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The ambulance is already there at turn one by the time Gabriel is finishing his cooldown lap. Its white flanks gleam nasty under the lights, reflecting fireworks from where they explode overhead, ripping the blackened firmament to pieces. Red and blue strobes glitter in Gabriel’s periphery as he slides untethered down the final straight. His heart is a fraying knot, smooth muscle tortured to its very limit. Squinting through his visor, he can just make out the shapes of uniformed paramedics where they swarm the damaged Red Bull. He can’t see Max. 

The car drifts and he has to brake hard in order to catch it again. Gabriel recalls how Max had once spun the car on a cooldown lap. At the time, he’d only met Max once or twice outside a karting track and it struck him then as a very silly thing to do, pirouetting like that. But then, that was Max. He was trying to congratulate Charles on his first podium, even if it meant he himself was demoted to fourth; because Max was- he was good like that. The best. A sore fucking loser, sometimes, when he thought he could have done better; but sweet. He’d been the first to congratulate Nico on his maiden podium, too. Gabriel had been looking forward to his own first podium. He’d been hoping Max would be there the way he’d been there for Isack, the way he’d been there for Kimi. 

He blinks, wrenching his focus back into his hands. Here, the steering wheel. The car. Pit entry. Parc fermé. The grandstands in uproar, chanting Max's song in fervor like it was the last time it would ever be sung.

Gabriel struggles to pilot his own body through the din, thoughts getting swept away by the cacophony of du-du-dudu’s being shouted at over a hundred decibels by thousands of mouths all at once. It’s worse even than Zandvoort, he thinks as his fingers scrabble against the harness. In Zandvoort, Max had gone after the McLarens as if he and the car were one and the same, and also as if he didn’t care much what happened to either of them so long as he could take this win before his countrymen. During the race, he’d snapped. On the podium, he’d stood on the step beneath Oscar. Gabriel didn’t find him until later, but Max's eyes were still grey and bitter as the sea which lashed that foul beach as he'd admitted, “was hoping for a bit more.” A sore loser, Gabriel had thought, though there wasn’t anything more he could have done.

Neither Ferrari had finished the race that time, either. 

Max, this time, had come in first.

At last, the straps give way. Gabriel manages to tear himself free of the cockpit and hauls himself out over the halo. Boots kiss tarmac and he’s already staggering forwards. There’s a commotion at the end of the lane- Red Bull, all in a pack, crowding the fence. They’re standing up on the barriers, sticking their fingers through the chain link as they howl. They’re either crying or cheering. Both, Gabriel realizes. The angle is all wrong for him to see what they’re shouting at, but he can hear the words as he stumbles nearer.

“You’re alright boy, come on!”  

“You did it Maxy, just let them help you now!”

“You did everything Max!”

 Gabriel would have to go further down, climb the barriers himself if he wanted to see. He’s not sure there’s any room. He’s not sure that he really wants to. His body feels mummified, feet glued to the ground. Through the screen of navy polos, he can just make out the tall squared hump of the ambulance. The emergency lights are still on, pulsing in time with the thunder and crash of his pulse. He stares at the bit of roofline he can see until the cabin doors snap shut like teeth. Max’s team wails. The shriek of the crowd reaches a fevered pitch, nearly unbearable, before it's joined by the keen of the sirens. Then the hump moves away. And it's gone.

 Gabriel stands there and watches Max’s team detach themselves from the fence like victims of a shipwreck, a plane crash or some other grave catastrophe. They hobble away in each other's arms, leaning into each other’s sides as if they’re the ones wounded, hardly able to stand. In the space they’ve vacated, Gabriel’s vision tunnels. There, Max’s car lies beached in the runoff. Red stains burst across the yellow of the engine cover and spray like podium champagne over the image of the charging bulls.

Something is wrong with himself, Gabriel thinks. He can feel his heart pounding, the blood surging thick in his neck. His helmet is a steam cooker for his brain. He needs- water. He needs to know what had happened to douse Max’s car like that. His head is all Max, the last time they’d spoken and also every time before that. At Max’s apartment in Monaco, at Gabriel’s. On stream, over text, out at dinner in Mexico City, at a karting track in Adria when Gabriel was just thirteen and Max was only just getting started. Scant hours ago, Max had reached out to Gabriel as the UAE anthem concluded to clutch Gabriel on the arm and wish him a “good race.” If the prospect of his fifth title dissolving before his eyes had weighed heavily on him then, Max hadn’t shown it. He’d only qualified seventh, after all. What was there for him to lose?

The wormhole of Gabriel’s vision collapses as another green and black race suit cuts in front of it. Nico's visor is flipped up. His eyes are puffy, sore the way they get sometimes after a race has been particularly gruelling. Nico had pulled off a very respectable eighth today over Gabriel’s own tenth. The Ferraris crashing meant both of them had finished in the points.

Max, of course, had won. Which Gabriel knows because he’d glimpsed it very briefly on the timing tower, and then had been trying hard on every lap behind the safety car to distinguish the order of the cars behind. He could just make out the silhouette of a McLaren running in third behind the Merc. But he couldn’t tell whose it was, whether it was Oscar or Lando. He’d been about to ask, when he’d seen Max hobble off the line in front of him and stagger into the runoff. It didn’t look like that time he’d spun out trying to wave to Charles. It looked like he’d been gored. 

“Did you see?” Gabriel gasps. 

“I didn’t,” says Nico, “not the crash, I was too far back.”

There’s a noise. Nico turns his head and Gabi follows his gaze to where Lando is standing on top of his car, pumping his fist in the air, triumphant. Fireworks crown him in a halo of gold, illuminating all of his soft edges. His team is cheering for him, entirely unlike the way that Max’s team had been cheering for him as they’d mobbed the barriers closest to turn one. 

Nico’s voice sounds dead as he says, “oh god. Someone needs to tell him.”

“Did he not see or something?” Gabriel hisses. “He was right there! There was- fuck!” Gabriel’s eyes sting against the dayglo glare coming off of Lando’s ugly yellow cue ball of a helmet. Of course Max would win like this. He’d stayed out to finish first with no hope of a greater prize, because of course he did. Because he was a dickhead driving a rocketship that he complained endlessly about, a car that might have won the championship tonight but didn’t. He was sweet, always, except when he thought there was something more he could have done. Max had bled out for lap after lap behind the safety car, just so that he wouldn’t have to stand beneath anybody else the way he had in Zandvoort. He’d done it because he could. Because he was good like that- the best- he knew what he was capable of. Gabriel knew also what Max was capable of. He knew, because he knew Max.

“Of course,” Gabriel seethes helplessly, “of course he would do something like this.”

Nico tugs him closer by the shoulders to bump their helmeted foreheads together. The crowd is still chanting, a flat wall of noise collapsing over top of them like the wreckage of a ruined building. Nico stinks the way Gabriel stinks, like sweat and fuel and melted tyre. If the dust Gabriel sucks in through the vents of his helmet tastes also like copper, then it must be something from the pyrotechnics. It must be. Gabriel’s vision blurs. The Max in his brain says, “good race,” and squeezes him as the UAE anthem concludes. His back turns and he leaves to go find his team.

“Weigh-in,” Nico grunts. And manually turns Gabriel by the shoulders until he is moving in the right direction, dropping one foot repeatedly in front of the other without feeling it at all.

At the weigh station, Gabriel arrives in time to watch Yuki step off the scale and duck into the FIA garage as if chased, his paper ticket crushed in his fist. No one there tries to stop him.

Gabriel doesn’t know what position Yuki had finished in. During the race, he hadn’t known where Yuki was at all except for somewhere vaguely in the pack behind. He hadn’t been sure where Fernando was either, except for ahead of him, picking fights with the almighty Mercedes; the W16, nine times the car that the Aston was but Fernando had been undaunted. A little matador, armed with nothing more than a cape and a sword as he’d stood in George’s way.

Fernando preached extraction. Max complained viciously about the rocketship his team had made for him but no one could get out of it what he could, though many had tried.

Gabriel steps onto the scale when Nico nudges him forward. His eyes drift over the shoulder of the FIA lady to where Fernando is taking off his helmet in the shadow of the pit building. Gabriel watches him sling it by the straps around his wrist like a handbag and rip his gloves off with his teeth. That done, he tips his head back to squint up at the grandstands where Max’s song has not faded even a little bit. “It’s like a rave,” Fernando had snorted in Belgium, chin jerking to where Max’s fans were dancing on the bleachers. The orange army out in force. “They think he is like Taylor Swift.” But even as he said it, his eyes twitched with mirth. He’d wandered away from Gabriel a second later to go and find Max on the other end of the parade truck.

Now, Fernando is rubbing hard at the space between his eyes. He drags a hand down over his face like it hurts. Slowly. Then, as if he’d sensed himself being watched, Fernandos’s head turns and he fixes Gabriel with a look.

Gabriel takes his weight slip from the FIA lady. And goes.

Up close, Fernando’s face is a gaunt mask. He pats Gabriel wordlessly as soon as he comes within range before seizing him by the elbow. Together they march across the threshold of the FIA garage. There’s a handful of other drivers, team staff and race officials milling around at the back but Fernando doesn’t go that far. Gabriel finds himself cornered under a vent close by the hanger doors, buffeted by his mentor’s stare and the glorious chill of cool, pre-conditioned air.

“Alright?” Fernando murmurs.

Gabriel shivers. “Yea, I’m fine.” He turns his head to look around but the Sauber trainer is nowhere. Maybe with Nico, he thinks. Nico’s eyes had been irritated and puffy, even though the race hadn’t been too bad for them and they had both finished in the points. “Did you see Max?” Gabriel asks. “Have you heard anything?”

“No. I finished sixth but I didn’t see it. My engineer tells me the ambulance went away with him.” Fernando’s eyes are scanning the garage as he talks, looking around as if Max might shuffle in at any moment, entirely unapologetic; and Fernando wants to be the first to see him so he can smack him upside the head. Or not, Gabriel thinks. Because the one time he had tried roughhousing with Max like that, launching after him out of habit the way he would do with Nico, Max had flinched like he’d been shot, and it was so awful Gabriel had apologized and made a mental note to never ever do it again- and never let anyone else do it to Max either, if he could help it. Max had laughed like nothing was wrong. 

Fernando says, “come on, take your helmet off.” And Gabriel moves to comply.

His fingers aren’t working right. He scrabbles at the latch under his chin and can’t get it to open. He should probably get his gloves off first but he isn’t sure how. The fabric which had been precision engineered to catch and to hold onto all the little buttons of his steering wheel feels all at once slippery as silk and also too bulky to be of any use. He should get them refitted, he thinks. He should find the Sauber trainer so he could get his phone back. He should tell Max. Kimi used to get his helmet stuck on his head all the time; all the time! Before Max had nudged him with an elbow and laid it out properly in words, how he was meant to wear his equipment so that it wouldn’t tangle. They’d been on the parade truck in Barcelona and George was ignoring them. It had been hilarious! Because Kimi was blushing like a girl, and Max was being very sweet and also very pedantic about it. Kept saying, “mate, mate, mate.” And then, “No one really told me how, either.” And if Gabriel can’t get his own helmet off his head in the next fifteen seconds, he thinks he might throw up inside of it and then probably die.

Fernando says, “slow down, Gabi. The race is over.” And sets his own helmet down onto the floor of the garage to help.

Gabriel finds himself being shucked from his helmet like an oyster from its shell. Fernando’s hair is very grey in this light. His eyes don’t get irritated like Nico’s do, but they harden, creasing underneath and around the edges whenever he is concentrating intensely on something. He doesn’t have to concentrate at all to help Gabriel out of his HANS device- he’s been doing this since before Gabriel was born. But his face is still rigid. Brittle as a sheet of carbon fiber.

 Gabriel reaches up to peel his balaclava off before Fernando does it for him, only to have the garment plucked from his fingers. Fernando takes it and sticks it inside of his helmet the way a trainer would. He does the same with Gabriel’s gloves, taking each hand by the wrist and tugging it free in turn. There’s a deep chasm forming in between his brows. His mouth is a cryptic line. 

Fernando thrusts the upturned helmet into Gabriel’s chest hard enough to make him stagger. He lets out a little, “oof,” reaching instinctively to cradle the bowl in both hands. He looks down, blinking stupidly, until Fernando thumps him on the arm again. “You are alright, Gabi,” he rumbles. 

It should sound like reassurance. But when Gabriel finally lifts his head, Fernando isn’t smiling.

Fernando had it out for Liam Lawson, considered Kimi a fad, and maintained a sweeping attitude of indifference towards Ollie and Isack and the rest of them. He didn’t care much for rookies in general- something, perhaps, about a young guy who’d once taken him to the mat at McLaren many years ago. But, Gabriel thinks. He likes his rookies. Fernando had chosen to mentor Gabriel personally. He’d traded helmets with a rookie Max all the way back at the beginning, and Max loved him for it, still. He saw himself in Max because Max was fearless; and because he, too, had once toppled a seven-timer. They were going to do Le Mans together one day, once Max got fed up with the circus as Fernando once had, and retired to go dominate in sportscars.

Fernando had known Max for years. He would know that Max didn’t like being roughed around the head like that, congratulatory cheek pinches notwithstanding.

Gabriel is asking before he can think better of it, “are you ok?”

Fernando’s caterpillar eyebrows arch at him. But he claps Gabriel on the arm anyways. “I’m fine, I’m fine. Just worried about Max.” He bends to collect his helmet from the ground, letting out a soft moan of breath as he straightens up again. Gabriel’s own back is seizing, a little. His spine feels as if someone had run it over and then tried to reassemble it using just cable ties and hot glue. He really needs water. The Sauber trainer is hovering on the other side of the garage, having finally reappeared from wherever they were before. When Gabriel glances back to Fernando, he is already jerking his chin.

“Go,” he says. “Cool off. They are going to have us in the media pen and make us pretend to be normal about this fucking shit.”

All the blood in Gabriel’s veins turns to ice. “What.”

Fernando’s lip curls. His face pinches into an expression of utmost disdain towards the world at large and at the FIA in particular as he shakes his head. “These fucking people,” he growls. His gaze flicks to the other side of the garage, then back to Gabriel. He bows his head, helmet dangling from his fingers, jaw working from side to side as he stares hard at an oil stain next to Gabriel’s shoe. At last he says: 

“I think, if they thought he might die soon, they would probably delay media.”

His voice is a wreck. Gabriel’s mouth is dry. His pulse rabbits, runaway engine crashing against the barrier of his ear drums.

Fernando continues. “But I saw the journalists go out already, so there’s a chance he’ll maybe be fine. But if you hear anything,” he says, finally looking up, “tell me. And I will let you know as well, obviously.”

Gabriel swallows. “Yea, of course,” he says as Fernando pats his arm again for what must be the fourth time in just the past ten minutes. Something is terribly wrong. “You’ll probably know before me though, I think.” It’s been one of precious few constants this year. Fernando knows things, and Max.

Fernando hums. “You should ask your rookie friends,” he grunts. “Isack and the other one. They might hear something from their team first.”

Gabi looks around the garage again, but he can’t see anyone from VCARB. They must have scuttled off with Yuki, apparently. The Sauber trainer has at last grown impatient and is coming over with a towel and- yes, fucking finally- water. “Alright. Fuck.” Gabriel scrubs at his eyes, clearing his throat. “I hope he’s ok.”

“Me too,” says Fernando.

It looks like he needs it, so Gabriel lets Fernando pet his arm a fifth time before moving away. He is already gone several paces, back turned, when Fernando calls out, sharp, “Gabriel.” 

Gabriel looks up. Fernando’s expression is stone. Cold and dry and remote as the lunar surface. His eyes are glass. He says, “you remember what I said about Max’s onboards, yes?”

Gabriel frowns. Just a few races ago, they’d been queuing up for the fan stage when Fernando had caught him watching Max’s onboard from Mexico on his phone, and decided to heckle him for it. “Don’t watch that,” he’d snorted. “He sets a bad example sometimes.” 

“He kept it out of the wall,” Gabriel retorted, swatting Fernando’s fat fingers away from the screen. 

“Yes, because his team has made for him a rocketship, and he’s very good,” Fernando had tutted. “I’m very good too, but you shouldn’t drive like that on purpose. Even if you have a rocketship, which-” he flicks the bill of Gabriel’s cap- “neither of us do.” 

A pause. 

Then, “He came very close.”

Gabriel had watched through the start a couple of times anyway. Here, the steering wheel. The car. The straight. The grass. The wall. The centimeters of space Max had avoided it by. Gabriel had been thinking of the footage when he’d crashed in Interlagos. He’d been trying- frantically- to remember what Max’s hands had looked like on the wheel, the direction he’d pointed his visor, what Max Verstappen had done to save himself as the wall hurtled closer to his head and white smoke streamed from his paralyzed rears. Gabriel must not have done it right, he thinks. Or maybe, as Fernando had suggested, it was just that his car wasn’t a plane. Because he had blacked out for a second and by the time he was back, they were already shuffling him off to medical. Max had come by later and told him to be careful like the massive asshole hypocrite that he was.

Fernando is still waiting for him to respond. Gabriel says, “yes. I remember.”

Fernando nods. “Don’t watch this one.”

“They’ll probably show it in the media pen, if he crashed.”

One side of Fernando’s mouth curls up in a smile, entirely devoid of humor. Grey. “No,” Fernando says. “They won’t.”

The screens in the media pen are all blank billboards. They show nothing but the still image of the F1 logo. Gabriel learns about what happened sideways, from the questions he is asked and the questions he is not asked and the things his press officer slips into his ear as new information comes out and is confirmed. The visor of Max's helmet had been compromised. Red Bull and Ferrari had each asked for a red flag and were denied. Max had needed help in order to extricate himself from the cockpit, and no one could say if the debris had really touched his eye or if it had just looked that way because of the- because of the way it looked.

Gabriel’s tongue feels numb and stupid. Max, unable to race, is an eldritch concept. “It would kill him,” Gabriel thinks. And then again, “it would kill him.” The idea is so viscerally upsetting, his mind aborts it on autopilot and thereafter, he soon forgets it had ever existed at all.

When the screens finally start showing the race highlights, it’s all drone shots and distant overheads. Gabriel pauses mid-interview to watch Max crouch behind the duelling Ferraris like a predator stalking prey in the grass. He lunges, and so does Charles. And then. Something on Charles’ car explodes, a visible combustion which dismembers his rear axle instantaneously, lighting up the back of the SF-25 like Christmas. The view cuts abruptly to Charles’ onboard. The spin. The collision. The slide into the barriers with Lewis as Max sails by in shaky pixels behind them. There’s another wide shot showing Max behind the safety car, and maybe if Gabriel didn’t already know what to look for, he wouldn’t see it. But he does. And he does. 

On screen, Max is stricken. His rocketship is sprayed all along its side, the stains growing longer with each lap that Max refuses to quit. Gabriel watches his friend bleed over the finish line. The view changes to one of the ambulance, parked in such a way where it obscures most of what’s really happening. They show Max’s team as they cling to each other and weep. They show nothing from the podium.

There is a microphone in Gabriel’s face. “Sorry,” he hears himself say, “what was the question?”

The journalist looks at him for several long seconds. Then, repeats, “does it surprise you that Max chose to stay out when he was injured? I understand the two of you know each other well, yes?”

Gabriel stares back at him. The journalist has cold grey eyes and a British accent. The white sleeves of his shirt are rucked up around several fat silver watches which are, Gabriel thinks, entirely too big for his narrow wrists. The logo on his microphone is unintelligible. Ugly. 

Here stood the journalist who’d come all the way to lowly Sauber for his headline. “Does it surprise you?” the man says- that Max would do something so mad? “The two of you know each other well,” the man says- so surely, Gabriel, you would be the one to ask whether Max was truly unhinged, or just dangerous on purpose. The journalist’s neck is thin like a gazelle’s. Not a driver, could never be a driver, would never understand. Max had helped Gabriel choose his tyres in Mexico. He’d walked Kimi back to the paddock after Kimi had wrecked him out of his own home race. Max had destroyed his teammates unapologetically, one after another after another, and had cared ardently for each of them. Not one had a single bad word to say. On the screens, Max’s team is inconsolable.

“I’ve said this before, but I truly think Max is one of the best drivers ever in Formula 1,” Gabriel says. “He is also my friend. So right now, I’m just hoping he’s okay. That’s all I’m thinking of.” He glares back at the journalist from beneath the shadow of his brow, hoping he looks as furious and heartbroken as he feels, until that microphone disappears. And is replaced by someone else.

The rest of media duty passes in a blur. Gabriel is dimly aware of Fernando on one side of the pit speaking a lot of Spanish with the Spanish media he prefers. On the other, Nico is doing the same in German. George keeps rattling off statements about GPDA ‘discussions’ and procedural changes and what he thinks should have happened, and he keeps ending every sentence with, “just hope Max is ok,” like he’s afraid no one will believe him. Stroll defends his penalty halfheartedly. Alex is being asked about Max the same way Gabriel was. And Yuki, if he had ever been there to begin with, seems to have scuttled off.

Not much to say there really, Gabriel thinks. Yuki had tried to help Max, but in the end there was only so much the second driver could do. “It’s the car,” Max had once bemoaned. “No one else can drive it, mate. I keep telling them, but- yea. It’s just bad.” A toss of the head. Max’s nostrils flaring as his eyes had scoured the paddock like something there might be just the cure his sickly rocketship needed. His expression when he’d turned back to Gabriel was pinched. A little fraternal furrow in his brow. “Please tell me if you see Liam,” he’d asked. “I think he might be hiding from me.”

Liam, right now, is tucked into a corner with Isack. Their heads bowed low together as they whisper. Max, right now, is in the hospital. Gabriel swims towards them from the other side of the media pen as if carried by some deep, slow moving current. The Max in his head says, “he was upset. I just need to talk to him.”

At some point, the screens had stopped playing Max’s team, wailing, and had gone back to the F1 logo. Isack keeps glancing up anyway, but stops when Gabriel catches his eye. Last year, they’d fought each other viciously in what had become the most contentious championship in F2 history. This year, they hadn’t so much as sniffed one another. Isack was on his way to the second seat, and spending a lot of effort conceptualizing what his future might realistically look like depending on how badly he was mauled. Gabriel was driving a pickle. 

But it was his pickle. And it came with Nico, who adored him; and without a conveyor belt to the lion’s den. Gabriel need not ever suffer that crucible which Isack had so optimistically signed for. Max would never be his teammate. But Max still hung out with him anyway. He helped him, taught him sim racing, slipped Gabriel pieces of advice with all the uncomplicated generosity of a kid sharing his candy. Isack, from what Gabriel could gather, was an ok guy who didn’t hold grudges about things that may have happened on track. Sometimes Gabriel almost feels bad for him.

They had scuffled briefly in the opening laps, and then not very much at all. Isack nods at Gabriel as he approaches and steps back to admit him into the corner he and Liam had been hogging. Before Gabriel can even open his mouth, he says, “sorry man, still no news.”

Gabriel can’t help but grimace. “About Max? Nothing?”

“Nothing,” Isack repeats, at the same time as Liam says, “who else, christ.”

Gabriel bites his tongue, hard. “Jerk,” he thinks. “Torpedo,” Fernando had once snarled. Liam’s arms are crossed, his shoulders hitched up to his ears. His eyes dart, lurching between his teammate and the reporters and the screens and Gabriel like something hunted, expecting but unprepared for the ambush. He must notice himself being stared at, because he eventually grunts out a, “Sorry.” Then, “fuck, I just hate this. I’m so glad the season is over.”

Gabriel chooses to ignore him. “Has Red Bull said anything yet?” he presses.

Isack turns his palms out placatingly. “I don’t know. I don’t- I haven’t gone over there.” He chews his lip for a second, then leans in to mutter, “I thought you might know, to be honest.”

“No,” Gabriel says. In his mind's eye: a vision of Max with tubes down his throat, his thick skull smashed like an egg. He has to swallow several times around the rising nausea before he can speak again. “Kelly. I think she is there with him, but I don’t have anyone’s number.” The last Gabriel had heard, Kelly and Stan Pex were the only family who’d come to see Max race tonight. Later, the only ones to follow him to the hospital. Jos was rallying in Africa right now. Victoria and his mom would be waiting for him at home in Belgium. No one else had flown in because no one had expected Max to win tonight. No one had expected him to do this thing that he’d done.

“Shit,” Isack hisses. Then, quietly, “I was trying to find someone to maybe ask earlier, but I think Laurent is still in the meeting with FIA people.”

Gabriel gnaws at the inside of his lip. He looks around. No one else is close enough to overhear, so after some consideration he ducks his head to whisper, “Jonathan went too.”

“It should have been a red flag,” Isack mutters. “That could have been- no, it was- so bad. Did you see how he was hit?” Isack is whale eyed now. The muscles in his neck quiver uncontrollably. “They had his cockpit on the screens for a second, before the safety car. He was bleeding. I can’t believe how he didn’t stop. I don’t understand how- I just don’t understand him.”

Gabriel feels very far away from himself. For almost as long as they'd known each other, Max has been unambiguous to him. Gabriel is used to understanding Max, because Max is his friend. He knows Max, because Max allows him to. He knows he isn’t what they say about him. Fernando had told him not to look at Max’s onboards all the time, but Gabriel still watched the one from Mexico. And then, also, the footage from Brazil in 2024. The mechanics of flight applied to birds just the same as they did to rocketships. But on that day, Max made his car look more like a UFO, something portentous and inexplicable; the lines he carved through the spray, the writing on the wall. “How did he do that?” Gabriel had thought, as he’d careened into the barriers a year later. “How could he?” he thinks now, stomach lurching the same as it had when he’d spun. He remembers GP’s voice on Max's radio, telling Max over and over again, “careful, careful, careful.” Max went on to set nine fastest laps. There was nothing in Interlagos or in the entire world that day which could have stopped him.

“I can’t believe Red Bull didn’t call him in,” Liam grouses. “It’s insane what that guy gets away with.”

Gabriel’s jaw crushes closed, the blood in his veins turned to ice. To Fernando, Liam was nothing but a prick and a torpedo. To Gabriel, he was Max’s quickest kill. Max was more empathetic. To Max, Liam was a dire circumstance. A small tragedy, but a tragedy nevertheless to be sent back down after a measly two races. Max had done his best to help him, but it didn’t pan out. They hadn't gelled. Liam Lawson was a spiny, “no-friends” pseudo rookie with all the gentleness of a starving dog. Max was a lion, and feared nothing. But Max had also spent a lifetime protecting himself, and Gabriel suspected that he’d never entirely trusted Liam with anything that was tender. Liam had never seen beyond the maw which had swallowed him. Of course, he wouldn’t understand.

As if sensing Gabriel about to explain it to him, Liam adds, abruptly, “come on, you know I love the guy but anyone else, they would have retired the car.”

“It should have been a red,” Isack hisses.

“I’m not saying it shouldn’t have been!” Liam insists. “But Max- they should have called him in! Fucking done something!” He shrugs, shoulders lurching in little convulsive fits as he says, “You haven’t been there yet, mate. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“They tried,” says Gabriel. “GP told him to stop, but he wouldn’t. He was trying to win the- the race, even if he couldn’t get the championship.” 

“Well that’s why they need to not let him do these things! The guy is-”

If Liam says, “crazy,” Gabriel realizes that he might just hit him. He can feel it in his teeth, the taught sinews of his hands; the place in his chest where all of his friends have their homes, and where Max lives, still. A muscle in his lip spasms.

Liam’s eye floats sideways and lands on Gabriel’s face. He stops. “He’s- sorry. Sorry, I don’t…” Liam trails off. He uncrosses his arms and removes his cap, shoving his fingers through his already mussed blonde hair. His gaze darts around the pen, fugitive. “Sorry,” he says again, “It’s been a shit day. And I know he’s your friend. I didn’t get to work with him for that long but Max was always- he was nice. He was always nice to me.”

“Shitshow,” Max had once spat, grinning hysterically the way he only ever did when he thought the situation was truly beyond help. “I fucking told them, but nobody likes to hear it.” He shook his head, stabbing into his plate as if it were somehow the carbonara’s fault that Liam had DNFed in Australia and then only managed to cough up twelfth in Shanghai. He chewed and swallowed. Then, “the car is of course fucked, but they didn’t even give him time to try. People need time if they are going to learn, and now, yea. He won’t get that. It’s a disaster, honestly. And I think he’s- well,” Max’s gaze slipped sideways. He’d become very interested in the hem of his sleeve for a second, and then for four more, anxiously plucking at the fabric where it was already draped perfectly even around the band of his watch. Finally, he’d batted it down and said, “I guess, I wouldn’t want to talk to me right now either, if I was him. It is what it is.”

Liam doesn’t say anything else. Probably for the best, Gabriel thinks as he turns away from him to face Isack. Isack had famously cried on television after crashing out of his debut grand prix. The display had earned him a hug from the dad of Sir Lewis Hamilton; and absolutely no favors at all from Helmut Marko, who preferred his drivers to be stone cold killing machines and not like. Human beings with emotions. Gabriel knew from racing him in F2, that Isack was always tougher than he looked. Which was good, because right now he just looks shaken. 

The crowd of microphones was at last starting to wash out. Journalists coming to terms with the fact that they would have to wait for updates with everyone else. Gabriel needs to leave before Isack’s fear touches him. But he needs to ask first, “can you do me a favor?”

Isack doesn’t make him say it. His eyes are still very wide, jaw spasming as his gaze flits around the blank screens and the thinning hoard. Still, he claps Gabriel on the shoulder and says, “don’t worry. I promise, you will know if we hear something.”

After media, there would always be fans and influencers and bloggers and broadcasters and even more journalists; all milling around outside hoping to get something. To exit the press pen without being mobbed, what you’d typically do is this: slip out through the pit lane. Weave through the mess of crates and forklifts and people from other teams moving big things on trollies and giving you the stink eye. Wash up in front of your own garage like flotsam ejected from the sea, and let yourself in. Don’t get in anybody’s way! But from there, it was usually simple to cut through the bedlam and waltz unbothered back to your own team’s hospitality.

The thing is. Gabriel doesn’t want to do any of that right now. Nothing which had happened tonight was Lando’s fault, really. But that doesn’t mean Gabriel need expose himself to whatever fanfare would be happening outside McLaren, now that Lando had finally beaten Max by two points. He doesn’t need to see what Red Bull looks like, either. He’s seen enough.

Instead, Gabriel slithers through a side exit and makes his way to the stained service corridor he’d first discovered in F2. The keypad on the door is still broken. The ground slopes beneath his feet, tunnel winding deeper and deeper into the earth. Gabriel had followed the burrow to its end only once, and had found nothing but the loading dock where they kept the dumpsters; a massive subterranean cavern of stink. Curiosity sated, he’d never gone back. Gabriel lets himself out into a stairwell about halfway down and starts to climb.

He’s not paying attention. He sets his feet down mechanically, lifting his body up step by laborious step as he rises towards that egress which was nearest to Sauber. He had an early flight tomorrow. He should try to get back to the hotel, try to sleep his aching heart. Max would be sleeping in the hospital tonight. Nobody there but Kelly and Stan. Gabriel realizes that if something were to happen- if Max got better, or if he didn't- he doesn’t think he could forgive himself if he was in Monaco. Cancel it, he thinks absently as he steps around a wad of spat gum. Fuck the plane. Then, a noise.

Gabriel registers the sound too late to pretend otherwise. His mind short circuits, front locking as he staggers to a halt just short of his intended landing. Kimi hasn’t noticed him yet. He’s sitting with his face buried in his arms, curled up on the concrete like a bug. The noise happens again. This time, Gabriel watches Kimi’s narrow shoulders tremble with the force of it, the whimper clawing its way out of him with vengeance. 

George had been upset in the media pen. Fernando had said, “I think, if they thought he might die soon, they would delay media.” But he’d also said, “these fucking people,” and had looked like he wanted to maul someone. Gabriel can scarcely breathe. All he can hear is Kimi crying, Max’s name being chanted in the grandstands, the wail of the ambulance and his team as they’d taken him away. Toto Wolff had gone with Jonathan and Fred Vasseur and also, apparently, Laurent Mekies, to speak to racing officials about what had happened. If something had happened to Max- if there was an update- maybe they would have found out first. Everyone knew that Toto held Kimi close, because, everyone knew, he reminded Toto of Max. If something had changed, would Kimi have been told?

“What happened?” Gabriel asks.

Kimi lurches upright as if electrocuted, nearly bowling himself over again in his haste to get standing. A muscle in Gabriel’s jaw twitches. It was a public stairwell. Even if Gabriel hadn’t come along, a janitor or a cook or a caterer would have caught Kimi crying eventually. Unwise, he thinks as he watches Kimi scramble, to expect privacy anywhere outside of one’s own driver’s room. 

Kimi still wipes furiously at his blotchy cheeks as if he could hide what he’d been doing. His voice is soggy when he says, stupidly, “what?’

“Max,” Gabriel demands. “Have you heard something?” The fingers on his left hand curl, white knuckled around the handrail. He can still see everywhere Kimi had been weeping. In the amphitheater of his mind, Max is smiling down at him, serene and relieved. “Jesus, Gabi,” he says. “Be more careful. Take it from me, you do not want to be going around getting smacked on the head like that.” Another quirk of the lips. Max, repressing a giggle at his own joke, finger wagging he tells him, “they said it’s very bad for you!”

Kimi just blinks at him. “What?” he says again. Then, “No. No, I haven’t heard anything.” A pause. Then, “have you?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

There is a silence. Kimi ducks his head in order to sniff loudly and then to scrub once more at his leaking face. Kimi, Gabriel recalls, had spent almost half the race with his nose to Lando’s gearbox, snapping at his heels like a little dog. He’d been ultimately unable to make the move. He’d only had the opportunity to make the move at all because his team had built for him a rocketship; a real rocketship that not even Max could have complained about had he been the one driving it, which he wasn’t, because he was in pre-divorce with the RB21. Kimi was driving that rocketship despite finishing behind both Gabriel and Isack in F2, because, for some reason, he reminded Toto of Max. Also, he still owed Gabriel a front wing from Monaco.

Before they’d shown it on the screens, Gabriel had briefly thought about finding Kimi in the press pit to ask him about the crash. Kimi had been running in sixth when it happened, much closer to the lead group than Gabriel was, so there was a chance he’d seen more. But then, Gabriel didn’t really want to talk to him. He doesn’t really want to talk to him right now, either.

Gabriel sighs through his teeth and peels his clenched fist from the railing. He steps over to the door without another word. Kimi has to move back in the narrow space to let him do it, turning away and pushing himself up against the wall like a beaten dog.

Gabriel’s lip can’t help but curl in disgust, “Nothing like Max,” he seethes. And flings the door open.

The thought at once gives him pause. 

Outside, it’s all black. The grandstands repose in shadow. No one is chanting Max’s name except for in Gabriel’s imagination, where the fireworks blaze on and the sirens scream, still. The chatter from the paddock filters in only vaguely, dulled by distance and lack of primetime. Close by but out of view, somebody is smoking a cigar. A utility cart rumbles past and disappears. In Gabriel’s periphery, Kimi keeps his chin tucked into his chest. His feet scuffle as he waits for Gabriel to leave him alone again.

Max had been only seventeen years old for most of his rookie year, and he still got cagey whenever anyone tried asking him about it. Gabriel himself had stopped asking after the last time, when Max’s face had contorted into a horrible blank mask and all he would say was, “I was mostly just focused on racing.” In retrospect, Gabriel doesn’t know why he’d bothered Max with the subject at all. Actions rang louder than words. And Max, though he’d never said so explicitly, had tacitly made clear that if any of them were to get caught crying alone in a stairwell and somebody wanted to give them shit for it, then they should kill that person and then also tell Max about it so that he could kill them too. Gabriel glances back over his shoulder. Kimi’s eyes are red rimmed, hunted. They meet his gaze for just an instant before skittering away. Gabriel knows, because he knows Max, that Max likes Kimi. Unlike Fernando, Max liked all the rookies, really.

Gabriel slowly shuts the door. Kimi still won’t look directly at him, but Gabriel finds himself asking anyway, “hey, are you ok?”

Kimi sniffs. “Eh, no,” he says. Then, “sorry. I am fine.” It’s not very convincing, not when Kimi is still hugging himself, his spine bent like a broken arch. He finally looks up. Then, he smiles- a pathetic wet napkin mockery of the real thing. The little grin that says, “please fuck off,” and also, “don’t eat me.”

Gabriel does not fuck off. He doesn’t do the other thing, either. Max isn’t here right now because Max is in the hospital, but if he were, then. Well. Max likes Kimi. He would be good to him, Gabriel thinks. He would want Gabriel to be good to him, too.

He withdraws from the crash bar and takes a step back. Kimi looks absolutely miserable at this new development, but it’s not as if Gabriel had locked the door or anything, so Kimi could either bolt or he could suck it up. Gabriel takes a deep breath and opens his mouth to say something good and reassuring. Something like, “it was just hard racing,” or, “hey, they didn’t delay media,” or even, “it’s going to be ok-” which would be the worst one by far because nobody really knew how bad it was to begin with, much less if it was ever going to be ‘ok.’ 

Instead, what comes out is, “did you see what happened to him? On the track?”

Kimi pushes a hand through his sweaty hair. His gaze flicks towards Gabriel then away again, eventually coming to rest on a patch of drywall somewhere over Gabriel’s left shoulder. “No. I just saw him weaving,” he admits. His nose wrinkles in fury, lip curling as he adds, “my fucking engineer wouldn’t tell me what was going on.”

Truthfully, Gabriel thought Max’s Red Bull swayed like a drunk even on the best of days. He hadn’t noticed anything unusual about the way Max was driving behind the safety car until he’d seen the blood. Too far back, he thinks. His engineer hadn’t wanted to tell him, either. He knows that Lando had noticed though, because he wouldn’t shut up about it in the press pen. Had kept insisting, he thought the problem was mechanical, something wrong with Max’s tyres or his suspension or his gearbox, like in Singapore. He’d been wearing his fucking ‘Lando Norris: World Champion’ cap and a panicked look on his face, and Gabriel had not been able to bring himself to go over and say congrats.

Kimi’s fingers curl tighter around himself. He gnaws viciously at the inside of his cheek, keeps glancing back and forth between Gabriel and the brown cement under his shoes. Gabriel waits with his heart held in limbo, for Kimi to say something.

At last, Kimi says, “I didn’t see it, but everyone keeps telling me. They were saying things in the media about the camera view from his cockpit. It was- they say it was bad.”

Gabriel remembers being sixteen and watching Max crash on television. Copse corner, Silverstone, 51Gs to the dome. Sitting on the couch next to Enzo, he’d pressed his hands over his open mouth and started praying. No one knew how bad it was. Later that year, Max would get sick in Jeddah. It was said his eyes stopped working at COTA. Even now, no one knew how bad it had been, really, because Max still wouldn’t say. Red Bull had long refuted any statements which implied their driver had been anything other than hale and fit to race. Max claimed mistranslation, and Gabriel had known to stop asking about it the same way he’d known to stop asking about 2015; what it had been like for Max to be the youngest rookie to ever land a seat, to tangle with Räikkönen and Seb Vettel and the almighty Mercedes as a boy.

Max’s T-cam from that race had been obliterated, reduced to smithereens by the same G-forces which put his head to the wall hard enough to scrape paint. There was no onboard. Gabriel had to settle for reviewing the incident through Lewis’ perspective. He’d watched the video from Lewis’ cockpit. Then, he’d listened to Max’s radio. He’d heard Max groan. He’d seen him struggle to lift his head as he hobbled to the ambulance, waving to a crowd he couldn’t see, on autopilot, doubled over like a building halfway through demolition. He’s glad that’s all there is. 

Gabriel drags a hand down over his face, calluses scraping over eyelids. “You shouldn’t always watch his onboards,” he says.

Kimi’s brow furrows. “What?”

Gabriel shrugs. It wasn’t worth explaining Max to anyone who could not understand him for themselves. What was it Fernando had said? “He sets a bad example, sometimes.” 

“He’s not crazy,” Kimi snaps. “I hate it when people say that.”

Gabriel looks up at him, and his eyes narrow. Kimi just keeps glaring back. He’s got his jaw clenched so tightly that it trembles, his face flushed pink from nose to ear, and Gabriel has to bite his tongue to keep from saying something mean. Max was his friend. But Kimi, of course, had a crush. It was because of Kimi’s crush on Max that he followed him around the paddock like a puppy and was always trying to touch his waist. It was why he blushed like a girl whenever Max gave him normal rookie advice, like how to not get tangled in your own helmet; and also why he was so eager to drive next to him after Max got fed up and left Red Bull, the way everyone said he was going to. Everyone with eyes should know what Max did to his teammates by now. But Kimi loved Max and wanted it. Kimi loved Senna too, who had died behind the wheel.

Gabriel doesn’t say anything mean, but he can’t quite keep from rolling his eyes. “I know that,” he says. “I’m just saying, you shouldn’t look at whatever people are going to be talking about. I didn’t see it either, and I don’t think I want to. He’s my friend, you know.” 

He doesn’t mean to say it that way, but it comes out, still. My friend. Possessive. Protective. Nevermind that Max was seven years his senior and had been protecting himself just fine, or so he claimed, for years before he and Gabriel had ever met.

The point still stands. In Mexico, Max had gotten dinner with Gabriel and helped him pick his tyres because he was Gabriel’s friend. He hadn’t helped Kimi because Kimi was driving the Mercedes despite only finishing sixth in F2, and so should be able to do it by himself. Kimi had a crush. But Kimi had also speared Max in Austria and held him back in Brazil and fumbled in Qatar when every point mattered. He hadn’t been able to get the overtake done tonight, either. If he had, then maybe Lando wouldn’t have been wearing that cap back in the press pit.

Kimi is shaking his head, not in disagreement but disbelief. “I just don’t know- I can’t think of why-” he stops, teeth snapping shut around whatever he’d been about to say. His eyes are still red rimmed and wet. His lip trembles between his teeth, bleeding where he’d bitten. For several perilous seconds, it seems as if Kimi might burst into tears all over again, and then Gabriel really will walk out. He’s just about hit his limit. But the moment passes. Kimi swallows hard. He licks the blood from his torn lip and says. Nothing.

“What?” Gabriel prompts, blood pounding in his ears.

“He couldn’t see,” Kimi bites out, immediately. “There’s no way he could see! George had blood on his suit when he got out. He wouldn’t talk to me. There was blood all over his helmet, too- that’s how badly he was cut.” Kimi shakes his head, a furious jerking motion that makes the curls all fan out before lying flat again. “He must have been in pain,” he hisses. “GP told him to stop! He told him!”

Kimi’s hands are flying now, making desperate gestures in the air as the words bubble up. “It was just a race win!” he seethes. “They fucking told him and he still- he doesn’t have anything to prove! It’s not worth it. If he wins, but like this- fuck, man.” His shoulders quiver. “He’s such a fucking- he’s so nice. He’s really so good. I hate it when people call him crazy. But I also hate that he did this.” Kimi’s hands fist at his sides, the tears at last spilling over as he makes his confession. He doesn’t bother trying to hide it this time. The weeping starts in his eyes and spreads outwards, until his chest is heaving, the whole of him shaking like he might just fall apart. Gabriel watches Kimi cry the same way he’d watched Max’s team wail at the barriers, unable to be anything but a witness. He wishes that he had Nico here. He wishes he had Max.

When Kimi finally speaks again, it’s in a horrible whimper. “I just really- I need for him to be ok, you know?”

Nobody knew anything about Max, except that his ambulance had made it to the hospital. Nobody knew if the debris had hit his eye or how bad the impact would have been on his brain. They didn’t know how much blood he’d lost. Fernando’s eyes were haunted when Gabriel had spoken with him, and he’d told Gabriel not to look at whatever had been on the broadcast. Gabriel’s engineer hadn’t wanted to tell him what was going on but he had said, three laps from the end, “potential red flag.” A pause. Then, “we’re not sure yet, just be prepared.” 

In the end, the red flag never came. Gabriel had assumed it was because a stoppage wasn’t deemed necessary, because everyone was safe and alright and out of their cars. He’d not been thinking of Max’s life, but about Max’s championship- Max’s win- the marvel of fighting from seventh to first, from pit lane to podium; from seventeenth to the top step through the bedlam of the storm as he’d done that day in Interlagos. Then, he’d seen the car in the runoff and all he could think was, “what have you done”

Watching Kimi cry, Gabriel thinks it again, “oh Max. Meu deus. What did you do?”

Gabriel closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to see Kimi crying anymore. “Max,” he sighs, “is a fucking dick.” He steps back until he can feel the wall kiss his spine, and slides down. He puts his head down on his arms. Max’s blood is spattered forever on the inside of his eyelids. Max’s song will be sung forever in his mind. He can still hear the ambulance howling, Red Bull bawling, Kimi sniffling from the opposite corner of the landing. He will never be able to forget Fernando’s gaunt face, that awful way it contorted when he’d finally turned to Gabriel and said, “I think, if they thought he might die-”

“I’m such a fucking idiot,” Kimi hisses. “If I hadn’t- or if I could just catch him, then- he knew! He fucking knew, and he stayed out anyway. He just lost by two points.”

Gabriel opens his eyes. Kimi is standing with one hand clawing at his own hip, the other tangled in his hair. He keeps his head bowed, jaw crushed closed. The tears drip freely off his chin as he bares his teeth at the ground. Max, Gabriel recalls, hadn’t cried at all after Zandvoort, though he’d wanted to win so badly it could’ve killed him. He’d looked like he might cry, a little, after Spain, so Gabriel had gone in search of him only to come up empty. “Leave him be,” Fernando told him. So Gabriel had left it alone. Max was his friend. He’d still never seen Max weep the way he was watching Kimi sob now.

Kimi had speared Max in Austria, held him back in Brazil, and fumbled so badly in Qatar that it was initially assumed he’d done it on purpose. Gabriel knew that Max liked Kimi anyway. He knew that Max saw himself in Kimi because Kimi was fast and young and was chosen the way Max was chosen, to pilot a rocketship before anyone thought he could. But Max had never invited his schoolmates to a race to watch him DNF. He was an old soul, even as a rookie. Around Max, Kimi blushes like a girl. He can’t help himself; reaching for Max’s waist, his chest, hanging off his arm like he might pass away without the contact. Max lets Kimi touch him because he likes Kimi the way he likes all the rookies. And he likes being petted. Max leans into bro-bro shoulder pats and side hugs like a housecat seeking warmth. He’s melted into every embrace Gabriel’s ever offered him, and gives just as good as he gets. Max’s team had held him tight at every race he’d ever won and they had never wanted to stop; they had wanted to go to him tonight, even as the ambulance was taking him away.

The words are tumbling from Gabriel’s lips before he can stop them, “he would have done it anyway.”

Kimi’s head snaps up and his eyes burn. His jaw works miserably for a while before he can grind out, “it was two points. If I hadn’t fucked up so bad, just in Austria-”

“It doesn’t make a difference to him,” Gabriel snaps. He realizes he’s still on the floor looking up at Kimi, which feels wrong for this conversation, so he gets up. Back screaming, he hauls himself to his feet. “You said it yourself, Max knew he wasn’t going to win the title. He could have been a hundred points behind or ten or fifty- it doesn’t matter. He wouldn’t stop.”

Once more, Gabriel recalls GP’s voice on the radio. “Careful, careful, careful,” as Max sailed through the storm like something mythical. Then in Baku, “no risk, no push,” just to make Max laugh. In front of him, Kimi’s eyes are red and wet and he still doesn’t see it. How could he?

Kimi was in love with his racecars and Max and Max’s driving. Gabriel knew, because Max was his friend, that Max was in love only with driving, with exceptions considered on a case by case basis. He considered Gabriel an exception, which was why he’d helped him in Mexico and shown up to be a hypocrite at him after Gabriel had binned it in Brazil. He considered his team a massive exception- or perhaps, a synonym- which was why he’d stuck around to drive the busted rocketship they’d made for him. A car he might have dragged to the championship tonight, and then didn’t. Kimi was fast and young and had a crush. Of course, he wouldn’t understand.

It wasn’t worth trying to explain Max to anyone who hadn’t already figured him out for themselves. Max had flinched badly when Gabriel lightly tapped the back of his head, then laughed and pretended he hadn’t. He’d never let Liam in past the fortress he made of himself so that people wouldn’t loot the gentle thing inside. Kimi had speared Max in Austria, held him back in Brazil and fumbled in Qatar when every point mattered. Kimi got his helmet stuck on his head and DNFed in front of his mates, and was still somehow seated in a rocketship. But Max saw himself in Kimi, for some reason. And he considered Kimi an exception, too. 

Max’s love. It's one of his best qualities, Gabriel thinks, one of the most beautiful, terrible things about him.

Kimi is still glowering at him, staring Gabi down over the bridge of his nose like a pissed off baby bird. “He shouldn’t lose like this,” he says.

Gabriel shrugs. Nothing that happened tonight was Lando’s fault, really, but Gabriel still hadn’t been able to say congrats. Max had been the better driver all year, everyone knew. There was no debate. But Formula 1 was fifty percent car and fifty percent driver and sometimes it just didn’t work out. “That’s life,” Fernando said. 

“If my mum had balls-” 

The words are like acid in Gabriel’s mouth, choking, but he says them anyway. “Well. He did.” 

“I’m being serious,” Kimi snaps.

“So am I.” Seized by instinct, Gabriel steps forward and reaches, taking Kimi by the shoulders and holding him fast. The journalists could go screw themselves. Liam Lawson was a lost cause. But Gabriel needs, suddenly, fervently, for Kimi to understand. Max had done what he did tonight for the same reason as why he’d done what he did in Brazil, last year; Zandvoort and Mexico, this year; fighting sick through the back half of 2021, and with glee at Monza and Baku and the Nords this past September. He’d done it from the heart. For the love of racing, and for- for the love of his team. He’d done it because he could. Because he wanted to win.

“Max doesn’t blame you, Kimi,” Gabriel snarls. “He would never do that! He’s a fucking asshole when he does things like this, but he’s also-” a hypocrite, Gabriel seethes. “Very good,” says the Fernando in his mind. The best, Gabriel thinks. The best. The best.

“He’s good,” he finishes, lamely. Kimi is staring at him like he’s lost it, but he’s not trying to actively get away. Gabriel’s fingers are curled, vice-grip on Kimi’s shoulders and he has to make a conscious effort to loosen them. He says, “he knew what he was doing. So stop beating yourself up!” Saying so, he squeezes once, before shoving Kimi back hard enough to make him stagger. Maybe knock some sense into his love addled brain. It’s not until Kimi catches himself at the wall and is staring back at Gabriel in shock that he registers the stinging in his own eyes.

“Fuck,” Gabriel swears. He lurches backwards, starts scrubbing furiously at the wetness. He hadn’t cried in the car or on the grid afterwards or with Fernando or even in the media pen, when all anyone wanted to talk about was Max, bleeding on the track; Max, intubated at the hospital; Max, one eyed and ripped from that which he loved most of all, like flesh torn from the bone. He is crying, now. He can’t stop it. It rises through him in a flood, his heart inundated beyond capacity, overflowing. “Good race,” he remembers Max saying to him, before anyone knew it wouldn’t be. “I’ll see you after.”

“Liar!” Gabriel thinks, “hypocrite!”

Gabriel flinches when he registers the hand brushing his arm. He looks up, and through the haze of tears sees Kimi looking back at him. Kimi, at least, doesn't look like he’s going to cry anymore. He just looks. Tired. Determined. As if to prove it, he reaches out again. This time when his palm lands, Gabriel holds himself still.

Gabriel takes a long shuddering breath. He wants Nico. He wants Jonathan. He wanted to find someone who knew what would happen after this, so that he could ask them. He wants to get his phone back so he could text Max, and then he wants Max to respond. He wants Max to come back so that he could leave his awful team that he loved with all his heart, and go to Mercedes to drive a real rocketship he couldn’t complain about, and eat Kimi the way Kimi was dying for. He wanted Max to be here so that he could be good to Kimi the way Gabriel could only try to be.

“This whole thing. It’s-” Kimi says haltingly.

“Fucked,” Gabriel finishes.

Kimi nods. “Yea. So fucked.”

Gabriel closes his eyes. He lets Kimi pet him once more. Twice. Before moving away, retreating back to what he’d come to think of as ‘his’ corner of the stairwell. They really need to get out of here, he thinks dimly. It had been a long season. Standing around and crying wouldn’t do anyone any good; least of all, Max.

Across from him, Kimi is gnawing on his lip. His eyes flick back and forth between Gabriel and the door and the stairs from where he’d come. He seems very young then, Gabriel thinks. Young, the way Max must have been at one point in time, surely, before he grew up. 

“What?” Gabriel prompts.

“Will you- I know you are his friend. If you hear anything, can you- would you mind-” Kimi trails off. His shoe scuffs against the ground. His eyes still dart, not quite meeting Gabriel’s.

Gabriel had been sixteen when Max tripped over Lewis’s wheel and into the wall at Copse, then seventeen by the time he took the crown. Max was seventeen when he’d first rocked up to the grid; a blunt object with a Renault engine and a rocketship that was not-quite-there, undaunted by the almighty Mercedes. Max loved racing. He’d been unafraid to lock horns with Seb and the other Kimi, to terrorize Nico Rosberg and remind Lewis Hamilton, again and again, the name of the one who would one day bite him in the ass, here at Yas Marina. Adult drivers did not take kindly to being so thoroughly raced by a teenager. The only thing Max would ever say, stilted, about that time, was that no one had helped him. He was focused only on driving.

Gabriel tries to imagine rookie Max crying alone in a stairwell, and can’t. If it had ever happened, there was no evidence to say. Adult Max was cagey. Rookie Max left no witnesses. Gabriel knows, because he knows Max, that he would never have allowed himself to be caught the way Gabriel had caught Kimi.

Kimi is nothing like Max. But his eyes are big and wet and red rimmed from crying, and Max considered him an exception. Max, if he were here, would be good to him. 

Gabriel says, “Don't worry. I promise, you will know if I hear something.”