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There is something deeply wrong with Charles Leclerc. There is something in his head, a vine, twisting itself around his frontal lobe, squeezing, tightening, a mesh of leaves and thorns. There is a crack in his skull, there is blood seeping in, drying and crusting along the edges of his brain.
He restarts the sim.
There is something deeply wrong with Charles Leclerc. There is something in his head, or a lack thereof, something that makes him so incapable of simply succeeding.
To cut open his own skull. Study his brain, study what makes him so, so, so—
There is blood, and there is tissue lying on the floor. Charles stares at it, in hopes of it giving him the answers. Like it might grow a mouth and talk to him, tell him everything he needs to know.
Charles Leclerc needs to know a lot.
He hits his head against the sim’s steering wheel, hot and sweaty from the heat of his hands, the frustration leaking through. Pieces of the bones lying underneath the fluffy, bloody mess he calls his hair crack and fall to the ground. They don’t tell him anything either.
He could study those pieces. Maybe if he looks close enough, he might see small inscriptions, sort out the bone marrow with all the right answers from the marrow with all the wrong answers that cling to his fingertips, because surely, surely, there must be something inside of him that is right.
Maybe if he wants it more, wants more, then it will reach him, or he will be consumed by his greed until the only pieces left of him are the bones on the ground whilst trying. Then at least he will have tried.
He crashes into a wall. Restarts the sim.
There is something deeply wrong with Charles Leclerc. Something that’s been planted into him, sown deep within and tied doubled, the twitch of his hands, shaking from nervousness that wasn’t there before – maybe the pressure has finally reached him fully.
Maybe. He wasn’t always so– bad. At everything. There was a time when he could actually win every once in a while, a time where he didn’t finish only ninth, with third as his best result.
He’d rather finish seventeen, because then the number may actually mean something.
He shakes his head, buries the grief deeper than the wrongness inside of him. Imagines it like burying a body – shoveling dirt on top, one final look at the ghostly pale of the face he’s staring down at before he covers it with a final layer of dirt. One last reminiscence before it’s gone and forgotten, like it never existed at all.
He crashes again. Restarts again.
There is something deeply wrong with Charles Leclerc. It came to him as a revelation, a prophecy, a crash that meant so much for someone that means so little themself. Like praying without crossing his hands, like looking into the depths of a fire that he’s seen too many times to count and to count it anyways, because everything means too much for Charles. He messes up, and he crashes, and he watches, and he does so much and too little and all at the wrong moments.
There’s a man walking out of fire, and there’s Charles Leclerc walking into it.
He crashes again. Restarts.
There is something deeply wrong with Charles Leclerc. He blames the team, when he should just be blaming himself. He blames the car, when he should just be blaming himself. He blames everything else, when he should just be blaming himself.
The blame only burns more because he knows it’s true – it’s not some kind of thing he believes, like believing in a god or in a conspiracy theory, this, this is—
A lap finishes on the sim, the numbers flashing, taunting him. His hands are shaking. He clenches his fists, shuts his eyes tight, gasps at the pain of his nails cutting through his palms. Slams his head against the steering wheel, picks up his phone and dials the first number in his recents.
It rings out, and he’s just about to hang up when a hello? laced with sleep graces his ears.
It feels relieving, in a way. To hear another voice, even how annoyed, tired, angry it may sound. There’s no way he can sink deeper than he already has – he thinks he’s dug into the centre of the Earth, and the hole can now only expand in size, can only swallow everything around him so at least he’s got company, at least he can see the evidence of what he’s ruined other than just himself.
He restarts the sim, phone pressed with his shoulder to his ear.
Charles?
There is something deeply wrong with Charles Leclerc. The thorns prick and prod at him, hitting all the wrong spots of his brain, internal bleeding, but he’s just blaming everything else again. If he’s his brain but his brain isn’t him, then who is he, really?
Internal bleeding can cause death, especially in the brain, he remembers reading once in a fit of anxiety and fear, shaking and shaking. If he’s bleeding, then the problem won’t be him, and the burden will be lifted. If he’s bleeding, then he can bleed all of his incompetence out until the right bits are left, and he can be good, can be enough, at least. And if he’s bleeding, then he should also be dead.
It feels so selfish to wish for death, to wish for a way out, to wish to have his burdens handed over to something out of his control, to wish.
Are you there?
Charles has already got all of this, and he wishes for more. He denies himself the satisfaction that comes with having, because he revels in the feeling of being bad, of feeling bad, of feeling like he’s on top of the world when he’s sweating and hyperventilating in the car, and feeling like he’s below the world when his heart beats normally again. When everything’s normal, and functioning how it’s supposed to, there’s nothing to blame himself on. There’s only him.
There’s only him.
He crashes again, the same corner, always the same. Always, always, always the same.
He restarts the sim.
Are you okay? Can you repeat?
There is something deeply wrong with Charles Leclerc, and he can only sob about it until he’s fixed it. It rips through his throat, dry and sharp, followed almost immediately by another, choking on his own spit and coughing painfully. The worried voice from the other end is only distant before he hangs up, a deafening silence the only thing bothering to follow him into this room, into this anger and this grief, his guilt, his shame, into the pits of his own personal hell.
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