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It’s the 29th of July. Harry Potter wins the Belgian Grand Prix after the disqualification of his teammate.
He couldn’t tell you why the other car was over a kilogram underweight, and honestly, he doesn’t really care. There is no joy in him when the news brakes. Even P1 feels cold and tasteless in his mouth. It feels like he hasn’t earned it.
The stewards determine that Article 4.1 of the FIA Formula 1 Technical Regulations has been breached and therefore the standard penalty for such an infringement needs to be applied.
The team also acknowledge that there were no mitigating circumstances and that it was a genuine error.
There is nothing at all.
The P2 trophy is already with the team. The switch should be quick and easy. The Instagram posts will be taken down and replaced. His publicist will post an emotional story about the power of teamwork and the pain of being knocked down only to come back stronger. There will be a picture of Harry and his teammate hugging in the comms room. All would seem to be well.
All Harry knows is that he needs to move. Teams, countries, whatever — it just needs to happen quickly. He’s starting to feel stagnant, and this isn't something he recognises. It lingers uncomfortably.
There has been talk, of course; false headlines, rumours that get slightly too close to the truth for comfort.
Harry did get an offer. And it’s been sitting on the desk opposite his bed ever since.
A stark red folder. An embossed silver horse rearing up. Two years. An escape route painted in Scuderia glory. Because everyone is saying now’s the time — that after more than a decade at Mercedes, it was really the only logical move, the only place left for him to go.
At one point, it might’ve felt good to feel wanted again.
At this point, Harry is lucky to feel anything at all.
He welcomes the summer break for once. He can finally let the wheels stop turning. No more cameras. No more pretences. No more races run with ghosts in his rear-view mirrors.
Harry can’t help but keep wondering if maybe this is the moment where he’s supposed to throw the towel in.
It was Ron who suggested the holiday. It was also Ron who knocked on his door on Wednesday morning with a semi-packed suitcase and an evening flight ticket.
He hadn’t asked. Just looked at Harry for a long second and said, “It’s either this or we start marathon training.”
The unspoken parts hang between them: You look like hell. You haven't slept. You keep checking the telemetry like it’s going to fix a car that can’t win because your team's stopped listening to you.
Harry hasn’t been back to Greece in well over a decade. There was something there, preserved by time. It feels wrong to disturb it.
Yet here he is.
—
Harry picks this beach on purpose. He half-expects to see two bikes still leaning against the crumbling sea wall, to hear laughter from the ocean, a shouted dare about cliff-jumping or something equally ridiculous. But it’s quiet.
The water rumbles gently. The seagulls swoop overhead.
Still, somehow, it’s full of them.
He doesn’t plan on staying this long or walking this far. The sun is lower than he expects. All he wants is air, maybe salt in his lungs instead of engine smoke for once. But the path draws him in, familiar and automatic, feet kicking up dust as he goes barefoot down the stone steps to the tiny cave he remembers.
But there’s someone there already.
He thinks he might be at a loss for words, but this guy, specifically, has his own special way of pulling them out.
“Ron sent you.” Harry is shaking with a fury he didn’t quite know he was capable of anymore. It feels good. It feels like he's alive again.
Draco turns at the sound of Harry’s voice, standing ankle-deep in the surf, arms crossed.
“Why the fuck”— Draco enunciates each word with that stupid fucking euro-posh drawl — “would I come here at Weasley’s behest?”
The absurdity of it — the lack of pleasantry, this man, in this place again — pisses Harry off even more.
“Why do you have to ruin everything?” Why are you here? Why are you here right now? Why is it always you?
“Oh, of fucking course. It’s just like 2016 again. I’m the one ruining your life.”
Draco wades out of the water and onto the sand. He’s close enough now that Harry can see the flecks of dried salt on his collarbone, recognises the fucked off twitch at the corner of his mouth.
“You think I showed up to ruin whatever this is for you? You think that’s what I’m doing?” he says, waving a hand. “It’s always about you, isn’t it?”
Harry stares at him. He’s angry, but he doesn’t know what for. He’s tired, but he doesn’t know why. He thinks he might hate racing except for the thirty-odd seconds in the car when he remembers why he does this twenty-four weekends a year, plus overtime.
He looks at Draco now and realises he probably feels the same. Thirty seconds of clarity — everything else is just noise.
This is typical of them. It’s actually exactly what Harry imagined when he pictured meeting Draco again.
It’s always ‘hit them where it hurts’ until the person opposite you knows exactly where to swing back. Neither of them are good at pulling punches.
They have the history to prove it.
“You don’t fucking get it, do you?” Draco is looming over Harry now, hair glowing something angelic from the sunlight he is directly blocking. “I had to win to retire. I had to have something you couldn’t take away from me.”
He says it like it’s still happening — like they’re back in Abu Dhabi 2016, side by side in Parc Fermé, and Draco’s hands are trembling as he’s celebrating and pulling off his gloves, but no one else notices, only Harry.
Harry still remembers the split-second, ice-cold realisation that he’d never get to race Draco again. He feels it actually. He remembers no satisfaction in being correct either.
Now they’re both breathless for no reason. Simultaneously fourteen and forty and thirty-one again, boyish and raw around the edges.
Draco exhales slowly, breaking the tenuous silence first. “You look like shit.”
Harry lets out a stuttered laugh. “Thanks. Been a long season.”
Harry can feel how Draco looks him over properly now. His eyes drag down the curve of Harry’s shoulders, his unshaven jaw, the slight tremor in his left hand that Harry knows he’s doing a shit job of hiding.
“Well, it’s not like I’ve been commentating the whole thing.” Then, quieter, “It’s not just that, though, is it?”
Harry shrugs. It’s noncommittal, automatic. He toes at the sand with one foot, suddenly hyper-aware of how stupid this all looks.
But Draco won’t let up. He knows Harry too well. Deep down, Harry knows that even now, Draco’s opinion carries a heavy weight.
“You’re not twenty anymore. Neither am I. You can’t keep driving yourself into the ground and pretending it looks noble.”
Harry bristles. “I’m not running.” Then he catches himself because that might not have been what Draco said, but it was sure as shit what he meant.
It was, and is, always only Draco who could beat Harry at his own game.
“No? Then what would you call this?” Draco gestures vaguely, not just at the beach, but all of it — the sunburning grief, the hollow victory, the fact that Harry’s here when he said he wouldn’t ever come back. “You show up here looking half like a corpse, scream at me like I’m the problem, and you think that’s just... normal?”
The heat rises to Harry’s face. He decides he doesn’t want to be here anymore, but he also doesn’t want to go. And maybe that’s part of the issue.
Draco sighs and scrubs a hand over his mouth, looking suddenly exhausted.
“Look,” he says, voice lower now, less sharp. “The house is still ours. It’s just up the road.”
Harry knows.
Draco hesitates, sputters like an engine failure. “There’s a spare room. If you need somewhere to go.”
A guest room. Harry had never slept alone in that house before.
Harry frowns. “You’re inviting me over?” He wonders if Draco really wants him back there.
Draco doesn’t flinch. “I’m not offering you a five-star, all-inclusive, beachside resort stay, Harry. You just look like someone who hasn’t rested in about a year. Figured the least you could do with is a roof and a locked door.”
Draco saying his name jars him actually. He was Haz before he was Harry before he became Potter, and then, just the ‘other guy’.
“So what?” Harry asks. “You play therapist now?”
“No,” Draco says, a little too quickly. “But I’ve had enough time with one to recognise when someone’s about three seconds from a crash.”
Harry doesn’t want to feel grateful. Not to Draco. Not here. Not like this. But the truth is, the thought of going back to the villa Ron rented for him makes him uncomfortable.
“For old times’ sake,” he mutters.
A lifetime of memories buried in the blink of an eye. And now they're back.
Draco nods once and starts back up the path. The hem of his trousers drips saltwater as he walks.
Harry stays there a moment longer. Then he picks up his shoes and follows.
It’s nice to wake up, Harry realises, when there’s no alarm blaring into your eardrum before the sun rises.
He thinks he’s slept well.
Draco had shoved him into an empty room with an ensuite, along with a hasty goodnight, despite knowing that Harry knows the exact outline of this place.
Harry thinks he could probably still walk from here to Draco’s room with his eyes closed.
He decides to try it.
One foot in front of the other. Until he bumps into a table he doesn't recognise.
Opening his eyes feels like a chore. He doesn't actually know if he wants to see what this place looks like.
He remembers it, twenty-six years ago and memory hazy. Nostalgic.
But the living room is different now — the old leather sofa is gone, replaced with something fabricky and yellow. There’s a wicker basket filled with children’s toys.
The walls are still white. Draco’s room is still Draco’s room, perched just off of the perimeter of the opposite hallway.
Harry still walks towards it. For old times’ sake.
He pretends that he isn’t still full of envy when he hears muffled French, then German, come from behind the closed door. Draco is talking to his father and mother, and Harry has no way of working out exactly what any of them are saying.
He can’t quite decide whether it’s a gift or a jinx to be a one-time championship winner son and have a one-time winner father.
It’s no secret that Lucius Malfoy had no crown to abdicate after his victory. Only one race win and yet, enough points to surmount a championship. He retired four years later, wife and tiny blond baby intact.
And Harry is jealous.
He’s seen the pictures and heard the stories and spent enough time with the Malfoy family to understand it now. People with something to lose don’t win seven championships. They win one. Then they lay the knife’s edge danger to rest and cradle their newborn in one arm and a helmet in the other.
Harry thinks it would be nice to have something to lose, something to stop him getting in the car when he thinks he might not get out.
He’s seen the news, read the papers. Former Mercedes Pilot Draco Malfoy: From Driving Champion to Divorce. He lingered on the picture of Draco and his son far longer than he should have. It was taken at a Monaco karting track.
A small, blond boy in one arm and a helmet in the other.
Harry returns to his room and goes back to bed.
—
Harry doesn’t expect the knock. He was expecting to be left alone.
There’s a pause, then a soft knock again. Not impatient. Just... waiting.
“Harry?” Draco’s voice filters through, muffled by the wood. “You up?”
Harry doesn’t respond. He gets up and opens the door instead.
Draco steps in a few inches, barefoot, sunglasses perched in his hair, holding two bottles of water. He looks maddeningly refreshed — and a flare of something barely recognisable flashes in Harry.
“Fancy going down to the beach?” Draco asks. “I was thinking lunch. Bread, olives, that aioli thing you used to eat like it was air.” He pauses. “You know, back in the days when we could eat whatever we wanted and still drop the weight before a weigh-in.”
Harry raises an eyebrow. “Speak for yourself.”
Draco chuckles and tosses one of the bottles to him. “Come on. For old times.”
Draco still aims lower left because he knows Harry’s weak spots. Muscle memory.
—
They walk in silence most of the way down. Harry counts his footsteps.
Draco spreads out a blanket once they reach the sand, opens the bag he’s packed — half a bakery’s worth of bread, ripe tomatoes, oily white cheese in paper, a yellow tub of aioli, and a cold bottle of sparkling water.
“You know,” Draco says eventually, “if someone had told me eight years ago I’d be willingly feeding you on this beach, I would’ve laughed in their face.”
Harry smirks. “Eight years ago, you were still saying my name like it was a cuss word.”
“Eight years ago, I was still trying to convince myself that I hated you.”
The words hang there. Harry glances at him, but Draco’s busy slicing bread.
“You were better at pretending then,” Harry says finally.
“I had more to lose.” Draco dusts crumbs out of his lap before lying back on his elbows, eyes squinting toward the water. “Do you remember the last time we came here?”
Harry laughs. “Yeah. We were fourteen and fucking stupid.”
“Well,” Draco sits up again, reaches for the water bottle, takes a slow sip. “Look at us now.”
They’re quiet for a minute. The waves roll in and out. A gull shrieks overhead. Harry picks at the edge of the blanket, brushing sand off the corner, eyes fixed on nothing in particular.
“It’s Ferrari, isn’t it?” Draco’s voice is lower now. “That’s the offer.” There’s no one on this beach. They're safe here. Draco could scream it, and the press still wouldn’t catch wind.
Harry shifts. “Does it matter?”
“You’ve already signed, haven’t you?”
“No.” A beat. “Not yet.”
Draco nods like he expected that. “But you will.” Like it doesn’t comfort him.
Harry looks down at his hands. Sand clings to the skin of his palms, caught in the creases.
“And what if I go in knowing that I might not get out?”
“I’d call it a death wish.”
A moment of silence. Draco turns to face him, takes Harry’s hands into his own and looks at him with enough earnestness that it hurts.
“Promise me you won’t get in that car.”
Harry doesn’t meet his eyes because the last time he was here, he was making promises he couldn’t keep. He was swearing to harbour secrets that eventually became circuit gossip.
“Harry, I need you to promise me you won’t get in the fucking car.”
Draco’s hold is now a death grip, knuckles turning white with sheer force. Years out of a car, and yet, he still holds everything like a steering wheel.
Harry wonders if that’s the only way either of them knows how to feel normal, with the roar of engines and the tunnel vision.
The Ferrari deal is burning a hole in his mind, louder than any crowd, brighter than any finish line. But here is Draco. Not as a teammate. Not as a rival. It’s not 2016 anymore, and they have both grown up.
It’s on the tip of Harry's tongue. All of it. Every sorry; Monaco 14, America 15, Spain 16, everything before and after and in between. His dilemma and his desire that he’d spent years stoking into success, only to feel like none of it matters anyway.
Of course, Harry says none of this. His hand twitches in Draco’s, and that’s as much of a reaction as he can give him right now.
Harry thinks he should say something, promise he won’t do it. He won’t sign the contract if that’s what Draco is asking, if he says it in plain English. He would stay if that’s what Draco wants — Harry in one hand and a helmet in the other.
Instead, he gets up and leaves the beach, leaves the pleading resistance in Draco’s hands, but takes that feeling of something not quite right with him.
The evening passes in silence, and Harry doesn’t leave his room. He doesn’t sleep much either. Just lies on his back, staring at the ceiling, replaying the beach, and the look on Draco’s face, and the grip he had on Harry's wrist.
He dozes and dreams, briefly, that he’s in the car already — and wakes up with his heart pounding and no track in sight.
He doesn’t see Draco again until the morning.
Harry stumbles out into the kitchen, where Draco is already set up for the day. He has a cup of coffee. And a bowl of Frosties. He’s wearing reading glasses.
Draco doesn’t look up right away. He flips a page in the newspaper — an actual paper, probably couriered in from god-knows-where because, of course, he’s still old school like that.
Harry drags himself toward the espresso machine, blinking against the light. The salt is still in his hair. His shirt is inside out. It doesn’t matter.
They sit like that for a while, neither one talking. The only sound is the gurgle of the machine and the slow turning of pages.
“You never asked, you know.”
“Asked what?”
“Why.”
“I didn’t need to ask why you retired. I knew.” Harry pauses for a second. “I know.”
And he did. He had him figured out all season. Sometimes, Harry tells himself he let Draco win out of love. He also knows deep down that the version of him back then really had the capacity to love nobody.
Draco lowers the newspaper, finally meets his eyes.
“My divorce?” Draco phrases it like a question. “That’s what I meant.”
Harry lets it sit between them for a while.
“Same difference.”
Harry supposes that if you were to look at Draco from the outside, he has it all. He’s gorgeous. He’s successful. He knows his wheel well enough to stay in the sport that stripped him bare.
Harry is still jealous.
Mostly because he’s still where Draco left him the first time.
So Harry kisses him.
Because if he does this here, then nothing distorts anywhere else.
He leans over the dining table, which hasn’t changed. He allows himself a final thirty seconds of freedom, wrapped up in the one thing he wanted more than to be the best. And it’s nice. Draco tastes sweet like his breakfast, and Harry tries not to cry at the fact that the last time he tasted Frosties was sitting next to Draco years ago.
He’s grateful Draco doesn’t push him away. He’s grateful that he doesn’t try to pull him any closer either.
Draco pulls back slightly, whispers it against Harry’s lips. “It’s always eight to me.”
Harry knocks their foreheads together, closes his eyes and tries to say it in one go. “It doesn't mean eight should’ve included your one.”
What he means is: I love you. It’s never just your fault. We did this together, we won together then, we lose together now.
He cries. Draco kisses him this time.
And Harry doesn’t think about being fourteen and falling in love with his best friend. He doesn’t think about how they’re sitting in the same place, both of them leaning in in the same way, except last time he was the one to push Draco away, and maybe it’ll be him this time too.
He doesn’t think of that time when Draco reverses his car out of Mirabeau, and fucks it up for the both of them, and the mutual punishment that comes after.
He sobs, but Draco pushes him harder, drinks him in like fresh champagne on the podium top step.
Harry does not think about how love has only ever brought out the worst in him, and decides that maybe the only way to get out of the car is by making sure he can never get back in again.
Just one last time.
“I’m leaving Mercedes.” Harry says it the following morning, over breakfast, and Draco continues to stir the eggs he has cooking.
Harry’s leaving today.
“Okay.”
His bag is packed by the door.
“No advice then?”
They both slept alone last night.
“No.” Draco looks up to face Harry. “Just know it’ll feel the same in red.”