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The worst day of Damon’s life happens when he’s fifteen, and he doesn’t even realise it. He goes about it as if it was a normal Saturday; he plays football with his mates from school in the morning, and then they spend a good part of the afternoon mucking about in town. Damon goes home afterwards, annoys his sisters, and puts off his schoolwork until well after dinner, when his mother and sisters were watching television in the living room, and all four of them were ignoring the fact that it was just the four of them.
(Damon is old enough to understand that racing is his father’s first love. He is also old enough to resent him for it, just a little)
Damon’s head snaps up when he hears the telephone ring, and by the time Damon makes it to the kitchen to answer, his mother is already there. Damon watches silent from the doorway as Bette goes pale and still with shock, and then as tears start to roll down her cheeks. Whatever it is, it’s not good news. Damon just hopes it’s nothing to do with his father.
“Mum,” Damon says, voice unsure and uncertain but he doesn’t want to watch his mother cry alone in the kitchen for any longer.
Bette’s face goes soft when she sees Damon, and she pulls the phone away from her ear and covers the microphone with her hand. “Put your sisters to bed, Damon. Please,” she says, and then she goes back to the telephone and it’s like he’s not even there.
Damon only moves because he thinks he’s going to start crying too, if he spends any longer in that room. It feels like there’s a war going on inside of him. There’s a part of him that knows it’s about Graham, because it always is, but there’s another part that’s screaming at him that it’s not, it’s not, it’s not, Graham is fine and Damon doesn’t know which side to believe.
Samantha and Brigitte must have a sixth sense or something, because neither of them complain when Damon tells them to turn the television off and go brush their teeth. They’re both in bed with no protests in five minutes, and normally Damon would be happy about that but as it is he still feels a bit like he wants to cry, so he goes back to his homework but he takes one look at it and actually starts to cry at that, because algebra is just so stupid and who decided it was a good idea to put letters in maths?
It’s only once his tears start to dry up does Damon feel brave enough to leave his room again. It must be nearing midnight but there’s still lights on throughout the house, and Damon’s mother is still in the kitchen. The telephone is laying on the countertop next to her, discarded.
“Mum?” Damon asks. Her head snaps up at the sound of his voice, and when their eyes meet, hers are bloodshot. “What happened?”
“Oh, Damon,” she says. She holds out her arms, and Damon doesn’t hesitate to put himself between them. Damon feels six years old in her embrace. “Oh Damon,” she says again, and starts petting his hair. “Your father’s plane crashed. None of them made it.”
(Damon misses a week of school and three more days after that. He never did finish that algebra homework, and when he went to apologise, his algebra teacher just told him that it was alright, in a sickly sweet tone, with some kind of look in her eye. The same thing happened with his English teacher, and PE, and Science. Half of his friends left him alone, and the other half could hardly bear to look him in the eyes. When they did, there it was again. There was pity in the eyes of every one of his teachers, and friends, and his dad’s racing friends that still visited, and every reporter that came to their house.
Damon never really manages to shake that look of pity from people.)
Damon is thirty-three when he becomes team leader of Williams, after the truly horrific weekend at Imola.
He absolutely hates how it happened, and privately mourns Senna and Ratzenberger, but Damon is no stranger to death in this sport. He has been surrounded by it his entire life. He is not like DC, young and scarred by the race and looking almost terrified to climb into the cockpit at testing.
(Damon had been scared to fly the first time he did after his father’s crash. He refuses to be scared to race.)
So Damon puts Imola out of his mind, and shoulders the hopes of the team. This is his shot. He has to make the most of it. He has to make Ayrton’s death worth something.
The rest of 1994 goes like this:
Newey manages to fix the car. It no longer feels like it may try to kill Damon at any moment, which is a massive improvement. Damon praises the man for it, though he’s still salty from when he heard Newey gossiping to Head - “I don’t know how Damon can get back in the car after all this, considering his father.”
Damon mentors DC throughout the season, together with Nigel Mansel, who’s lingering around Williams for a final year. Nigel is old school, old school enough that he’s seen death as well, and is able to put Ayrton out of his mind well enough to race. (After all, Nigel had won the race after Elio de Angelis had passed away.) Between testing and tips the two of them manage to build DC’s confidence to the point that it shows in his results; a second place in Portugal is something to be proud of.
Damon spends the season trying to catch up to Schumacher from three races behind, and after his retirement at Monaco, manages to win six of the remaining races with a healthy amount of second places to keep his title hopes alive, and they were. Heading into Australia, all Damon had to do was finish in the points, ahead of Schumacher, and he’d be golden. Damon was so, so close, and then Schumacher turned in, and was all for nothing.
Fuck.
Very, very deep inside of Damon is a fifteen year old, sobbing and thinking about how the only thing he has left of his father now is racing. On the long, long flight back to England, Damon goes over the tragedies and failures of this year and wonders if he even really has that, anymore.
At thirty-six, half a year after they’d last been teammates, Damon accidentally walks into Jacques Villeneuve’s motorhome in Montreal, instead of his own.
Damon is ready to apologise, leave, and never have a reason to think of this mistake again, when Jacques walks out of the bathroom. There’s a towel around his shoulders and some sort of light blue liquid in his hair.
“Sorry,” Damon says. “I walked into the wrong motorhome.”
“Ok,” Jacques shrugs. He stares at Damon. Damon stares back. They’re silent for a few moments.
“What are you doing to your hair?”
“I’m bleaching it,” Jacques says. He turns to walk back into the bathroom. Damon follows him, getting a glimpse of a brown spot of hair on the back of his head Jacques hadn’t been able to reach. “I’m going blonde. It’s like, a thing now. I saw it in a movie,” Jacques messes with the bleach in his hair, looking at Damon through the mirror, “Not that you would know anything about that, old man.”
“Oi.” Damon punches Jacques in the side, and laughs as Jacques keels over. This is familiar, at least. They hadn’t been close, as teammates, but there was no animosity from competition between them either. Despite his stellar season Jacques had been happy to play second fiddle to Damon, on most occasions. “You missed a spot. Where are your gloves?”
Wordlessly, Jacques points to a drawer, which upon Damon opening it, reveals a box of disposable gloves. Damon puts them on and reaches for the little tub of bleach sitting on the countertop. Jacques quietly hums as he lets Damon fix his mistakes, watching their reflections in the mirror.
Suddenly uncomfortable in the silence, Damon speaks. “You’re really just bleaching your hair for a trend?”
“Got sick of people telling me I look like Gilles,” Jacques mumbles. Damon pauses. They make eye contact through the mirror. “Don’t you?”
“It helps that I don’t have a moustache,” Damon shrugs. The truth is that he’s just like Jacques; he absolutely hates it. He hates everyone in the paddock who comes up to him just to say oh, you look like your father or you have his eyes or he would be so proud of you, like they’re entitled to Graham’s memory on account of having known or watched him three decades ago. Not to mention the on-track comparisons. They’re the second lot of father-sons to win the Australian Grand Prix, the only two to win world championships. Everything Damon does is replicating his father, and the media will never let him forget it.
“It was a fantastic mustache,” Jacques laughs.
“They're never going to stop, you know,” Damon says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re blonde for the rest of your life. We’re always going to be our father’s sons.”
“Doesn’t mean I can’t hate it,” Jacques says, and that’s the end of it.
Damon is sixty when he runs into Mick Schumacher in the paddock. Literally. It’s night, and the is paddock nearly deserted. Damon hadn’t been paying attention to where he was walking, two busy on Instagram (a guilty pleasure, he will admit), and he walks straight into Mick. Despite his small size Mick is all muscle, and Damon has gotten (literally) soft in his old age, and he ends up doing some kind of comical falling-backwards manoeuvre before managing to right himself.
Mick stares, horrified, for a moment before he jumps into motion. “Oh mein Gott, Damon,” Mick says. He grabs the front of Damon’s shirt and starts dusting him down? Checking him over? “I’m so sorry, are you alright? I didn’t mean to, I didn’t see you, I’m so sorry.”
Damon almost wants to pinch Mick’s cheeks. He hasn’t managed to outgrow his awkwardness, yet, or his baby face. But then Damon remembers the time when he was seventeen and Jackie Stewart had actually pinched his cheeks, and he thinks better of it.
“I’m fine, Mick, I didn’t even fall,” Damon says. “How are you feeling?”
Mick blinks, confused. “Good?”
“And about next year?”
“Oh,” Mick exhales, relaxed at the more direct question. “I’m really excited of course, and I’m super happy to be with Haas, but…” Mick frowns. “I really should’ve talked to you about this earlier, since you would probably understand the most,” Mick takes a breath, and before Damon can ask what this is, starts talking again. “I know that no matter what I do I will never be better than him, but I still want to make him proud and there are all these drivers who raced with him and so many people who idolised him and I just wish I could talk to him about it and have some help, maybe, but I can’t and…” Mick had been looking down at the ground during his ramble, but now when he locks eyes with Damon, they’re wet with unshed tears. “How did you do it?”
Damon can’t resist any longer and wraps Mick in a hug. He lets the boy, because that’s really what he is, bury himself into his arms, and cards his fingers through the spikes of Mick’s hair when he starts to let out little hiccuping sobs.
“I know it’s not the same,” Mick chokes out.
“But he’s still not here to watch you race, and it hurts all the same,” Damon says. Mick nods into his chest. “I still miss my father. I still wish he had been there to watch me race and win, but we can’t change the past. Honestly, I’m not sure how I did it, apart from knowing I didn’t have another option. The media will never stop calling his son. You just have to learn how to ignore it, or take it in stride.”
There’s silence after that, but Mick stays buried in Damon’s arms, crying, for at least ten minutes afterwards. Damon holds him for every one of them, and when Mick’s breathing evens out and he pulls, finds himself almost reluctant to let go.
“Are you okay to get back to your hotel?” He asks.
“Yes,” Mick says. “Thank you.”
Damon wants to tell him that’s unnecessary, but he holds his tongue. Now’s not the time. “Call me if you ever want to talk. About anything.” Mick nods. Damon pats him on his shoulder, “Good lad,” and sends him on way.
It’s only as he’s watching Mick’s retreating form that he remembers something else he’d wanted to say. “You’re understeering into Turn 3 because you’re braking too early!” Damon calls. “Try doing it ten metres later tomorrow!” There’s no response, but Damon knows he’s been heard.
He lets out a little involuntary laugh that morphs into a sob. Damon’s not much of a crier but Mick’s such a sweet kid, and it’s late. He’s probably the only person left in the paddock, at this point.
Damon is nearly fifteen years older than Graham was when he had his crash. His mother is also gone now, and his sisters are well into their fifties and starting their own retirements. Jacques still bothers him frequently enough to be like the annoying younger brother Damon never had.
But sometimes Damon feels like the little kid playing with his toy cars on the carpet and telling anyone who listens that he wants to be a racing driver just like his dad when he grows up, and he doesn’t think he’ll ever escape that kid.