallway and room like the back of his hands since he was sixteen. He still appreciates it.

He’s always liked the atmosphere of it, the buzzing around the workshops, the smaller rooms for the sim work, the big halls with all their achievements. It feels cosy in a way a company shouldn’t, but maybe it’s because of the familiarity, because Max has spent most of the past decade in here.

The factory hasn’t changed now that he’s not a driver anymore. Most of the trophies still carry his or Seb’s name. He knows most of the employees he comes across as they walk through the building. He makes a detour to the showroom to get a look at the RB19 again.

“I can’t believe we went from you to that,” Max mutters, a hand resting on the halo. “A disgrace.” He does feel a bit bad, talking about a car like this. But it’s not like he’s being overheard by him. Her. Max frowns at the RB19. Daniel’s cars are probably girls. He’s not sure about Yuki.

Max sighs. “We had a good run, huh?” He turns, lets his gaze sweep over the other cars showcased. There are Seb’s still, the cars from the Renault era. His first championship-winning car.

For a moment, his eyes linger on the RB20, the unluckier of the two cars, the unexpected end of a dream. Hesitantly, he walks towards it, his hand clutching the crutch tighter. With the other, he reaches out, lets his fingers glide over the chassis. It doesn’t feel much different from the RB19 did, solid underneath his hands, cold against his skin. It feels like something good, a nice memory of something he misses dearly, but there’s a tinge of sadness left behind. He can feel it in his fingertips, in the way his hands tremble.

There aren’t any signs of the crash left, no burn marks, no dents, no holes in the chassis. It’s almost like it’s never happened, like it’s been nothing but a bad dream he can still wake up from.

He wonders if they still have the pieces of it.

“I wish things had worked out differently,” Max whispers, but they hadn’t. They hadn’t, and there’s nothing to change about it now. They hadn’t, and he’s accepted it.

The car doesn’t answer him. Of course, it doesn’t. But when Max turns around and away from the car, it feels easier. When he leaves to catch up to GP again, he takes a lighter breath for the first time in over a year.

He stops to have a quick chat with Jake to ask about the simulators, then to talk to his— Daniel’s mechanics.

“You’re back quickly, mate,” Genty jokes, one arm around Max’s shoulders. He doesn’t seem to mind it much—that Max is going to start bothering them even more now than he already used to do.

Max pushes his shoulder. “I am going to go for your job. Watch out.”

Genty raises his eyebrows. “Oh, I’m sure,” he says, a twinkle in his eyes. “Just make sure that no one runs into you with the car.”

Max should have known, should have known better. He’s walked straight into that one. He pouts. “That only happened once! Once, Genty!”

Genty cackles.

He doesn’t see Christian until late afternoon when he comes out of his office.

Max looks at him. “Bad meeting?” he asks.

Christian just sighs. His hair is flat, and the eye bags under his eyes are dark, and there are wrinkles all over his shirt. “Don’t worry. Regarding you, everything has been solved.”

Max tilts his head. “I have not even said yes yet.” Christian just looks at him. They both know better. He wouldn’t be here if it were a no.

“But if you do,” Christian says, feigning like he doesn’t have a clue about what Max’s answer could be, like he doesn’t know, like Max doesn’t know that he knows, “then there is nothing that should be an issue.”

He gets to know some of the junior drivers, the ones he’s supposed to help. Most of them, he’s seen around. Quite a lot of them, he’s followed throughout their careers. They’re tiny and so young, and suddenly, Max isn’t sure anymore if he can do it.

GP nudges his shoulder, offers him an encouraging smile like he’d done when Max was 18 and freshly at Red Bull. This doesn’t feel very different from then, only that he’s not 18 anymore, and GP isn’t his race engineer any longer.

“Hey,” Max forces himself to say, offering the first driver—Tim, he thinks, one of the Formula Three juniors—his hand. “I’m Max.”

His head aches, but satisfaction warms his chest. Sassy is rolled up on his lap, and Max’s chin rests on Charles’ shoulder, and he could probably stay like this for the rest of his life.

“You are in a good mood,” Charles notes.

Max hums. He is. It’s been nice, and no one has been annoying. No one even mentioned potential media duties. “The kids were nice.”

“The kids?” Charles asks, amused. Max tilts his head at it. It’s not exactly far-fetched to call them kids. They are. Some of them are more than a decade younger than they are, and it makes Max’s skin crawl. Even Arvid is ten years younger, and he’s looking for a ride in Formula One soon. Not that Charles has any right to say anything about it—sometimes, Max catches him calling Ollie and Kimi kids, too.

“My kids,” Max says like that clarifies anything. They’re not even his kids. It’s not even his job yet.

“They are already your kids?” Charles sounds even more amused now.

Max bats at him, but Charles catches his hands, keeps them tightly wrapped up in his own. “They might as well be.”

“So, you said yes?” Charles asks, but he’s not looking at Max. Instead, he’s busy with pressing kisses to the palms of Max’s hands. Max only half-heartedly tries to get out of his grip.

“Not yet,” Max admits. He’s not sure why he can’t just say yes, why he can’t go to Christian and accept the contract, why it’s so hard. It’s an easy decision, an easy plan for the future. It’s not forever, and Max can leave whenever he needs to. He’s not tied down. He can still do whatever he wants to do.

“Max,” Charles groans. “Chéri.”

Max pulls a face at him. “I just need a bit more time.”

The flight sucks, but Max is glad for the private jet. It leaves them with privacy, makes it easier to stretch his legs out and melt into Charles. His back aches, and his vision flickers, but it’s not bad enough for him to be concerned about it. His back always starts to act up when he has to sit for longer periods of time.

But Charles pats Max’s hair, and Max can almost forgive himself for the stupid decision to fly to the US.

He’s not even five minutes in the paddock when he’s immediately surrounded by three rookies. Isack and Liam aren’t with them, but he’s going to see them later anyway.

Max just raises an eyebrow. “Should you not get ready for FP1?” he asks, though he can’t deny that it’s nice that there are people who are waiting for him, to know that they want him around. It’s not always been like this.

Gabi waves it away, which Max can’t blame him for. The Sauber doesn’t just look like a tractor. It is one. Max certainly hopes things will change under Jonathan. “Are you coming to the driver dinner later?”

Max frowns at him. Charles hasn’t even mentioned it yet, but Charles is never good at remembering these things. He’s lucky to have teammates who think of those things for him as well. “I am not a driver anymore,” he says.

“But you are here,” Ollie argues. “It only makes sense for you to come as well.”

“Retired drivers never join,” Max points out, because they never do. It’s supposed to be for the drivers currently on the grid, not for people outside of it.

“But you should. The others want you to come as well.” Kimi sounds sad, and for a moment, Max considers that they sent Kimi on purpose to convince him, that this was Charles’ plan because he knows. How is Max supposed to say no now?

Max shakes his head, sighs. “Fine,” he says. He tries to ignore the smiles blossoming on their faces. What did he get himself into?

He nudges Gabi, waves at Kimi and Ollie. “Now back to work with you all. Good luck.”

“Thank you, Max!” Ollie beams at him. He’s never going to get out of this.

“Max!”

He turns around to face the journalist. He likes Chiel, more than most of the others, but that’s also not exactly hard to achieve. That, he muses, is the advantage of not being a driver anymore. He’s simply not as interesting to them as Charles or Lando or Oscar are, especially now that the end of the title fight is getting closer and closer.

“Are there any plans for your future?” Chiel asks, pushing the microphone under Max’s nose.

A month ago, this would have made Max bristle, turn around and walk away. Maybe he would have come up with a colourful curse that they wouldn’t have been able to show on TV. Now he grins, showing too many of his teeth. “Maybe I will try to just live my life for now.”

Chiel frowns at him, the answer obviously not satisfying enough. “So, you won’t be in the paddock regularly?”

Max shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Will Red Bull continue to invite you to their garage, then?”

Max shrugs again. “You will have to ask them about that. I cannot read Christian’s mind, you know? Of course, I cannot know what they will do.”

Chiel sighs, but he doesn’t push it further. He changes topics instead, “How do you feel about 2026? The engine project Red Bull has been working on?”

“I have not been involved in that,” Max lies. He has been, even back in 2024, and everyone knows that. It’s not really a good lie. But Max also isn’t one of the engineers, so it’s not like he actually knows what goes into their engines. He couldn’t answer what that specific project looks like even if he wanted to. Which he doesn’t.

Chiel squints at him. He seems as sick of this as Max feels. It’s not been Max’s idea. “What do you think?”

“I, of course, hope for Red Bull to go back to winning,” Max says pleasantly. Anything else would be embarrassing and not enough for him. But everyone knows that. Maybe they need a bit of a reminder of it.

“That’s all? You won’t get involved in it yourself?”

Max smiles, but now there is nothing pleasant about it. “That is all,” he confirms. “Of course, I cannot race anymore. How would I be able to get involved in bringing Red Bull back to the top?”

(“They will never believe you,” Daniel says later, shaking his head when Matt shows them the video. “Mate, Maxy, you looked like you were going to start hunting them down. It makes you think you would eat them alive.”

Matt snorts, but Max can see something close to competitiveness flicker on his face. The Red Bull mechanics and Max are similar in that vein. It’s why they’ve always worked so well together.

Max glances at Daniel. “Wait and see.” He doesn’t have many expectations, doesn’t know how much difference he will actually make, but it could be fun to help the drivers become the best versions of themselves, to get the other drivers to fear them on track, to let all the other teams regret that they let him coach the Red Bull juniors.

He just hopes that he won’t make them worse, that he’ll become someone he doesn’t want to be.)

Max hugs Jonathan tightly. They hadn’t seen each other the last time, Max was at a race, so it’s nice now. It’s even harder to catch Adrian.

“Good to see you back,” Jonathan says, clasping a hand around Max’s neck, who ducks his head.

“You too,” Max says, smiles. “I have seen your pit stops.”

Jonathan’s face immediately brightens. That’s how Max has always been able to get him. “The crew is great,” he says, satisfaction all over his words. “It helps that Lee is here, too.”

“Now you just need a good car, too. Gabi has been complaining,” Max teases. “Hopefully, Audi will be better.”

Jonathan winks at him. “That’s still a secret.”

Max rolls his eyes in amusement. “This sounds like a distraction.”

“You’re sure you don’t want to work for us?” Jonathan asks.

Max laughs. “You are the third person to ask me this.” He could. It would be nice to work for Nico and Gabi, but the Sauber green is hideous, and he’s not sure yet about what colour Audi is going to pick. Not to mention that he’d have to change his entire wardrobe.

Jonathan just raises his eyebrows knowingly. “Toto and Christian?” It sounds less like a question and more like an assessment, but Max can’t exactly say anything about it. It’s no secret, and it’s not a surprise either. Obviously, it’s them who would ask. Other teams wouldn’t have much chance to get him anyway.

He’s not going to work for McLaren, and Ferrari would have him want to quit within two minutes. Absolutely not.

“Of course.”

“No surprises there,” Jonathan comments.

Max rolls his eyes.

Jonathan pats Max’s back. “You should become Sporting Director,” he jokes. “You know the rules well enough for that.” He’s not exactly wrong about it. Max just doubts it’ll be positive or actually helpful for the drivers.

He tucks his hair behind his ears. “I think I will make it worse for them instead.” He’s going to accidentally have them give the drivers even worse penalties than originally planned. They’ll bring back community service for swearing just for him.

Jonathan laughs. “Maybe they will like you better when it’s not you they have to make a decision about.”

“Oh, I am sure they would be excited to hear that they still have to deal with me,” Max deadpans.

Jonathan smiles at him. “Well, for me, it’s always been fun,” he says, and it sounds sincere. Jonathan doesn’t say things like this unless he means it.

Max swallows.

“How does the sim look?” Daniel asks quietly. It’s quiet enough that none of the other drivers can hear it. “Earlier this year, we had issues because it didn’t fit to the car on track.”

Max frowns, stabbing a fry with his fork. He hasn’t seen any obvious kinks in the way the sim looks compared to how the car drives, but he’s also not been sitting in the sim rig himself. Jake hadn’t mentioned anything either when they’d been in contact earlier, but that doesn’t have to mean much when it’s already a known problem. “It seems fine now,” he says. “At least, I have not noticed any bigger issues for now.”

Nico leans over to them. Curiosity is written all over his face, and Max wonders how long they’re going to be able to keep Red Bull’s offer a secret before the entire grid knows about it. “Is there a reason why you are here?”

“Kimi, Ollie and Gabi insisted,” Max answers, well aware that it’s not what Nico is asking for.

Nico pats Max’s shoulder. “I mean, at the track.” He switches over to Dutch, and Max considers for a moment to just tell him the truth. No one else understands them, and Nico isn’t one to go around telling everyone else about it.

He shrugs. “Helping Red Bull out a bit. Nothing more, really,” he settles on instead. It’s not through yet, so there’s no point anyway.

He catches Charles’ gaze, who lifts both eyebrows at him. Max answers it with a smile and turns back to Nico. He can still feel Charles’ eyes on him.

“There is always more with you,” Nico points out.

Max scrunches his nose. He can’t exactly disagree with it. “You will see.” It’s the confirmation Nico needs, who just laughs.

“Got it,” he says.

Lando clears his throat. “What secrets are you talking about?” he asks, and before Max can tell him that there’s no way he’d ever tell Lando secrets that no one else is allowed to know, Daniel interrupts them.

“Team secrets,” he says, a mischievous glint in his eyes.

Oscar just looks amused. “They’re not going to tell you about those,” he says to Lando. “You are incapable of actually keeping them.”

Max can clearly see how Lando kicks Oscar under the table.

“You are a child,” Oscar complains, rubbing his shin.

Lando crosses his arms in front of his chest. He looks affronted, and he also seems like he has already forgotten about their previous topic. Max can live with that. “You are younger, you muppet!”

Oscar pulls a face at him. It’s the most emotion Max has seen on him all evening. “That doesn’t mean you don’t behave like a child, idiot.”

Max exchanges an amused glance with Nico. Nothing has changed. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise him that everything is still the same. That things are different and yet nothing at all.

It’s never been unusual for Max and GP to go out to eat together, but it’s not happened since their last race together, and Max has missed it.

Charles is busy with the team, and GP has some downtime until the preparations for the race start.

It’s a restaurant GP has chosen, somewhere away from the track, and Max is grateful for it. All the noise, and the people around them, and the fans recognising him have been exhausting even though he always loves the atmosphere at races, but Max likes to get away from it for a few hours sometimes.

It makes his heart ache.

“How are the kids?” he asks, squinting at the burger in front of him. He’s ordered fries with it, had heard Charles’ voice in his ear when he considered just getting the burger on its own.

GP smiles. Talking about the kids always makes his entire face light up. “Good. They are very excited I’m home more now.”

“Yeah, I can imagine.” Max also still remembers how hard it used to be for GP to leave in the first few years, how he always told Max that he couldn’t imagine doing it for much longer, but then he’d stayed anyway. “I have not seen them in ages.”

“You should come to visit us sometime,” GP says, and it sounds genuine, so Max nods, agrees. It’s not really something they do, not something they have ever really done, but things have changed now.

Max clears his throat. “Max is doing well?”

GP rolls his eyes. “Of course, Max the dog is doing well. Who do you think I am?”

Max snorts. GP has managed to keep him alive, so obviously, he’d also manage to take care of Max the dog.

“We have been thinking about adopting another dog,” Max says, though that’s technically a lie. Charles has been wanting a dog for months, but he’s not been actively thinking about one, hasn’t been on the search. Max would have an option. He’s just not sure it would be an option Charles likes.

GP raises his eyebrows. “Another? Are you planning to have a zoo?”

“Yes,” Max says, nods sagely. They really should get another cat, too.

“A dog from the shelter where you volunteer?” GP asks. Max can’t even be bothered by the fact that, somehow, everyone around him has found out about it by now. It’s probably also not exactly a surprise.

“Yeah, he came in recently. I think he is still quite young.” They haven’t let a vet determine his age yet because the shelter doesn’t deem it to be necessary, but his paws are quite big.

“What’s he called?” GP asks, and he’s smiling.

Max coughs. “Rocky.”

It makes GP laugh. “You’re kidding.”

“It’s a good name for a dog,” Max says. It’s also a good name for a car, he doesn’t say. He misses him, Rocky—the car. Sometimes, he still dreams of him, can hear his engine rumble even there. Even if all of this hadn’t happened, even if he wasn’t missing racing, he would still miss Rocky; he’s sure of that.

“Tell me you didn’t name him after your car,” GP says.

“He was already named that,” Max admits, but GP still snorts.

“I can’t even say I’m surprised,” he says, which is just rude. Max isn’t predictable like that, and he didn’t even choose Rocky because of his name. He didn’t even know at first.

Max grins at him. “I guess it would be very fitting for you to have a dog called Max, and I have one called Rocky.”

“Mate,” GP says, shakes his head with amusement. “The next pet you get has to be named after me.”

They’d already made that deal some time ago, but it’s just never happened because Leo is technically Charles’, and Charles had not wanted to name Leo after GP.

“I am not sure Charles is fine with that,” Max says, but it’s mostly to poke fun at GP. Charles would probably let Max name one pet after GP if Max really, genuinely asked him to do so.

“Better than naming them after yet another club,” GP points out.

Max pouts. “Hey! I only did that…twice.”

“Twice too many,” GP mutters.

Max rolls his eyes, stretches a hand out for GP to shake. “Okay. The next pet will be named GP.”

“It better be,” GP says, shaking Max’s hand. There’s a glimmer in his eyes. “Or I’m going to rename Max.”

Max gasps at him. “You would not.”

GP wiggles his finger in front of Max’s face. “I will.”

Oscar wins the race. It makes Max wince, but Charles looks happy enough.

“The car has been shit all weekend,” he’d complained to Max in the morning, and maybe he’s just hoping not to get disqualified again around this track.

“You have done well,” Max says now, and Charles smiles at him.

“A win would have been better, but…” Charles shrugs. But the McLarens have been ridiculously fast all weekend. He doesn’t seem too dejected about it. After all, he’s still leading the championship, and he hasn’t lost too many points—not enough for Oscar to still catch him.

“It is still good, of course,” Max says, and it’s something he would have never allowed himself to think. You don’t settle for good. You don’t even settle for great. But thinking about his dad ruins his mood, so he tries to ban him from his head.

He forces the smile on his face to brighten, just so that Charles won’t notice anything. There is no way Max will let his dad ruin his and Charles’ mood, so he grabs Charles’ hand. “Let’s go celebrate.”

Charles lights up, planting a kiss square on Max’s face. “Yes, chéri. You always have such good ideas.”

(They don’t have much time until Charles flies to Mexico, until Max returns home on his own. He intends to use it productively.)

“I saw that you were in the US,” Vic greets him. It’s very obviously just an excuse for a conversation. He’s been back home for two weeks already, and they have talked since then.

Max pets Jimmy’s ears. “Yes.” He doesn’t elaborate. Victoria is clearly waiting for him to do so.

She huffs. “Did you enjoy it?” she asks then.

“Yes,” Max says again just to annoy her. “It was nice to see everyone.”

“You just saw everyone,” Victoria points out as if she doesn’t also constantly see her coworkers and friends.

“I wanted to see everyone again,” he says.

“You are hiding something,” Victoria decides then, and Max only doesn’t groan because it would have clued her in that she’s definitely correct. He’ll tell them once he’s made his decision, once the contract is through.

“What makes you say that?” he asks instead.

Victoria hesitates. “You sound weird,” she says.

“There is a cat on my chest,” Max says, and that’s not exactly a lie. He always sounds a bit off when there’s additional weight on his chest. It’s just also not the entire truth.

“A different weird,” she points out.

Max pulls a grimace before he answers, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

Victoria scoffs. “You definitely do.” He does.

“Why did you call?” he finally changes the topic.

“I know what you are doing,” she says, but then she falls silent, hesitates.

Max stares at the ceiling above him, and his stomach churns. He has the feeling he knows what Victoria is going to talk about. Now he is even gladder that he has not mentioned Red Bull’s offer before. He’s not sure how he’s supposed to tell Victoria that he’s going to coach Red Bull’s junior drivers when he’s resisted coaching his own nephews for so long.

“He’s started karting,” she says eventually.

Max frowns, looking out of the window. The sun is still out, but the trees are slowly losing their leaves, and here, it’s nicer weather than it is in Belgium. “Is it not a bit cold now?”

“He insisted,” Vic says, and Max can clearly picture her shrugging. “And for now, they are inside anyway.”

Max has never trained inside. It’s always been a proper track outside or nothing at all.

“That is good,” he says. “Is he having fun?”

“A lot,” Victoria confirms. “He can never wait to go to his next lesson.” That’s how it should be, Max knows that. It’s been like that for him, too, in the beginning. And then the pressure had gotten worse and worse, and sometimes, Max had considered just quitting and going back to his normal life.

But then his parents had divorced, and his grades got worse, and then there hadn’t been much of a choice left.

He doesn’t regret it. Looking back, he doesn’t regret it. He had, sometimes, back then, when he’d been twelve and wandering around the track with his helmet on, when he’d been fifteen and his dad left him alone at a gas station, when he was twenty-three and his dad told him he couldn’t tell the team about the concussion, when he knew that his dad was right, that it was his only chance at winning the championship.

Max bites on his lip. “How is the trainer?”

“Great,” Victoria says, and he can hear a smile in her voice. “Luka won’t stop talking about how cool he is. Apparently, he’s done some car racing? I’m not entirely sure.”

Max hums. “Good. That sounds good.” Maybe then, it won’t be as bad when he has to tell her about his future plans.

“It is,” she agrees. It’s not exactly been a secret to him that she’s been worried about the same things as him.

“I’m glad,” he whispers into the phone, quiet enough that Victoria might not even hear it.

“I am, too,” Victoria says, voice soft.

“We should do a world tour,” Max says.

Charles snorts. “A world tour? Have you not done enough of them?”

Max rolls onto his stomach. His back protests his moves. “Of course, none of them were actual trips,” he says, because, as many countries as they have visited, they have never really seen a lot of them outside of the tracks. There is no time for it, not with how many races there are, not with how often they have to fly to the next within the week.

“And I will visit you every time I am not racing?” Charles asks, amused. “Travel after you?”

Max rolls his eyes. “You would take a sabbatical, of course,” he says, not serious at all.

“Of course,” Charles echoes, nods.

“Like Mika did,” Max says, struggling to keep a serious face.

Charles wags his finger in front of Max’s face. “You just do not want me to equal your championships.”

Max grins at Charles cheekily. “For that, Ferrari would have to build a good car first.”

Charles pokes Max’s side. “Tell that my championship lead.”

“That is only one of three,” Max says. He’s heard the rumours. He doesn’t know how true they are, and he doubts anyone else knows it either, but he does not have a lot of faith in the next year’s cars. He is certainly not going to tell Charles that.

Charles’ fingers dig into Max’s side, which only makes Max laugh. He weakly bats at Charles’ arms, who doesn’t move away at all.

“Just wait,” Charles says, and his eyes twinkle. It can’t just be delusions, Max muses, when Charles had been right about this year.

Max nods, appeasing. “Which, of course, means that you then have the time for a sabbatical,” he says, still grinning.

Charles snorts. “Keep dreaming.”

Max pulls Charles down onto the couch with him—Charles doesn’t fall onto him, hovers over him instead; his hands are careful like they always are when he manoeuvres Max so he can lie down next to him.

He just hopes that Charles knows this is only a joke and nothing more, that it would never be anything more. He would never ask this of Charles. He doesn’t think he could.

Charles presses a kiss to Max’s forehead, hums quietly. “Where would you want to go first?” he asks then. Obviously, he doesn’t mean it, just wants to entertain Max and his too ambitious ideas. They’re never going to go on a world tour unless Charles retires, too, and even then, Max isn’t entirely sure how well a trip like that would work out for them.

Unless Max can finally walk better than he can now by then.

“We should do something where we have not been before. Maybe South Africa.” He ponders, tilts his head. He’d like to see lions in the wild. “Or maybe we could do a trip around the Mediterranean Sea first. I think I have deserved to eat as much kebab and gyros as I want for the rest of my life,” he says, a joke. It’s not supposed to be anything else.

Charles smiles at him. It’s bright and warm, and Max has to look away.

“You do,” he says, and his voice is too soft, too gentle, and not for the first time, Max wonders what he’s done to deserve someone like Charles.

His phone is ringing. Max reaches for it blindly to turn it off, but after a few seconds, it starts ringing again. Maybe it’s important.

Max groans as he slowly sits up to take the call. His hips are locking up when he tries to turn, and his back cracks with every move, but he manages to grab it.

When he sees it’s his dad, he hesitates.

Charles’ head pops up when Max doesn’t immediately answer the phone. “Chéri?” he asks, voice slurring from sleep.

“Go back to sleep,” Max mutters, pressing a kiss to Charles’ forehead.

Charles frowns at him, but his brain is still sleep-addled enough for him not to question it further and drop back on his pillow. Seconds later, his breathing evens out again. The pros of being a Formula One driver. Max snorts. They all learn to sleep in the worst positions and with the worst background noise whenever there’s a bit of time to kill.

He turns down the volume, and eventually, the call goes to voicemail. He’s not sure he wants to answer it anyway. It’s still too early to deal with his dad, and they’ve not talked since their last botched conversation. Max really isn’t interested in hearing all the things his dad hasn’t yet told him, that he still has to get rid of, that he needs to smack in Max’s face so that he can sleep well again, so that Max will stay awake for the rest of the night.

His phone lights up again. It’s still his dad.

Max turns his phone off.

Max hates walking with one crutch. It throws his balance off, has only one of his arms in a weird position, and it has his shoulders ache far too quickly. But sometimes, his stance isn’t secure enough for him to leave without any aid. He’d rather have to use his crutches than fall somewhere in public.

“Could a cane be better?” Lando asks when Max once again complains about it.

Max scrunches his nose. “Carlos said that, too.”

“You could get a bull head,” Lando suggests, a grin widening on his face.

“You are all horrible,” Max groans. He is not going to get a bull head as a cane.

Lando just laughs at him.

He could, Max considers, get a cane, though. His neurologist has mentioned something like that before, but Brad probably knows more about it.

Lando turns to him before Max can think further about it. There’s something eager in his face. “But tell me,” he says, adopting a whisper, “there are rumours going around.”

“Rumours?” Max asks innocently. He’s not heard anything about rumours, and Charles hasn’t mentioned them either. For all Max cares, there might not be any at all. He’s never been much interested in rumours anyway, never bothered to listen to them or find out if there was any truth to them. It’s never felt like there’s been a point to it when they don’t know, when they’ll still have to wait for the confirmation anyway.

“Since the driver dinner,” Lando clarifies.

Max suppresses a sigh. “I cannot even say I am surprised.”

“I didn’t say anything!” Lando protests, but there’s a bit of a guilty look on his face. He’s definitely been asking around. Max is sure of that. Sadly, Max has never managed to be mad at Lando.

“Fine,” Max says. “Maybe you will see me sooner back in the paddock than you think.”

Lando tilts his head. “Oh? What are you planning?” he asks, then he narrows his eyes, squints at Max like he sees something there. “You have that glimmer in your eyes, Verstappen.”

Max shrugs, smiles. “I am just planning to beat you,” he says and doesn’t explain anything. It’s the most he’ll say at the moment. Now it’s worse than just knowing about the rumours.

Lando blinks. “Beat me how?”

“Guess you will have to wait to find out,” Max says nonchalantly, leaning back in his chair. Or Lando figures it out himself. He’s not sure about that one.

Lando groans. “You are the worst,” he complains.

“Thank you,” Max says pleasantly, still smiling.

“That is not a compliment,” Lando grumbles.

Max grins at him. “I know.”

“Hi, mama,” Max says.

“Good evening, Max,” his mum says, and her voice is gentle, but there’s an edge to it that Max can’t place. Normally, she only ever sounds like that when his dad is involved, but as far as Max can tell, they haven’t been in contact in years. His mum doesn’t want to talk to his dad, and his dad hates his mum. It’s been like this ever since the divorce. It’s not changed since.

“Your dad has called me,” she says, and Max stops. His fingers tremble.

“What?” he asks, unable to stop the disbelief from creeping into his voice. “What did he want?”

His mum breathes out softly. “He told me that you haven’t been answering your phone.” And that’s why he’s called Max’s mum? He just hopes his dad hasn’t had the stupid idea to also get in contact with Red Bull to tattle on Max like he’s sixteen and doesn’t know how to handle himself. But alone that his dad has called his mum seems ridiculous.

Max is 28, not five.

“I just—” Max takes a deep breath. “I don’t think I want to talk to him at the moment.” Maybe he will, in a few weeks or even just a few days. But he doesn’t want to talk to him, not at the moment, not when he’s behaving like this.

Max just can’t handle anymore being insulted every single time they talk. And his dad doesn’t get it. His dad has never gotten it, and sometimes Max thinks his dad won’t ever get it.

“That’s fine,” his mum says, and her voice is still so unbearably gentle. “You know that? It’s fine if you don’t want to.”

“I know,” Max says, looking out of the window. The sun is slowly setting, and it turns all the buildings red. There are still so many people outside even though the weather has been getting worse.

“Good. You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” his mum continues, but now there’s something certain about her words, something steady and determined. She’d sounded like that, too, when she told Max about the divorce.

“He is just my dad,” Max whispers, and he’s not sure what he’s trying to say with that.

“I know, baby,” his mum says, and she just sounds sad.

Max takes a shaky breath. “I am sorry.”

“There is nothing you have to be sorry for,” she chides him, but there is. There is because this has been between Max and his dad, because his mum was never supposed to get involved in this, because it’s been years, and his mum shouldn’t even have to think about him anymore. Because Max is still bringing him back into her life again and again. Because Max chose his dad and chased a dream, and left her behind.

“It just sometimes feels like it,” he says.

“It’s fine,” she repeats when it’s not. It never is. “Don’t worry about it, okay?”

Max chokes out a wet laugh. How is he supposed to not worry about it? How is he supposed to just ignore it when his dad keeps calling him? When did his dad start to call his mum? When he’s just making everything worse again? When it’s been years and nothing has changed?

“He will never change, will he?” he asks, finally, an echo from an earlier, from a different and yet not different conversation in his ears. His eyes burn. He wants his dad, and he doesn’t want him at all. He wants his dad and wishes he were someone else. But his dad has always been his dad, and his dad has always been like this.

His mum hesitates. “Maybe he will. Maybe he won’t. We can’t know.”

“I could—” Max swallows. “Maybe I could help.” Change him, have things be different, make things get better. He could, maybe, but for that his dad would need to listen to him, and Max can’t remember the last time his dad has. If he ever has.

Sometimes, Max only remembers his dad yelling at him to shut up.

“That’s his decision,” his mum just says.

“I know.” He does. “But—” But it feels wrong to just give up on him when his dad has never given up on him. But it feels wrong to just leave, to leave his dad behind, to continue with his life without his dad in it, but Max doesn’t know anymore what other options there still are.

“Max, if you don’t want to talk to him, then don’t,” his mum says, firm. “Things might change, and things might not change, but that’s out of your hands. That’s all on him.”

Sometimes, Max wonders if his dad knows—and if he just doesn’t care.

“Max?” Christian answers the call, and he sounds muffled, confused, a bit out of it, and when Max looks at the clock on his face, it’s already past nine PM. But Christian shouldn’t have been asleep yet.

“I will do it,” he says in lieu of a greeting.

There’s rustling on the other side of the phone. “Do what?” Christian asks, and now his voice sounds a bit clearer.

“Your offer,” Max says. “I will accept it.” His heart is pounding. He can hear blood rush through his ears, but he doesn’t take the words back. He just lets them stand between them.

“That is amazing to hear, mate,” Christian says, smiling. Max has always been able to tell when Christian is smiling, but it’s never been hard to, not when Christian had been smiling on the radio after Max’s first race with him.

“But—” Max swallows. “But I do not want to do it full-time. I do not think I can just yet.”

He’s not sure what he expects Christian to say, maybe that he should just make up his mind, that it’s not a hard decision at all, that if he can’t commit, then he shouldn’t at all.

Instead, Christian just says, “That is fine. We didn’t really expect you to.”

Max blinks, opens his mouth and closes it again. Maybe they expected that he wouldn’t want to do it at all, that he’d step away from Formula One and racing altogether. Or maybe there wasn’t really another expectation because the junior series don’t follow Formula One wherever they go.

“Just to make sure it is really what I want, you know?” he still says to offer Christian a resemblance of an explanation.

“Of course. Take as long as you need,” Christian says and nothing else.

Max narrows his eyes. “You are very understanding.”

Christian snorts. It doesn’t sound belittling, doesn’t sound like he’s making fun of Max. “You’ve been part of this team for over ten years, Max,” he says, like that’s supposed to be an explanation.

Max has been part of Red Bull for over ten years, and he knows how they work. It’s never mattered to them how long drivers have been part of the team, never interested them whether they’d been junior drivers, too or only joined a year ago. Ten years mean nothing.

“That doesn’t have to mean anything,” Max points out.

“It does not,” Christian agrees. Apparently, it does, anyway.

“But it does?” Max asks. He doesn’t know why he asks, why he wants to know this, why he wants an answer. But this still doesn’t make sense to him, not really, and no one has ever offered him a proper explanation either. They know that he’s not the same Max anymore they used to know, and somehow, it doesn’t seem to matter at all.

For a moment, it’s quiet. He can hear Christian’s breathing over the phone, can hear rustling.

“You’re basically family, Max,” Christian says then, and his voice is kind. “Obviously, it does.”

His heartbeat echoes in his ears.

“Don’t ever get too close to any of them,” his dad says. “They’re not your friends, Max.”

His hands shake.

“Okay,” Max says quietly. “Thank you, Christian.”

“Not for this,” Christian says, and he’s smiling again.

Max clears his throat. There’s something stuck in it, makes it tight and uncomfortable, and his eyes are burning. “Then, we will see each other soon?”

“I’ll send you the details,” Christian confirms.

“Great,” Max says, and he doesn’t know what else he can say, what else there is to say. His heart burns, and the words are caught in his throat.

“That was easy,” Christian mutters, and it doesn’t sound like Max was supposed to hear it.

Max huffs. “For you, maybe.”

“Nice to see you back,” GP says, joking. Max scoffs. They have seen each other far too often in the factory and then the race, and over the phone for that. He’s only here to sign the contract, anyway, and GP had been there when they’d set it up.

“You are still here,” Max quips back. “So much about retiring.”

“I am still here,” GP agrees, a long-suffering sigh following. “This is your fault, you know that?” But he doesn’t sound very accusing, like he regrets his decision. Max does not buy it.

He looks at GP out of the corner of his eyes. “Did you decide then?”

GP brushes a shoulder against Max’s. “Maybe I’ll retire next year,” he muses.

Max laughs. “Liar.” GP is as bad at leaving as Max is.

GP just shrugs, nonchalance written all over his face. “Touché.”

“The car looks good,” Max says, arms crossed in front of his chest as they watch Thierry make his way through the Nordschleife. The trees don’t have any of their leaves anymore, and the grass is brown, with more dirt than actual plant. It looks bleak in a way Max isn’t used to. “Thierry, too.”

Lully nods. “It’s been going well.”

Max sighs, resting his head against the wall behind him. He’d wanted to do this once, had wanted to race on the Nürburgring and disappear into the Green Hell like he’d always dreamed of. But back in 2023, Red Bull hadn’t allowed him to do it—he knows Helmut had been too scared of him trying to set a record—and now, it’s too late.

It’s almost ironic that Helmut’s fears still came true.

“And Red Bull really doesn’t mind?” Lully asks, squinting.

Max snorts. “Oh, they wanted me here.” Red Bull doesn’t yet have a foot in the GT world. It’s the perfect place to start. And if they didn’t have issues with it back when Max was still actively driving for them, they shouldn’t have issues with it now. After all, they’re still sponsoring it.

Lully nods. “That’s good to hear,” he says, a faint trace of relief in his words. Max would not have just let them lose their jobs if it had come to it.

“Have you been enjoying it?” Max asks.

Lully’s eyes flicker away from him towards the screen where they show Thierry again. He hesitates, almost like he’s afraid of what to say and what not to say.

Max doesn’t thud his head against the wall, but it’s a near thing, and he really, really wants to do it now. It’s not the first time, people are hesitant and unsure to talk about these things with him, like they think he can’t deal with it, like they think it will break him.

Max sighs again and tries not to show the discomfort in his entire body, the annoyance coursing through his veins, the impatience in his chest. They’re not wrong, he ponders. It had been true more than a year ago.

It’s not true now.

“Yes,” Lully finally says. “It’s been great. I mean, we’ve done the Nordschleife a lot with the other guys, but I didn’t expect it to be so much more fun in real life.”

Max smiles gently. “I thought so,” he says, looks wishfully at the screen in front of them. That could have been him some time ago. That would have been him. There’s a sting in his chest, a pang of sadness crawling in his stomach. But it’s not as bad as he expected it to be.

Charles blinks at the bowl in front of him. He looks baffled, hasn’t even glanced at the pizza so far, and it’s his favourite. Margherita with prosciutto. Max almost feels offended.

“You have made tomato soup?” Charles asks, and the tone of his voice can only be described as flabbergasted. Max really doesn’t think tomato soup warrants all this.

“Yes,” Max says slowly.

Charles looks up, a question mark on his face. “You cannot cook?”

Max opens his mouth, closes it again. He’d be offended if it wasn’t partially true. Then again, it’s not like Charles has any right to say anything at all. He’s worse than Max, and Max can only do a couple of pasta sauces.

He wrinkles his nose. “My mum showed me.” And it’s quite good if Max says so himself. His mum had been right—it’s really not that hard without someone else in the kitchen constantly distracting him, so it hadn’t even taken that long. He’s also made sure to taste it beforehand, to actually make sure that he’s not poisoning Charles before the weekend.

“And it is edible?”

“Why are you so in disbelief?” Max huffs. “I have cooked before!” Rarely, but he has.

Charles coughs. “Thank you,” he says even though he still looks bamboozled. “Why tomato soup, though? You have not been eating it a lot lately.”

Max shrugs. “No reason really.”

“Hm,” Charles makes, dipping the spoon into the soup.

“A good luck charm for the weekend,” Max adds. His cheeks flush. It’s just silly. It’s not even a good good luck charm. He should have just not said anything.

It has Charles look up. “You are my good luck charm,” he says, and his voice is a bit too serious for it to be a joke.

“Charles,” Max complains. It’s impossible to hide the way his cheeks burn from Charles.

“What?” Charles says. “It is the truth.”

Max decides to ignore it. He is not going to get out of this anyway, and the one thing he still can manage to do is not get even more embarrassed than he already is. “My mum always used to make me tomato soup before races, so I thought it would be fun to continue that,” he says, not quite looking at Charles. “But obviously, since it is not your favourite dish, I also brought pizza.” And candles and flowers, but Charles has not even looked at them once.

It’s silent.

When Max finally looks up again, Charles is looking at him, a besotted smile on his lips. Max looks away again.

“You are so cute,” Charles says.

Max groans. “I hate you,” he says. “I will not make you food again.”

“Max,” Charles pouts.

Max sniffs. “Eat the damn tomato soup.”

This night, Charles presses his face against Max’s stomach. Max keeps scrolling on his phone, combs through Charles’ hair with his other hand.

“It will be fine,” Max says.

Charles just lets out a noise that Max cannot even properly describe.

“I feel like I am going crazy,” he confesses.

“It will be better with the second one,” Max says. The first one is always the worst—especially like this, when it goes to the last race, when there are only a couple of points separating them. 2022 and 2023 had been nice in that regard, had been easier.

Charles lets out the same noise again. He doesn’t sound comforted at all. Max has never been good at this.

“I love you, you know that?” Max says even though he doubts this will make it better, either.

“I love you, too,” Charles’ voice comes out muffled. His grip on Max tightens.

Max clears his throat, looks away from his phone at Charles. “They’ll be proud of you either way,” he says finally.

Max is screaming when Charles crosses the line. It’s a clear victory, a clean sweep. Max has never felt prouder.

He’s not the first one at the barriers, but the Ferrari mechanics let him through when he wobbles through them. Though, he is the first one to pull Charles into a hug and smother him with kisses. Charles just beams, but tears gleam in his eyes when he spots Pascale waiting for him, and Max lets go of him, so he can hug his mother, too.

It doesn’t take long for Charles to come back to Max, to wrap him in another tight hug. His eyes are red-rimmed, and tears glimmer on his cheeks, and Max’s heart aches.

“I did it,” Charles whispers, and Max leans his forehead against Charles’ helmet.

“You did,” he whispers back. His stomach feels heavy, but there is joy glowing in his chest. “I love you.”

Charles wiggles his finger in front of Max’s face. “I love you more,” he says because he’s a competitive little shit who can’t let things be even after he’s just won his first championship.

Max rolls his eyes. “I doubt that, but okay. I definitely love you more,” he says, because he can’t either.

“You do not,” Charles disagrees.

“I do,” Max insists.

“You do—”

Silvia clears her throat.

“Sorry,” Max says. His cheeks burn. There are cameras on him, and he’s not sure how they’re supposed to explain this. Ferrari is going to kill them.

Silvia rolls her eyes, but she seems more amused than annoyed. “Coulthard is waiting for you,” she says with a nod towards the cameras and the microphones.

“Coming,” Charles says. He’s pouting, but he does take a step back from Max, finally pulls off his helmet.

“Proud of you,” Max mouths at him as Charles is forced to leave.

Charles shines brightly.

It’s easier than he expected—to push the jealousy down, to focus on Charles and only Charles. Charles, who beams, Charles who peppers his face with kisses, Charles who doesn’t let go of Max even once even though he should be celebrating himself.

His eyes burn, and his heart stings, but it’s easy to forget when Charles is laughing, when he’s not stopped shining the entire evening.

“We are World Champions!” Charles yells over the music, throwing both of his arms into the air, urging Max to do the same. Max laughs at his antics, but it’s true. They are. Both of them are.

Maybe that should be enough.

“You know,” Charles says, his words are slow and spaced-out, and he leans heavily against Max as he tries to settle Charles into their bed, “I’m proud of you, too, Max.”

Max raises his eyebrows. “Of course, I am much prouder of you. You have just won your championship, Charlie.” He rests a hand against Charles’ forehead, but except for his alcoholic breath, there doesn’t seem to be anything off about him. He probably should make Charles brush his teeth, but he’s floppy and barely cohesive, and it’s already hard enough to have them make it across the room once with not even two working legs between them.

“And I can still be proud of my boyfriend, yes?” Charles grumbles.

Max rolls his eyes. He doesn’t think Charles would be very proud of him if he knew about the ugly jealousy burning in Max’s chest. “Sure.” There’s no point in arguing with a drunk Charles. Max had figured that out rather quickly.

“No, but I am serious,” Charles slurs. “I am very proud of how far you have come.”

“Yes, Charles,” Max says, deciding to just entertain him. Charles probably won’t remember any of it the next morning anyway. “You still have two more championships to get to match me.”

Charles stops in his movement to look at Max. There’s a seriousness in his eyes that doesn’t fit the rest of his drunken state. “That is not what I am talking about, chéri,” he says, voice clearing up.

Max sighs. “I know.” He doesn’t want to think about it. There still isn’t the ugly swell of jealousy in his stomach that he’s expected, nothing of the bitterness in his mouth that he knew would accompany it, and he doesn’t want to dwell on it. Not now, not here. Not when they are supposed to be celebrating Charles.

“You should,” Charles says, and he only looks half-awake by now.

“Go to bed,” Max says, pushing Charles into the pillows.

“Max?” Charles asks, mumbles. His eyes are barely open, and Max isn’t quite sure how Charles even manages to still be awake.

Max combs through Charles’ hair. “Yes?”

“Now, you always have to make me tomato soup before a race,” he says, smiles sleepily.

Max snorts. “Okay, I will.”

Charles nods, satisfied, before his face goes slack and his eyelids start to droop, and Max hurries to find Charles’ sweatpants before he fully falls asleep.

(“I mean it,” Charles says many hours later when they’re on their way back home. He looks a bit pale, and the morning he’s spent throwing up, and it’s made Max very glad that he’s not allowed to drink anymore because he knows he would have ended up the exact same way. “What I said yesterday. That I am proud of you.”

Max flicks his arm. “Are you sure you are not still drunk?” he asks, more sullen than he’s wanted it to be. He doesn’t want to talk about it, doesn’t think this week is the right time for it anyway.

“Max,” Charles says.

“Charles,” Max sighs.

Charles hesitates, and for a moment, Max can see doubt flicker across his face, but then Charles straightens his shoulders, and says, “Things have changed so much since last year, but you have come so far since then, and I am proud of you, and you can be proud of yourself, too.”)

“He is cute,” Charles says, kneeling down in front of the bars to reach out with a hand and let Rocky take a sniff.

“He is,” Max agrees, leaning on his crutch. He doesn’t squat down as well. His legs have been bothering him more than they have in the past few weeks, and he’s worried he’ll just fall over. Charles would catch him, but Max can do without that embarrassment today.

“What is his name?” Charles asks, making a weird kissy face at the dog.

Max scrunches his nose. “Rocky.”

Charles laughs, but it’s quiet enough not to scare Rocky. “Are you serious?” he asks, looking up at Max as if he wants to see whether it’s a joke or not.

Max shrugs, pointing at the plaque on the door. “He was already named that when he came in.”

Charles snorts and turns back to Rocky. “I am sure that has not at all influenced your decision,” he says, though he’s wrong. Rocky has very big, brown eyes, and Max is very bad at saying no.

“Definitely.” Max has a hard time staying serious.

Rocky doesn’t flinch back when Charles gently runs his fingers through his fur. Max tries not to think about how long it took until Rocky let him pet him.

“Okay,” Charles says.

“Okay?” Max asks.

Charles smiles at him. Max reaches out to poke his dimples. “We should take him.”

Max only doesn’t immediately hug Charles because Charles is still crouched somewhere on the floor, and Max can’t move that fast anymore without falling on his face, because the sudden movement would scare Rocky.

Instead, he slowly kneels down to plant a light kiss on Rocky’s forehead, who just presses closer to Max. His tail hits Max’s thighs. “Welcome home,” he whispers.

Max sits on the stool, lets his legs dangle. His knees ache, but it’s not bad enough to put a lot of focus on. It’s still twenty more minutes until the pizza is done, but the kitchen already smells like it, and he’s not sure how much longer they can manage to keep Charles out of the kitchen.

“Do you think volunteering would fit to me?” Max asks carefully, not looking at his mum, who’s leaning against the counter. They probably should be doing other things, should help Charles and Tom with the kids, but neither of them has moved to do so.

Sometimes, Max can hear Luka laugh, and so far, Charles hasn’t appeared panicking in the kitchen. It’s probably fine.

“Volunteering?” his mum asks, and she sounds confused. “Are you not already volunteering in the shelter?”

“Yes, but I mean”—he gestures—“something like you do.”

“Social work?” she asks. It doesn’t exactly sound surprised, but there’s still a note of disbelief in her voice that makes him cringe. He can’t blame her for it, not when he has never shown interest in anything outside of his pets and racing, but—

Things are different now. Of course, they’re different now.

Max grimaces. “I don’t want to do it as a job, but helping out, maybe? I am not sure how that works.”

When Max looks at his mum, she’s got her head tilted, squints. “We have a lot of people coming in from other professions helping out. I’m sure you could find something similar in Monaco, too,” she says slowly. “We always need more help.”

He’s guessed so much, looking through all the open positions, all the possibilities and the help needed. There had been a lot of voluntary options, and it had surprised him that it hadn’t been hard to imagine himself doing those. He’d still wanted his mum’s opinion, anyway.

Max nods. “Okay. I will look into it.”

His mum winks at him. “You could also actually study it, follow in my footsteps.”

Max huffs. “Now, you are a bit too ambitious, mum,” he says. He doesn’t want to become a social worker, doesn’t need the money either, but he wants to help out, he thinks, more than just donating money.

His mum laughs. “Just saying.”

“Max,” Vic says, smiling innocently at him, and already now, Max should know that Vic has something planned.

He still entertains her. “Yes?”

“I have a good idea for what we could be doing today,” she says, still smiling.

“We?” Max asks slowly. “With the kids?”

Vic shakes her head. “It’s been so long since just the two of us have been doing something, so I thought we could do, like, a small activity together.”

He’s not sure he likes where this is going.

“Which would be?” he prompts her.

She grins at him as if he’s fallen into her trap—he probably has, knowing her. “Pottery!”

Max groans, but he doesn’t bury his face in his hands like he would have preferred to do. “I have never done pottery in my life, Vic,” he says.

“I haven’t either,” Vic says, shrugs. “It’s why it could be fun!”

He really doesn’t think it will be fun. He’s never done it before, but he just knows that he won’t be any good at it—he’s never good at these things. “I am also really not artistic. Go with Tom,” he says, trying to sound as dismissive as possible. He doesn’t think he’s really succeeding.

Victoria pouts at him, and for a very ridiculous moment, she looks exactly like she did when she was eight and begging him for his last piece of chocolate. “You are so boring,” she says.

Max narrows his eyes at her. “And you are a nuisance.”

“Please?” Victoria asks.

Max rolls his eyes. He’s never been able to say no to her. “Fine.”

It’s been hours, and Max’s entire body hurts, and they’re still not anywhere near done. The first few hours were spent explaining how everything works, and he would have preferred it if it had stayed like that, if they hadn’t been forced to try things out themselves. But that’s what he had signed up for when he had agreed to go with Vic, and he’s not sure whether to curse out her or himself.

He stretches his back and his legs. No one had told him that he needed his legs for it, but in a way, he guesses, it’s not too different from accelerating in a car. It still took him longer to figure it out than the others did, but the others also don’t deal with having no feeling in their lower legs.

He suppresses a groan. His back still aches.

It makes Vic look up from her own potter’s wheel.

“Yours doesn’t look too bad,” she says. Her hands are dripping, are covered in clay to her elbows.

Max stares at his uneven clump of clay. “You cannot be serious.”

“It’s fine, I think,” Vic says, lies because her clay actually looks like a bowl.

Max sniffs. He’s close to smashing the clay thing in front of him. He can’t even call it a bowl with how unformed it is. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not,” Vic says, but there’s a glimmer in her eyes that Max doesn’t like.

“You are!” he complains.

It has Vic shrug. “I guess, it could be better,” she says—guess, as if all the other participants haven’t managed to produce decent bowls by now. It’s just Max’s that keep being uneven and collapsing, that are either too thin or too thick, that fall into themselves when he tries to remove them from the wheel.

He thinks he’s slowly starting to go crazy.

“You guess?” Max huffs.

“But it’s not too bad for a first try?” she tries to encourage him as if it’s actually his first try and not his tenth.

He’s going to cry if this doesn’t get better. He’s not cried because of something stupid like that since he was eight and his dad yelled at him to go faster.

“It is horrible,” he says.

Vic snorts. “It’s really not that serious, Max,” she says, which might be true to her because her bowl looks decent. He’d say the same if his bowl looked decent, but it doesn’t.

“This does not even look like a bowl,” Max points out. “Of course, it’s that serious!”

Vic shakes her head in amusement. “You are impossible.”

Max presses his lips together. “And this is really the first time you did it?” he asks, squints at her bowl. He’s not looking forward to having to put it in the kiln once he actually manages to produce something decent, and then have it crack before his eyes when they take it out again.

He doesn’t even want to think about potentially painting it. Just thinking about it makes him shudder.

There is a reason why Charles is the creative one in their relationship.

“Yes,” Vic says, smiles at him as if she’s not just made everything worse.

“Then why are you so good at it already?” he asks, throwing a glance at his own hands. They’re just as covered in clay as hers, but that’s the only thing that they have even remotely in common at the moment.

“I’m not as heavy-handed as you,” she points out, which might not be entirely wrong. He’s never been good at delicate things, and the last year probably has not helped with improving that either.

Max groans and pushes the clay together, so that it’s now an actual clump. “I am going to start going to pottery class. What is this?” he complains.

Vic laughs. “Max.”

“What?”

“You can’t be serious,” she says, which is true. He’s not serious. He’d prefer never having to look at another piece of clay ever again.

“This is literally just a clump,” he says, pointing at one of the bowls he’s made and that he had deemed to be good enough until he’d seen the others. “You cannot even recognise what it’s supposed to be.”

Vic shakes her head, throwing a bit of clay on her pottery wheel. “Just have fun, please.”

“I’m trying!” he complains because he has been trying to do so. He just sucks at it.

“You’re thinking about going to pottery class because yours doesn’t look great,” she points out, and it does sound ridiculous when it’s just supposed to be a fun afternoon for the two of them away from the kids. No one will care what his pottery pieces look like because no one is here to compete for the best piece.

“Victoria,”—Max points at the thing at his feet anyway—“this cannot even be called a bowl.”

It’s only supposed to be for fun, he tries to tell himself, but if he’s honest, he doesn’t remember the last time he had fun doing something he wasn’t good at.

“Here,” Victoria says, holding out more clay to him, and when he doesn’t immediately take it, she fixates him with a stare until he buckles. “Time to try again.”

Max heaves out a sigh and takes the sponge from the wheel to accept the clay instead. “Fine,” he says.

“Did you have fun?” Vic asks when they finally leave the studio.

Max pulls the jacket tighter around him. “It was fine,” he says, huffs.

Vic stares at him. He can feel her eyes burn into his skin, and she doesn’t stop until he rolls his eyes.

“I had fun,” he caves because it had been fun to just hang out with his sister again—even if the last bowl he made still doesn’t really look like a stupid bowl. At least, no one had laughed at him. “Happy?”

The smile on her face looks satisfied. “Very,” she says, sounding a bit too smug. “Next time, we’ll do a painting class.”

Max doesn’t even try to get out of it.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Charles says, and he’s squinting at Max as if he’s trying to get a read on him.

Max shrugs. “Of course, I want to,” he says. “Luka is very excited.” And anyway, no one is expecting anything of him. No one expects him to coach Luka, and no one expects him to have much of an opinion, but Luka had asked him to be there for his first karting race, and he’d been so excited his entire face had glowed. It’s not like Max would have said no.

“He is,” Charles says, but he still looks worried.

Max really doesn’t think he needs to be—he’s made it through the Grands Prix just fine. He’ll manage a karting race that isn’t even really a race.

“He is rarely this excited about things,” Max says.

Charles doesn’t reply to it; he only makes a noise that tells Max more than enough. Charles is worried, obviously, but if Max can’t even make it through this, then he shouldn’t work for Red Bull either. It will be fine. He’ll just keep his distance, will let everyone handle things related to the karts and the racing and the training. And then, nothing will happen, then everything will be fine.

“My dad didn’t call,” Max finally says and looks at Charles. He’s not even sure his dad knows yet, but he also wouldn’t know from where he’d know—Vic isn’t in contact with him anymore, and Max hasn’t picked up the phone again. “I think it will be fine.”

It’s nothing serious. It’s not even an actual competition. The kids race each other, but there is no prize, no trophy; it’s not even properly timed. It’s just for fun, and Luka has been vibrating all morning, waiting for them to finally leave.

“Are you excited?” Max asks.

Luka nods with so much force that Max worries that he’ll give himself a concussion.

Max smiles at him. “Good luck, little man,” he says and ruffles Luka’s hair.

“I’ll just be like you!” Luka exclaims, and Max swallows. “I’ll beat them all.”

If he could, he would have picked up Luka now. Instead, he leans heavily on the crutch to kneel down so that he is face-to-face with his nephew.

“You know you always make me proud even if you don’t beat them all, hm?” he says, ignoring his dad’s voice in his ears.

Luka rolls his eyes as if Max is silly for thinking that he doesn’t know something like that. “Of course, I know,” he says.

Max’s eyes burn. “Good,” he says. “Always remember that.”

Max’s hold on Charles’ hands is so tight that they’ve gone cold by now. He doesn’t have to look at Victoria to know that she’s doing the exact same, that her knuckles have turned white, that she’s barely breathing as they follow Luka’s tiny kart around the circuit.

“He has your intuition,” he says when Luka is on the straight, and he can breathe for a few seconds. He’s fast, doesn’t back down or slow down after a wobble. He keeps going as if he’s always karted, and Max is just thankful that this will be Victoria’s problem and not his.

“Or yours,” Vic jokes.

Max snorts.

“Mum’s,” they agree.

Max clears his throat, lowers his voice. “Do you ever regret it? That you didn’t race?”

He can feel Charles’ hands tighten around his. He squeezes back.

But Vic’s face is open. There is nothing of the regret he used to see on the faces of their former karting teammates when they couldn’t continue, when they had to stop, when there was no other way forward but to quit. “Not really. It was fun, but nothing I would have wanted to do as a job.”

“You had the talent for it,” Max says, because it’s always been true. He’s sure she could have made it to Formula One if she had wanted to.

“Yeah, but that’s not everything, is it?” she says. “To have the talent or skills, I mean. Sometimes, I think, the fun is more important.” And maybe she’s not wrong. Whenever they used to kart before this, before the crash, she’d still always had fun going karting, and maybe, maybe it would have burned her out, would have destroyed the fun of it.

“I guess,” Max says, shrugs with one shoulder.

Victoria laughs, nudges his side. “It is okay to be bad at pottery.”

Charles, next to him, snorts, so Max glares at him. “You are so annoying,” he complains.

Luka comes second for his age group, which is better than Max has ever expected, and Max has never seen him look this happy.

“Uncle Max, did you see?” he yells, after he’s skipped to his parents and patiently waited to be done with them hugging him and kissing his face.

Charles nudges his side. Max ignores him.

“I saw! You were so fast!” Max says, already wishing luck to Victoria. He doubts that Luka is going to want to stop any time soon. He still doesn’t think he could do it, if Charles and him will ever have kids.

“I almost crashed there!” Luka says, pointing at a corner where he’d had a big wobble. “Come!” He takes Max’s hand to pull him with him; when Max doesn’t immediately move, he turns around to also look at his parents, who just seem amused. “Mama, Papa, you, too.”

Victoria snorts. “One race, and he’s already forgotten about us,” she says, shaking her head.

Max only doesn’t make fun of her for it because his nephews are still around.

“But you had fun?” he asks instead even though he probably really wouldn’t need to be asking that.

Luka’s eyes are sparkling. “It’s the best! Maybe I can race you one day!”

Max leans down to Luka to whisper in his ear, “If you can beat me in the kart, you can move up to car racing.” He looks up at Victoria and grins at her. “Don’t tell your mum.”

It has Luka giggle before the track catches his attention again. “Look here! It’s so hard to take the corner!” he says, and Max nods. The skid marks in that turn really speak for themselves.

“But you did really well, didn’t you?” Max says, nudging Luka’s shoulder gently. “But that is not as important as having fun, right?”

Luka nods with wide eyes. “Both are good,” he decides.

Max laughs. “Both are good,” he agrees.

Luka is off to play football with some of the other kids. It stings, just a tiny bit, and once again, Max ignores the look Charles throws at him. They’d also always played football after the races. Max hadn’t.

“You are Luka’s uncle?” the man—Luka’s trainer—asks even though Max can see the recognition in his eyes. He still nods.

“Yes, exactly. I’m Max,” he says, stretching his hand out.

“I’m also Max,” he says, and shakes first Max’s, then Charles’ hand. “It’s nice to meet you.” He laughs sheepishly. “I already thought you were related, but you can never know for sure.”

Max nods. “Yeah, he is my sister’s kid. He has been very excited to start karting.”

“And you don’t want to coach him?” the other Max asks. He sounds genuinely curious, and there’s nothing of the judgement Max expected to see. It helps, maybe, that people don’t know yet that he’s accepted Red Bull’s offer, that no one even knows about it.

He shakes his head. “No, not really,” he says with a laugh. “I think you’re doing a great job. He’s having a lot of fun.”

The other Max smiles. “That’s good to hear,” he says, glancing at Max’s crutch. “Sorry about—” he trails off.

Charles’ grip on him tightens, but Max just shrugs. “It is fine.”

The other Max nods. He looks embarrassed.

“How long have you been coaching?” Max changes the topic, smiles.

“For a few years already. I did a season of Italian Formula Four, then some Formula Renault, but— yeah, life.” He shrugs with one shoulder. Max nods.

“Life,” he agrees. He doesn’t ask about that. “But it is fun?” He gestures to the kids, the karts, the track. He can see Charles throw a glance at him, but he simply squeezes Charles’ hand. He will not become a karting coach.

The other Max’s face brightens. “I like it. The kids are great. It’s fun. I’ve not come to regret it.”

“That is good,” Max agrees. He hopes that he has also made the right decisions, that he will not come to regret things either, but even then— He smiles at Charles, who returns it gently. But even then, it’s never too late to change things again, to find something else instead. Something else that will make him happy.

Max squeezes Arvid’s shoulder, gives him an encouraging smile. “It will be much easier than you think,” he says.

Arvid ducks his head, but he’s smiling when he puts the helmet on. He’s lanky and bumbling as he gets in the car, but Max has seen enough of him during races that it should get easier once he’s in the car.

It’s two laps later that Genty comes to a stop next to him. “How does it look?”

“Good,” Max says. “But that, of course, is not a surprise.” He knows that Red Bull had wanted for Arvid to get his Super License before he’d turned 18. The FIA hadn’t been very excited about it, GP had said. Max can’t imagine why.

Genty bumps his shoulder. “Have fun,” he says. Max always has fun at a track.

“Make a good car,” Max yells after him, leaning on his cane, “when you are already hiring a prodigy!”

Genty just laughs.

Five laps later, Arvid is called in to box. He’s beaming all over his face—Max has felt the same when he’d first tested a car, has seen the same expression every time a rookie has driven a Formula One car.

“How was it?” Max asks as Arvid pulls his helmet off.

“It’s so fast,” he says, breathless, but his entire face is beaming. Now that he’s tasted the speed of a Formula One car, he won’t ever be able to go back. Max had felt the same.

Max laughs. “That it is. But has anything felt weird? Differently than it should have been?”

Arvid shakes his head, but then he stretches his neck, rotates his head, and he grimaces like he’s in pain.

Max comes closer, asks, “Are you hurt?”

“No,” Arvid says, but it’s quick and uncertain. “Just a lot of pressure on my neck.”

Max nods quickly. Nothing bad then. But that comes with switching from the junior series to Formula One. Even with all the training that happens beforehand, the neck simply won’t be comfortable with the G-forces until a few races in.

“Just take the padding, mate,” Max says, knowing that his dad would have called him a pussy, which he has. When Arvid pulls a face, Max nudges his shoulder and steers him back to the garage. “It is fine. Everyone does it.”

Charles is waiting with packed suitcases when Max comes back. Rocky sits by his feet, and his eyes are big and brown, and he pushes into Max’s hand like he has never before, and for a moment, Max almost forgets to ask Charles what this is all about.

When he finally remembers, he just tilts his head, points at the suitcases. “Where are you going?” he asks.

“Where are we going, you mean?” Charles corrects him, pushing the suitcases closer to the door.

Max raises an eyebrow. He does not remember them talking about a vacation, much less booking one, and Charles doesn’t have anything on his schedule until Christmas. He’s rather sure it also would be nothing where Max would be allowed to come with after the telling-off they’d gotten from Ferrari. He really doesn’t care about that, though.

“Where are we going, Charles?” he asks.

Charles grins at him. “We might not have the time to travel the entire world, but we definitely have enough time to eat as much kebab as we want.”

“Now?” Max asks because Charles hadn’t mentioned anything about this until now. He didn’t even know that Charles was capable of booking a vacation on his own, not even talking about packing for both of them. Charles hates packing.

Charles snorts. “Of course, now,” he says, which is very deserved considering that the suitcases are all packed up, and Charles already has Rocky on a leash. He can hear Leo bark in the background.

Max looks at Rocky, who just looks back. “But the cats and the dogs—” he starts.

Charles shushes him. “Don’t worry about anything. I have already taken care of everything. The cat sitter is informed, and the dogs are very excited to come with us.”

Max shuts his mouth, blinks and takes the leash Charles offers him.

“Now just enjoy, chéri,” Charles says, satisfied, kisses him quickly.

“Thank you,” Max says, finally feeling like he’s gotten the ground back beneath his feet. “I feel like I should have made you this gift.” Since Charles just won his championship.

Charles rolls his eyes. “You can book the next vacation.”

“Good afternoon, Mr Verstappen,” Dr. Claasen says, a smile on her face. Her hair is tied back into a ponytail, and her eyes disappear behind thick glasses. She looks exactly how he expected a psychotherapist to look.

She seems nice. Max had chosen her because she’s Dutch.

“Is this your first time doing therapy?” she asks after Max has settled down on the chair across from her. He leans the cane against the back of it.

Max nods. “Yes. I am not entirely sure what to expect if I am honest.”

She smiles at him. “Don’t worry too much about it. We’ll start slow, and it’ll be only as much as you want it to be, right?” She shrugs.

“Not sure I can do slow,” Max jokes.

Her eyes twinkle. “Ready when you are, then.”

Max pauses, then he admits, “I am not sure where to start.”

“Just give me anything you want,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be anything personal. Maybe your middle name. Your job. Whatever you feel comfortable with.”

Max takes a deep breath. “My name is Max Verstappen. Technically, it is Max Emilian, but no one calls me that except for my mum when she is pissed at me. I am 28 now. And I am— I was a Formula One driver.”

His hands shake, but Dr. Claasen nods encouragingly for him to continue.

Max has never been gentle or kind. He would like to be it now.

I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do.
A box made out of leaves.
What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless.
— Richard Siken. Detail of the Woods