Archive of Our Own

Three Tenths Apart

I.

The first time Nico Rosberg-Wolff met the Crown Prince of Britain, he beat him by three tenths of a second and complained loudly that it should have been five.

Lewis was ten years old at the time. He had already learned, in the particular way children learn things too young, that most other children became strange around him the moment some adult whispered his name into their ear beforehand. Some simply stared. Some became painfully, exhaustingly polite. A boy at school had once actually bowed to him, having apparently seen someone do it on television, and then burst into tears when Lewis gently asked him to stop.

Nico did none of that. He simply pulled off his helmet, shoved his damp blond hair out of his eyes with the back of one glove, and pointed accusingly toward the final corner of the karting circuit.

“You blocked me.”

Lewis looked behind himself instinctively, half expecting the accusation to be meant for somebody else entirely. Two protection officers stood near the pit wall, wearing ordinary looking jackets that fooled absolutely nobody who actually looked at them closely. Beyond them, a palace aide was speaking quietly with the circuit's owner. The entire morning, in fact, had been carefully arranged solely so that Lewis could spend three uninterrupted hours doing something other children were simply permitted to do without any accompanying security assessment.

“I was ahead of you,” Lewis said, a little defensively.

“You moved twice.”

“I did not.”

“You did. I counted.”

Nico said this with such total, unshakeable confidence that Lewis very nearly laughed out loud despite himself. Nobody his own age had ever accused him of cheating before, not once. Adults occasionally corrected him gently, of course, but even their corrections always arrived carefully wrapped in soft language and followed immediately by an apology of some kind. Nico, by contrast, looked entirely ready to drag him bodily back onto the track and personally reconstruct the exact crime scene.

“You still passed me in the end,” Lewis pointed out reasonably.

“That is not the point.”

“It sounds a little bit like the point, though.”

Nico narrowed his eyes at him. He had a pale line pressed clearly across his forehead where the helmet padding had dug into his skin. His race suit hung tied loosely around his waist, one sleeve trailing dangerously close to the oily concrete beneath them. He looked furious, thoroughly untidy, and wonderfully, refreshingly unimpressed by any of it.

“Again,” he demanded flatly.

Lewis glanced toward the nearest protection officer for guidance. The man checked his watch briefly before offering the smallest, most economical nod imaginable.

Nico noticed that small exchange happen. Something briefly uncertain flickered across his face, the very first small acknowledgment that Lewis was perhaps not simply another ordinary boy at the circuit that morning. Then the expression vanished again just as quickly.

“Unless you are frightened,” Nico added, testing him.

Lewis put his helmet back on without another word.

They raced four more times together that morning. Lewis won twice. Nico won twice. On their final lap together, rain began falling steadily over the far end of the circuit, and neither one of them slowed down enough to satisfy any of the watching adults. Nico went too deep into the newly wet corner. Lewis slipped calmly past him on the inside line and crossed the finish line first by less than a tenth of a second.

They both climbed out of their karts shouting over each other at once.

“You pushed me wide.”

“You were already going wide on your own.”

“Because you were right there.”

“That is generally how overtaking is supposed to work.”

The argument might well have continued for the rest of the entire afternoon if Susie hadn't appeared between them just then, carrying two towels and wearing the composed expression of a woman who had already privately decided neither boy was going to win this particular argument.

“Lewis, your car is waiting for you,” she said calmly. “Nico, your father would very much like a word with you about racing in the rain, after being explicitly told not to.”

Nico accepted his towel with visible, obvious reluctance. “Am I in trouble?”

“Profoundly so.”

“For how long, exactly?”

“That depends entirely on how convincing your apology turns out to be.”

“Then probably not very long at all, in that case.”

Susie sighed in a way that strongly suggested this particular prediction was, unfortunately, almost certainly true.

Lewis laughed at that. Nico looked over at him, visibly startled, as though he had momentarily forgotten Lewis was still standing right there beside him. Then he grinned back at him widely. The grin transformed his entire face completely. All the earlier sharpness simply disappeared, leaving something bright and wide open underneath it.

“Next Saturday,” Nico said.

It was not phrased as a question at all.

Lewis glanced toward his waiting aide instinctively. He already knew, before even asking, exactly what the answer would be. There was a scheduled school visit in Leeds the following weekend, followed immediately by some family engagement he only vaguely understood the purpose of, and then dinner with an ambassador whose name he had been carefully practicing all week long.

“I cannot come.”

Nico's grin faded slightly at that. “The Saturday after that one, then.”

Lewis genuinely did not know his own schedule that far in advance. Other people knew it, though. There existed several thick binders somewhere inside the palace devoted entirely to deciding exactly where Lewis would stand, precisely what he would wear, and how long he would remain standing there for. His own life existed almost entirely in neat half hour blocks he was rarely, if ever, invited to help arrange himself.

“I will try to come,” he said finally.

Nico studied him carefully for a long moment, then nodded once, decisively. “Fine, then. I will keep practicing while you're gone.”

“That seems rather unfair to me.”

“You're a prince. You'll survive somehow.”

It was, Lewis realized afterward, the very first joke anybody had ever made directly about his title to his actual face.

He thought about that particular joke the entire way back to London.

Two weeks later, Lewis returned to the circuit and discovered that Nico had genuinely kept his promise. He was faster now by almost half a second, unbearably pleased with himself about it, and was holding a folded timing sheet he had apparently taken directly from the officials' room.

“Look at this,” Nico said, flattening the paper firmly against the side of Lewis's kart.

The page listed every single driver present by surname and initial only. No titles anywhere on it. No gold crests. No careful, deliberate distinction drawn between a child who would one day inherit an entire crown, and a child who would one day inherit several languages, an impossible quantity of raw confidence, and Toto Wolff's own distinctive eyebrows.

ROSBERG-WOLFF, N.

HAMILTON, L.

Three tenths of a second separated the two names.

Lewis stared at the two printed names together until Nico finally nudged his shoulder impatiently, waiting.

“I told you it should have been five.”

Lewis folded the sheet carefully in half and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket, where it would stay safe.

“Next time,” he said quietly, “I am beating you.”

Nico smiled at that, wide and genuine. “You can certainly try.”

For the following six years, that was really about all either of them did.

II.

Karting gave Lewis an entire language his own household simply could not properly edit before he ever managed to speak it.

There were no officially approved remarks permitted at a racing circuit. No member of staff ever pulled him quietly aside afterward to gently suggest that perhaps he had appeared visibly bored during some charity luncheon, or insufficiently solemn while laying a memorial wreath somewhere. A lap was either genuinely fast, or it simply was not. A mistake cost real time on the clock regardless of who exactly had made it. The checkered flag never once lowered itself more respectfully simply because the future king happened to be approaching the line.

Nico certainly never did either, not once.

He stole Lewis's spare gloves whenever his own got wet through. He complained loudly and often whenever Lewis happened to receive newer equipment first, even when that particular equipment had been delivered through exactly the same junior programme as everybody else's gear. He once told a visiting reporter, with a perfectly straight face, that Lewis's single greatest weakness as a driver was his complete and total inability to admit that Nico simply had better hair than him.

“That is not actually a racing weakness at all,” Lewis pointed out afterward, annoyed.

“It distracts you badly, every single time you look at me.”

“Mostly because I'm wondering whether you actually own a comb.”

Nico shoved him bodily into a nearby stack of tyres in retaliation, then spent a full ten horrified minutes afterward frantically checking that he hadn't somehow managed to injure the future heir to the throne in the process.

Their two families gradually became entangled together, by slow degrees. Susie learned exactly which particular palace entrance allowed them to collect Lewis without driving straight through a waiting crowd of photographers each time. Toto started receiving formal security briefings ahead of every European race weekend and complained loudly about each and every one of them, while nevertheless following every single instruction to the letter regardless. George Russell-Wolff, three years younger than Nico and solemn in a way Nico himself had never quite managed to be at any age, often sat quietly in the back of the Wolffs' car with a book open across his knees, patiently listening to Lewis and Nico argue heatedly about gear ratios up front.

A full year after Lewis and Nico first met, Kimi Antonelli-Wolff was born into the family. Nico announced the happy news over the telephone with all the solemn, personal pride of somebody who genuinely believed he had single handedly accomplished the entire birth himself. Lewis visited the Wolff family home three days later and found George sitting protectively beside the cradle, while Nico explained, in entirely unnecessary and exhaustive detail, absolutely everything he personally intended to eventually teach their brand new youngest brother.

“He cannot even properly hold his own head up yet,” George pointed out reasonably.

“That is precisely why we begin with the theory first,” Nico replied, entirely serious.

Kimi grew steadily into exactly the sort of child who dismantled toy cars completely before he had even properly learned how to pronounce the names of their individual parts. At the age of six, Nico attempted to personally teach him how to drive a small golf cart, and watched in genuine horror as his youngest brother promptly steered it directly into an ornamental fountain nearby. Lewis helped haul a dripping, thoroughly delighted Kimi out from the passenger side afterward, while George stood safely well back on the dry path and calmly informed them all that this exact outcome had been entirely predictable from the very start.

By that point, Lewis genuinely no longer remembered the exact moment he had actually become part of the wider Wolff family himself. It had simply happened gradually, somewhere between endless races and birthdays and the sight of Susie placing food in front of him without ever once bothering to ask whether official palace staff had properly approved it first. George always saved him a chair at breakfast without being asked. Kimi climbed straight into his lap without ever bowing to him first. Nico argued with him passionately about absolutely everything under the sun. Inside that particular house, Lewis was never once required to become anybody else other than simply himself.

“He agrees with me completely,” Nico announced once, after losing an argument so thoroughly and completely that he had been forced to resort to inventing imaginary allies on the spot.

George looked up briefly from a thick book about Norman castles. “I was not actually listening to any of that.”

“You were absolutely listening the whole time.”

“I was actively trying very hard not to.”

Lewis laughed so hard at that exchange that he completely missed the correct motorway exit, and Toto subsequently banned all three of them from speaking at all until they finally reached the hotel that evening.

At various circuits, Lewis and Nico were constantly measured directly against one another by everyone watching. Lewis was instinctive, people generally said of him. Nico was precise and methodical. Lewis attacked every corner as though the track itself had personally insulted him somehow. Nico studied the resulting data afterward until he could explain exactly where a single missing tenth of a second had gone, with all the grave seriousness of somebody formally reporting a missing person to the police. Lewis won consistently in wet conditions that genuinely frightened everybody else on the grid. Nico won reliably whenever Lewis grew a little too confident that raw talent alone would carry him through regardless.

They learned each other's specific weaknesses long before either one of them had even properly learned how to shave.

Nico knew that Lewis braked noticeably too late whenever he was genuinely angry about something, and that he stopped eating properly before any truly important race. Lewis knew that Nico talked considerably faster whenever he was nervous, and became strangely, viciously cheerful whenever he was actually frightened of losing. They could each recognize the other's distinct footsteps echoing in hotel corridors, and each other's specific engine note from clear across a crowded, noisy circuit.

Lewis could also recognize the exact, precise moment that Nico stopped seeing him as a prince at all.

It happened the very instant his visor finally came down over his face.

That particular fact mattered to Lewis more than he ever properly knew how to explain to anyone else.

At fourteen years old, they spent an entire summer competing together across Europe. Lewis traveled everywhere with considerably more security than some minor heads of state possessed, and with noticeably less patience for any of it. Nico traveled with three badly overpacked suitcases, six books he never once actually opened, and a stubborn conviction that every single restaurant in northern Italy would happily prepare pasta exactly the way he personally demanded it, provided he simply spoke slowly and clearly enough to the waiter.

They shared hotel rooms together whenever the protection team formally approved the arrangement. Lewis privately suspected this particular arrangement involved several careful private discussions, some signed documentation, and at least one worried palace official fretting aloud about establishing dangerous precedent. To Lewis himself, though, it simply meant lying awake well after midnight while Nico talked quietly into the darkness from the other bed nearby.

“Do you ever think about Formula One all the time?” Nico asked him quietly, one such night.

Rain tapped softly and steadily against the window glass outside. Their damp race suits hung drying over the closed bathroom door, filling the small shared room with the mingled smell of damp fabric and stale petrol.

“Nearly all the time, yeah.”

“What do you think about, the rest of the time?”

Lewis turned his head slightly on the pillow to look at him. Nico was only really a vague shape beneath the thin hotel blanket in the dark, his pale face barely lit by the light leaking in around the curtains.

“Whether you're thinking about Formula One too, mostly.”

Nico went quiet for several long seconds at that.

“I am,” he admitted finally, softly.

“Good.”

“Why is that good, exactly?”

“Because I don't want to get there without you.”

At fourteen years old, it had seemed entirely reasonable to both of them that simply wanting the exact same thing together would somehow guarantee they either received it together, or not at all. The wider world had not yet properly taught either of them how easily two separate lives could actually be pulled apart from each other, without either person involved ever truly agreeing to it happening.

Nico reached one hand slowly into the narrow gap between their two separate beds.

Lewis stared at the offered hand. “What exactly are you doing?”

“Making a formal agreement.”

“That is not remotely how agreements actually work.”

“It's how this particular one works, though.”

Lewis reached across the gap and clasped his hand properly. Nico's fingers felt warm, and slightly sticky from the sweets he had firmly denied eating after dinner earlier that evening.

“We both make it there,” Nico said seriously. “And one of us eventually becomes world champion.”

“Only one of us?”

“We could take turns doing it, I suppose.”

“How very generous of you.”

“I will go first, obviously.”

Lewis squeezed his hand hard enough in response to make Nico yelp in complaint.

“We both make it there,” Lewis repeated firmly.

“Obviously we will.”

Nico fell properly asleep less than five minutes later, his hand still hanging loosely over the edge of the mattress between them. Lewis stayed awake for considerably longer afterward, listening to the steady rain outside and quietly imagining a future so vivid in his mind that it felt less like simple hope and more like an actual, remembered memory.

In that particular imagined future, their two names remained listed together on timing sheets, all the way through to Formula One itself.

The crown itself appeared absolutely nowhere on that page.

III.

The palace waited patiently until Lewis turned sixteen to finally explain to him that his childhood had, in fact, quietly ended several years earlier already, entirely without ever properly consulting him about it first.

The meeting itself took place in a room Lewis had always intensely disliked. It contained three formal portraits of long dead relatives, two ornate clocks that never once agreed with each other on the correct time, and one long, heavily polished table specifically designed to keep every single person seated around it at a safe, comfortable emotional distance from everyone else. Lewis's own father sat to his immediate left. The private secretary sat directly opposite him, one closed folder resting beneath both of his carefully folded hands.

Nobody in the room began the conversation by mentioning racing at all.

They spoke instead, at some considerable length, about preparation, continuity, public duty, and a demanding constitutional role that would only grow steadily more time consuming as Lewis properly approached adulthood. His formal education apparently required greater structure going forward. His official programme of engagements would need to expand considerably. He would soon begin attending regular briefings, and would shortly undertake his very first extended overseas tour, scheduled for the following spring.

Lewis listened patiently to all of it, right up until the careful language became genuinely impossible to misunderstand any longer.

“When exactly do I get to train, then?” he asked directly.

The private secretary's careful expression shifted by barely a fraction. “Your existing recreational commitments will naturally need to be properly reviewed, of course.”

“Karting is not simply a recreational commitment to me.”

“Nobody here is dismissing what you have personally achieved with it.”

“You are telling me, quite plainly, to stop entirely.”

His father leaned forward slightly in his chair. “We are telling you that this next particular stage carries risks the institution as a whole simply cannot reasonably accept going forward.”

“The institution itself is not the one driving the actual car, though.”

A heavy silence settled firmly across the polished table between them.

Lewis had been carefully trained since early childhood to instinctively recognize the exact moment at which plain honesty became genuinely unacceptable in a room like this one. He crossed that particular line anyway, deliberately.

“I am the one driving it.”

“You are also the heir to the throne,” his father said quietly, not unkindly. “You cannot simply separate those two things from each other, merely because one particular identity feels considerably easier to carry around than the other.”

Lewis looked directly at the closed folder resting beneath the private secretary's still hands. His entire future was probably printed somewhere inside it already, neatly arranged in twelve point black type, carefully organized into tidy sections, and formally approved by people who would genuinely never once understand the specific smell of hot tyres, or the clean, total silence found inside a closed racing helmet.

“Was there ever, at any point, a version of this exact conversation where you actually allowed me to continue racing?”

Nobody at the table answered him immediately.

That particular silence was, in itself, answer enough for Lewis.

Lewis left the room without formally asking anyone's permission to do so. Two members of staff called out anxiously after him as he went. He kept walking regardless, until the palace corridors gradually narrowed and the endless dead relatives' portraits became noticeably less important to him. Only once safely back inside his own private rooms did he finally take out his phone.

Nico answered on the second ring, as always.

“You're calling quite late,” he said immediately. “I've been looking carefully at next season's race entries, and if we actually apply before Friday, there's a promising test scheduled in France that would honestly be perfect for us. Toto reckons the whole field will be considerably stronger there next year, but I told him that's exactly, precisely why we should go ahead and do it anyway.”

Lewis closed his eyes tightly, phone pressed hard against his ear.

Nico continued talking easily, filling the silence the way he always naturally did, trusting Lewis to interrupt him whenever he actually needed to.

“The exact dates might clash a little with the first British round of the season, but we could probably move the test around easily enough. Susie says your office apparently needs at least six full months' notice for absolutely everything, which is honestly insane, by the way. How could they possibly know exactly what you'll be doing six entire months from now?”

“They know literally everything I'll be doing, apparently.”

Something in the flat tone of Lewis's voice finally reached him properly.

“What actually happened?”

Lewis tried hard to say it as plainly as he possibly could manage. He had delivered countless formal speeches to thousands of watching people before without his own voice ever once changing noticeably. He had personally met grieving families, visiting foreign presidents, and entire rooms full of anxious adults all quietly waiting for him to offer precisely the right sentence at the right moment.

“I can't race next year.”

Nico went completely, totally silent on the other end of the line.

“Is the calendar simply too busy for it?”

“There won't be another proper year after that one, either.”

“What exactly do you mean by that?”

“I mean that I'm finished with it. Completely.”

“No.”

The single word came back so instantly and fiercely that Lewis very nearly smiled despite everything.

“Apparently so, yes.”

“They cannot simply decide that for you, just like that.”

“They absolutely can, though.”

“Then tell them no, flatly.”

Lewis laughed once, a short, genuinely ugly sound in the otherwise quiet room. “Do you honestly think I hadn't already considered that myself?”

“I think you're giving up on this far too easily, if I'm honest.”

The words struck Lewis exactly where he was already hurting the most.

“You have absolutely no real idea what I'm actually giving up here.”

“Of course I do. It's my life too, in a sense.”

“No, Nico. It's still entirely your own life. That's the whole entire point of this.”

Lewis ended the call abruptly before Nico could possibly answer him back.

For three full days afterward, neither one of them tried calling the other again.

On the fourth morning, Lewis found Nico sitting quietly on the cold stone steps outside his own private palace entrance. He wore a dark coat pulled on over a team branded sweatshirt, with a small overnight bag resting on the ground beside his feet. One of Lewis's own protection officers stood several respectful yards away, quite visibly pretending that this entire situation was completely ordinary and unremarkable.

“How did you even get in here?” Lewis asked, surprised.

“Your mother happens to like me a great deal, apparently.”

“That surely cannot possibly be the entire official security procedure.”

“It certainly helps that my surname is already listed on six separate approved visitor lists, at least.”

Lewis stopped walking at the bottom of the stone steps. For three entire days now, he had been genuinely furious with Nico simply for continuing to possess the exact future that Lewis himself had just lost. Seeing him sitting there now made that particular anger feel both sharper somehow, and considerably less defensible at the same time.

Nico stood up slowly from the steps. “I shouldn't have said that you were giving up so easily.”

“No, you shouldn't have.”

“I was genuinely angry when I said it.”

“So was I, honestly.”

“I still am angry, if I'm being truthful.”

“That certainly makes two of us, then.”

Nico looked at him steadily for a long, quiet moment. “What exactly am I supposed to do now, without you there?”

It was such an entirely selfish question to ask that it broke something open unexpectedly inside Lewis's chest.

He stepped forward without another word and pulled Nico firmly into his arms.

Nico held onto him back with immediate, almost desperate force. His cold face pressed tightly against the side of Lewis's neck. Lewis gripped the back of his coat and stared silently over his shoulder at the grey, wintry garden beyond, trying very hard not to imagine racing circuits simply continuing on without him from now on. Nico would go and test in France soon. Nico would enter single seater racing properly. Nico would make the exact climb they had once carefully planned out together, side by side, while Lewis instead learned formal briefings and ceremonies and the thousand small, careful duties that came attached to the life he had unwillingly inherited.

“You keep going,” Lewis whispered against him.

Nico's arms tightened further around him. “That isn't actually what I asked you just now.”

“It's still the honest answer, though.”

“Come with me, then.”

“You already know perfectly well that I can't do that.”

“Then just tell me not to go at all.”

Lewis pulled back just far enough to properly look at his face.

Nico's eyes were bright with obvious anger, and with something else dangerously close to real fear underneath it. Lewis understood then, quite suddenly, that Nico wasn't actually asking him for permission at all. He was instead quietly offering to abandon the entire path himself, before it could possibly carry him somewhere Lewis simply couldn't follow along too.

For one weak, genuinely terrible second, some part of Lewis desperately wanted to accept that offer.

If Nico stopped racing too, the resulting loss would instantly become theirs again, together. Equal. Properly shared between them. There would be no more timing sheets arriving from France with only one single familiar name printed on them anymore. No more photographs of Nico standing proudly beside cars that Lewis himself would never actually get to drive. No difficult future ahead in which Lewis had to somehow learn whether pride and envy could genuinely occupy the exact same body at once, without ever tearing it completely apart from the inside.

Lewis loved him far too much, in the end, to actually say yes to that.

“Go,” he said instead, quietly.

Nico's face crumpled visibly for just a moment before he managed to master it again. “Lewis.”

“Go, and be so genuinely good at it that nobody can ever pretend you only got there because of Toto's money and influence. Win absolutely everything you can. Complain loudly about every bit of it afterward. Call me every single time, no matter what.”

“Every single time, truly?”

“Every time, I promise.”

Nico swallowed hard. “Even when I actually lose a race?”

“Especially then, if anything.”

They stood close enough together now that Lewis could feel Nico's warm breath directly against his own mouth. Neither one of them moved away from the other. At sixteen years old, Lewis already understood exactly how many different forms of simple affection he was formally permitted to openly show in public, and precisely how carefully each and every one of them would inevitably be interpreted and analyzed afterward by somebody.

He did not yet properly know, though, whether kissing Nico specifically belonged anywhere on that particular approved list.

Nico solved that exact question for him by simply pressing his own mouth clumsily against Lewis's.

The kiss itself lasted perhaps only two full seconds. Nico pulled back afterward looking genuinely horrified by his own sudden burst of courage.

“I'm sorry, I shouldn't have.”

Lewis caught the front of his open coat firmly in one hand and kissed him again, deliberately this time.

This particular kiss lasted long enough that it clearly became a real decision between them, rather than an accident.

When they finally separated again, Nico rested his forehead gently against Lewis's own and closed his eyes tightly.

“You do realize this makes actually leaving considerably harder for me now.”

“Good. It should.”

“That's rather cruel of you to say.”

“You accused me of simply giving up too easily, remember.”

“I already apologized properly for that.”

“Not quite convincingly enough, though, in my opinion.”

Nico laughed softly at that, the sound coming out slightly unsteady between them in the cold morning air.

Later on, Lewis would always remember that particular kiss as the exact, precise moment that Nico had quietly become both the one life Lewis genuinely could never have for himself, and simultaneously the one single person he could never truly bear to lose either.

At sixteen years old, though, he only really knew that Nico left for France early the very next morning.

Lewis watched his very first official test session through a grainy video clip sent directly to a private phone, sitting quietly beneath an ornate gilded ceiling while three separate palace officials discussed detailed plans for his own upcoming overseas tour nearby.

Nico was the fastest driver there that day, by a clear margin.

Lewis replayed that particular lap five separate times in a row before finally putting the phone away.

IV.

For several long years after that, loving Nico properly happened mostly through a steady, ongoing series of departures.

Lewis left various hotel rooms well before sunrise each time, specifically so that nobody would ever notice the Crown Prince quietly emerging from the exact same corridor as a promising junior racing driver. Nico left palace entrances discreetly beneath borrowed baseball caps, complaining loudly the entire time that Lewis's dedicated security team apparently knew far too much already about his own private personal life. Together, they gradually became genuine experts at finding perfectly unremarkable little spaces hidden inside otherwise remarkable buildings: quiet service staircases, unused back offices, one particular private corner of a garden completely hidden away from the main public path.

They never once formally sat down and decided together to actually keep the whole relationship secret from everyone. Secrecy instead simply grew up naturally around the two of them, much like persistent ivy, one small practical choice quietly attaching itself to the next, until the entire tangled thing eventually became genuinely difficult to properly separate from whatever it was actually protecting underneath.

Lewis slowly learned the particular rhythm of Nico's growing career from a careful distance. Testing sessions. Constant travel. Qualifying rounds. Race day itself. Nico learned Lewis's own demanding schedule too, in turn, though he always carefully pretended otherwise. He knew exactly which formal speeches Lewis genuinely dreaded giving, and which specific charities Lewis had actually chosen entirely for himself. He watched various state ceremonies unfold from anonymous hotel rooms scattered across different countries, and sent Lewis pointed criticism of his chosen ties while television commentators simultaneously praised the overall dignity of the occasion.

After every single race, without fail, Nico called him.

Whenever he won, he spoke so rapidly and excitedly that Lewis rarely managed to get in more than the occasional brief question. Whenever he lost instead, he always began every single conversation by firmly insisting he didn't want to discuss it at all, then proceeded to discuss absolutely nothing else for a full hour straight regardless.

Lewis listened patiently from the backs of official cars, from quiet private studies, and from guest bedrooms specially prepared for him inside various other people's palaces around the world. He gradually learned to recognize different racing circuits purely through sound alone. Mechanics busily dismantling equipment somewhere behind Nico's voice. A distant celebration erupting from another team's garage nearby. Rain striking steadily against the thin roof of some temporary hospitality unit.

Sometimes Lewis would close his eyes tightly and could almost, just barely, convince himself that he was actually there in person with him.

That particular comforting belief never once managed to properly last, though.

Nico finally reached Formula One itself at the age of twenty one.

Lewis received the exciting confirmation during a formal reception for young world leaders being held at the palace. His phone buzzed once, silently, inside his jacket pocket. He really shouldn't have checked it right then. There were cameras positioned nearby, an education minister actively speaking directly to him at that exact moment, and forty carefully selected guests all patiently waiting for their own individual turn to be formally introduced to him.

The message itself contained only a single photograph.

Nico sat comfortably inside the cockpit of his brand new race car, helmet balanced casually on top of the halo device, smiling with his entire face at once. Someone had thoughtfully taped a small handwritten label directly beneath the steering wheel for him.

ROSBERG-WOLFF, N.

Lewis stared down at the image until the patient minister beside him finally paused politely, noticing his distraction.

“Good news, sir?” she asked kindly.

Years and years of careful royal training brought exactly the correct polite expression instantly to his face.

“Very good news indeed,” Lewis said smoothly.

He did not personally attend Nico's actual first Formula One race weekend in person. The scheduled date unfortunately fell squarely during an overseas state visit that had already been carefully arranged nearly a full year in advance. Lewis ended up watching qualifying instead at two o'clock in the morning from inside a government residence somewhere, sitting cross legged on an expensive rug with the television volume turned deliberately low. On the actual Sunday itself, he followed the entire race secondhand, through brief updates whispered quietly to him by an aide in between his own scheduled meetings.

Nico finished the race in seventh place overall.

Lewis called him the very moment his own final official reception finally ended for the evening.

“You certainly took your time calling,” Nico answered immediately.

“I was working, actually.”

“So was I, in fairness. Mine simply happened to involve considerably more speed than yours did.”

Lewis stepped quietly out onto the private balcony just outside his room. The unfamiliar city spread out below him felt warm and foreign, its traffic moving like scattered points of light through the growing darkness.

“You were genuinely brilliant out there today.”

Nico went quiet for a moment on the other end.

“Say that again, please.”

“Don't become completely unbearable after just one single race, please.”

“Far too late for that now, I'm afraid.”

“You were brilliant,” Lewis repeated warmly.

Nico exhaled softly and audibly down the line. Lewis could picture him perfectly in his mind's eye right then, the quiet satisfaction he'd be actively trying hard to hide, and the deep tiredness already visibly settling in comfortably underneath it.

“You really should have been here in person today,” Nico said quietly.

The happiness building steadily inside Lewis's chest twisted painfully at that.

“I know. I'm sorry.”

“I actually looked for you out on the grid anyway, before the start.”

Lewis rested both his hands heavily against the cold balcony railing. “Please don't do that to yourself.”

“Why on earth not?”

“Because I genuinely cannot keep on disappointing you, purely for being exactly where I'm actually required to be at any given moment.”

“I never actually said I was disappointed in you.”

“You didn't really need to say it out loud.”

They ended that particular call rather badly, in the end. It became something of a recurring pattern for a good while afterward.

Nico wanted Lewis physically present at his races, simply because Lewis had always historically been the one person he had raced directly beside, right from the very beginning. Lewis wanted desperately to actually be there so badly himself that every single invitation extended to him started to sound uncomfortably like a pointed accusation instead. Nico grew increasingly resentful of the palace itself, for continually claiming pieces of Lewis's time that had once simply, naturally belonged to the two of them alone. Lewis, in turn, grew resentful of Nico for apparently still believing that Lewis somehow possessed enough real personal freedom left to simply choose differently if he truly wanted to.

Neither one of them ever said the very worst parts of any of this directly out loud to the other, though.

The very first time Lewis officially attended a Grand Prix weekend, the entire surrounding paddock seemed to visibly reshape itself around his presence.

New barriers suddenly appeared in places where open public walkways had always previously existed. Team personnel everywhere received hurried new instructions. Photographers crowded thickly around the main entrance for hours before he had even properly arrived. Lewis stepped carefully out of his official car wearing a dark formal suit, and shook hands politely with people he had personally known intimately since early childhood, almost as though he were meeting each of them for the very first time in his life.

Nico waited for him just outside the garage, already dressed in his full race suit and wearing a carefully polite public smile.

“Your Royal Highness,” he said formally.

Lewis genuinely hated him a little in that moment, for how absolutely perfectly he managed to perform that particular role.

“Mr. Rosberg-Wolff,” Lewis replied, matching his tone.

They shook hands formally beneath the watching cameras.

Nico's thumb pressed once, deliberately, directly against the pulse point on Lewis's wrist.

The small, private contact lasted less than a single second in total. Lewis found himself feeling it, though, throughout the entirety of that long tour afterward.

He watched the actual race unfold from inside the garage, standing beside Toto, who had by now thoroughly perfected the delicate art of speaking naturally to both a reigning prince and his own son's secret boyfriend simultaneously, without ever once outwardly acknowledging any real difference between the two roles. Nico finished the race comfortably on the podium that day. Lewis applauded warmly along with everybody else present, and carefully kept his own expression perfectly composed when Nico finally climbed out of the car afterward, flushed with visible effort and pure joy combined.

Their eyes met briefly through the surrounding crowd.

For one genuinely dangerous moment, Nico actually started moving directly toward him.

Then a nearby team member quickly caught hold of his shoulders instead, and firmly turned him back toward the waiting cameras.

Lewis spent the entire subsequent podium ceremony standing beneath a large royal standard umbrella, while champagne sprayed liberally across the track below. Nico looked directly at him from the very top step of the podium and simply laughed, delighted.

That same evening, Lewis eventually found him alone inside an empty engineering office nearby.

Nico hadn't bothered changing out of his team kit yet. He closed the office door firmly behind Lewis, turned the lock, and leaned back casually against it with both arms folded across his chest.

“Mr. Rosberg-Wolff?” Lewis said, removing his jacket.

“Your Royal Highness?” Nico shot back immediately.

“You started that particular little game first.”

“There were cameras everywhere around us.”

“There are always cameras positioned everywhere around you now, it seems.”

That last sentence carried considerably more genuine hurt in it than actual accusation.

Lewis crossed the small room toward him. “I came here today, though.”

“Officially, you mean.”

“It was genuinely the only realistic way I could manage it at all.”

“I know that already.”

“Do you, really?”

Nico's expression sharpened noticeably at that. “You seem to think I don't properly understand your particular life, simply because I happen to be allowed to race freely.”

“I think that properly understanding something intellectually, and actually having to live constantly inside it day after day, are two very different experiences entirely.”

“And you genuinely think that watching you stand exactly three meters away from me all day, acting as though we barely even know each other, is somehow easy for me to bear?”

“No. I think that you get to be completely, authentically yourself in public every single day, while I instead have to spend every waking day carefully deciding which specific parts of myself are actually safe enough to let other people see at all.”

Nico went completely still at that.

Lewis immediately regretted the underlying cruelty of what he'd just said. Nico had, after all, spent years quietly hiding the two of them as well, in his own way. He had lied outright to his own teammates about it. He had left various rooms separately from Lewis on purpose. He had carefully learned to erase any trace of visible tenderness from his own face, every single time Lewis entered a room accompanied by his formal royal escort.

“That was genuinely unfair of me to say,” Lewis admitted quietly.

“It was honest, at least.”

“The two things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive of each other, you know.”

Nico looked down at the floor between them. “I do understand it, a little bit at least. Not fully, perhaps. But a little.”

Lewis stepped closer to him. “I genuinely wanted to kiss you, right there in front of that entire podium crowd today.”

Nico looked back up sharply at that admission.

“That would have caused a fairly memorable constitutional incident, to say the very least.”

“Probably, yes.”

“Toto might well have actually died on the spot.”

“Susie would have handled the entire situation calmly regardless, I'm sure.”

“She generally does manage to, somehow.”

The tense space between them softened noticeably at that shared joke.

Nico reached out and touched the open collar of Lewis's shirt gently. “Did you truly think I was brilliant out there today?”

“Painfully so, honestly.”

“You looked genuinely miserable up there during the whole podium ceremony, though.”

“I was standing there watching you actively live out my own childhood dream, right in front of me.”

Nico's hand fell away from his collar at that.

And there it finally was, out in the open. The specific truth they had both been carefully circling around for years now, without either of them ever quite managing to land directly on it before.

Lewis forced himself, deliberately, not to look away from him now.

“I was proud of you,” he continued steadily. “I was also deeply jealous of you, at the exact same time. Both of those things were completely true simultaneously.”

“Jealous of me, specifically?”

“Jealous of absolutely everyone out on that entire grid, if I'm honest. You most of all, though.”

Nico quietly absorbed those particular words in silence for a moment. Lewis braced himself, waiting for anger, or perhaps guilt, in response. Instead, Nico simply moved in closer and gently placed one warm hand against the side of Lewis's face.

“Thank you for actually telling me that.”

“That's genuinely all you have to say?”

“Did you honestly want me to apologize for finishing first in the race?”

“No, not at all.”

“Did you want me to instead pretend that none of it actually meant anything real to me?”

“Never, absolutely not.”

“Then simply come here, please.”

Nico kissed him slowly then, entirely without the usual frantic secrecy of dark hotel corridors or stolen, hurried minutes squeezed in between busy schedules. Lewis let himself finally be properly held. Beneath his own hands, Nico's body still felt genuinely warm from the exertion of the race itself.

Pride and envy remained tangled up together inside Lewis afterward, sharp edged and completely inseparable from each other.

So, quietly, did love.

For the very first time, Lewis properly understood that one particular feeling didn't necessarily have to destroy all the others entirely, simply because it happened to be considerably harder to openly admit to.

V.

That championship season officially began with Nico winning decisively in Australia, while Lewis simultaneously missed the entire race because Parliament happened to be formally opening on that exact same weekend.

It quickly became that particular kind of year for both of them.

Nico won again shortly afterward, while Lewis was required to attend a formal state funeral instead. He then lost rather badly during one of the very rare free Sundays Lewis had actually managed to secure in months. He suffered a frustrating mechanical retirement at the one single race the palace had specifically built directly into Lewis's official public programme that entire year, and then apologized afterward as though the car's mechanical failure had somehow been a deliberate personal failing on his part, arranged purely to waste Lewis's rare visit.

“You do realize I didn't actually come here today purely to watch you win,” Lewis said gently.

They were standing together inside the small bedroom of Nico's motorhome. Just beyond the thin door, the rest of the paddock continued noisily packing itself away for the evening.

“That was, generally speaking, the entire stated purpose of the race itself.”

“I came here specifically to see you.”

“You watched me retire from the race on lap eighteen, is what you actually saw.”

“I also personally witnessed you throw a racing glove at a solid wall with truly remarkable accuracy afterward.”

Nico sat down heavily on the edge of the narrow bed and covered his face completely with both hands. “Please just leave me alone right now.”

Lewis loosened his tie and sat down calmly beside him instead. “No.”

“I'm genuinely unbearable to be around right now.”

“You're equally unbearable after your actual victories too, if I'm honest. At least this particular version of you is considerably quieter about it.”

Nico leaned sideways slowly until his forehead came to rest against Lewis's shoulder.

Lewis pressed a gentle kiss into his hair.

This, in the end, was precisely what their relationship gradually became over the course of that particular year. Not grand, sweeping declarations or dramatic stolen moments, but rather a slow, steady accumulation of small, quiet permissions granted between them. Nico allowed Lewis to properly see him in the aftermath of genuine failure. Lewis allowed Nico to actually hear his own quiet envy spoken aloud, without immediately translating it into something gentler and easier to swallow first. Together, they gradually learned that real love could genuinely survive even the particular truths that neither one of them found especially flattering to admit.

The wider public, meanwhile, began noticing considerably more than the palace itself would have preferred.

Photographs of Lewis standing casually inside Nico's garage began circulating fairly regularly online. Various commentators eagerly revived old stories about their well documented childhood rivalry together. One old karting interview resurfaced online, in which a twelve year old Nico had confidently declared that Lewis was genuinely the only driver on the grid worth properly beating, while Lewis, standing right there beside him at the time, looked openly, visibly delighted by the compliment.

The palace's official communications office slowly began fielding increasingly pointed questions about it all.

Lewis, in turn, received a great deal of careful advice.

He was gently reminded that personal affection, however genuinely private its original origins, inevitably acquired complex constitutional dimensions once it became formally attached to the heir apparent. He was informed that Nico's own rapidly growing personal fame significantly complicated matters further. He was directly asked whether their relationship was actually sufficiently serious to justify the intense scrutiny that publicly acknowledging it would inevitably invite.

Lewis repeated that particular question back to Nico later over the phone.

“Sufficiently serious?” Nico repeated, incredulous.

“Apparently there exists some kind of official threshold for it.”

“Do they happen to provide a proper form to fill out for this?”

“Several forms, most likely, knowing them.”

“Could we perhaps fail the assessment deliberately, on purpose?”

Lewis smiled despite himself at that. “Probably not, unfortunately.”

“Then what exactly did you end up telling them?”

Lewis glanced slowly around his own private sitting room. Papers from that day's various briefings covered his desk entirely. A draft speech sat waiting patiently for his final approval. On the mantel above the fireplace stood a framed photograph of Lewis and Nico together at fourteen years old, both of them thoroughly soaked through with rain, each proudly holding trophies they had spent the entire long car ride home afterward loudly comparing to each other.

“I told them that it had genuinely been serious between us, long before either one of us properly even knew what the word serious actually meant.”

Nico went quiet for a moment at that.

“That's almost embarrassingly romantic of you.”

“Don't sound quite so alarmed about it.”

“I'm not alarmed at all, actually. I'm simply recording the exact date for future historical purposes.”

“George can properly archive that particular fact for you, I'm sure.”

“George is only seventeen years old.”

“He already personally owns more books than most entire national libraries combined. I'm sure he'll manage the task just fine.”

Their shared laughter settled warmly between them across the physical distance separating them that evening.

By the exact midpoint of that season, Nico led the overall championship standings comfortably. Every single race result made their shared future feel simultaneously closer and considerably more dangerous at once. He slept noticeably less than usual. He called Lewis considerably more often than before. Lewis learned carefully not to offer simple reassurance whenever Nico actually wanted concrete strategy instead, and equally not to offer strategy whenever what Nico genuinely needed most was simply quiet permission to be openly frightened for once.

At night, alone, Lewis sometimes found himself imagining Nico actually winning the full championship title outright.

The resulting mental image always split neatly into two distinct versions in his mind.

In one imagined version, Nico climbed straight out of the car and ran directly toward him without hesitation. Lewis caught him tightly in front of every single watching camera, held his face gently in both hands, and kissed him openly while the entire world finally discovered the whole truth all at once, together.

In the other, considerably more likely version, Lewis simply stood quietly beneath the royal standard and applauded politely from a careful, respectful distance, while Nico celebrated his historic achievement several careful meters away from him instead.

Lewis genuinely did not know which particular version frightened him more, if he was honest with himself.

The championship itself was finally decided at the very last race of the season.

For once, Lewis's own demanding schedule had actually been cleared months well in advance for the occasion. He arrived openly this time, without bothering to disguise the true purpose of his visit at all. The palace officially described it publicly as general support for British motorsport interests, despite the obvious fact that Nico actually raced under an entirely different national flag, a detail he privately found endlessly, quietly hilarious.

“Perhaps you're actually here purely to study international relations up close,” Nico suggested playfully on the Saturday evening beforehand.

“Perhaps I'm actually here because the man I love might very well become world champion himself tomorrow.”

They stood alone together up on the circuit's roof, beneath a slowly darkening evening sky. Warm heat still radiated up steadily from the concrete surface beneath their feet. Below them, garage lights burned brightly through the gathering evening dusk.

Nico's easy smile slowly faded at those words.

Lewis had told him that he loved him plenty of times before, usually inside quiet bedrooms or in hurried doorways, often just moments before one of them absolutely had to leave again. This particular time, though, the simple words seemed to land quite differently between them, stripped bare of all their usual secrecy by the wide open evening air surrounding them both.

“Say that again, please,” Nico said quietly.

Lewis stepped in closer to him. “Become world champion tomorrow, and I'll seriously consider saying it again.”

“That's genuinely emotional blackmail, you realize.”

“Then you'd better go and win, hadn't you.”

Nico kissed him then, right there beneath the wide open, empty evening sky.

The following afternoon, Lewis watched the deciding race unfold from the very back of the garage, both of his hands clasped together so tightly behind his own back that his fingers eventually went entirely numb from the pressure.

Nico needed to finish in second place at minimum to secure the title. For the vast majority of the race itself, though, he ran steadily in third place instead.

Lewis understood every single number that appeared on the various timing screens around him. That, in particular, was the specific cruelty of the entire situation for him. He could follow every gap perfectly, recognize each strategic call being made, and feel the overall shape of the race tightening steadily, well before any of the commentators had even properly named what was happening. He knew exactly when Nico was carefully protecting his tyres, and precisely when he had finally begun pushing hard instead. He knew the crucial overtaking move was coming a full three corners before Nico actually made it.

For one single, suspended second, two cars ran perfectly side by side together on the track.

Then Nico finally emerged clearly ahead of the other car.

The entire garage around Lewis erupted at once into pure celebration.

Lewis didn't clearly remember the final few laps of that race afterward, not really. He remembered Toto shouting loudly beside him. He remembered Susie gripping his arm tightly. He remembered the checkered flag finally waving, and the timing screen suddenly changing beside Nico's printed name.

George stood nearby with one arm wrapped protectively around twelve year old Kimi's shoulders. Kimi had been shifting around impatiently throughout the entire race, asking detailed questions about tyre degradation and pit stop windows with such total seriousness that several actual engineers had answered him properly before even remembering he was still just a child. Now, though, he went completely, utterly still, staring fixedly at the timing screen with exactly the same fierce concentration Nico himself had worn at that very same age.

“He actually did it,” Kimi whispered, awestruck.

Lewis glanced from the youngest Wolff brother to the eldest one standing beside him, and understood clearly in that moment that Nico's hard won victory already belonged, in some deep sense, to the entire family, in ways that no single trophy could ever properly measure or contain. George was openly crying now, without any embarrassment at all. Kimi simply looked as though somebody had just personally proven to him that the impossible could, in fact, be genuinely inherited.

WORLD CHAMPION.

Lewis had spent literal years quietly imagining this exact moment in his head. He had never once, though, properly imagined that pure joy could actually hurt this much physically.

He applauded loudly. He laughed out loud. At some point during it all, he realized he was crying too, and simply stopped bothering to try hiding it from anyone.

Nico climbed slowly out of the car straight into a dense wall of celebrating people. Engineers pulled eagerly at him from every direction. Toto reached him first of all. Susie reached him next. Cameras pressed in tightly from absolutely every possible angle.

Lewis stayed exactly where he was, not moving.

He wasn't entirely sure himself whether he held back purely because strict protocol demanded it of him, or because some younger, still wounded part of him simply couldn't quite bring himself to move toward the shared future they had once so carefully promised each other, all those years ago.

Across the crowded garage, Nico actively looked around for him.

Their eyes finally met across the distance.

Nico's entire face changed completely in that instant.

He immediately began pushing his way directly through the crowd of people separating them.

Someone from the palace staff said Lewis's name sharply in clear warning. Lewis simply ignored them entirely.

Nico reached him quickly and wrapped both arms tightly around him at once.

Lewis held him back just as tightly.

The garage roared loudly all around them both. Photographers eagerly captured every single possible angle of the moment. Nico's face pressed firmly against the side of Lewis's neck, his whole body shaking visibly with a mixture of laughter and tears combined.

“You actually did it,” Lewis whispered into his ear.

“We did it together.”

That particular answer should have felt beautiful to hear.

Instead, Lewis felt something deep inside himself recoil sharply at the words.

He pulled back from the embrace carefully. “No. You did it, Nico. Not me.”

Nico's obvious joy faltered visibly at that correction.

Before either one of them could properly repair the sudden awkwardness of the moment, the surrounding team quickly carried Nico away toward the waiting podium ceremony.

Lewis remained standing there beneath the bright garage lights, surrounded on all sides by genuine celebration, and quietly hated himself for finding the one single sharp edge hidden inside the happiest moment of Nico's entire life so far.

VI.

Nico stood proudly up on the podium beneath a heavy shower of gold confetti, lifting the gleaming championship trophy high above his own head in triumph.

Lewis watched him carefully from down below.

There existed certain particular moments in public life when his own body seemed to understand its expected role entirely independently of his conscious mind. He instinctively knew exactly when to smile, when to applaud enthusiastically, and when to quietly step aside so that the resulting image would properly belong to somebody else entirely. He performed all of it flawlessly now, while something raw and genuinely shameful churned steadily beneath his own ribs the entire time.

He had personally wanted this exact moment for Nico, ever since they were both small children together.

He had equally wanted it desperately for himself, for just as long a time.

Champagne ran freely through Nico's damp hair. His face shone brightly beneath the powerful stadium lights. Every single screen positioned around the entire circuit displayed the exact same triumphant image, enlarged repeatedly until Nico's pure happiness effectively became part of the surrounding architecture itself.

Lewis felt proud enough of him that it genuinely physically ached inside his chest.

He felt envious enough, simultaneously, that it made him feel faintly sick to his stomach.

Both of those conflicting truths remained equally real and present inside him.

The official celebration continued on for several more hours afterward. Lewis dutifully attended the formal team reception, delivered a brief prepared statement of congratulations, and allowed himself to be photographed standing beside Nico with one hand resting formally at the center of his back. Nico performed genuine happiness brilliantly throughout it all, but Lewis could clearly recognize every small betrayal hidden within his careful expression. The particular way his easy smile tightened slightly whenever Lewis addressed him a bit too formally in public. The way his gaze kept returning repeatedly to Lewis, every single time somebody else managed to pull them apart from each other in the crowd.

Shortly after midnight, Lewis finally slipped away quietly.

He told his assigned protection officer that he simply needed ten minutes completely alone, and walked back slowly through the gradually emptying paddock. Mechanics were still working steadily beneath the harsh overhead garage lights. Distant music drifted faintly over from various hospitality units further away. Confetti had already begun collecting in drainage grates and along the edges of the pit lane, bright celebratory scraps already quietly becoming ordinary rubbish.

Nico's own garage stood almost completely empty by that point.

The actual championship winning car remained parked in the very center of it, visibly scarred with rubber marks and racing dirt. Lewis stopped walking several feet short of it, staring.

For years now, he had genuinely wondered what it might actually feel like to finally see the exact machine that had carried Nico directly into the shared future life they had once so carefully planned out together as children. He had rather expected to feel real grief, perhaps. Instead, standing there now, he felt something considerably quieter than that.

Simple recognition.

The car itself did not belong to Lewis in any real sense. The championship title did not belong to him either. Genuinely loving the person who had actually earned it did not somehow magically make the achievement a shared one between them, no matter how generously Nico himself kept trying to offer it to him anyway.

Lewis heard soft footsteps approaching steadily from behind him.

“You left your own celebration party,” he said, without bothering to turn around.

“You left first, though.”

Nico's voice sounded genuinely tired now, all the earlier triumphant edge worn cleanly away from it. Lewis finally turned around properly to face him. Nico had changed into a plain dark shirt by now, though his hair remained damp from the earlier champagne shower. A brand new world champion branded cap hung loosely from one of his hands.

“They'll be actively looking for you by now.”

“They already found me, actually. I told them plainly that I was out looking for you instead.”

Lewis glanced briefly toward the open garage entrance nearby. “That's becoming a rather publicly visible sentence to say out loud these days.”

“Perhaps I'm simply tired of constantly pretending that it isn't true anymore.”

Nico crossed the remaining space between them, but deliberately stopped short of actually touching him.

“What exactly happened, after the race ended?”

“Nothing happened.”

“Please don't do that right now.”

“Don't do what, exactly?”

“Don't suddenly become the formal Crown Prince again, purely whenever you don't feel like properly answering me.”

Lewis's shoulders visibly tightened at that. “I am always the Crown Prince, Nico. That's genuinely been the central, ongoing difficulty here, right from the very beginning of all this.”

“You know perfectly well what I actually mean.”

“Yes. I do know exactly what you mean.”

Nico waited patiently. Lewis looked past him instead, toward the now dark and silent timing monitors nearby.

“I probably shouldn't have said we, back there,” Nico said eventually. “Not if it genuinely upset you like that.”

“You shouldn't have to formally apologize to me, tonight of all nights.”

“I'm not actually apologizing to you right now. I'm honestly trying to properly understand why you looked at me just now, as though I had somehow personally taken something valuable away from you.”

The sheer accuracy of that observation made Lewis physically flinch.

“That's genuinely unfair of you to say.”

“Is it actually wrong, though?”

Lewis walked a short distance away from the parked car, needing some physical space. The garage itself offered very little of it, unfortunately.

“I really don't want to have this particular conversation tonight, of all nights.”

“Of course you don't.”

“What exactly is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that we've both genuinely waited literal years now to properly have this exact conversation between us, and every single time we finally come close to actually having it, you decide that carefully protecting me from the plain truth somehow matters more than actually allowing me to truly know you.”

Lewis turned sharply toward him. “I have told you the truth before.”

“You told me, once, that you were jealous of me, inside an empty office somewhere, and then you spent years afterward acting as though simply admitting that one single time had somehow permanently cured you of the feeling entirely.”

“What exactly would you have preferred instead? That I mention it explicitly after every single race we're apart for? Should I have sent you a formal message straight from Parliament itself, carefully explaining that I was genuinely thrilled by your victory, while simultaneously furious that I wasn't the one actually sitting inside that car myself?”

“At the very least, then, I would have actually known the truth.”

“You already knew it.”

“I guessed at it, mostly. There's a real difference between the two things, you know.”

Nico set the champion's cap down carefully on a nearby workbench. His hands were visibly shaking slightly as he did it.

“Do you have any real idea what it's actually like, to win something enormous, and immediately afterward find yourself wondering whether the person you love most is quietly hurting because of it?”

“Do you have any real idea what it's actually like, to love somebody deeply through every single version of the life you yourself were never once permitted to properly attempt?”

The words landed hard and heavy between the two of them.

Nico looked away from him, stung.

Lewis pressed both his own hands firmly against his face. He had spent the entire long evening carefully finding graceful, polished sentences for various reporters, sponsors, and team members alike. Now that only Nico remained standing there with him, all that careful grace had apparently deserted him completely.

“I watched you race today,” Lewis said, quieter now. “I understood every single decision you made out there, in real time. I knew exactly when you were carefully saving your tyres. I knew precisely where you would eventually attempt the crucial overtake. For fifty eight entire laps straight, I clearly remembered exactly who I used to be, before they ever told me I couldn't be him any longer.”

Nico's expression visibly softened at that admission, but Lewis raised one hand quickly before he could actually speak.

“And then you won the whole thing. You genuinely won, Nico. I have honestly never once been prouder of another person in my entire life. But for one single second there, when you said that we had done it together, some part of me actually wanted desperately to believe you. That frightened me badly, because it simply wasn't true, or mine to claim. I didn't drive that car myself. I didn't personally live through that entire grueling season. I cannot simply turn your hard earned championship into some kind of quiet compensation for the one I myself never even got the real chance to properly fight for.”

“I genuinely wasn't trying to offer you compensation for anything.”

“I know that.”

“I was simply saying that I carried you with me, out there, the entire time.”

Lewis closed his eyes tightly at that.

Nico continued speaking, his own voice noticeably unsteady now. “Every single track walk, every race start, every single time I sat there in that car waiting anxiously for the lights to go out, some small part of me genuinely expected to look across and find you sitting right there beside me. I know perfectly well that you didn't actually win this particular championship yourself. I know completely that it belongs entirely to me alone. But I learned somewhere along the way how to properly want it beside you regardless. I genuinely don't know how to separate you at all from the actual reason I kept pushing forward this whole time.”

“You really should have learned how to separate us, though.”

“Why exactly?”

“Because I might very well have asked you to stop entirely, if you hadn't.”

Nico simply stared at him, stunned.

Lewis finally forced himself to say the single ugliest truth of all, out loud.

“That particular morning, back at the palace, when you asked me directly to tell you not to go at all, some part of me genuinely wanted to say it.”

All the color drained visibly from Nico's face at that admission.

“For one single second,” Lewis continued. “Perhaps considerably longer than that, if I'm honest. I wanted you to lose your own chance too, purely so that I wouldn't have to watch you go on living your whole life without me by your side.”

“But you told me to go anyway, in the end.”

“Because I loved you considerably more than I actually envied you, even then. I still do, even now. That simple fact doesn't mean the underlying envy itself ever properly disappeared, though.”

The garage fell completely silent around the two of them.

Nico sat down heavily on the edge of the nearby workbench. In that moment, he looked nothing at all like a brand new world champion. He looked instead exactly like that same frightened sixteen year old boy who had once waited patiently outside a palace entrance, quietly offering to surrender his entire future purely out of love.

“I have spent my entire life so far, genuinely winning the exact thing you yourself were never once even allowed to properly attempt,” he said quietly.

Lewis moved toward him. “And I have spent my own entire life instead, loving you enough to feel genuinely proud of you, every single time that you actually did.”

Nico looked up at him then.

“I really do envy you, you know,” Lewis continued honestly. “I envy every single race you've run, every mistake you've made, every free choice you were personally allowed to make along the way. But I have never once, not truly, wished that you had achieved less, simply so that eventually losing it myself might hurt me somewhat less in comparison. Not after that very first morning together. Not really, if I'm honest with myself.”

“You could have simply hated me instead, this whole time.”

“Sometimes, admittedly, that probably would have been considerably easier for me.”

“That's really not especially comforting to hear, you know.”

Lewis stepped in between Nico's knees and placed both his hands gently against the sides of his face.

“I love you,” he said simply. “That's the actual comfort in all of this. Everything else I've just said is simply, plainly true as well.”

Nico's eyes filled with sudden tears. He laughed once, quietly, and looked down at the floor, visibly embarrassed by his own reaction.

“I became world champion today.”

“Yes, I had noticed that, actually.”

“I'm really not supposed to be crying in an empty garage afterward, you know.”

“You already cried openly on my shoulder in front of roughly four hundred separate cameras earlier tonight. The overall dignity of this particular occasion is already thoroughly beyond any hope of repair at this point.”

Nico reached for his waist and pulled him in closer still. Lewis rested his own forehead gently against Nico's.

“Say it again, please,” Nico whispered.

“You are the world champion.”

“No, the other thing.”

“I love you.”

Nico kissed him then.

There was absolutely nothing hurried or hidden about it this time. The garage door itself remained wide open behind them both. Literally anyone at all could have simply walked past and seen them together. Lewis knew perfectly well that somewhere nearby, a protection officer was actively, deliberately choosing not to interrupt them at all.

Nico's hands settled comfortably against his back. Lewis kissed him back thoroughly, until the entire long, exhausting day finally narrowed down completely to the simple warmth of Nico's mouth, and the considerable weight of the truth finally resting openly and honestly between them, without any further disguise at all.

When they finally parted again, Nico glanced briefly toward the still open garage door.

“There could easily be more photographs taken of us.”

“There are genuinely always more photographs, these days.”

“That almost sounded suspiciously like actual permission, just then.”

“It certainly wasn't meant to be.”

“What a shame, then.”

Lewis kissed him again regardless, smiling against his mouth.

VII.

Nico formally announced his own retirement from the sport just five days later.

Lewis himself only learned about the decision a mere three minutes before the official public statement actually went out.

He was seated quietly in the back of his official car, traveling between two separate scheduled engagements, when Nico called and carefully asked whether he had a few minutes to properly talk. The unusually careful phrasing of the question immediately frightened him.

“What exactly happened?”

“Nothing bad has happened, honestly.”

“That particular phrase is rarely followed by genuinely good news, in my experience.”

“I'm retiring from racing.”

Traffic moved slowly past outside the car's tinted window. Lewis watched a lone cyclist pass by and quietly waited for that particular sentence to somehow rearrange itself into something considerably less alarming.

“You're doing what, exactly?”

“Retiring. From Formula One entirely.”

“I understood the actual word you used just fine.”

“Then why did you ask me to repeat it?”

“Because you only became world champion five entire days ago.”

“Exactly my point, really.”

Lewis sat forward abruptly in his seat. His protection officer politely looked away, giving him privacy.

“Nico, please don't publish anything official yet. I'm coming straight to you right now.”

“The official statement goes out in exactly three minutes.”

“Stop it from going out.”

“Lewis.”

“Please stop the statement.”

Something in the particular tone of his voice clearly worked. Nico muttered something quickly under his breath in German, and then Lewis heard rapid footsteps followed by the muffled sound of a door opening somewhere nearby.

“I've managed to stop it. Temporarily, at least,” Nico said. “My poor communications manager may genuinely never forgive either of us for this.”

“She can happily join the growing queue of people who feel that way.”

Lewis immediately canceled the entire remainder of his scheduled afternoon.

Doing so caused exactly the kind of significant administrative crisis he had been specifically trained his whole life never to create. A planned school opening had to be hastily rescheduled. An official reception proceeded without him entirely. Three separate palace offices demanded proper explanations. Lewis offered none of them, until he finally reached Nico's private apartment and found him standing barefoot in the kitchen, surrounded by half packed bags from the final race weekend.

“Please tell me this isn't happening purely because of me,” Lewis said, before the front door had even fully closed behind him.

Nico's expression hardened immediately. “It's my own career to decide about.”

“That doesn't actually answer my question.”

“You don't get to simply arrive here and interrogate me, as though I've somehow done something genuinely wrong.”

“I'm not accusing you of anything at all. I'm simply asking whether you're deliberately giving up something you genuinely love, purely because I finally admitted out loud that watching you succeed at it sometimes actually hurts me personally.”

“No, that's not it at all.”

“You answered that a little too quickly, just now.”

“Because I've actually been quietly answering that exact same question myself, privately, for several months now already.”

Nico walked through into the adjoining sitting room. Lewis followed him inside.

The gleaming championship trophy stood prominently on the table, positioned between two still unopened suitcases. In the ordinary light of day, it looked almost surprisingly unremarkable. Lewis remembered it being triumphantly raised above Nico's head beneath falling gold confetti, and felt that same old, familiar collision of pride and personal loss all over again. This particular time, though, he chose not to hide from either feeling.

“Why now, specifically?” he asked.

Nico sat down heavily on the sofa and leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees. “Because I finally won it all.”

“You could easily go on to win it again, though.”

“Perhaps I could. Or I could instead spend an entire additional year simply defending the title, and then another full year after that proving the first victory wasn't purely down to luck. There will always be some new argument available for staying on longer.”

“You genuinely love racing, though.”

“I do, very much.”

“Then stay in the sport.”

Nico looked directly up at him. “Do you actually want me to stay?”

Lewis forced himself to answer with real care. “What I personally want doesn't actually matter here.”

“It has never once been irrelevant to me, though.”

“That's precisely the entire problem, don't you see. I absolutely refuse to become just another institution, quietly deciding for you what your own life is allowed to properly look like.”

Nico stood up and crossed the room directly toward him.

“The Crown itself decided your entire life for you, long before you were ever actually able to choose it yourself,” he said quietly. “I am choosing my own life now, for the first time.”

“Choosing what, exactly?”

“I honestly don't know yet, myself.”

Lewis simply stared at him.

Nico laughed softly at his expression. “That's actually the entire point of it, don't you see. I've known precisely what came next in my life since I was barely ten years old. Another racing series. Another contract to sign. Another season to complete. Another championship to chase. For the very first time in my life, I can genuinely wake up tomorrow morning and simply not know what comes next, and somehow that particular thought doesn't frighten me quite as much as it probably should.”

“You might very well come to regret this decision.”

“Yes, I might well.”

“You might genuinely miss the racing itself terribly.”

“I certainly will miss it.”

“You might eventually come to resent me for this.”

“For a decision I'm actively making directly against your own explicit wishes? That would honestly require some seriously impressive creativity on my part, even for me.”

Lewis didn't smile at that.

Nico's expression softened considerably. He reached out and took both of Lewis's hands in his own.

“I'm not actually retiring purely for your sake,” he said gently. “But I am genuinely allowed to want a life for myself that has proper room left in it for you as well. I'm allowed to want ordinary mornings that don't begin immediately with race data, and quiet evenings that don't simply end at some airport somewhere. I'm allowed to become world champion, and then simply decide for myself that it was actually enough.”

“You never once think that anything is truly enough for you, though.”

“Perhaps I'm finally growing up a little, then.”

“That seems rather unlikely, honestly.”

“And there you are again, being properly yourself.”

Nico lifted one of Lewis's hands and pressed a gentle kiss against his knuckles.

The official retirement statement finally went out publicly about an hour later.

For several months afterward, Nico became restless enough that he managed to make absolutely everyone around him genuinely regret ever supporting his decision in the first place. He completely reorganized his entire apartment from top to bottom. He accepted far too many media interviews, and then complained loudly about every single one of them afterward. He began quietly advising several promising young drivers, learned just enough practical diplomacy to become genuinely dangerous company at formal dinner parties, and involved himself deeply in three separate charitable projects at once, before Susie finally gently suggested to him that retirement didn't strictly require him to personally solve every single available problem in the world before breakfast each morning.

Lewis watched him steadily build an entirely new life for himself.

He also watched, at the same time, as the wider world gradually discovered the truth about the two of them together.

The particular photograph that eventually surfaced had been taken on championship night itself. It clearly showed Nico kissing Lewis inside the open garage, Lewis's hands cupped gently against Nico's face, with the actual race winning car clearly visible in the background behind them both.

The palace received the compromising image well before it was ever formally published anywhere. Lewis was duly summoned to yet another polished meeting table, though this particular time he arrived there with Nico standing directly beside him.

Various advisers discussed at length the likely public response, relevant constitutional precedent, security implications, personal privacy concerns, and the particular complications arising from Nico's specific nationality and considerable public fame. Nico listened to all of it with flawless, patient attention for a full twenty minutes, before finally asking whether anybody present in the room actually intended to discuss the simple fact that the two of them genuinely loved each other.

The overall meeting improved noticeably after that particular question was asked.

Their relationship was formally confirmed to the public the very next morning.

Lewis had rather expected the entire world to change dramatically as a result. In purely practical terms, though, it mostly just became considerably louder around them. Fresh headlines appeared everywhere. Commentators eagerly replayed old childhood footage of the two of them together. Photographs from literally every single race Lewis had ever attended were carefully re-examined afterward for supposed evidence that now seemed, in retrospect, almost painfully obvious to everyone.

For the very first time in his life, Lewis found himself walking into a room alongside Nico, without having to carefully decide in advance exactly how far apart the two of them ought to properly stand from each other.

The particular freedom of that small change was so subtle that nobody else watching would ever have properly recognized it as freedom at all.

Lewis certainly did, though.

One full year after Nico's official retirement, the two of them returned together to the very same karting circuit where they had originally first met, all those years ago.

The circuit itself had changed ownership twice since then, and had been fully resurfaced at some point, but the final corner remained entirely, comfortingly familiar to them both. They raced each other privately together in the late afternoon light, accompanied only by a couple of security officers, one visibly amused circuit manager, George, and fourteen year old Kimi, who had already argued persistently for his own proper turn in both of the karts available. George had only agreed to formally record their individual lap times after first extracting a solemn promise from both Lewis and Nico that neither of them would try to involve either of their younger brothers in the inevitable resulting argument afterward.

Nico ultimately won by two hundredths of a second.

“He clearly moved twice,” Lewis said, climbing carefully out of his kart.

George looked down at the stopwatch in his hand. “I was quite explicitly told not to become personally involved in this particular dispute.”

“You saw exactly what happened, though.”

“I witnessed two fully grown men nearly colliding with each other, over a completely meaningless practice lap that literally nobody else in the world will ever actually care about.”

“That certainly sounds like a confirmation to me,” Nico said, satisfied.

George handed the timing sheet over to Lewis. “I'm going to go and find some proper coffee now. Please do try to complete whatever elaborate romantic gesture this entire visit is quite obviously designed around, before it actually starts raining on us all.”

Kimi remained standing beside the barrier, reluctant to leave. “Am I honestly supposed to leave too, then?”

“Yes,” George said firmly, catching hold of the back of his jacket.

“But I genuinely want to see whether Nico actually cries or not.”

“He'll happily give you a detailed report afterward, I'm sure.”

George steered his younger brother firmly toward the small circuit café. Kimi twisted around just long enough to call back over his shoulder, “If Lewis happens to say no to whatever it is, can I please drive his kart instead?”

“No,” Lewis and Nico both answered together immediately, in perfect unison.

Lewis watched the two brothers walk away together. “They're both genuinely, alarmingly perceptive, aren't they.”

“They always have been, honestly. People simply tend to forget to properly notice it in them.”

That particular observation settled somewhere quietly in the back of Lewis's mind, to be properly considered later.

Nico leaned back casually against the barrier and looked out thoughtfully over the empty circuit stretching before them. “What exactly is this elaborate romantic gesture you're apparently planning, then?”

Lewis carefully unfolded the timing sheet in his hands.

Their two names appeared there together, exactly as they had done all those many years earlier.

ROSBERG-WOLFF, N.

HAMILTON, L.

No titles anywhere on the page. No lengthy explanations needed. Just two hundredths of a second separating them.

“I actually kept the very first one,” Lewis said quietly.

Nico turned to look at him properly. “The first what, exactly?”

“Timing sheet. From the very first day we ever met each other.”

“I beat you that day by three tenths of a second, if I recall correctly.”

“You still actually remember that clearly?”

“Of course I remember it clearly.”

Lewis smiled at him. “You complained loudly at the time that it really should have been five tenths instead.”

“It genuinely should have been.”

“You were honestly completely unbearable that day.”

“You still came back for more, though, in the end.”

“I always came back to you, in the end.”

Lewis reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and withdrew a small box.

Nico went completely, utterly still at the sight of it.

For once in his entire life, no practiced, ready response came to him at all. He simply looked back and forth between the small box and Lewis's own face, with open, genuine shock written plainly across his features.

“Before you say anything at all,” Lewis began carefully, “I honestly cannot promise you any real privacy going forward. I cannot promise you simplicity either. There will inevitably be responsibilities placed on you that you yourself never actually chose, entire rooms full of people constantly discussing our private lives together as though we aren't even standing right there in the room with them, and photographs taken of us at exactly the moments we would both much rather simply be left alone in peace.”

“You're being remarkably persuasive so far, I must say.”

“I'm being completely serious right now.”

“So am I, genuinely. Please, continue.”

Lewis opened the small box.

“What I can properly promise you, though, is that you will always get to remain entirely yourself. Never simply my royal consort before you are properly Nico first. Never merely a former champion before you are properly Nico first, either. I will never once ask you to make yourself smaller than you actually are, purely because the institution surrounding the two of us happens to be so very large.”

Nico's eyes shone brightly with unshed tears at that.

“And what happens if I become genuinely unbearable to live with?”

“Then simply become even worse than that, if you must.”

“That's rather a dangerous promise for you to make me.”

“I've already personally survived knowing you since I was ten years old, remember.”

Lewis lowered himself carefully down onto one knee, right beside the old timing line painted on the tarmac.

“Nico, will you please marry me?”

Nico looked down at him for one long, suspended moment.

Then he glanced briefly upward at the darkening evening sky above them.

“I should probably check my calendar first, to be sure.”

Lewis stood back up again immediately. “I've completely changed my mind about this, then.”

Nico laughed loudly and caught him firmly around the waist before he could actually step away from him.

“Yes,” he said, genuine laughter breaking clearly through the single word. “Obviously, completely yes.”

Lewis kissed him then, right there beside the exact track where the two of them had once naively believed that simply wanting the same shared future together would automatically be enough to guarantee they actually received it.

Their eventual real future together had become something that neither one of those two young boys could possibly have properly imagined, all those years ago.

It genuinely belonged entirely to the two of them anyway, regardless.

VIII.

Their formal engagement was publicly announced on a Thursday morning, beneath a particular photograph that neither one of them especially liked very much.

The palace itself had specifically selected an image taken inside one of the private royal gardens. Lewis wore a dark formal suit in it. Nico wore a somewhat lighter colored one, and appeared so effortlessly composed in the photograph that the general public immediately began describing him as having been born specifically for royal life, a particular phrase that made him complain loudly about it for the entire rest of that day.

“I was actually born specifically for racing,” he said, scrolling irritably through a related article on his phone. “I merely adapted successfully to royal life afterward, purely through sheer, exceptional personal discipline.”

Lewis looked up from the considerable stack of official correspondence sitting between them. “You once directly asked an archbishop whether the wedding rehearsal itself could possibly be moved, purely because it happened to clash directly with a qualifying session.”

“It was a genuinely important race that weekend.”

“You were already fully retired from racing by that point.”

“The sport itself apparently continued existing perfectly well without me, somehow. Somebody clearly still needed to keep a close eye on it for quality control purposes.”

Lewis reached across the table and gently took the phone away from his hand.

Overall public reaction proved considerably warmer than the palace had actually prepared either of them to properly expect. There were, inevitably, some formal objections raised, carefully dressed up in the familiar language of tradition and general concern. There were also, though, large crowds gathering outside the palace gates, children proudly holding up photographs from Nico's championship season, and countless letters arriving from ordinary people who had genuinely never once imagined they might someday see themselves properly reflected anywhere near the throne itself.

Lewis personally read considerably more of those particular letters than his own staff ever actually realized.

Nico read every single one that was ever given to him.

The formal marriage preparation process gradually introduced Nico to the entire complex machinery that had quietly governed Lewis's own life since the moment of his birth. Endless meetings about formal titles, various patronages, complex finances, tight security arrangements, and demanding public duties occupied entire weeks of their time together. Nico argued fiercely, every single time people in these meetings casually discussed him in the third person while he sat directly in front of them the whole time. Lewis quietly watched, one by one, as various palace officials gradually discovered that the charming former racing champion sitting calmly across the table from them had built his entire successful career out of flatly refusing to yield ground easily to anyone.

Lewis found that he loved him most of all, precisely during those particular difficult meetings.

He loved him thoroughly everywhere else as well, of course.

The two of them eventually moved into a shared private apartment inside the palace together, and then promptly spent a full three weeks afterward disagreeing loudly about exactly where Nico's various racing trophies should properly be displayed. Lewis wanted the main championship trophy prominently displayed somewhere highly visible. Nico insisted that putting it in their main shared sitting room would look rather too arrogant and boastful.

“You personally carried that exact trophy through an entire airport once, purely so strangers could take photographs of you holding it,” Lewis reminded him pointedly.

“That situation was entirely different.”

“You actually slept right beside it once, too.”

“Only the one time.”

“For an entire solid week straight, if I recall correctly.”

The trophy eventually ended up displayed on the mantel, positioned right beside a neatly framed copy of their very first shared timing sheet.

Nico noticed the newly hung frame there on the very evening it first appeared. He stood quietly in front of it for a long while, one hand resting comfortably against Lewis's back the entire time.

“Three tenths of a second,” he murmured softly, almost to himself.

“Please don't start this again.”

“I simply happen to genuinely enjoy proper historical accuracy, that's all. George would surely approve of the sentiment.”

“George privately thinks the two of us are both completely ridiculous, you know.”

“George is usually correct about most things, in fairness.”

Their formal wedding ceremony took place the following spring.

George stood proudly beside Nico as his official witness that day, composed and quietly watchful in his formal dress attire. Kimi, now fourteen years old and deeply offended by his own stiff formal collar, guarded the wedding rings inside his jacket pocket with considerably more focused concentration than he had shown throughout the entire preceding rehearsal process. Before the actual ceremony began, he had seriously asked whether his official responsibilities that day also included personally driving the newly married couple away afterward. Nico had told him, quite firmly, absolutely not. Kimi subsequently declared the entire wedding to be rather poorly organized overall, but promised faithfully not to lose the rings regardless of his complaints.

Roughly half the entire planet reportedly watched the ceremony live, according to various estimates repeated so frequently that they eventually stopped sounding like real numbers at all. Nico officially became the very first man in modern British history to formally marry the heir to the throne. Commentators everywhere called the resulting ceremony genuinely historic. Newspapers extensively discussed constitutional change, growing public acceptance, the monarchy's uncertain future, and Nico's particular expression the moment Lewis first properly appeared at the far end of the aisle.

Lewis himself noticed none of that particular commentary in the actual moment.

He noticed only Nico.

Nico stood there beneath the soaring vaulted ceiling, warm sunlight falling gently across one entire side of his face. For once in his life, his usual careful composure had completely abandoned him. His eyes were already visibly bright with unshed tears. His mouth trembled slightly around a wide smile he seemed genuinely, completely incapable of properly controlling.

Lewis walked steadily toward him.

He had entered countless rooms throughout his entire life, always knowing full well that every single person present was specifically waiting for him. This particular moment felt entirely different, though. Nico wasn't actually waiting there for the Crown Prince at all. He was waiting instead for the same boy who had once blocked him unfairly in a wet corner, the same rival who had once solemnly promised to follow him all the way into Formula One together, the same man who had loved him faithfully through every single victory he himself could never properly share in directly.

When Lewis finally reached him, Nico let out a long, unsteady breath.

“You certainly took your time getting here,” he whispered.

Lewis smiled warmly at him. “I was working, as usual.”

Nico laughed loudly enough that the nearest microphone clearly picked up the sound for everyone to hear.

Their formal wedding vows had, of course, already been carefully reviewed beforehand by several different people. The private personal promises underlying them, though, belonged entirely and only to Lewis and Nico themselves.

Lewis privately promised never again to confuse simple duty with total silence between them.

Nico privately promised never again to offer up his own personal happiness as some kind of quiet payment for Lewis's necessary sacrifices.

Neither one of them promised, though, to never again feel envious of the other. They had both learned, by then, considerably better than to try building genuine love upon some impossible standard of complete emotional purity. Nico still occasionally envied the sheer public reach that Lewis naturally possessed, his simple ability to transform an entire room merely by walking into it. Lewis still occasionally envied Nico's fully completed racing career so fiercely that watching old race footage together could still genuinely hurt, even now.

They promised each other, instead, to always simply tell the honest truth about it, whenever it happened.

After the formal ceremony concluded, the two of them stepped out together onto the palace balcony. The sound of the enormous waiting crowd rose up around them immediately, loud enough to feel almost physically present. Nico's hand tightened noticeably inside Lewis's own.

“Are you genuinely frightened right now?” Lewis asked him quietly.

“Absolutely terrified, honestly.”

“Good. You should be.”

Nico glanced sideways at him. “That's rather a cruel thing to say to your new husband.”

“You love me regardless, though.”

“Unfortunately for me, yes, I do.”

Lewis kissed him then, openly, right there in front of the entire watching world.

Five full years later, Nico found him still wide awake well past midnight, sitting quietly in the shared sitting room the two of them had slowly, gradually made properly their own together over time.

The original championship trophy still stood proudly on the mantel. New photographs had steadily accumulated all around it over the years: Nico and Lewis together on their very first official overseas tour as a properly married couple, Kimi grinning widely from inside a go kart, George dressed formally in academic robes and looking deeply suspicious of the camera pointed at him, Toto and Susie surrounded warmly by all three of their grown sons at a family dinner that had reportedly taken twenty seven separate emails to properly arrange in the first place.

The original, faded timing sheet remained positioned right in the very center of it all.

Lewis held it carefully in his hands now, the old paper feeling fragile and thin beneath his fingers.

“You know,” Nico said from the doorway behind him, “most ordinary people generally just look at photographs, when they happen to become sentimental well after midnight like this.”

Lewis looked up at him. Nico wore simple sleep clothes, along with the patient expression of a husband who had clearly already searched two separate rooms looking for him.

“Most ordinary people didn't spend their entire childhood carefully collecting evidence that you once managed to beat them at something.”

“Only once?”

“Please don't go and ruin this particular moment.”

Nico crossed the room and sat down comfortably beside him. Their own fifth wedding anniversary was steadily approaching. The palace had already filled their shared calendar with numerous meetings concerning an upcoming exhibition Nico himself was actively developing, in partnership with Lewis's own charitable foundation, the Wolff Family Trust, and several notable European museum collections. Nico had spent the entire dinner that evening enthusiastically describing the whole proposal in detail. Lewis had listened patiently the entire time, quietly watching his husband skillfully turn what was technically a public obligation into something he genuinely, personally cared about.

“Why exactly are you looking at that particular thing tonight?” Nico asked gently.

Lewis ran one finger slowly beneath the two faded printed names.

“I was simply thinking about who exactly we both used to be, before any of this ever happened to us.”

“Considerably smaller, mostly, back then.”

“You had noticeably worse hair back then too, if we're being honest.”

“That claim is objectively, factually untrue.”

Lewis smiled at that. “On this particular page here, nobody watching could have possibly known what we would eventually become together.”

“We already knew, though, even then. We were always going to reach Formula One together eventually, and then politely take proper turns becoming world champion, one after the other.”

“You were genuinely never once going to be remotely polite about any of that, though.”

“Probably not, no, in fairness.”

Nico rested his head comfortably against Lewis's shoulder.

For years and years, Lewis had genuinely mourned that entire missing second half of their once imagined shared future together. That particular grief had never fully vanished from him, not completely. It had simply, gradually changed its shape enough over time to comfortably live alongside everything else that had eventually come afterward instead.

“Do you ever regret any of it?” Nico asked quietly.

Lewis understood exactly what he actually meant by the question. Nico had asked some version of that exact same question, in various different forms, throughout their entire life together so far. Did Lewis genuinely regret inheriting the crown itself? Did he regret permanently losing his own chance at racing? Did he regret loving somebody whose greatest personal achievement would always, inevitably resemble the exact future that had been unfairly taken away from Lewis himself?

“Some parts of it, honestly, yes,” Lewis answered truthfully.

Nico nodded slowly against his shoulder in response. “Me too, if I'm honest.”

“Not marrying me, though, I sincerely hope.”

“Ask me again properly, after we get through all these exhibition meetings.”

Lewis turned his head and pressed a gentle kiss into his hair.

“I don't regret you,” he said simply. “Not for one single moment.”

Nico lifted his head to look at him properly.

“I already know that.”

“That sounded like an extremely confident thing to say, just now.”

“I happen to have five full years of solid evidence backing it up by now.”

“And what about the full twenty years that came before that, then?”

“Considerably less conclusive evidence there, admittedly. You were absolutely terribly competitive that whole time, if you recall.”

Lewis laughed softly at that, the sound warm in the quiet room.

Nico gently took the old timing sheet from his hands and carefully returned it to its proper frame on the mantel. The two printed names remained there together, side by side, separated permanently by three tenths of a second, and by absolutely none of the formal titles that would later come to properly define them both in the wider world's eyes.

Lewis had once genuinely believed that true freedom simply meant seeing his own name printed there without any crown symbol displayed prominently beside it.

Now, though, he properly understood that real freedom had also always meant Nico looking directly at him, and clearly seeing that exact same boy that everybody else in the world had always simply forgotten existed underneath the weight of his title. Nico had done precisely that, effortlessly, when they were both just ten years old together. He still did it now, just the same, beneath grand chandeliers and formal royal standards, through countless official ceremonies and small private arguments and every single carefully managed public moment of their long marriage together.

“Come to bed now,” Nico said softly.

Lewis took his offered hand.

On the mantel behind them, the old timing sheet remained resting quietly beneath the gleaming championship trophy, with neither one of those two cherished memories ever diminishing the other one in the slightest.

Lewis followed his husband quietly out of the room.

– END –