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The air is hot and sticky with tar and disappointment, and Lewis’s arm hurts like the day he fell off a swing and pulled it taut trying to hold himself back on the metal chain, burning his skin and the fear off his chest. This feels like much of the same, except it’s the tips of his grown-out hair he’s singed off in the mess, and his arms are bruised up, but not bad enough that he can feel little beads of tears come on. Just that old, weary disappointment, and the beginnings of quiet resentment.
“Verstehst du, was du gerade getan hast, Nico?” (Do you understand what you just did, Nico?)
He clearly doesn’t, because he’s not nodding, or shaking his head, or moving much at all. Lewis tries to side step from behind Mr. Rosberg to see him better, but he’s too large, and Lewis doesn’t much want to step into the wreckage of both of their shiny karts, wiring and oil wrapped around each other in something of a false knot, something so fragile, it could be undone with just a pinprick more pressure. The whole of the karting body seems to be standing behind them three, watching, and pretending like they’re not. They’re shit spies. Lewis cocks his head at them, frowns, and they all pretend to look away.
Nico’s dad’s back is alight with his anger, rightfully so, but it scares Lewis in a way he didn’t know was possible—especially because it isn’t directed at him, and because it’s for him, in a way. He still feels that nausea, from when he banged into the corner, hard, after Nico wouldn’t ease up on the turn, and when he lurched forward against the absolute-emergency brakes, creasing his arm on the metal of his steering wheel. Then came the jolt of the boy behind him ramming into his back, and it was just a pile up from there—a mess Nico had gotten tangled up in as the backside of his kart hopped blisteringly onto part of Lewis’s. Lewis remembers the impact, and then getting out of the kart with some other boy’s help, and looking for Nico, half-annoyed, all-confused why he hadn’t been the one to pull him free. And then he saw Keke. And then he saw Nico.
“I say it again, Nico. So Lewis can hear this. You understand what you just did? What you almost caused?”
He’s nearly spitting with anger, and Nico doesn’t really react to it at all, doesn’t say a word in the face of the lion, just a stupid thing playing dead in the hopes he’ll just stop dragging him out for the safari to see, and eat him already. Make the move. Take the blow. Go home. Let it all end.
“You— tell Lewis. Tell Lewis what you almost did.”
Lewis flinches back, startled at his call to attention, and identical, cold, wet eyes looking down at him and the mess of wires pooling at his cold feet. He almost wants Nico to defy him again, and not tell him, because telling him means there’s a point to all of this, and Keke will just go on until he thinks Nico’s got it, hours or weeks later. He is harsh, but he makes sure Nico gets it. “I almost sent Lewis into the barrier.”
“Say it to him, Nico. Not to me. You did not crash me out.”
Nico drags his eyes, slow and shivering from the aftershocks of the collision, from his father’s chin to Lewis’s ear, nearly closed, nearly bursting. “I— I almost sent you into the barrier.”
Keke steps into the mess with Lewis, leaves Nico just on the edge of it with his gloves bunched in one nervous, wringing hand, and his sweat-soaked hair plastered to his forehead and sideburns. His eyes are still shaking like cold, shaved lambs in the wintertime, seeing double the wolves and half the protective dogs. Dogs that abandon their post when the wolves start snarling too loud in the night. Lewis raises his hand towards the two, something of a peace-making gesture, when Keke cuts across him again, sweet like licking desert sand. “Not his kart. Him. You almost— Nico, do you see the state of this?”
And surely he does—he’d tumbled out of the aftermath onto dry ground and watched them untangle Lewis from the bent steering wheel what seems like years and years ago, though it can’t have been more than 20 minutes since it all happened. He watched it happen, front seat. He did it. He caused it. He should feel— “Sorry. Sorry, Lewis.”
“It’s okay,” Lewis whispers. He rubs at his elbow with the other hand, checking if it really is okay. If he can race the next time around if their karts are fixed on time. “I’m fine.”
Nico’s eyes, though, follow the motion like a hyper-vigilant deer, fixated in an unhealthy sort of stare at Lewis’s clothed arm, like it’ll peel back and bloom bruises before his very eyes. Lewis is sure he has at least one patchwork of purple underneath his race suit, but he’ll be damned if he lets Nico know that, and sets his dad off again, evidence and evidence piling up of how he'd so spectacularly failed to push him down and down until he just doesn't want to race at all anymore. What makes it worse is Nico's eyes, man.
"Don't cry."
Nico snaps his face up, picture of shock. The fresh Italian sun still burns on his face, and especially on the watery line filling up his vision, an aching deep underneath that gets worse the harder he tries to hold it in, older than he was the last time he'd welled up like this, the last time he'd screwed up this bad. His cheeks are ruby pink, round apples unknowingly defiant of his father, chin hooked up to the sky towards where the predator is in a frightening display of arrogance, even for Lewis's standards. "I am not crying."
"Good," Keke gruffs, holding him in a huge hand by his jaw and soft cheek, gentle in a way Nico will feel guilty for forever, just for being his son and being what he is. Just a fucking coward, a fucking failure in the wreckage of his cause. "You do not get to cry if it was your fault. You fix it first."
Lewis scruffs his toes quietly on the mucky, oiled ground, awkward. He's not sure what to make of Mr. Rosberg, or what Nico thinks of him, or what happened in the first place. He was only trying to get ahead around that corner, and he hit the wall, and it wasn't even that hard, if he's being honest. If only he could check...
Nico sees the spots on his wrist before he does, the spray of gravel down his sleeve and soft, welting lines running diagonal to the plane of his arm from bracing on the steering wheel, then crawling up out from the ground. He sees them, and his face warbles into something of deep shame, and his eyes widen the largest Lewis has ever seen them. His mouth starts to fall open, and Lewis knows that that is it. This is when the tears will start, and they will not stop. They cannot stop, no matter what Keke has to say about it, or what Nico's ego demands of himself. He cannot stop what he's always trying to prevent, weakened and shivering as he is before his biggest threat—his potential.
Keke notices, because how could he not? Nico's eyes are already rapid-blinking, his breathing quickening to a trot and his hands swiping, frantic and involuntary, at the sweat beading up on his forehead, the back of his red, guilty neck. He's trapped, going to be eaten alive if he doesn't do something about it, but what can he do? He's only a boy, and his father is a grand, strong man, better than he could ever be. Keke claps him on the shoulder, deceptive in his kindness. "But if you must cry, and you know you have done wrong, then do not do it in front of me. Ich will die Show nicht sehen." (I don't want to watch the show.)
Lewis blinks once, just misses the wrenching of Nico's arm almost out of his socket to detach himself from his father, but catches the blur of his wheezing back as he runs off, to hide, or wallow, or sit alone for hours until he's calmed down enough to sit back in the car, pretend like he'd never had a fit in the first place. Pretend to his mother that he loves what he does all the time, regardless of what it does to him. Pretend to Lewis that he's as robotic as to take in everything his father says like a change of oil, and that he can become a different sort of machine, just like that. That he is more than a pitiful, bleating thing attracting more wolves than humans in the dark, deathless night. A pity he is not.
—
Lewis is looking for him, sneaking between left-open doorways because he definitely is not allowed back here without an actual Mercedes-affiliated person, but desperate times are calling for desperate interventions.
"Nico!" he whisper-screams, knocking with just the tips of his fingers on one of the hundred other closed doors running up and down the hallway, as grey as the previous he'd stepped into, except this one is actually locked, and labeled 'Driver.' A hesitant shuffling inches towards the door, and then a skeptical, blue eyeball scrutinises him from between the tiniest crack between the metal and the wall. That's--
"Next door."
Lewis nods frantically, and backs away as Michael Schumacher slams the door shut between them, quick enough to have Lewis scrambling down the hall towards that next door, as promised, also labeled 'Driver,' but smaller, somehow. Less imposing. So unimposing, maybe, as to seem very insignificant—which is crazy to think about, because this is his Nico he's putting down. "Nico?"
The room does not move. "Nico. I know you're in there."
He doesn't, but he's got a fair guess that he'd run in to hide after Michael spewed his mouth about his rookie, no-good teammate to the press and laughed about all the mean shit he'd said, from one mic to the next as he tried to defend whatever sort of dignity he has left as a fading-fast driver. Lewis thinks Nico's been doing just fine. Not like Lewis, with his one, shiny championship under his belt, but he's been doing just fine. He must not think so, though, because the room twitches, just a bit, yet still doesn't let up on the lock on the door. "Can you— I promise it's just me outside. Your mum's gone home."
She'd come just for him. She would've stayed, really, and bugged him until he crawled out of there with his tail between his legs and his ears cupped down with the weight of his own name tagged into them, an unavoidable kind of mark, and trotted all the way back to the hotel with her to spend his night wallowing in a different private room, but Lewis had told her to leave. Had told her he'd handle it. Sometimes having anyone else there at all can make the difference between a wound-up-tight Nico and a little bit of a looser one, not eager to tell Lewis much at all, but able to be around him, at least. Not as stubborn. Not as scrunched up to his ears.
A footstep echoes in the silence, and Lewis thanks anyone who's listening that he'd trusted his gut when it told him Nico would want him around, out of anyone else. Anyone at all. "Just open it a little bit. You can see for yourself, Nico."
He waits, precious seconds dripping right to the ground, until the handle clicks, the tiniest sound in the stillness, and the door cracks open, an eyelash’s width at a time. A very, very belligerent Nico peers at him through the door, looking so very much like his fellow German teammate, but feeling, to Lewis, so very different in the pure misery that wafts off him and into Lewis’s face. “What do you want?” His voice sounds even thicker when he's been bubbling up with fat, held-stuck tears clogging up his nose.
“Can I come in?”
He’s got a foot against the door, firm and obvious to Nico, who’s tempted, always, to just lock him right out and handle the silence himself. But Lewis wants to handle that silence with him, is the thing. “No.”
Lewis eyes the twitch in his sore, red nose, imagines the irritation on the side of his hand he always uses to swipe at his eyes when he’s upset, and upset that he’s upset. “Come on, man. It’s just me. Nothing I haven’t seen before.”
It's true. He's seen a lot of Nico before, and Nico's seen a lot of him, so it's really unfair that Nico is acting, now, like he's just as overbearing as his mother, or as firm as his father. Lewis melts into putty when it's Nico he has to berate, or comfort, or keep company with. He's a terrible influence, but he likes to think he's a pretty good friend. Good enough for Nico to ease up on his hold, and step back behind the door, waiting for Lewis to take the hint and just barge in already, the only person he'd willingly let get away with doing half the things he's done. "Thanks," Lewis murmurs, like Nico's the one doing him a favour.
Nico doesn't say much after that. The door slips shut behind Lewis's entry, and he twists the lock into place before Nico can even look pointedly at the handle, afraid of being seen. He takes quick stock of the room before Nico can try to hide it by filling up his vision, distracting him with impertinent upset and throwing him off his trail. It looks tidy enough, which by Nico's standards is half-impeccable where anyone can see and the mess shoved up into corners and underneath his bed for the cleaners to find and drag out, a terrible, bothersome habit he's not been able to break off because no one really knows about it but Lewis. And the poor cleaners. His racing suit is peeled off and in a pile on the floor. He's almost shivering in just his fireproofs, in just the shirt with the pants probably also in that pile, tucked back into his joggers and evidently in the process of rewinding himself to something a little more composed so that he can actually leave the track with the team and go back to his hotel room, spent. Too bad Lewis is keeping him from making it all worse for himself, spending another 15 minutes with Michael in that stuffy company car they insist they must both travel in to uphold some sense of unity. Tough, tough luck. "Did you eat something yet?"
"Do you think I'm a terrible teammate?"
Nico's eyes are glossy, and rippling, and his pupils are as tiny as little coffee beans of fear, and he's looking just past Lewis at the other wall of his room, at the picture pinned there of him and Michael surrounded by their decked-out team in their hospitality, a respectful, gaping distance from one another and smiling uneasily at the camera. Well, Nico is smiling uneasily. Michael looks like a shark possessed him, all teeth and not a lot of smile at all. He's backed himself up against the wall, cornered himself where Lewis won't go because he knows Nico better than that, and Nico knows him better than that. He knows he's got to wear him down. "Do you think you're a terrible teammate?"
His recoil is immediate. "No. I don't think so."
He is as honest as he can be, but he's not telling Lewis everything there is to know. Very closed off, his Nico. "Does your team think so? Did they tell you this explicitly?"
Lewis prowls closer, but switches last minute to come to the little bed along the back wall instead, rumpled and damp like he'd just been laying in it, swathed under the thin sheets and blinking his tears away because he knew he'd be interrupted sometime soon to be dragged back to the hotel where there's so many other people around than just them two. "No, not— explicitly. Michael told me they want to replace me next year, because I've been not up to expectations. He says I'm ruining his races."
"What race has he been winning for you to ruin?!" Lewis hops up on the bed, scoots Nico's jumper to the side so that he doesn't crease it, and Nico twitches a smile at him for that, though he's still incredibly lost, and not making any sense.
"I don't know! He just said— well, to the media, he said—"
Lewis groans, kicking his feet, not noticing how it makes Nico flinch a little bit. "He's said everything under the sun to try and get you to quit beating him, man. It's nothing! It's just banter, or— or something. He's just trying to get under your skin, and you're letting him!"
His eyes shut, tight as screws, and he starts to slip down to the floor, breathing solely through his parted mouth. His cheeks glow pink, red, but he has the distinct paleness of someone who's working through his head, running through well-learned social expectations to figure out how it is he wants to react to what Lewis is trying to get into his head, and get an idea of how bad he's got it. "So— so me being his teammate, beating him, that's not— that's not, like, a terrible thing to do?"
"No! It's not! Nico, listen to yourself! You should be proud that you're beating a 7-time-world champion! It doesn't matter that you're the one making it obvious that he's fallen off, because if not you, then it would've just been someone else, eventually. I mean, even he has to know he's not who he used to be—"
Nico mumbles, like he didn't hear the rest of Lewis's placation at all. "It's not me as a person, then. It's not... my fault that he's saying all of this, and I'm— and they're praising me over him."
He sounds like he's coming to a revelation, but he's still in a crushed up little pile in the corner and staring up at Lewis like Lewis is going to go and kick him when he's down like that. Lewis pulls his socked feet up on the bed, long accustomed to Nico being absolutely lax about this bit of his personal hygiene, leaving his shoes fallen over on the floor. "No, Nico. It's not your fault. It's just— time, and circumstances. Could've happened to anyone, honest."
He looks away from Nico, to the pale, gray wall. "And I don't think you're a terrible teammate, for the record. I don't think you ever could be. At least, not on purpose. You're— you've got big morals, and you're way too nice. Way nicer than me, at least. I mean, Jenson and I are great, but I must've tried kill him at least 5 times this weekend alone."
He trails off, struggling to fill the silence now that Nico's run out of things to get off his chest. He has to be ready to get back now. There's already a few messages on Nico's phone from "Toto Wolff (TP)", lighting it up next to Lewis's thigh.
He picks it up to toss it down to Nico, but when he looks back at him, Nico's twisted himself into something of a human knot, with a knee to his chest and the other half-tucked against himself, digging into the opposite knee and pushing himself further into the corner, further away from what's outside. He's clutching at his face with both hands, cupped so that his fingers are pressing over his eyes and his wrists are bunched together at the tip of his chin, muffling his face more than he is hiding it. His arms are shaking with the effort, and his hair is sticking every which way, his face blistering red where Lewis can still see it, uncovered by his pale, tight hands. He jolts, once, then twice again like he's laughing, but Lewis knows better than that. He puts the phone down, quietly, and steps in only his socks across the tiny space, feeling the hum of electricity more than ever now that it's so silent, he can hear the sharp, heady drags of Nico's breath through his pressed-closed nostrils, and the shuffles of his pants across each other as he tries to contain himself, closer than ever to pulling himself to snapping, no longer at his limit but long, and far, past it.
He sets a hand on Nico's shoulder, feels out the stiff muscle and the heated skin under his fireproofs, just a little damp with warm sweat. It's worrying how he doesn't even react to it, just goes on trying to punch his eyes back into his skull so he can stop seeing the world for what it is, and other people for what they are—just mean, mean wolves out to get him all the time. Lewis goes for the other shoulder, too, reaching underneath his tucked head to try to ease him up, untangle him from what he's made himself into, but Nico is inconsolable, if there's anything to console at all from how quiet he's made himself all of a sudden, a twitching ball of distress under glaring, fluorescent light. "Come on, up you go."
Lewis pulls him forward, so he's not crushing Lewis's hand between the wall and himself, and he lets it happen. Small miracles. He follows the motion, still hiding his face from Lewis, but relaxing his hands the smallest bit to balance himself, and not tip over onto the floor. Lewis just keeps going until he's tipped over into him, though, sitting on his sore bum on the floor and rearranging his long legs to bracket Nico, who's just touching him on either one. Lewis hovers his hands up Nico's neck until he can plant them on his jaws, fingers firm on the skin but thumbs pushing insistently up Nico's wrists until he dislodges them from Nico's face completely, and watches them drop down, useless, onto Nico's lap between them.
Lewis has had girlfriends who cried pretty right before he broke it off with them quite unceremoniously, and watched it all turn ugly really fast, all the mascara running and verbal berating from girls he couldn't have known for more than a month, at most. Nico doesn't fool him like that. He starts out crying ugly, and he never gets any better.
His eyes are puffy, bursting with red and as wide as they can be, which is not very much. They're just strained, and staring at Lewis like he's the predator here, and streaked with messy, wet lines from where he'd been trying to contain his tears with his cupped hands, but it had only made them spread out wider, all over his cheeks and chin, though that may be from the thin dribble he's let free from his mouth while he was preoccupied holding everything else together. He looks pitiful, like a kicked dog, and he's not saying anything to defend himself, to attempt to hide it one last time, to preserve whatever's left of his dignity after begging Lewis to tell him he's not just a stain upon Michael's record. That he's more than what his own teammate has been saying about him. Lewis looks from his eyes, to his scruffed, sniffling nose running down to his parted, shivering mouth, and feels nothing but an all-encompassing, frightening adoration. He pulls him forward, chest-to-chest, with their legs crisscrossed and Lewis's hands now pressing down on the middle of Nico's back, the dip in his spine directly underneath his sweat-soaked neck. He collapses forward, like a puppet with its strings all cut, into Lewis's shoulder and drops his arms to the ground, nothing left in him but this need to be carried off, and taken care off, dead or alive already. "You can let it out. It's not your fault, Nico. Not this time."
He makes a noise like a 'puh', an exhale that even Lewis can feel, and winds up his breath for a pitiful imitation of a wail, more stuttering than a complete, despairing thing. He barely makes any noise at all, really. Just bursts of exhale followed by sucking inhales, and his chest rumbles for every cycle he completes, but he's not able to let it go, fully. Lewis knows this. He just does. He sets one of his hands on Nico's neck, now, thumbing at his short, blond hairs twisted into each other at the nape, pulling his elbows in so Nico can feel that pressure, that encaging that he'd only ever permit from someone he'd let into his room when he feels like this. He rocks Lewis until Lewis is rocking him back, soothing and repetitive like he's a child living in a nightmare that'll never really go away as long as his favorite thing in the world is going to haunt him like this, as long as it hovers at the edge of his vision, being a winner and also being a good teammate, a good friend. Lewis has never really seen him wail. He's only heard it from the next room, or from the outside of Nico's hotel room when he, rarely, refuses to let Lewis in. There's some things, still, that he's not allowed to help with. Lewis thinks he'd like to.
Nico just has to let him.
—
Nico comes down from his little episode on time for the debrief to start, wringing his hands together in tight circles and avoiding just about everybody's eye. Lewis isn't like that. He's not a fucking coward, who can't even admit when something is partially his fault. Did Lewis push harder than he knew the car would be able to handle because he was miffed that Nico had taken the lead from him just like that? After the seasons he'd had, when he was always, always on top? Maybe. But did Nico have to push him so far off with his defense? And defend so late? And go and cry about it to the team, because that's about the only thing that he can do when he's overwhelmed by what Lewis has to say about him?
All Lewis knows, now, is the team finds them both indelibly at fault, not just for the race but also for the tension slicing through their usual team dynamic from even the previous season, carrying through to this one. Lewis is mad, understandably so, as Toto begins his great chewing-out-session with little warning and looks them both in the eye, somehow at the same time, to convey just how badly he thinks they both fucked up, which—fair—but Lewis doesn't think having their team principal berate them now, after it's all been said and done, is going to improve much morale within the team.
Discretely, he looks over to Nico to see if even he feels the same, though they're not talking, but Nico isn't giving him anything. He's not frozen in terror, he's not pinched in anger, nor is he making much of an expression at all. He's just staring, giving the barest of eye contact and maintaining this perfect neutrality that Lewis knows has to be a front. He can’t feel neutral about this, surely. Or maybe he’s too far gone for Lewis to make any judgment on what he should feel at all. Maybe he’s not the Nico Lewis grew up with.
They ask Lewis whose fault he thinks it was, and he scoffs. “Not mine.”
He‘s looking at Nico as he says it, not caring for the look Toto shoots at him. Toto can think whatever he wants—he’s done taking the blame for Nico’s incompetence. It’s about fucking time Nico caught up to himself.
Nico’s eyes are forward and still, and his hands are hidden from view, though Lewis bets he’s holding them tight as taut ropes, and scratching for a hangnail where he can. They ask him the same question, goading, despite themselves. Even Lewis knows this. Someone always has to take the blame. Or more of the blame, in their case. Someone has to fall. Nico looks dead ahead, his eyes too hidden from Lewis for him to tell if they’re dry as week-old roadkill or starting to brim with liquid, neither of which Lewis will know what to do about, but he does answer. Quiet, and resolved, he answers, avoiding Lewis’s gaze.
“Not mine either.”
The meeting ends for time, and he hurries out of the room before Lewis can check for his guilt, see tangible evidence of how weak he is in the face of his team. Lewis is left, again, behind by his teammate, in the dust and in the dark, and he feels further, now, than ever from understanding what it is that makes Nico so averse to being himself, showing himself to the people who know him. He’s afraid he will never really know.