Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The air in the Mercedes motorhome in Suzuka was thick enough to taste, a cloying cocktail of expensive coffee, hot electronics, and unspoken truths. Toto Wolff paced the length of the debriefing room, a caged panther in a team shirt, while Paddy Lowe stared fixedly at a data screen as if it held the secrets of the universe, not just the secrets of two broken drivers. The Japanese Grand Prix was over, another one-two finish for the Silver Arrows, but the victory felt like a funeral. Nico had won, cool and flawless. Lewis had finished second, a silent, brooding shadow who had uttered only the bare minimum required by his contract before retreating into a silence that was somehow louder than any explosion.

It had been like this for months. The 2016 season was a war fought on two fronts: the scorched tarmac of the world's circuits, and the frozen tundra between their two drivers. The team, their family, was being torn asunder by the very forces that made them invincible. They all remembered a different time. Toto could still picture it vividly: the young, spiky-haired Nico and the bubbly, charismatic Lewis, fresh from their boyhood karting days, their rivalry then a spark, not a conflagration. He remembered the laughter that used to echo from the driver room, the practical jokes, the way Lewis’s eyes would crinkle at the corners, fixed on Nico with a fond, proprietary light that spoke of a shared history no one else could penetrate.

And Nico… Paddy remembered Singapore 2014, a lifetime ago. Lewis had been on the podium with Nicole, his then-girlfriend, and the camera had caught Nico in the background, his smile a brittle, forced thing, his eyes burning with a jealousy so raw it was almost painful to witness. It wasn't the jealousy of a competitor for a trophy; it was something far more intimate, far more human. They had all seen the signs, the coded language of a relationship conducted in the stolen moments the spotlight couldn't reach. The way they would sneak out of adjacent hotel rooms in the dead of night, thinking no one was the wiser. The handshakes after qualifiers that would linger, their gloved hands clasped not in sportsmanship, but in a silent communion, fingers tightening for a fraction too long. The way Lewis would look at Nico when he thought no one was watching—a look of such open, unguarded longing that it felt like a physical touch.

But that was all gone now, buried under the wreckage of Spain, where they had taken each other out, and under the weight of a championship that was slipping through Lewis’s fingers. The boyish glint in Lewis’s eyes had been extinguished, replaced by a flat, distant resignation. He no longer lingered in the garage, no longer played music, no longer laughed. He was a ghost in the machine. And Nico… Nico had become a different kind of machine altogether. Polished, polite, and utterly impenetrable. He was a man who had built a fortress around his heart and was now single-mindedly focused on the one thing he thought he could control: winning the world title.

Toto finally stopped his pacing, his knuckles resting white on the polished table. "We cannot continue like this," he said, his voice low and strained. "This… this silence is going to destroy us. It’s going to destroy *you*."

Nico, who had been calmly reviewing his throttle traces, didn't look up. "The car was good today, Toto. The balance was perfect through the Esses. We should look at the tire deg on the mediums for next week." His voice was a monotone, a recitation of facts, devoid of any emotion.

Lewis, slumped in a chair in the corner, his cap pulled low over his eyes, let out a soft, derisive snort. It was the most animated sound he’d made all afternoon.

"This isn't about the car, Nico!" Toto’s control snapped, his hand slamming flat on the table, making the water bottles jump. "This is about you two! This… this feud! It has to stop. We are a team."

Now, Nico looked up. His blue eyes were like chips of Arctic ice. "There is no feud, Toto. I am focused on my job. I am driving. I am winning. That is what I am here to do." His gaze flickered, just for an instant, towards Lewis’s hunched form, and something flickered in their depths—a quick, pained spasm that was gone as soon as it appeared. "If Lewis has a problem, he is welcome to speak about it."

The challenge hung in the air, toxic and heavy. All eyes turned to Lewis. For a long moment, he didn't move. Then, with a slow, deliberate motion, he pushed his cap back, revealing eyes that were dark with a profound, weary hurt. He didn't look at Toto or Paddy. He looked only at Nico.

"My problem," Lewis said, his voice quiet but razor-sharp, cutting through the stifling air, "is that I don't recognise you anymore." He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his gaze pinning Nico to his seat. "You used to be my friend. You used to be the person I…" He trailed off, the unspoken words—*loved, trusted, needed*—screaming in the silence. "Now you're just… this. A robot. A points calculator. Is that all that's left?"

Nico’s jaw tightened. He held Lewis’s stare, a monumental effort of will. "This is a championship fight, Lewis. This is what it takes. Perhaps if you focused a little more on the driving and a little less on… everything else… you would be in a better position."

It was a cruel, calculated blow, designed to wound. Lewis flinched as if struck physically. He leaned back, the shutters slamming down over his expression once more, the brief flash of vulnerability gone, replaced by a colder, harder anger. "Right," he murmured, pulling his cap back down. "The driving. I'll remember that."

He stood up, the chair scraping harshly against the floor. "The car was fine. I have nothing else to add." And with that, he walked out, leaving a void of silence in his wake.

Nico watched him go, his posture rigid. For a single, unguarded moment, the mask of the icy competitor slipped, and Toto saw it—the raw, desperate agony in his driver’s face. It was the look of a man who had won the battle but was losing the war for his own soul. He was pushing Lewis away to harden himself for the fight, but in doing so, he was carving out his own heart.

Toto sank into a chair, feeling decades older. He looked at Paddy, who gave a slight, helpless shake of his head. They were the custodians of the most dominant team in the history of the sport, and they were utterly powerless. They weren't just watching a championship unravel; they were watching a tragedy in slow motion, a love story turned into a ruin, built on a foundation of longing glances, secret handshakes, and a jealousy that had festered into this—a cold, quiet room where the only sound was the echo of a heart breaking in two. They knew, with a certainty that chilled them to the bone, that this wasn't just about a trophy. It was about two men who loved each other so desperately that the only way they knew how to express it was by trying to destroy one another on the world stage.

Chapter Text

The silence Lewis left behind was a physical presence, a heavy, suffocating blanket that smothered the room. Toto remained seated, his head in his hands, the echo of the slammed door still vibrating in the air. Paddy finally reached over and switched off the data screen, the numbers vanishing into blackness, a silent admission that none of it mattered.

The following two days were a study in tense avoidance. The team packed for the next race in Austin, Texas, but the usual buzz of anticipation was gone, replaced by the hushed, careful movements of people walking on glass. Lewis was a ghost in the hotel, seen only briefly slipping into his room, his headphones on, his gaze fixed on some distant, painful point. Nico maintained his robotic efficiency, but the circles under his eyes were darker, his politeness now brittle and sharp-edged.

On the third morning, as the Mercedes motorhome was being prepared for shipping, Toto’s phone buzzed on his bedside table. The screen lit up with a single name: *Lewis.*

Toto’s heart gave a complicated thud, a mixture of dread and hope. He answered, his voice carefully neutral. “Lewis.”

There was a long pause on the other end, so long Toto thought the call might have dropped. Then, Lewis’s voice came through, stripped of its usual bravado, thin and frayed. “Toto.”

Another silence. Toto could hear the faint sound of Lewis breathing, a slow, measured rhythm that sounded like it was taking all his concentration.

“I’m not coming to Austin for the early engagements,” Lewis said finally, the words coming out in a rush. “The sponsor appearances, the media day… I can’t.”

Toto closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Lewis, you know the contract. You know what’s required. We need you here.”

“No,” Lewis interrupted, and there was a raw, desperate edge to his voice that Toto hadn’t heard before. It wasn’t anger. It was exhaustion so profound it was close to collapse. “You don’t understand. I’m not asking. I am… I am telling you. I need some days off. I need to not be here. I need to not see… any of it.”

The unspoken name hung between them, a spectre in the digital signal. *I need to not see him.*

“Lewis,” Toto began, his mind racing through the logistical nightmare, the headlines, the fury of the sponsors.

“Toto, please.” The plea was so quiet, so utterly broken, that it stole the breath from Toto’s lungs. This wasn’t the petulant star driver. This was the man he’d watched grow up, the boy with the luminous smile, now brought to his knees by a pain that had nothing to do with racing. “If I get in that car right now, I will break it. Or I will break myself. I just… I need to breathe. Somewhere else.”

Toto saw it then, with terrifying clarity. He saw the long, longing looks, the secret hotel rooms, the handshakes that lasted a lifetime. He saw the jealousy in Nico’s eyes, the withdrawal in Lewis’s. He saw two hearts that had been beating in sync for twenty years, now so badly out of rhythm they were tearing each other apart. This wasn’t a negotiation. This was a triage call.

“Okay,” Toto said, the word leaving him on a defeated sigh. “Okay, Lewis.”

The relief on the other end of the line was palpable, a shaky exhale that sounded almost like a sob. “Thank you.”

“But,” Toto added, his voice firming, slipping back into the role of team principal, the only anchor he had left. “You are in the car on Friday for FP1. No excuses. You fly directly to Austin. You will be there. Understood?”

“Understood.” The line went dead.

Toto sat on the edge of his bed for a long time, the phone still in his hand. He then made the necessary calls, his voice a calm, steady lie as he informed the PR team that Lewis was unwell, a stomach bug, he would miss the early events but would be fit to drive. He built the narrative, layer by layer, constructing a fortress of fiction to protect the devastating truth.

An hour later, he found Nico in the gym, a solitary figure pounding relentlessly on a treadmill, his face a mask of focused intensity. The news would break soon. He had to be the one to deliver it.

“Nico,” Toto said, leaning against the doorframe.

Nico didn’t slow his pace, his eyes fixed on the monitor displaying his heart rate. “Toto. The tire allocation for Austin looks aggressive. We should…”

“Lewis isn’t coming with us,” Toto said, cutting him off. He watched Nico closely. “He’s taking a few days. He’s flying directly to the circuit.”

The rhythm of Nico’s pounding feet faltered for a single, telling second. His hand darted out and hit the stop button. The whirring of the treadmill slowed to a halt. He stood there, chest heaving, sweat dripping onto the silent belt, his back to Toto. The rigid line of his shoulders was the only sign of the earthquake happening within.

“Is he unwell?” Nico asked, his voice dangerously level.

“He needs a break,” Toto replied, choosing his words with the precision of a bomb disposal expert.

Nico turned slowly. His face was flushed from exertion, but his eyes were that same, chilling ice. Yet, deep within them, Toto saw a flicker of something else—panic. The control Nico so desperately clung to was predicated on Lewis’s presence, on the constant, painful friction. Lewis’s absence was an variable he hadn’t calculated.

“A break,” Nico repeated, the words tasting like ash. “From what? From losing?” It was a weak jab, devoid of its usual conviction.

“From this, Nico,” Toto said softly, gesturing between them, encompassing the entire, poisoned atmosphere. “From you.”

Nico’s composure cracked. It was just a hairline fracture, a tightness around his mouth, a slight tremor in his hand as he reached for his towel. But it was there. He looked away, out the window at the Suzuka circuit, now empty and quiet.

“He can’t run from a championship,” Nico muttered, but it sounded hollow, a line recited from a script he no longer believed.

“Maybe he’s not running from the championship,” Toto said, his voice dropping to a near whisper. “Maybe he’s running from you.”

He didn’t wait for a response. He turned and walked away, leaving Nico alone in the sterile, air-conditioned room, the silence now his to contend with. The fortress Nico had built around himself was still standing, but its most important prisoner had just escaped. And as Toto walked back into the sun, he wondered if, for Nico Rosberg, that didn’t feel like the greatest loss of all

The post-strategy meeting in the Mercedes motorhome felt hollow, a ship sailing with half its crew. Lewis’s absence was a palpable void, a silent, brooding presence in the empty chair at the far end of the table. Toto had run through the Austin data, his voice echoing slightly in the tense quiet. Nico had contributed nothing beyond monosyllabic technical answers, his gaze fixed on the grain of the table as if he could read his fate in the polished wood. The rest of the engineers and strategists spoke in hushed tones, the usual vibrant debate extinguished.

“Right,” Toto finally said, slapping a folder shut. The sound was unnaturally loud. “That’s it. We’ll reconvene tomorrow after FP1. Let’s all try to get some rest.”

A collective murmur of relief went through the room. Chairs scraped back as people stood, eager to escape the oppressive atmosphere. James Vowles reached for the door handle first, gave it a turn, and pulled. Nothing happened. He frowned, trying again, putting more shoulder into it. The heavy door didn’t budge.

“It’s locked,” James said, a note of confusion in his voice.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Toto grumbled, getting up and striding over. He jiggled the handle, then yanked at it with considerable force. The door held fast, as solid as a bank vault. “What the hell is this? A malfunction?”

Paddy Lowe moved to a side panel, tapping at the electronic lock system. “It’s not responding. It’s like it’s been overridden.”

A faint prickle of unease, the first touch of frost on a windowpane, traced its way down Toto’s spine. This was too strange. Before he could voice another command, the large television screen mounted on the far wall, which had been powered down to a blank, dark grey, flickered to life with a soft *click*.

A single, stark, white number filled the center of the screen.

**2021.**

A collective, sharp intake of breath hissed through the room. 2021? That was five years in the future. What kind of a sick joke was this? The number hung there, luminous and impossible, for five long seconds, imprinting itself on their retinas. Then, just as suddenly, the screen went black again, plunging the room back into a stunned, bewildered silence.

“What… what was that?” one of the junior engineers stammered.

“A glitch,” Nico said, but his voice lacked its usual cold certainty. He was staring at the black screen, his brow furrowed.

“A glitch showing a specific year?” Toto countered, his mind racing. Was this some bizarre psychological tactic? Had a rival team hacked their systems? It felt… otherworldly.

Before anyone could form a coherent theory, the screen flickered on once more. But this was no number. This was a scene, vivid and full-color, playing out as if it were a live broadcast. The quality was hyper-real, every detail crisp and clear.

They were looking into a kitchen. It was modern, all clean lines and warm wood, but it wasn’t sterile. It was lived-in. A half-empty mug sat by the sink, a dog’s lead was hooked by the door. And there, leaning against a central island, was Lewis Hamilton.

But it was a Lewis they barely recognized.

He was older, there was no denying it. A few graceful lines etched the corners of his eyes and mouth, but he looked… settled. At peace. He was dressed in simple, comfortable loungewear, and he was sipping from a porcelain cup, his gaze soft and contemplative. And then they saw it, the glint of gold on his left hand. A wedding band.

A jolt, like a collective electric shock, passed through every person in the room. Lewis? Married? The Lewis they knew was a ghost, a man so withdrawn he could barely speak. This man was the picture of domestic contentment.

The camera angle widened slightly, and a woman walked into the frame.

Every jaw in the Mercedes conference room hit the floor.

She was a vision of controlled, terrifying power. Dressed head to toe in form-fitting black leather that gleamed under the kitchen lights, she moved with a panther’s fluid, seductive grace. The outfit was severe, almost militaristic, yet it clung to her in a way that was undeniably, dangerously alluring. Her arms, and what was visible of her torso, were a canvas of intricate, dark tattoos, a tapestry of stories written in ink. Her face was sharp, intelligent, and utterly commanding. The only splash of color was her lipstick, a slash of violent, defiant red.

“What the fuck…” someone whispered, the profanity a prayer in the stunned silence.

This… this was Lewis’s *wife*? The boy who had loved Nico Rosberg with a devotion that had nearly destroyed them both? He had married… *this*? She looked like she commanded a battalion of supernatural assassins, not a household.

“Morning, Lew!” Her voice was a surprise. It was warm, rich with affection, and laced with a husky confidence that was utterly captivating.

Lewis turned his head, and the smile that broke across his face was one they hadn’t seen in years. It was open, unreserved, and full of a deep, unshakeable fondness. “Morning, Esra! What’s my favourite five-star rank general doing this morning?”

*Five-star rank general?* Toto’s brain short-circuited. Was she… military? The leather, the tattoos, the aura of command… it was starting to make a terrifying kind of sense.

“I’m fine, you know the usual stuff,” Esra said, leaning against the counter opposite him, her posture effortlessly dominant. “Training, commanding officers, scaring the living shit out of every person in the paddock!” She threw her head back and laughed, a sound that was both musical and utterly fearless.

Lewis chuckled, a low, warm sound, and reached for the coffee machine, pouring her a cup and sliding it across the island to her. “You are fucking scary as hell when you get mad, Esra. It’s normal for people being scared of you.”

“Even you, my best friend, are afraid of me sometimes!” she teased, her red-lipped smirk both playful and challenging.

“Only sometimes!” Lewis shot back, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

The ease of their banter, the sheer, palpable strength of their friendship, was dizzying to watch. This was a Lewis who was known, who was challenged, who was met as an absolute equal. It was a universe away from the stifled, painful silences of their present.

Then, Esra took a sip of her coffee and asked the question that sent the room reeling for a second time.

“Speaking of people who are afraid of me… where is your husband?”

*Husband.*

The word landed in the locked Mercedes conference room with the force of a detonation. *Husband?* Lewis’s… husband? The collective mental whiplash was almost physical. They stared at the screen, their minds scrambling to process the information. Lewis had a… husband? The wedding ring on Lewis’s finger… did it belong to this man?

Lewis’s smile softened, becoming something impossibly tender, a look of such profound, settled love that it was almost painful to witness. “He’s fine. The Sky Sports keep him busy,” Lewis said, his voice dripping with affectionate amusement.

On the screen, Esra shook her head in mock despair, her leather-clad shoulders shaking with laughter. “You are disgustingly in love, Hamilton.”

The scene held for a moment longer—Lewis, the contented husband in his warm kitchen, sharing a coffee with his formidable best friend, a woman who knew his deepest secrets, including the identity of the man he called his husband—and then the screen abruptly went black again.

For a full minute, no one in the room moved. No one spoke. The only sound was the frantic, ragged breathing of a dozen people trying to comprehend the impossible.

Nico Rosberg was as still as a statue, his face a bloodless mask. All the color had drained from it, leaving his skin a sickly white. His eyes were wide, fixed on the dark screen, but he was seeing nothing in that room. He was seeing a future he had never dared to imagine, a future where Lewis had not only moved on but had built a life of such stunning, complex, and joyful normality. A life that included a husband. The word echoed in the silent, locked room, hammering against the walls of his carefully constructed fortress.

He had pushed Lewis away to win a championship, to harden his heart, and in doing so, he had apparently forfeited… everything. Lewis hadn't just found someone else; he had found a whole new world, a world where he was "disgustingly in love" and had a terrifyingly loyal best friend who knew his truth.

Toto finally found his voice, a hoarse, shattered thing. "What in God's name," he whispered, "was that?"

It was a question none of them could answer. They were prisoners, not just by a locked door, but by a vision of a future that had just rewritten their entire past and present in a handful of bewildering, heart-shattering seconds.

The silence in the locked conference room was no longer just stunned; it was sacred, fragile, as if a single misplaced breath could shatter the very fabric of reality they were witnessing. The black screen had felt like an ending, but it was only an intermission. Before anyone could form a coherent thought, let alone a sentence, the screen hummed back to life.

The scene shifted. They were no longer in the warm, domestic kitchen. Now, they were in the stark, fluorescent-lit, familiar chaos of a Formula 1 garage. It was unmistakably Mercedes, but everything was… sleeker, more advanced. The 2021 cars sat in the background, their complex aerodynamics a silent testament to the passage of time.

And there was Lewis, in his race suit, the top half tied around his waist, a easy, relaxed smile on his face as he approached a figure standing with his back to the camera, studying a data screen.

“Morning, boss.”

The figure turned. It was Toto Wolff. An older Toto, his hair more silver than grey, the lines on his face deeper, but his presence was, if possible, even more commanding. Yet, the sight of Lewis seemed to trigger a well-worn routine of exasperation.

“Lewis, you are late! Again!” Future Toto’s voice was a familiar, gruff bark, but those in the locked room could hear a subtle undercurrent, a thread of fondness woven into the frustration.

Lewis’s smile only widened, utterly unrepentant. “Sorry, I was with…” he began, but Future Toto cut him off with a wave of his hand, a gesture so familiar it ached.

“I don’t care what you are doing in your bed, Lewis,” Future Toto said, his tone implying this was a recurring, tiresome topic.

A genuine, hearty laugh burst from Lewis, a sound so alien and wonderful to the 2016-era team that it felt like a physical blow. “No, no, no! I was with Esra.”

At the mention of the leather-clad enigma, Future Toto’s stern expression shifted. He brought a hand up to massage his temple, a long-suffering sigh escaping his lips. It was a gesture of pure, theatrical exhaustion.

“Lewis, by the amount of time you and her spend together, people will start wondering if Esra and you are married,” Future Toto grumbled, the words echoing bizarrely in the silent, locked room.

The Lewis on screen shook his head, his expression turning soft and sincere. “Sorry, Toto. I love Esra. She is scary, amazing, but she is my best friend. Just a friend.” He then paused, a mischievous glint in his eye as he raised his left hand, wiggling his fingers to make the gold band catch the light. “And I need to remind you that I have a husband?”

The casualness of it, the sheer, unadulterated normalcy with which he said the word “husband” in the heart of the F1 paddock, sent another seismic shock through the observers. This was not a secret. This was his life.

Future Toto’s face contorted into a grimace, as if recalling a traumatic event. “You want to remind me? You want to remind me that in 2016, you and her went out for a drink and you showed up to the garage with a wedding ring? We lost our minds that weekend! The media was a circus! I nearly had a heart attack!”

Lewis’s laughter was infectious now, his eyes sparkling with the memory. “We were drunk! But it was beautiful.”

“I still have nightmares,” Future Toto retorted, though the corner of his mouth twitched.

“Oh, come on, boss,” Lewis cajoled, stepping closer and nudging Toto playfully with his elbow. “Just admit that you were jealous of me and Esra back then.”

And then, the most impossible thing happened. Toto Wolff, the fearsome Toto Wolff, the man who commanded a billion-dollar empire with an iron will, actually *blushed*. A faint, but unmistakable, pink tinge crept up his neck and into his cheeks. He looked away, suddenly very interested in a nearby set of tire warmers.

“You were in denial for months about your feelings for her,” Lewis pressed, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, though it was perfectly audible on the broadcast from the future. “Remember? How every time you couldn’t take your eyes off her? Or how you almost declared war on Red Bull because Christian Horner sent her a bouquet of tulips?”

In the 2016 room, every single head swiveled to stare at their Toto. His present-day self was standing rigid, his face a mask of utter, cataclysmic shock. His mouth was slightly agape, his eyes wide with a horror that was rapidly being eclipsed by a dawning, terrifying sense of possibility. *Horner? Tulips?* The sheer, specific absurdity of it rang true in a way nothing else could.

On the screen, Future Toto straightened up, squaring his shoulders. The blush was still there, but it was now framed by a look of possessiveness so profound it was almost primal. He raised his own left hand, showing a thick, masculine wedding band that matched the one on Lewis’s finger.

“Well,” Future Toto said, his voice dropping, losing all its gruffness and becoming soft, intimate, and fiercely proud. “Now all that is in the past. She is mine now.”

*CRACK.*

It was the sound of a dozen jaws hitting the polished floor simultaneously. Toto? *Toto* was married to *her*? To the five-star general in leather and tattoos? The man who preached corporate synergy and team protocol was married to a walking, talking rebellion? The cognitive dissonance was so extreme it felt like the room was tilting.

Lewis beamed, a look of pure, unadulterated triumph on his face. “You owe me, boss. If I hadn’t called Esra back then in 2016 and begged her to come, you would still be single and fighting with Horner over paddock real estate.”

“Go annoy your husband, Hamilton,” Future Toto said, shooing him away, but the affection in his eyes was blinding.

Lewis sauntered off, his laughter trailing behind him like a banner. Future Toto stood alone for a moment, watching him go. Then, he did something so private, so vulnerable, it felt like a violation to witness it. He looked down at the wedding ring on his own finger, his thumb stroking it gently. He lifted his gaze back to where Lewis had disappeared, and in a whisper so soft the microphones almost didn't catch it, he breathed, “I thank you for her every day, Lewis.”

The screen went black.

This time, the silence in the locked room was absolute. It was a void. The air had been sucked out, leaving only the vacuum of impossible revelations.

All eyes were fixed on the present-day Toto Wolff. He was still standing by the door, his hand still resting on the unyielding handle. He was pale, trembling slightly. The image of his future self—blushing, possessive, whispering a prayer of gratitude to Lewis for the most terrifyingly magnificent woman any of them had ever seen—was burned onto his retina.

Nico Rosberg finally moved. He slowly sank back into his chair, the fight draining out of him completely. He wasn't just seeing a future where Lewis was happy without him. He was seeing a future where the entire world had shifted on its axis. Where Toto, the anchor of his professional existence, was married to a force of nature, and where Lewis was not just a driver, but a cherished, matchmaking friend. It was a future so full, so complex, and so utterly devoid of the shadow he himself was casting in 2016, that it felt like looking into a different dimension.

He had been fighting for a trophy, a golden cup that would one day tarnish. And in doing so, he had lost his place in a story that was far, far more extraordinary than any championship. The locked door was no longer just a physical barrier; it felt like a wall separating him from that brighter, more vibrant future, a future where he was, devastatingly, not even a footnote.

The final, profound blackness of the screen seemed to suck all the sound and light from the room, leaving behind a vacuum of stunned disbelief. The door remained an immutable fact, a locked slab of polished wood and metal that sealed them in with the ghost of a future that had just rewritten their entire understanding of the world.

It was Paddy Lowe who broke the silence, his voice a dry, cracked whisper. "So... tulips, Toto?"

The absurdity of the question, so specific and so utterly bizarre, was the pin that popped the bubble of tension. A nervous, slightly hysterical chuckle escaped one of the engineers before he could stifle it. It was like a dam breaking.

Toto Wolff did not respond to Paddy. He was still braced against the door, his forehead now resting against the cool surface, his shoulders rising and falling with deep, ragged breaths. The image of himself—his future self—looking at that wedding ring with such raw, unguarded devotion was more intimate than anything he had ever experienced. It felt less like watching a video and more like having his soul photographed.

"Did anyone else... did anyone else see that?" James Vowles asked, his voice trembling slightly. "Lewis. He was... happy. Actually happy."

"He had a husband," someone else murmured from the corner, the word still foreign and electrifying on their tongues. "He said it right here, in the garage. To you, Toto. Like it was nothing. Like it was normal."

"And you," another voice, bolder now, joined the fray, directing the statement at Toto's back. "You and... Esra?" The name was said with a mixture of awe and terror.

Toto finally pushed himself away from the door, turning to face them. The usual granite mask of the team principal was gone, replaced by a look of profound, earth-shattering confusion. His face was pale, his eyes wide.

"I... I don't..." he began, but his voice failed him. He ran a hand through his hair, a gesture of pure, unvarnished agitation. "What in God's name was that? A hallucination? A... a shared psychotic episode?"

"Five years," Nico Rosberg's voice cut through the babble, quiet and hollow. All eyes turned to him. He was slumped in his chair, looking smaller than any of them had ever seen him. He wasn't looking at anyone, his gaze fixed on the blank screen as if it were a portal into his own personal hell. "Five years from now. Lewis is married. To a man. And he's... he's best friends with Toto's wife." He let out a short, bitter breath that was almost a laugh. "A wife who looks like she could disarm a bomb with her fingernails and command a legion of demons before breakfast."

The description was so apt it was chilling.

"And you," Nico continued, his eyes lifting slowly, painfully, to meet Toto's. "You. You were... blushing. You were *teasing*. You were... in love." He said the last word as if it were a terminal diagnosis.

Toto flinched. The observation, coming from Nico, from the epicenter of their current storm, felt like a physical blow. He had no defense. He had seen it himself. The fond exasperation, the playful bickering, the sheer, overwhelming pride in his future self's eyes when he said, *She is mine now.*

"This changes nothing," Toto said, but the words were weak, automatic. The command structure was crumbling.

"Changes nothing?" Paddy Lowe exploded, standing up. "Toto, we just saw the future! We saw Lewis settled, happy, loved. We saw him *here*, with us, in five years' time, joking with you about your wife! Does that look like a man who left the team? Does that look like a man broken by a championship loss in 2016?"

The question hung in the air, devastating and full of hope.

"It means he stays," James Vowles whispered, the implication dawning on him. "Whatever happens this year... he stays with Mercedes. For years."

"And it means you," another engineer, a young woman named Sarah who rarely spoke in these meetings, said softly to Toto, "you find... *that*. You find a love so strong it makes you blush in your own garage." She shook her head in wonder. "Who is she? A five-star general? How does that even happen?"

The focus shifted back to the most enigmatic piece of the puzzle. Esra. The woman in black leather with the red lips and the terrifying grace.

"Lewis called her his best friend," James mused, piecing it together. "He said he called her in 2016. *This* year. He begged her to come."

All eyes swiveled back to Toto. The unspoken question was deafening: *Do you know her?*

Toto's mind was a whirlwind. 2016. Now. He scoured his memory, his contacts, every formidable woman he had ever met. Nothing. No one who fit that description. But the video... the video had felt more real than the room they were standing in. The look in his own future eyes... that was not something that could be faked.

"It's a trick," Nico said, but his voice lacked all conviction. It was a last, desperate stand. "It has to be. Some kind of... deepfake. From Red Bull. To destabilize us."

"To show us a future where Lewis is happily married to a man and Toto is married to a dominatrix general?" Paddy retorted, his sarcasm biting. "That's a hell of a specific destabilization plan, Nico. Why not just show us a car blowing up?"

The logic was unassailable. The sheer, bizarre, personal nature of what they had witnessed was its own guarantee of authenticity. No enemy would concoct something so strangely beautiful, so specifically healing.

The room lapsed into another silence, but this one was different. The initial shock was giving way to a slow, dawning, collective realization. They were not watching a tragedy unfold. They were being shown a redemption arc. A difficult, painful road lay between 2016 and that 2021 garage, but it led somewhere. It led to a place where the war was over. Where Lewis was whole. Where Toto was loved. Where the team was still a family, a weirder, wilder, but stronger family.

Toto finally walked back to the table and sank into his chair. The fight had gone out of him. He looked across at Nico, and for the first time, it wasn't with the frustration of a team principal, but with the pity of a man who has seen the other side of the mountain.

"Nico," Toto said, his voice quiet but clear in the locked room. "What are we doing?"

Nico looked up, his icy blue eyes finally showing a fracture of the pain he had been suppressing for months.

"We are fighting for a championship," Nico whispered, the words sounding hollow, meaningless.

"We are burning down a house to win a battle," Toto corrected him gently. "And we just saw a glimpse of the house we could have built if we stopped setting the fires." He gestured weakly to the black screen. "That... that is what is on the other side of this. Not a trophy. A life. For all of us."

He let the words settle. The truth of them was inescapable. The locked door was no longer a prison; it had become a confessional. And they had all seen the same miracle. The future was not set in stone, but the vision they had been granted was a compass. It pointed away from the self-destruction of 2016 and towards the unthinkable, leather-clad, joyful normality of 2021. And as they sat in the silence, the weight of the present began to feel less like a burden and more like a choice. A choice they now knew, with terrifying clarity, that they had the power to make differently.

Chapter Text

The silence in the locked room had become a living entity, thick with processed shock and dawning, impossible hope. The black screen was no longer a void but a pregnant pause, and everyone, from Toto to the most junior mechanic, held their breath, waiting. The air hummed with the unspoken question: *What else could there possibly be?*

The screen obliged. It flickered on, softer this time, the perspective intimate, almost voyeuristic. They saw Lewis again, alone now, leaning against a stack of tires in a quiet corner of the paddock, bathed in the long, golden light of late afternoon. His race suit was unzipped to his waist, his expression was tender, a private smile playing on his lips. He was holding a phone to his ear.

"Hey, baby," he said, his voice a low, warm caress that was so unlike the strained tones of their present. "I missed you too."

A pause, a soft, answering murmur from the phone that they couldn't hear, but they could see its effect on Lewis. His smile deepened, his eyes crinkling at the corners. He looked… besotted.

"How is the work?" he asked.

Another pause, then Lewis let out a rich, delighted laugh. "Really? God forbid a man be good at his job *and* as beautiful as you." The line was delivered with such effortless, adoring charm that it felt like a physical warmth radiating from the screen. This was a Lewis completely at ease with his heart, utterly unafraid to lavish praise and affection.

He listened again, nodding. "Oooh, yes, Esra stopped by…" He laughed again, a sound of pure amusement, shaking his head as if recalling a fond, chaotic memory.

Then, his expression shifted to one of gentle, teasing incredulity. "I can't… I… I really love that after all these years you are *still* terrified of her?" He listened, and his smile turned into a grin. "I mean, Esra knows how to kill someone using only a spoon, and maybe back in 2016 she threatened you with castration with a tire iron, but she loves you in her own deadly and dangerous way."

In the locked room, a collective, silent shudder went through the men. *Castration with a tire iron.* The threat was so specific, so visceral, and delivered with such casual fondness, that it cemented Esra’s legendary status in their minds forever. This was not a woman to be trifled with. And Lewis’s husband—the beautiful, talented man on the other end of the phone—was apparently a long-standing victim of her… affection.

"Look on the bright side," Lewis continued, his tone consoling yet amused, "you are not the only one who is afraid of her! The whole paddock is. Sebastian, Jenson, Alonso, Ferrari, Haas… even the FIA." He listed the names like a roll call of the damned, and the image of the formidable Fernando Alonso or the entire Scuderia Ferrari trembling before this woman was both terrifying and darkly hilarious.

Then, Lewis leaned closer to the phone, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial, intimate whisper, as if sharing the most delicious secret. "I think only Toto is not afraid of her…" A slow, wicked smirk spread across his face. "I think even he gets turned on when Esra threatens someone."

A strangled, choked sound came from the present-day Toto. He looked as if he’d been simultaneously electrocuted and thrown into a vat of ice water. His face flushed a deep, mortified crimson, and he seemed to be trying to decide whether to protest or to simply sink through the floor. The sheer, brutal accuracy of the observation, the fact that his future self’s psyche was being so perfectly read by Lewis, was a humiliation of the most profound order. Paddy Lowe had to turn away, his shoulders shaking with silent, helpless laughter.

On screen, Lewis’s expression softened again, all the teasing melting away into something profound and sincere. The noise from the paddock faded into a distant hum, leaving only him and the voice on the phone.

"Anyway… I just… I missed you," he said, the words simple and heavy with emotion. "Yes. I hope to see you at the paddock soon, or I’ll see you at home."

He paused, listening to the goodbye from the other end. A look of such pure, unadulterated love washed over his face that it was almost too private to witness. It was the look he’d once, long ago, reserved for stolen glances at Nico. But this was different. This was open. This was free.

"I love you, my sun," Lewis whispered, and ended the call.

He stood there for a moment longer, phone held to his chest, just breathing, a man completely and utterly at peace, anchored in a love that was his sanctuary. Then, he pushed off the tires and walked back towards the garage, the ghost of a smile still on his lips.

The screen went black.

This time, the silence in the locked room was not one of shock, but of absorption. They were digesting the most intimate glimpse yet. They had seen the political landscape of the future paddock, ruled by the fear of one woman. They had seen Lewis’s husband established as a beautiful, successful man who was still, endearingly, scared of his best friend’s wife. They had seen Lewis as a protector, a teaser, a lover.

Nico Rosberg finally spoke, his voice ragged, stripped bare. "He calls him 'my sun'." He looked around the room, his eyes lost. "He never…" He trailed off, but they all heard the end of the sentence. *He never looked at me like that. He never called me that.*

It was the final, crushing blow. The championship, the points, the cold war—it all seemed so pathetically small next to the simple, devastating power of a man calling the love of his life "my sun." Nico had been fighting for a title. Lewis, in the future, had found a solar system.

Toto, still reeling from Lewis's casual dissection of his… arousal… at Esra's threats, found a new anchor in the chaos. He looked at Nico, truly looked at him, and saw not a rival, but a drowning man.

"Nico," Toto said, his voice low but firm, cutting through the heavy air. "This… this is the truth. This is what is real. Not whatever hell we are putting each other through right now." He gestured to the black screen. "That phone call is more real than any trophy. That is the victory."

He stood up, walking over to Nico’s chair. He didn’t tower over him; he knelt, bringing himself to eye level, a gesture of profound respect and empathy.

"We have been given a gift," Toto said, his voice intense. "A warning and a promise. We can keep on this path, and we will end up with a championship, maybe, and a lifetime of regret. Or we can choose a different path. We can choose to try and find our way to that garage. To that phone call."

He placed a hand on Nico’s shoulder. "The door is still locked, Nico. But I think we all know the key isn't out there." He tapped a finger gently against Nico’s chest. "It's in here. The question is, are you brave enough to use it?"

The locked room held its breath, waiting for an answer that would define not just a season, but the rest of their lives.

The final, tender image of Lewis whispering "my sun" had left the room in a state of raw, emotional suspension. The silence was heavy, not with shock now, but with a profound, almost reverent understanding. They had peered into the very soul of a future they could scarcely comprehend, a future built on a foundation of love that seemed to eclipse everything they currently knew.

Just as the weight of it threatened to become unbearable, the screen hummed back to life, but the tone shifted dramatically.

Gone was the warm, domestic glow or the intimate corner of the paddock. Now, they were thrust into a harsh, sun-bleached landscape. Dust hung in the air, and the camera shook slightly, as if filmed on a handheld device. In the foreground, standing atop a rocky outcrop, was Esra.

But this was not the Esra of the kitchen, playful and confident in leather. This was a warrior-queen.

She was clad in a crisp, olive-drab Turkish Army uniform, the stars on her epaulets marking a fearsomely high rank. Her hair was pulled back in a severe bun, and her eyes, even through the screen, were chips of flint, scanning the horizon. She was barking commands in sharp, guttural Turkish to a squad of soldiers who stood at rigid attention below her. Her voice was a whip-crack of absolute authority, each syllable designed to be obeyed without question. She was the five-star general made terrifyingly, magnificently real.

Then, a incongruously soft ringtone pierced the air. Without breaking her commanding stance, Esra pulled a satellite phone from her belt. She glanced at the screen, and the most astonishing transformation occurred. The iron mask of command melted away, replaced by a slow, predatory, and utterly sensual smile. Her posture relaxed, one hand going to her hip.

"Hello, Mister Wolf," she purred into the phone, her voice dropping an octave, becoming a low, velvety rumble that was entirely at odds with the barked orders of moments before.

In the locked room, every single person flinched and then swiveled to look at Toto. He had gone perfectly still, his eyes locked on the screen, his expression one of rapt, terrified fascination. *Mister Wolf.* The intimacy of it, the playful formality, was devastating.

"I am fine," she continued, her free hand absently rubbing her shoulder. "Just a little sore from the training session this morning. What about you?"

She listened, and then threw her head back and laughed, a rich, unfettered sound that echoed across the training ground. "For the love of… Toto, come on!" She was teasing him, the way Lewis had, but there was a sharper, more knowing edge to it.

"You can't complain because Lewis is late…" she said, a wicked smirk playing on her red lips. "If I remember correctly, you missed a meeting with the FIA president last week because you were busy *this morning*… with me."

A wave of heat seemed to flash through the locked conference room. The implication was blisteringly clear. The present-day Toto made a small, choked noise, his face flooding with a color that rivaled Esra's lipstick. This was a level of personal detail that felt more invasive than anything they had seen so far. This wasn't just about love; it was about passion, about a physical, all-consuming relationship that could make the formidable Toto Wolff shirk a meeting with the most powerful man in the sport.

"They are in love, baby, let them be," Esra continued, her tone shifting to one of affectionate exasperation. "And then you can complain later when you catch them making out in a closet."

She listened again, and her smirk widened into a full-blown, dazzling grin. "Toto! Don't be a hypocrite, *buffone*!" The Italian insult—*idiot*—rolled off her tongue with such fondness it sounded like an endearment. "We used to make out in your office before we got married! Kisses? Making out? And then when you made your office soundproofing…" She paused, letting the silence hang with potent implication, her eyebrows raised. "...we were doing a lot more than a simple make out."

That was the final straw for the present-day Toto. He sank into a chair, burying his face in his hands. The image of himself, not just in love, but so passionately, recklessly in love that he had his office soundproofed… it was too much. It was a version of himself he could not reconcile with the man currently trying to manage two warring drivers. The humiliation was total, but beneath it, in a place he dared not examine, was a terrifying, thrilling spark of… recognition.

On screen, Esra’s expression softened marginally. "Yes… of course I will be at the race! I will support my man!" She then feigned a gasp of correction. "Ohhh, I mean Lewis… sorry, not sorry. You are my husband! It's different." The way she said "husband" was a declaration of ownership, fierce and proud.

Then, her voice hardened again, the general returning. "And what? No. No, no, I can't promise you that I will be on my best behaviour." A glint of pure, anarchic joy lit her eyes. "I have promised Lewis that I will scare the crap out of everyone, and I will not break my promise."

She was a force of nature, utterly ungovernable, even by the man she loved. She was Lewis’s weapon of mass intimidation and Toto’s greatest chaos and comfort. The complexity of it was breathtaking.

Finally, her voice dropped again, losing all its edge, becoming something private and genuine. "I love you too, Mister Wolf." She ended the call.

She stood for a moment on the outcrop, the phone held to her chest, mirroring Lewis's gesture from the previous vision. Then, she turned back to her soldiers, and in an instant, the lover was gone, replaced once more by the five-star general. "Alright, you maggots! Let's move out!" she barked, and the screen cut to black.

The silence in the room was absolute for a full ten seconds. Then, it was broken by a single, awed whisper from James Vowles.

"Wow."

It was the only word that seemed adequate.

They had just witnessed the full, terrifying, magnificent spectrum of Esra. They saw the commander who could lead men into battle, the lover who could reduce Toto Wolff to a blushing, shirking schoolboy, and the loyal, chaotic friend who made promises to scare the entire paddock for Lewis. She was the key that unlocked both Lewis's happiness and Toto's hidden heart.

Nico Rosberg looked from the screen to Toto, who still had his face in his hands. The last vestiges of his own cold anger seemed to drain away, replaced by a strange, hollow awe. He wasn't just competing with Lewis anymore. He was competing with a future that contained *that*. A future where Lewis had a husband he adored, a terrifying best friend who was married to his boss, and a life so full of love and wild, unscripted joy that a world championship seemed like a paltry, lonely consolation prize.

The locked door was no longer a mystery or a prison. It felt, now, like a necessary cocoon. They were being forced to metabolize this impossible truth, to let it break down the brittle, toxic structures of their present before they could be released into the world, forever changed. They had seen the future, and it was named Esra. And it was glorious.

The journey for Toto Wolff, from the first flicker of the screen to the final, devastating image of his future wife barking orders on a Turkish hillside, had been nothing less than the systematic and total demolition of the man he knew himself to be.

It had begun with the simple, grating tension of a failed meeting. The air was thick with Lewis’s absence, a void that screamed louder than any debrief. Nico’s robotic coldness, the team’s hushed anxiety—it was a familiar poison. When the door had refused to open, his irritation had been professional, logistical. A malfunction to be solved. Then came the number: **2021**. A cold finger of dread, entirely different from the heat of the current conflict, had traced its way down his spine. This was not a glitch. This was a message.

The first vision of the kitchen had been a gentle, yet profound, shock. Lewis, older, settled, with a wedding band. The relief was immediate and startling—*he stays with us, he’s okay*—a paternal instinct he hadn’t had time to acknowledge. Then *she* had entered. Esra. A whirlwind of black leather and red lipstick, a walking paradox of lethal grace and warm laughter. His initial reaction had been pure, unadulterated bewilderment. *This* was Lewis’s wife? The thought was so incongruous it was almost laughable. But then he had watched them. The ease. The friendship. The way Lewis’s smile reached his eyes for the first time in years. And the confusion had begun to curdle into a strange, nascent curiosity.

The second scene, in the garage, was where the foundations had truly begun to crack. Seeing his future self—the silver in his hair, the authority still palpable—had been like looking into a distorted mirror. He heard the familiar gruffness in his own voice, the exasperation at Lewis’s lateness. It was a comforting, familiar script. And then the script had been torn to shreds.

*“Just admit that you were jealous of me and Esra.”*

The blush on his future face had been a betrayal. He had felt it echo on his own skin, a hot, unwelcome flush. The teasing had been bad enough, but the confession—*“She is mine now”*—followed by the sight of his own wedding ring, had been a seismic event inside him. The possessive pride in that statement, the sheer, unvarnished love, had stolen the air from his lungs. This wasn't a future where he had found a partner; it was a future where he had been conquered, willingly and completely. The whispered, *“I thank you for her every day, Lewis,”* had been the final blow. It spoke of a debt of happiness, a gratitude so deep it was humbling. The team’s stares had burned into him, but he was too lost in the internal cataclysm to care.

Then came the phone call. Lewis, tender and open, calling a man “my sun.” It was the final piece of Lewis’s puzzle, a picture of such wholeness it made the broken man of 2016 seem like a ghost. But it was the casual, brutal insight into his own soul that had truly unmoored him. *“I think even he gets turned on when Esra threatens someone.”* The accuracy was annihilating. It wasn’t just that Lewis knew him; it was that Lewis knew a version of him that was so utterly alien to the present-day Toto—a man who found arousal in chaos, who was electrified by danger embodied in a single, magnificent woman. The humiliation had been total, a complete surrender of his carefully constructed persona.

But the final vision, Esra on the training ground, was the crucible. It was one thing to hear about the general; it was another to see her. To witness the absolute, fearsome authority she commanded, the way she could switch from barking orders that made hardened soldiers flinch to purring “Mister Wolf” into a phone with a voice that promised sin. The revelations came like targeted strikes: the missed FIA meeting, the soundproofed office. Each one peeled back another layer, revealing not just a relationship, but a raw, passionate, and gloriously inconvenient obsession. This was not a tidy, corporate partnership. This was a force of nature that had swept into his life and rearranged everything, from his schedule to his very soul.

When she refused to promise to behave, declaring her loyalty to Lewis’s request to “scare the crap out of everyone,” he finally understood. She was not just his wife or Lewis’s friend. She was the wild card, the protector, the chaos and the order. She was the one who could make the mighty Toto Wolff blush and shirk responsibilities, and she was the one who could, with a single look, make an entire paddock fall silent.

As the screen went black for the last time, Toto remained in his chair, his face still buried in his hands. But the gesture was no longer one of pure shame. It was one of overwhelmed processing. The arrogant team principal, the master of control, was gone. In his place was a man who had been shown a mirror reflecting not what he was, but what he could be—a man capable of a love so deep it made him foolish, so powerful it made him brave, and so consuming it required soundproofing.

He slowly lowered his hands. He didn't look at his team. He looked at the blank screen, now a silent oracle. The locked door, the tense meeting, the championship war—it all seemed so small, so trivial. The path to that 2021 garage, to that phone call with Esra, was shrouded in mystery, but he now knew it existed. And he knew, with a certainty that settled deep in his bones, that every decision from this moment forward would be a choice: a choice to cling to the barren, controlled present, or to take the first, terrifying step towards the chaotic, glorious, and utterly unimaginable future.

Chapter Text

The final, echoing purr of "Mister Wolf" had left the room in a state of suspended animation. The image of Esra, the warrior and the lover, was seared into their minds, a testament to a future so wildly beyond their current reality it felt like science fiction. The collective gaze was fixed on Toto, who sat as if turned to stone, his very identity a pile of rubble around him. The air was thick with the unspoken, a cacophony of shock, awe, and a dawning, terrifying hope.

Then, the screen flickered once more.

This time, the scene was the pre-race garage. The 2021 cars, those beautiful, complex monsters, were being fussed over by mechanics. The energy was a familiar blend of tension and focus. And there was Lewis, in his fireproofs, his helmet under his arm, going through his final pre-race rituals. He looked focused, a warrior in his own right, but the deep-seated peace they had seen in him earlier was still there, a calm center in the storm.

Then, a figure appeared at the entrance to the garage, silhouetted against the bright light of the paddock. He stepped inside, and a collective, sharp intake of breath hissed through the locked room.

It was Nico Rosberg.

But it was a Nico they had never seen. Older, yes. The boyish softness was gone, replaced by a sharper, more defined elegance. He wore a smart, casual blazer, looking every bit the retired champion turned businessman and family man. But it was his expression that was the most jarring. He looked… happy. Not the brittle, triumphant happiness of a podium, but a deep, settled contentment. His eyes, no longer chips of ice, were warm and clear as they scanned the garage, instantly finding Lewis.

Lewis, sensing the presence, turned. For a heartbeat, the two men simply looked at each other across the busy garage. The entire history of 2016—the silence, the bitterness, the wreckage—hung in the air between them, a ghost finally being laid to rest.

Lewis’s lips quirked into a small, unreadable smile. He took a few steps forward, raising a single, questioning eyebrow.

“Rosberg,” he said. The name was not spat, not cold. It was… a question. A touchstone.

Nico mirrored his expression, a single eyebrow rising in return. A faint, genuine smile touched his lips. “Rosberg?” he repeated, his voice carrying a lightness that was utterly alien to the 2016 version of the man. “You stopped calling me that years ago.”

He took several deliberate steps forward, closing the distance between them. The mechanics, Toto, everyone in the future garage seemed to fade into a blur. There were only the two of them.

In the locked room, the present-day Nico made a small, choked sound. He was leaning forward, his hands gripping the edge of the table, his knuckles white. He was watching his own future self walk towards a man he was currently freezing out, and the expression on his own face was one of open, affectionate challenge.

“What do you want me to call you?” Lewis asked, his voice soft, almost teasing. The tension was no longer hostile; it was intimate, thrumming with a history only they shared.

Nico took the final step, now standing directly in front of Lewis. He was close, too close for mere acquaintances, his gaze locked on Lewis’s.

“Nico?” Lewis continued, a playful glint in his eye. “Driver? I can’t call you that. You retired in 2016 and you became…” He was clearly baiting him, enjoying this.

He was cut off as Nico’s future self reached out, not to strike, but to gently interrupt the flow of words. The gesture was possessive, familiar.

“Nico Hamilton,” the future Nico said, his voice low, firm, and filled with a love so profound it was dizzying.

The name—*Hamilton*—landed in the locked conference room with the force of a supernova.

The present-day Nico recoiled as if physically struck, his grip on the table slackening. His mouth fell open. All the color drained from his face, leaving him parchment-white. *Hamilton.* He had taken Lewis’s name. He hadn't just reconciled; he hadn't just become friends. He had… married him. The husband. The beautiful, talented man Lewis had called "my sun." It was *him*.

On the screen, Lewis’s playful expression melted away, replaced by a look of such overwhelming, tender adoration that it was almost too bright to look at. All the walls were down. All the defenses were gone.

“Hello, my sun,” Lewis whispered, the words a soft, sacred vow.

And then he leaned in and kissed him.

It wasn’t a chaste peck. It was a deep, meaningful, loving kiss that spoke of years of shared history, of a love that had survived a war and emerged stronger on the other side. It was a kiss of homecoming, of forgiveness, of a future chosen together.

In the locked room, the world stopped.

The present-day Nico made a sound like a drowning man gasping for air. He stumbled back from the table, his chair screeching, and collapsed back into it, his hands coming up to cover his face. A ragged, broken sob was torn from his chest. It was the sound of a dam breaking, of a fortress he had spent a lifetime building shattering into a million pieces. He had been fighting for a title, a golden cup, while the man he had loved—the man he *still* loved, with a ferocity that terrified him—was his "sun" in a future he had thrown away.

Toto watched Nico’s collapse, and his own complicated turmoil was eclipsed by a surge of pure, heartbreaking empathy. He had seen his own future of passionate, chaotic love. Nico had just seen his own future of quiet, devoted, soul-deep love. They had both been shown their hearts’ true desire, and the chasm between that desire and their current reality was a yawning abyss of their own making.

The screen went black. The final, silent, perfect image was the kiss. The answer to every unspoken question, the healing of every wound, the destination of their long and painful road.

The locked door was no longer a mystery or a prison. It was a mercy. They needed this silence. They needed to be trapped here, forced to face the truth they had just witnessed: that the greatest victory wasn’t a championship, but the courage to walk away from a fight and into the arms of the person you were always meant to love. The key was in the kiss. And for the first time, as Nico’s sobs echoed softly in the quiet room, it felt like someone was finally, desperately, trying to use it.

The final, silent image of the kiss did not simply fade from the screen; it seemed to burn itself into the very air of the locked conference room, leaving an afterimage of impossible grace and reconciliation on everyone’s retina. The black screen that followed was not an absence, but a heavy, saturated silence, thick with the echoes of a shattered past and the breathtaking vision of a redeemed future.

For a long, suspended moment, no one moved. No one breathed. It was as if the universe itself had paused to acknowledge the monumental shift that had just occurred.

Then, all eyes, wide and shimmering with a maelstrom of emotions, turned to Nico Rosberg.

He was broken. Utterly and completely. The rigid, icy fortress he had maintained for months had not just cracked; it had vaporized. His shoulders shook with silent, heaving sobs, his face still buried in his hands, as if he could not bear to face a world that contained the truth of what he had just seen. The choked, ragged sounds escaping him were the raw, unfiltered noise of a soul realizing the magnitude of its own catastrophic error. He had not just lost a rivalry; he had abandoned his destiny. The name—*Nico Hamilton*—echoed in the silent room, a ghost of a life he had chosen to destroy.

It was James Vowles who broke the spell, his voice a hushed, awed whisper. "He's your husband." It wasn't a question. It was a statement of fact, as undeniable as gravity. "All this time... the 'husband'... it was you."

Another engineer, a young man who had only ever known the bitter cold war between his two drivers, let out a soft, disbelieving laugh that was close to a sob. "You retired... to become *Nico Hamilton*."

The sheer, beautiful, heartbreaking poetry of it settled over the room. He hadn't been defeated. He hadn't been cast aside. He had chosen a different victory. He had chosen Lewis.

Paddy Lowe, ever the pragmatist, found his voice, though it was thick with emotion. "2016," he said, looking at the sobbing Nico. "You retired at the end of 2016. Right after you won the championship." The pieces of the puzzle, the *why* of it all, were crashing into place with devastating clarity. "You won... and then you left. You left... for him."

The truth was a physical blow. The ultimate victory had been the catalyst for the ultimate sacrifice—or, as the future had just shown them, the ultimate commitment. He had climbed the mountain, seized the crown, and then thrown it away to build a home with the man he had been fighting.

Toto Wolff finally rose from his chair. The personal shock of his own future with Esra was now contextualized, folded into this larger, more profound narrative of healing. He walked over to Nico, his steps slow and deliberate. He didn't speak. He simply placed a firm, steadying hand on Nico's trembling shoulder.

The touch seemed to shatter the last of Nico's control. A loud, gut-wrenching sob broke free, and he leaned forward, his body folding in on itself under the weight of his grief and regret.

"It's alright, Nico," Toto said, his voice low and surprisingly gentle, stripped of all its team principal authority. It was just a man comforting another. "We saw it. We all saw it."

He looked around at his team, his family. He saw no judgment in their faces. Only a shared, staggering wonder and a dawning, collective empathy. They had not just watched a private moment; they had witnessed a universal truth about love and forgiveness.

"The future..." one of the strategists began, shaking her head in wonder. "It's not lost. It's... it's waiting."

"It's a choice," Toto corrected softly, his hand still on Nico's shoulder. "It was always a choice. We were just too blind to see it." He looked at the black screen, a profound gratitude welling up in him, so powerful it threatened to overwhelm him. This locked room, this bizarre, impossible event, was the greatest gift he could have ever received. It wasn't a curse; it was an intervention.

The focus was no longer on the locked door. The obsession with escape had vanished. They were exactly where they needed to be, forced to confront the ruin of their present and the glorious possibility of their future. The atmosphere had transformed from one of claustrophobic tension to one of sacred, painful, necessary catharsis.

They had come into this room as a team divided, trapped in the bitter narrative of 2016. They were now a unit, bound together by a secret, by a shared vision of a grace they could barely comprehend. The championship, the points, the politics—it all seemed like childish noise compared to the silent, powerful truth of that kiss.

The door remained locked, but for the first time, nobody wanted to leave. There was too much to process, too much to feel. They sat and stood in the quiet, the only sound Nico’s slowing, shuddering breaths as he began, slowly, to rebuild himself around the stunning, terrifying, beautiful knowledge that he was, and always had been, Lewis Hamilton's sun.

For Nico Rosberg, the journey within the locked room had been a descent into a special kind of hell, each segment of the broadcast from the future a fresh turn of the screw, meticulously dismantling the fortress of his own making.

It had begun with a familiar, almost comfortable, coldness. The meeting without Lewis was a relief, a respite from the oppressive weight of those wounded, longing glances he could no longer bear to meet. The locked door was an irritation, the number **2021** a bizarre curiosity. He was the Iceman, focused only on the championship, and this was a distraction.

The first crack appeared with the vision of the kitchen. Seeing Lewis older, content, with a wedding band, was a shock, but a distant one. It was the woman, Esra, who had thrown him. Her terrifying allure, her easy dominance, and the sheer, open friendship she shared with Lewis was a universe away from the strained, poisoned dynamic he cultivated. A sliver of something ugly and cold—jealousy, not of a romantic rival, but of the effortless *ease*—pricked at his heart. Lewis had found a sanctuary, and he was not in it.

The garage scene was the first true body blow. To see his future self—happy, sharp, content—was like looking at a ghost of a road not taken. But it was the banter, the history, the way Future Toto blushed and preened that confused him. This was a world where Lewis and Toto had a shared, joyful secret, and he was on the outside. The revelation of Lewis’s "husband" was a abstract concept, a mystery that paled next to the visceral sight of Toto Wolff, in love.

Then came the phone call. Lewis, tender and soft, speaking to a man he called "my sun." The term of endearment was a dagger to a part of Nico he had buried so deep he’d forgotten it existed. It was the kind of devotion he had once, in his most secret dreams, craved from Lewis. To hear it given so freely to another was an agony he had to physically suppress, clenching his fists under the table until his nails bit into his palms. The whole paddock being afraid of Esra was a fascinating detail, but it was Lewis's love, his *sun*, that held him in a vise of silent, jealous torment.

The vision of Esra in her uniform, the phone call with Toto, was a spectacle that fascinated and horrified him in equal measure. It cemented the reality of this future, a world of powerful, passionate adults where he seemed to have no place. He watched, detached, as Toto’s world was dismantled, feeling a grim sense of camaraderie in their shared humiliation. They were both being exposed.

But it was the final scene that was the execution.

The sight of his own future self walking into the garage was a jolt that stopped his heart. This wasn't the ghost from the earlier scene; this was *him*. Older, sharper, but with a light in his eyes he hadn't seen in a mirror for years. The ease with which he moved through Lewis's space, the playful, challenging exchange—"Rosberg?" "You stopped calling me that years ago."—it was a dance of such profound intimacy it stole the air from his lungs.

He watched, mesmerized and horrified, as his future self closed the distance. He saw the look in his own eyes—not ice, but warm, open adoration. He heard Lewis tease him, and he felt the phantom touch of his own future hand, gently cutting Lewis off. The tension was palpable, a charged wire of history and love.

Then came the words. The two words that shattered the universe.

"Nico Hamilton."

The name did not just hang in the air; it detonated. It was the key that unlocked every memory, every stolen glance, every hotel room sneaked out of, every handshake that lasted too long. It was the answer to the question he had been too proud, too scared, to ever ask. He hadn't just reconciled. He hadn't just found friendship. He had taken Lewis's name. He had built a life. He was the husband. He was the sun.

The realization was a physical collapse. The sob that was torn from him was the sound of two decades of suppressed love, of a championship won at the cost of his own heart, finally breaking free. The weight of it crushed him, folding him in half. He had been so focused on beating Lewis, on proving he was the better driver, that he had failed to realize the only thing he had ever truly wanted was to be his partner.

The kiss was both the most beautiful and the most painful thing he had ever witnessed. It was his future, his love, his redemption, playing out on a screen while he sat trapped in the hell of his own creation. Every moment of coldness, every calculated word, every time he had turned away from Lewis’s longing eyes—it all crystallized into a single, searing point of regret.

As he felt Toto’s hand on his shoulder, the dam broke completely. The tears were not just for the love he saw, but for the love he had wasted. For the years of friendship he had torched, for the man he had forced himself to become—the Iceman—when all he had ever been was a boy in love with his best friend.

From the beginning of this nightmare, he had been shown a path out of the darkness, and with each vision, he had resisted, clinging to the cold comfort of his rivalry. Now, there was nothing left to cling to. The fortress was dust. The championship was ash. The only thing that was real, the only thing that had ever been real, was the man on the screen, the man he had just seen himself kiss, the man whose name he now shared.

He was not Nico Rosberg, the 2016 World Champion. He was Nico Hamilton, Lewis’s sun. And he had five years of lost time to somehow, someway, make up for. The locked room had become his confessional, and the future, once a taunting specter, was now a desperate, aching prayer.

Chapter Text

The raw, cathartic silence in the locked room was shattered by the television humming back to life. The image of the kiss was gone, replaced by the bustling 2021 garage. But the sacred, tender moment was immediately, brutally, and hilariously interrupted.

“I am going to puke,” declared a familiar, deadpan voice from off-camera.

The spell was broken. On screen, Lewis and Nico jumped apart, their intimate bubble popped. The present-day Nico, his face still streaked with tears, flinched at the sound, his sobs catching in his throat.

“We were having a moment!” Future Nico—*Nico Hamilton*—complained, but there was no real anger in his voice. There was a whining, familiar ease to it, the sound of a man completely comfortable being teased by a close friend.

The present-day Nico stared, mesmerized. He was… *complaining*. He was bickering. He was *alive* in a way the 2016 version had forgotten how to be.

Esra strode into the frame, holding two coffee cups, her leather-clad form a stark contrast to the technical backdrop. “Keep the role play in the bedroom, boys.” She thrust one of the cups toward the blonde man. “You, blonde, here’s your coffee.”

A wave of something—not quite laughter, not quite shock—rippled through the locked room. *‘You, blonde.’* The casual, almost dismissive term of address for the man who was once his fiercest rival was staggering.

“Thank you, General,” Future Nico said, accepting the cup with a nod of respect that seemed entirely genuine.

In the conference room, the present-day Nico’s breath hitched. *General.* He said it with deference, but without fear. It was an acknowledgment of her power, an acceptance of her place in their world.

Lewis beamed, looking between them. “Oooh, look at you guys! You two are bonding!”

The sight of Lewis, so openly delighted by the connection between his husband and his terrifying best friend, sent another jolt through the observers. This was a web of relationships, a found family, built on a foundation that seemed both rock-solid and wildly improbable.

Esra fixed Future Nico with a look that could curdle milk. “I will stand that *if* he makes a wrong move, he will find out why they are referring to me as the ‘General of Death’.”

A collective, silent gulp went through the Mercedes team. The title was even more fearsome than they had imagined.

Future Nico didn’t even flinch. He took a sip of his coffee. “And I am still terrified of you,” he stated, as if commenting on the weather.

“As you should be,” Esra laughed, a rich, dangerous sound. Then, in a gesture that was both commanding and oddly affectionate, she reached out and grabbed his free hand. “Come on, Hamilton number two. I want to scare Alonso, and I want an audience who appreciates my work.”

The present-day Nico looked down at his own hand, feeling the phantom grip of the formidable woman from the future. *Hamilton number two.* He was being claimed, dragged into her orbit, and he was going willingly.

“Can I record it?” Future Nico asked, a genuine, boyish laugh escaping him.

The sound was like a punch to the gut for the 2016 Nico. He hadn’t laughed like that in years.

“Of course,” Esra purred, her eyes glinting with malicious glee. “Then send it to the Mercedes group chat. They need to be scared of me and be appreciative that I didn’t say yes to Vettel when he asked me out back in 2016.”

The room erupted in silent, wide-eyed shock. *Sebastian Vettel?* The four-time world champion had asked *her* out? The timeline of this alternate universe was becoming increasingly, wonderfully crowded.

Future Nico threw his head back and laughed, a full, unguarded sound of pure joy. “You were busy in 2016! You know, terrorizing Mercedes, getting drunk with Lewis and getting married, being fascinated by Toto, and receiving tulips from Red Bull!”

Each item on the list was a bomb, detonating the last remnants of the 2016 reality. The locked room felt like it was spinning. The pieces were falling into place with dizzying speed. The drunken marriage, Toto’s fascination, Horner’s tulips—it was all true. It was all part of the chaotic, glorious origin story of this future.

“Don’t forget threatening to pop your eyes out with a spoon, Nico!” Lewis chimed in, laughing uproariously.

“How could I forget it?” Future Nico asked, his voice dripping with fondness for the memory of a death threat. He leaned in and kissed Lewis again, a quick, sweet smack on the lips that was so natural it was breathtaking.

He then pulled back, his expression softening into something proud and deeply loving. He looked at Lewis, the F1 driver, his husband, the champion.

“See you at the finish line, my champion,” Future Nico said.

The words were simple. They were everything. They were not the words of a rival, but of a partner. They held the entire history—the battles, the pain, the separation, the reconciliation, the love. He was sending his husband, his champion, out to race, with all his support and all his heart.

The screen went black.

The reaction in the locked room was not one of stunned silence, but of a collective, shuddering exhalation. The story was complete. The circle was closed. They had seen the bitter end of 2016 and the glorious, redeemed beginning of everything that came after.

Nico Rosberg slowly raised his head. His face was a mess of tears, but his eyes… his eyes were different. The ice was gone, melted away by a torrent of emotion, revealing a raw, vulnerable, but clear resolve. He looked at Toto, then at the faces of his team—his family.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. The message had been received. The path was clear. The championship was no longer the goal. The goal was the finish line. The goal was to hear Lewis call him “my sun.” The goal was to become Nico Hamilton.

The final, profound image of Nico sending his "champion" off to race had left the room in a state of quiet, emotional wreckage. The story felt complete, the redemption arc finished. But the screen, their relentless window into tomorrow, had one more scene to play, one final layer of vibrant, chaotic life to add to the tapestry.

The garage was still the backdrop, but the focus shifted to the exit. Nico and Esra, the unlikely duo, were walking out, a shared mission of terrorizing Fernando Alonso in their eyes.

Then, a voice, laced with a familiar, grounding authority, stopped them.

“Where are you two going?”

Toto Wolff walked into the frame, his expression a perfect blend of curiosity and command. But his actions betrayed his tone. In a move that still sent a jolt of disbelief through the 2016 team, he seamlessly slid an arm around Esra’s waist, pulled her close, and kissed her. It was not a chaste peck, but a firm, possessive kiss that spoke of a deep and comfortable intimacy.

From the sidelines, Future Nico mimed gagging. “I am going to puke!” he mocked, throwing Esra’s own earlier line back at her.

The three of them burst into laughter. The sound was stunning—a trio of people who were not just colleagues, but a family, bound by shared history and immense affection. The present-day Toto could only stare, his own heart hammering against his ribs. He saw the ease in his future self’s posture, the absolute rightness of his arm around that leather-clad waist.

“Nice to see you, Nico,” Future Toto said, his tone warm and genuine as he extended a hand.

“You too, Toto,” Future Nico replied, meeting the handshake firmly.

The simplicity of the moment was its own miracle. The handshake that had once been a battleground was now a greeting between family. The 2016 Nico watched, his breath catching, as his future self shook the hand of the man he now saw as a brother-in-arms, a partner in the chaos of loving a Hamilton and being loved by a Wolf.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Future Toto pressed, his eyes narrowing playfully. “You two. Where are you going?”

Esra drew herself up to her full, formidable height. “Excuse me? Mister Wolf, I am a free woman. I am a strong and independent general and…” she began, a speech dripping with theatrical indignation.

“We’re going to terrorize Alonso,” Future Nico interjected bluntly, demolishing her performance with a single, amused sentence.

“I will not explain myself to no one about how I am having fun!” Esra finished, shooting a mock-glare at Nico for spoiling her grand declaration.

Future Toto looked between them, a long-suffering but fond expression on his face. “Do I want to know?” he asked, his gaze settling on his wife.

“For your blood pressure, no,” Future Nico answered for her, his delivery dry and perfect.

The present-day engineers exchanged looks of pure delight. The dynamic was flawless. Nico was the snarky little brother, Esra the chaotic sister, and Toto the put-upon but adoring patriarch.

“Hamilton, take a walk. I want to talk with my wife,” Future Toto said, his voice dropping into a tone that brooked no argument.

Future Nico didn’t hesitate. He walked away, but not without a final, impish shot over his shoulder. “Use protection!”

The burst of laughter that escaped Paddy Lowe in the locked room was strangled into a cough. The sheer, audacious normalcy of the insult, in the middle of the F1 paddock, was breathtaking.

Once Nico was gone, Future Toto turned his full attention to Esra. “Independent and strong woman?” he quoted, a smirk tugging at his lips.

“Yes,” Esra retorted, not missing a beat. “You are right, I forgot to add deadly force and hot as fuck.”

The present-day Toto buried his face in his hands for a moment, his shoulders shaking. He was simultaneously mortified and exhilarated.

Future Toto just laughed, a rich, unburdened sound, and kissed her again. “Just do me a favor,” he said, his voice softening. “Stay away from Red Bull, and for the love of god, don’t touch a spoon.”

The spoon. The threat was now an inside joke, a beloved part of their family lore.

“Everything for you,” Esra said, her own voice softening as she reached up to brush his cheek.

The tenderness of the gesture, from the General of Death, was almost more shocking than any threat. Future Toto’s eyes sparkled.

“You are trying to seduce me?” he asked, his voice a low, playful rumble.

Esra groaned in frustration, dropping her head against his chest. “It’s not fun anymore! I can’t do it, Toto! I mean… before we got together it was fun to get a reaction from you, and now… you still blush, but you know my moves! This is unfair!” She was genuinely, adorably put out.

The locked room watched, utterly captivated. This was the intimate, mundane magic of a long-term relationship. The games were still there, but the rules had changed.

“Unfair?” Future Toto laughed. “Darling, just admit that you lost this round and move on.”

Esra growled, the sound vibrating with mock fury. “I am a general! A weapon and…”

He cut her off. Not with words, but by spinning her and pinning her gently against the nearest wall, kissing her with a passion that was both commanding and deeply loving. She kissed him back with equal fervor.

When they broke apart, he was breathing heavily. “You are mine,” he stated, the words a simple, undeniable fact.

Esra narrowed her eyes, her lips twitching. “I am not going to say anything.”

“A wise choice.”

“Go find Nico, he will wait for you,” Toto said, releasing her.

She straightened her leather jacket, a glint in her eye. “This is not ended yet. I will have my revenge,” she declared, and began to walk away.

Future Toto laughed, watching her go with unabashed adoration. But his laughter cut off abruptly, his expression shifting to one of pure, comical panic as Esra’s voice floated back, sweet as poison.

“Hello there, Christian…”

The change in Future Toto was instantaneous. All his cool composure vanished. “Esra! Esra, I’m sorry! You win!” he called out, actually breaking into a run to chase after her.

The screen went black.

The silence in the locked room was different this time. It was not stunned or heavy. It was light. It was filled with the echoes of laughter and the warmth of a love that was both passionate and playful.

They had seen it all. The pain, the love, the reconciliation, and now, the glorious, everyday joy. They had seen Toto Wolff, the titan of their sport, brought to his knees not by defeat, but by love, chasing after his terrifying, magnificent wife because the mere mention of his rival’s name was enough to spark a playful, possessive panic.

Nico Rosberg wiped the last of the tears from his face. A small, real, tentative smile touched his lips. The future was no longer a taunt. It was an invitation. It was messy, and chaotic, and full of strong, independent women who were "hot as fuck," and it was so, so much better than winning.

The final, comedic image of a panicked Toto Wolff sprinting after his wife to head off a flirtation with Christian Horner seemed to hang in the air long after the screen faded to black. The silence it left behind was not the stunned, heavy silence of before, but something warmer, softer, saturated with the echoes of laughter and the profound sense of a story having reached its true, joyful end.

The door remained locked. But the desperation to escape had vanished, replaced by a collective, dazed contentment. They were digesting a feast of impossible futures.

It was James Vowles who finally broke the quiet, his voice laced with a weary, wondrous amusement. "Well," he said, letting out a long, slow breath. "I, for one, am deeply appreciative she said no to Vettel."

A ripple of soft, genuine laughter moved through the team. It was a release valve, a shared acknowledgment of the sheer, beautiful madness they had witnessed.

Paddy Lowe shook his head, a slow, amazed smile spreading across his face. "A spoon. He's still worried about the spoon." The mundane domesticity of the threat, now a long-standing joke between a husband and wife, was perhaps the most grounding detail of all.

All eyes eventually drifted back to the two men at the center of the storm. Nico was no longer sobbing, but sitting quietly, his posture slack, his gaze distant yet clear. The raw agony had been processed, leaving behind a deep, aching hollow that was slowly being filled with a new, terrifying resolve. He looked like a man who had been shown a map to a treasure he thought was lost forever.

Toto, meanwhile, had not moved from where he stood. He was staring at the black screen as if it were a holy relic. The blush from his future self's teasing, the possessive kiss, the panicked run—it should have been humiliating. And it was. But it was a humiliation laced with a golden thread of hope so potent it felt like a physical warmth in his chest. The image of Esra, brushing his cheek and saying, "Everything for you," was etched onto his soul. He had seen a version of himself that was not just a team principal, but a man—a man deeply, passionately, and completely loved.

He finally turned away from the screen and looked at Nico. The anger, the frustration, the managerial disappointment was gone. He saw only the boy he had watched grow up, the man who had been his driver, and now, the person who was, in some impossible future, family.

"Nico," Toto said, his voice quiet but firm in the hushed room.

Nico’s eyes, red-rimmed but clear, lifted to meet his.

"We can't unsee that," Toto stated. It wasn't an accusation. It was a fact.

Nico gave a slow, single nod. "No," he whispered. "We can't."

"The championship..." Toto began.

"Is a trophy," Nico finished, his voice gaining a shred of strength. "It's metal. It's... it's not him calling me 'his sun'." The words were still raw, but he said them. He acknowledged the core of the truth that had shattered him.

A profound understanding passed between them, silencing the rest of the room. The battle was over. Not the one on the track—that would continue—but the war between them. It had been rendered obsolete, a petty skirmish in the face of the epic love story they had just been shown.

"The door is still locked," one of the junior engineers murmured, almost to himself, as if remembering their physical reality.

Toto glanced at the immovable handle, and a strange, calm smile touched his lips. "I think," he said, his gaze sweeping over his team, "it will open when we're ready."

He wasn't talking about the mechanics of the lock. He was talking about their hearts. They had been shown the path. The door to that future wouldn't open until they had truly, collectively, decided to walk it. Until the cold war between their drivers had genuinely thawed. Until the first, difficult, honest words were spoken.

The locked room was no longer a prison. It had become a cocoon. And inside it, the old, bitter world of 2016 was dissolving, making way for something new, something forged in the fires of a future they now knew was waiting for them. They sat together in the quiet, not as a team divided, but as a family who had shared a miracle, waiting for the courage to finally turn the key.

Chapter Text

The profound, almost reverent silence that had settled over the locked room was abruptly shattered by the familiar, unwelcome hum of the television. Just as they had begun to process the emotional cataclysm, the window to the future snapped open once more, this time with a jarring new energy.

The scene was a stark, mirrored gym. The air seemed to vibrate with intensity. In the center of the mat stood Esra, a vision of lethal readiness in tactical pants and a tight tank top that showed off the tapestry of tattoos on her arms. Her posture was a coiled spring, her eyes locked on her opponent.

"Attack me!" she barked, the command echoing off the walls.

The camera panned to her opponent. It was Nico, future Nico, dressed in similar workout gear, his face a mixture of determination and sheer terror. And from a bench off to the side, a familiar voice rang out, full of gleeful, unhelpful encouragement.

"Kick his ass!" Lewis screamed, grinning from ear to ear, looking for all the world like a spectator at his favorite bloodsport.

The present-day Nico flinched. The contrast was dizzying. This was not the tender, loving husband from the garage. This was a different, equally vital dynamic—a playful, brutal camaraderie.

Future Nico spun around, his expression one of utter betrayal. "What the fuck, Hamilton? You're supposed to be on my side! I am your husband!" The complaint was so genuine, so whiny and familiar, it was heartbreaking. This was the sound of everyday, married life. Arguing over whose side your spouse should be on during a simulated fight to the death.

Lewis just shrugged, utterly unrepentant. "Sorry, babe, but Esra is a weapon." He said it with the same tone one might use to state that the sky is blue.

Back on the mat, Esra's patience was gone. "Attack me, blonde!" she commanded again, her voice a whip-crack.

Future Nico, with a look of doomed resolve, let out a guttural, warrior-like scream—a sound that was both comical and genuinely effortful—and charged.

It was over in two seconds.

Esra didn't so much fight him as she simply redirected the universe around him. A blur of motion, a twist of his arm, a precise sweep of her leg, and Future Nico was airborne for a breathtaking moment before crashing face-first onto the gym mat with a sickening *thud*.

He lay there, motionless for a second, then groaned into the floor. "This is embarrassing," he mumbled, his voice muffled by the vinyl.

Then, he pushed himself up onto his elbows, a new, petty thought striking him. "I hope Toto has the same treatment as me," he grumbled, seeking solace in the idea of his brother-in-law sharing his humiliation.

Esra threw her head back and laughed, the sound rich and unburdened. "Darling," she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial purr as she leaned over him. "The only fight I have with Toto is involving a bed and handcuffs."

In the locked room, the present-day Toto made a sound like a teakettle boiling over. He buried his face in his hands for the umpteenth time, but his ears were a brilliant, burning red. The sheer, brazen intimacy of the statement, delivered with such a wicked smirk, was beyond anything he could have ever conceived.

From the bench, Lewis was heard murmuring in agreement, "Toto knows that it's useless to pick up a fight with you. Or he's too scared to do it."

Esra stood up, brushing her hands together, a triumphant, predatory gleam in her eye. "He finds it very sexy," she stated, as if it were the most obvious fact in the world.

The screen went black.

The reaction in the locked room was no longer one of shock, but of overwhelmed, hysterical delirium. The sheer whiplash from the sacred to the profane, from the tender kiss to the discussion of handcuffs and marital combat, was too much.

A mechanic in the back let out a strangled guffaw that he quickly tried to smother. Paddy Lowe was simply shaking his head, a permanent look of amazed resignation etched on his face. James Vowles looked from the screen to Toto and back again, his mouth opening and closing like a fish.

But the most significant reaction was from Nico. He wasn't crying anymore. He was just staring at the screen, a slow, dazed, and utterly genuine smile finally breaking through the devastation on his face. He had just seen himself get his ass handed to him by his wife's best friend, while his husband cheered from the sidelines. He had seen the mundane, ridiculous, and utterly perfect reality of the life he was fighting against.

He looked at Toto, who was still hiding his blushing face, and for the first time in months, he felt a connection to him that wasn't based on competition or strategy, but on shared, bewildered fate. They were both, it seemed, destined to be utterly and completely dominated by the forces of nature they loved.

The locked door was forgotten. The championship was a distant memory. All that was left was the echoing, terrifying, and magnificent truth: the future was a gym mat, a warrior's scream, a betrayed complaint, and the undeniable fact that Toto Wolff found handcuffs very, very sexy. And somehow, against all odds, it was a future they all now desperately wanted to reach.

The final, jarring image of Nico's face meeting the gym mat, punctuated by Esra's brazen confession about handcuffs, seemed to have short-circuited the collective brain of the Mercedes team. The silence that returned was different this time—not heavy with revelation, but buzzing with a kind of hysterical, overloaded static. They had passed beyond shock into a state of surreal acceptance.

The door remained locked. The fact was now a mere background detail, like the hum of the air conditioning or the faint smell of coffee. Their prison had become their sanctuary, the only place where this impossible new reality could exist without collapsing under the weight of the outside world.

It was the junior engineer, Sarah, who finally gave voice to the new collective consciousness. Her voice was small, slightly dazed, but clear. "So," she said, "just to summarize... in five years, Lewis and Nico are married, Toto is married to a terrifyingly beautiful Turkish general who may or may not have threatened Nico with a spoon, and their primary forms of communication are playful betrayal and discussing their sex lives in the gym."

A beat of silence followed, and then it happened. A snort of laughter escaped from James Vowles. It was followed by a choked giggle from another mechanic. Then, Paddy Lowe let out a full-bellied, helpless laugh, wiping tears from his eyes. It was a cascade, a release of tension so immense it was physically painful. They weren't laughing at the people in the visions; they were laughing at the sheer, glorious, unbelievable absurdity of it all.

Toto, his face still flushed, found himself smiling wearily. The humiliation was still there, a hot ember in his chest, but it was now ringed by the warm, bewildering glow of possibility. He looked at Nico.

Nico was still smiling that faint, dazed smile. He met Toto's gaze, and to the astonishment of everyone in the room, he gave a slight, self-deprecating shrug. "I suppose," Nico said, his voice hoarse but steady, "getting thrown on my ass is a small price to pay."

The statement was so simple, so profound in its acceptance, that the laughter quieted, replaced by a warm, shared understanding.

The dynamic in the room had fundamentally, irrevocably shifted. The hierarchy of team principal and drivers, the tension of competition—it had all dissolved. They were now just a group of people who had shared a profound and bizarre secret. They had seen the boss get flustered over his wife's threats. They had seen one driver declare his love and the other get beaten up by their mutual best friend. There was no going back to the way things were.

Toto walked over to the coffee machine, its familiar whirring and dripping a comforting anchor to normality. He didn't speak as he started making a fresh pot. The simple, mundane action was a signal. The crisis was over. The processing had begun.

Nico watched him, then slowly stood up. He didn't walk toward the door. He walked to the window, looking out at the Suzuka circuit, now bathed in the soft light of late afternoon. The track where he and Lewis had fought so bitterly just hours before. It looked different now. The asphalt was just asphalt. The corners were just corners. The real battle, he now understood, had never been out there.

Lewis's absence was no longer a void of tension, but a palpable space waiting to be filled with a new kind of truth. The first words spoken when that door finally opened would set the course for the next five years. They would either lead back to the cold war of 2016, or they would be the first, difficult steps on the path to the gym mat, to the kiss in the garage, to the name "Hamilton."

The door was still locked. But for the first time, it felt like they were all, silently and together, searching for the key not on the other side, but within the quiet, changed landscape of the room itself. The future was no longer on the screen. It was in the way Toto handed Nico the first cup of coffee, a silent offering of truce. It was in the way Nico accepted it, with a nod that held the weight of a thousand unspoken apologies and a single, burgeoning hope.

The shared, almost giddy sense of camaraderie, born from the gym scene’s absurdity, was utterly extinguished by the television’s next offering. The screen did not flicker with the energy of a paddock or a gym, but with the soft, low light of a bedroom in the deep of night.

The room was silent, save for the quiet, rhythmic breathing of two sleepers. The camera focused on Esra. The General of Death, the woman who commanded armies and terrified champions, was asleep. And she was trapped in a nightmare. Her body twitched, her brow furrowed, and a low, pained whimper escaped her lips before she jolted awake, gasping, her skin sheened with a cold sweat.

The sight was profoundly intimate, a violation of a different kind. This was not the curated chaos of her public persona. This was raw, private terror.

She turned, her movements jerky, and her gaze fell upon the man sleeping beside her. Toto. He was on his stomach, one arm flung out towards her vacated space, his face relaxed in slumber, looking younger, vulnerable. The sight of him seemed to both calm and agonize her. She watched him for a long moment, a war playing out in her eyes, before she slipped silently from the bed.

In the Mercedes conference room, the air grew thick and still. The earlier laughter felt like a blasphemy. They were witnessing something sacred and broken.

The scene followed her to a vast, modern kitchen, lit only by the moonlight streaming through panoramic windows. Her hands, the same hands that could disarm a man in seconds, were trembling so violently she could barely grip a glass. Water sloshed over the rim as she tried to pour it. Defeated, she set the glass down with a sharp click and pressed her palms hard into her eyes, her shoulders slumping as if carrying the weight of the world.

Minutes passed in that silent, moonlit kitchen. Then, a soft footfall.

“You should know better than to sneak up on a lady,” Esra said, her voice raspy from sleep and unshed tears, but the old, automatic defense was there.

Toto moved into the frame, wearing only pajama bottoms. His hair was mussed, his expression soft with concern, not sleep. “And you should know better than to leave the bed,” he replied, his voice a low, gentle rumble.

“Go back to bed, Toto. I’m fine.” The lie was brittle, transparent.

“Don’t lie to me,” he said, the words not a command, but a plea. An invitation.

Esra finally lowered her hands from her face, staring at them as if they were foreign, contaminated objects. The silence stretched, taut and painful.

“How can you do it?” The question was a whisper, torn from the deepest, most damaged part of her soul.

“Doing what?” Toto asked, taking a slow, deliberate step toward her.

“Love me.” The two words hung in the air, charged with a lifetime of self-loathing. She looked up, her eyes glittering with unshed tears in the moonlight. “I have killed. Tortured. I have…” Her voice broke as she began to list the horrors, each one a ghost she carried. She spoke of missions and orders, of a life lived in shadows and blood. And then, the final, devastating confession. “I have killed a 12-year-old kid because he picked up a gun. A kid who thought it was a toy.”

A collective, horrified gasp was stifled in the locked room. The spoon had been a dark joke. This was the grim reality behind it. This was the source of the nightmares.

“I know how to kill someone with a spoon, Toto!” she cried, her voice rising in a desperate, anguished crescendo. “With a fucking spoon! This is not normal!” She was begging him to see the monster she believed herself to be. “Why are you not afraid of me?”

The question was the core of it all. Why did he look at her and see a woman to love, when she could only see a weapon to be feared?

In the conference room, no one moved. No one breathed. The image of the invincible Esra, brought to her knees not by an enemy but by her own past, was more shattering than any display of power. They saw the cost of being a "weapon." They saw the profound, lonely burden she carried.

And they watched Toto. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t recoil. He didn’t offer empty platitudes. He simply closed the final distance between them. He didn’t reach for her hands; instead, he cupped her face, his thumbs gently stroking her tear-streaked cheeks, forcing her to look at him.

His voice, when he finally spoke, was so soft it was almost inaudible, yet it carried the weight of absolute certainty.

"Esra," he whispered. "My love. I am not afraid of you because I see you. I see the woman who carries these ghosts so the rest of the world can sleep peacefully. I see the strength it takes to live with those hands. And I see the beautiful, fierce, loyal heart that beats beneath the scars."

He leaned his forehead against hers, his eyes closed, sharing the weight of her silence.

"I am not afraid of the past your hands hold," he murmured. "I am only interested in the future they will build with mine."

The screen faded to black, leaving behind not the echo of a nightmare, but the profound, healing silence of being truly, completely, and unflinchingly seen.

In the locked room, the silence was absolute. The jokes, the blushes, the chaos—it was all gone, stripped away to reveal the raw, painful, beautiful truth underneath. Toto Wolff, the man of data and strategy, was also a man of depths they could never have imagined. And the love he shared with his wife wasn't just a passionate adventure; it was a sanctuary. A place where the most terrifying weapon in the world could finally, safely, fall apart.

The final, whispered words from the screen—*“I am only interested in the future they will build with mine.”*—did not simply fade. They seeped into the very walls of the locked conference room, silencing the last vestiges of nervous energy, of stunned laughter, of awkward shock. What remained was a silence so profound it felt holy.

The door was still locked. But the concept of a ‘door’,
of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, had lost all meaning. They were not trapped in a room; they were suspended between two worlds, and the bridge between them was built on a foundation of brutal honesty and unconditional love they could scarcely comprehend.

No one looked at the handle. All eyes were on Toto.

He was standing apart from them, his back turned, his shoulders rigid. He wasn't the blushing, flustered man from the earlier visions, nor the commanding team principal. He was a man whose soul had been laid bare. They had not just seen his future wife's trauma; they had seen his role in it. Not as a savior, but as a witness. A anchor. The one person in the universe who was not afraid of the storm that raged inside her.

Paddy Lowe was the first to move, not toward Toto, but to the coffee machine. He wordlessly began preparing another pot, the ritualistic grinding of beans and the gurgle of water a small, human sound against the backdrop of the cosmic truth they had just witnessed. It was an act of care, of giving Toto the space and time he needed without needing to be asked.

James Vowles slowly sank into a chair, his head in his hands. He wasn't an engineer in that moment; he was just a man humbled by the sheer scale of the human drama he had been allowed to witness. "He sees her," James whispered to himself, the words a prayer. "He really sees her."

The junior engineers and mechanics sat in stunned silence. The glamorous, dangerous woman in leather was gone, replaced by the haunting image of her trembling over a kitchen sink, confessing to the murder of a child. The spoon was no longer a joke; it was a symbol of a life steeped in unimaginable violence. And Toto… Toto had not just accepted it. He had reframed it. He had called her beautiful.

Nico Rosberg’s reaction was the most complex of all. The visions of his own future had been about love and reconciliation. This was about something darker, more profound. He saw the depth of the bond that existed in this future family he was meant to be a part of. It wasn't just about shared laughter and kisses in the garage. It was about sharing the weight of nightmares. It was about showing the most broken, ugly part of yourself and having someone not just look away, but pull you closer. His own problems, his own coldness, his own petty war with Lewis, seemed shamefully small in comparison. How could he have ever hoped to be part of something so real, so raw, when he himself was hiding behind a wall of ice?

He looked at Toto’s back, and for the first time, he felt a surge of something beyond empathy—awe. The man he had seen as a boss, a strategist, a figurehead, possessed a courage Nico could not even fathom.

The coffee machine finished its cycle with a final, steaming hiss. The sound seemed to break the spell. Toto’s shoulders slumped, not in defeat, but in release. He slowly turned around.

His face was pale, his eyes red-rimmed. He looked exhausted, as if he had lived a lifetime in the last few minutes. He didn't look at his team, not directly. His gaze was inward, fixed on the image of the moonlit kitchen and the woman he now knew was his destiny.

He walked to the table, his steps slow and heavy. He didn't reach for coffee. He simply placed his palms flat on the polished surface, leaning his weight on them.

"The door will open," he said, his voice rough but certain, "when we have learned what it is trying to teach us."

He finally lifted his head, his gaze sweeping over each of them, and finally settling on Nico. The look was not one of a superior to a subordinate, but of one soul recognizing another in the dark.

"It's not about the championship, Nico," Toto said, his voice barely above a whisper. "It never was. It's about this." He gestured weakly to the black screen. "It's about having the courage to see the nightmare, and choosing to build a future anyway."

The locked room was no longer a container for their anxiety. It was a crucible. And in the quiet, as the scent of fresh coffee filled the air, they all understood that they were being forged into something new. The key to the door wasn't a physical object. It was the collective decision to stop fighting the ghosts of the past, and to start, however tremulously, building the future they now knew was waiting for them. Together.

Chapter Text

The single name, spoken not as a question but as a statement, hung in the saturated air. It was an acknowledgment, a summoning. All eyes, wide and filled with a tumultuous mixture of awe, pity, and a dawning, fierce loyalty, were fixed on him.

Toto Wolff did not immediately respond. He remained with his palms pressed flat against the cool table, his head bowed, as if drawing strength from the solidity of the wood. The images played behind his eyes on a relentless loop: Esra’s trembling hands. The sweat on her temple in the moonlight. The raw, gut-wrenching confession of a child’s death. And his own voice, not the bark of a team principal, but the soft, unwavering certainty of a man standing as a bulwark against the tide of his lover’s grief.

He saw it all now. The blushing, the playful bickering, the chaotic energy—it was the beautiful, sunlit surface of a ocean whose depths were cold and dark and haunted. And he had not been afraid to dive in.

Finally, he pushed himself upright. He looked… older. The boyish charm that sometimes flickered in his eyes was gone, replaced by a gravitas that seemed to have aged him a decade in an hour. His gaze, when it lifted to meet theirs, was clear, stripped bare of all pretense.

“All my life,” he began, his voice low and raspy, “I have been driven by control. By data. By the need to dominate, to win, to impose order on chaos.” He gave a short, hollow laugh. “I built an empire on it. I thought it was strength.”

He paused, his eyes drifting back to the black screen, seeing something they could not.

“That… that is not strength,” he said, his voice gaining a shred of its familiar power, but directed inward. “That is a fortress. A beautiful, impenetrable fortress to hide the parts of yourself you are afraid of.”

He looked at Nico, and his expression was one of profound understanding. “We have both been building fortresses, Nico. Yours of ice. Mine of steel. To keep everyone out. To keep ourselves safe.”

He took a slow, deep breath, as if inhaling a new reality.

“What you saw…” He gestured to the screen. “That is strength. Strength is not being unafraid. It is looking into the heart of the thing that should terrify you—the violence, the trauma, the broken pieces—and not looking away. It is seeing the nightmare and choosing to love the dreamer anyway.”

He finally reached for the coffee pot, his hand remarkably steady. He poured a single cup, the steam rising in a gentle plume.

“I have spent years trying to manage you two,” he said, his gaze encompassing both Nico and the empty space where Lewis should be. “Trying to force a reconciliation. To broker a peace for the good of the team. I was trying to fix the data. To optimize the performance.”

He set the pot down with a definitive click.

“I was wrong. This is not a problem to be solved. It is a truth to be embraced.” He looked directly at Nico, his eyes piercing. “The truth that you love him. That you have always loved him. And that you are so terrified of that love, you would rather destroy yourself and him than admit it.”

Nico flinched, but he did not look away. The truth, spoken so plainly, was a liberation.

Toto’s voice softened. “And the truth is… I was lonely. In my fortress of steel, I was so… bloody lonely. And I saw a force of nature, and instead of being afraid, I was fascinated. I saw the chaos, and I wanted… I wanted to understand it. To be consumed by it.”

He picked up the coffee cup, not to drink, but to feel its warmth. A symbol of the simple, human comfort he now knew he was capable of giving and receiving.

“The door will open,” Toto repeated, his certainty now absolute, “when we stop trying to escape this room and start building the foundation of the one we just saw. When we choose to be vulnerable. When we choose to be brave.”

He took a sip of the coffee, and it was not just a drink. It was a sacrament. A commitment.

“The first brick,” he said, his voice clear and strong, “is honesty. So let’s begin.”

The profound, soul-scraping intimacy of the previous vision had left the Mercedes team in a state of hushed reverence. Toto’s raw confession had been the final piece of the puzzle, cementing their understanding of the deep, abiding strength that underpinned the future’s chaotic joy. The silence that followed was heavy, but it was a productive silence, thick with unspoken resolutions.

And then, the television, that relentless, mischievous oracle, hummed back to life, shattering the solemnity with a burst of pure, unadulterated chaos.

The scene was a sun-drenched patio surrounding a glittering blue pool. The air shimmered with heat. And sprinting around the water’s edge, shrieking with laughter, were a fully-grown man and a deadly military general, armed with brightly colored water pistols.

“Come back here, you blonde!” Esra yelled, her warrior’s bark now filled with playful fury. She was in a bikini, her tattoos on full display, a terrifying and magnificent sight as she gave chase.

Nico, laughing so hard he could barely run, dodged a stream of water. “Ooh, the big, scary general is mad! Lewis, dear husband, save me!” he mocked, throwing a desperate look toward a lounger.

Lewis, future Lewis, lay sprawled on a sunbed, a large margarita in hand, wearing oversized sunglasses and a look of utter, beatific contentment. “Leave me out of this,” he declared, taking a slow sip of his drink, the very picture of a man who had earned his peace and would not be disturbed for anything less than a full-blown catastrophe.

The sight was so jarring, so wonderfully normal, that the locked room seemed to physically exhale. The tension that had held them captive for what felt like an eternity simply dissolved into a wave of disbelieving laughter. It was the release they desperately needed.

On screen, Nico and Esra continued their madcap chase, their laughter echoing. It was the gym scene again, but stripped of all pretense of training. This was pure, childlike play. The General of Death and the retired world champion, reduced to squabbling siblings.

Then, Esra skidded to a halt, a wicked glint in her eye. “Ooh, I heard something juicy from Toto last night,” she called out, her voice singsong. “Something about the FIA awards…”

Lewis didn’t even look up from his margarita. “You need to stop threatening Toto with a good time.”

“He likes it,” Esra retorted with a smug shrug.

“The tea, Esra! Tell the gossip!” Nico demanded, lowering his water pistol, his curiosity instantly overriding their game.

Esra leaned in conspiratorially, though her voice was loud enough for all to hear. “It’s about the singer who will open the event… it’s….” She drew out the pause for maximum dramatic effect. “It’s *Nicole*.”

The reaction on screen was instantaneous and electric.

Lewis choked on his drink, sputtering margarita onto his chest as he sat bolt upright, pushing his sunglasses onto his head. Nico, who had been creeping closer for the gossip, froze mid-step, his playful expression vanishing, replaced by a single, sharply raised eyebrow.

In the locked conference room, the laughter died in their throats. The name landed like a stone in a pond, sending out ripples of stunned recognition. *Nicole.* Lewis’s ex-girlfriend. The very same woman whose presence had once ignited a jealousy in Nico so raw and palpable the team had felt it from across a paddock.

The present-day Nico, who had just been on the verge of a genuine smile, felt the old, cold ghost of that jealousy brush against his soul. His jaw tightened. He watched his future self’s face, searching for a sign of that old pain, that familiar insecurity.

But it wasn’t there.

Future Nico’s raised eyebrow wasn’t one of hurt or anger. It was… curiosity. Amusement, even. He looked from Esra’s triumphant face to Lewis’s spluttering one, and a slow, knowing smirk spread across his lips. There was no fear. No sense of threat. Only the quiet confidence of a man who knew, without a shadow of a doubt, exactly who he was and exactly who he was to Lewis Hamilton.

The screen held the frame: the chaotic, sun-drenched scene now charged with this new, historical weight. The water pistols were forgotten. The gossip was the main event. And the unshakable foundation of the future was laid bare once more, not in a moment of profound trauma, but in the face of a ghost from the past, met not with ice or fire, but with a raised eyebrow and a shared, unspoken understanding.

The door was still locked, but the world outside no longer mattered. They were all, every one of them, already in that sun-drenched future, learning its most vital lesson: that the strongest love is not the one that burns hottest, but the one that can face down its old demons and simply laugh.

The silence in the locked room was now a living, breathing entity, shaped and reshaped by each new vision from the future. The shift from the profound vulnerability of the moonlit kitchen to the sun-drenched poolside chaos had been jarring, but it was the name "Nicole" that had crystallized a final, stunning truth.

They watched, utterly captivated, as the scene on the screen unfolded. The initial shockwave of the name faded, leaving not tension, but a charged, anticipatory silence among the three future figures.

Lewis, having recovered from his coughing fit, wiped his mouth, a wry, almost embarrassed smile playing on his lips. He didn't look at Nico with guilt or apprehension. He looked at him with a shared sense of absurdity, as if to say, *can you believe this?*

Nico’s smirk deepened. He placed his hands on his hips, the water pistol dangling forgotten from his finger. "Well, well," he said, his voice dripping with playful theatrics. "The plot thickens. Are you going to be alright, my love? Should I be concerned?" The question was a joke, a performance for Esra's benefit, and they all knew it.

"Shut up," Lewis laughed, shaking his head. He looked back at Esra, who was watching them both with the glee of a master puppeteer. "And you. You are a menace."

"I am a conduit of information," Esra corrected primly, though her eyes sparkled with mischief. "I simply provide the intel. What you do with it is your own business." She then aimed her water pistol at Nico again. "Now, where were we? You have a soaking coming for your insubordination."

But Nico was not to be distracted. "So, Toto just... volunteered this information?" he asked, his tone shifting to one of genuine, gossipy curiosity. "What else did he say? Was he stressed? Annoyed? Please tell me he did that thing where he massages his temples and mutters in German."

In the locked room, the present-day Toto let out a soft, involuntary groan, a fresh blush creeping up his neck. The accuracy of the description was mortifying.

Lewis chuckled. "He was mostly worried about the media circus. The 'narrative'," he said, making air quotes. "I told him the only narrative that matters is the one where we win the championship. And that my incredibly handsome and secure husband isn't threatened by ancient history." He threw a warm, fond look at Nico that was so full of trust and adoration it made the air in the conference room feel thin.

Future Nico preened under the gaze, puffing out his chest comically. "Damn right, I'm not." He then turned his attention back to Esra. "So, the 'General of Death' is now a carrier of paddock gossip. How the mighty have fallen."

Esra shrugged, a dangerous, playful glint in her eye. "Even generals need hobbies. And scaring Alonso is only a part-time job. This is much more fun." She squirted a stream of water directly at his chest.

Nico yelped, then laughed, the sound free and unburdened. The moment of gossip was over, absorbed and dismissed by the unshakable bedrock of their present. The ghost of Nicole had been summoned, and had been found to have no power here.

The screen faded to black, leaving the image of their playful, water-soaked laughter imprinted on the minds of the silent, watching team.

The reaction in the locked room was no longer one of shock or even awe. It was a quiet, settled understanding. The final test had been passed. They had seen the future face its past, and watched it not with fear or conflict, but with the gentle, mocking laughter of those who have already won the only war that ever truly mattered.

Nico Rosberg, the 2016 version, let out a long, slow breath. The last vestige of the icy fortress around his heart melted away, leaving behind something soft, vulnerable, and hopeful. The jealousy that had once consumed him was now a relic, a curious artifact from a different life. He looked at the blank screen not with longing, but with a clear-eyed determination.

Toto watched him, and saw the change. He saw the resignation and the resolve. He nodded slowly, a silent communication passing between them.

The door was still locked. But it no longer felt like a barrier. It felt like a starting line. And they were all, finally, ready to run.

Chapter Text

The final, playful image of water pistols and dismissed gossip had left a lightness in the locked room, a sense that the future was not only possible but was also filled with a joy so pure it was contagious. But the television, their relentless guide, had one more, deeper layer of truth to reveal. The screen glowed back to life, but the energy was different—softer, more intimate, stripping away the last of the defenses in the room.

The scene was a living room, bathed in the warm, golden light of a setting sun. It was clearly *their* home—elegant, lived-in, with photographs on the shelves and a comfortable disarray that spoke of a shared life. Lewis was sitting on a large sofa, staring not at the view, but at his own left hand, his thumb slowly, reverently stroking the gold band of his wedding ring.

Nico watched him from across the room, a soft, knowing look in his eyes. His voice, when he spoke, was gentle, devoid of any tease. "You afraid that it's going to disappear if you look away?"

Lewis didn't speak. He just continued to look at the ring, as if the simple, solid reality of it was a miracle he was still comprehending.

The silence in the Mercedes conference room was absolute. They were intruders again, but this time in a moment of such profound peace it felt sacred.

Then, Lewis looked up, his gaze finding Nico's. "You know how I met Esra?" he asked, his voice quiet.

Nico smiled, a fond, familiar expression. "Of course. You met her at Egypt, in a club. You spotted a man you wanted to spend the night with, but unfortunately, Esra had the same thought. You were ready to fight for him until the man suggested a threesome, and you and her left him alone and went for tequila shots."

In the locked room, the 2016 team blinked in unison. The sheer, chaotic, and bizarre normality of the story was staggering. It was so specific, so utterly *them*, that it carried the undeniable ring of truth.

"But..." Lewis said, standing up and walking slowly toward Nico. "That's the real version. But..." He sat down next to him, their knees almost touching. "You remember the day Esra walked into the garage and called you the 'prototype'?"

Nico’s future self nodded, a curious frown on his face. "Yes, I remember. But you or Esra never told me the reason."

Lewis took a deep breath, as if steeling himself for a confession he had carried for a lifetime. "I had a type. Or at least, a pattern, as Esra called it. I wasn't realizing what she was talking about until she told me. She had been watching the men I used to pick up to spend the night with."

He paused, letting the implication hang in the air of both their future living room and the silent, breathless conference room.

The present-day Nico had gone perfectly still, his eyes wide, his breath held. He was leaning forward, his entire being focused on the screen.

"They were all blonde," Lewis continued, his voice dropping to a near whisper, as if sharing the most intimate of secrets. "Soft. Blue eyes." He looked directly into Nico's eyes, his own gaze filled with a decades-old ache. "I didn't realize it until Esra saw a picture of you and pointed it out to me."

A collective, silent gasp echoed in the locked room. The truth was so simple, so devastatingly obvious in hindsight, that it felt like a physical blow.

"I didn't want to admit it back then," Lewis confessed, his voice thick with emotion. "But she was right. I was trying to find you in other men. I was trying to find your smile and your laugh in men I wanted just a night with. I couldn't have you, and I looked for replacements."

The raw, unvarnished honesty of the admission shattered the last remaining walls. The present-day Nico made a small, choked sound, his hand flying to his mouth. His eyes filled with fresh tears, but these were not of despair. They were of heartbreaking, soul-deep understanding. All the distance, all the coldness from Lewis that had confused and wounded him—it hadn't been a lack of feeling. It had been an overflow of it, so powerful and terrifying that Lewis had to try and dilute it in a sea of meaningless, blonde-haired substitutes.

Lewis reached out, his hand covering Nico's. "I have been in love with you, Nico, for years. Since our childhood. I can't remember a day that your laugh didn't make my heart beat faster, or your eyes didn't haunt my dreams."

The words, spoken so softly in the quiet living room, were deafening. They were the missing key, the Rosetta Stone that translated every single moment of their shared history—the longing looks, the intense rivalry, the painful silence. It had all been love. A love so immense and frightening it had twisted itself into every possible shape except the one it was meant to be.

In the locked room, Nico Rosberg began to cry in earnest, silent, shuddering sobs that wracked his entire frame. He wasn't looking at the screen anymore. He was looking inward, at a lifetime of missed signals and self-imposed blindness. The championship, the trophy, the glory—it all crumbled to dust in the face of this simple, devastating truth: he had been loved. All along, he had been so profoundly, hopelessly loved.

The door was still locked. But the man trapped inside it was finally, completely, free.

The final, whispered confession from the screen—*“I can’t remember a day that your laugh didn’t make my heart beat faster, or your eyes didn’t haunt my dreams.”*—did not simply fade. It detonated.

The reaction in the locked room was not a single, collective response, but a cascade of individual, visceral shatters.

**Nico Rosberg** completely broke. The quiet sobs that had shaken him before were nothing compared to the raw, guttural sound that was torn from him now. He folded over, his arms wrapping around his stomach as if physically wounded, his shoulders heaving. These were not tears of sadness, but of cataclysmic, life-altering revelation. Every moment of coldness, every bitter word exchanged, every time he had convinced himself that Lewis’s longing looks were just a trick of the light—it all collapsed under the weight of that truth. Lewis had been trying to find *him*. In strangers. For years. The sheer, desperate poetry of it was unbearable. He was not the unlovable rival; he had been the unattainable standard, the ghost in Lewis’s bed, the prototype for a decade of heartache. The sound he made was the sound of a man realizing he had been standing in the sun his entire life, while stubbornly insisting he was in the dark.

**Toto Wolff** did not move. He stood as a statue, his own personal turmoil over Esra completely eclipsed by the monumental nature of what he had just witnessed. He saw the entire, tragic arc of his two drivers with a devastating new clarity. He hadn’t been managing a rivalry; he had been presiding over a tragedy. All his strategies, his pleas for professionalism, his attempts to force a ceasefire—they had been attempts to put a bandage on a gaping, emotional wound he had never understood. The "pattern"—blonde, soft, blue eyes—was so obvious it was painful. He felt a profound surge of guilt, as a leader and as a friend, for not seeing it. His gaze on Nico was one of pure, unadulterated pity and respect for the storm of grief and clarity currently ravaging him.

**Paddy Lowe** simply removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes, letting out a long, weary, and utterly amazed sigh. The engineer in him, the problem-solver, saw the final variable click into place. The entire chaotic equation of the 2016 season was now solved. The source code of the conflict was not ambition or ego; it was a tragically misplaced, mutually destructive love story. He looked at the blank screen with a sort of reverence. They hadn't just been shown a future; they had been given a diagnostic for the present, one of heartbreaking simplicity.

**The engineers and mechanics**, who had been silent witnesses through it all, exchanged looks of stunned empathy. The gossip, the blushes, the chaos—it all made sense now. It was the vibrant, joyful aftermath of this foundational pain. The woman they had seen terrorizing Alonso and the man they had seen getting thrown on a gym mat were the same people who had carried this secret, this ache, for years. The depth of Lewis’s confession gave context to every moment of joy they had been shown. The future wasn't just happy; it was *earned*.

The room was filled with the sound of Nico’s ragged breathing. No one tried to comfort him. There was no comfort that could possibly be adequate. This was a pain that had to be fully felt, a truth that had to be fully absorbed, before any healing could possibly begin.

The door was still locked. But its purpose was now achingly clear. It had forced them to sit and bear witness to the root of all their problems. It had forced Nico to finally, after all these years, sit still and listen. And he had heard the one thing he had never allowed himself to believe: that he had always, always been loved. The key was not on the other side of the door. It was in that confession. And as Nico’s sobs slowly began to subside, shifting from world-ending grief to something softer, something like awe, it was clear he was finally, clumsily, trying to turn it.

The name was not spoken aloud. It was a silent, collective thought that hung in the air, a focal point for every gaze in the room. All of them—Toto, Paddy, James, every engineer and mechanic—watched Nico Rosberg, who was still hunched over in his chair, the aftershocks of his emotional earthquake still trembling through his frame.

For Nico, the journey through the television’s revelations had been a brutal, surgical dismantling of his entire identity. It had begun with a cold, clinical focus on a championship, a trophy he thought would fill the void he carried. He had watched the initial visions with a detached, almost scornful curiosity. *Lewis married? To a woman?* It was an oddity, a footnote.

But then the pieces began to fall, each one landing with the force of a hammer on the shell of his carefully constructed ice.

The sight of his future self—happy, sharp, and bearing the name *Hamilton*—had been the first major fracture. It was a version of himself he had never dared imagine, a man who had chosen love over legacy. The kiss had been a sledgehammer, shattering the frozen lake of his heart.

Yet, even that had not been the core. It was Lewis’s confession, the raw, unvarnished truth spoken in the quiet of their future home, that had reached the deepest, most hidden part of him. The "prototype." The pattern. The decades-long search for a ghost of *him* in the arms of strangers.

The truth was not just that Lewis loved him. The truth was that Lewis had been *haunted* by him. That his laugh had been a soundtrack to Lewis’s life, his eyes a recurring dream. Nico had spent years building walls against a perceived indifference, only to discover that the other side of that wall was a shrine.

The sobs that had wracked him were the sound of those walls collapsing inward. He was not crying for the lost championship. He was mourning the lost years. The wasted time. The countless moments he could have turned, could have spoken, could have reached out, instead of retreating further into the cold.

Slowly, agonizingly, he pushed himself upright. His face was ravaged, blotchy and streaked with tears, his eyes swollen. But they were clear. The ice was gone, melted away, leaving behind something raw, vulnerable, and terrifyingly open. He looked around the room, meeting the eyes of his team, his colleagues, his… family. There was no shame in his gaze. There was only a stunned, exhausted acceptance.

He looked at Toto, who was watching him with an expression of profound empathy, no longer the team principal, but a fellow traveler who had also seen the depths of his own future soul.

Nico’s voice, when it finally came, was shredded, a hoarse whisper that demanded the complete silence of the room to be heard.

“All this time,” he rasped, shaking his head slowly, a disbelieving, broken laugh escaping him. “All this time… I thought I was fighting a rival.” He looked down at his own hands, the hands that had gripped a steering wheel so tightly in his quest to beat Lewis Hamilton. “I was fighting… the only man who ever really saw me.”

He lifted his gaze, and it was filled with a resolve so fierce it was startling.

“The door,” he said, his voice gaining a sliver of strength. He didn’t look at the physical door. He looked at the path ahead. “I know how to open it now.”

He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to. The key was honesty. The key was vulnerability. The key was walking out of this room and looking Lewis Hamilton in the eye, not as a competitor, but as the man who had been searching for his smile in a crowd of strangers for a decade.

Nico Rosberg, the 2016 World Champion, was gone. In his chair sat a man ready to become Nico Hamilton. And the first, most difficult race of his life was about to begin.

Chapter Text

The heavy, emotionally charged atmosphere in the Mercedes conference room, still thick with the raw aftermath of Nico’s breakdown and Lewis’s devastating confession, was suddenly and violently punctured. The television, which had just shown them the deepest secrets of the heart, now flickered with a scene of pure, unadulterated chaos.

The view was from within the Red Bull Racing garage. The familiar navy and yellow livery was a jarring shift from the silver arrows they were used to. And then, a whirlwind in black leather stormed into the frame.

**Esra.**

“Christian! Where are you?” she yelled, her voice a sharp, commanding bark that cut through the mechanical hum of the garage.

In the Mercedes room, the collective jaw of the engineering team hit the floor. They were watching their boss’s future wife—the woman they had just seen trembling from a nightmare—march into the enemy’s stronghold as if she owned it.

Christian Horner appeared, a familiar, slightly smug smile on his face, though it was tempered with what looked like genuine caution. “Esra! My beautiful and deadly general and friend,” he greeted, his tone a mix of charm and wariness. “What can I do for you?”

The fact that he had a specific, practiced greeting for her was telling enough.

“Where are my tulips?” Esra demanded, planting her hands on her hips.

The sheer absurdity of the question caused a mechanic in the back of the Mercedes room to choke on his own spit. *Tulips?*

Christian blinked. “What?”

“You heard me!” she shot back, her voice rising. “For the first time you met me, you sent me tulips every month for years! My favourite flowers. First as a joke, and then it became a tradition.” She took a step closer, her presence somehow making the large garage feel small. “But this month, nothing! Where are my flowers, Christian?”

The revelation was staggering. The tulips. The ones Future Nico had casually mentioned. It wasn't a one-time flirtation; it was a *years-long tradition*. A monthly courtship from the rival team principal to the woman who would become Toto Wolff’s wife. The present-day Toto felt a hot, irrational spike of jealousy, followed immediately by a wave of bewildered pride. Horner had sent his wife flowers for *years*, and she had still chosen *him*.

On screen, Christian laughed, a rich, amused sound. “What happened? Toto doesn’t buy you flowers?”

Esra waved a dismissive hand, a gesture so effortlessly disrespectful it was glorious. “Please. Toto hides the spoons most of the time, or he’s chasing Lewis around the paddock because he was making out with Nico in his office.”

The statement was so casual, so packed with insider knowledge of Mercedes’ chaotic future domestic life, that the entire Mercedes team first blushed, then burst into a unified, helpless wave of laughter. It was the final, surreal piece of normalization. Their future was so insane that discussing their driver’s office make-out sessions with the Red Bull boss was a normal Tuesday.

Christian Horner laughed along with them, the sound echoing from the television. “I will give you your flowers before the end of the training session,” he promised.

“Thank you, my friend,” Esra said, her entire demeanor shifting from fearsome general to gracious recipient. She leaned in and kissed his cheek before turning on her heel and striding out.

The Mercedes team was left in a state of hysterical, disbelieving silence. They had just witnessed a geopolitical incident in miniature. An inter-team negotiation over floral arrangements, mediated by the threat of spoons and office make-outs.

Then, a young voice piped up from the Red Bull garage. Max Verstappen, looking bemused, asked, “So, does this mean she will be a Red Bull girl?”

Christian Horner let out another laugh, shaking his head as he watched her leave. “Only if Hamilton decides to drive for Red Bull.”

The screen went black.

The reaction in the locked Mercedes room was pure, unadulterated delirium. The emotional whiplash was total. They had gone from the depths of human vulnerability to the peak of surreal comedy.

Paddy Lowe was wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. “He’s been sending her tulips for years,” he repeated, shaking his head in wonder.

James Vowles grinned. “And she still chose the guy who hides the spoons.”

They all looked at Toto, who had his head in his hands again, but this time, his shoulders were shaking with laughter. The jealousy was gone, replaced by a triumphant, giddy awe. His future was one where his wife was so formidable, so utterly herself, that she could storm into Red Bull and demand her tribute, and the rival team principal would comply, simply for the honour of being part of her story.

The door was still locked. But it no longer felt like it was keeping them from the outside world. It felt like it was protecting this perfect, impossible bubble where they finally understood: their future wasn't just about winning. It was about tulips, spoons, and a love so powerful it could make Christian Horner an errand boy. And not a single one of them would have it any other way.

The final, surreal image of Christian Horner acquiescing to Esra’s floral demands did not simply fade from the screen; it seemed to dissolve into the air of the locked room, leaving behind a residue of pure, unadulterated cognitive dissonance. The emotional pendulum had swung with such violent force from the soul-scraping intimacy of Lewis’s confession to the absurdist comedy of the Red Bull garage that for a long moment, the Mercedes team could do nothing but sit in stunned, silent paralysis.

Then, the dam broke.

It started with a single, choked snort from a junior data analyst who had been trying valiantly to maintain professional composure throughout the entire ordeal. The sound, so incongruous in the heavy silence, was the pinprick that popped the balloon of tension. A mechanic clapped a hand over his mouth, but his shoulders shook uncontrollably. Another let out a strangled guffaw that sounded more like a sob.

**Paddy Lowe**, the ever-pragmatic engineer, was the first to articulate the collective madness. He removed his glasses, pinching the bridge of his nose as a wave of helpless, wheezing laughter overtook him. “He… he sends her tulips,” he managed to gasp between breaths. “Every month. For years. And she just… goes and collects them.” The sheer, bizarre persistence of Horner’s gesture, and Esra’s utter entitlement to it, was a level of paddock politics they had never conceived of.

**James Vowles** slumped back in his chair, running his hands through his hair, a wide, disbelieving grin plastered on his face. “She kissed him on the cheek!” he exclaimed to no one in particular. “She stormed into the heart of Red Bull, accused their team principal of failing in his floral duties, and then kissed him on the cheek! As a ‘thank you’!” The brazenness of it was so magnificent, so utterly terrifying, that it transcended rivalry and entered the realm of legend.

The rest of the team descended into a chaotic symphony of reactions. Theories exploded across the room.

“Do you think Toto knows about the tulips?”

“Of course he knows! He probably has a spreadsheet tracking them!”

“The spoons! He hides the spoons! It’s a real, actual thing he does!”

“She called Horner ‘my friend’! Since when are they friends?”

The laughter was not mocking; it was the hysterical, relieved sound of people who had stared into the emotional abyss and were now being tickled by its absurd aftermath. The image of Lewis and Nico making out in Toto’s office was no longer a shocking revelation, but a casual piece of background information used to deflect a question about marital neglect. Their future was so gloriously, insanely interconnected that the lines between team, family, and rival had been completely erased.

All eyes, shining with tears of mirth and disbelief, eventually found their way to **Toto Wolff**. He was no longer hiding his face. He stood with his arms crossed, a slow, deep, resonant chuckle building in his chest until it erupted into full-bodied laughter. The blush was there, a faint pink on his cheeks, but it was now mingled with a look of triumphant, possessive pride. The jealousy he’d felt moments before had been incinerated in the face of this display. Horner could send a thousand tulips. He could send a whole botanical garden. It didn’t matter. Because *he* was the one who got to hide the spoons. *He* was the one she came home to after collecting her tribute. *He* was the one whose office was soundproofed for reasons that had nothing to do with engine data. The tulips were a quaint tradition. What he had with Esra was a wild, unpredictable, and all-consuming force of nature.

And then, their collective gaze shifted to **Nico Rosberg**. He was still pale, his eyes still red-raw from his catharsis. But as the laughter had filled the room, a tiny, fragile smile had begun to touch his lips. He watched the scene not with the pain of minutes before, but with a dawning sense of wonder. This was the world he was being offered. A world where his husband’s best friend could reduce the Red Bull pit wall to a florist’s counter. A world where his own love story was so accepted, so normalized, that it was used as casual gossip. The sound of his own future laughter, mingling with Lewis’s and Esra’s from the poolside, seemed to echo in the present, healing the last fractures in his spirit.

The door was still locked. But the sound that now filled the room was not one of frustration or fear. It was the sound of a family. A weird, chaotic, unbelievably loud family who had seen the best and worst of each other and had decided, unanimously and without a word spoken, that they wouldn’t change a single, insane second of the future they had been shown. They were no longer waiting for the door to open. They were too busy laughing, planning, and wondering where, exactly, Toto kept the hidden spoons.

The laughter of his team was a distant, muffled sound, a wave breaking on the shores of his own consciousness. Toto Wolff stood amidst the chaos, an island of silent, staggering revelation. The television was black, but the images burned behind his eyes in a relentless, life-altering montage.

He saw the moonlit kitchen first. *Esra.* Not the General, not the weapon, but the woman. The terrifying, vulnerable truth of her. The weight of the ghosts she carried, a burden so immense it made the pressure of a championship feel like a feather. And he saw his own hands—his *future* hands—cupping her face, not to direct or to command, but to hold. To anchor. His voice, *"I am only interested in the future they will build with mine."* The words weren't just a line; they were a philosophy. A purpose he had never known he was missing.

He had built his entire identity on control. On data. On the imposition of order. He was the architect of the most dominant racing machine in history, a king in a kingdom of his own making. And it had left him… lonely. A hollow king in a silent castle. He saw it now with painful clarity. The long nights, the relentless focus, the emotional distance he maintained as a tool of leadership. It was all a fortress.

And then this force of nature had stormed his gates. Not with an army, but with a smirk and a threat involving a spoon. She was chaos incarnate. She was the unpredictable variable his spreadsheets could never account for. And his future self hadn't tried to control her. He had… surrendered. Willingly. Joyfully.

The blush he felt now was not one of humiliation, but of awe. He had seen the proof. The soundproofed office. The missed FIA meetings. The way his future self ran after her, panicked, at the mere mention of Christian Horner. It wasn't a loss of power. It was a trade. He was trading the sterile, lonely control of his kingdom for the vibrant, chaotic, and deeply passionate reality of a shared life.

His thoughts then shifted to the two boys—the men—he had been trying to manage. Lewis and Nico. He had been so blind. He had seen the data points: the tension, the rivalry, the dropped points. He had tried to manage the symptoms. He had never diagnosed the disease. And the disease was love. A love so profound and terrifying it had mutated into its own opposite. Lewis, trying to find Nico’s ghost in a parade of strangers. Nico, building a wall of ice to protect a heart that had been given away in childhood.

The "prototype." The words would haunt him forever. All the strategy meetings, the psychological profiles, the delicate balancing act… and the answer had been that simple. That human.

A new, overwhelming emotion surged within him, eclipsing everything else: a profound, gut-wrenching *responsibility*. Not to Mercedes-AMG Petronas. But to *them*. To Lewis and Nico, to guide them out of the wilderness of their own making. To Esra, to be the sanctuary she so desperately needed. This was no longer about winning a championship. It was about shepherding souls.

He looked around the room at his laughing, shell-shocked team. They had seen it all too. The dynamic had irrevocably changed. He was no longer just their boss. They had seen him blushing, they had seen his future wife reduce him to a panicked suitor, they had seen the raw, unvarnished truth of the man behind the title. And in their eyes, he saw not diminished respect, but a deeper, fiercer loyalty. They were in on the secret.

The locked door was a metaphor. His old life, his fortress of one, was locked. The key was not out there in the paddock, in a new contract or a technical directive. The key was in here. In the choice to be vulnerable. To be brave. To choose the messy, complicated, beautiful future over the sterile, controlled past.

Toto Wolff took a deep, steadying breath. The laughter in the room was starting to subside. He could feel their eyes on him again, waiting. He didn't have a speech. He didn't have a plan. For the first time in his professional life, he was going in without data.

He met Nico’s gaze across the room. He saw the resolve there, the shattered ice replaced by a fragile, but determined, warmth.

The door was still locked. But Toto Wolff was already on the other side.

Chapter Text

The familiar, dreaded, yet now almost comforting hum of the television sliced through the warm, contemplative silence. A collective groan, this one fond and exasperated, rippled through the Mercedes team. It was like a demanding, all-knowing child interrupting a peaceful moment, and they had no choice but to give it their attention.

The screen glowed to life, revealing a scene of opulent, stifling elegance. A high-society gala. Crystal chandeliers, men in black tie, women in glittering gowns. And there, standing near a marble column like two magnificent caged tigers, were Nico and Esra.

They were a vision. Nico was in a perfectly tailored tuxedo, his blonde hair sleek, looking every inch the retired champion and sophisticated businessman. Esra was a study in lethal elegance, her gown a slash of deep crimson that contrasted violently with her dark tattoos, which coiled up her bare arms and back. She held a champagne flute as if it were a weapon she was evaluating.

“Can we leave please? This is boring!” Esra complained, her voice a low, dangerous purr that was utterly at odds with the soft classical music in the background.

In the locked room, a mechanic snorted. “She looks like she’s planning a heist, not sipping champagne.”

Nico, future Nico, nodded in fervent agreement, his expression one of profound suffering. “Tell me about it. I retired from Formula One to have peaceful nights at home, not be dragged to galas.”

The present-day Nico felt a jolt of recognition. The desire for a quiet life, away from the glittering circus—it was a feeling he knew well, one he had buried under ambition. To see his future self so comfortable admitting it was liberating.

Esra took a disdainful sip of her drink. “This is the cost of being married to Lewis Hamilton.” She sighed, a theatrical, world-weary sound. “At least before I met Toto, my events involved guns and tequila shots behind the backs of our superior officers, and maybe a hook-up in the bathrooms.”

The statement landed with the force of a small bomb. Engineers exchanged wide-eyed looks, a mixture of horror and immense respect on their faces. The contrast between the sterile gala and the visceral, dangerous world she described was dizzying.

“You have tequila with you?” Future Nico asked, his eyes lighting up with a conspiratorial gleam that was so unlike the icy driver of 2016.

“In the car. But don’t tell Toto this,” Esra whispered, leaning in.

“We are leaving,”Nico declared, a rebellious spark in his eyes. “Toto and Lewis can manage without us.”

Esra let out a short, sharp laugh. **“That is the most ridiculous lie that has ever slipped from your mouth, Blonde.” She looked at him with affectionate mockery. “They’d last ten minutes before panicking.”**

But Nico was already sold on the idea, a wicked grin spreading across his face. He leaned in closer. “Come on, it would be fun to watch Lewis and Toto lose their minds while they try to find us.” He winked.

The sheer, unadulterated mischief of the plan sent a wave of delighted laughter through the Mercedes conference room. They were no longer watching distant, perfect future versions; they were watching partners-in-crime, the chaotic id of the Mercedes family, plotting their escape.

Esra’s expression shifted from mockery to one of dawning, wicked inspiration. Her red lips curved into a smile that promised beautiful trouble. “Tell Fernando to take a picture of the panic on Lewis and Toto’s faces when they find out we left together.”

The room erupted. The specificity of involving Fernando Alonso, their fierce rival, as a documentarian of their own team’s internal chaos was the masterstroke. It was no longer just an escape; it was a performance, a piece of psychological warfare designed for their own amusement.

Paddy Lowe was wiping tears from his eyes. “They’re a menace! A beautiful, coordinated menace!”

James Vowles shook his head in awe. “They’re using Alonso as their personal paparazzo. That’s… that’s genius.”

The junior staff were howling, imagining the synchronized, panicked fury of Lewis and Toto, and the unbridled glee of Alonso capturing it all.

And through the laughter, a single, unifying thought bonded them all: they couldn’t wait for this future. They wanted to be there, in that gala, to witness the moment those two slipped away, to see the look on Toto’s face, to be part of the story. The locked door was forgotten. The championship was a secondary concern. The real prize, they now knew, was a front-row seat to the greatest, most chaotic show in the paddock, a show where the stars were a retired champion and a deadly general, and the plot was always, delightfully, unpredictable.

The sound was so simple, so mundane, that for a moment, it didn’t register. A soft, definitive *click*.

It was the sound of the lock disengaging.

The roar of laughter and chatter died in an instant. Every head in the room, from Toto to the most junior mechanic, snapped toward the door. It stood ajar now, just by an inch, a sliver of the brightly lit, normal corridor visible beyond.

The silence that fell was heavier than any that had come before. It was the silence of a spell being broken. The television screen was dark and silent, its work complete. The window to tomorrow was closed.

For a long moment, no one moved. They were all suspended between two worlds—the impossible, luminous future they had just inhabited, and the stark, difficult reality of the present. The air in the room still felt charged, thick with the ghosts of laughter, confessions, and the scent of Esra’s imagined tequila.

Nico Rosberg was the first to break the stillness. He slowly, deliberately, pushed his chair back. The movement was not the jerky, anxious motion of before, but one of clear, resolute purpose. He didn’t look at anyone as he stood. His gaze was fixed on that sliver of light from the corridor. His face, though still marked by the storm of his tears, was calm. The ice was gone, replaced by a quiet, unshakeable determination. He was not the same man who had walked into this room.

Toto Wolff watched him. He saw the change in his posture, the set of his shoulders. He saw the man who was ready to become Nico Hamilton. And in that moment, Toto made his own choice. The data, the strategy, the control—it could wait. He stood, not as the team principal, but as the man who had seen his own future and knew the path he had to walk. He gave a single, slow nod to Nico, a silent transfer of understanding and permission.

One by one, the rest of the team rose. There were no words. None were needed. They had shared a baptism by fire, by vision, by absurdity. They filed out of the room, their steps quiet, each lost in their own thoughts, yet bound together by a secret that would forever change the fabric of their team.

They stepped out into the corridor. The world outside was exactly as they had left it. The hum of the Suzuka circuit, the distant sound of a support race, the smell of fuel and asphalt. It was all the same.

But they were not.

As they walked back toward the garage, the familiar surroundings seemed both alien and newly precious. The championship battle still loomed. The tension with Lewis was still a live wire. But the context had been irrevocably shifted. They were no longer just fighting for a trophy. They were fighting for a sun-drenched patio, for a moonlit kitchen, for the right to hear a laugh that had haunted dreams for two decades.

The door had opened. But the real journey was just beginning.

Chapter Text

The unlocked door did not lead to an immediate return to normality. Instead, the Mercedes team stepped out into a world that looked the same but felt fundamentally, irrevocably altered. The Suzuka circuit was still buzzing with the aftermath of the race, but for them, it was as if they were moving through a dream, the vivid, impossible memories of the future superimposed over the drab reality of the present.

The next few days were a study in quiet, collective disorientation.

Toto Wolff was a ghost of his former self. The blustering, pacing energy that usually defined him was gone, replaced by a deep, contemplative silence. He would be found staring out of his office window, not at the circuit, but at some distant point on the horizon, his fingers unconsciously stroking the bare ring finger on his left hand. The team knew better than to disturb him with trivial matters. He was a man rebuilding his entire worldview from the ground up. The memory of Esra’s laugh, the feel of her leather-clad waist under his hand—it was more real to him than the stack of financial reports on his desk. He drafted three separate emails to his personal assistant, each with the subject line "Potential Security Consultants - Turkish Military Background," before deleting them all, his ears burning with a mixture of shame and thrilling anticipation.

Paddy Lowe and James Vowles became reluctant archivists of the impossible. They would catch each other's eye during technical briefings, and a single, raised eyebrow would be enough. *The spoon,* one would think, and the other would have to suppress a shuddering laugh. They tried to re-engage with the data from Suzuka, but the numbers for tire degradation felt laughably insignificant compared to the cosmic truth they now held. Their conversations were hushed, circling around the edges of what they'd seen.
"Do you think... it's a fixed point?" James asked quietly over coffee, the third morning after.
Paddy stirred his cup, his gaze distant. "I think we were shown a possibility. A... very persuasive one. But Lewis isn't even back yet. The first brick hasn't been laid."

The mechanics and engineers moved through their duties with a new, unspoken camaraderie. The schism that had divided the garage into "Lewis's side" and "Nico's side" had not just healed; it had been rendered obsolete. Now, they were all simply custodians of a secret. A young mechanic, bolting on a front wing, would suddenly pause, a grin spreading across his face as he remembered Future Nico's mock-gagging. The sullen tension that had plagued them for months had evaporated, replaced by a sense of shared, bewildered purpose.

And then there was Nico.

His transformation was the most profound. The cold, calculating driver was gone. In his place was a man who seemed to be seeing the world for the first time. He was quiet, but it was no longer a hostile silence. It was the quiet of intense, internal focus. He attended debriefs, he discussed car setup, but his contributions were measured, thoughtful. The frantic, obsessive edge was gone. He was no longer fighting a war.

He spent hours walking the Suzuka circuit alone, not as a driver studying his lines, but as a man retracing the steps of a ghost—the ghost of his own future. He would stop at the entrance to the garage, remembering the vision of himself walking in, happy and sure. The memory of Lewis’s lips on his, the name "Nico Hamilton," was no longer a source of crushing pain, but a lodestar. It was a goal. It was the only goal that mattered.

He found himself standing outside Lewis's vacant hotel room more than once, his hand raised to knock on a door he knew was empty. What would he even say? *'I saw a vision of our future where we're married, so could you please come back so we can start making it happen?'* The absurdity of it was staggering. The chasm between the glorious future and the broken present felt impossibly wide.

The absence of Lewis was a palpable presence, the missing piece that made their new reality feel fragile, unanchored. Every phone call, every email notification, made the entire team jump, hoping it was news of his return. They were a clockwork mechanism waiting for its mainspring.

Three days after the locked room, Nico finally broke. He was in the hotel gym, pounding on a treadmill not with frantic energy, but with a steady, determined rhythm. Toto walked in, having seemingly mustered the courage to leave his window.

They exercised in silence for ten minutes, the only sound the whirring of the machines and their own measured breathing.

"It's real, isn't it?" Nico said finally, his voice calm, cutting through the noise.

Toto slowed his own machine to a walk. He didn't pretend to misunderstand. "It felt more real than this," he replied, gesturing vaguely at the sterile gym.

"I don't know how to get from here to there," Nico admitted, his voice barely above a whisper. It was the confession of a man who had spent his life following a map, only to have it replaced with a treasure chest and no directions.

"Neither do I," Toto said, his gaze introspective. "But we saw the destination. That's more than most people get." He looked at Nico, a newfound respect in his eyes. "The first step, I think, is to stop fighting him. In every way."

Nico nodded slowly, the truth of it settling deep within him. The championship was a cage. He had to find a way to open the door.

The wait for Lewis was agony. But it was no longer a anxious wait. It was a patient, purposeful one. They were no longer the Mercedes team of 2016. They were a group of people who had seen a promised land, and they were ready, however clumsily, to begin the long, uncertain journey towards it. The first test would be Austin. The first step would be when Lewis Hamilton walked back through the garage door. And for the first time in a long time, they all awaited his return not with dread, but with a desperate, hopeful, and quiet love.

The air in the Austin paddock was different. It was always a vibrant, chaotic circus, but for Lewis, returning after his self-imposed exile, the change within the Mercedes garage was a palpable, physical force. He had braced himself for the usual wall of tension, the frosty silences, the averted gazes. He had prepared his own armor, the withdrawn demeanor that had become his only defense.

Instead, he was met with a quiet, almost reverent calm.

He pushed open the door to the motorhome, his bag slung over his shoulder, his headphones around his neck. The usual pre-race frenzy was there, but it was muted, as if someone had turned down the volume on the world. Mechanics looked up from their work, and instead of the wary nods or hurriedly glanced-away looks he’d grown accustomed to, they met his eyes. And they smiled. Small, tentative, but genuine smiles. One of the senior engineers, a man who hadn't spoken an unnecessary word to him in months, gave him a firm, respectful nod. "Good to have you back, Lewis."

It was… unnerving.

He made his way to the debriefing room. Toto was there, studying a data screen with Paddy Lowe. Lewis stood in the doorway, waiting for the usual curt acknowledgment, the reminder of his lateness, the weight of disappointed expectation.

Toto turned. And the look in his eyes was one Lewis hadn't seen in years. It was… soft. There was concern there, and a deep, unspoken understanding that made Lewis’s throat feel tight.

"Lewis," Toto said, his voice lacking its usual gruff edge. "You look rested." It wasn't an accusation. It was an observation, laced with something that sounded like relief.

"I… yeah. I am," Lewis managed, thrown completely off balance.

"Good," Toto said simply, before turning back to the screen. "The car is good here. We think you'll be strong."

Lewis just stood there for a moment, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It didn't.

Then, he saw Nico.

He was already in the room, sitting at the far end of the table. He wasn't hiding behind a screen or a sheaf of papers. He was just sitting, his hands resting on the table, and he was looking directly at Lewis. The icy wall that had lived in Nico’s blue eyes for the better part of a year was gone. In its place was something raw, open, and devastatingly vulnerable. It wasn't a smile. It wasn't a glare. It was a look of such profound, unguarded scrutiny that Lewis felt his breath catch. It was the way you might look at a priceless, fragile artifact you thought had been lost forever.

Nico held his gaze for a long, heart-stopping moment, and then, slowly, deliberately, he gave a single, almost imperceptible nod. It was an acknowledgment. A recognition. A promise.

Then he looked down at his own hands, a faint flush creeping up his neck.

The air crackled with everything that was left unsaid. Lewis could feel it, a charge running through the entire team. They all knew something. They had shared an experience from which he had been absent, and it had changed them on a fundamental level. They moved around him not with caution, but with a new, deliberate care, as if he were convalescing from a long illness.

No one mentioned the locked room. No one spoke of the visions. But the evidence of it was everywhere. In the way a mechanic handed him a drink with a newfound respect. In the way Toto’s lectures about media engagements lacked their usual bite. In the way Nico’s cold, calculated silence had been replaced by this heavy, charged quiet that was somehow a thousand times more intimate.

Later, as Lewis pulled on his fireproofs, a young data analyst he barely knew approached him. "Everything feels different, doesn't it?" the young man said, his voice full of awe. "Lighter."

Lewis could only nod, his mind reeling. He had gone away to find a piece of himself, to escape the suffocating atmosphere. He had returned to find that the atmosphere had been purified in his absence. The war was over, and he hadn't even known a truce had been called. The fortress he had spent months building around his heart felt suddenly unnecessary. The locks were still there, but outside, everyone had quietly, mysteriously, laid down their arms.

He walked out towards the car for FP1, the Texas sun warm on his back. He didn't understand what had happened. But for the first time in a long, long time, the track ahead didn't feel like a battlefield. It felt like a road. And for a reason he couldn't fathom, when he glanced back at the garage, he saw Nico Rosberg watching him, not with the eyes of a rival, but with the quiet, unwavering certainty of a man waiting for his sun to rise.

The first practice session in Austin was a surreal experience. Lewis slid into the cockpit, the familiar embrace of carbon fibre and technology a stark contrast to the emotional ambiguity of the garage. He expected the usual barrage of tense, clipped radio messages, the pressure to immediately deliver a benchmark time to assert his dominance over Nico.

Instead, the voice in his ear was James Vowles, and it was calm. Measured.

"Good morning, Lewis. The car's balance is looking stable. No rush, just build up your rhythm. Let us know how the tires feel."

*No rush.* The words were so foreign he almost asked James to repeat them. He pulled out of the garage, the engine's roar a comforting scream in a world that had gone quiet. He drove. And he waited for the psychological warfare to begin—for Nico to slot in behind him, mirroring his lines, trying to disrupt his flow.

It never happened.

Nico was on track, but he kept his distance. When Lewis set a fast time, there was no immediate, aggressive response from the other side of the garage. Nico’s feedback over the radio was purely technical, focused on his own car. It was as if the invisible string that had tied them together in a destructive dance had been cut.

Back in the garage, the silence was deafening. Lewis climbed out of the car, pulling off his helmet. His eyes immediately found Nico, who was doing the same a few feet away. Their gazes met over the tops of their steering wheels. Nico’s wasn't challenging. It was… acknowledging. He gave another one of those small, almost shy nods, then looked away, a faint, unreadable smile touching his lips before he turned to his engineer.

It was making Lewis feel insane.

The debrief was the most bizarre of his career. He and Nico sat at the same table, and instead of the usual tense posturing, they… agreed.

"The rear was a bit nervous on the exit of Turn 11," Lewis offered, bracing for Nico to contradict him, to claim his car was perfectly planted.

Nico nodded, studying the trace. "Yes, I felt that too. A bit of oversteer. Maybe we can look at the differential setting."

Lewis stared at him. He looked at Toto, who was watching the exchange with an expression of profound satisfaction, as if his two prized roosters had suddenly started reciting poetry.

The entire day continued in this vein. A polite, professional, and utterly disorienting détente. It wasn't warmth, not yet. It was a ceasefire so absolute and so universally observed that it felt more radical than any argument.

That evening, alone in his driver room, Lewis finally broke. He called Angela, his physio and confidante.

"Something's wrong," he said, his voice low. "Or… something's right. I don't know. It's like I walked into the wrong team. Nico’s not… he's not *Nico*. Toto’s not barking. The mechanics are looking at me like… I don't know. Like I'm made of glass."

"Maybe they just missed you," Angela offered, her voice gentle.

"This isn't about missing me," Lewis insisted, running a hand over his face. "This is something else. It's like they all had a meeting and decided to… stop. And no one told me."

The mystery gnawed at him. The next day, during a long run in FP2, the answer, or a piece of it, finally came. He was trailing Nico by a few seconds, studying the flow of his car. And then, over the radio, he heard it. It was Nico’s engineer, Jock Clear, his voice calm but with a new, subtle layer of fondness.

"Good lap, Nico. Consistent. See you at the finish line."

The phrase was innocuous. Standard even. But the way he said it… the inflection… it echoed something deep in Lewis's soul. *See you at the finish line, my champion.*

Lewis’s breath hitched. His hands tightened on the wheel. A memory, not his own, flashed behind his eyes—a future Nico, smiling, proud, saying those exact words. It was a ghost, a whisper from a reality that didn't exist.

He drove the rest of the session in a daze. The pieces were all there, scattered around him. The changed behaviour. The knowing looks. The specific, haunting phrase. They were all living in the aftermath of something. A shared dream. A vision.

He didn't have the facts. But he had the feeling. The heavy, cold anger he had carried for months was still there, but it was now surrounded by something new, something warm and fragile trying to thaw it. The fortress around his heart was still standing, but outside the walls, his enemies had vanished, replaced by a quiet, patient, and waiting garden. And he was beginning to suspect that the key to the gate had been in their possession all along.

Chapter Text

The Mercedes garage was a study in focused, quiet industry. The hum of data servers, the soft whir of tools, the low murmur of engineers—it was the sound of a well-oiled machine. Lewis, immersed in a telemetry screen, felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. He pulled it out, saw the caller ID, and a genuine, unforced smile touched his lips for the first time in days. He stood up, needing a semblance of privacy, and walked towards the open garage door, leaning against the frame with his back to the room, the bright Texas sun outlining his figure.

He didn't realize that in the sudden lull of garage activity, his voice carried with perfect, crystalline clarity.

"Hey, Esra."

The name acted as a freeze-ray. Every single person in the garage stopped what they were doing. Wrenches hovered mid-turn. Fingers paused over keyboards. Heads snapped up. Toto, who had been discussing brake bias with Paddy Lowe, went utterly still, his pen freezing above his clipboard. Nico, sipping from a water bottle, lowered it so slowly it seemed to defy gravity, his eyes wide and fixed on Lewis's back.

Lewis, oblivious, chuckled softly. "No, I'm fine. You were right! Some days away from this circus was a very good idea." He listened for a moment, his posture relaxing. "How are you?"

A beat of silence, then Lewis let out a rich, hearty laugh that echoed in the stunned quiet. "Really? Woman, how many times have I told you to not scare the crap out of the new soldiers?"

The mechanics exchanged wide-eyed glances. *Soldiers.* The title confirmed it. The General was real. She was not a phantom from a shared hallucination; she was a woman who scared new recruits and made Lewis Hamilton laugh like that.

Lewis listened again, his head tilting. His expression shifted to one of bewildered amusement. "What? Esra… I don't know if I want to cry or laugh. This is better than when you said straight to my face that if Nico continues to act like an asshole you will break his hands."

The reaction in the garage was physical. A mechanic dropped a socket, the clatter unnaturally loud in the silence. Nico flinched as if struck, his face flushing a deep, mortified red. He looked down at his own hands, the very hands that had held a coffee cup in a future kitchen, now being threatened with breaking by a woman who was, apparently, his friend. The sheer, terrifying normalcy of the threat, delivered through a casual phone call, was mind-bending.

Lewis, still unaware of the audience hanging on his every word, continued. "Nico? Yes, we're fine, I think… It's just… the atmosphere in the garage is different. Not bad, just different."

Toto closed his eyes for a brief second, a prayer of thanks sent to whatever gods had orchestrated this. Lewis could feel it. The change wasn't just in their heads.

"When you decide to come to see me?" Lewis asked, his voice brightening. "This Friday? Good. Just promise me you will not threaten or kill some of my engineers, Esra! I need them!"

The plea was so specific, so perfectly *them*, that Paddy Lowe had to turn away, his shoulders shaking with silent laughter. The image of their future, of Lewis begging his best friend to spare the lives of his staff, was now their present.

"See you soon, you crazy general," Lewis said, his voice fond and full of warmth. He ended the call, slipped the phone back into his pocket, and turned around.

He walked back to his seat, his mind clearly still on the conversation. He sat down and reached for his tablet, ready to resume his work.

It was only then that he felt it. The weight of the silence. The intensity of the stares.

He looked up slowly. Every single person in the garage was looking directly at him. Their expressions were a chaotic mix of awe, terror, and dawning, hysterical joy. No one spoke. No one moved.

Lewis’s brow furrowed in confusion. "What?" he asked, his voice cutting through the static silence.

It was Nico who broke first. A sound escaped him, a choked sputter that was half-sob, half-laugh. He brought a hand up to cover his mouth, his shoulders trembling. He wasn't looking at Lewis with anger or coldness. He was looking at him with the stunned realization that the architect of his future happiness, the woman who had threatened to break his hands and who was now friends with him enough to be discussed on the phone, was real. And she was coming on Friday.

Toto finally let out the breath he'd been holding. He looked at Lewis, a slow, deep, knowing smile spreading across his face. It was a smile that held five years of future secrets, of soundproofed offices and blushes and a love so fierce it required its own military rank.

"No," Toto said, his voice strangely thick with emotion. "Nothing, Lewis. It's… it's all good."

And for the first time, Lewis had the uncanny feeling that it wasn't just a platitude. It was a promise. A promise they had all, somehow, already seen come true. The name 'Esra' now hung in the air of the garage, no longer a specter from a vision, but a tangible, impending reality. And based on the reactions of his team, her arrival on Friday was going to be nothing short of an apocalyptic event.

The silence in the garage did not break so much as it… thawed. It melted away under the warm, bewildered gaze of Lewis Hamilton, who was now the only person in the room not privy to the cosmic joke. The tension was gone, replaced by a collective, breathless anticipation.

Lewis looked from Toto’s knowing smile to Nico’s shell-shocked, laughing-crying expression, to the mechanics who were now hastily pretending to be engrossed in their work, their shoulders still shaking with suppressed emotion.

“Right,” Lewis said slowly, drawing the word out. He picked up his tablet again, but his focus was shattered. The name ‘Esra’ seemed to echo in the space, a word that had somehow rewritten the entire atmosphere. He could feel the change now, not as an abstract concept, but as a direct consequence of that single phone call. They knew her. The way they had reacted… they *knew* her.

The rest of the day passed in a blur of surreal normalcy. Engineers approached him with a new, almost reverential deference. A young mechanic offered him an energy bar with the solemnity of a squire presenting a sword to a knight. Every interaction was laced with an unspoken, “*You are friends with the General.*”

It was during a late-afternoon strategy meeting that the final barrier fell. They were discussing start procedures, and Lewis, feeling bold, decided to test the waters.

“We need to be aggressive into Turn 1,” he stated, expecting the usual pushback or a counter-argument from Nico’s side of the table.

Nico, however, just nodded, his eyes clear and focused. “I agree. The inside line is crucial. We can’t afford to be passive.”

Lewis blinked. He looked at Toto, who was watching them with an expression of profound satisfaction.

“Okay,” Lewis said, a little thrown. “So we’re agreed then.”

“We are,” Nico said, and then, almost as an afterthought, he added, his voice quiet but firm, “We’re on the same page.”

The phrase was simple. But the weight it carried was monumental. It wasn’t just about the race start. It was about everything.

After the meeting, as the team filtered out, Lewis found himself alone with Nico in the quieting garage. The sun was setting, casting long, orange shadows across the concrete floor. Nico was packing his bag, his movements slow and deliberate.

Lewis took a breath. “Nico.”

Nico stopped, straightening up. He didn’t turn around immediately, his shoulders tense. Then, slowly, he faced Lewis. The vulnerability was back in his eyes, raw and breathtaking.

“The… atmosphere,” Lewis began, gesturing vaguely around them. “It changed while I was gone. What happened?”

Nico’s gaze held his. A thousand answers flickered in his blue eyes—memories of a locked room, a kiss, a shared name, a terrifyingly wonderful woman. He saw the confusion and the budding hope in Lewis’s face, and he knew he couldn’t explain it. Not yet. The truth was too vast, too impossible.

So he gave the only answer that was both true and safe.

“We had a wake-up call,” Nico said, his voice low and steady. “All of us. We saw what we were becoming… and we didn’t like it.”

He took a step closer. The space between them, which had been a minefield for so long, now felt like a bridge.

“I didn’t like who I was becoming,” Nico whispered, the confession costing him everything.

Lewis stared at him, his own defenses crumbling in the face of such stark, unvarnished honesty. The cold anger, the resentment, it all felt suddenly flimsy and unimportant.

Nico gave him one last, long look, filled with a promise and an apology. Then he turned, slung his bag over his shoulder, and walked away, leaving Lewis standing alone in the twilight garage.

Lewis watched him go, his mind reeling. It wasn’t an explanation, but it was a beginning. The fortress around his heart wasn’t just unnecessary anymore; it was already being dismantled, brick by brick, by the quiet, determined hands of the very people he had been defending it against.

He looked out at the darkening track. Friday was coming. Esra was coming. And for the first time, the future didn't feel like a battle to be won. It felt like a destination, and he was, finally, on the right road.

The Austin garage two days later was a hive of nervous energy. Lewis was late again, and this time, the anticipation was a tangible, crackling force. Whispers swirled like dust motes in the Texas air.

“Do you think he’s okay?” an engineer murmured, checking his watch for the tenth time.

“He was fine yesterday,” James Vowles replied, but his voice lacked conviction. They were all waiting, not just for their driver, but for the other shoe to drop. For the world to tilt back onto its familiar, painful axis, or to spin off entirely into the strange new orbit they had been shown.

It was then they heard it. A sound utterly alien to the world of Formula 1: the sharp, deliberate, and unnervingly confident *click-clack* of high heels on concrete.

The sound stopped at the garage entrance. Every head turned as one.

She stood there, silhouetted against the bright paddock light, just as she had in the visions. Dressed head to toe in form-fitting black leather, a gallery of dark tattoos snaking down her arms, her lips a slash of violent red. Esra. In the flesh. She was more, so much more, than the screen could ever convey. There was a physical pressure to her presence, an aura of command that made the air itself feel heavier.

She scanned the garage, her gaze a slow, predatory sweep that missed nothing. Her eyes, sharp and intelligent, took in the frozen mechanics, the wide-eyed engineers, the stunned management. A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched her crimson lips.

“Hello, Mercedes,” she said. Her voice was a low, smoky purr that carried effortlessly through the vast space, both a greeting and a challenge.

The silence was absolute. You could have heard a carbon fibre splinter drop.

She took a few slow, deliberate steps inside, the heels echoing like gunshots in the quiet. “Don’t worry,” she continued, her tone laced with dark amusement. “I’m not here to kill everyone. Or seduce you.” She paused, letting her words hang in the air, her eyes glinting. “Though, most of you would cry if you heard me moan.”

A collective, silent gasp swept through the team. A junior engineer turned a shade of beetroot and looked frantically at his shoes. She was here. She was real. And she was every bit as terrifyingly magnificent as they had dreamed.

She gracefully sat on the edge of a tool cabinet, crossing her legs with a fluid, dangerous grace. “Where is Hamilton?” she asked, her gaze once again sweeping the room.

Her eyes landed on Nico Rosberg.

He was frozen, a statue carved from shock and awe. He looked into the eyes of the woman who had threatened to break his hands, the woman who was his friend in a future he desperately wanted, the woman who held the key to so much of his happiness. He felt pinned, seen in a way he had never been before.

A brilliant, terrifying smirk blossomed on her face. “Hello there, prototype.”

The word detonated in the silence.

Prototype.

The crew’s reaction was a symphony of stifled gasps and wide-eyed, disbelieving stares. They all knew that word. They had heard it from Lewis’s future self in the most intimate confession imaginable. And now, here was the source, in the flesh, using it as a casual, devastating greeting. They looked from Esra’s smirk to Nico’s face, which had drained of all color. He looked… exposed. Seen. But to their astonishment, he didn’t look angry. He looked… acknowledged.

It was at that moment that Lewis finally hurried in, a harried look on his face. He stopped dead in his tracks, taking in the scene: his entire team, petrified, and Esra, sitting on his toolbox like she owned the place.

The chaos intensified, shifting from stunned silence to frantic, silent panic.

“You’re early,” Lewis said, a mix of exasperation and fondness in his voice.

“How was the flight?” he asked, walking towards her as if they were in a park, completely ignoring the twenty other people having a collective out-of-body experience.

“Long and boring,” Esra answered, uncrossing and recrossing her legs. “I wanted a margarita, but…”

“Esra! It’s 11 in the morning,” Lewis laughed, the sound wonderfully normal and out of place.

“Your point?” she retorted, a glint in her eye. “Somewhere else, it’s happy hour.”

They both laughed, a shared, easy sound that built a bubble of normality around them in the surreal garage. They talked quietly for a moment, then embraced in a warm, strong hug that spoke of deep, platonic affection.

“You’re staying at my place while you’re here,” Lewis told her.

“Obviously,” Esra replied, and they shared another laugh, a private joke passing between them.

As she made to leave, her predatory gaze swept the room once more. This time, it landed, and stuck, on Toto Wolff.

He had been standing by the data screens, trying to project an air of calm authority, but the moment her eyes found his, he faltered. He looked like a man seeing a ghost, a very beautiful, very dangerous ghost he was desperately in love with.

They stared at each other. The air crackled. The entire garage watched, breath held, as five years of future history passed between them in a single, silent look. It was a look of recognition, of challenge, of a shared, chaotic destiny.

“Esra,” Lewis said, his voice sharp, a warning.

She didn’t look away from Toto. “Don’t spoil my fun, Hamilton.”

“People get killed when you have fun,” Lewis replied, deadly serious.

A slow, devastating smile spread across Esra’s face as she finally broke the gaze with Toto to look at Lewis. “Details, details.” She then turned her full attention back to Toto, who seemed to have forgotten how to breathe.

She took a few steps towards him, stopping just a little too close for professional comfort. Her eyes roamed over his face, taking in every detail.

“Hello,” she purred, her voice dropping to an intimate murmur that was nonetheless heard by every straining ear in the garage. “Mister Wolf.”

And with that, she turned and walked out, the clicking of her heels fading slowly, leaving behind a garage full of people who felt like they had just survived a hurricane. The future wasn't coming anymore. It had just walked in, said hello, and promised, with a single, crimson smile, that things were never, ever going to be the same.

Chapter Text

The 2016 season did not end with a bang, but with a series of quiet, seismic shifts that only the Mercedes team truly understood. The world saw a thrilling championship battle go down to the wire in Abu Dhabi, with Nico Rosberg emerging as the World Champion by a handful of points. They saw Lewis Hamilton, the dethroned king, congratulate his rival with a handshake that seemed, to the outside world, surprisingly civil.

They did not see the truth.

They did not see that the handshake lasted a second too long, that Nico’s grip was not one of triumph, but of a promise. They did not see the look that passed between them—not of bitterness, but of a shared, exhausting journey finally reaching its end. They did not see Lewis’s eyes, which held not defeat, but a profound, quiet relief.

The moment Nico’s championship was mathematically sealed, a strange peace settled over the Mercedes garage. The war was over. The real work could begin.

Nico’s retirement announcement sent shockwaves through the sport. The reigning champion, walking away at the peak of his powers? It was unprecedented. The media speculated about burnout, about the intensity of the fight, about a desire to spend more time with his family.

Only a handful of people knew the real reason. He had won the only trophy he had thought he wanted, and found it to be cold and hollow. He had looked at it, and all he could see was a locked conference room in Suzuka, and the face of a man he had called “my sun.” The championship was a cage he had built for himself, and he had just found the key. He was trading a golden cup for a golden ring.

The transition was not without its pain. There were long, difficult conversations between him and Lewis, held in the neutral territory of hotel rooms and private jets, conversations filled with tears, with anger at wasted time, and with the fragile, terrifying hope of forgiveness. They were guided by the ghost of their future selves, two men who had shown them that the other side of this pain was not just peace, but joy.

Esra became the unlikely architect of their new reality. She was a fixed point in their chaos, a force of nature who tolerated no nonsense. She bullied them into friendship, her threats now laced with a fierce, protective affection. She would drag them both out for drinks, her laughter a shield against the lingering awkwardness, until one night, they found themselves laughing with her, and then, miraculously, with each other.

Toto Wolff watched it all unfold with the air of a man who had seen the blueprint. The frantic, controlling team principal slowly gave way to a calmer, more centered leader. He stopped trying to manage the unmanageable and started to nurture the possible. He and Esra circled each other for months, a dangerous, exhilarating dance of wills and wit. The paddock was baffled by their dynamic—the formidable Mercedes boss and the terrifyingly glamorous “consultant” who seemed to answer to no one but somehow always had his ear. The rumors flew, but no one could have guessed the truth: that he was patiently, determinedly, courting his own future.

It took time. A year of tentative steps and rebuilt trust. But the foundation laid in that locked room held firm.

The wedding was a small, private affair, held at Lewis’s new home in Colorado. There were no sponsors, no media. The guest list was the Mercedes team from the 2016 season. They were all there, not as employees, but as family.

And when Lewis Hamilton, his eyes bright with unshed tears, looked at Nico Rosberg—who stood before him, not in racing overalls, but in a simple, elegant suit—and said “I do,” the sound that broke the mountain silence was not just a vow. It was a collective exhale from everyone present. It was the sound of a prophecy fulfilled.

Later, under a blanket of stars, Toto Wolff, his arm wrapped tightly around the waist of his new wife, Esra—resplendent in a black leather jacket over her wedding dress—raised a glass.

“To the future,” he said, his voice steady and sure.

Lewis, his hand entwined with Nico’s, his wedding band glinting in the firelight, smiled. It was the smile from the vision, open and free. “To the future we chose.”

Nico, Nico *Hamilton*, leaned his head against Lewis’s shoulder, his champion, his sun. He looked around at the faces of the people who had seen him at his worst and had never given up on his best. He had spent his life chasing a finish line, only to find that the greatest victory was waiting for him just beyond it, in the arms of the man he had always loved.

The 2016 championship trophy sat in a case somewhere, a relic of a forgotten war. Here, under the vast, starry sky, surrounded by the echoes of laughter and the certainty of love, they had won something infinitely more valuable. They had built the house they saw in the vision. And they were finally, blessedly, home.