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The first thing he remembers saying to Lewis that day in 2018 is a lie, and it still rattles him when he thinks about it because rather than I didn’t know you had tattoos what he really meant was I didn’t know seeing them up close would make me feel like this.
But still Lewis spared him one of those glances he spared him when he still didn’t know Max’s teeth did anything but nibble pleasantly at his heels and he asked Max if he liked them, after a beat.
With that suspicious raise of the eyebrow, like he thought Max was playing at anything but nursing wants he couldn’t quite yet tell he was allowing to turn into needs.
He doesn’t remember what he replied. He remembers his stomach tied in knots and the image of Lewis’ back covered in champagne being always in his dreams for a while.
His retina had a cross burnt onto them.
Back then he was trying to contain it and before then he had been trying to understand what is was—now he doesn’t try either because he has grown up and he knows.
That whatever they had to say to each other was loud and clear through carbon fiber at the apex straight ahead; that whatever they could learn from prying deeper they already know too intimately to ever sacrilegiously embed with words.
He sees car number 44 parked on P2 and he cannot even bring himself to think that it was at his expense because all he can think is fucking finally, all he can think is baby, I’m home.
For a very long year five years ago, Max had to learn not to let it show. He forgot how the moment he crossed that line at Abu Dhabi and he doesn’t try to learn again as Lewis gets out of the car and he goes for Kimi first; Max waits, knows he is waiting, knows he doesn’t care.
He watches Lewis lift Kimi up into the air and it tugs at his guts and all he remembers is the wanting and the needing to nestle himself there Lewis fresh out of car 44 and with an arm around him, stronger but never invincible. To vanquish again or to be vanquished matters very little when this is the manner of it.
Which is to say, it matters a lot more.
His arm around Lewis. He remembers now the sound their helmets make when they bump just a little because they forget they still have them on.
Max could kick rocks down in P11 for a single point and he could breathe the never-breathed air of the top of the world and it is only ever being invincible that had ended up mattering more.
He notices that Kimi has entered the room when they get up to leave for the podium and Lewis stays back to tie a shoelace and there is suddenly another pair of brown eyes that looks at him very differently and with a very different smile.
“What?” he scratches his ear. Eardrums still fucked from the race. Must be that.
Kimi only laughs and keeps walking and says it all again, and Max can only wonder, is this what you see?
But back then as much as it was about Lewis being Lewis it also was about Lewis being the most attractive man he’d ever seen up close, it was about Lewis and the rings around his sometimes calloused fingers and the way that he did it with that killer smile when he told the FIA to fuck off about the earrings and the everything else and it was about Max fiddling with his bare and naked fingers and thinking how stupid, who would die on this hill, Max locking himself in his room praying Daniel wasn’t hearing and thinking about Lewis’ hands around his throat with all the rings trying to make dents, it was Max’s bedsheets made a mess.
He looks down now and he’s only got a watch and his fingers are still bare all those years later. He thinks Kimi would not think about how the metal of them would feel inside his mouth if he does not have them.
And if this is about Max being Max then he will continue to be Max, to have no choice but to fight back fiercer and to stand from P3 in front of a crowd roaring ignorance and think he would only deserve it had he been better, but they worship blindly.
He readies himself for the nausea that comes with the anger.
If anything though there is something strange like happiness when Kimi is not yet on the stage and he glances at Lewis’ side of the podium and he's just the slightest bit taller.
I enjoyed finally getting to battle with Max—it’s not a thought that Lewis has had that Max somehow knows about, which would also be good, but the words are said out loud, and a glance is exchanged, and Max’s heart goes full throttle at the same speed it goes when he dives around the outside and the car goes all sensitive on him and for a split second he knows that he knows everything.
Later, he thinks; he doesn’t know what but he knows exactly why, exactly when.
Later, he told himself when Lewis came and held his hand and shook it when it was 2021 and everything was finally over and Max was boneless from crying into so many people’s arms.
It was Lewis’ fingers colder against his and the way he had looked and through the pain had meant it when he’d said good job, and it was the first time he had looked at Max and had not seen a kid or a beast in a pen.
Later, he’d extirpated himself from his father and followed Lewis down the corridor and he didn’t know if he was going to make it worse or better but what came out of his mouth was thank you.
Lewis looked up, and Max had thought it would be the day it would stop feeling like standing beneath a giant but it wasn’t. Lewis, eyes up at him, was still looking down.
He reached. Max didn’t move. The collar of his RedBull shirt was grabbed into a fist.
It was also what Lewis did the first time that Max showed up at his room, back in 2019. Well, the first time he opened the door.
Grabbed and pulled Max down and said what is it without sounding all that much angry.
“Anything,” Max said, “please.”
It hadn’t been kind.
It had been Max’s face on the furniture and then a slap on that same face for forgetting not to drool on it like that.
It had been the ache between his thighs that he’d nursed for a week and kept pressing and pressing hoping it would stop going away little by little.
And that night in Abu Dhabi it had instead been Lewis’ hand around his throat wordless and against the wall, Max whining stupidly when he’d soiled his fireproofs and then been left alone to sit with the weight of a crown he had wrestled off the hands of a benevolent tyrant, a king from the stories mantled in divinity and Max's own hands soiled in motor oil, and Max's own hands in the shape of those that bruised.
He leans back against the couch, neck to leather. He almost feels the phantom of it. He shifts in his seat, trying to focus.
Kimi tells him something again. Max opens his eyes and sees another kingslayer. Is this what they see?
“—and then he had a lockup, so it was me again who—”
The hunger, the bloodthirst, the blood.
The blood.
They open the floor.
He thinks about the time all the journalists had left and the room was vacant entirely and it was just him and Lewis who still hadn’t moved.
The complete standstill. Come on, Verstappen. I know you’re better than this.
Max hadn’t replied because his mouth was full but he wanted to say yes, I know, yes, thank you.
“It was absolutely awesome to get to have a battle with one of the greats,” Lewis is replying. Max stops hearing what Kimi says. “My whole life, it has been about this. The hunt—”
Listen, Kimi, Max tries to say, he knows better.
His head rests on Lewis’ shoulder. He’s still got the lion there, mouth open and roaring and still as ink can be when the body beneath it is breathing.
Max’s teeth want to bite, but there is nothing left in him, and Lewis’ hand is in his hair, drawing circles.
Montreal’s night is frowning at the sight, hundreds of twinkling lights that’ll never catch up to them and won’t understand.
“Missed you,” says Lewis, so softly Max thinks he is not meant to hear.
He can’t say anything that Lewis doesn’t already know.