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marilinhazz · 2 days ago

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rosquez + true hate’s kiss :3

how did this end up at 2k words well i’ve been in the forest. and i love elle. anyways i briefly considered making this fic a list of vale going around trying to mack on all of his enemies in chronological order which really made me laugh. like do we think jorge lorenzo shuts the door in his face. anyways anyone in this bar read macbeth

Marc’s voice is flippant in that tightly controlled way of his. It grates— nails over a chalkboard, red lines scratched over the skin on Vale’s back. Lines that should be scarred over after ten years, but that still manage to throb here and now, when he needs something that only Marc can give him.

“Why can’t you try someone else? You’ve had lots of rivals that you’ve fought more than me— Stoner, Biaggi, Gibernau.” His voice drags out the list, counting on his fingers.

Vale grits his teeth.

“None of them are, speaking technically, still my enemies.”

Marc points bluntly into his own chest. Vale points his own eyes at the sky. Nothing is ever easy with him.

“And I am? Because honestly, I have not fought against you in many years.”

It stings. Whatever. Marc never admits that he hates Vale— he never did, even when it was plain for everyone to see, spelled out in huge letters all over the racetrack. Vale pictures him pouting, wide mouth red and worried. No, officer, I was standing over there. Honey from his lips as he hides the gun behind his back.

Vale sucks on his teeth. Smiles beatifically.

“Everyone is telling me so.”

Marc huffs something that might be a laugh.

“Right. Well there is no fight here, if that is what you want.”

“That’s good at least. Because I’m not here for a fight.” Vale corrects, reminds, shuffles them deftly into order. Irritation won’t help here. “I’m here for a curse.”

“Yes, you’ve said.” Marc sighs. “Fine. Okay— Then how bad is it?”

Vale bares his teeth, not a smile. He doesn’t want to tell Marc the truth, but he will. The same sort of speech he gives his mechanics: A calculated revelation of weakness made slightly more bearable by the possibility of an improvement in circumstances. There’s a trade off for everything— there certainly always is with Marc.

“I can’t ride. I try to climb on a bike— it breaks down. I take a turn— I slide out. I go somewhere else, use someone else’s gear—it rains, the suit rips. The engine jams, the track floods, the gas is gone, the flight is delayed, there’s a meeting I can’t miss. It never ends. It’s all fucked.“

He licks his lips, pressing them harshly together, trying to contain any frayed bit of feeling cracking out of him. It’s been five very long months, everything that matters slipping like soap between his fingers whenever he tries to throw his leg over a chassis— too consistent and uncanny to be anything but a curse, and a good one. It’s cornering him into one of his least favorite emotions: desperation.

It’s also the biggest stretch of time that he’s been off a motorcycle in over thirty years, since before Marc was even born. He swallows hard and grinds down the thought down to dust.

There’s a sound to his right.

He looks up to the sight of Marc chewing his lip, eyes lit from within with some spark of badly suppressed emotion. Anger floods in, a cleansing balm as he recognizes the expression: Marc is trying not to laugh.

At the look on Vale’s face, he gives up trying.

“And what did it sound like, when you called Casey?” He imitates the sound of a dial tone, harsh and honking. Enamored with his own bad joke. Mean in the way Marc always is— like he doesn’t even realize.

“Ha,” Vale asserts, too hard and too loud, another little revelation. “Very funny.”

Marc tilts his head, laugh dying a little. A divot forms between his brows, his eyes below wide and innocent. As if Vale took his thumb and pressed it into the smooth, soft clay that made him.

Vale takes a deep breath. Chews on his fingernails.

He hadn’t actually called Casey, even if he’d rather deal with his repressed smugness any day of the week over Marc’s donkey braying— there would be no point. Rivalries of yesteryear don’t count, the curse breaker he’d talked to had been very clear on that front. In a way, she had said, he’s lucky that he hasn’t resolved things with Marc.

Lucky. He almost wants to laugh himself.

He doesn’t want to think about what will happen if Marc doesn’t give him what he needs. Sharp pain stings at his fingers, followed by a bright blossom of Marquez red. He’s bitten the skin around his nails bloody, another wound Marc is responsible for, among many. He balls his hand into a fist, and the red smears over his knuckles, staining him. Out, damned spot, he thinks, furious.

“Please, it was probably one of your fucking fans that cursed me in the first place.”

All at once, the sun drains out of the room—Marc’s face closes down, his expression falling through a trap door into the abyss.

“Don’t talk to me about that,” He says, hard, and Vale nearly flinches in recognition. Saves it just in time.

It’s rumor, but confirmed enough. Five years ago, the beginning of the 2020 season. Some asshole had lobbed a bolt of illegal magic at Marc during the race in Jerez. Vale remembers watching it on the screen in his box, the electric flashing missile of the curse, how the protective wards around the barriers had failed, sparking out in a horrifying shower— and how Marc had somersaulted through the air, dragging the bike into the gravel with him.

He had ended up saddled with broken arm, one that would never completely heal. A nasty bit off black market cursework. It didn’t stop him from trying to race the next week—Vale still doesn’t know who the fuck let that happen.

News had wormed its way through the grapevine that they caught the guy who did it eventually, but only after Marc had seen a specialist to put a partial block on it— an experimental layer of spellwork that had left new runes over the existing ones, lurid and ruined over his skin. him to find a way to muscle his way through two curses tangling their way around him, both of them thick and iridescent as a fishing net.

Vale’s never asked if the person who cast it was one of his. It wouldn’t change anything. He guesses he has his answer.

He points at the almost-there glow of the arm. There’s a need to try to make this easy, understandable.

“Then what do you need for that, hm? Do this for me and I’ll get it for you. We’ll do a trade.”

Marc lets out a harsh noise, punched out of him in surprise. His shoulders get stiff, knitted across so snug he looks watertight. Vale wonders what he could pour into him— if he’d hold it, refuse to let it go.

Marc thinks on it for a second, his mouth twisting.

“Tell me why you didnt ask anyone else, first. Then I will.”

“I told you. My other rivals, they aren’t current enough.”

“And I told you, neither am I. You are still a racing driver, no? You have people you race against in that paddock, I assume. Or do you care enough over there to even bother to try and get mean?”

It feels like a slap.

Vale is silent. Seething.

Marc shrugs, chin-up at Valentino, handsome and terrible. Vale had almost forgotten: underestimating Marc is how you get hurt. He gestures at his arm, the glittering network of wards where the curse lives and throbs.

“Okay, you won’t tell me. Then we’ll both be broken.”

Vale takes a half step back before he remembers himself— failure isn’t an option here. He can’t have his ability to ride a motorcycle cupped in Marc’s hands like this much longer.

It would feel like he was a crow caught in a fox’s teeth. It would feel like this, right now, all the time. Unbearable.

“Because I need you to kiss me.” He admits. Not quite the truth, still close enough to the bone. He doesn’t know why it was Marc, exactly, except for all the reasons it couldn’t be anyone else. “That’s how to break the curse. Strong magic— If I want to get back something that I love, then someone who hates me has to kiss me.”

Surprise flickers over Marc’s face, and then cool nothing. Throwing a stone into a still lake and watching it swallow it up.

“Ah. I see. And you came to me.”

“Well, yes.”

Marc is silent, coiled around himself, mind working. Vale needed to kiss someone, someone who hates him, and he chose Marc. He feels horribly exposed— the blood on his knuckles drying gross and tacky. He takes a step forwards, forcing them back on track.

“So. What will you need, for your arm?” It could be anything— gold from a specific river, a lock of hair from a newborn cousin, a kind touch from a person who knew him when he was twenty, a plant from deep in the ocean, the feather of a rare bird, the blood of his grandfather. For Marc not to be able to get it, it must be hard to find.

Knocked out of his train of thought, Marc looks like he’s waking up, disoriented and off-balance. He glances up at Vale, and blinks hard enough that Vale could count every one of his lashes.

His mouth, red and lovely, opens. Trembles. It’s the same color as the wound on Vale’s hand.

“I’ll tell you in a minute,” He breathes, and he leans towards him.

Marc’s lips, when they touch him, are hot, hard, and spiteful. Giving up too much of both of them for Vale not to take something back for himself. He licks against the bow of his mouth, bites at him, and grinds against the flat plane of his stomach. Hands grip him. Marc, like Vale knew he would, shudders. Satisfaction curls in his chest, thick and ugly. Voracious.

He crowds him against the wall and Marc moans, sending electric shocks down his spine. He’s tried to come up with words to describe it— how he wants Marc. The dangerous, unending well of it. He’s never gotten particularly close. He tries another language: one desperate, clinging kiss.

When he pulls back there Marc is again, the liquid color of his eyes— a glow between them. Gold is shining out of Vale’s fingertips, the ends of his bloody fingernails. Something in him splits, separates, like cracking an egg into a pan for a Sunday breakfast. The curse coming apart, breaking. He knows that if he got on a motorcycle right now, it would listen to him, just like Marc never does. Red-orange light washes across his eyelids when he blinks, and he focuses in on the man in front of him, the simple feel of him.

It’s warm, in the his chest for a moment. And then, when he notices it, very cold.

Marc’s arm glows too— a bright throbbing purple and red wound of light wrapping its way around his humerus, jagged and beautiful. It’s shrinking, fading away like water slipping down a drain until the smooth skin of his bicep remains. Healthy, smooth, unblemished. A perfect form.

“I guess you were right,” Marc says, eyes blazing even as he sways towards Vale. The same kind of ugly happiness swimming in his face. “I fix you— you fix me. Nice trade, no?”

“What?”

Marc flexes his bicep, rolls his shoulder in a circle and raises his arm above his head— he smiles, teeth white and brilliant, dazzling. He looks half a decade younger, pain sloughing off of him in giddy waves. No— he looks like he did when Vale first met him, the time that he remembers anyways, when Marc was older. There’s that same shock of joy and something more smug spreading across his face, jam on toast, sweet and sticky.

It makes Vale’s teeth ache.

“I haven’t been able to do that for years.” He marvels.

“Marc,” Vale tries to speak. Bright eyes meet his. “Your arm. It’s better.”

Marc shrugs. “Well, you kissed me.” He says it like it makes sense.

“The way to break your curse— it was the same as me? You needed to kiss an enemy?” Why hadn’t he asked earlier?

Marc shakes his head, still wiggling his fingers. He lays his other hand cross-wise on a diagonal over his upper arm, illustrating the old runes that laid there.

“No, no. Similar, but not the same. The doctors told me— there wasn’t anything really, that could stop it, the spell work was too tight, bonded onto me. The attempts to break it only made it worse, that’s why the latest spell to try and fix it had to layer on top of everything. But, you know— There’s one thing that can break any curse.”

Danger pricks up the back of Vale’s neck.

“That’s an old wives tale.” He says immediately. That’s not real— that sort of thing doesn’t happen. It’s for stories, fairytales you tell children.

Marc ploughs on.

“It might’ve broken yours too, honestly— I don’t know. We’re not rivals anymore, so. I thought it was worth a try.”

“I don’t believe you.” He’s starting to put together why Marc is so smug. Assurance will do that to a man. It trickles like ice down his spine.

Marc’s face is feverish, delirious, flushed and rosy. He grins as if he’s cracked a code, solved a cypher, found some sort of key to a puzzle. Maybe he has. Vale takes a step back.

“Believe what you want. The curse breaker I went to in the United States told me, and it’s true— the only way to get rid of any of the curses on me was True Love’s Kiss. “

He teeth are like a fox, sharp and white.

Vale wants to throw up.

“So— I guess you love me.”

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