☆ crushed stars and liquid lightning ☆

Carlos didn’t know why he told Alex–every new team he went to, he made the resolution to keep more distance to his teammate than the last time, not get attached. He never kept his word, but there was a difference between making friends and offering up your insecurities cooked medium rare. 

“Oh, yeah, whatever it is, it’s coming,” Alex said from where he was stretched out on the floor of Carlos’s drivers room. Alex wasn’t running in the tyre test until tomorrow so Carlos assumed he wouldn’t see Alex until the media timeslot, but instead Alex had been hanging around in the garage for the entire morning. It’d be one thing if he was just trying to mooch data, but instead, every time Carlos was out of the car, Alex called him over to check something out on the screen, suggesting an adjustment here or an alteration there. And then, during the twenty minute coffee break, he’d followed Carlos to his driver’s room and laid down on his floor without explanation. 

“Sorry?” Carlos said.

“It’s always something,” Alex said. “Sometimes you can see it coming, sometimes it’s a surprise. Like, for me, first season, Max. Second season, Max again. 2022, appendix, et cetera. Like a curse. Sometimes it’s worse when you can see it coming and can’t do anything against it, but in the end, I feel like it’s better to know? Or, well, I don’t know why I’m telling you this? Last season must have been like–anyway, as I said, it’s always something.”

“Ah,” Carlos said. “I hoped you were going to tell me–never mind.”

“Oh, you’re going to be fine,” Alex said. “You have cockroach DNA.”

When Carlos sputtered, he waved Carlos off dismissively.

“I’m just saying,” Alex said. “You escaped the Verstappen curse, you went from appendix surgery to race win. Whatever comes, you’ll be fine.”

Something about his casual–trust, you could call it, made Carlos feel… Warm, maybe. 

“You too,” he’d said before he could think about it and Alex propped himself up on his elbows. “You have, what is it, cockroach DNA too.”

Alex blinked. A crooked smile passed over his face, creasing his eyes. There was something about his smile that Carlos liked, his big teeth and his big mouth and the way he laughed with his entire face, sometimes his entire body. It was very rewarding, making Alex laugh. 

“Maybe this year our combined survivor instincts will inoculate us against the curse,” Alex said and laid back down on the floor. “Now talk to me about your set-up and spare no detail.”

And maybe stupidly, Carlos did. Alex listened, asked questions and then, after his own tyre test, called Carlos and dutifully listed everything he’d tried and what results it had yielded. 

“Just so you–I’m putting my cards on the table, this season,” Alex had said at the end of the call. “You can–if you want to play your own game, I respect that, it’s a new team, I get it. But I just wanted to, y’know. If we–next year, if we work together, we can be proper rivals in 2026.”

He laughed then, kind of self-deprecatingly and Carlos started talking before he even thought about what he’d say, wanting Alex to stop thinking that Carlos would make fun of him for–for not biting.

“I want that,” Carlos said. “We can–we’ll have earned it, yes? So this season, we tell each other. Avoid the curse.”

“And avoid the curse,” Alex repeated, a smile in his voice. “Or at least tell me when you’ve seen it, yeah? So I know what’s coming.”

This is the curse, Carlos captioned the picture of the Grove breakfast menu, the dried out beans in tomato sauce sticking to the stainless steel chafing dish. Alex texted back that dunking on British cuisine was like dunking on a newborn baby and somehow, forty minutes of texting later, Carlos had accepted an invitation from Alex to go get dinner at Alex’s favourite Thai place in London in exchange for Carlos making real pasta carbonara for Alex the next time they were in Monaco. 

“Deal,” Carlos said.

*****

*****

“I’m pretty sure this is the curse,” Alex said, showing Carlos the F1 75 livery reveal schedule they just got handed in the marketing meeting. “Look at this, they’re going to have us walk the red carpet.”

“Have you not ever walked a red carpet before?” Carlos asked and Alex crumpled up the paper to toss it at Carlos.

“Oh, yeah, remind me how much of a hot commodity you were, Sainz,” he said and Carlos grinned. “Mister Gladiator II.”

“That was not even my first red carpet,” Carlos said loftily and Alex imitated him until they got shushed for disrupting the meeting.

“So,” Alex muttered under his breath a few minutes later, when the meeting had moved on to the scheduled sponsor dinners. He leaned in until he was a warm line against Carlos’s side. “What was your first red carpet?”

“The Secret Life of Pets,” Carlos whispered back, waiting until Alex was already giggling before adding: “Two.”

The resulting guffaw Alex let out was so loud the meeting got excused for five minutes so everyone could, Rachel pointedly said, let off some excess energy. 

*****

“Maybe this entire event is the curse,” Carlos said as he watched Pierre on the stage of the O2 arena talking around the fact he’d gotten a hair transplant. He’d turned his chair away from the stage, surreptitiously at first, then openly once he realised he really, really couldn’t care less about what colour Haas was painting their cars this year. Instead, he’d been making jokes to Alex for most of the evening. Usually, Carlos didn’t really see the value of doing things that were very easy, but somehow making Alex laugh wasn’t difficult at all and still rewarding.

“I don’t know,” Alex said, face thoughtful all of a sudden. “I’m having a pretty good time.”

“Me too,” Carlos admitted and when Alex grinned at him, he could feel his own face break open into a helpless, answering smile.

*****

“I think this might be the curse,” Carlos said and Alex looked up with a raised eyebrow. His mouth was bitten pink and his hair was disheveled. It made him look otherworldly attractive. “Not that it is not–it is very good. But it is–not smart.”

“Oh,” Alex said. “Yeah, no, you’re right.”

He kissed Carlos’s throat again and Carlos groaned. They were folded into Alex’s cramped backseat, Alex’s limbs bent in directions that looked unnatural. The entire situation was frankly ridiculous, Alex’s offer to drive Carlos home instead of Carlos just taking an Uber, the car parked in the quiet, dark alley next to Carlos’s building, as if his empty flat wasn’t less than a minute away. Carlos told himself, you idiot. And then he opened his mouth again, letting Alex lick behind his teeth. Alex’s thigh was a warm pressure against Carlos’s hard dick. He could keep himself from rutting up against it, but his restraint was running out rapidly. 

“I mean,” Alex said, pulling back and mercifully ignoring the cut-off wanting sound that Carlos made. “Maybe this is good? We know what’s coming, we have full control over it. Maybe you have to make your own curse at home instead of, y’know, store bought–”