Chapter Text
Gasping. The sound tore itself from his throat, raw and ragged, a dying animal’s plea lost in the suffocating dark. Each breath was a jagged shard scraping down his windpipe, his heart a frantic prisoner hammering against the cage of ribs – thud-thud-thud-thud – a desperate drumbeat syncopated with the cold sweat beading, then spilling down his temples. It traced paths like liquid diamonds over skin stretched taut over hollow bones, each drop a testament to the silent war waged within. Charles couldn’t recall a single, untainted night of sleep untouched by the chemical oblivion of sedatives. Perhaps such innocence had never existed for him. Only relics remained: the salt-crusted hieroglyphs of dried tears etched into the pillowcase, a silent archive of despair, and the crumpled, rust-stained gauze – discarded petals from a wound that refused to heal, whispering of violence turned sepia with time.
His fingers, spectral and trembling with a life of their own, spiders made of ice and fear, scrabbled across the lacquered wood of the nightstand. Clink. The bottle. A familiar ritual performed with the numb precision of the damned. The cap yielded with a dry twist, a sigh of resignation. He tipped the pills – small, bitter promises of numbness – into his mouth. They caught, gritty and acrid, a desert storm scraping down his throat, leaving a trail of phantom fire in their wake. A choked gasp escaped, fractured between convulsive swallows. His chest caved inwards on every second breath, a collapsing star. He folded himself smaller, tighter, drawing knees sharp as broken kingwood to his concave chest. The blanket became his shroud, a flimsy sanctuary woven from childhood’s ghostly remnants, a pathetic shield against the encroaching world… or the specters that lived within his own skull. It offered no protection. Only the illusion of it.
But the memories… The memories were sovereign. They recognized no borders, acknowledged no pleas for mercy. They came uninvited. Unannounced. They shattered the fragile walls of the present.
A flash. Not light, but a plunge into frigid, viscous darkness. Thick, muscled arms – smelling of cheap tobacco and sweat-soured aggression – wrapped like constricting vines around the fragile frame of his younger self. Thrown down. Pinned. A visceral tearing, a violation as profound as the rending of sacred cloth. The sensation wasn't memory; it was present – the phantom teeth of rabid beasts worrying at the soft, exposed marrow of his soul, a lamb offered on an altar of cruelty.
His body recoiled violently, a puppet jerked by invisible wires of terror. A sound escaped him then – not a sob, but the fragile shattering of glass: a high, sweet whimper, thin and breathless, muffled by the cotton that tasted of salt and despair. It echoed in the suffocating silence, a solitary pin dropped onto the marble floor of an empty, echoing cathedral, the sound magnifying the void. The ache in his limbs was a deep, resonant thrum beneath skin already mapped with the purple-black constellations of old bruises. The wounds – some faded silver scars, others raw, weeping crimson fissures too new for scabs – screamed beneath each inhalation. They pulsed with a heat that was almost alive, they stung like nettles woven into his nerves, they itched with the maddening persistence of insects burrowing beneath his skin. His hands, traitors to his conscious will, moved with a dreadful autonomy. Fingernails, bitten to the quick, raked over the fresh slashes, reopening the fragile seals, clawing at the ridges of ancient scars that refused to fade into oblivion. Skin lifted, peeled back like unwanted parchment. Blood, warm and startlingly red, welled anew. The pain was a lover. Insistent. Intimate. The only thing that felt real in the dissolving world.
He buried his face deeper into the pillow’s sterile whiteness, a landscape soon transformed into a watercolour of misery by silent, trembling tears. They fell not in torrents, but like the slow, relentless drizzle down a rain-streaked windowpane – cold, isolating, obscuring the view. A sigh escaped him, long and shuddering, raw as exposed nerve endings. His lungs felt like collapsed bellows, each expansion a sharp, staccato agony. His lips, already a battlefield of cracks from nervous gnawing, now bloomed with tiny crimson beads. His eyes, vast caverns hollowed out by relentless insomnia, were framed by bruised crescents the colour of storm clouds and exhaustion – badges of honour won in endless battles against nights devoid of sleep, filled only with fevered echoes and the oppressive weight of dread.
And the guilt. It was the bedrock upon which his suffering was built. It settled in his marrow, cold and heavy. He blamed himself. For everything. For the inherent weakness of his bones, the smallness of his frame against the onslaught. For the paralysis that had seized his limbs, the scream that had died unborn in his throat. For the simple, devastating fact of survival – for carrying the poison within him, a festering thing. For the treacherous, persistent beat of his own heart when it should have stopped. For the unforgivable sin of loving – fiercely, hopelessly, destructively – when love felt like a betrayal of his own shattered state.
The anorexia, a specter he’d battled into an uneasy truce, returned. It wore the face of an old, seductive demon, its smile chillingly familiar. He’d told himself he was managing, existing within the narrow parameters of functionality – walking, driving, breathing. But the crushing weight of the facade, the Herculean effort of compressing his fractured reality into the neat, acceptable box labelled "fine," had finally ruptured him. The pressure had grown too immense; the silence he maintained was a dam straining against a flood.
People offer platitudes: You can’t mend shattered porcelain with glue. It’ll never be whole again. Sometimes the cracks become more terrible than the break. Charles knew this. Intellectually. Yet, like Sisyphus cursed with hope, he persisted. He gathered the shards – each splintered memory, each ruined fragment of himself. He tried, with desperate, bleeding hands, to force them back into a semblance of wholeness using nothing but sheer, agonizing will. But the edges were cruel. They cut deeper than the original wound, embedding themselves in his palms, in his soul, ensuring the bleeding never ceased. They were not pieces of a vase, but shrapnel.
He remembered Max.
Max – perhaps the only soul outside the fragile fortress of blood ties he had ever truly, fiercely trusted. Not with blind faith, but with the desperate, unwavering grip of a drowning man clutching a single, frayed rope in an abyss, naming it hope. But this specific brand of agony, this particular flavour of love poisoned by shame, was untranslatable. It resided in the deepest, most lightless vault of his being, secreted away alongside the rotting carcass of his humiliation.
Max could never know.
Never witness the grotesque gallery of Charles's hidden wounds – the exhibits even Charles couldn't bear to examine without choking on his own breath.
Because Charles cherished him. More than victory. More than breath. More than sanity. Enough to weave tapestries of lies. Enough to endure the gnawing ache in solitude, a martyrdom repeated nightly. The mere thought of Max truly knowing – comprehending the depth of the defilement, the magnitude of what had been stolen, the tainted vessel Charles now inhabited – was a terror more profound, more annihilating, than the physical pain itself.
So, silence became his sacrament.
He told no one.
Not his family. Not from lack of love, but because their love was a mirror reflecting his own devastation. He couldn't withstand the fracture lines appearing in his mother's eyes, the tremor that would steal the steadiness from her hands – hands that had once cradled him whole. He couldn't be the architect of their ruin.
“I’ll be fine,” he breathed into the stale air, a mantra as hollow as his bones. He always did.
Curled fetal beneath the inadequate shield of fabric and the swirling vortex of nightmares, he pressed clenched fists against his sternum, feeling the frantic, erratic flutter beneath – a wounded sparrow trapped against his ribs. The sobs were soundless now, strangled things caught in the prison of his throat, vibrating against clenched teeth. His fear had transcended name. It was elemental. A constant hum beneath his skin, a second pulse keeping time with the drumbeat of his heart.
He was terrified – of phantom hands reaching from the past to violate the present; of the world discovering his secret and recoiling in disgust; of being seen not as Charles Leclerc: The Golden Prodigy, Ferrari's Shining Knight, The Untouchable Racer – but as Charles: The Defiled. Charles: The Broken Thing. Charles: The Omega.
A white-hot spike of pain lanced through his skull. His vision swam, dissolving into a nauseating kaleidoscope. A treacherous thought, seductive in its simplicity: One more pill. Just one more. Then stillness. Then nothing.But then her face bloomed behind his eyelids – his mother’s face – and he imagined it crumbling like ancient stone, the light extinguished in her eyes. He stopped.
His teeth sank into the flesh of his own forearm – a savage, grounding punctuation. Sharp pain. The coppery tang of blood. Real. Immediate.
Then came the collapse. Not dramatic, but a quiet, inevitable crumbling inward. A seismic shift contained within the fragile architecture of his body. Shaking. Weeping that was less sound and more the convulsive shudder of absolute depletion.
Then… silence. A terrifying, hollow calm. Like the eye of a hurricane. He sat up, dazed, blinking in the weak light. As if the tempest had been a fever dream. The ritual of erasure began. He cleaned. Methodically, mechanically, like an automaton programmed for tidiness, he restored order to the room his anguish had torn asunder. Every movement precise, rehearsed over countless repetitions of this private apocalypse. Then, drawn by an unseen force, he drifted towards the piano – the silent, polished monolith in the living room, an island of untouched elegance.
He sat. The ivory keys felt cold beneath his trembling fingers. Yet muscle memory, deeper than conscious thought, guided them. They found their places.
A melody emerged. Not composed, but unearthed. Sweet as poisoned honey, slow as a dirge, saturated with a sorrow so profound it became beautiful – like pressing a lover’s kiss onto an open wound after driving the blade in yourself. A paradox of pain and tenderness.
Smoke from the illicit cigarette coiled into the still air, grey serpents dancing in the lamplight. He wasn't a smoker. But tonight, it was the only sensation strong enough to pierce the numbness. It tasted of ash and oblivion. Of nothingness.
Too much. The word echoed in the hollows of his mind. Expectations stacked like mountains. Deadlines ticking like executioners' clocks. The unblinking eyes of cameras, hungry for a flaw. The solution, etched in acid: Work harder. Smile brighter. Speak less. Minimize the ripples. Perhaps then the world wouldn't notice the desperate flailing beneath the surface, the silent scream as he drowned in plain sight.
Max. Max’s image surfaced, unbidden. Max – incandescent with brilliance, armored in courage, honed to a razor’s edge. But life, Charles knew with weary certainty, held no reverence for brilliance. It spared no one, not even the seemingly strong. Max carried his own Atlas-burden, sculpted by fists and voices that cracked like whips in the dark corridors of memory. Charles recognized the contours of that pain. That kinship was precisely why he dared not add his own crushing weight to Max’s shoulders.
Because Max wasn't a savior carved from marble. He wasn't a healer with magic salves. He had no sacred obligation to embrace, let alone love, something fractured beyond recognition, something spoiled.
Charles exhaled. The smoke drifted out, a visible sigh carrying the ghost of his exhaustion into the indifferent air.
His body persisted. A machine running on fumes and habit. Going through the motions. A hollow vessel. Nothing more.
“Pressure makes diamonds,” he whispered, or perhaps the words only echoed in the desolate chamber of his skull.
But not everything compressed yields gemstones.
Some things simply disintegrate. Reduced to irredeemable dust.
And he remembered. With the clarity of a recurring nightmare, he remembered the fundamental curse: Being born Omega in an Alpha’s world. A society paying lip service to progress, yet riddled with the ancient, festering disease of prejudice. An Omega birth wasn't rarity; it was calamity. From the first gasp of air, it meant consignment: branded caregiver, designated pleasure-giver, object to be kept. Seen as inherently soft, perpetually disposable, permitted existence only in the margins, the shadows, never the searing glare of the spotlight. Shine too brightly? The world would scorch you to cinders for the audacity.
Charles hadn't chosen this vessel. He hadn't courted the dormant gene that had bloomed within him like a nightshade flower – beautiful, toxic, inescapable. It had chosen him. Marked him.
He was the sole bearer of this recessive curse in his family – a hidden flaw, subtle at first. But it poisoned everything. His body betrayed him: faltering where others endured, bruising like overripe fruit, healing at a glacial pace. Emotions weren't felt; they were tsunamis that obliterated his fragile shores. His skin was a palimpsest recording every touch, every slight. This sensitivity wasn't charming; it was inconvenient. Weakness. Instability. A liability.
And yet… here he stood. An Omega, buried beneath mountains of Beta-coded paperwork, hurtling a metal beast around circuits at 300 km/h. A world where weakness meant death, measured in milliseconds.
No one forced the concealment. But survival demanded it. What alternative existed?
The world wasn't ready. "An Omega in Formula One?" The imagined laughter was brittle, cruel. "Don't be absurd."
He wasn't joking.
He was hiding. Perfectly.
Every gesture, every inflection, every carefully modulated response was a masterpiece of forgery. Sculpted into the ideal Beta mold: the calm, cerebral, emotionally impenetrable competitor. The quiet golden boy with the Ferrari-red smile that never reached his haunted eyes, the steady voice in interviews that masked the scream within. Not the truth. Never the truth.
He’d learned the art of vanishing early. When the heats came – those brutal, biological betrayals, dragging him down into fevered, humiliating panic – he mastered the ritual. Locked hotel rooms. Sealed windows. Utter solitude. Towels muffled screams that threatened to tear his throat raw. Teeth clenched on fabric, on his own flesh, anything to imprison the animal sounds within the cage of his body. Suppression pills became his chemical armor. They murdered appetite, assassinated sleep, gifted migraines like iron bands around his skull, left muscles screaming in protest – but they worked. Mostly. Enough. Enough to sit ramrod straight in team meetings while blood painted the back of his throat. Enough to smile and utter, “I’m fine,” while every cell shrieked “I’m breaking.” Enough to render his agony invisible.
Ferrari knew. Naturally, they knew.
The contract demanded disclosure – a discreet clause buried beneath legalese and blood-red seals, shrouded in confidentiality. But they knew the fact, not the reality. They didn't know about the bite marks, souvenirs of past violations, that lingered like bruises on his soul. They didn't know about the heatwaves that ambushed him without warning, turning his world into a furnace of shame. They didn't register the instinctive, electric flinch that seized him at any sudden touch, however gentle.
The FIA? The FIA must not know. Privacy laws were his flimsy shield, a legal fig leaf inadequate to cover the raw, gaping wound of his existence. To the watching millions, Charles Leclerc was Beta. Prodigy. Success Story. Ferrari's Flawless Icon. The Golden Frontman.
No one suspected he ran on a cocktail of willpower and pharmaceuticals, perpetually one step from the precipice.
No one saw the blood-flecked handkerchiefs, scarlet Rorschach tests hidden in his driver's suit.
No one noticed the microscopic tremor in his fingers as he gripped the steering wheel before qualifying, a tremor born of exhaustion and terror.
No one understood that the scorching heat of the cockpit, unbearable to others, often felt like a refuge – a place where speed could temporarily outrun the demons gnawing at his core.
He used to love life.
A lifetime ago. When simplicity reigned. When he was a boy with sun-bleached hair and cheeks flushed from Monegasque sun, sketching racing cars in the margins of schoolbooks, believing fiercely that the world would embrace brilliance if you offered it enough. He’d scrawled his name everywhere: Charles Leclerc. Charles Le Racer. Charles Le Dreamer.
He used to gaze at Max Verstappen as one gazes at the sun – a distant, golden, incandescent entity whose very presence made the cold void inside his chest shiver with something perilously close to warmth.
Thirteen. Max was frost incarnate, arrogance personified, terrifyingly brilliant – and Charles adored him with the helpless intensity of first love. He had no name for the feeling then. But whenever Max flashed that rare, sharp smile, or whenever their karts dueled wheel-to-wheel on some sun-baked track, something detonated inside him. His heart performed a violent pirouette, like tyres skimming the very edge of adhesion on Eau Rouge – a terrifying, exhilarating flirtation with disaster. No brakes. Pure, reckless momentum.
He thought, with the desperate logic of youth, If I become brilliant enough, fast enough, strong enough… he’ll see me.
And then… came the night.
The Event.
The singularity that shattered the lens through which he viewed the universe.
The theft of something irreplaceable, rendering him forever mute in the language of trust.
The world drained of color, leaving only desaturated grey. Races became grim obligations. Afternoons were intervals for recovery, measured in therapy sessions and the sterile smell of hospitals. The open sky was replaced by the cracked plaster of clinic ceilings. Whispers followed him – adult voices, low and laden with pity and morbid fascination, weaving narratives around him as if he were an inanimate exhibit, incapable of comprehension.
He ceased believing in softness.
He learned to weep without tears – dry, silent convulsions.
He learned to walk without faltering – a perfect, brittle pantomime of stability.
He learned to exist without needing – sealing his heart in permafrost.
His feelings for Max didn't die. They were entombed. Buried fathoms deep beneath strata of guilt, corrosive fear, and a self-loathing so profound it felt like his natural state.
He couldn't tell him. Couldn't risk the transformation of Max’s face – the potential shift from camaraderie to pity, or worse, to revulsion. Not if Max ever knew the full horror. Not just that Charles loved him, but that Charles’s body was a violated temple, his spirit broken by others long before Max could even consider looking at him with desire. What Alpha, especially one forged in fire like Max, would want damaged goods? What Alpha would crave a soul already plundered, a map already scarred by other conquerors?
He didn't hate Max.
He hated the ruin reflected in his own eyes.
He hated the treacherous vessel of his body. Hated the scent it emitted, a biological billboard he couldn't control. Hated the invasive, humiliating heat that arrived unbidden. Hated the phantom hands that still groped from the past. Hated the intricate architecture of lies he constructed daily, brick by suffocating brick, just to breathe the same air as others.
Max was kindness itself. But Max wasn't his. Couldn't be. Wouldn't want to be.
They were comrades.
Rivals locked in an eternal, beautiful duel.
Twin stars blazing in parallel trajectories, condemned by cosmic design to never touch, never merge, forever separated by the cold, uncaring vacuum of circumstance.
So Charles extinguished hope.
Methodically.
Ruthlessly.
He never allowed himself to reach out.
Never dared to bridge the impossible gap.
He drifted to the window. The city sprawled below, a constellation of artificial stars blurring behind the unshed tears that filmed his vision.
“I’ll burn myself to cinders before I let them see the smoke,” he murmured. Who was ‘her’? His mother? Max? The ghost of the boy he used to be? He no longer knew.
A fresh, warm trickle slid from his nostril. Copper bloomed on his tongue.
A ghost of a smile touched his ruined lips. “I suppose… I’m already at the edge.”
He tilted his head back. The sky was an empty, indifferent black. An abyss mirroring the one within.
The cigarette burned down to the filter, a dying ember. Deliberately, slowly, he pressed the glowing tip into the tender skin of his inner forearm. Hiss. The smell of searing flesh, intimate and acrid, filled his nostrils. He watched the flesh redden, blister, and submit. He needed to feel it. To anchor himself in this specific, controllable agony.
He remembered a time when his scent was innocent. Like sunlight on clean linen. Like the delicate, fleeting perfume of peonies steeping in bathwater – his mother’s favourite.
Not this. Not the metallic tang of blood. Not the chemical sting of bleach and suppression drugs. Not this pervasive aura of despair and pharmaceutical decay.
His hands were a battlefield. Knuckles split and scabbed from impacts against walls in silent rages. Palms etched with half-moon crescents where nails had bitten deep. Nails themselves are reduced to ragged nubs.
His gaze drifted to the shelf. A bouquet of peonies, once vibrant, now slumped in their vase, petals browning at the edges, surrendering to entropy. Max’s peonies. Picked with careless grace during a spring weekend that felt like a lifetime ago.
Peonies. Symbols of bashful love. Of prosperity. Of… loyalty. The kind of unwavering devotion Charles knew, with bone-deep certainty, was a paradise forever barred to someone like him.
His hand, trembling violently now, lifted. Fingertips, feather-light, brushed the edge of a dying petal. It detached instantly, a silent surrender, spiraling down to join the fallen on the polished wood below.
So heartbreakingly beautiful.
So devastatingly brief.
His fingers spasmed.
Smoke curled from his lips like a final, silent sigh.
The oversized nightshirt slipped, revealing the stark, vulnerable architecture of a collarbone too sharp, catching the room's chill.
And deep within the frozen core of him –
The last, guttering ember of hope flickered, surrendered, and died into absolute, perfect darkness.