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It's dark and cold inside his apartment in a way it never needs to be, not with an eight-figure salary in the heart of Monaco. Charles wraps his arms around himself, staring resolutely at the shadows that dance across the opposite wall, projected from the streets below.
"Are you okay?" Jules asks, leaning against the door frame. He's only in a t-shirt, but he's not shivering, voice lilting around the French consonants.
Charles shrugs. Tries to shape an answer. He thinks he should be, can’t think of why he wouldn’t be, but— "I don't know. I don't think I know anything anymore."
"That's okay."
Charles shakes his head.
"It is, though. It's okay not to know." The breeze catches around the edge of a window, not quite pulled shut, bitterly cold. Charles shivers.
"Come, sit," Jules gestures to the couch, and Charles complies, taking the far corner, curling his legs under himself. Night has long since fallen, but he’s still in his race suit. He fiddles with the cuff, bites down on it for something to stop his teeth chattering. Tastes the salt of sweat and something else, something metallic.
"Aren’t you cold?" He asks.
"Charles..." Jules’ voice carries a hint of warning. Charles sighs.
"I know. I know . You're not real.”
Jules’ mouth twists, like he wants to say something and then thinks better of it.
The wind blows harder. The door hinges squeal against the onslaught. The wood twists and bows and cracks and breaks, fracturing, and Charles can only watch it fall away and — there's no hallway. Just a dizzying drop to the street below.
And then the rain begins.
Jules stands on the threshold, holding his hand out. Charles joins him.
The road below curves out toward the coast, oil marks already slickened, water pooling along the circuit boundaries.
"This might change the race tomorrow," Charles says.
Jules looks at him, and Charles looks back.
"There won't be a race tomorrow."
Charles can feel that ‘v’ forming between his eyebrows, the one his mama always smoothed out with her thumb. "Of course there will be. Why won't there be?"
Jules looks at him, through him, and—
— Charles is 8 years old, and the rain is pouring down so hard that he can barely see, so hard that it's pooling around his feet in the cart, his fingers too slick to unclip his harness, but Jules is there with steady hands and hot cocoa and a hug, even though Charles' race suit is sodden and he's getting Jules all wet too, and—
—His race suit is sticking to his body, Ferrari red, but darker somehow, and Jules' t-shirt is red too, but darker in places, and the rain is pooling around his feet now, inside his apartment, he really should get the door fixed—
"Why won't there be?" He asks again, feeling eight, and seventeen, and twenty-seven all at once.
"Because of that," Jules says, and points.
Charles follows his line of sight to a black smear across the tarmac, rubber so thick he can almost hear the slide that must have gone with it. It streaks from the centre of the road straight into the wall. He stares, mind putting together the speed, the axle locking, the force of impact. He sucks in a breath that struggles to come, arms clawing at his sides as something cracks , something gives way, and the rain is coming in so fast now. "What happened?"
Jules steps away from the door, puts both hands on Charles shoulders. "They red flagged the session. No one wanted to continue."
Behind him, a window gives way. Glass shatters, and water starts to pour in. It's over his waist now. He can’t feel his legs, can’t feel the floor beneath him.
"It was a head-on collision. Catastrophic brake failure, they said. A terminal issue with the car, one that's been there all season, the team was just crossing their fingers that it would hold on." Jules glances back at the road. "I guess someone forgot to cross their fingers."
There's an awful creaking, and Charles turns just in time to see a hairline fracture splinter up the wall. He clutches at his chest, tries to gasp in a breath; maybe the water is inside him now too, consuming him as it swallows the room. "Who was it?" He asks.
And there is—
—Quiet.
The rain stops. The flooding is up to his neck. It’s peaceful, almost, as though he’s sinking even though he’s standing still. As though if he just opened his mouth, let the water flow in and through and over him, he could rest. Jules just looks at him, calm despite the rain, eyes so full of something that Charles can't decipher.
The cracks creep higher up the walls.
On the road, by the wall, the moonlight catches on a front wing end plate. Torn off, edges jagged and sharp.
Bright red.
"Who crashed?" Charles asks again.
The walls give way. The apartment opens up around him, flayed open, falling apart like a toy model glued wrong. Charles opens his mouth, to inhale, to speak, to drown, to scream. Jules’ hands are firm on his arms. His eyes glued to Charles’.
“You did.”
Charles tries to scream as his chest gives way, caves in, splinters apart, the force of a hurricane into a door, an F1 car into the walls of Monaco—
"You have to wake up now, Charles.”
—The force of hands, pressing over and over again into the chest of a dead man, trying to claw life back into a stopped heart within a house of cracked ribs.
He opens his eyes.
The room is white, sterile. Beside him, the monitor sounds a continuous monotone alarm. There are hands against the shattered remains of his chest, and there is Jules, leaning against the door frame, red t-shirt stained a darker red, as people rush around and past and through him.
“You have to wake up now, Charles,” he says, hands clenched into fists at his sides.
Above him, rain pounds against the roof.