Work Text:
It started with a missing shopping list.
Charles stood in the middle of his kitchen, one hand resting absently on Leo's head, the other scrolling through his phone. He had written it this morning. He was certain of it. Eggs, milk, the obscenely expensive pasta Max pretended to complain about but always cooked a double portion of, and that specific brand of chocolate Charles craved during pre-race weeks. He remembered tearing the corner off a notepad, scribbling it down in his barely legible handwriting, and then—
Nothing.
"Leo," Charles said, looking down at his golden dachshund, "did I leave it at Max's place again?"
Leo wagged his tail.
Charles had a habit of writing things down and abandoning them everywhere. Grocery lists on the back of receipts. Reminders on torn envelope corners. Doodles on napkins. Max collected them like evidence. Charles knew this because Max would sometimes produce one from his pocket—"You said you needed to call your trainer," Max would say, holding up a scrap of paper from three weeks ago—but Charles had never questioned where they all ended up.
Now, standing in Max's apartment on a Thursday afternoon while Max was stuck in a late strategy meeting, Charles decided to find out.
---
He wasn't snooping. He was retrieving. There was a difference.
Max's apartment in Monaco was cleaner than Charles's, which wasn't saying much, but it had a particular order to it. Everything had its place. The kitchen counters were bare except for the espresso machine. The living room shelves held books Max had actually read, not just bought for decoration. Jimmy and Sassy were curled up on the couch, watching Charles with the bored indifference of cats who had long ago accepted the Omega as a permanent fixture in their territory.
Charles checked the kitchen drawers first. Takeout menus, neatly stacked. A folder of appliance manuals. A drawer of batteries and charging cables organized by length.
No grocery lists.
He checked the desk in Max's home office. This felt slightly more intrusive, but Charles reasoned that if Max truly wanted privacy, he wouldn't have given Charles the door code. The desk drawers held tax documents, race contracts in Dutch, a small leather case containing Max's backup watch, and a sealed box of ink cartridges for a printer Charles wasn't sure Max owned.
Still nothing.
Then Charles opened the bottom drawer.
It wasn't a drawer so much as a filing cabinet built into the desk, wide and deep, and inside was a single object: a dark blue notebook, thick with use, its spine cracked in several places. It was the kind of notebook people used for journals. Or diaries. Or—
Charles hesitated.
If Max kept a diary, Charles shouldn't read it. That was a line. That was a line even Charles, with his Omega curiosity and his boyfriend privileges and his deep, consuming need to understand every part of Max Verstappen's brain, should not cross.
He put his hand on the drawer handle.
He pulled it back.
He reached down again.
"Fuck," he muttered, and opened the notebook.
---
It wasn't a diary.
The first page held no words at all. Instead, tucked into a clear plastic sleeve meant for photographs, was a crumpled sticky note the size of a thumb. Charles recognized his own handwriting immediately.
Butter. Bread. Coffee pods.
Max had smoothed it out. The creases were still visible, pressed flat with deliberate care, but someone had clearly wetted the paper at some point because the ink had blurred at the edges. Charles remembered writing this one. He'd been lying on Max's couch, feet tucked under Max's thigh, and Max had said "We're out of coffee" and Charles had written down coffee pods and then forgotten the list entirely. That was four months ago.
Charles turned the page.
Another sleeve. Another note. This one on a corner torn from a newspaper.
Call physio @ 3pm DON'T FORGET!!!
The three exclamation points were underlined twice. Charles had missed that appointment anyway.
The next page. A napkin from some restaurant in Monaco, the paper thin and translucent, Charles's handwriting barely visible under the restaurant's logo. He had drawn a small cartoon of a cat on it. Next to the cat, the words remind Max to buy Jimmy more treats. Under the cat, in Max's handwriting, Done.
Charles sat down on the floor of Max's office. Jimmy meowed from somewhere in the distance.
He kept turning pages.
Today I want Italian
Laundry pickup Monday
ASAP -> text Pierre back
Max Max Max Max Max (this one was written twelve times in different sizes, like Charles had been testing a pen)
You're an idiot (followed by a small heart)
Eggs milk chocolate the good one not the cheap one
The notebook was full of them. Every page, every sleeve, held another fragment of Charles's scattered attention. Some were months old. Some were recent. Some Charles didn't even remember writing. Max had dated each one in the corner, tiny numbers in his precise handwriting. 14 Feb. 23 March. 7 April. He had organized them chronologically.
Charles felt something tighten in his chest. Not arousal—his Omega instincts were quiet, cataloging evidence of his Alpha's devotion but not yet reacting. This was something stranger, something raw. Max thought Charles was careless. Max was right. Charles left pieces of himself everywhere he went, and Max had been gathering them one by one, smoothing them flat, preserving them like museum artifacts.
He didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
---
He was still sitting on the floor when he found it.
Tucked near the back of the notebook, folded into quarters rather than pressed into a sleeve, was a sheet of paper slightly larger than the others. Charles unfolded it.
MAX IS AN IDIOT
That was it. No shopping list. No reminder. Just those four words, capitalized, taking up the entire page. Charles's handwriting. He didn't remember writing this one at all.
Below it, in Max's handwriting, also capitalized:
I KNOW
And below that, in smaller letters:
But I'm your idiot.
Charles pressed his hand over his mouth. His scent gland gave an involuntary pulse, releasing a brief bloom of bergamot and summer rain that would have embarrassed him if anyone else were here to smell it. The cats didn't count.
He heard the front door open.
"Charles?" Max's voice carried down the hallway, slightly hoarse from a long meeting. "Your car is in my spot. I had to park on the street. You're lucky I love you."
Charles didn't answer. He couldn't. He was sitting cross-legged on Max's office floor with the notebook open in his lap, and his scent was probably spreading through the apartment like a distress signal, and Max was going to walk in and see him and Charles had no explanation for any of this.
Max appeared in the doorway.
He was still wearing his team polo, navy blue with the Red Bull logo, and his hair was flat on one side from leaning against a headrest. He looked tired. He looked like he'd been arguing about downforce levels for three hours. He looked at Charles. He looked at the notebook. He looked at the open bottom drawer.
"Oh," Max said.
"Max," Charles said.
A long pause.
"I can explain," Max said.
"I don't think you can," Charles said. "I don't think there's an explanation for this." He held up the notebook. "There are thirty-seven of my grocery lists in here. Thirty-seven. I counted."
"You counted them?"
"I had time! You were in a meeting!"
Max crossed the room and sat down on the floor next to Charles. He didn't try to take the notebook away. He didn't look embarrassed, exactly, but there was a tension in his shoulders that Charles recognized, the same tension Max carried during post-qualifying debriefs when he didn't yet know if his lap had been good enough.
"It started accidentally," Max said. "I found one of your lists under my couch. After you left. And I didn't want to throw it away."
"So you put it in a notebook."
"Yes."
"And then you kept doing it."
Max rubbed the back of his neck. His scent—cedar and warm leather, steady as a heartbeat—drifted toward Charles, and Charles's Omega hindbrain immediately tried to purr. He suppressed it. He was supposed to be interrogating his boyfriend, not melting into him.
"It wasn't intentional at first," Max said. "I just. You leave things everywhere. And I kept finding them. And they smelled like you."
Charles blinked. "They what?"
"Your scent. It's on everything you touch. Paper holds it really well, actually. Didn't you know that?"
Charles did know that. All Omegas knew that. It was why Omegas were particular about their nests, why they surrounded themselves with fabrics and objects saturated in their own calming scent. But he had never heard Max acknowledge it so plainly. Alphas weren't supposed to find comfort in an Omega's scent outside of heat or a bonding context. That was biology. That was the accepted wisdom.
"So you kept them," Charles said slowly, "because they smelled like me."
"Yes."
"For months."
"Seven months."
"And you put them in chronological order."
Max looked down at the notebook. His ears were slightly pink. "The dates were easy to remember. You usually write them the day before you come over. Or the morning of. So I just tracked which day I found each one."
Charles thought about the Chinese Grand Prix in March, when he'd been running on three hours of sleep and had scribbled NEED COFFEE on a hotel notepad before collapsing into Max's bed. Max had flown to Shanghai two days later for an unrelated sponsor event. Charles remembered because Max had sent him a photo of a coffee shop with the caption found some for you.
That note was in the notebook. Charles had seen it. The hotel's logo was still visible on the corner.
"You're insane," Charles said.
"Probably."
"This is insane behavior. This is, like, serial killer behavior."
"You're the one who keeps writing shopping lists and never using them."
"I use them! Sometimes!"
"You have never once come back from the store with everything on your list."
"That's not the point!"
Max smiled. It was a small smile, the kind he only ever aimed at Charles, private and slightly crooked. "What is the point?"
Charles held up the last note. The folded one. The one that said MAX IS AN IDIOT in aggressive capital letters. "When did I write this?"
Max's smile flickered. "You don't remember?"
"No."
"That's probably for the best."
"Max."
"After Monaco. Last year. You were upset."
Charles tried to remember Monaco last year. He'd finished fourth. Max had won. Charles had burned his tires out trying to catch him on the final lap, and then he'd gone back to his apartment and Max had shown up two hours later with takeout containers and Charles had shouted at him. He didn't remember shouting. He remembered Max standing in his doorway, soaked from unexpected rain, holding a bag of food that was getting wetter by the second. He remembered the crash of adrenaline and disappointment and something that felt like grief.
He remembered telling Max to leave.
Max hadn't left.
"I wrote this then," Charles said.
"You threw it at my head. Then you told me to get out. Then you started crying."
"I don't cry."
"You definitely cry. It's okay. I'm not going to tell anyone."
Charles's scent gland pulsed again. This time it wasn't embarrassment. It was something more complicated, something that made him want to crawl into Max's lap and press his nose against Max's throat and breathe until the world stopped spinning. He didn't do that. He was still holding the evidence of Max's serial-killer notebook.
"You wrote back," Charles said. "Underneath. 'I know. But I'm your idiot.'"
"You wrote it first."
"I was angry."
"I know." Max reached over and gently extracted the folded paper from Charles's fingers. He smoothed it against his knee, then tucked it back into the notebook, between two blank pages near the end. "But you weren't wrong. I am an idiot. About a lot of things."
"You're not," Charles said. "You're the smartest person I know."
"I kept your trash in a notebook for seven months."
"That's not stupidity. That's." Charles stopped. He wasn't sure what it was. Devotion, maybe. Obsession, definitely. Something that made his Omega instincts sit up and take notice, something that felt like safety and possession and a claim made so quietly Charles hadn't even noticed it happening.
He shifted closer to Max on the floor. Their thighs pressed together. Max's cedar scent deepened slightly, an unconscious Alpha response to an Omega's proximity, and Charles felt his own scent rise to meet it. Bergamot and leather. Summer rain and warm wood. The combination had become familiar over the past year, as recognizable as his own heartbeat.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Charles asked.
"What was I supposed to say? 'Hey, Charles, I've been hoarding your garbage, is that weird?'"
"Yes. That would have been a normal thing to say."
"That would have been insane."
"More insane than building a scrapbook of my handwriting?"
Max considered this. "Fair point."
---
They ordered dinner because neither of them wanted to cook. Charles sat on Max's couch with the notebook in his lap, thumbing through the pages while Max called the Italian place down the street. Jimmy had claimed the armrest. Sassy was draped across the back of the couch like a fur stole.
"I want the pasta," Charles said when Max hung up.
"You always want the pasta."
"That's because their pasta is good. Put extra parmesan."
"You can just say please."
"Please put extra parmesan."
Max disappeared into the kitchen to find the takeout menu they'd already ordered from. Charles kept turning pages.
He found a note he'd written on a ferry ticket from Nice to Calvi, a trip they'd taken together in January when both their schedules had briefly aligned. The ticket stub was yellow and creased, and Charles had written Max + Charles in the margin, surrounded by a wobbly heart. He had drawn the heart while Max was driving, distracted by the ocean and the way Max's hands looked on the steering wheel.
Max had kept that too.
"Your nesting habits are getting weird," Charles called toward the kitchen.
Max's head appeared around the doorway. "I'm not nesting. I'm an Alpha. Alphas don't nest."
"You're literally building a nest out of paper."
"It's a collection."
"It's a nest."
Max's scent spiked with something that might have been embarrassment. "It's not a nest. Nests are for Omegas."
Charles raised an eyebrow. "That's a stereotype."
"It's biology."
"It's a stereotype and you know it. Alphas can nest. Piastri nests. I've seen his driver's room, it's full of hoodies."
"Oscar nests because he's bonded to Lando, and Lando's scent is on everything Oscar owns, and—" Max stopped. His ears went pink again. "I'm not having this conversation."
"You're the one who said paper holds scent."
"I regret that."
"You can't regret it. It's in the notebook now." Charles held up a random page. "See? I'm going to write it down. 'Max admitted paper holds scent.' Then I'll leave it under your pillow and you'll have to keep it forever."
Max walked back into the living room and dropped onto the couch next to Charles, close enough that their shoulders touched. He smelled like cedar and something warmer now, something that made Charles want to burrow closer.
"You're making fun of me," Max said.
"A little bit."
"Is it working?"
"A little bit." Charles closed the notebook and set it on the coffee table. Then he turned sideways, tucking his feet under Max's thigh, and leaned his head against Max's shoulder. "But I'm also flattered. I think. It's hard to tell. The line between flattering and frightening is very thin."
"I would never frighten you."
"I know."
Charles meant it. The thing about Max was that he was terrifying to everyone else—competitors, journalists, other Alphas who got too close to Charles in bars—but he had never once been terrifying to Charles. Even during fights. Even during Monaco. Max's anger was a controlled burn, directed outward, never inward, never at the people he loved.
It still surprised Charles sometimes. All that intensity, and Max aimed none of it at him.
"The food will be here in twenty minutes," Max said.
"That's enough time."
"For what?"
Charles didn't answer. He shifted his weight, climbing into Max's lap properly, one knee on either side of Max's hips. Max's hands came up automatically to steady him, warm palms against Charles's waist, and Charles felt the familiar spark of contact, the way their scents tangled together in close quarters.
"Charles," Max said.
"Max."
"You're distracting me."
"That's the point."
Max's thumbs pressed gentle circles into Charles's hipbones. His scent had gone darker, the leather note deepening, and Charles felt an answering warmth spread through his chest. This wasn't heat. It was just proximity, just the simple biological fact of an Alpha and an Omega who had chosen each other, who had spent months learning each other's bodies and boundaries and breaking points.
"I like that you kept them," Charles said, quiet against Max's jaw. "I like that you wanted my scent."
"I always want your scent," Max said. "That's not new."
"It's new that you admit it."
"Maybe I'm getting better at admitting things."
Charles smiled and pressed his nose to Max's scent gland, breathing in cedar and warmth and comfort. Max's hands tightened on his waist.
---
Later—after the pasta and the extra parmesan and a brief argument about whose turn it was to feed the cats—Charles lay stretched across Max's couch with his head in Max's lap. The notebook was back in its drawer, but Charles could still feel its presence, that careful catalog of his scattered self.
"You have to stop leaving notes everywhere now," Max said, one hand idly stroking through Charles's hair. "It won't be as fun if you do it on purpose."
"Who says I'll do it on purpose?"
"You will. You'll write ridiculous things just to see if I keep them."
"You'll keep them anyway."
Max didn't deny it.
Charles turned his head slightly, looking up at Max's face from this undignified angle. Max's blue eyes were half-closed, his expression peaceful in a way it rarely was during race weekends. He looked younger like this. Softer. Charles's Alpha.
"I'll write you one now," Charles said. "Something you have to keep forever."
"That defeats the purpose."
"Nothing defeats the purpose. The purpose is you loving me enough to keep my trash."
Max's hand stilled in Charles's hair. "The purpose," he said, "is that you leave pieces of yourself everywhere, and I want to make sure none of them get lost."
Charles's throat tightened. His scent gland gave a soft, involuntary pulse of bergamot, and Max's answering scent was immediate, cedar and leather wrapping around Charles like a blanket.
"You're so weird," Charles said.
"I love you too."
"I didn't say I love you."
"You didn't have to."
Charles reached up and caught Max's wrist, tugging until Max leaned down far enough for Charles to kiss him. It was awkward, upside-down and off-center, but Max made a small sound against his mouth and Charles decided it was perfect anyway.
When they broke apart, Charles said, "I'm still writing the note."
"I know."
"And you're keeping it."
"Obviously."
Charles smiled. "Good. Now find me a pen."