For your writing event “I’d really love if you came” for max and little leclerc
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6. "I'd really love it if you came"
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In almost every aspect of your life, you were dramatic.
It was something everyone around you noted about you, regardless of your age or stage in life. You were a loud, boisterous child who loved to have the room’s attention. You were a theatrical teenager, finding extravagant ways to complain about the smallest of things—much to your mother’s amusement. You were the one people tended to focus on when you walked into a room, regardless if you were a familiar face or not.
You were a person who thrived in the spotlight.
Which is why it was really fucking confusing for Max to find out that you had an exhibit through a random flyer on your fridge when he went to grab the protein shake he left in there earlier.
The protein shake was quickly forgotten as he grabbed the flyer, making his way towards the living room where you were currently settled with a handful of sketches around you. Max didn’t even have time to admire the sight (especially considering it took weeks of coaxing before you finally worked openly around him). Not when he had more pressing matters at hand.
“How come you didn’t tell me about this?”
“Hm?”
“That you have an exhibit.”
Max watched the moment the words registered in your brain. He watched the way your whole body froze, pencil hovering over the sheet you were currently working on as you stared down at it. Like if you stared intently enough, maybe he would forget he had even asked and just move on.
Unfortunately for you, Max Verstappen was one stubborn asshole.
“Schat?”
You cleared your through, finally snapping out of your daze as you turned to look at him with a strained smile on your face. “It’s nothing. Just a small exhibit at the university. Everyone is doing it.”
Max didn’t seem convinced. “And you’re doing it too?”
You nodded.
“And people can go see?”
You hesitated for a moment before nodding again.
It broke your heart to watch the way Max’s face crumpled at the knowledge. “So why didn’t you tell me?” He glanced down at the flyer again. “It’s not a race weekend, I could come.”
“I–” You paused, bottom lip tucked between your teeth as you worried the skin—a nervous habit Max picked up on pretty early in the relationship. “It’s really not that big of a deal.”
“If it’s about you, then it’s a big deal to me,” Max corrected, moving further into the living room as he paused by the couch you were sitting on. “You always support me at races. Let me support you at your work too.”
Your face softened. “I don’t think a couple of university assignments are on the same level as a Formula One Grand Prix.”
Max instantly scoffed, kneeling down so he could catch your eye properly. “Then you clearly underestimate your own talent and I will not stand for slander against my wife’s work.”
You snorted, shaking your head.
“I won’t go if you don’t want me there,” Max said in a softer voice. “Say the word and I’ll pretend I didn’t even know.”
“I’d really love it if you came,” you whispered, a small smile growing on your face.
Max’s expression instantly brightened. “Then I’ll be there. And I’ll show off to everyone how talented my wife is.”
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Pairing: Max Verstappen x Charlotte Fischer (Original Character)
Summary: Charlotte Fischer has spent years making sure no one in Formula One knows who she really is.
At Red Bull, she is simply Charlotte: Cambridge graduate, simulator engineer, owner of a deeply judgmental cat, and the woman responsible for making the team’s broken 2025 car model finally tell the truth.
She prefers it that way. No family name. No questions. No one looking at her like she is someone’s daughter, someone’s mistake, or someone’s failure to protect.
Max Verstappen notices her anyway.
Warnings and Notes: I wrote fanfiction of my own fanfiction. This is the result.
As always big thanks to @llirawolf , who listens to me ramble.
Charlotte knew the migraine was bad when the apartment started to feel hostile.
The flat was quiet. She had made sure of that. Curtains drawn. Overhead lights off. Kettle abandoned. Phone face down on the coffee table with every notification silenced. The world had been reduced to low amber light, soft fabric, and Tilly’s warm weight pressed against her hip.
Still, everything had edges.
The clock on the wall ticked too sharply. The refrigerator hummed with spite. Even the air seemed to press against her skin as if it had mass.
Charlotte lay very still on the couch, one hand resting over Tilly’s ribs, counting the cat’s slow, steady breathing.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
The migraine pulsed behind her eye, dull and insistent. Not the worst kind. Not the kind that made her vision fracture or sent nausea crawling up her throat.
Bad enough.
Bad enough that she had given up pretending she could work from home. Bad enough that she had closed the laptop after eleven minutes and stared at the ceiling in grim defeat while Hannah’s final message sat on her phone like a reprimand.
Do not log back in. I will know.
Charlotte had not logged back in.
This, apparently, was personal growth.
Tilly shifted against her side, purring faintly, as if pleased with this display of compliance.
“Yes,” Charlotte murmured. “You win.”
The doorbell rang.
Charlotte did not move.
For several seconds, she simply stared toward the hallway, offended by the very concept of visitors.
Wrong door, she thought. It had to be.
No one came to her flat unannounced. That was one of the reasons she liked it. People at work knew better. Delivery drivers left things downstairs. Hannah would text first.
The bell rang again.
Tilly lifted her head.
Charlotte closed her eyes. “No.”
The universe, predictably, did not apologise.
She pushed herself upright with slow, careful movements, one hand braced against the arm of the couch until the room steadied. The migraine objected immediately, pressure blooming behind her right eye.
“Stay,” she told Tilly.
Tilly did not stay.
She followed Charlotte into the hallway, tail raised, already prepared to inspect whatever disturbance had entered their carefully managed ecosystem.
Charlotte opened the door.
And stopped.
Max Verstappen stood in her hallway.
For one long, surreal second, Charlotte’s brain refused to assemble the image properly.
Max Verstappen, four-time world champion.
Max Verstappen, Red Bull’s gravitational centre, the man half the factory treated like a temperamental national treasure.
Max.
Hoodie. Trainers. Hair slightly flattened like he had run a hand through it too many times. A paper bag clutched in one hand with the awkward solemnity of someone delivering classified materials.
Charlotte blinked. The hallway light stabbed directly into her skull. “…What are you doing here?”
It came out flatter than she meant it to.
Not rude. Not quite.
Just entirely without the energy required to make confusion sound polite.
Max straightened slightly. “Hi.”
Charlotte stared at him.
That was apparently all he had.
“Hi,” she repeated slowly.
He winced, as if aware of the poor start. “I heard you were sick.”
Charlotte closed her eyes for half a second.
Of course. Of course someone had told him. Of course her carefully contained absence had somehow become information that travelled.
“I have a migraine,” she said, because if people were going to discuss her, they could at least be accurate.
“I know,” Max said quickly. “I mean, I know now. They told me. Not you.”
That made her open her eyes again.
There was something in the way he said it. Not defensive, exactly. Careful. Like he understood there was a difference between being told and being trusted with something.
Charlotte looked at the bag.
Then at him.
Then back at the bag.
Max noticed and lifted it slightly.
“I brought things.”
“Things.”
“For migraines.”
The situation, already strange, tipped fully into the impossible.
Charlotte stared at him.
“You brought migraine things.”
“Yes.”
“To my flat.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Max’s mouth opened.
Closed.
Then he said, very plainly, “I googled.”
Charlotte was almost certain the migraine had made her start hallucinating.
“You googled.”
“The internet was very aggressive,” Max said, with the faint defensiveness of a man who had spent too long reading contradictory medical advice on his phone. “But Hannah said no scented things. So there are no scented things.”
Charlotte’s throat tightened before she could stop it.
That was irritating.
She should have told him to go home.
She should have said, thank you, that is kind, but unnecessary. She should have taken the bag, shut the door, returned to the couch and the dim, curated safety of being alone.
Instead, she stepped back.
“Come in,” she said.
Max looked so visibly relieved it would have been funny if her head did not hurt so much.
“But,” Charlotte added, lifting one finger, “if anything in that bag makes noise, smells strongly, or flashes, I will throw it into the street.”
Max nodded solemnly. “That is fair.”
He stepped inside like he had been given temporary diplomatic clearance.
Charlotte shut the door behind him, blocking out the cruel hallway light. The flat fell back into its low-lit quiet, though it felt different now. Not louder. Not crowded.
Altered.
Max stood in her small kitchen area and looked briefly too large for it, which was absurd, because Charlotte was not short and the flat was not tiny. Still, there was something about him that changed a room by entering it. Usually Charlotte found that kind of presence exhausting.
Today, he seemed to be trying very hard not to take up space.
That was worse. Or better.
She did not know.
He set the bag on the counter and began removing items with careful precision.
Electrolyte drinks. Plain crackers. Peppermint tea. Ginger chews. An eye mask. A small packet of instant soup. Something labelled low-sugar.
Charlotte stared.
“All of this is migraine-safe,” she said quietly.
Max glanced up, suddenly uncertain. “I checked.”
“I can see that.”
“I did not know what would help,” he admitted. “So I bought options.”
Options.
Not flowers. Not some dramatic gesture. Not something meant to make him look thoughtful in a way she could compliment.
Useful things. Quiet things. Things she might actually need.
Charlotte folded her arms, mostly because she did not know what else to do with her hands. “You didn’t have to do this.”
“I know.” The answer came immediately.
Not apologetic. Not defensive.
“I wanted to,” he added.
Charlotte looked away.
That sentence was becoming a problem.
Tilly chose that moment to emerge from the hallway and inspect the intruder. She approached Max with the slow, imperious caution of a customs official.
Max went very still.
Not afraid. Respectful.
Charlotte watched him watching the cat.
“This is Tilly,” she said.
Max nodded gravely. “Hello, Tilly.”
Tilly sniffed his shoe.
Then his ankle.
Then flicked her tail, which Charlotte knew meant provisional tolerance.
“She is judging you,” Charlotte said.
“I understand.”
“You should. She’s very experienced.”
Max’s mouth twitched.
Tilly brushed once against his leg and then abandoned him, leaping back onto the couch as if her work was done.
Max looked after her. “She’s the cat from the hats.”
Charlotte’s head turned slowly.
“You know about the hats?”
Max froze. A beat too late. “I might have seen the account.”
“The account has thirty-eight followers.”
“Thirty-nine now.”
Charlotte stared at him.
The migraine pulsed.
Somehow, against all reason, she almost laughed. “You followed my cat’s Instagram?”
“It is a good account.”
“It is a terrible account.”
“No,” Max said seriously. “The mushroom hat is very good.”
Charlotte closed her eyes.
“I cannot believe I am having this conversation with a migraine.”
“Sorry.” But he sounded a little pleased.
She hated that she liked it.
Charlotte walked back toward the couch before the standing became too much. Tilly immediately rearranged herself to make room, because she was benevolent when she felt like it. Charlotte sat down carefully, one hand pressing briefly to her temple.
Max stayed where he was.
That, more than anything, made her look back at him.
He did not assume the invitation extended further than the doorway. Or the kitchen. Or the groceries. He had come all the way here and still waited to be allowed nearer.
Something softened in her chest.
It was very inconvenient.
“You can sit,” she said.
Max nodded and moved to the armchair instead of the empty space beside her.
Good. Terrible. Thoughtful.
“Five minutes,” Charlotte added.
“Okay.”
“I mean that.”
“I know.”
He sat carefully, elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped. He did not look around the flat with obvious curiosity. Did not ask questions about the books stacked by the window or the yarn basket half-hidden under the side table or the framed photograph turned just slightly away from the room.
He simply sat.
Quietly.
Charlotte sank back against the cushions, Tilly warm against her thigh.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
The silence should have been awkward.
It wasn’t.
That unsettled her more than the visit.
Most people treated silence like a problem to solve. They filled it, tripped over themselves inside it, tried to make it comfortable by making it cease to exist. Max did not. He sat in it like he understood that today, noise was expensive and Charlotte had none of herself to spare.
After a few minutes, he nodded toward the bag.
“The crackers are plain,” he said quietly. “Not the ones with salt everywhere. I wasn’t sure.”
“Salt is fine.”
“Okay.”
A pause.
“The ginger things are maybe bad.”
“They are always bad.”
“Yes,” Max said. “I thought so.”
This time, the laugh slipped out before she could catch it.
Small. Rough at the edges. But real.
Max looked at her like he had just watched something rare happen.
Charlotte immediately regretted laughing.
Not because it was wrong. Because it had been easy.
She looked down at Tilly and stroked the soft fur between her ears.
“She’s my cancer cat,” Charlotte said.
The words came out before she had decided to say them.
Max went very still.
Charlotte kept her eyes on Tilly.
“I got her after the diagnosis,” she continued, voice low. “I thought I was being practical. Something alive in the flat. Something to feed. Something that would notice if I disappeared.”
Tilly purred, oblivious to the enormity of her own biography.
“She was the reason I wanted to survive for a while,” Charlotte said. “Which sounds dramatic, but it’s true.”
Max said nothing.
For one second, Charlotte thought she had made a mistake.
Then he said, softly, “She looks like she took that very seriously.”
Charlotte’s breath caught.
Not sympathy. Not horror.
Not I’m sorry said in that careful voice people used when they were trying to decide how tragic she was.
Just acceptance.
Tilly had a job. Tilly had done it.
Charlotte’s hand stilled on the cat’s back.
“Yes,” she said. “She did.”
Another silence.
This one felt different.
Closer.
The migraine was still there. Still pressing. Still turning the room faintly sideways.
But some of the sharpness had eased.
Not because Max had fixed anything. He hadn’t. He couldn’t.
He had simply come with crackers and electrolyte drinks and no demand to be useful beyond what she allowed.
“What are you doing here, Max?” Charlotte asked again.
This time, the question was quieter.
Less bewildered. More dangerous.
He looked at her.
“I wanted to make sure you were okay,” he said. “And I didn’t know how to do that properly, so I decided to do it badly but honestly.”
Charlotte stared at him.
“That is an alarming sentence.”
“Yes.”
“At least you know.”
“I know many things.”
“You googled migraines and followed my cat’s Instagram.”
“Those are also things.”
The laugh came again.
Barely.
But enough.
Max smiled, small and pleased and trying not to be.
Charlotte looked away before it did something irreversible to her.
She had survived alone for a long time.
Not entirely alone, perhaps. There had been colleagues eventually. Hannah, in her sharp way. The sim department, with their quiet protective instincts. Tilly, most of all, warm and stubborn and alive when Charlotte had needed a reason to remain the same.
But this was different.
Max sitting in her dim living room, holding himself carefully still so the world would not hurt her more, was different.
He had chosen to come.
Not because she asked.
Not because he owed her.
Not because there was anything in it for him.
He had simply noticed she was gone and decided that mattered.
Charlotte closed her eyes, one hand resting on Tilly, the other curled against the blanket.
The migraine still pulsed.
The flat still hummed.
The world still had edges.
But for the first time all day, she did not feel like she had to hold all of it by herself.
That was not dependence.
Not need.
Not yet.
Just the fragile, disorienting realisation that someone had shown up at her door and, somehow, made being found feel less like an intrusion than a kindness.
And that felt more dangerous than the pain.
***
Lunch should have been safe.
That was what made it dangerous.
The debrief was over. The sim session had not yet started. There were sandwiches, bad coffee, and the familiar comfort of listening to GP complain about correlation curves in a tone that suggested the laws of physics had personally disappointed him.
Normal things.
Manageable things.
Max sat across from GP and Hannah, unwrapping his sandwich with great concentration, doing his best impression of a man who had absolutely not spent part of the previous afternoon standing outside Charlotte Fischer’s flat with a bag of migraine-safe groceries and the emotional instincts of a raccoon that had learned to use Google.
He was fine. Very normal.
Not thinking about drawn curtains. Or an orange cat. Or Charlotte in an oversized hoodie, pale with pain, looking at him like she could not decide whether he was a hallucination or a logistical problem.
Hannah watched him for exactly twenty-seven seconds.
Then her mouth twitched.
“So,” she said.
Max froze with his hand halfway to his drink. “No.”
GP did not look up from his coffee. “Because you did.”
Max shot him a glare. “I did not say anything.”
“You don’t have to,” GP said. “You’re sitting like someone trying very hard to look innocent.”
“I always sit like this.”
“No,” Hannah said, delighted now. “You sit like that when you’ve done something and you’re hoping nobody noticed.”
Max looked between them.
This, he realised, was a trap.
Unfortunately, he had already entered it, sat down, and unwrapped a sandwich.
Hannah leaned forward, elbows on the table, eyes bright with the kind of professional curiosity that made her so dangerous on a pit wall and unbearable in personal matters.
“You went, didn’t you?”
Max looked down at his sandwich.
It suddenly seemed very interesting.
GP finally glanced up. “Oh, mate.”
Max exhaled through his nose.
Slowly.
Defeated before the first corner.
“…Yes.”
Hannah’s face changed at once. The amusement stayed, but something softer came in beneath it. Something almost fond. “Oh my god,” she said. “You actually went.”
“It wasn’t a big thing.”
“You went to her apartment,” GP said.
“I brought things.”
“Things,” GP repeated.
“Migraine things.”
Hannah pressed her lips together.
Max pointed at her. “Do not laugh.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“You are internally laughing.”
“I am internally screaming,” Hannah corrected. “There is a difference.”
GP leaned back in his chair, arms folding. “Did you Google it?”
Max said nothing.
Hannah’s smile widened. “You googled it.”
“The internet had opinions,” Max muttered.
“Of course it did,” GP said. “And you obeyed them?”
“I bought crackers.”
Hannah made a small, strangled sound.
“And electrolytes,” Max added, because apparently he had lost control of his own mouth.
GP stared at him.
Max glared back. “She had a migraine.”
“Yes,” GP said slowly. “And you handled that by assembling an emergency care package like you were preparing for a small natural disaster.”
“It was not like that.”
“What was it like?” Hannah asked.
Max looked down again.
He remembered Charlotte opening the door, squinting against the hallway light, hair soft and slightly disordered, her expression completely blank with disbelief.
What are you doing here?
He remembered the dimness of her flat. Tilly brushing against his leg like he was being assessed by a very small committee. Charlotte looking into the bag and going quiet when she realised he had actually tried.
He shrugged, because explaining any of that felt dangerous.
“She asked why I was there.”
GP’s eyebrows rose. “Reasonable.”
“I told her I wanted to check she was okay.”
Hannah softened again.
“And?”
“She let me in.”
GP looked genuinely surprised. “She did?”
Max frowned. “Yes.”
Hannah sat back, impressed. “That is huge.”
“It was five minutes.”
“Still huge.”
“She told me five minutes,” Max clarified. “Very specifically.”
GP nodded gravely. “Ah. A formal audience.”
Max kicked him lightly under the table.
GP did not react.
Hannah rested her chin in her hand. “If Charlotte Fischer did not want you there, you would have been out of that doorway in under ten seconds.”
Max considered that.
It sounded true.
Charlotte was polite, but Max had already learned that her politeness was not softness. It was a locked door with excellent diction.
“She let me sit,” he said after a moment.
Hannah’s eyes narrowed happily.
“Where?”
“In the armchair.”
“Good choice.”
“What do you mean good choice?”
“It means you didn’t immediately sit next to the woman with a migraine and no energy to remove you physically.”
“I am not stupid.”
GP made a noise.
Max looked at him. “Do not.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You made a noise.”
“It was a tactical noise.”
Hannah laughed into her coffee.
Max tried to focus on his sandwich again.
It did not work.
“So,” Hannah said, softer now. “Was she okay?”
Max hesitated.
The jokes had made it easier, for a moment. Easier to stand slightly outside the thing and let GP and Hannah tease him until it became absurd instead of frightening.
But the memory of Charlotte on the couch, one hand on the orange cat curled against her side, returned with uncomfortable clarity.
“She was in pain,” he said. “But she said it wasn’t alarming.”
Hannah nodded once. “That sounds like her.”
“She said Tilly was her cancer cat.”
The table went quieter.
GP’s expression shifted, the humour draining back into something more careful.
Hannah looked down at her mug for a second.
“She told you that?”
Max nodded.
“She said she got her after the diagnosis. That she needed something alive in the flat.”
Hannah exhaled slowly.
“Well,” GP said after a beat, quieter than before. “That’s something.”
Max looked between them. “What?”
Hannah met his eyes.
“Charlotte doesn’t usually give people the story behind things.”
Max sat very still.
“Oh.”
“She gives facts,” Hannah said. “Migraine. Tumour. Treatment. Stable. Fine. She doesn’t usually give the part where it hurt.”
Max thought of Charlotte saying it without looking at him.
She was the reason I wanted to survive for a while.
His chest tightened.
GP watched him with an expression that was almost sympathetic, which somehow felt worse than the teasing.
“Mate,” he said.
Max immediately scowled. “No.”
“You have it bad.”
“I was worried.”
“Yes,” GP said. “That is one of the symptoms.”
Hannah snorted.
Max groaned and leaned back in his chair. “You are both impossible.”
“You bought electrolyte drinks for a woman who did not even clap when you won Imola,” GP said.
“She said congratulations.”
“Professionally,” Hannah added.
“She said good drive later.”
GP pointed at him. “Listen to yourself.”
Max folded his arms. “She is interesting.”
Hannah smiled.
“Oh, we’re saying interesting?”
“She is.”
“She’s brilliant, private, stubborn, has a cat, survived cancer, doesn’t care about your trophies, and somehow let you into her flat for five whole minutes,” Hannah listed. “Yes, Max. Very interesting.”
Max stared at her.
“That was too many details.”
“I’m an excellent strategist.”
GP nodded. “She is.”
Max looked away, ears warm.
“This is not how this usually goes,” he muttered.
“No,” GP agreed. “Usually they are impressed by the winning.”
“She is not impressed by anything.”
“That’s not true,” Hannah said.
Max looked back.
Hannah tilted her head, thoughtful now. “She’s impressed by competence. By consistency. By people doing what they say they’ll do. By not making a mess she has to clean up.”
GP added, “By models that don’t lie.”
“And cats in hats,” Max said before he could stop himself.
Hannah’s face lit up.
GP closed his eyes. “Oh no.”
Max realised his mistake too late.
Hannah leaned forward again. “You brought up the cat hats.”
“I was making a point.”
“You were thinking about the cat hats.”
“I follow the account.”
“We know,” GP said with a long suffering sigh.
Hannah was laughing now, but not cruelly. More like she had just watched a puppy walk into a glass door and wanted very badly to help while also enjoying the spectacle.
Max sighed.
“She has a cat,” he said weakly, because apparently he had chosen surrender.
“Yes,” Hannah said warmly. “And you are doomed.”
GP picked up his tray, standing. “I am leaving before you ask whether crochet hooks come in sizes.”
“I am not asking about yarn.”
“Not today.”
Max pointed at him. “I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
GP walked away, far too pleased with himself.
Hannah stayed seated, still smiling, but her expression gentled once GP was out of earshot.
“For what it’s worth,” she said, “you did fine.”
Max looked at her.
“With Charlotte,” she clarified. “You didn’t push. You brought useful things. You left the choice with her.”
“I didn’t know what else to do.”
“That’s usually when people do the most damage.”
Max absorbed that.
His lunch sat untouched in front of him.
Somewhere between the sim room, the empty console, the paper bag in his hand, and Charlotte’s dim living room with the curtains drawn, something had shifted.
He had crossed a line.
Not with her, maybe.
With himself.
A few weeks ago, Charlotte Fischer had been interesting because she did not react to him the way people usually did.
Now she was interesting because he wanted to know if she was okay even when there was nothing he could do about it.
That was much worse.
Hannah watched the realisation arrive and smiled like she had seen it coming from several kilometres away.
“You really do have it bad,” she said.
Max picked up his sandwich at last.
Took one bite.
Chewed.
Swallowed.
Then said, very quietly, “Yes.”
Hannah’s smile softened.
She did not tease him for that.
Which was how Max knew he was truly in trouble.
***
Text Messages: Max Verstappen & Victoria Verstappen
Max: Hypothetically.
Victoria: I already don’t like where this is going.
Max: If you had a crush on someone.
Victoria: YOU DO.
😂😂😂
Oh my god who is it.
Max: I said hypothetically.
Victoria: You only say hypothetically when you’re already doomed.
Is she pretty.
Max: Yes.
Victoria: TALL pretty or annoying pretty.
Max: Tall. Smart. Does not care when I win races.
Victoria: Oh no.
That’s a serious one.
Max: She works with us.
Victoria: OF COURSE SHE DOES.
Let me guess. Engineer.
Max: Sim engineer.
Victoria: I’m screaming.
You fell for the one woman in the building immune to your charm.
Max: She didn’t even blink after Imola.
Victoria: I love her already.
Max: I went to check on her the other day.
Victoria: YOU WHAT.
Max: She was sick.
Victoria:Max.
Max: I brought groceries.
Victoria: MAX.
Max: Migraine-friendly ones.
Victoria: I cannot wait to tell mum.
This is incredible.
Max: Don’t. Please.
Victoria: Fine.
So what’s her deal?
Max: She had a brain tumour.
Victoria: …what.
Max: A few years ago. Cancer. She survived. Gets migraines sometimes.
Victoria: Oh.
Victoria: Okay.
No jokes. That’s serious.
Max: Yeah.
Victoria: Does she have support?
Max: Her colleagues are very protective.
She lives alone. Has a cat.
Victoria: Of course she does.
Victoria: Is that why you went?
Max: I think so.
Victoria: Okay.
Then listen to me.
Victoria: Be kind.
Don’t make it about you.
Don’t rush her.
And don’t treat her like she’s fragile unless she asks you to.
Max: I don’t think she’d tolerate that anyway.
Victoria: Good.
Then you’re already doing better than you think.
Victoria: I take back laughing.
You’re allowed to like her.
Just… do it properly.
Max: I don’t know how this ends.
Victoria: You never do.
Victoria: But I’m rooting for you.
And for her.
***
Susie knew something had shifted the moment Toto stopped looking broken and started looking efficient.
That was never a good sign.
Grief made him restless. Guilt made him quiet. Panic made him sharp around the edges, all pacing and half-finished sentences and hands dragged through his hair until it stood up in every direction.
But this was worse.
This was Toto with his jaw set and his laptop closed with deliberate finality. Toto picking up his phone. Toto scrolling through contacts with the stillness of a man who had already made a decision and was now simply carrying out the logistical consequences.
Susie watched him from the other side of the dining table, unease settling low in her stomach.
“Toto,” she said slowly. “What are you doing?”
He did not look up.
“Reaching out.”
Susie waited.
He kept scrolling.
That should have told her everything.
Unfortunately, she made the mistake of assuming he meant reaching out like a normal person. Emotionally. Vulnerably. Perhaps writing the letter Susie had suggested, or asking for advice on how to begin an apology he was terrified Charlotte would never read.
That was Susie’s first mistake.
Her second was leaving him unsupervised.
She discovered this an hour later, when he appeared in the kitchen and said, with the casual seriousness of a man announcing he had booked a dental appointment, “I’ve hired someone.”
Susie froze with her mug halfway to her mouth.
The silence lasted long enough that Toto finally looked at her.
She lowered the mug very carefully. “You’ve hired who exactly?”
“A private investigator,” Toto said.
For a moment, Susie simply stared at him.
There were points in marriage when a person had to decide whether to respond with love, rage, or the kind of controlled calm used around live explosives.
Susie chose the third option.
“You hired a private investigator,” she repeated.
“Yes.”
“To look for Charlotte.”
“To find out if she’s alright.”
“To look for Charlotte,” Susie said again.
Toto’s mouth tightened. “She blocked my number. She doesn’t answer emails. I don’t know where she lives, what she does, whether she’s safe—”
“That is because she does not want you to know.”
He flinched.
Only slightly.
Susie saw it anyway.
“I’m her father,” he said.
The words were low. Defensive. Desperate.
Susie set her tea down on the counter before she did something regrettable with it.
“And she is an adult woman who chose not to have contact with you,” she said. “Those things can both be true.”
Toto looked away.
That only made her angrier.
Not because she did not understand him.
She did.
That was the problem.
She understood the guilt. The fear. The way not knowing had started to eat through him the moment he realised Charlotte’s trust had sat untouched for years, compounding interest around her absence.
Susie understood why his mind had gone straight to worst-case scenarios, to danger, to illness, to the unbearable possibility that his daughter might be suffering somewhere and he would not even know.
She understood.
She simply refused to let understanding become permission.
“You cannot outsource intimacy,” she said.
Toto’s eyes came back to hers.
“What?”
“You heard me.” Her voice sharpened. “You cannot hire someone to do the frightening part for you and call it reaching out.”
“I’m not trying to frighten her.”
“No,” Susie said. “You’re trying to avoid being frightened yourself.”
That landed.
She watched it land.
Toto went still.
For all his height, all his presence, all that famous Wolff severity people mistook for invulnerability, in that moment he looked almost unbearably tired.
“I just need to know she is alive,” he said.
The words came out rough.
Susie’s anger faltered for half a second.
Only half.
“She is alive,” she said. “She did not survive everything she survived just to vanish quietly because you stopped watching.”
His face tightened.
“That’s cruel.”
“It’s true.”
His jaw worked once, but no answer came.
Good, Susie thought. Let it hurt. Maybe it needed to.
She stepped closer, not enough to comfort him, but enough to make sure he had to hear her.
“Charlotte did not leave because she wanted to become a mystery you could solve,” she said. “She left because she wanted distance. She wanted a life that did not require her to keep waiting for you to choose her. And now, instead of respecting that, you are paying a stranger to cross the boundary she made because you don’t like how it feels.”
Toto looked down at his hands.
“I failed her,” he said quietly.
The admission no longer surprised Susie.
It had been sitting between them for days now. Weeks, perhaps. Years, if she was honest. Only recently had Toto found the courage to say it out loud without immediately burying it beneath explanations.
“I know I failed her,” he continued. “But not knowing—” He broke off, gesturing helplessly. “Susie, I don’t know anything. I don’t know where she lives. I don’t know if she’s happy. I don’t know if she needs help. I don’t know if she is alone.”
Susie took a slow breath.
“And whose fault is that?”
He closed his eyes.
She regretted the sharpness immediately.
Not because it was untrue.
Because it was too easy.
Still, she did not take it back.
“Toto,” she said, softer but no less firm, “you are trying to soothe your guilt without risking rejection.”
His eyes opened.
There it was.
The thing he had not wanted named.
The reason the private investigator had felt easier than a letter. A report could not ignore him. A report could not return unopened. A report could not look him in the eye and say, too late.
Charlotte could.
That was what terrified him.
He sank into one of the kitchen chairs, suddenly older.
“I don’t even know what I would say to her,” he admitted. “If she answered.”
Susie looked at him for a long moment.
There were versions of this conversation where she yelled. Where she told him exactly what she thought of his instinct to manage emotional pain like a corporate problem. Where she reminded him that Charlotte had been a child in his house, and all the investigators in the world would not change the fact that he had seen enough and still stayed quiet.
But he already knew.
That did not absolve him.
It only meant cruelty would serve no one.
“Then start there,” Susie said.
He looked up.
“Write that down. Don’t send it yet. Just write it. ‘I don’t know what to say because I know I failed you.’ Start with the truth.”
Toto’s mouth twisted. “And if she never wants to hear it?”
“Then you live with that.”
His face tightened.
Susie held his gaze.
“Like she had to live with you not choosing her.”
Silence fell.
It was not comfortable.
It was not meant to be.
Outside, Monaco glittered beyond the windows, all polished glass and distant lights, as if the world could be made beautiful enough to distract from what people did to each other inside expensive rooms.
After a while, Toto said, very quietly, “I already paid the retainer.”
Susie closed her eyes.
Of course he had.
Of course he had gone from remorse to wire transfer without stopping anywhere near emotional common sense.
“Toto.”
“I know.”
“No,” she said, opening her eyes again. “I don’t think you do.”
He looked up at her, helpless and stubborn all at once.
“I can cancel it.”
“You should cancel it.”
“I just wanted—”
“I know what you wanted,” Susie said. “That’s what makes this so frustrating.”
She picked up her mug, more for something to hold than because she wanted the tea.
“You run one of the most successful teams in the world,” she said, shaking her head. “You negotiate contracts worth millions. You manage drivers, sponsors, engineers, shareholders, crisis after crisis. And this is how you handle emotional repair? You hire surveillance?”
“It’s not surveillance.”
Susie gave him a look.
He had the grace to wince.
“It is discreet,” he muttered, but weakly now.
“It is still a violation.”
His shoulders dropped.
For a moment, he looked so much like the man she had married — brilliant, impossible, wounded in places he covered with competence — that Susie’s anger softened into something sadder.
She came closer and rested a hand on the back of the chair beside him.
“Toto,” she said quietly, “if you want to be part of Charlotte’s life again, you cannot begin by proving she was right to leave you out of it.”
That broke through.
She saw it.
The pain moved over his face before he could hide it.
He looked down.
“I know.”
“Do you?”
This time, he did not answer quickly.
Good.
Susie turned toward the doorway, then stopped.
Behind her, Toto said, almost inaudibly, “What if she needed me?”
Susie closed her eyes for a moment.
There it was.
The rawest part.
Not control. Not pride. Not even guilt.
Fear.
What if she had needed him, and he had not known?
What if she had suffered?
What if she had been alone?
What if the answer was yes?
Susie turned back.
“Then you will have to live with the fact that she learned not to call you,” she said.
Pairing: Max Verstappen x Charlotte Fischer (Original Character)
Summary: Charlotte Fischer has spent years making sure no one in Formula One knows who she really is.
At Red Bull, she is simply Charlotte: Cambridge graduate, simulator engineer, owner of a deeply judgmental cat, and the woman responsible for making the team’s broken 2025 car model finally tell the truth.
She prefers it that way. No family name. No questions. No one looking at her like she is someone’s daughter, someone’s mistake, or someone’s failure to protect.
Max Verstappen notices her anyway.
Warnings and Notes: I wrote fanfiction of my own fanfiction. This is the result.
As always big thanks to @llirawolf , who listens to me ramble.
Winning Imola felt good.
It always did — the track, the flow, the way a lap could come together there like a sentence that finally made sense. The car had still been difficult, still on the edge of uncooperative, but he’d dragged it where it needed to go and stood on the top step anyway.
Applause. Champagne. Noise.
By the time Max made it back to the factory a few days later, the win had already settled into something quieter — pride instead of adrenaline. He expected congratulations. Handshakes. Smiles.
What he hadn’t expected was how clearly, immediately, he knew where he was going.
Charlotte’s desk sat where it always did: half-buried in screens, notes taped at precise angles, a mug that had definitely gone cold hours ago. She was leaning forward slightly, chin tucked, eyes fixed on a replay loop from the simulator, fingers tapping lightly against the desk as she thought.
Max stopped a few steps away, watching her for a moment.
Still pretty. Still focused. Still not looking at him.
He cleared his throat.
She glanced up. Recognition flickered — quick, contained.
“Hey,” she said.
Just that.
No excitement. No smile. No Imola! hanging in the air between them.
He waited.
Nothing happened.
“Well,” Max said finally, tilting his head, “we won.”
Charlotte nodded once. “Yes. Congratulations.”
That was it.
No follow-up questions. No gushing. No visible awe. She turned back to the screen, already rewinding a segment of the run.
Max frowned slightly. “…You saw the race?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And the mid-corner balance looked improved,” she said, still watching the data. “The correlation update helped.”
He blinked. “That’s—” He stopped himself, then tried again. “That’s all?”
Charlotte looked back at him properly this time, dark eyes assessing, not unkind — just curious. “Did you want something else?”
Max stared at her.
People usually did something when he won. Even people who tried very hard not to care still leaked enthusiasm at the edges. Pride. Excitement. Relief.
Charlotte just… processed it.
He shifted his weight, suddenly aware that this wasn’t going the way he’d pictured.
“I thought,” he said slowly, “you might be… impressed.”
She considered that. “I’m glad the work helped,” she said eventually. “But you’ve won races before.”
It wasn’t dismissive. It wasn’t rude. It was factual.
Max felt something unfamiliar flicker in his chest — not annoyance, not quite — more like disorientation. “…Right,” he said.
She tilted her head slightly, studying him now. “Is everything okay?”
He huffed out a small laugh despite himself. “Yeah. Just—”
He stopped. Tried to find the words.
Normally, this part was easy.
Normally, the women he was interested in reacted. There was a rhythm to it — admiration first, curiosity second, the unspoken understanding that this was impressive and he was part of it.
Charlotte wasn’t playing that game.
She wasn’t unimpressed.
She just wasn’t impressed by that.
“I just wanted to say hi,” he said finally.
She nodded. “Hi.”
Then, as if remembering something, she added, “Good drive.”
Two words. Earned. Clean.
Max felt more validated by that than he wanted to admit.
She turned back to her work, conversation clearly concluded.
Max stood there for a second longer than necessary, then walked away, hands in his pockets, brain spinning.
That had not gone according to plan.
At all.
He’d come expecting to dazzle her.
Instead, he’d been treated like a variable that performed as expected.
And for the first time in a long while, Max Verstappen found himself genuinely, deeply dumbfounded.
Which was… annoying.
And, inconveniently—
Kind of thrilling.
***
GP did not look surprised.
Which, frankly, offended Max a little.
They were walking down the corridor toward the sim wing, Max still buzzing with post-win energy that had nowhere to go, irritation prickling under his skin like static. He’d tried to ignore it. Failed. Badly.
“So,” Max said finally, unable to help himself, “I went to see Charlotte.”
GP hummed. Noncommittal. Dangerous. “And?” he asked.
Max stopped walking and turned on him. “She didn’t care.”
GP blinked. “About what.”
“About Imola,” Max said, exasperated. “About the win. About—” He gestured vaguely at himself. “Any of it.”
GP sipped his coffee. Took his time.
“She said congratulations,” Max added quickly. “But like. Professionally.”
GP stared at him for a long moment. Then: “Mate.”
Max folded his arms. “Don’t.”
“You have it bad.”
Max scoffed. “I do not.”
“You came to find me specifically to complain about a woman not being impressed by you winning a Grand Prix,” GP said evenly. “That’s not subtle.”
Max opened his mouth to argue. Closed it. “…She just went straight back to her screen,” he muttered. “Like I was a meeting reminder.”
GP nodded. “Sounds like Charlotte.”
Max frowned. “You know her?”
GP shrugged. “Some. Hannah does more. They’re friends through one of the other sim engineers.”
Max perked up despite himself. “They’re friends?”
“Yes,” GP said. “They talk. Coffee. Normal human things.”
Max exhaled. “Of course they do.”
GP gave him a sideways look. “You’re spiralling.”
“I am not spiralling.”
“You are,” GP said calmly, “standing in a hallway, emotionally compromised by a woman who complimented your driving efficiency instead of your ego.”
Max grimaced. “When you say it like that, it sounds —”
“It sounds accurate,” GP finished.
They resumed walking.
GP took another sip of coffee, then added casually, “Also, you need to recalibrate your expectations.”
Max shot him a look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
GP didn’t hesitate. “Charlotte has a Cambridge degree,” he said. “She’s been buried in sim models since she was about twenty-two. She’s not a wannabe model, influencer, or someone impressed by trophies.”
Max bristled. “I don’t only go for—”
GP raised an eyebrow.
Max sighed. “…Usually.”
“Exactly,” GP said. “She doesn’t orbit your world. She has her own. And she’s not going to perform admiration on command.”
Max stared ahead, jaw tight.
“That doesn’t mean she doesn’t care,” GP added. “It means you’re going to have to try something you’re not very good at.”
Max groaned. “What.”
“Being interesting without winning something,” GP said.
“That’s harsh.”
They walked in silence for a moment.
“…She said the car looked better,” Max muttered. “Said the correlation update helped. That it was a ‘Good Drive’.”
GP smiled faintly. “High praise. From her.”
Max glanced at him. “You think?”
“I know,” GP said. “If Charlotte Fischer tells you ‘good drive’ and means it, that’s about as close as you’ll get to a standing ovation.”
Max absorbed that slowly. Then, quieter: “I didn’t know what to do.”
Aero_Matt:rumour check
did max actually go to charlotte after imola expecting her to be impressed
Sim_Ruby:yes
Aero_Matt:oh my god
Garage_Pete:how bad was it
Sim_Ruby:she said congratulations and then went back to the model
Strategy_Leah:iconic
Composite_Tom:brutal
Powertrains_Nina:efficient
Garage_Pete:did she at least smile
Sim_Ruby:no
Aero_Matt:MAX VERSTAPPEN WON IMOLA AND GOT A CALENDAR NOTIFICATION RESPONSE
Comms_Jess:wait is charlotte even single
Aero_Matt:do we know literally anything about charlotte
Sim_Ruby:she has a cat
Garage_Pete:called tilly
Powertrains_Nina:tilly wears hats
Composite_Tom:crochet hats
Strategy_Leah:seasonal crochet hats
Comms_Jess:okay so we know cat lore
do we know boyfriend lore
Sim_Ruby:no boyfriend has ever been mentioned
Aero_Matt:has ANY personal human ever been mentioned
Powertrains_Nina:hannah?
Garage_Pete:hannah is not charlotte’s boyfriend
Strategy_Hannah:Thank you for clarifying.
Comms_Jess:no but seriously
she’s pretty, terrifyingly smart, has an expensive accent, went to cambridge, and max is acting like a teenage boy
someone should know if she’s single
Composite_Tom:“expensive accent” is so real
Aero_Matt:she says “can’t” like there’s inheritance involved
Sim_Ruby:she was born in austria though
Comms_Jess:SHE WAS WHAT
Garage_Pete:welcome to charlotte lore part 2
Strategy_Leah:austrian but sounds like she was educated by the bbc
Powertrains_Nina:because she was
Aero_Matt:boarding school apparently
Comms_Jess:how do we know all this and still not know if she has a boyfriend
Sim_Ruby:to be fair charlotte doesn’t talk about herself
Composite_Tom:she once answered “did you have a good weekend?” with “it was operationally sufficient”
Garage_Pete:that’s romantic actually
Comms_Jess:max would probably propose if she said that to him
Engineering_GP:Do not give him ideas.
Aero_Matt:GP CONFIRMED MAX HAS IDEAS
Engineering_GP:I confirmed nothing.
Strategy_Hannah:You confirmed it by appearing.
Engineering_GP:I regret teaching any of you how to use Slack.
Comms_Jess:okay facts we know about Charlotte Fischer:
Austrian
Cambridge
sim engineer wizard
posh accent
cat named Tilly
crochets cat hats
immune to Max Verstappen Grand Prix victory flirting
possibly single
mysterious family situation??
Aero_Matt:what family situation
Sim_Ruby:her mother died, I think
Comms_Jess:oh
Powertrains_Nina:yeah. she doesn’t talk about it much.
Garage_Pete:does she have family here?
Sim_Ruby:not really, I don’t think
Composite_Tom:I’ve never heard her mention anyone
Strategy_Leah:she has Tilly
Strategy_Hannah:And before anyone gets weird: that is enough information.
Comms_Jess:understood
Aero_Matt:respecting boundaries in the gossip channel
growth
Garage_Pete:wait wasn’t there also the cancer thing
Comms_Jess:the what
Sim_Ruby:Pete.
Garage_Pete:sorry
Strategy_Hannah:Careful.
Garage_Pete:no I mean not gossip way
just like
That why everyone is protective of her, right?
Powertrains_Nina:yes. partly.
Composite_Tom:she had a brain tumour a few years ago. she’s okay now.
Comms_Jess:oh my god
Strategy_Leah:she gets migraines sometimes. we cover when she’s out.
Comms_Jess:okay suddenly max having a crush is less funny and more like
oh no he is going to be extremely sincere about this
Engineering_GP:Unfortunately, yes.
Aero_Matt:does max know about the cancer?
Strategy_Hannah:Not from this channel.
Sim_Ruby:good point
Garage_Pete:if max finds out he’s going to hover
Strategy_Leah:he already hovers
Composite_Tom:he does emotional hovering
Comms_Jess:what does emotional hovering look like
Sim_Ruby:asking whether the low-speed model has been updated when what he means is “is Charlotte here today”
Aero_Matt:walking past the sim wing three times
Powertrains_Nina:bringing coffee and pretending it was extra
Garage_Pete:liking Tilly’s strawberry bonnet at 01:13
Comms_Jess:HE DID WHAT
Strategy_Hannah:Please stop monitoring the man’s likes.
Aero_Matt:he followed a 39-follower cat account
that’s public behaviour
Comms_Jess:back to the important bit
how did max take charlotte not being impressed by imola
Engineering_GP:Badly.
Aero_Matt:details
Engineering_GP:No.
Strategy_Hannah:He complained that she “didn’t care.”
Composite_Tom:HAHAHAHA
Garage_Pete:world champion defeated by woman saying “expected performance”
Strategy_Leah:to be fair she did say good drive
Sim_Ruby:that is basically a standing ovation from Charlotte
Powertrains_Nina:that is Charlotte throwing underwear on stage
Strategy_Hannah:Nina.
Powertrains_Nina:sorry
Aero_Matt:did GP give him advice
Engineering_GP:I told him to be interesting without winning something.
Comms_Jess:that is the meanest and most useful advice I’ve ever heard
Garage_Pete:did he survive it
Engineering_GP:Barely.
Sim_Ruby:max has never had to flirt uphill before
Composite_Tom:flirt uphill 😭
Strategy_Leah:Charlotte is basically Eau Rouge emotionally
Strategy_Hannah:Difficult, fast, and punishes arrogance?
Engineering_GP:Accurate.
Sim_Ruby:I am gonna go and find out if Charlotte has a boyfriend.
***
It happened over coffee.
It always did.
There was something about the Red Bull sim wing before ten in the morning that made people forget themselves. Maybe it was the bad coffee. Maybe it was the hours. Maybe it was the false intimacy of standing around half-awake with mugs in hand, pretending they were not all about to spend the day arguing with data that had the emotional temperament of a spoilt racehorse.
Charlotte had been halfway through explaining a small but irritating inconsistency in a tyre degradation model when one of the younger engineers, Ruby, — bright, well-meaning, and entirely too invested in the romantic prospects of everyone around them — looked at her over the rim of her mug.
“You know,” Ruby said, far too casually, “my friend is single.”
Charlotte paused. Only for a second. “No,” she said.
Ruby blinked. “You don’t even know what I was going to say.”
“You were going to tell me he works in aero,” Charlotte replied, turning back toward the screen. “Possibly that he is tall. Probably that he is normal, which is never as reassuring as people think it is.”
A beat.
Ruby’s mouth fell open. “How did you—”
“You have tried this twice before.”
“I have not.”
“You have. Once with the gearbox analyst. Once with the composite materials guy who owned a bearded dragon.”
“He was lovely.”
“He brought the bearded dragon to a first date.”
“That shows commitment.”
“That shows poor judgment.”
Someone at the next desk laughed into their coffee.
Ruby, undeterred, leaned against the edge of Charlotte’s workstation. “Okay, but this one is different.”
“They never are.”
“He’s nice.”
“I’m sure.”
“Tall.”
“As predicted.”
“Works in aero.”
“Tragic.”
“And he’s normal.”
Charlotte looked at her then.
Ruby winced. “Okay, I hear it now.”
“Good.”
“Oh, come on,” Ruby said, laughing. “It’s just coffee. No pressure. You might like him.”
Charlotte’s face settled automatically into something pleasant and final.
“No, thank you.”
The words came easily.
Too easily.
They always had.
Ruby held her gaze for a moment, looking for a crack in the answer, some hidden hesitation she could widen into a yes. Charlotte gave her nothing.
Eventually, Ruby shrugged. “Fine. Your loss.”
“Statistically unlikely.”
That earned another laugh, and the conversation drifted back toward the model, toward tyre behaviour and track evolution and the clean relief of problems that did not ask to be loved.
Charlotte appreciated that.
She appreciated people who knew when to stop.
Still, the thought followed her after Ruby left.
It sat beside her through the next simulation review, quiet and unwelcome. It lingered when she corrected an input error, when she sent an update to Hannah, when she stood by the coffee machine later and realised she had forgotten to drink the first cup entirely.
Dating required openness.
Not the fashionable kind of vulnerability people discussed in seminars, all neat language and tidy conclusions. Not the sort of thing that could be packaged into a sentence about communication styles.
Real openness.
The kind that meant letting someone close enough to see the places where you had learned not to expect much.
Charlotte did not have that in her anymore.
Or maybe she had once, and it had been worn away so gradually she had not noticed until it was gone. Either way, she had lost the ability to trust gently a very, very long time ago.
She had never had a boyfriend.
Not in school, where safety had felt temporary and affection like something that could be revoked without warning. She had been too busy learning which version of herself took up the least space.
Not at Cambridge, where she had worked until her eyes burned and her hands cramped, pouring herself into problem sets, libraries, lectures, late-night calculations, anything that could be solved by discipline. People had flirted. Some had even been kind about it. She had deflected them all with essays and deadlines and the cold, efficient belief that competence was a better investment than connection.
There had always been something more important.
Then there had been the cancer.
That had settled the matter in a very definitive way.
Charlotte still remembered the room where the doctor told her.
Sterile walls. Too-bright lights.
A poster about neurological symptoms curling slightly at one corner. The careful, gentle cadence of a specialist explaining timelines and treatment options and probabilities as if kindness could soften the shape of the words.
Tumour.
Surgery.
Radiation.
Chemotherapy.
Monitoring.
Support.
They had said that word several times.
Support.
As if it were a thing a person could simply decide to have.
Charlotte had sat with her hands folded in her lap, listening carefully, asking precise questions, nodding in the appropriate places. And somewhere beneath the clinical calm, a thought had arrived with perfect clarity.
This is not something you ask someone to share.
Nobody should be burdened with that.
The fear. The uncertainty. The possibility that she might disappear halfway through someone loving her.
She had survived, yes.
But survival had come with a cost.
It had taught her to carry her own weight and then some. To plan for the worst and apologise for nothing. To assume that if life dropped something unbearable into her hands, it was still her responsibility to hold it.
Opening herself up enough to let someone in would mean explaining too much.
Her mother.
Her father.
The house where she had learned to be silent.
The years no one had come for her.
The scars, visible and otherwise.
Charlotte no longer knew how to do that without flinching.
So she didn’t.
It was easier that way.
Cleaner.
By the time Charlotte got home that evening, the migraine had settled in properly.
Not the sharp kind. Not the kind that made her vision blur at the edges and forced her immediately into darkness.
This was duller. Heavier. A pressure wrapped around her skull like a hand tightening very slowly, making the world feel faintly misaligned, as though everything was half a second behind where it ought to be.
She unlocked the door, stepped inside, and closed it behind her.
For a moment, she stayed there.
Bag dropped at her feet.
Forehead pressed against the cool wood.
Breathing.
In.
Out.
Again.
It was not panic.
It never was anymore.
But migraines still carried echoes.
Pressure behind the eye. Light sensitivity. The low, traitorous whisper at the back of her mind: you have felt this before.
Charlotte closed her eyes.
“I know,” she murmured, to no one in particular. “I know.”
A soft, questioning noise answered from the hallway.
Charlotte opened her eyes and looked down.
Tilly sat on the floor, tail curled neatly around her paws, a round orange face tilted up in stern disapproval. She looked profoundly unimpressed by human frailty.
“You’re right,” Charlotte said quietly. “I’m late.”
Tilly blinked.
Judgment, but with affection.
Probably.
Charlotte kicked off her shoes and padded into the living room, switching off the overhead light before it could worsen the pressure behind her eyes. She left only the small lamp on near the sofa, its glow low and amber.
Muscle memory.
Survival habits never quite left. They only softened around the edges until they looked like preferences.
Tilly followed at her heels.
Charlotte sank onto the couch carefully, one hand pressed against her temple. The migraine pulsed, insistent but contained.
Unpleasant.
Not alarming.
She repeated that to herself automatically.
Unpleasant. Not alarming.
Still, every migraine carried the echo of hospital lights. Of MRI machines humming too close to her skull. Of doctors speaking gently in that terrible voice people used when they were about to change your life.
It’s probably nothing, they had said at first.
It had not been nothing.
Tilly jumped up beside her without waiting for an invitation, circled once, then climbed into Charlotte’s lap with the deliberate gravity of a creature who considered herself medically essential.
Charlotte exhaled.
“There you are,” she whispered.
Tilly tucked herself against Charlotte’s stomach, purring almost immediately.
Charlotte let her head fall back against the couch.
“Cancer cat,” she murmured, resting one hand on Tilly’s warm back.
Tilly flicked an ear.
Charlotte had gotten Tilly on a Tuesday.
Charlotte remembered that with unreasonable clarity.
The shelter had smelled of disinfectant, old blankets, and damp fur. Charlotte had still been wearing the blouse she wore to the appointment. She remembered that too. White. Stupid choice. Too formal for a diagnosis, too ordinary for the fact that her life had just split neatly into before and after.
The doctor’s voice had still been in her head.
We caught it early.
The prognosis is good.
You’ll need support.
She had not called her father.
She had not called anyone.
Instead, she had gone to the shelter on the way home, because some part of her had known before the rest of her caught up that she could not return to an empty flat with a brain tumour and nothing alive waiting for her.
Tilly had been in the last cage.
Quiet. Watchful. Recently surrendered.
Not performing charm. Not pawing at the bars. Not begging to be chosen.
Just sitting there, looking at Charlotte with an expression that seemed to say, Well?
Charlotte had crouched in front of the cage.
Tilly had stared back.
And Charlotte had thought, with startling, absurd clarity: If I die, this cat will not understand why I left.
So she had stayed.
Through surgery.
Through radiation.
Through the long, ugly recovery no one put in pamphlets properly — the fatigue, the dizziness, the fear disguised as medical vigilance, the slow crawl back into a body that no longer felt entirely trustworthy.
She had stayed because every evening there was a cat waiting to be fed.
A cat waiting to complain.
A cat waiting to climb onto her chest as if she could hold Charlotte’s soul in place by sheer stubbornness.
Charlotte stroked Tilly’s fur now, slow and steady, feeling the vibration of her purr seep through her hand and into her bones.
“I stayed,” she whispered. “See?”
Tilly pressed closer.
The migraine dulled, fractionally.
Outside, the world went on. Rumours, races, strategy calls, factory gossip, the noise of a season slowly trying to eat itself alive.
Inside, there was low light, warm fur, and the steady proof of something Charlotte still struggled to name.
Not happiness, exactly.
Not peace.
But life.
Chosen once.
Chosen again.
Chosen every day since.
Charlotte closed her eyes and let herself rest beneath the weight of the cat who had once made survival feel less like an obligation and more like a promise.
Just for a moment.
Just long enough to remember why she was still here.
***
The simulator room was wrong.
Not silent — the simulator room was never silent. There was always the low electrical hum of machinery, the faint murmur of engineers speaking in half-sentences, the click of keys, the shuffle of someone moving between consoles with a coffee in one hand and three problems in the other.
But it was missing something.
Max noticed before he meant to.
A rhythm.
A presence.
The far console, usually lit before the rest of the room had properly settled, was dark.
Charlotte’s chair was empty.
Max pulled off his gloves slowly, gaze lingering on the workstation as if she might appear if he looked long enough. Which was stupid. He knew it was stupid. He had known her properly for only a handful of weeks, and yet somehow his brain had already started cataloguing the room by whether or not Charlotte Fischer was in it.
He looked away.
“Where’s Charlotte?” he asked.
Casual.
Perfectly casual.
Like he had simply noticed a missing engineer and not the absence of a particular woman with short dark hair, dark eyes, and the ability to make him feel like an idiot by raising one eyebrow.
One of the sim engineers looked up from their laptop. “She called in sick.”
Max nodded. “Oh.”
The word landed badly.
Too heavy.
Too obvious.
He made himself set his gloves down.
Another engineer, older and more familiar, grimaced slightly. “Yeah. Migraines.”
Max paused. “Migraines?”
“Yeah.”
“She gets those a lot?”
The engineer hesitated.
It was small. Barely anything. But Max noticed it the way he noticed hesitation in a car before it snapped.
The first engineer glanced at the second.
The second shrugged. “After the brain tumour,” they said. “Yeah. Sometimes they’re brutal.”
Max went still.
For a second, the hum of the room seemed to flatten into one long, dull note.
“…The what?”
Both engineers looked at him.
The older one’s expression shifted first.
Realisation. Then regret.
“Oh,” they said slowly. “You didn’t know.”
Max shook his head once.
“No.”
The answer came out too quiet.
There was another pause, and this one was heavier. A silent exchange moved between the two engineers — not gossip, not panic, just the quick calculation of people who had learned there were things you handled carefully because Charlotte mattered.
That, somehow, made it worse.
The younger engineer spoke first, voice gentler now.
“She had cancer. A few years ago. Brain tumour.” He said it plainly, without drama, which only made the words more brutal. “She survived. Obviously. But the migraines stuck around.”
Max stared at them.
Brain tumour.
Cancer.
The words did not fit.
They refused to attach themselves to the woman he knew — precise, contained Charlotte, who rewound sim runs with a frown of intense concentration and spoke about flawed modelling assumptions like the data had personally betrayed her.
Charlotte, who crocheted tiny hats for her cat.
Charlotte, who had looked at him after Imola like winning a Grand Prix was a perfectly normal thing for a Grand Prix driver to have done.
Charlotte, who had made the car honest again.
“She’s fine now,” the engineer added quickly, as if Max had asked. As if the room could feel the sudden, sharp drop in him. “It’s not… I mean, they monitor everything. She’s okay. It’s just that sometimes her body reminds her.”
Max nodded.
He did not trust himself to speak.
Sometimes her body reminds her.
He looked toward the empty console again.
Her screens were off.
Her chair pushed in.
A neat absence.
The older engineer followed his gaze and sighed softly. “We basically force her to stay home when it hits.”
Max’s eyes moved back to them.
“Force her?”
“She’d work through it otherwise.”
“Of course she would,” the younger engineer muttered, fond and exasperated. “Last time she tried to remote into the model review from her sofa with one eye open.”
“She lasted eleven minutes,” the older one said. “Then Hannah threatened to change her passwords.”
Despite himself, Max almost smiled.
Almost.
“She’s stubborn,” the younger engineer said.
“Brilliant,” the other added. “But stubborn.”
Then their tone shifted, just slightly. Firmer. Protective.
“And we don’t mess around with it. If Charlotte says she’s not okay, she’s not okay. End of.”
Max looked between them.
That was when he saw it properly.
Not pity.
Not curiosity.
Not the strange, hungry interest people sometimes had in someone else’s tragedy.
This was different.
Quiet. Unshowy. Absolute.
They protected her.
Not because she had asked them to.
Max suspected Charlotte Fischer rarely asked anyone for anything.
They protected her because they had decided she was theirs.
The sim department’s. Red Bull’s, in that strange, territorial way the team had with people it loved.
The same way half the building treated Max like he was both weapon and child.
Except Charlotte had earned it without ever inviting it.
Something tightened in Max’s chest.
“How long has she been here?” he asked.
“Since she graduated,” the younger engineer said. “Cambridge. Straight in.”
“Barely took time off even then,” the older one added. “Had to be bullied into it, obviously.”
Max let out a slow breath.
Cambridge.
Austria.
Boarding school.
The cat account.
Cancer.
Migraines.
The pieces rearranged themselves, but they still did not make a full picture. If anything, they made less sense now. Or maybe they made too much.
Charlotte’s composure. Her distance. The way she did not waste energy trying to be liked. The way she treated praise like a weather report. The way she had made herself necessary and still somehow almost invisible.
“She never talks about it,” Max said.
It was not really a question.
“No,” the older engineer replied. “And we don’t push.”
The younger one glanced toward Charlotte’s empty console, expression softening. “She earned that.”
Max nodded once.
He understood that.
More than he expected to.
There were things people did not get to know simply because they were curious.
There were parts of a person that had to be offered, not taken.
Still, the knowledge sat badly in him.
He had gone to her desk after Imola wanting her to be impressed.
The memory turned sour now.
He had stood there with a trophy somewhere in the building and a win still fresh in everyone’s mouth, waiting for Charlotte Fischer to look at him like he was extraordinary.
And she had survived a brain tumour.
Of course she had not cared about Imola the way he wanted her to.
Of course she had looked at him like winning was simply what he was supposed to do.
Her scale for important had been rewritten by things he had not even imagined.
Max swallowed.
“Right,” he said finally. “Okay.”
It was neither right nor okay, but there was nothing else to say.
He turned back toward the simulator, movements automatic. Helmet. Seat. Straps. Wheel. Systems coming online around him, the familiar ritual settling over his body even as his mind stayed fixed on the empty workstation beyond the glass.
The run began.
The car loaded.
The model waited.
Max stared at the screen for a moment longer than necessary.
He was supposed to be thinking about balance. Entry instability. Rear load. The thousand problems of a car that wanted to punish him for believing in it too much.
Instead, he thought about Charlotte sitting alone somewhere with a migraine bad enough to keep her away from the one place she seemed to prefer over people.
He thought about her colleagues closing ranks without needing to discuss it.
He thought about a woman who had survived something enormous and then returned to work as if that were the logical next step.
A few days ago, he had been curious about her.
Annoyingly curious.
Embarrassingly curious.
He had wanted to know why she sounded British when she was Austrian. Why she crocheted hats for her cat. Why she looked at him like he was a variable instead of a world champion.
Now the curiosity had changed shape.
It had become concern.
Not abstract. Not polite.
Personal.
Max tightened his hands on the wheel.
That was inconvenient.
That was dangerous.
That was very, very bad.
Through the glass, Charlotte’s console remained dark.
Max looked at it once more.
Then he drove.
***
Max found Hannah exactly where he expected to find her.
In her office. Half-hidden behind two monitors, shoulders rounded toward a screen full of data, a mug beside her hand that had probably been hot once in a previous lifetime.
She looked up when he knocked.
Then immediately narrowed her eyes.
“You have a face,” she said.
Max paused in the doorway. “I always have a face.”
“No,” Hannah said. “You have that face. The one where you are about to ask a question you have already decided is casual, even though it absolutely is not.”
Max exhaled through his nose and leaned one shoulder against the doorframe.
“I found out about Charlotte.”
Hannah’s expression changed.
Not dramatically. Not with alarm.
Just softer.
“Oh,” she said.
That confirmed it before she said anything else.
Max’s jaw tightened.
“They said she called in sick. Migraine.”
Hannah nodded once. “Yeah. That happens sometimes.”
“Because of the tumour.”
She watched him for a moment, measuring how much he knew and how much he was trying very hard not to show he cared.
“Yes,” she said eventually. “Brain tumour. Cancer. A few years ago.”
The words were not new anymore. He had already heard them in the sim room.
They still landed badly.
Max looked down at the floor, then back at her. “She’s okay?”
“If it’s one of the migraines, she’ll be fine in a day or two,” Hannah said. “She knows her limits.”
Max gave her a look.
Hannah sighed. “Mostly.”
That sounded more like Charlotte.
“She tries to work through them?”
“Of course she does,” Hannah said, as if this was a deeply irritating fact of nature. “Because apparently surviving cancer did not teach her that rest is not a moral failure.”
Max’s mouth pressed into a line.
Hannah leaned back in her chair.
“She doesn’t like people making a thing out of it,” she added. “She doesn’t hide it exactly, but she doesn’t volunteer it either. It’s not how she wants people to see her.”
“No,” Max said quietly. “I can understand that.”
Hannah studied him.
There was too much understanding in her face.
Max hated that.
He shifted, folding his arms. “So she’s alone?”
Hannah blinked.
“Alone?”
“At home,” Max clarified too quickly. “I mean, if she has a migraine. Is someone there? A boyfriend or something?”
Silence.
It lasted half a second too long.
Then Hannah’s eyebrows rose.
Max immediately regretted everything.
“Oh,” she said.
“No.”
“Oh, Max.”
“I am just asking.”
“No, you are absolutely not just asking.”
He straightened. “It’s a normal question.”
“It became abnormal the second you said boyfriend or something like the word boyfriend was trying to murder you.”
Max looked away. “Forget I asked.”
“I will do no such thing.”
“Hannah.”
“She’s single,” Hannah said, far too calmly.
Max’s eyes flicked back to her before he could stop them.
Hannah saw it.
Of course she saw it.
Her smile sharpened.
“She lives alone,” she continued. “A few minutes from campus. Quiet flat. One cat. No boyfriend. No secret husband. No dramatic situationship with an aero engineer, despite several people’s attempts.”
Max absorbed that with a level of interest he did not want to examine.
“Oh,” he said.
Hannah’s smile became unbearable.
“Right,” he added, because apparently he was determined to make it worse.
She rested her chin in her hand.
“You want to check on her.”
“No,” Max said automatically.
Hannah waited.
He made it three seconds.
“…Maybe.”
“There it is.”
“I can’t just show up at her apartment,” he said. “That’s weird.”
“It can be weird,” Hannah allowed.
Max stared at her. “That is not helpful.”
“It depends how you do it.”
“How is there a non-weird way to show up at someone’s home when they’re sick?”
“By not making it about yourself,” Hannah said simply. “By bringing something useful. By leaving if she wants you to leave. By not expecting gratitude, vulnerability, or a scene from a romantic comedy.”
Max frowned. “I don’t want a romantic comedy.”
“No,” Hannah said. “You want a woman who doesn’t care that you won Imola to let you care about her without biting your head off.”
Max opened his mouth. Closed it. “That is very specific.”
“And yet accurate.”
He rubbed a hand over his face.
“I don’t even know her that well.”
“No,” Hannah agreed. “You don’t.”
That should have helped.
It did not.
“But you know enough to be worried,” she added.
Max looked at her.
Hannah’s voice softened. “And for Charlotte, someone being worried without trying to take over is not the worst thing in the world.”
“She doesn’t need me checking on her.”
“No,” Hannah said. “She doesn’t need anyone.”
That hit him harder than expected.
Because Hannah did not say it admiringly.
She said it like it was a fact and a wound at the same time.
Max looked toward the corridor, though Charlotte was not there. Her empty console flashed in his mind again. Dark screens. Chair pushed in. The whole room subtly wrong without her.
“She would hate people fussing,” he said.
“She would despise it.”
“So I should not fuss.”
“Correct.”
“But checking is different?”
“It can be.”
Max huffed. “You are being very unhelpful for someone who knows her.”
“I know her well enough to know she won’t want pity,” Hannah said. “And I know you well enough to know pity is not what this is.”
Max went still.
Hannah let that sit for a moment.
Then she stood, picking up her tablet.
“Don’t overthink it.”
“That is impossible.”
“For you, apparently.” She moved around the desk, then paused beside him. “Bring normal things. Migraine-safe things. Crackers. Electrolytes. Nothing scented. Nothing loud. Don’t knock like the police. If she opens the door and tells you to go away, go away.”
Max nodded slowly, committing the list to memory with the same seriousness he gave race strategy.
Hannah looked at him and sighed.
“Oh, you are completely doomed.”
“I am not.”
“Max,” she said, almost fond now. “You came into my office to ask whether Charlotte Fischer has a boyfriend because you heard she has a migraine.”
He said nothing.
There was really nothing useful to say.
Hannah patted his arm once as she passed.
“She lives on Hawthorn Close,” she said. “Number twelve. I did not tell you that.”
Max stared after her.
“That seems very much like you told me.”
“No,” Hannah called over her shoulder. “I merely released information into the room. What you do with it is between you, your conscience, and whatever terrible romantic instincts you apparently have.”
“Hannah.”
She glanced back, smiling now.
“You really do have it bad.”
Then she was gone, leaving Max alone in her office doorway with Charlotte’s address in his head, concern sitting uncomfortably behind his ribs, and the deeply inconvenient realisation that, for once, winning something would not help him at all.
Pairing: Max Verstappen x Charlotte Fischer (Original Character)
Summary: Charlotte Fischer has spent years making sure no one in Formula One knows who she really is.
At Red Bull, she is simply Charlotte: Cambridge graduate, simulator engineer, owner of a deeply judgmental cat, and the woman responsible for making the team’s broken 2025 car model finally tell the truth.
She prefers it that way. No family name. No questions. No one looking at her like she is someone’s daughter, someone’s mistake, or someone’s failure to protect.
Max Verstappen notices her anyway.
Warnings and Notes: I wrote fanfiction of my own fanfiction. This is the result.
As always big thanks to @llirawolf , who listens to me ramble.
Charlotte Fischer had been at Red Bull since the week after she graduated.
She’d sent in her CV like anyone else. Interviewed in a windowless room with bad coffee and too many questions. Signed her contract quietly and moved her life to Milton Keynes with the vague sense that she’d chosen something irreversible.
Sometimes — usually when she was three coffees deep and the sim refused to behave — it amused her, in a dry, private way, that she’d ended up here of all places.
Red Bull Racing.
The irony wasn’t lost on her.
No one here knew who she was related to.
No one softened their tone around her. No one watched her for signs of brilliance or disappointment. No one projected legacy onto her shoulders.
She wasn’t anyone’s daughter.
She could just be Charlotte.
Just another engineer with too many tabs open and a stubborn relationship with data.
Charlotte liked it that way.
The simulator lived deep inside the building, far from daylight and distraction.
Charlotte liked to joke — only to herself — that you could lose entire days down there and no one would notice.
She’d learned the rhythms of the place: the hum of machines, the faint smell of warmed electronics, the way the air never quite changed. It was insulated from the outside world, from weather and seasons and expectations.
The sim didn’t care who her father was. It didn’t care who her mother had been.
It didn’t care that she’d once lain in a hospital bed counting ceiling tiles and wondering if this would be the last room she would ever see.
The sim only cared whether the model was wrong.
If the numbers were wrong, it told her.
If the assumptions were flawed, it punished her.
If she fixed it, it responded honestly.
There was no pity in it.
Only cause and effect.
She spent most of her time down there — long hours, irregular meals, headphones on, mind locked into the language of physics and probability. People sometimes forgot she existed until something broke or improved unexpectedly.
She didn’t mind.
Being invisible had its advantages.
There were days — quieter ones, harder ones — when she recognised the truth without flinching:
When it wasn’t Tilly the cat keeping her alive, it had been this.
The focus. The problems.
The sense that something complex could be understood if she stayed with it long enough.
She had survived because she’d had reasons to keep thinking forward.
Sometimes, late at night, she’d sit alone in the sim control room, lights low, replaying runs not because she needed to — but because the repetition was grounding.
The steady hum reminded her that she was still here, that time was still moving.
She didn’t think about her father much while she worked.
That part of her life felt distant, sealed off behind professional neutrality and old decisions. Here, she was judged on output, not origin.
Here, she was competent.
Here, she mattered.
Charlotte adjusted a parameter, watched the model settle, and made a note to herself for the next session.
Just Charlotte.
And that was more than enough.
***
The car was lying to him.
Max had known it for weeks, in that low, irritating way that lived between shoulder blades and instincts — the way a thing felt wrong even when the numbers insisted otherwise.
The simulator said one thing. The track said another.
And every time he brought it up, it got smoothed over with words like correlation and tolerance and development window.
None of which helped when the rear snapped like it hated him personally.
So when GP told him there was someone in the sim department who wanted ten minutes of his time, Max expected another polite meeting.
Another explanation.
Another we’re working on it.
He did not expect her.
She was standing half-turned toward the screen when he walked in, arms crossed loosely, posture straight but not stiff.
Tall. Longer legs than most people in the room.
Short dark hair that brushed her jaw, slightly mussed like she’d run a hand through it too many times.
Dark eyes — sharp, focused— flicked to him, assessed him, and then went straight back to the data.
No awe. No hesitation.
Interesting.
“Max, this is Charlotte Fischer.” GP said. “Sim engineer. Charlotte, Max.”
Charlotte Fischer nodded once. No smile. No fuss.
“Hi, nice to meet you.”
Her voice was calm. Neutral in a way that suggested it had been trained that way.
Max nodded back, suddenly very aware of the fact that he was still in his race suit and probably smelled faintly like heat and frustration.
“So,” he said, because silence felt loaded already. “You found something.”
“Yes,” she said immediately, uncrossing her arms and stepping closer to the screen. “The sim wasn’t wrong because of bad inputs. It was wrong because it was assuming the car behaved honestly.”
Max blinked.
“…Okay.”
She glanced at him then, just briefly, and there was something dry in her expression. Not amused. Not impressed. Just… certain.
“The aero load model is overcorrecting for yaw instability,” she continued. “Which means the sim compensates in ways the real car can’t. It’s smoothing behavior that doesn’t exist. So when you drive it, you subconsciously trust a balance you’ll never actually have on track.”
GP inhaled slowly, like someone bracing.
Max stepped closer, eyes narrowing at the replay she pulled up.
“That’s why it snaps,” he said quietly. “Mid-corner. Feels fine until it doesn’t.”
Charlotte nodded. “Yes.”
Not maybe. Not we think. Yes.
She pulled up a comparison run — sim versus real telemetry — and the discrepancy was suddenly obvious, glaring in hindsight. The sim was lying, and it had been doing it for months.
“I adjusted the assumptions,” she said. “Removed the artificial stabilisation. It’s… less pleasant to drive now.”
Max snorted.
“Good.”
That earned him a real look. One eyebrow lifted slightly. “I thought you might say that.”
He liked her already.
They ran the updated sim together.
The car was ugly, nervous, difficult — and suddenly, it made sense. The feedback matched his hands. The fear points lined up with reality.
When Max climbed out, adrenaline buzzing in his veins, he realised something else had changed.
He was smiling. “That’s it,” he said, turning toward her. “That’s the car.”
Charlotte inclined her head, like she’d expected nothing else.
“You’ll still hate it,” she said. “Just for the correct reasons now.”
He laughed before he could stop himself.
GP cleared his throat, looking between them with interest. “Good work,” he said to Charlotte.
She nodded again, already gathering her tablet, mentally moving on.
Max watched her for half a second too long.
Pretty was the wrong word. She wasn’t decorative. She was… arresting.
Tall, composed, dark hair sharp against pale skin, dark eyes that didn’t seek approval. Someone who fixed things quietly and didn’t need applause for it.
And something else — something he couldn’t quite name — tugged at him.
Familiarity, maybe. Or recognition.
As she turned to leave, Max found himself speaking without planning it. “You’ll be around for the next sessions?”
Charlotte paused, glanced back at him. “Yes.”
Just that.
Then she walked out, steps measured, already gone from the moment.
Max stood there, helmet under his arm, heart doing something annoying and unexpected.
GP watched him, unimpressed. “…Don’t,” he said flatly.
Max didn’t even look away from the door. “I haven’t done anything.”
GP huffed. “You’re thinking too loudly.”
Max smiled to himself, slow and crooked. Yeah. He definitely was.
***
Lunch was a brief ceasefire between debriefs and damage limitation.
They were halfway through eating when Charlotte appeared at the edge of the table, tablet tucked under her arm, tote bag slung over one shoulder.
She paused, polite. “Sorry to interrupt.”
Max looked up immediately. Tried not to look like he had.
Hannah smiled. “You’re not interrupting.”
Charlotte reached into her bag and pulled out something… knitted. Crocheted, actually. Thick yarn, carefully shaped.
It was a tiny hat.
A ridiculous, adorable, painstakingly made tiny hat.
“This is for Nimbus,” Charlotte said, handing it to Hannah. “Your daughters asked if the ears could be… exaggerated.”
Hannah gasped softly. “Oh my god. They’re going to lose their minds.”
Max stared at the hat.
Then at Charlotte.
Then back at the hat.
“…Is that,” he said slowly, “a cat-sized hat?”
“Yes.”
No hesitation. No embarrassment.
GP choked on his drink.
Hannah turned the little thing over in her hands, inspecting the stitches. “You’re a miracle worker. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Charlotte hesitated, then added, “If Nimbus hates it, tell them it’s my fault.”
“He won’t,” Hannah said confidently. “He tolerates nonsense remarkably well.”
Charlotte nodded once, satisfied, and glanced briefly at Max — just a flicker — before stepping back.
“Enjoy lunch,” she said.
Then she was gone again, leaving behind a crochet hat and a table full of stunned engineers.
There was a beat of silence.
Max broke it immediately.
“I need to see pictures,” he said, pointing at the hat. “Immediately. When your cat wears that.”
Hannah laughed. “Of course you do.”
“I’m serious,” Max said. “This is important.”
GP sighed into his coffee. “Please explain to me how this is now important.”
Max ignored him, eyes still on the hat.
Hannah smiled knowingly. “Charlotte has an Instagram.”
Max’s head snapped up. “She does?”
“Yes,” Hannah said casually. “She only posts her cat. Modeling the hats.”
Max froze. “…Only that?”
“Yes.”
“How many hats are we talking about?”
Hannah shrugged. “Seasonal. Themes. There was a little witch one at Halloween.”
Max was already pulling out his phone.
“What’s the handle?”
Hannah told him.
Max followed the account without a second’s hesitation.
The feed loaded.
Cat. Hat. Another hat. A different angle of the same cat. A caption that was aggressively understated.
Max stared.
Then smiled.
Then liked three photos in a row before realising he probably shouldn’t like all of them.
GP watched him with the weary expression of a man who had seen this before and knew how it ended.
“You are,” GP said, “deeply predictable.”
Max didn’t look up.
“She crochets hats,” he said faintly. “For cats.”
“Yes,” Hannah said. “And?”
“And she fixes our sim,” Max added. “And she’s tall.”
Hannah snorted.
GP stood, collecting his tray. “I’m leaving before this gets worse.”
Max finally glanced up, phone still in his hand, eyes bright.
“It’s already worse,” he said cheerfully.
And he liked another photo anyway.
Max was still scrolling when GP came back with his coffee.
Another cat. Another hat.
Max liked it.
Hannah watched him do it.
She didn’t say anything at first. Just leaned back in her chair, arms crossed, eyes flicking between Max, the phone, and GP with the quiet confidence of someone about to ruin a man’s day.
“Ah,” she said eventually. “There it is.”
Max frowned. “What.”
GP glanced over. Took in the scene in half a second. “Oh,” GP said flatly. “No.”
Max finally looked up. “What do you mean no.”
“You have a crush,” Hannah said, far too cheerfully.
Max scoffed. “I do not.”
GP sat down slowly, the way one does when bracing for disappointment.
“You followed an engineer’s cat Instagram within thirty seconds,” GP said. “And you’re smiling at your phone.”
“It’s a cat,” Max argued. “In a hat!”
Hannah raised an eyebrow. “You don’t follow my cat.”
“That’s because your cat doesn’t wear costumes,” Max shot back.
GP pinched the bridge of his nose.
“This,” he said, gesturing vaguely at Max, “is exactly how it starts.”
Max rolled his eyes. “You’re both being dramatic.”
Hannah leaned forward. “Max. You asked me to send you photos of Nimbus wearing the hat. You said it was ‘important.’”
“It is important.”
GP stared at him. “Why.”
Max opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Opened it again.
“Well,” he said, stalling, “because—”
Hannah smiled sweetly. “Because you like her.”
“I like that she fixed the sim,” Max said quickly.
“And crocheted a hat for my cat,” Hannah added.
“And has an Instagram for it,” GP said.
“And you followed it immediately,” Hannah finished.
They both looked at him.
Max exhaled through his nose, defeated.
“…Fine,” he muttered. “Maybe a little.”
Hannah clapped once. “Oh god. You have a crush.”
GP groaned. “We are not doing this in the middle of a season from hell.”
Max looked back at his phone. The orange cat stared out from the screen, tiny hat slightly askew.
“She’s just… interesting,” he said, quieter now. “And she’s good. At her job.”
GP gave him a long look. “So were many people before who you did not stalk via crochet content.”
Max shrugged.
Hannah laughed outright. “This is adorable. I give it three weeks before you ask her about yarn.”
“I am not asking her about yarn,” Max protested.
GP didn’t even look convinced.
Max liked another photo.
Just one more.
For science.
***
Meanwhile on Twitter:
@/gridwatcher:
🚨 extremely important max verstappen following update 🚨
he just followed… a cat account???
@/tyredegpls: a WHAT account
@/gridwatcher: no because look
it’s just
a cat
wearing crocheted hats
@/papayapanic: pls tell me you’re joking
@/gridwatcher: I WISH I WAS
handle is literally tillyshats
@/softsector: hold on
scrolling
oh my god
WHY IS IT SO CUTE
@/dutchdelight33: max: fighting a cursed car every weekend
also max: yes. tiny hat.
@/downforcegirlie: this is the most unhinged thing he’s done all season and that is SAYING something
@/gridwatcher: the captions are killing me
“she hated this.”
bestie SAME
@/tyredegpls: do we think max knows the person irl or is this just him discovering joy again
@/softsector: either way i support his healing journey through crochet cat hats
@/downforcegirlie: he’s gonna like every post isn’t he
@/softsector: he already liked three in a row. source: me, refreshing.
@/gridwatcher: someone please tell him twitter has eyes
@/papayapanic: no don’t
this is the only joy we have this season
@/gridwatcher: max verstappen following a cat crochet account is the most emotionally stable thing he’s done in months and honestly? relatable.
@/papayaemergency: the captions are like
“she did not consent”
“winter collection complete”
I’m crying
@/F1Detective: give us 24 hours
@/F1Detective (later): ok so:
– account has existed for years
– never posted anything F1 related
– follows exactly 12 people
– max followed it today
this is either chaos or romance
@/OrangeSector33: max verstappen silently liking crochet cat content during a catastrophic season is my new coping mechanism
@/MaxAppreciation: I just know GP saw this and sighed
@/SlowPitStop: this is how it starts
first the cat
then the yarn
then suddenly he’s knitting in the garage
@/RedBullChaos: max hasn’t liked anything else today
just the cat
priorities king 👑
@/DutchF1Watcher: I don’t care who runs the account
I just want them to know
they made the fandom happy today 🧶🐱
Sim_Ruby: because he is a dedicated professional athlete committed to improving performance
Aero_Matt: ruby
Sim_Ruby: because charlotte is here
Strategy_Leah: ah
Composite_Tom: there it is
Garage_Pete: wait are we allowed to say that now
Strategy_Hannah: No.
Garage_Pete: so yes
Strategy_Hannah: Also no.
Sim_Ruby: Max asked whether the updated low-speed model was ready
Aero_Matt: is it
Sim_Ruby: it was ready yesterday
Aero_Matt: and did he know that
Sim_Ruby: yes
Aero_Matt: Beautiful
Powertrains_Nina: I saw him walk past the sim wing three times this morning
Garage_Pete: maybe he was lost
Powertrains_Nina: max verstappen has been in this building since he was seventeen
Garage_Pete: emotionally lost
Composite_Tom: that checks out
PR_Sophie: Can someone confirm whether Max has actually followed the cat account or is this another rumour?
Strategy_Leah: confirmed
PR_Sophie: oh my god
Aero_Matt: what cat account
Sim_Ruby: Charlotte’s cat. Tilly. The crochet hats.
Aero_Matt: the WHAT
Garage_Pete: welcome to the lore
Powertrains_Nina: Tilly has worn, to my knowledge:
pumpkin hat
dinosaur hat
mushroom hat
flower hat
PR_Sophie: and max followed within approximately thirty seconds of learning it existed
Aero_Matt: that is not a crush
that is a telemetry trace
Engineering_GP: All of you have work to do.
Aero_Matt: so do you
Engineering_GP: Correct. Mine is apparently preventing a world champion from flirting like a concussed golden retriever.
Sim_Ruby: GP
Garage_Pete: A CONCUSSED GOLDEN RETRIEVER
Powertrains_Nina: accurate though
Strategy_Hannah: Unfortunately.
PR_Sophie: For legal purposes, no one is to discuss this outside internal channels.
Aero_Matt: we have legal purposes now?
PR_Sophie: Max liking five consecutive photos of a cat wearing hats is market-sensitive information.
Strategy_Leah: true
Composite_Tom: the FIA should investigate
Garage_Pete: penalty for excessive adorableness
Sim_Ruby: UPDATE: Charlotte just told Max the simulator was “less wrong than yesterday” and he smiled like she handed him a trophy
Aero_Matt: oh he is GONE gone
Powertrains_Nina: did she mean it as praise?
Sim_Ruby: for Charlotte? yes
Strategy_Hannah: That is basically a sonnet from her.
Engineering_GP: Do not encourage him.
Strategy_Hannah: I am not encouraging him. I am observing.
Engineering_GP: You gave him her cat Instagram.
Strategy_Hannah: That was cultural enrichment!
Garage_Pete: max just asked whether charlotte was having lunch
Aero_Matt: normal
Garage_Pete: then immediately said “not like that”
Strategy_Leah: less normal
Garage_Pete: then left without eating
Composite_Tom: catastrophic
Powertrains_Nina: has anyone told charlotte
Sim_Ruby: told charlotte what
Powertrains_Nina: that the entire building thinks max has a crush on her
Sim_Ruby: she knows
Aero_Matt: SHE KNOWS?
Sim_Ruby: she has eyes
Strategy_Hannah: And a Cambridge degree.
Garage_Pete: so what is she doing about it
Sim_Ruby: mostly pretending not to know
Strategy_Leah: valid
Composite_Tom: romance, but make it deeply repressed and data-driven
Sim_Ruby: MAX JUST BROUGHT CHARLOTTE A COFFEE
Aero_Matt: did she accept it
Sim_Ruby: yes
Composite_Tom: oh my god
Garage_Pete: wedding when
Strategy_Hannah: Do not be weird.
Garage_Pete: sorry
Powertrains_Nina: what kind of coffee
Sim_Ruby: black. no sugar. exactly how she drinks it.
Strategy_Leah: oh
Aero_Matt: OH
Composite_Tom: he knows her coffee order
Garage_Pete: we are so back
***
Charlotte arrived early enough that the building had not fully woken yet.
The corridor lights were still dimmed to half-strength, the air cool and quiet in the way she liked best, before the factory filled with voices and footsteps and the restless machinery of a race weekend being prepared in a thousand invisible ways.
She had a coffee in one hand, her tablet tucked beneath her arm, and half her mind already turning over the work she had left unfinished the night before.
There was still a discrepancy in the latest sim run that annoyed her.
Not enough to be alarming.
Enough to be personal.
She slowed when she reached the entrance to the sim wing.
Voices drifted from the coffee machine.
Two engineers stood near the counter, jackets still on, mugs in hand, bodies loose with the kind of ease people only had before the day had properly claimed them. They were talking the way people talked when work had not yet narrowed them down to data and deadlines.
“My mum keeps asking if I’m coming home for Easter,” one of them said, amused. “As if I can just teleport.”
The other laughed. “Mine’s already planning Christmas. It’s March.”
“Better than my dad,” the first replied. “He sends spreadsheets. Travel options. Budget comparisons. Last year there were colour-coded tabs.”
Charlotte stopped just out of sight.
Family talk had a way of slipping under her skin before she had time to brace for it. It was always the harmless conversations that did the most damage.
The little complaints. The fond exasperation. The casual certainty that someone was waiting somewhere, planning too much, caring clumsily but consistently.
She waited until the moment passed, then stepped forward.
The engineers glanced over, nodded in greeting, and moved aside to let her reach the coffee machine. Their conversation faded naturally as work reasserted itself.
Normal.
Unremarkable.
Charlotte returned the nod, polite and distant, then continued down the corridor with her coffee warming her hand.
She did not think about her family often.
Not actively.
It was not something she pushed away so much as something that had ceased to belong to her daily life. Like a room in a house she had stopped entering until, eventually, she no longer remembered the exact placement of the furniture.
She had a mother once.
That part was easy to remember.
Warmth. Beauty that had nothing to do with mirrors. A laugh that lived in the body more than the mouth. Hands that tucked hair behind Charlotte’s ear with absentminded tenderness. A voice that spoke to her as if she were already someone worth listening to.
Then she had a father.
Had.
The word still landed strangely.
She had not spoken to him in nearly four years now. Not properly. Not since the last argument — if it could even be called that. Arguments implied heat on both sides. Noise. Back-and-forth. Something alive enough to resist.
What they had…that was a rupture.
A single moment where everything unspoken finally surfaced, where Charlotte stopped absorbing it quietly and said, in every way she knew how, this hurts.
And he had answered with calm-downs.
With compromises.
With that familiar, polished instinct to keep the peace, as if peace had ever been neutral. As if it had not always been purchased with her silence.
She had walked out that night without slamming the door.
She had never gone back.
Cutting contact had not been dramatic.
It had been administrative.
She changed her number. Updated emergency contacts. Removed his name from forms and replaced it with her own. Changed what needed changing, signed what needed signing, and built a life that no longer required anyone else’s permission to continue.
It had not felt like loss.
That had surprised her, at first.
It had felt like relief.
She reached the simulator control room and set her things down. The machines hummed around her, steady and familiar, wrapping the room in a sound she understood better than most people’s voices.
This, she could trust.
Data did not ask where you were from.
It did not ask who raised you.
It did not assume connection where there was none.
She powered up her workstation, eyes scanning the screen as systems came online. The familiar glow caught against her coffee cup, her notes, the edge of her hand.
Families, she thought, were something you either got lucky with or learned to live without.
She had learned. And she had survived.
Still, sometimes, she could not help thinking about it.
It happened more often than she liked to admit.
Not deliberately. Not masochistically.
Just… in passing.
A screen left on in the background. A photograph in a paddock recap. A video clip that autoplayed before she could stop it.
Her father laughing with Jack on his shoulders.
Her father leaning down to listen to Rosa, one hand warm and familiar at her back.
Her father with Benedict, proud and attentive and present in a way that looked effortless from the outside.
A father.
Charlotte never sought those moments out, but they found her anyway, slipping into her periphery like static she could never quite tune out.
Every time, she wondered the same thing.
How can you do it for them?
How could he know how to kneel to a child’s height, how to listen, how to protect, how to make himself soft enough to be trusted — and still never have managed it for her?
She did not think it with anger anymore.
That part had burned out years ago.
What remained was quieter. Sharper.
Confusion, edged with grief.
She had been there first.
The thought arrived uninvited every time. Not as an accusation. Not even as a plea.
Just as fact.
She had been there first.
Stephanie’s face surfaced next, as it often did when Charlotte let herself follow the thread.
Stephanie, cool and immaculate. Stephanie, whose displeasure had never needed to become a raised voice to be felt. Stephanie, who had looked at Charlotte as if she were a problem that should have resolved itself through gratitude and silence.
Charlotte had spent years trying to be smaller around her.
Quieter.
Easier.
Less inconveniently alive.
It had never worked.
Nothing would have worked.
That had been one of the cruellest things to learn. That sometimes there was no correct version of yourself that would make someone love you. Sometimes the offence was not your behaviour, or your tone, or your awkwardness, or your grief.
Sometimes the offence was simply that you existed.
Susie belonged in a different category altogether.
Susie had never been cruel.
That mattered.
It also had not been enough.
Charlotte had learned early that kindness without intervention still left bruises. That sympathy did not stop harm if it stayed quiet. That a soft look across a dinner table was not the same thing as someone saying, enough.
She did not resent Susie.
Not exactly.
She simply had not trusted her.
And that, too, had felt inevitable.
Her mother was the only one untouched by complication.
Charlotte missed her with a dull, persistent ache that had nothing to do with time. No amount of years had softened it. No amount of success had replaced the absence. It lived in her quietly, beneath the skin, like an old injury that ached before rain.
She missed the way her mother had spoken to her like Charlotte’s thoughts mattered.
The way she had touched her hair when she was thinking.
The way she had laughed — full-bodied, unselfconscious, generous — as if joy was not something to ration.
She missed the safety of her.
The certainty.
Sometimes Charlotte tried to imagine what her life would have been if her mother had lived.
She suspected the answer was: simpler.
Not easier.
Just less lonely.
She rarely allowed herself to dwell on the question that haunted her most.
If she were still alive, would any of this have happened?
Charlotte knew the answer.
No.
Because her mother would never have let anyone make her feel optional.
She sat down at her desk, set her coffee beside the keyboard, and pulled up the latest sim data.
The discrepancy was still there, waiting for her.
Good.
That, at least, was something she knew how to fix.
***
Max hadn’t meant to listen.
That was the thing.
He was not sneaking around the sim wing like some sort of stalker who lingered near doorways because Charlotte Fischer happened to be on the other side of them.
He was simply walking.
And then he heard her laugh.
Not the small, contained sound she sometimes made when someone said something mildly funny and she decided, apparently by committee, that it deserved acknowledgement.
This was different.
Quick. Unpolished. Surprised out of her.
Max slowed before he could stop himself.
The office door was half-open. Voices drifted out into the corridor — easy, bright, the kind of conversation people had when the day had not fully sharpened around them yet.
Charlotte’s voice cut through the others.
Distinct.
Calm.
Impeccably British in that way that made Max think of expensive schools and people who used forks correctly even when angry.
“You know,” one of her colleagues said, audibly grinning, “every time you say can’t, I expect you to start announcing tea.”
Charlotte made an offended sound. “That’s not even fair.”
“It is,” another voice chimed in. “You sound like you went to the kind of school that has its own crest.”
“I did,” Charlotte said dryly.
Max stopped walking.
He pulled out his phone, because apparently he was now that person and if anyone asked, he could pretend he had received a message.
“Called it,” the first colleague said triumphantly. “I knew it. Boarding school.”
“Very pricey boarding school,” Charlotte corrected. “With uniforms that cost more than my rent.”
Someone laughed. “You’re joking.”
“I wish I were. There was a blazer. It had piping.”
“Oh, posh-posh.”
“Traumatised-posh,” Charlotte corrected. “There is a difference.”
Max’s mouth twitched despite himself.
He could picture it too easily.
Charlotte in some severe school uniform, dark hair shorter even then maybe, dark eyes already watchful, standing too straight because someone somewhere had taught her posture could be armour.
Charlotte learning early how to sound composed. How to make every sentence smooth enough that no one could grab hold of it.
He filed it away.
Boarding school.
Expensive.
Old money, maybe.
Or at least money somewhere.
That part did not quite fit with the rest of her, though. Not with the way she never talked like someone expecting anything to be handed to her. Not with the way she moved through Red Bull like she had carved out every inch of space herself.
Then one of her colleagues said, “Okay, but wait — you’re not even British, are you?”
There was a pause.
Small. Almost nothing.
Max noticed anyway.
“No,” Charlotte said. “I was born in Austria.”
That stopped him properly.
Austria.
The word clicked into place somewhere in the back of his mind, sharp and unexpected.
“In Austria?” the colleague echoed. “Then why do you sound like you were raised by the BBC?”
Charlotte huffed softly. “Because I moved young and learned quickly that sounding neutral was useful.”
The colleague laughed. “Neutral? Charlotte, you sound like you should be disappointed in my table manners.”
“I often am.”
More laughter.
Max did not laugh this time.
Sounding neutral was useful.
He turned the words over once.
Twice.
He had learned, in the few weeks since Charlotte had appeared properly in his orbit, that she rarely wasted words. She could make a joke, yes. She could be dry enough to make GP look up from his coffee. But she did not say things by accident.
Useful.
Not natural.
Not inherited.
Useful.
He stored that away too.
Austrian.
Moved young.
Accent chosen. Or trained. Or both.
He should have kept walking.
He really should have.
Instead, he stood there in the corridor with his phone in his hand, pretending to scroll through nothing, collecting pieces of Charlotte Fischer like small, mismatched parts of a car he did not yet understand.
Cat Instagram.
That had been the first piece, really.
The account with the orange cat in crocheted hats.
Tilly’s hats. sixty-seven posts. No selfies. No friends. No food pictures. No glamorous life tucked between work and travel.
Just a cat staring into the camera with offended dignity while wearing whatever newest crocheted creation her owner had made.
Max had followed the account within thirty seconds of finding it.
Hannah and GP had mocked him for that.
Fairly, maybe.
He had liked only three photos at first, because he had enough self-control not to like all of them immediately. Then he had gone back later and liked two more, because the cat had been wearing a tiny mushroom hat and he was not made of stone.
That had told him something about Charlotte too.
Not the obvious thing — that she liked cats, though that was important and frankly made her more interesting.
But the other thing.
That she made things with her hands.
Tiny, impractical, ridiculous things.
For a cat.
The same woman who spoke in clean, precise lines about sim correlation and flawed modelling assumptions spent her free time crocheting hats for an animal that looked furious about it.
Max liked that more than he knew what to do with.
Now Austria. Boarding school. The accent.
The little pause before she answered.
He put those beside the cat hats in his head.
None of it made a full picture.
All of it made him want to look again.
“So what,” the first colleague said, still teasing, “secret posh childhood?”
Charlotte made a sound Max could not quite read. “Something like that.”
That was not an answer.
Max knew that because he gave those kinds of answers all the time.
The ones that sounded enough like truth that people stopped asking.
“Come on,” the colleague pressed. “Austria, British boarding school, Cambridge, Red Bull. That’s a lot.”
“It looks more coherent on paper than it was in practice,” Charlotte said.
There it was again.
A sentence with a door behind it.
Max stared at his phone without seeing it.
“Did your parents just decide England would build character?” someone asked.
Another pause.
Longer this time.
Then Charlotte said, lightly, “Something like that.”
The same phrase.
Different weight.
Max’s fingers tightened around his phone.
Parents.
So there were parents. Or had been. Rich enough for boarding school. Connected enough for Cambridge. Absent enough, maybe, that Charlotte had learned to make her voice sound like something that could not be questioned.
He did not know.
That was the problem.
He did not know anything, really.
He knew she was tall. That he had noticed immediately.
Tall, short dark hair, dark eyes that looked at data like it had personally offended her. Pretty in a way that did not ask to be looked at and therefore made him want to look more, which was annoying and inconvenient and absolutely GP’s fault somehow.
He knew she was good.
Not normal good. Not useful member of the department good.
Very good.
The kind of good that made people in the sim wing listen when she spoke. The kind of good that had made the car, for the first time in weeks, feel honestly bad instead of dishonestly manageable. The kind of good that mattered, because Max hated being lied to by machines almost as much as he hated being lied to by people.
He knew she was not impressed by him.
That might have been the worst part.
Or the best.
He had not decided.
She did not look at him like most people looked at him. Not fans. Not sponsors. Not women who already knew his reputation before he opened his mouth.
Charlotte looked at him like a data point.
A very fast data point, maybe.
Occasionally useful.
Occasionally irritating.
But not miraculous.
Max should have found that insulting.
Instead, he found himself walking slightly slower past corridors where he knew she worked, checking whether she was in the sim bay before he asked a question he could probably have asked someone else, and thinking about an orange cat in a frog hat more often than was dignified.
“Anyway,” Charlotte said inside the office, her voice shifting back toward professional even as the others still sounded amused. “If we are finished psychoanalysing my vowels, the model is still wrong.”
Someone groaned. “You’re no fun.”
“I am enormous fun,” Charlotte replied. “In controlled conditions.”
Max nearly smiled.
There she was.
The door closed on the conversation a moment later, the voices muffling into work.
Max stood there for half a second longer.
Then he put his phone away and continued toward the sim bay.
By the time he arrived, Charlotte was already there, because of course she was. She sat at her desk with her posture perfect and her eyes on the screen, short dark hair tucked behind one ear, speaking to another engineer in that polished British register that now sounded different to him.
Not fake.
Never fake.
Constructed.
There was a difference.
Max watched her while pretending not to.
Austria, he thought.
Boarding school.
Cambridge.
Cat.
Parents with money, maybe. Or money around her. Or something complicated enough that she had learned to answer around it.
He added each fact to the quiet little folder in his mind labelled Charlotte Fischer.
It was becoming embarrassingly full.
She looked up suddenly, as if she had felt him watching.
Max, who was excellent under pressure and had won world championships, immediately forgot what he had come in for.
Charlotte raised an eyebrow.
“Did you need something?”
“Yes,” Max said.
A pause.
Her eyebrow rose a fraction higher.
He recovered badly.
“The sim,” he said. “I wanted to ask about the updated model.”
That was at least true.
Charlotte turned back to her screen. “Sit down, then.”
Max sat.
Too quickly.
Behind him, GP made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a cough and even more suspiciously like amusement.
Max ignored him.
Charlotte pulled up the model, all focus again, all precision. The polished accent. The steady hands. The brain that saw flaws in systems and fixed them before anyone else had found the right question.
Max listened.
Mostly.
But some part of him stayed in the corridor, holding the pieces he had collected.
He wondered how many versions of herself Charlotte Fischer had built to get here.
And, more dangerously, whether she ever let anyone see the one underneath.
***
The apartment was quiet in the particular way Monaco became quiet at night.
Not silent.
Never silent.
There was always the low hush of the city beyond the glass, the distant drag of tyres over tarmac, the occasional voice rising from the street below and dissolving into the dark. But up here, above most of it, the noise arrived softened. Cushioned. Expensive.
Toto Wolff sat alone at the dining table, laptop open in front of him, the glow of the screen cutting pale lines across the polished stone.
The paperwork was orderly.
Of course it was.
Trust statements. Account summaries. Investment reports. Tax documents. Things that made sense because numbers had the decency to declare what they were. They could be checked, balanced, corrected.
He had reviewed these accounts often enough to know most of them by heart.
Often enough to pretend this part would not still hurt.
He scrolled.
Benedict’s trust was active. University fees. Living expenses. Transfers made with the faint carelessness of someone who had always known the safety net was there.
Rosa’s was the same. Regular withdrawals. Sensible ones, mostly. A larger payment for an apartment deposit. A few indulgences Toto had noticed and chosen not to comment on.
They were using what he had built for them.
That was the point of it, he told himself. That had always been the point.
Then the next file opened. Charlotte Wolff.
Her name sat there in the same clean font as the others, understated and formal, as if it were simply another account to review. As if it did not reach through the screen and close around his throat.
Toto went still.
The balance was untouched.
No withdrawals.
No requests.
No transfers.
No activity beyond interest accrual and the neat, automatic work of money compounding around an absence.
For years.
He stared at the numbers for a long time.
Four years since she had blocked his number.
Four years since his calls had stopped ringing through and gone instead into that cold, immediate silence. Four years since messages had remained delivered but unanswered, until eventually even that stopped because he no longer knew whether she had the same number at all.
Four years since he had told himself the same cowardly thing over and over.
She will call if she needs something.
It had sounded reasonable at the time.
Respectful, even.
A way of giving her space. A way of not forcing himself into a life she had clearly decided to keep without him.
Now, looking at the untouched trust, he saw it for what it had been.
An excuse.
She had never called.
Not for money.
Not for help.
Not because she was frightened.
Not because she was ill.
Not because there was no one else.
She had taken his absence and made it permanent.
Cleanly.
Efficiently.
Like Charlotte did most things.
And the worst part — the part that sat heavy and sickening beneath his ribs — was that he had always known she would be capable of it.
Even as a child, she had been too self-contained.
Too careful.
Too ready to take responsibility for the temperature of a room before any adult had asked why a child was reading it so closely.
He could still see her sometimes, if he let himself.
Small at the edge of a dining table. Hands folded. Back straight. Eyes lowered, then lifted, then lowered again. Watching. Measuring. Learning what not to say.
He remembered the way her shoulders tightened when Stephanie spoke her name.
He remembered the way she grew quieter over the years.
He remembered noticing.
That was the unforgivable thing.
Not ignorance.
Not blindness.
Not some convenient failure of perception.
He had noticed.
He had seen enough to know.
The tension in her jaw. The way she left rooms before she could be dismissed from them. The way she stopped asking for things. The way she learned, year by year, to make needing him unnecessary.
And he had done nothing.
Not because he had not loved her.
That was the excuse he had reached for in darker moments, but even he had never managed to make himself believe it.
He had loved her.
He had simply loved his own peace more.
He had loved the fragile balance of the household more.
He had loved avoiding confrontation more.
He had loved the version of himself who could provide everything measurable and pretend protection was included somewhere in the cost.
Toto pressed his fingers to his eyes.
“I didn’t protect her,” he said.
The words fell into the empty apartment and stayed there.
They did not shock him.
They were too old for that.
Too worn down by repetition.
Too true.
Behind him, the door opened softly.
Toto did not turn around.
He heard Susie come in, the quiet click of keys set down, the pause that followed when she saw him sitting there in the dark with the laptop open and every line of his body pulled tight.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
It was not really a question.
Susie had always been better than most people at reading the shape of disaster before anyone named it.
Toto kept his eyes on the screen.
“I really fucked up with her,” he said.
The apartment seemed to hold its breath.
Susie did not ask who.
That was its own kind of mercy.
After a moment, she came closer. Her hand settled lightly on the back of his chair, not quite touching him yet.
“Charlotte,” she said.
Toto nodded once.
The name hurt more when Susie said it.
“She hasn’t touched the trust,” he said. “Not once.”
Susie’s gaze moved to the laptop.
Toto heard her inhale.
“Years,” he continued, and his voice sounded strange even to himself. Too flat. Too controlled. “No withdrawals. No calls. No requests. Nothing.”
Susie was quiet.
“I told myself she would call if she needed money,” he said.
The shame of it rose hot in his throat.
“God,” he muttered. “Money.”
Susie’s hand moved from the chair to his shoulder.
“That was never how Charlotte asked for help,” she said gently.
Toto laughed once.
Short.
Humourless.
“She didn’t ask,” he said. “That was the point.”
“I know.”
“No.” He shook his head. “No, I don’t think I did. Not properly.”
He looked back at the screen.
At the pristine account.
At the money he had set aside like proof of fatherhood. As if a trust fund could stand in for all the rooms where he had remained silent. As if Cambridge and doctors and security and a name on paperwork could add up to safety.
“I gave her everything except what she needed,” he said.
Susie said nothing.
There was kindness in her silence, but not absolution. He was grateful for that.
“She was a child,” Toto said, and this time his voice cracked around it. “She was a child, Susie. And I left her alone in that house.”
“You were there,” Susie said softly.
“That’s worse.”
Her hand tightened on his shoulder.
He closed his eyes.
“She looked at me that night,” he said. “Before she left. After I told her to calm down.”
The memory came back with brutal clarity.
Charlotte standing at the table, pale with fury, eyes too bright and too dry. Stephanie offended. Rosa defensive. Benedict silent.
And Charlotte looking at him.
Not waiting for him to fix it anymore.
Just watching him fail one final time.
“I thought I was de-escalating,” he said.
The word tasted obscene.
Susie did not soften it for him.
“You were choosing the room,” she said. “Not her.”
Toto nodded.
The truth of it settled between them like dust.
“I know.”
He had known then too, perhaps. Somewhere beneath the practiced instinct. Beneath the diplomacy, the management, the relentless need to make every conflict survivable by making it smaller.
Charlotte had not needed the conflict made smaller.
She had needed him to make himself larger.
He had not.
Susie drew out the chair beside him and sat.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
The laptop screen dimmed slightly, the numbers fading toward grey.
After a long moment, Susie said, “You could try reaching out again.”
Toto stared at Charlotte’s name.
“I don’t know how.”
“Start with the truth.”
He let out another brittle laugh. “Which part?”
“All of it.”
“That would take years.”
“Then start with one sentence.”
He looked at her then.
Susie’s face was calm, but her eyes were not easy. She was not offering comfort. Not exactly. She was offering something harder.
A way forward that did not pretend forward meant forgiveness.
“She blocked me,” he said. “I don’t even know if anything would reach her.”
“You could write.”
“She might not read it.”
“She might not,” Susie agreed.
“She might hate me.”
Susie held his gaze.
“Toto.”
He looked away first.
Of course.
“I don’t even know what she’s doing,” he admitted. The words came quietly, and somehow that made them worse. “Where she lives. Who she knows. Whether she is happy. Whether she is safe.”
His mouth tightened.
“I don’t know who she is anymore.”
Susie’s expression flickered.
Pain.
Regret.
Something she did not ask him to name.
“She made a life without me,” Toto said.
The laptop went darker again, Charlotte’s untouched account now barely visible on the screen.
He looked at it anyway.
“And I taught her how.”
Susie reached for his hand then.
He let her take it.
For once, there was nothing to fix. No strategy to find. No call to make. No negotiation, no restructuring, no transfer of money large enough to alter the shape of what had happened.
There was only the untouched trust fund.
The daughter who had not needed it.
The father who had mistaken provision for protection until the evidence became impossible to ignore.
And in the expensive quiet of the Monaco apartment, Toto Wolff finally understood that Charlotte had not left because he had given her too little.
She had left because the one thing she had needed from him had never been something he could buy.
FIC SUMMARY ⋆˚꩜｡ ( max verstappen x fem!fiance!reader ) ( 1.6k wc )
⤷ you are engaged to a world-class athlete who couldn't identify a sexual advance if it was wearing a flashing neon sign. from failed lingerie reveals to rejected candlelit dinners, you're ready to give up. when it comes to the racetrack, max verstappen is a tactical genius. when it comes to picking up on his fiancée's subtle—and not-so-subtle—hints in the bedroom, he’s completely oblivious.
( my m. list | more of MV3 ) ( requests )
The apartment was quiet, save for the rhythmic click-clack of Max’s controller and the distant, muffled explosions from his headset. You stood in the doorway of the living room, watching him. He was sprawled on the couch, lower lip caught between his teeth in concentration, completely engrossed in a solo Call of Duty mission.
You’d timed it perfectly. He’d finished his media duties for the week, the simulator was off-limits, and for the first time in ages, you had a whole evening of uninterrupted Max-time. An evening you very much wanted to spend not wearing clothes.
You sauntered over, sitting on the edge of the couch beside his hip. He didn’t even flinch, his eyes glued to the screen. You leaned in, pressing a soft kiss to his shoulder, letting your hand rest high on his thigh. He grunted in acknowledgement, a non-committal sound that was swallowed by a fresh round of gunfire.
“Max,” you murmured, your lips brushing against the shell of his ear. “I’m bored.”
“Almost done with this level, schat,” he mumbled, not taking his eyes off the TV. “This last part is a bitch.”
You sighed, letting your fingers trail up his thigh, dangerously close to the hem of his shorts. “I can think of something much more fun to do than shooting pixelated people.”
He finally glanced at you, his expression confused. “Like what? We could watch a movie after this. I saw that new cat documentary is on.”
You stared at him. He was completely, utterly serious. He saw your blank expression and offered a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, I’ll be quick. Then we can cuddle and watch the cats.”
Defeated, you slumped back against the couch. Ten minutes later, he was indeed quick, dropping his controller with a triumphant “Yes!” and immediately queuing up a video titled “Cats Who Are Absolute Jerks.” He spent the next hour pointing and laughing, while you plotted his slow, frustrating demise.
A few days later, you found him in the same spot on the couch. No headset this time, just his phone held aloft, a soft smile on his face as he scrolled through what you could only assume were more cat videos. He was in a grey hoodie and sweats, looking soft and comfortable and completely oblivious.
This time, you decided to be more direct. You went into the bedroom, changed into the new silk lingerie set you’d bought specifically for this purpose—a deep emerald green that you knew he loved on you—and walked back into the living room.
You stood directly in his line of sight, one hand on your hip. “Max.”
He looked up from his phone, his eyes widening slightly as they took you in. A slow, appreciative smile spread across his face. “Wow. You look . . . wow.”
“I was thinking,” you said, your voice low and husky. “We have the whole afternoon free. The bed is cold.”
His smile didn’t waver, but his brow furrowed in thought. He put his phone down, giving you his full attention. “Yeah, it is a bit chilly today, isn’t it? I can get you another blanket. A big fluffy one. We could make a nest on the couch. Or we could turn up the thermostat.”
You felt a vein in your temple twitch. “Or,” you said through a strained smile, “we could warm up. Together.”
“Oh, good idea!” he said, his face lighting up as if you’d just proposed a stroke of genius. “Body heat is the best. Come here.” He opened his arms, expecting you to curl up beside him for a cuddle session.
You closed your eyes and took a deep, calming breath. You were engaged to a world-class athlete, a tactical genius on the race track, who couldn’t identify a sexual advance if it was wearing a flashing neon sign.
The final straw was the candlelit dinner. It was a masterpiece of seduction. You’d cooked his favourite pasta, set the table with your best linen, and placed dozens of candles along the huge windows that overlooked the city lights. The apartment glowed, smelling of garlic, basil, and vanilla.
Max walked in, his eyes going wide with genuine awe. “Schatje . . . what is all this?”
“I just felt like it,” you said, trying for nonchalant as you pulled out his chair. “A special night for us.”
Dinner was perfect. He was charming and attentive, telling you stories about the latest developments at the factory, holding your hand across the table. He was relaxed, happy, and completely at ease, which was why, as you cleared the plates, you decided to go for the kill.
You leaned against the table, the candlelight flickering over your skin. “So,” you began, your voice a silken purr. “Are you ready for dessert?”
Max’s face lit up like a kid on Christmas morning. “Dessert? Yes! What did you make? Is it that tiramisu from the Italian place?”
You held his gaze, letting the silence stretch between you. “It’s me.”
He blinked. Once. Twice. A small, confused wrinkle appeared between his brows. “You?” He looked around the dining area as if expecting you to pop out with a cake. “You’re dessert?”
“Yes, Max,” you said, your patience finally snapping. “I am dessert.”
He still looked utterly lost. Then, a slow, playful grin spread across his face. He reached out, gently taking your wrist and bringing it to his mouth. He bit down softly on the sensitive skin, a playful nip that made you gasp.
“You’re not dessert,” he chuckled, shrugging. “You’re my fiancée. That’s much better.” He let go of your wrist and leaned back in his chair, completely satisfied with his response, while you silently screamed into the abyss.
“Can I have tiramisu still?”
“No.”
It was a cosmic joke. The one time you weren’t trying, the one time you were just being affectionate, was when he finally caught on.
He was streaming with Red Line and Gabriel Bortoleto, deep into a competitive race on iRacing. You were bored, wandering past his setup, and decided to just lean over his shoulder, pressing a soft kiss to the top of his head as you rubbed slow circles on his back.
His reaction was instantaneous. He flinched, his shoulders tensing, glad he had kept his camera off today. On the screen, his car wobbled slightly. You heard Luke Crane’s voice crackle through his headset. “Woah, Max, you alright there? Lost your focus?”
Max didn’t answer. His eyes were wide, fixed on the screen, but his entire body was rigid. He turned his head just enough to shoot you a look that was pure, undiluted fire. It wasn’t angry; it was hungry. He licked his lips, his gaze dropping to your mouth for a split second before snapping back to the monitor. He was glaring at the track, at the other cars, at the world in general, a deep pout settling on his lips. He looked like a puppy who’d been told he couldn’t have his favourite toy yet.
You couldn’t help but smirk, giving his back one last pat before leaving him to his frustration.
It happened again a week later. He was on a serious-sounding business call, pacing the living room in a crisp shirt. You came in to grab a glass of water, and as you passed him, you let your fingers trail lightly down his arm.
He stopped mid-stride. His voice, which had been confident and clear, faltered. “Yes, uh-huh, we’ll . . . we’ll circle back to that.” He was looking at you, his eyes dark, his jaw tight. He watched you walk away, and you could feel his glare on your back. When you glanced over from the kitchen, he was scowling at his phone, his free hand shoved in his pocket, looking utterly miserable.
The most satisfying, however, was during a NLS race weekend. You were standing with him in the crowded garage, the air thick with tension and the smell of fuel. He was between stints, listening intently as his engineer spoke, his expression focused. You stood beside him, a silent pillar of support, and reached up to rub his back in a slow, soothing motion.
He didn’t move, but you felt the muscles in his back go rigid as a board. He didn’t look at you, but his entire demeanor changed. He was no longer the calm, collected driver. He was a coiled spring of frustration. He glared at a data screen, then at a passing mechanic, then at the floor, his lips set in a tight, pissy little line. He was annoyed at the world, at the delay, at the fact that he was trapped in this firesuit when all he wanted was to be anywhere else with you.
As soon as the engineer walked away, he rounded on you, his voice a low, desperate whine. “Why now?”
You just smiled sweetly, patting his chest. “Just giving you some motivation, champ.”
He huffed, a truly pathetic sound, and pulled you into a quick, tight hug, burying his face in your hair for a second before his race engineer was calling him back to the car. He walked away with a pout so profound you were surprised it didn’t trip him.
Later that night, after he’d secured his second win and first disqualification, he finally got his reward. He was still in his pouty-puppy mood, glaring at the hotel room door as if it had personally offended him.
“You,” he said, pointing a finger at you as he finally got his firesuit off. “You are the biggest tease in the entire world.”
“You’re the one who’s oblivious 90% of the time!” You shot back.
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summary: y/n webber vettel swore she was done with formula 1 and race drivers forever. max is determined to change her mind
a/n: I’ve had this piece rumbling about in my mind since like November 2024 so I’m really excited to actually start posting it!
a/n2: a cheat code for some names — not_yn and mv are private accounts for yn and max, yn_vettel and max_v are locked accounts for yn and max, art_by_yn and maxverstappen33 are public accounts (yn talks to max with not_yn, family with yn_vettel, and everyone else with art_by_yn) (for the most part)
a/n3: all art is by anastasia trusova
a/n4: I’m not a lawyer nor a judge so we’re just all going to kinda gloss over that please and thanks
Masterlist | Series Masterlist
mv
liked by not_yn, charles, mick, and 622 others
tagged: not_yn
mv: made the move to Monaco — and found the perfect spot for art to be made
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not_yn: knapperd that is such a beautiful place
↳mv: I'm glad you like it — I've got a key ready for you whenever I see you next
↳not_yn: max…
↳mv: moppie as I keep telling you, I'm in this forever. of course I'm going to get a place that you'll love and give you a key to it
↳not_yn: I love you
↳not_yn: but I'm going to put my phone down now before I really start crying and get vater all concerned
↳mv: well we wouldn't have the worry the old man 😂
mick: when this comes out, I'm going to pretend I don't know you
↳mv: that's fair
↳mick: also you better not hurt her or else
↳mv: well now I'm curious…or else what?
↳mick: I'll tell Fernando
↳not_yn: oh please don't involve him
charles: you are setting the bar very high
↳mv: this is literally bare minimum
↳charles: it is not
↳not_yn: it kinda is?
↳charles: you are used to his high standards and your judgement is suspect
gina: I know charles is complaining about the standards you're setting but I love it and throughly approve — continue to treat her well!
↳mv: thank you Gina, I plan to liked by not_yn
↳charles: I'm not complaining!
↳mv: 😑😑 yes you are
art_by_yn
liked by nando, seb5priv, danric, and 1,823 others
art_by_yn: I'm excited to announce that my work will be showcased in the Monaco Art Gallery starting next Friday! This display is made up of pieces close to my heart and it's an honor to have been chosen! Lasting three months, I plan read more
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user1: oh I can't wait!
max_v: I'm so proud of you moppie
↳yn_vettel: thank you knapperd 💜💜
seb5priv: words cannot even begin to describe how proud I am of you yn — you deserve this and even more
↳yn_vettel: vater I'm literally about to start crying, I always aim to make you proud
↳seb5priv: there is nothing you could do to make me not proud of you
user2: buying tickets right now actually
nando: pequeña I am excited to see even more of your work — and to see how far you've come from the little girl who painted flowers in the fields outside your house
↳yn_vettel: did all you old men decide to band together to make me cry today? Because it's nearly working
↳nando: no but we are all so very proud of you and wanted to tell you
user3: searching how much tickets to Monaco are right now…I need to see these in person
lewis44: congratulations darling, I can't wait to see the exhibit
↳yn_vettel: it'll be good to see you again!
danric: thanks for the invite little vettel
↳not_yn: good things come from having Danny Ric at your event!
↳seb5priv: it better not happen again! I'm watching you
↳yn_vettel: go away vater!
Private Messages: David Coulthard and Mark Webber
Emails: ABC School
Emails: A. Smith, Lawyer
Emails: B. Loveland, Judge
Mailbox: Neighborhood Watch
Emails: Neighborhood Watch
skynews
liked by user, user, user, and 1,729,922 others
tagged: aussiegrit
skynews: Mark Webber, previously announced to be reporting in China this weekend, will not be there due to a private family matter.
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user1: no mark??? What the hell
user2: i hope everything is ok…
↳user3: i wonder what happened
user4: I've only had announcer mark for a single race but I love him. this makes me sad
↳user5: fucking same!!
user6: I wonder if this has anything to do with the rumors that apparently he's been running around Monaco?
↳user7: I heard about that! Wonder what that's all about…
Mail: Art Gallery Invitation
Private Messages: David Coulthard and Mark Webber
Emails: Private Investigator
Taglist
If you want to join my taglist, interact with my taglist post. I won’t be adding from anywhere else
oscar piastri x yn!singer | request — here | masterlist |
"One night I was bored in bed, And stalked you on the internet" in which a popstar's crush on a f1 driver turns into a front page story...
note — (all manips made by me!!) i love this fic soooooo much, like it's very dear me.... hope you all enjoy it (not proofread ignore any mistakes) <3 !! likes, reblog's and comments are really appreciated ❤
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♬ Y/n L/n ‧ obsessed
Liked by yourinstagram, user1 and 772,256 others
oscarpiastri 💪
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user1 new song to add to the playlist
user2 thirst trap on main???
user3 y/n is holding her self back by not commenting
->user4 ik she's remembering her pr training right now
->user5 wait why????
->user4 it's a known thing among fans that she has a crush on oscar...
->user5 HUH!??!?!? how haven’t i heard about this??!???
user6 You got this 🏎️
user7 okay can mclaren invite y/n to a race please
user8 listening to obsessed?? why does oscar know ball
user9 need to see all his playlists
user10 Future world champion💪🔥🧡
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Liked by user1, user2 and 385,924 others
tmz Y/nL/n seen arriving in Melbourne, Australia today.
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user1 love her <3
user2 wait..... the australian gp is this weekend
->user3 and mclaren recently followed her....
->user4 are we thinking they invited her to oscar's home race!?!??!
->user3 YESSS
user5 this could be so major...
user6 winona hat is so cute
user7 she's going to find her a aussie man anyway she can
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Liked by user1, user2 and 645,758 others
YnLnNews Y/N IN AUSTRALIA!!!!! Y/n sat with Oscar Piastri prior to qualifying, Y/n cheered on Oscar as he qualified P2.
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user1 EVERYONE STAY CALM
user2 very important things happening right now
user3 who else was with them???? do we know how long they hung out..?
->user4 i saw a video of them talking and the poster said they were talking alone for about 15+ mins until someone on the team wanted to meet y/n
->user4 he sat with them for 5 mins and they kept talking for around 30 more minutes and hugged goodbye
->user3 omg ty sm user4 !!
user5 her SMILEEEE
user6 already loving them AIWLUHDFLUIAWG
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Liked by oscarpiastri, rachelzegler and 2,748,362 others
yourinstagram never finished that beer 🍻
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user1 summer maxing
user2 everywhere but that damn studio
oscarpiastri 🌹🍻
->user3 alright man... we get it
->user4 no im not jealous at all
user5 you r my inspo
user6 mclaren girllll
->user7 **oscar piastri girl
->user8 she's truly only there for the race and oscar
user9 gorgeous girl
user10 what dat mean???
->user11 idk maybe she never finished her beer????
->user10 okay 😐
user12 does the piano mean we're getting music?!!?!
user13 the last slide and the koala.... taking notes
user14 can you get any more perfect
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yourinstagram story !
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oscarpiastri It was great to finally meet you in person!
yourinstagram a pleasure to meet you as well!!!
yourinstagram ik you have a busy schedule so ty for sparing the time!
oscarpiastri SPARING?? I would've skipped qualifying just to keep talking to you
oscarpiastri I wanted to meet you! So the schedule was cleared just for you!
oscarpiastri It obviously wasn't the race I would've liked for you to have been present for....
yourinstagram at least you didn't finish last!!!
yourinstagram hopefully the next race i go to will have a better outcome 🤞
oscarpiastri Speaking of you going to another race have you been to China? 👀
yourinstagram no…. but i’ve always wanted to go!!
oscarpiastri Well there is a race coming up in China if your up for that…?
yourinstagram mhmmmm that does sound like something i’d enjoy
yourinstagram and if i were to go…
oscarpiastri Mhm hmm 🤔
yourinstagram id like to find a place for us to get dinner, since you picked last time 😁
oscarpiastri You drive a hard bargain.. but i think we have a deal
yourinstagram good doing business with you 🤝
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Liked by user1, user2 and 855,758 others
enews Brewing Romance? Y/n L/n and Formula One Driver Oscar Piastri have been causing a stir as of late.
While the pair have been linked to each other since late 2024, the two hadn't met in person till March 15th 2025. Piastri said after meeting L/n "We've talk prior to meeting, so it was nice to finally meet in person. She's lovely." With L/n's recent presence in China for the Chinese Grand Prix, people are starting to wonder if there's a couple in the making...
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user1 they're so cute! im here for it
user2 enews doesn't even know about their crushes on each other
->user3 i was fully expecting to see them mention that but was glad they didn't
->user4 truly don't know how i would react if there were articles written about my crush
user5 i've been rooting for them since she liked an edit of him on tiktok
user6 her with an athlete is scary but he seems chill
user7 not my favs being on the jumbotron wth
user8 i feel like ppl are going to say it's PR but i think they're dating honestly
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Liked by yourinstagram, alex_albon and 2,672,856 others
oscarpiastri First win of the year 🏆
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user1 wait is that y/n????
user2 LETS GOOOOOO
yourinstagram and to many more!!
->oscarpiastri 😉
->user3 okay they're cute i guess...
user4 Y/N MADE THE POST!!!!!
user5 mini goat 🐐
user6 keep on pushing oscar we love you!
user7 he knew to add that y/n pic iktr
user8 power couple omg?!
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Liked by user1, user2 and 45,758 others
deuxmoi While we do enjoy seeing young love, we can't help but wonder is it real... or is it PR?
Comment your thoughts below ⬇
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user1 it's not like they're two young attractive people dating they HAVE to be doing pr??? y'all are so bored, let them live
user2 no shade to oscar but there are much more famous guys she could've gotten with to "up" her image
->user3 LITERALLY
->user4 an actor would've made waves... like it's not about the perception
user5 they had crushes on each other and then started dating it's not rocket science
user6 no one likes you guys, please don't speak on the queen
user7 this is family business.. why are you here??
user8 they're happy.... why does it matter ?
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♬ The Cure ‧ Just like Heaven
Liked by yourinstagram, alex_albon and 4,842,584 others
oscarpiastri 💙🏝🌞
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user1 My parents omg
yourinstagram 🐢🌊🐠 Liked by oscarpiastri !
user2 she is a real life princess
user3 1st slide is my roman empire
user4 you two are adorbs
user5 does he know this is his instagram...? bro only posted 1 pic of his face 😭
->user6 because he knows we're here for y/n
->user5 fairs
user7 he knew to post her on main
user8 that picture being first is so iconic
user9 okay we need about 50 more pics of you 2 cuties
user10 ugh he matches her energy so well <333
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Liked by user1, user2 and 155,758 others
enews Y/n L/n teases new music in Vogue Interview!
"Everything that I've been writing has been written in this notebook and I feel like my last two albums are very angsty and heartbroken and just as a creative endeavor and also because I'm experiencing so much joy in my life, I've wanted to figure out how to like inject that into the songs that I'm making. And I'm really proud of it so far!”
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user1 we are about to get such a lover girl song
user2 she could never make a bad song... im so ready
user3 not related but her face card is so insane in that picture wow
user4 i just know she has a hit song on the way
user5 "y/n to grace us with new music" i can't wait
user6 oooo i need it NOWWW
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Liked by oscarpiastri, rachelzegler and 4,563,642 others
yourinstagram <3 !!!
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user1 oh mama is in loveeee
user2 posting her man on main wow
oscarpiastri = ❤♾ Liked by yourinstagram !
->user3 EXACTLYYYY
->user4 need them to get married
user5 it so SERIOUSSSS
user6 "I'm experiencing so much joy in my life" MY SHAYLAS
user7 holy hard launch
user8 and when u + me = <3 is a song title THEN WHAT????
user9 a WHOLE post dedicated to being in love... that love song is going to change my life
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Liked by oscarpiastri, rachelzegler and 5,631,874 others
yourinstagram drop dead is out now!!!! I was lucky enough to film the music video at the palace of Versailles a few months ago and I’m so stoked with how it turned out. I hope you guys love it as much as I do xoxo
more soon to come <3
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user1 Can’t stop listening!!!❤️
user2 obsessed is an understatement...
rachelzegler MY GIRLLLL Liked by yourinstagram !
user3 ALREADY LISTENED ATLEAST 100 times
user4 best song of all time
user5 might drop dead over this music video 😭
user6 literally changed my life
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Liked by yourinstagram, alex_albon and 3,842,584 others
oscarpiastri "drop dead (taken that eurostar to france)" music video filmed by me out now on y/n's youtube!
so proud of my girl ❤
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user1 HE FILMED IT????
yourinstagram thank you angel boy <3 Liked by oscarpiastri !
->user2 im so parasocial about them
->user3 OSCAR PLEASE TEACH ME YOUR WAYS
->user4 "angel boy" and "my girl" I LOVE THEMMMM
user5 this is so cute i can't
user6 OMGGGG THEY'RE SO ADORABLE
user7 she’s looking like an angel on the walls of versailles
user8 you can hear him say "perfect" at the VERY end of the video
->user9 I knew i heard something !!
->user10 very cute that she kept it in 🥺
user11 this is cooler than any race win lowkey
user12 the way the video is actually beautifully shot too, oscar you have a backup career in photography
user13 "my girl" someone hold me please i can’t take it
user14 PARENTSSS
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✎…… hope you all enjoyed as much i did!!! i adored making this fic <3
using the same profile picture for the tweets made finishing this go 99% faster... probably going to be doing that from now on 😭
In your introduction i read that Pierre is like an older brother for little leclerc.
Does that mean that Kika is like her older sister? Cause I can see baby leclerc needing a trusted person who she can gossip with that isn’t married to her brothers or her mama. So Kika is like her keeper of her secrets and never tells anyone anything (not even pascale or alexandra)
Wait, I am in love with this. I love Kika being little!Leclercs older sister.
Yn was sitting cross-legged on her bed while Kika leaned against the headboard beside her. The room was quiet, comfortable, and exactly why Yn loved talking to her. “I swear, you’re the only person I can tell things to,” Yn said. Kika smiled. “I’m honored.” “I’m serious. If I tell you something, it stays with you.” “Unlike a certain someone?” Yn pointed at her immediately. “Exactly unlike Alexandra.” Kika laughed. “Poor Alex.” “No. I told her one tiny secret once and somehow Charles knew before I even got home.” “Okay, that’s fair. She is a wicked witch.” (There is no beef with Kika and Alexandra. However, Kika knows how much Alexandra betraying Yn hurt little!Leclerc)
A smile tugged at Kika’s lips. She secretly loved how much Yn trusted her. Ever since they’d met, she’d always felt protective of her, like a little sister she’d somehow accidentally adopted. “So,” Kika said, nudging her shoulder. “Tell me about Ollie and Kimi.” Yn groaned and dropped backward onto her pillows. “They’re both so sweet. Kimi always notices when something’s wrong. Even when I haven’t said anything.” Kika’s smile softened. “And Ollie?” she asked. Yn smiled into her pillow. “He’s just… really thoughtful. He remembers everything.” “That boy absolutely has a crush on you.” “Kika!” “He does. And Kimi does too.” Yn buried her face completely. Kika laughed. “You know, most girls would love having two cute racing drivers following them around.” “I’m never telling you anything again.” “Yes, you are.”
Outside the bedroom door, Charles, Pierre, Arthur, and Lorenzo were all standing with their ears pressed against the wood. “What are they saying?” Arthur whispered. “I can’t hear,” Pierre whispered back. Charles frowned. “Move over.” The second all four shifted closer, the door suddenly swung open. The boys stumbled forward in a pile.
Silence. Yn blinked. Kika blinked. Arthur was somehow lying on top of Pierre. “…Really?” Yn asked. Charles sat up and pointed at Arthur. “This was his idea.” “It was not!”
While lando is away for f1 reader gets hurt and lando doesn't find out until after the race as max f doesn't tell him on her orders.
Maybe lando finds out live during post race press. Worries, crashes out and then leaves etc.
Im sure whatever you do will be amazing.
The price of a podium
Pairing: Lando Norris x Reader(y/n)
Warnings: car crash, big lie, scared lando, fluff
Summary: When a violent car accident leaves you hospitalized in London, you force Max and Pietra to hide the truth from Lando so he can focus on the Australian Grand Prix. After securing a podium, Lando learns the terrifying truth and rushes across the world to confront his guilt and care for you.
Requested: Yes/ @shannonannegan
Masterlist
The rain in London didn’t fall so much as it drifted, a heavy, gray mist that blurred the red tail lights of the traffic ahead. It was the kind of evening where the world felt small, muffled, and slick. You had the radio turned down low, just background noise to compete with the rhythmic slap of the windshield wipers. Lando was on the literal opposite side of the world, Melbourne, where the sun was either just rising or just setting, your internal clock always scrambled by his travel schedule. You’d spoken to him only three hours prior, his face pixelated on a FaceTime screen as he walked the Albert Park track, squinting against the Australian sun, complaining about a blisters from his new trainers.
Then, the world shattered.
It happened in the span of a single heartbeat. A delivery van, rushing to make a late drop-off, blew through a flashing amber light at the intersection. You didn’t even have time to gasp. There was the blinding glare of high beams illuminating the interior of your car, the deafening screech of locked brakes on wet asphalt, and a violent, catastrophic impact that spun your compact vehicle like a top.
The sound was the worst part, the sickening crunch of metal folding in on itself, the explosive pop of the airbags deploying, and the instantly suffocating smell of gunpowder and burning rubber. When the world finally stopped spinning, everything was dead quiet except for the pathetic, distorted honk of your own crumpled horn.
You sat there, pinned against the seat, your breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. Your left shoulder throbbed with a white-hot intensity, your ribs ached where the seatbelt had sliced into your chest, and a warm trickle of blood was slowly making its way down your temple from where your head had clipped the side window. But as the adrenaline began to spike, your very first thought wasn’t about the pain.
It was about Lando.
“He has qualifying in less than twelve hours,” your brain wired itself to think with terrifying clarity. “He can’t know. If he knows, he’ll drop everything.”
By the time the flashing blue lights of the emergency services arrived, casting a surreal rhythm over the shattered glass on the tarmac, you had managed to fish your phone out of the footwell. The screen was spiderwebbed with cracks, but it still buzzed. You didn't call emergency contacts. You called Max Fewtrell.
The hospital room smelled of industrial bleach and cheap floor polish. By the second day, you had come to utterly despise the rhythmic, mechanical *beep... beep... beep...* of the heart monitor attached to your finger. The diagnosis wasn’t as bad as it could have been, a moderate concussion, three cracked ribs, a dislocated left shoulder that had been popped back into place with agonizing precision, and a colorful constellation of deep bruises that made moving feel like wading through setting concrete. They were keeping you for three days for observation, mostly because of the head injury and a small pocket of fluid near your lung that the doctors wanted to monitor.
The door to the private room clicked open, and Max Fewtrell slipped inside, followed closely by Pietra. Both of them looked pale, their eyes wide with that distinct, panicked anxiety that only hits when you see someone you love in a hospital gown.
"Oh my god, Y/N," Pietra breathed, instantly rushing to the right side of your bed, careful not to touch your heavily bandaged left arm. She pressed a gentle hand to your cheek, her eyes shining with unshed tears. "Look at you. We came as soon as the police called us from your phone."
Max stood at the foot of the bed, his hands shoved deep into his hoodie pockets, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He looked completely out of his depth, his eyes tracking the IV lines and the purple bruising along your jawline. "Jesus, Y/N. You look like you went twelve rounds with Tyson. What the hell happened?"
"A van decided stop signs were optional," you said, your voice cracking. It sounded raspy, a byproduct of the smoke inhalation from the airbag. You forced a weak, reassuring smile. "I'm okay. Really. Nothing is permanently broken. Just... structural damage."
Max let out a breath that was half-laugh, half-sigh of relief, running a hand through his hair. "Right. Well. I'm calling Lando. He’s probably just waking up over there, but he needs to-“
"No!"
The sudden sharpness of your voice caught in your throat, triggering a harsh cough that sent a searing spasm straight through your cracked ribs. You gasped, pressing your good hand flat against your chest as Pietra instantly leaned over you, rubbing your shoulder.
"Don't call him, Max. Please," you squeezed out, your eyes watering from the pain.
Max stared at you like you’d lost your mind. "Y/N, are you insane? He’s your boyfriend. He's in Australia. If he finds out we hid this from him, he will literally murder me. He’ll use my sim rig as a weapon."
"Max, listen to me," you pleaded, reaching out with your uninjured hand to grab the sleeve of his hoodie. "It’s Thursday night there. Practice starts tomorrow. Then qualifying, then the race. You know how he gets before Melbourne. The pressure is already sky-high with the new car updates. If you tell him right now, what is he going to do? He’s going to withdraw. He’s going to board a twenty-four-hour flight back to London, losing his mind the entire time, unable to help me, completely ruining his weekend."
"He wouldn't care about the weekend, Y/N," Pietra pointed out softly, though her eyes showed she understood your logic. "He'd only care about you."
"And that’s exactly why he can’t know," you insisted, looking directly into Max’s eyes. "I am safe. I am in a hospital bed surrounded by doctors. There is absolutely nothing he can do from an airport lounge in Singapore or on a plane over the Indian Ocean except panic and put himself in danger. Promise me, Max. Pietra, please. Do not tell him until the checkered flag drops on Sunday. Promise me."
Max looked torn, a deep, conflicted frown marring his forehead. He looked at Pietra for backup, but she was looking at you with a mixture of immense pity and profound respect. She knew the brutal, uncompromising reality of the motorsport world. She knew how easily a driver’s focus could be shattered, and how dangerous that could be at two hundred miles per hour.
"She’s right, Max," Pietra said quietly. "If he flies back now, he’s useless here and useless there. We are here. We can take care of her."
Max groaned, throwing his head back against the wall. "This is a terrible idea. A historically bad idea. The fallout from this is going to be radioactive." He lowered his gaze back to you, pointing a stern finger. "But... if you swear to me you're not hiding a worse diagnosis, I won't call him. But the second that race ends, the second, I’m dialing his number."
"Deal," you whispered, sinking back into the stiff hospital pillows, a profound wave of exhaustion washing over you. "Thank you."
The next forty-eight hours were a masterclass in psychological warfare. Because you couldn't tell Lando the truth, you had to maintain the illusion of absolute normalcy across an eleven-hour time difference while completely incapacitated.
Your phone became your greatest enemy and your only lifeline. You couldn't do FaceTime calls; the background of a hospital room, the sterile white walls, and the glaring telltale sign of an IV pole would give you away instantly. When Lando called before his FP1 session, you didn't answer, instead typing out a quick, pre-written text with your right hand: “'Out with friends for drinks, super loud in here! Good luck in practice, text me when you're done. Love you x”
You hated lying to him. Every character you typed felt like a tiny betrayal, especially when he replied with a string of hearts and an enthusiastic update about the car's balance.
On Saturday, the concussion symptoms peaked. The light from the window made your skull feel like it was cracking open, and the nausea kept you from eating more than a few spoonfuls of gelatin. Pietra stayed by your side the entire time, painting your nails with a soft, steady hand, helping you sip water through a straw, and acting as your ultimate shield. When Lando texted after qualifying, he had secured P4 on the grid, ecstatic but exhausted, you had to dictate a text to Pietra.
"Tell him I'm so incredibly proud of him," you whispered, closing your eyes against the glare of the room. "Tell him I had a bit of a migraine so I'm sleeping early, but I’ll be watching the race."
"Are you sure you want to watch it?" Pietra asked softly, her thumb hovering over the screen.
"I have to," you said. "If I don't, I'll go crazy."
Sunday arrived with a heavy, suffocating tension. The nurse had adjusted your bed so you were sitting up slightly, the TV mounted on the wall tuned into the pre-race broadcast. Max sat in the vinyl armchair in the corner, his phone already clutched firmly in his hand, his thumb hovering over Lando’s contact profile. He looked more nervous than he usually did when he was racing virtually.
The five red lights went out, and the Australian Grand Prix began.
For the next hour and a half, you forgot about the dull, throbbing ache in your ribs. You forgot about the stiff collar around your neck and the IV bruising on the back of your hand. You only watched the papaya car. You watched Lando defend his position fiercely, watched him navigate a chaotic safety car restart, and watched him execute a breathtaking overtake into turn six that had Max jumping out of his chair with a loud, echoed shout that brought a stern look from a passing nurse.
When the checkered flag finally waved, Lando crossed the line in P3. A podium. His first of the season.
On the screen, you watched him pull his car into the pit lane, leap out onto the nose of his vehicle, and throw his arms up in pure, unadulterated triumph. He hugged his mechanics, poured champagne over his team principal, and grinned that wide, boyish smile that always made your heart skip a beat. He looked so deliriously happy, so utterly unburdened.
A single tear slipped down your cheek, cutting through the dried ointment on your bruised cheekbone. You had preserved that smile. You had given him that podium.
Max didn't wait for the cool-down room interviews to finish. He stood up, his face hardening back into an expression of sheer dread. "He’s walking into the media pen right now. He’s going to have his phone in his pocket or with his press officer. I'm calling."
You nodded weakly, your heart hammering against your fractured ribs."
In Melbourne, the adrenaline was still pulsing hot through Lando’s veins. His race suit was soaked through with sweat and sticky champagne, his hair plastered to his forehead. He was laughing with a Spanish television reporter, holding his third-place trophy tightly under his arm, when his press officer, Jon, stepped into his line of sight.
Jon didn't look happy. In fact, he looked incredibly pale, holding Lando’s personal phone out toward him.
"Lando," Jon interrupted smoothly, offering an apologetic nod to the reporter. "Sorry, we need to cut this short. You need to take this."
Lando blinked, his brow furrowing as he took the phone. "Jon, I’ve still got three more TV pens to do, what’s-" He looked down at the screen. Max’s face was flashing on the display. He smiled, expecting a loud, chaotic FaceTime from his mate screaming about the podium. He pressed answer and put it to his ear. "Maxy! Did you see that start? The grip on the medium tires was absolutely-“
"Lando. Stop talking and listen to me."
Max’s voice wasn't celebratory. It was flat, deadly serious, and vibrating with an undercurrent of intense anxiety.
Lando’s smile instantly vanished. The noise of the paddock, the shouting mechanics, the roar of the crowds, the whir of air guns, seemed to drop away into a dull hum. "Max? What's wrong? What happened?"
"Y/N was in a car accident on Thursday night," Max said, delivering the news like a surgical strike, knowing there was no soft way to break it. "A van hit her side-on in London. She’s been in St. Thomas’s Hospital since then."
Lando felt the world tilt violently on its axis. The heavy silver trophy slipped from his grip, clattering loudly against the concrete floor of the paddock, denting the base, but he didn't even blink. His lungs suddenly felt empty, as if the air had been violently sucked from his body.
"What?" Lando’s voice was barely a whisper, a choked, terrified sound. "Is she... Max, is she alive? Tell me right now."
"She’s alive, she’s stable, she’s going to be completely fine," Max said quickly, rushing to de-escalate the sheer terror in his friend's voice. "She has a concussion, some cracked ribs, and a messed-up shoulder. But she’s awake, Lando. She’s okay."
"Thursday?" Lando’s mind was racing backwards, a frantic, agonizing timeline stitching itself together. "Thursday? Max, that was three days ago. Why the fuck am I just finding out now? Why didn't you call me?!"
His voice cracked into a desperate, furious shout, drawing shocked looks from nearby team personnel and journalists. Jon stepped closer, putting a grounding hand on Lando’s shoulder, but Lando violently shook it off, pacing like a caged animal.
"Because she made us promise not to," Max said, his own voice cracking under the weight of the secret he’d kept. "She knew you had the race. She knew you’d drop out and fly home. She wouldn't let us tell you until the race was over. She literally threatened to fire us as friends, Lando. She did it for you."
Lando closed his eyes, a hot, searing wave of anger, guilt, and profound love crashing over him so hard he felt physically sick. “She lay in a hospital bed for three days while I was driving a car in circles.” He remembered the texts. The 'migraine'. The fake drinks with friends. She had done all of that while broken and bleeding, just so he could stand on a plastic podium and spray champagne.
"I’m going to the airport," Lando snapped, his voice trembling violently. "I'm leaving now."
"Jon is already arranging a flight," Max told him. "Just... get back safe, mate. She’s waiting for you."
Lando hung up without saying goodbye. He turned to Jon, his eyes wide, bloodshot, and completely frantic. "Get me a flight. Now. I don't care if it's private, commercial, a cargo plane, get me out of this country."
The twenty-four hours that followed were a waking nightmare for Lando. Because of the nature of international travel from Australia, there were no direct magic flights. He spent the first leg to Singapore staring blankly out the window of a first-class cabin, the luxury around him feeling like a sickening mockery.
He had managed to FaceTime you briefly during his layover. The sight of you had broken something deep inside him. Your face, usually so bright and full of life, was discolored by dark purple and yellow bruising. A stark white bandage sat over your left eyebrow, and you looked so incredibly small in that massive hospital bed, your left arm strapped securely to your chest in a heavy black immobilizer.
"Lando, don't look like that," you had whispered through the screen, trying to smile, but the movement clearly hurt your face. "I'm okay. Look, I can move my fingers. I’m fine."
“You lied to me," he had choked out, sitting in a secluded corner of the lounge, tears streaming down his face, completely unbothered by anyone who might recognize him. "You were hurt, and you lied to me."
“I don't care about the stupid trophy, Y/N," he had cried, pressing his forehead against the cool glass of his phone. "I care about you. I should have been there."
The second leg of the flight was worse. The Wi-Fi on the aircraft failed over the ocean, leaving him completely cut off from you for twelve hours. He couldn't sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he envisioned the twisted metal of your car, imagined you trapped in the dark, cold London rain, terrified and alone, while he was eating dinner with his engineers and laughing at telemetry data. The guilt was an physical weight, pressing down on his chest until he could barely breathe. He paced the aisles of the plane until the flight attendants gently asked him to sit down, his hands trembling, his mind a chaotic loop of what-ifs.
By the time Lando arrived at St. Thomas’s Hospital, it was Tuesday morning in London. The sky outside was still a miserable, dripping gray. He hadn't showered, hadn't slept in over a day, and was still wearing the McLaren team hoodie and sweatpants he’d traveled in, now wrinkled and smelling of airplane cabin air.
He practically threw himself through the heavy double doors of the ward, his sneakers squeaking loudly against the linoleum. He didn't ask the front desk; Max had texted him the room number hours ago.
When he reached Room 412, he paused, his hand hovering over the silver handle. His heart was hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He took a deep, shuddering breath, trying to compose himself so he wouldn't scare you, and pushed the door open.
The room was quiet. Pietra and Max had gone home a few hours prior to let you rest. The only sound was the low hum of the television playing a morning talk show on mute.
You were propped up on the pillows, staring out the window at the London Eye in the distance. The bruising on your face had blossomed into deep, terrifying shades of plum and green. When the door clicked, you turned your head slowly, careful of your neck, and your eyes met his.
"Lando," you breathed.
In two strides, he crossed the room. He didn't care about the IV lines, he didn't care about the stiff hospital chair, he dropped to his knees right beside the bed, his hands instantly reaching out, hovering over you frantically, terrified of touching you and causing pain.
"Y/N," he choked out. The sight of you up close was infinitely worse than the phone screen. The raw vulnerability of your state broke the last of his composure. He collapsed forward, burying his face in the mattress right beside your right hip, his shoulders shaking violently as he broke down into deep, sobbing gasps.
"Oh, sweetheart. No, don't cry," you whispered, your heart aching worse than your ribs at the sound of his distress. You reached out with your good right hand, burying your fingers into his messy, unwashed curls, gently stroking his scalp. "I’m here. I’m okay."
"I was so scared," he sobbed into the bed sheets, his voice muffled and thick with tears. "The whole flight... I thought... I thought what if something went wrong? What if there was internal bleeding? What if you died while I was driving that fucking car?"
"Hey," you said, your tone shifting from soft comfort to a gentle firmness. "Look at me, Lando. Pull it up. Look at me."
He slowly lifted his head, his blue eyes red-rimmed, bloodshot, and swimming with tears, his nose pink. He looked completely stripped of his usual boyish armor. He looked like a boy who had almost lost his entire world.
"I didn't die," you said softly, using your thumb to wipe away a hot tear that was tracking down his cheek. "I’m right here. The doctors said I can go home tomorrow. The car did exactly what it was supposed to do to protect me. I am safe."
"Why did you do it?" he asked, a hint of that raw, frantic anger returning to his voice, though it was entirely driven by pain. "How could you let me sit there, completely clueless? I was celebrating, Y/N. I was spraying champagne and laughing, and you were here. Do you know how sick that makes me feel? The team was posting photos of me smiling, and you were in a hospital bed!"
"Because I know how hard you worked for that podium," you said, your own eyes filling with tears now, the emotional weight of the past few days finally cracking your own facade. "I know the stress you’ve been under. I know what Melbourne means to you. If I had told you, you would have hopped on a plane, and you wouldn't have been able to fix my ribs or heal my concussion. You would have just suffered in the air. This way... you got what you deserved. You got your trophy. And now you’re here."
"I don't care about the trophy!" Lando cried out, his voice cracking as he gripped your right hand with both of his, pressing his lips to your knuckles, over and over again. "I would throw every single trophy I have into the Thames if it meant keeping you safe. I don't care about racing if I don't have you to come home to. Don't ever do that to me again, Y/N. Please. I am begging you. No more secrets. No matter how big the race is."
The raw intensity of his words hung in the sterile air of the room. You looked at him, seeing the absolute truth in his eyes. He wasn't just a racing driver; he was your person, and you had underestimated just how deeply your pain would wound him, regardless of geography.
"I promise," you whispered, a tear escaping your eye and tracking down into your hair. "No more secrets. I'm sorry I made you go through that."
Lando let out a long, shaky breath, leaning his forehead gently against your uninjured right shoulder, careful not to put an ounce of his weight on your chest. "You're a idiot," he mumbled into your skin, the first trace of his usual humor finally peeking through the trauma.
"An idiot who saved your race weekend," you countered, a small, genuine smile finally breaking through the pain on your face.
"Shut up," he breathed, turning his head to press a soft, lingering kiss to the unbruised skin of your neck. "I’m never letting you drive again. I’m hiring you a permanent chauffeur. Or buying you a tank."
"A tank sounds expensive on insurance."
"I don't care. I'll pay it."
The transition from the hospital to Lando’s apartment in London was a clumsy, painful, but ultimately fiercely comforting affair. Lando had completely transformed from a panicked, crying mess into an aggressively attentive, borderline overbearing nurse.
He had refused to let anyone else drive you home. He drove his own car at exactly five miles under the speed limit, treating every single pothole in the London streets as if it were a landmine. Every time the car dipped slightly, his right hand would fly across the center console, hovering over your lap to brace you, his eyes darting anxiously between the road and your face.
"Lando, if you drive any slower, the cyclists are going to start overtaking us," you teased gently, leaning back against a mountain of pillows he had brought from the flat to pad your passenger seat.
"The cyclists can mind their own business," he muttered, his eyes glued to the rearview mirror as if expecting a rogue van at any second. "We are practicing safe driving. Defensive driving."
When you finally reached the flat, he wouldn't even let you walk from the underground garage to the elevator. Despite your protests that your legs worked perfectly fine, he insisted on lifting you into his arms. He whimpered slightly with anxiety, murmuring a stream of “Sorry, sorry, did that hurt? Tell me if that hurts," as he carried you bridal-style, careful of your strapped left arm, and kicked the front door open.
The apartment was spotless, Max and Pietra had clearly gone in ahead of time to clean up and stock the fridge, leaving a massive bouquet of lilies on the kitchen island with a note that read: “We survived the wrath of Lando. You owe us dinner. Glad you're home.”
Lando carried you straight to the master bedroom, where he had already changed the sheets to your absolute favorite, ultra-soft silk ones. He lowered you onto the mattress with the structural precision of a mechanic fitting a fragile front wing onto a car.
"There," he said, stepping back and wiping a nonexistent bead of sweat from his forehead. "Are you comfortable? Do you need more pillows? Water? The pain meds? I have the schedule written down on my phone, the doctor said the next dose is at 2:00 PM but we can do it ten minutes early if—"
"Lando," you interrupted softly, reaching out with your right hand. "Come here."
He stopped his frantic pacing, looking at you with wide, eager-to-please eyes. He walked over to the side of the bed and sat down gingerly on the edge.
"I don't need pills right now," you said, pulling him down by the collar of his hoodie. "I just need you to lie down with me. I’ve missed you for a week."
His expression softened, the last remnants of the past week's high-alert anxiety finally melting away. He carefully kicked off his trainers and climbed into the bed beside you. He lay on his right side, facing you, sliding his arm under your head to serve as a pillow while his other hand came to rest incredibly gently on your hip, avoiding your ribs entirely.
You shifted closer, resting your cheek against his chest, listening to the steady, reassuring, fast-paced rhythm of his heartbeat. The familiar scent of him, a mix of his expensive cologne, laundry detergent, and just him, instantly acted better than any painkiller the hospital had given you.
"I'm sorry I yelled at you at the hospital," Lando whispered into the quiet room, his fingers tracing small, soothing circles on your hip. "And I'm sorry I wasn't there when it happened."
"We're past that now," you murmured, closing your eyes, the warmth of the bed and his body finally allowing your tense muscles to relax. "You're here now. That’s all that matters."
Lando was quiet for a long moment, his chin resting on the top of your head. "I spoke to Zac and the team today," he said softly. "I'm skipping the simulator sessions this week. I told them I’m completely unavailable until the next race weekend."
You blinked your eyes open, looking up at him. "Lando, you don't have to do that. I have Max and Pietra, I can manage—"
"No," he said, his tone leaving absolutely no room for argument. He leaned down, pressing a soft, slow, deeply tender kiss to your lips, careful not to press too hard against your bruised jaw. When he pulled away, his eyes were soft, fierce, and entirely devoted. "I missed the first three days. I’m not missing the rest. I'm staying right here. I’m going to make you awful tea, burn some toast, and watch whatever terrible reality TV shows you want."
You let out a soft laugh, the slight ache in your ribs entirely worth the feeling of absolute safety wrapping around you. "You promise the tea will be awful?"
"Abysmal," he grinned, that familiar, goofy dimple finally returning to his cheek. "I might even put the milk in first just to spite you."
"You wouldn't dare."
"Try me," he whispered, kissing the top of your head again, pulling the heavy duvet up over both of your shoulders, shielding you from the cold London rain outside.
For the first time since the headlights had flashed in the dark intersection, the phantom smell of smoke and shattered glass completely vanished from your mind, replaced entirely by the warmth of the boy beside you, whose heart beat entirely for you, podiums be damned.
I would love to read a oneshot where a driver (I don't have a preference which one) takes care of a sick y/n. Lots of fluff and caring please.
The apex of the sneeze
Pairing: Oscar Piastri x Reader(y/n)
Warnings: oscar flinching cause of sneezes, flu, protective oscar, fluff
Summary: When the winter break brings a brutal bout of the flu, McLaren’s stoic driver Oscar Piastri trades telemetry for tracking fevers. Stepping into full, protective pamper mode, he navigates medicine schedules, makes homemade broth, and hilariously battles his own lightning-fast reflexes every single time his sick girlfriend sneezes.
Requested: Yes/anon
Author’s note: I really hope this is what you had in mind! Used Oscar cause i haven’t written anything about him yet and felt like he could fit the plot. Enjoy!! xx
Word count: 4191
Masterlist
The transition from the frantic, high-octane blur of the Formula 1 season to the absolute stillness of the winter break always felt like a sudden decompression. One week you are surrounded by the deafening roar of V6 turbo-hybrids, flashing cameras, and a sea of papaya orange; the next, you are staring at a gray London sky from the window of a quiet apartment, the silence so heavy it almost makes your ears ring.
For Oscar, that transition was usually seamless. He was a creature of baseline calm, a man whose heart rate seemed to remain stubbornly low whether he was taking a corner at three hundred kilometers an hour or choosing between sourdough and rye at the local bakery. He didn’t do drama. He didn’t do frantic.
But he did do devotion.
It began on a Thursday in early December. The last of his post-season debriefs and PR commitments had finally wound down, leaving them with a clear, uninterrupted stretch of weeks before the simulator work for the next car would inevitably drag him back to the MTC. They had planned a thoroughly lazy fortnight, no flights, no packed schedules, just pure, unadulterated domesticity.
The first sign that something was amiss didn't arrive with a dramatic flourish. It arrived with a cup of tea.
Oscar was sitting on the plush cream sofa, his iPad resting against his thighs as he reviewed some telemetry data from the final race, ld habits died hard, and his brain never fully shut off. You were sitting on the other end, curled into a tight ball beneath a heavy knit blanket that you had dragged from the bedroom.
"You're quiet," Oscar noted softly, his eyes not leaving the screen but his head tilting slightly in your direction. His voice had that characteristic Melbourne cadence, even, low, and laced with a gentle, dry warmth.
"Just cozy," you murmured. Your voice sounded thicker than usual, a little raspy around the edges, like dry autumn leaves scraping across pavement.
Oscar paused. His thumb hovered over the glass screen. He didn't say anything immediately, that wasn't his style, but his internal radar, normally tuned to the subtle mechanical vibrations of a racing chassis, suddenly recalibrated itself entirely to you. He looked up, his calm, dark eyes locking onto your face.
You were pale, save for a high, unnatural flush that bloomed across the bridge of your nose and the tops of your cheekbones. Your eyes looked glassy, heavy-lidded, reflecting the dim afternoon light with a strange, watery sheen.
"Are you warm enough?" he asked, his tone deceptively casual as he set the iPad down on the coffee table.
"Mhm. Perfect." You pulled the blanket tighter around your chin, shivering despite the fact that the apartment’s heating was humming away at a comfortable twenty-one degrees.
Oscar stood up, his tall, lean frame moving with that unhurried, deliberate grace that defined him. He walked over to the kitchen, filled the kettle, and set it to boil. He didn't ask if you wanted tea; he just made it. He chose a chamomile blend, adding a generous, heavy-handed dollop of honey, the way his mother used to do when he was a kid back in Australia.
When he walked back into the living room, carrying the steaming mug, you chose that exact moment to let out a sudden, sharp sneeze.
Oscar flinched. It wasn't a massive, dramatic leap backward, but a highly visible, full-body twitch, a sudden tightening of his shoulders and a sharp intake of breath, his hands instinctively steadying the mug so the hot liquid wouldn't spill. He stared at you, his eyes wide for a fraction of a second before his expression flattened back into its usual carefully guarded composure.
"Bless you," he said, his voice dropping an octave.
"Thanks," you wheezed, reaching a hand out from beneath the fortress of wool.
When your fingers brushed against his to take the mug, Oscar froze. Your skin wasn't just warm; it felt like a radiator that had been left on high for hours. Your fingertips were burning against his naturally cool hands.
Without a word, Oscar didn't let go of the mug until it was safely in your lap. Instead of returning to his side of the couch, he dropped to his knees on the floor directly in front of you. The sudden proximity made you blink heavily.
"Oscar?"
He didn't answer. He simply raised his right hand, the back of his knuckles smooth and cool, and pressed them gently against your forehead.
The contrast was instantaneous. You let out a soft, involuntary sigh at the cold relief of his skin, leaning into his touch. Oscar, however, felt his chest tighten. Your skin was radiating a dry, baking heat. The fever wasn't just creeping in; it had already set up camp.
"Right," Oscar said, his voice entirely devoid of panic but carrying a new, absolute authority. He withdrew his hand, already mentally organizing a checklist. "You're burning up."
"I'm just a little tired," you tried to protest, but the words were cut off by another sudden sneeze.
Again, Oscar flinched, his head jerking back slightly as if dodging an invisible blow in a boxing ring. It was an involuntary, physical reaction to your illness, a bizarre manifestation of his sudden, overwhelming desire to shield you from the very air you were breathing.
"That's the second time," he murmured, his eyes tracking the way your shoulders shook. "And you're shaking. Stay here. Don't move."
"I wasn't planning on running a marathon," you muttered into your tea, but the humor was weak, drowned out by the heavy lethargy settling deep into your bones.
Oscar vanished down the hallway. You could hear the distant, methodical opening and closing of cabinets in the master bathroom. He wasn't rummaging; he was selecting. When he returned, he was armed with a digital thermometer, a fresh bottle of ibuprofen, a box of tissues, and a massive, oversized McLaren team hoodie that he practically lived in during travel days.
He dropped the hoodie onto your lap. "Put that on. Your clothes are too thin."
"Oscar, it’s huge on me."
"Good. More insulation." He turned on the thermometer, waiting for the digital beep. "Open up."
You obeyed, slipping the plastic tip under your tongue. Oscar stood over you, his hands tucked loosely into the pockets of his sweatpants, looking for all the world like a race engineer waiting for a crucial telemetry reading during a red-flag stoppage. His face was a mask of calm, but his eyes were scanning every detail, the dark circles under your eyes, the rapid rise and fall of your chest, the way your hands trembled slightly against the ceramic mug.
The thermometer beeped. Oscar took it, tilting the small screen toward the light.
Thirty-eight point nine.
A tiny, almost imperceptible twitch formed at the corner of his jaw. It was the only outward sign that his internal alarm bells were suddenly blaring at maximum volume. A driver who spent his life managing tire degradation and brake temperatures knew exactly what numbers meant. And this number meant danger.
"Okay," Oscar said smoothly, his voice dropping into that rhythmic, soothing register he used over the team radio when things were going sideways on track. "The couch is done. We’re moving you to the bed."
"But I want to watch the show-"
"I'll move the iPad. I'll move the tea. I'll carry you if I have to, but you're getting into bed." He didn't give you a choice. He reached down, carefully setting your mug on the table, and then extended his hands toward you.
When you tried to stand, your knees felt like spun sugar. You swayed, a sudden wave of vertigo washing over you, and you instinctively reached out for him.
Oscar caught you before your brain could even register the fall. His arms wrapped around your waist and back, pulling you flush against his chest. He was solid, unyielding, and incredibly grounded. Without a single grunt of exertion, he lifted you cleanly off your feet, tucking you into his side as if you weighed nothing at all.
You buried your face into the crook of his neck, your hot breath ghosting across his skin. Oscar swallowed hard, his grip tightening as he carried you down the dimly lit hallway and into the bedroom.
The sheets were cool, but Oscar didn't just dump you there. He laid you down with an almost comical level of precision, ensuring your head hit the center of the pillows perfectly. He pulled the thick duvet up to your chin, tucking the edges beneath your shoulders until you were practically mummified.
"Oscar, I'm going to melt," you complained weakly, though you didn't actually make any move to break free.
"You need to sweat it out. And your hands are still cold," he countered, his logic unassailable. He popped two ibuprofen tablets from the blister pack and handed them to you alongside a fresh glass of water he had seemingly conjured from thin air. "Drink. All of it."
You swallowed the pills, the cool water soothing your raw throat. When you set the glass down, Oscar was already moving around the room with singular focus. He closed the thick blackout curtains, cutting off the drab London twilight and plunging the room into a warm, gentle gloom. He plugged in a small humidifier by the nightstand, filling it with water and a few drops of eucalyptus oil until a fine, fragrant mist began to curl into the air.
He was a man who optimized systems for a living. Now, he was optimizing your recovery.
"Are you staying?" you asked softly, your eyelids already feeling as heavy as lead weights as the medication began its slow work.
Oscar looked down at you from the side of the bed. He had already changed into an old t-shirt and shorts, his hair a little messy from where he’d rubbed his hand through it.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said simply.
He climbed into the bed beside you, moving with immense care so as not to disturb the blankets he had so meticulously arranged. He didn't lie down properly; instead, he propped himself up against the headboard, his long legs stretched out beneath the covers, placing himself like a silent, protective sentinel right next to you.
You shifted, dragging your blanket-wrapped body closer until your head rested against his thigh. Oscar didn't hesitate. His large, warm hand found its way to your shoulder, his fingers gently kneading the tense, aching muscles through the thick fabric of his oversized hoodie.
For a long time, the only sounds in the room were the soft hum of the humidifier and the rhythmic, heavy sound of your breathing. Oscar stared straight ahead, his mind calculating timelines, how long the fever would take to break, when the next dose of medicine was due, what groceries he needed to order to keep the kitchen stocked with liquids.
Suddenly, your chest hitched.
Oscar's entire body went rigid. His hand stopped moving on your shoulder. He froze, his eyes darting down to your face just in time to see you let out a violent, muffled sneeze into the pillow.
Oscar flinched so hard his back hit the headboard with a soft thud. He closed his eyes for a brief second, letting out a slow, controlled breath through his nose, before opening them to look down at you with a mixture of profound concern and mild, exasperated trauma.
"You really have no warning with those, do you?" he murmured, his voice laced with that dry, deadpan Aussie humor.
"Sorry," you mumbled into the pillow, your voice sounding even worse now. "Did I scare you?"
"I don't get scared," Oscar lied smoothly, his hand resuming its gentle, rhythmic stroking of your arm. "I was just... checking the structural integrity of the headboard."
"Liar."
"Go to sleep," he whispered, his tone softening into something so tender it made your heart ache more than your throat. "I've got you."
The middle of the night was when the flu truly showed its teeth.
Sometime around three in the morning, the fever peaked. You woke up in a state of confused, disoriented misery, your skin drenched in a cold, sticky sweat while your core felt like it was being scorched by an open flame. You were shivering violently, your teeth literally chattering together, a low, pathetic groan escaping your lips before you could stop it.
The moment that tiny sound cut through the silence of the dark bedroom, Oscar was awake. He didn't stir slowly or blink away sleep; he was instantly, totally alert, as if a green light had just flashed in his mind.
"Hey," he murmured, his voice rough and deep from sleep but entirely present. "Hey, look at me."
He shifted, sliding down the pillows until he was level with you. In the dim light filtering through the crack in the curtains, you could see the intense, unwavering focus in his eyes. He reached out, his hand instantly finding your face. His knuckles met your cheek, and he let out a sharp, quiet breath.
"You're boiling," he muttered.
"Oscar, it hurts," you whispered, tears of sheer physical exhaustion pricking the corners of your eyes. "Everything hurts."
To anyone else, Oscar Piastri was a brick wall, unreadable, stoic, cool under immense pressure. But to you, in the dark of a fever-ridden winter night, that stoicism transformed into an absolute, unshakeable anchor. He didn't panic. He didn't get overwhelmed by your distress. He simply became the calm center of your storm.
"I know. I know it does," he said softly, his thumb gently wiping away a stray tear that had escaped down your temple. "The fever is just fighting it off. You're okay. I'm right here."
He threw back the heavy duvet, ignoring your small cry of protest at the sudden influx of cool air. "We need to get your temperature down. Just trust me."
He left the bed for less than a minute, returning with a clean, soft washcloth and a bowl of cool water. He sat on the edge of the mattress, his long frame casting a protective shadow over you. Very gently, with the patience of someone handling a priceless, fragile artifact, he pressed the damp cloth to your forehead.
You gasped at the cold shock, but within seconds, the relief washed over you. Oscar didn't stop there. He wiped down your face, your neck, and the pulse points on your wrists, his movements slow, deliberate, and endlessly patient.
Every time you shivered, his jaw would tighten, but his hands remained perfectly steady.
"Better?" he asked quietly, his eyes searching yours.
"A little," you croaked. "Can you... can you just hold me? I'm so cold."
Oscar paused. The rational, analytical part of his brain, the part that understood viral loads and contagion, knew that getting too close to a flu patient during peak fever was a surefire way to ruin his own training schedule. If he got sick, his winter fitness regimen would take a massive hit.
But Oscar didn't look at you like an athlete calculating risk. He looked at you like a man who loved you.
Without a word of complaint, he set the washcloth aside and climbed back under the sheets. He didn't care about the sweat, he didn't care about the germs. He pulled your shaking body directly against his chest, wrapping his long arms and legs around you until you were completely enveloped in his warmth. He was like a human furnace, his steady, slow heartbeat thumping right against your ear.
"You're going to get sick," you mumbled against his collarbone.
"Then I'll get sick," he replied, his chin resting gently on the top of your head. "But right now, you're the priority. Shut your eyes."
He began to trace slow, meaningless patterns on your back with his fingertips, circles, lines, the invisible tracks of circuits he knew by heart. Silverstone, Monaco, Spa. He mapped them out across your skin, a silent, rhythmic language of comfort that slowly, surely, began to lull your panicked, feverish mind back into the twilight of sleep.
Just as you were about to drift off, a sudden tickle in your nose made your eyes fly open. You tried to turn your head away, but you were locked tight in his embrace.
“Achoo!”
Oscar didn't just flinch this time; his entire torso jolted backward against the pillows, his breath catching in his throat as if he had just survived a major broadside collision on track. He stared down at the top of your head, his eyes wide in the dark, his heart rate visibly spiking against your cheek.
"Sorry," you mumbled sleepily, too exhausted to even feel guilty.
Oscar let out a long, slow exhale, his fingers restarting their slow sweep across your back. "That's too many," he muttered dryly. "I'm going to develop a permanent reflex if this keeps up."
"You're brave," you whispered.
"Incredibly," he agreed, his voice dropping to a soft, affectionate rumble. "Now sleep."
When morning arrived, the gray London light filtered through the edges of the curtains, bringing with it a dull, freezing rain that splattered against the glass.
You woke up feeling as though you had been run over by a very large, very heavy truck, but the suffocating, terrifying heat of the night before had finally receded into a dull, manageable ache. The fever had broken.
Oscar was gone from the bed, but the space beside you was still warm.
A few minutes later, the bedroom door creaked open. Oscar walked in carrying a large wooden tray. He looked slightly disheveled, his hair was sticking up in odd directions, and there was a faint smudge of something dark on his forearm, but his expression was one of total, focused determination.
On the tray sat a bowl of steaming chicken broth, a plate of dry toast cut into perfect triangles, a fresh glass of orange juice, and a neat array of cold medicines.
"You're awake," he said, setting the tray down on the nightstand. He immediately reached out, the back of his hand testing your forehead. He let out a quiet, almost imperceptible sigh of relief. "Temperature's down. Still warm, but you're not a radiator anymore."
"Did you make that?" you asked, nodding toward the broth.
"I ordered the ingredients express at six AM," Oscar admitted, pulling the pillows up behind your back so you could sit up. "And then I spent the last forty-five minutes ensuring I didn't burn the apartment down. It's from a recipe my mum texted me. She told me if I messed it up, she’d fly over here and do it herself."
You smiled, the movement stretching your chapped lips. "Thank you, Osc."
He picked up the spoon, blew on the broth with painstaking care, and held it up to your lips.
"Oscar, I can eat by myself," you laughed weakly, reaching for the spoon.
He pulled it back slightly, his expression remaining completely deadpan. "I've entered full pamper mode. It's a non-negotiable directive from team management. Open up."
You couldn't help but chuckle, which turned into a slight cough, but you obeyed. The broth was warm, salty, and incredibly soothing. Oscar fed you the first few spoonfuls with absolute gravity, his hand perfectly steady, his eyes watching you to ensure you were swallowing properly.
Once he was satisfied that you weren't going to collapse, he handed over the spoon and sat back on the edge of the bed, watching you eat.
"Did you sleep at all?" you asked, looking at the faint shadows under his eyes.
"Plenty," he lied effortlessly. "I'm an elite athlete. I can sleep anywhere, under any conditions."
"You were awake every time I moved."
"That was just my fast reaction times," he countered, a tiny, rare smirk tugging at the corner of his lips. "Gotta keep the reflexes sharp during the off-season. Sneeze defense training."
As if on cue, a sudden, sharp tickle hit your sinuses. You didn't even have time to put the spoon down before you let out a massive, unannounced sneeze.
Oscar’s smirk vanished instantly. His entire body leaped backward about six inches, his shoulders hunching up toward his ears, his hands flying up in a defensive, half-formed guard. He stared at you, blinking rapidly, his chest heaving with a sudden burst of adrenaline.
You froze, the spoon hovering in mid-air, before you burst into a fit of breathless, raspy laughter.
"It's not funny," Oscar said, though the tips of his ears were turning a distinct shade of pink. He lowered his hands, smoothing down his t-shirt with an effort at reclaiming his dignity. "You're like an unexploded ordnance. There’s no countdown. No warning lights. Just... boom."
"I told you I was sorry," you giggled, wiping your nose with a tissue he quickly handed you. "You look like you're dodging a crash."
"I've avoided multi-car pileups at Spa that were less stressful than sitting next to your nose right now," he muttered dryly, though he was already reaching out to gently tuck a stray strand of hair behind your ear.
His fingers lingered on your cheek, his touch incredibly soft. The humor faded from his eyes, replaced by that deep, steady warmth that he rarely showed the rest of the world, but kept entirely reserved for you.
"How are you really feeling?" he asked softly.
"Better," you said honestly, leaning into his hand. "Still weak, and everything tastes a bit like cardboard, but the fire is gone."
"Good." He leaned forward, pressing a soft, lingering kiss to the center of your forehead, right where the fever had been raging just hours before. "Because you're stuck in this bed for the next three days at least. I've already cancelled the grocery run and ordered everything to be delivered. You're doing nothing but resting, watching rubbish television, and letting me take care of you."
"Is that a team order, driver Piastri?"
"Strict compliance is required," he murmured, his lips brushing against your temple. "No exceptions."
For the next forty-eight hours, Oscar was true to his word. He became a ghost in the apartment, always present but moving with a quiet, efficient purpose that ensured you never had to lift a finger.
He monitored your medicine schedule with a precision that would have made the McLaren garage proud. Every four hours on the dot, he would appear by the bedside with a fresh glass of water and the exact dosage required. He kept a running log in the notes app on his phone, temperatures, times, symptoms, treating your recovery like a crucial engineering problem that required a perfect solution.
When you grew tired of the bedroom, he executed a flawless transfer back to the living room, building an elaborate, multi-layered fort of pillows and blankets on the sofa that he deemed "aerodynamically optimized for maximum comfort."
He sat with you through hours of terrible reality television, shows he would normally never have tolerated for a single second. He didn't complain once. He just sat there, his arm wrapped around your shoulders, letting you rest your heavy head against his chest while he occasionally offered dry, devastatingly witty commentary on the contestants.
And through it all, his "sneeze reflex" remained fully active. By day three, it had become a running joke between you. You would feel a tickle, take a sharp breath, and Oscar would instantly stiffen beside you, his eyes darting toward you like a soldier spotting a flare in the night.
"You're getting better at the dodge," you remarked on the third afternoon, curled up against his side as the credits rolled on another episode.
"I'm adapting," Oscar said, his tone perfectly even. "It's all about anticipating the apex of the sneeze. If I can predict the trajectory, I can minimize the splash zone."
"You are ridiculous."
"I'm effective," he corrected, turning his head to look down at you.
The color had finally returned to your face. The glassy, watery look in your eyes was gone, replaced by their usual brightness. Your skin was cool to the touch, your breathing deep and easy. The flu had run its course, defeated by time, medicine, and the absolute, unwavering care of a boy who refused to leave your side.
Oscar looked at you for a long moment, his thumb tracing the line of your jaw. For all his stoicism, for all his quiet, reserved nature, the look in his eyes right now was entirely transparent. It was pure, unadulterated relief.
"You're back," he whispered softly.
"Thanks to you," you said, reaching up to wrap your arms around his neck. "You're a really good nurse, Osc."
"Don't tell Logan or Lando," he murmured, a genuine, soft smile finally breaking across his face as he pulled you close, burying his face in your hair. "They'll start asking me to look after them when they get a cold, and I don't think my reflexes could handle Lando sneezing."
You laughed, the sound clear and bright, echoing through the quiet apartment. Oscar held you tight, his heart beating a steady, calm rhythm against yours, completely content in the quiet safety of the winter break, where the only race that mattered was the one he had just helped you win.
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summary: you and max spontaneously get married in las vegas. the kicker? you guys aren’t even dating.
pairing: max verstappen x reader
fc: camila morrone
request: Hi id love to attend the tea party with max verstappen and have a pink lemonade with a marmalade sandwich and paper rings by Taylor swift playing - @amelia098765
warnings:
vicious speaks: surprise, the first fic for the tea party is here!! i had a blast working on this, and i really hope you enjoy it 💓 thank you so much for attending!! (PS the twitter thread got too long so i had to get a little creative with the format, hopefully it's easy to read!)
tea party masterlist | max masterlist | read on ao3
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. .・。.・゜✭・.・✫ .
liked by maxverstappen1 and others
yn forever proud of you 💙
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maxverstappen1 couldn’t do this without your support, schatje 💙
⤷ yn on my way to your drivers room to hug the shit out of you!!
⤷ maxverstappen1 looking forward to it 🙂
⤷ fan they're so cute 🥹
fan my fave besties!!
fan he needs to wife you up already!!
⤷ fan maxverstappen1 get on it before someone else does!!
fan ugh i love how supportive they are of each other 🥹
fan cuties 🥰
fan i love them sm 🫶
fan i swear this is basically a max fan account 😭
⤷ yn lmao yeah basically
redbullracing Always love when we get to have max’s lucky charm in our garage 💙 don’t stay away for too long!!
⤷ yn lysm admin 😚
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. .・。.・゜✭・.・✫ .
the next day
non-british bias gc
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. .・。.・゜✭・.・✫ .
winx club gc
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. .・。.・゜✭・.・✫ .
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. .・。.・゜✭・.・✫ .
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. .・。.・゜✭・.・✫ .
liked by pierregasly and others
kikagomes much to celebrate this nye 🤍🥂
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yn grateful to ring in a new year with you guys by my side ♡
⤷ kikagomes love u forever 🥹 ♥︎ by yn
fan hey why does this kinda look like-
⤷ fan right. thinking thoughts...
alexandrasaintmleux 🤍🤍🤍 ♥︎ by author
fan yn looked so good, kika had to post her twice
⤷ fan me 🤝 kika 🤝 being in love with yn ♥︎ by author
lilyzneimer a night to remember!!
⤷ kikagomes for sure 🤭
fan bets on who max is looking at in that pic?
⤷ fan yn for sure
⤷ fan his wife
⤷ fan so...yn.
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. .・。.・゜✭・.・✫ .
♫ taylor swift ・paper rings
ynverstappen and maxverstappen1
liked by maxverstappen1 and others
ynverstappen 11/22/2025 💍
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maxverstappen1 🤍
fan did you two get married in fucking VEGAS?!
danielricciardo still bitter i wasn't invited
⤷ ynverstappen first of all, it was spur of the moment. second of all, we more than made up for it on nye
⤷ danielricciardo ...true.
⤷ fan I KNEW KIKA'S PICS FROM THAT NIGHT GAVE WEDDING VIBES
⤷ fan spur of the moment marriage is crazy
fan i didn't even know you guys were dating 😭
⤷ maxverstappen1 we weren't
⤷ fan lmfao???
victoriaverstappen so happy he finally got his head out his ass and locked you down 💞
⤷ fan pls everyone was tired of them
⤷ victoriaverstappen i've had a front row seat to them being desperately in love since we were kids
⤷ ynverstappen can't even defend ourselves cause it's true 😭
fan omg??? congrats!!!
lilymhe cuties 💓 ♥︎ by author
fan when it wasn't brought up again, i truly thought osc and max were just joking about him being married 💀 very happy that it's true!! wishing you two a happy marriage <3 ♥︎ by author
You struggle to get your key in the door while balancing groceries and a very vocal cardboard box. When you finally manage to stumble into the apartment, Oscar looks up from his laptop, then does a double-take.
"What," he says slowly, "is that noise?"
The box meows in response.
"Funny story," you begin, setting down the groceries. "Remember how you said I shouldn't go grocery shopping when hungry because I make impulsive decisions?"
"YN."
You open the box carefully, and a small orange cat pokes its head out, looking around curiously.
"What is that?"
"Our cat!"
"Our what?"
"His name is Oscat!"
Oscar pinches the bridge of his nose. "We don't have a cat."
"We do now! Look how cute he is!" You lift the cat, who immediately starts purring. "I found him outside the store and he was all alone and hungry and look at his little face!"
"No."
"But-"
"We can't have a cat."
"We can! I already got food and litter and toys and-"
"When did you have time to get all that?"
"...I may have gotten the supplies before the groceries."
"YN."
"Oscar," you mimic his tone, holding the cat up so it's face-to-face with him. "Look at him. Look at his little nose. He looks just like you!"
"He does not- wait, is that why you named him Oscat?"
"He's grumpy but secretly sweet. Just like you!"
The cat meows again, reaching a paw toward Oscar.
"No," Oscar says firmly. "No way. We travel too much."
"Lando's sister already said she'd cat-sit during race weekends!"
"You called Lando's sister before talking to me?"
"I knew you'd say no!"
"Because it's a no!"
The cat chooses that moment to wriggle free from your hands, landing gracefully on Oscar's lap and immediately curling up.
"See?" you say triumphantly. "He loves you!"
"He's... just warm," Oscar says, very carefully not petting the cat despite its loud purring. "And we're not keeping him."
"But-"
"He can stay until we find him a proper home. That's it."
"Really?"
"Just until we find him a home."
You beam. "You're the best!"
"I mean it, YN. Just temporary."
"Of course, totally temporary," you agree, already taking pictures of Oscar and the cat. "Completely temporary."
One Week Later:
"Oscar? Have you seen Oscat's fish toy? The blue one?"
"It's under the couch," Oscar replies without looking up from his phone. "And don't give him the catnip one, he got too hyper last time."
"Says the person who bought him three new toys yesterday."
"They were on sale."
"Mhmm. And the custom bed with his name?"
"It was practical."
"And the special food you ordered from that fancy pet store?"
"He's picky!"
"Face it, babe," you grin as Oscat jumps onto Oscar's lap, immediately demanding attention. "You love him."
"I tolerate him," Oscar corrects, even as he scratches behind the cat's ears exactly where he likes it. "And we're still finding him a new home."
"Sure we are."
"We are!"
"Is that why you changed your phone background to that picture of him sleeping in your racing helmet?"
"He looked cute- I mean, it was funny."
"And why you FaceTimed him during the simulator session yesterday?"
"I was checking if he ate!"
"And why you're currently letting him sleep on your McLaren jacket?"
Oscar looks down at the cat, who has indeed made himself comfortable on the expensive team gear. "He has good taste."
"Just admit you love him."
"Never."
Oscat meows, headbutting Oscar's hand for more pets.
"Demanding little thing," Oscar mutters, but he's smiling as he strokes the cat's fur.
"Like owner, like cat."
"I'm not his owner."
"No?" You pull out your phone. "So I shouldn't show everyone the video of you singing him to sleep last night?"
Oscar's head snaps up. "You didn't."
"Want to bet?"
"Delete it."
"Make me."
Oscar moves to get up, but Oscat digs his claws into the jacket, giving him the most betrayed look a cat could manage.
"Ha!" you say triumphantly. "You won't move because you don't want to disturb him!"
"I just don't want him to ruin the jacket."
"Sure, that's why you let him sleep on it every day."
"I do not-"
"And why you're currently smiling at him like he's the cutest thing you've ever seen."
Oscar quickly schools his expression. "I'm not."
"Too late, already got a picture."
"You're the worst."
"And yet you love me."
"Unfortunately."
"Almost as much as you love Oscat."
"I don't-"
Oscat chooses that moment to stretch and yawn, then snuggles closer to Oscar, purring loudly.
"...fine," Oscar admits defeat. "Maybe I like him a little."
"A little?"
"Don't push it."
"Says the guy who installed a cat camera to watch him while we're away."
"It's for security!"
"The one that you check every hour?"
"I'm just being thorough."
Oscar looks down at the cat, who is now fully asleep on his lap. "This is your fault," he tells him. "You and your stupid cute face."
Oscat just purrs louder.
"Face it, babe," you sit next to them, scratching Oscat's chin. "You're a cat dad now."
"I hate that term."
"Would you prefer 'fur parent'?"
"I hate you."
"No you don't. You love me and our cat."
Oscar sighs, but he's fighting a smile. "Yeah," he says softly, watching Oscat sleep. "I really do."
"Both of us?"
"Both of you. Even when you're both impossibly annoying."
"We learned from the best."
Oscar doesn't argue, too busy taking another picture of Oscat for his growing collection. You hide your smile, watching your grumpy boyfriend completely smitten with your little orange cat.
And if Oscat now has his own Instagram account run by Oscar? Well, that's just coincidence. Totally temporary, of course.
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.
When you'r f1 driver gets jealous for absolutely no reason.
pairing: f!reader x f1!boyfriend
genre: contains spicy texts but mostly fluff
drivers mentioned: cl16, ln1, ka12, ob87, mv3, op81
this has been sitting in my drafts before i made my tumblr so enjoy!!
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.
Can you please write a fic about reader x Oscar Piastri and reader has curly hair and he absolutely loves it. To the point where during a video for McLaren social media they ask Oscar “what is your favorite thing about reader” and Oscar says “her curls” 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽
Her Curls
Oscar Piastri x Girlfriend!reader
Synopsis: Oscar films a McLaren Q&A and, without hesitation, says his favourite thing about you is “her curls.” Later at home, he can’t stop touching them, admitting they’re the first thing he noticed and the thing he misses most.
McLaren HQ days always drain Oscar in a very specific way — not bad, just… overstimulated. Too many lights, too many cameras, too many people asking him to smile a little wider or tilt his head a little more. He handles it all with that calm, polite charm he’s known for, but you can always tell when he’s had enough.
Which is why, when he walks through the front door that evening, the first thing he does is find you.
Not greet you.
Not take off his shoes.
Not drop his bag.
Find you.
You’re in the living room, curled up on the sofa with a blanket and a half‑finished cup of tea, hair in its natural state — soft, springy curls framing your face, falling over your shoulders, catching the warm lamplight.
Oscar stops in the doorway like he’s been physically hit.
“There you are,” he breathes, voice already softer than it’s been all day.
You smile. “Hi, baby.”
He crosses the room in three long strides, drops onto the sofa beside you, and immediately buries his face in your curls. Not your neck. Not your shoulder. Your hair.
His hands slide in next, fingertips brushing your scalp, gently separating curls, twisting one around his finger like he’s grounding himself.
You laugh quietly. “Rough day?”
“Mm.” His voice is muffled in your hair. “Better now.”
He stays like that for a long moment — breathing you in, playing with your curls, letting the tension leave his shoulders. You stroke his back, slow and steady, and he melts even further, practically draped over you.
“You’re clingy today,” you tease.
“Not clingy,” he says, lifting his head just enough to look at you. “Just missed you. And your hair.”
“My hair?”
He nods, completely serious. “Your curls are my favourite thing in the world.”
You’re about to tease him again when his phone buzzes. He groans, reaches for it, and you both see the notification:
McLaren: Social video is live!
“Oh god,” he mutters. “That one.”
You raise a brow. “What did you do?”
“Nothing!” he insists, which is exactly what someone guilty would say.
You open the video.
It’s Oscar in the papaya chair, sitting with that polite media-day posture, hands folded, expression calm. The interviewer is off-camera, cheerful as ever.
“Oscar, what’s your favourite thing about [reader]?”
Oscar doesn’t even blink.
“Her curls.”
You choke on your tea. “Oscar!”
He groans again, burying his face in your shoulder this time. “I didn’t think they’d use that part.”
On screen, the interviewer laughs. “Her curls?”
Oscar nods, cheeks pink. “Yeah. They’re just… her. I love them. I love playing with them. I love when she wakes up and they’re all messy. I love when she’s frustrated trying to style them. They’re my favourite thing.”
The clip ends.
You look at him. He refuses to look back.
“Oscar.”
“Nope,” he says into your shoulder. “Not discussing it.”
You gently tug his chin up so he has to meet your eyes. His face is bright red.
“You really meant it?” you ask softly.
He swallows. “Of course I did.”
You brush a curl away from your face. His eyes follow the movement like he’s hypnotised.
“They’re the first thing I noticed about you,” he admits. “And the thing I miss the most when I’m away. They’re just… comforting. They’re home.”
Your chest tightens. You lean in and kiss him — slow, warm, grateful. He sighs into it, hands sliding back into your curls like they belong there.
When you pull back, he rests his forehead against yours.
“You know,” you whisper, “they’re all yours.”
He smiles, soft and a little overwhelmed. “Good. Because I’m never giving them back.”
He pulls you closer, curls tangled between his fingers, the two of you wrapped up in each other like the world outside doesn’t exist.
summary: texts they send when you thirst over the off campus boys.
drivers: charles leclerc, oscar piastri, lando norris and max verstappen. (fem!reader)
warnings: use of y/n, cursing, jealousy (not toxic), mentions of garret graham and dean di laurentis (🫦). i think that's pretty much it but lmk if you find something else!
a/n: hi my loves, i was supposed to post this on monday or tuesday but stuff happened lol. anyways here it is! enjoy ;) also: watch off campus if you haven't cause it's really good.
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a/n: inspired by my favourite current event also known as oscar's paddock pass not working. i have not stopped rewatching it; it makes me laugh so bad so naturally I had to write this as I sit in the parking lot waiting for my parents to finish their errands 🤓 happy race week!
+ also new dividers! i have one for all drivers i write for. what do we think? :)
Her laugh echoed along the Monaco walkway, bright and entirely unhelpful. "Baby, don't laugh, it's not funny," Oscar muttered, though it was hard to sound threatening when he was looking like a sad but frustrated puppy. His paddock pass had just flashed a ruthless bright red at the turnstile. Now, they were stuck: her on the inside, and Oscar trapped on the outside, looking less like a driver and more like a tourist who has gone too far.
"How does yours work and mine doesn't?" Oscar asked, eyeing her badge. "Are you sure you didn't accidentally steal mine?" That only made her laugh harder. "Osc, it's my face, and my name," she said through giggles, turning the ID around to show him.
Oscar turned back to the towering security guard. He puffed out his chest slightly, trying to look imposing. "Sir, I'm a driver for McLaren. I raced here last year." The guard looked down at Oscar. Then down at Oscar’s outfit. Then back up to Oscar's face. Without breaking eye contact or moving a single facial muscle, the guard slowly raised his walkie-talkie to his mouth.
"We have a breach at Gate 3," the guard droned into the radio. Oscar groans; she clutches her stomach and chest, trying to breathe but failing as she continues to burst out laughing. How was it only getting worse?
A few feet away, Mark was supposedly handling the situation with the race officials, though he was very obviously failing to hide a smirk, thoroughly enjoying Oscar practically begging the guard with his eyes. Finally, after the head of security cleared his name over the radio, he was quickly swept off to the side entrance. She immediately jogged over and grabbed Oscar’s hand, still wiping a tear of laughter from her eye.
"I can't believe they didn't believe I was a driver," Oscar grumbled, the faint pout returning as they walked. It was entirely endearing, but she couldn't help the fresh wave of amusement. Leaning up, she planted a soft, apologetic kiss on his cheek. "Well, maybe you should stop dressing like a 90s dad on vacation and more like an athlete?"
Oscar stopped, giving her a look of pure betrayal.
"I'm joking!" she laughed, tugging his arm. "Seriously though, babe, we are burning those khaki shorts tonight."
