putyourreddresson

[putyourreddresson]

lestappen in austria / the creation of adam

[putyourreddresson]

(giovanni gasparro, 'the right hand knows what the left' 2015)

tell me a secret

— i did not forgive them

— i still don't remember

— i was lying

or: what happens when you live in shades of self-destruction

(lestappen, 3.5K, oneshot, written for @lestappenweek summer 2023)

ao3

[putyourreddresson]

hello i will be exercising my human right to be an entitled brat and ask for a snippet of all the wips that havent been requested yet (particularly hanahahaHAA because is that a typo or is my deranged ass sniffing a hanahaki AU?) AND a snippet of any other wips that you hold close to your heart but didn't have the space to mention <3

[ kisses your bratty forehead tenderly ] has anyone ever told you your deranged ass is so wise??

“Can’t you just.” Max waves his hand like something obvious. “Tell them?” Which makes sense because it is obvious, and Charles tries not to feel insulted at just how obvious.

“No,” he says.

“Why not?”

“Because it is not.” He swallows around something and his fingers find the edge of his pants’ pocket where it crinkles lightly. “I cannot.”

Max squints. Then he rolls onto his feet and rummages through the mini fridge, pulling out a carton of grapefruit juice and grabbing two glasses. He starts pouring into one, the color a soft pillow pink, then pauses and turns around. “Is it me?”

Charles nearly chokes and his hand goes all the way into his pocket. “Mate,” he says, “no.”

---------------- and then, bc i will launch myself at any invitation, some random snippets from some random wips i'd absolutely love to finish at some point but doubt i will

: a road trip fic with a very recurring trope :

“Well?” says Charles, brushes past Max to go kick around the small corner cabinets for the eighteenth time in a last attempt at holding onto whatever fragile sanity is barely clinging on. 

“Nothing,” groans Max. A whoompf follows bare milliseconds later. 

Charles twists his neck. Gapes. “What do you think you are doing?” he exclaims.

“Shhhh,” waves Max lazily from all over the bed. “You’ll wake the neighbors.”

“Oh, I will wake the neighbors all I want.” Charles stalks over and slaps his hand out of the air. “Get off my bed, Verstappen.”

“It is our bed, actually,” replies Max with a raise of one singular eyebrow. 

Singular, like the mattress he is currently taking up with the entirety of his stupid frog-faced splodge of a body. Charles doesn’t even want to think about how vaguely soft the entire image looks because if he does, he will, quite frankly, go insane.

: a completely different road trip fic that's a little more m for mamma mia :

Max’s hands are tight on his flesh, everything hot and heavy and laved in an electrifying haze. Charles drags his wandering mouth back up, kisses hard and slow with a disgusting amount of tongue. 

They part slightly, saliva dripping in a thin string between lips. Max grimaces, a mirror, as it breaks cold onto Charles’s chin. “Fucking gross.” 

“You are telling me,” says Charles. It comes off on his fingers and he wipes it away on the edge of the bed, thin and slimy, and he feels his face do something weird. Max chuckles. A glare he only laughs at harder and Charles easily pulls both their grins together, clash of teeth and nose and cheek.

: and, finally (wow i really splurged with this ask) probably the one i want to finish most of all out of anything :

“You need to stop.”

Charles stares, stabbed so suddenly with horror at the mess in front of him. “Are you high?” 

The laugh he gets in response sets teeth on edge, nails on a chalkboard. Max’s hands are finding his hair every other second — Charles wants to reach, drag them out because it looks painful. 

It sounds painful when Max says, “Please, Charles, fuck.”

He should not, but he does. Max’s fingers come away with resistance, sweat—sticky under his and overheating. It is disgusting, but Charles does not let go. “Please what?”

“Go back to your apartment, stay in your bed — do not get out of your bed, do not. Just hold Jewel and do not leave.” Everything is a rush, the words, the air. Between his hands, Max’s palms have pressed themselves together. He is a begging man but for his knees, and Charles thinks this is only stopped because of how he is holding him. 

[putyourreddresson]

'unwinding of the fall (BLACK SWAN AU BABY)' 'the ripple of tenderness (a corrupted tide)'

— i would like to know intimately about both of these things please and please 🌺💛🌹

oh i love you and i am SO sorry for what i am about to unleash on you

unwinding of the fall

(lovingly shortened to just black swan by a friend of mine) is my magnum opus that i have been slaving over for more than 7 months now. it's my first too-ambitious writing project that now spans upwards of 60K words, 14 chapters, a lot of mental breakdowns and is unfortunately nowhere close to being finished.

the premise is pretty simple – the 2022 formula 1 season reimagined through the lens of the obsessed artist; the fatality of devotion and the intricacies of how ambition can deteriorate into fanaticism. i borrow a few plot points, themes and dialogue from the movie black swan but it all takes place in the f1 cinematic universe.

in terms of plot, i am keeping all the results the same until summer break (it's like ferrari did all that clownery specifically for my sadistic streak) and then afterwards i am taking some hefty artistic liberties in order to self-serve my agenda and accompany charles' even bigger spiral into insanity (he's my final girl and my fav literary lab rat). all of this is accompanied by a lot of surrealistic elements, manipulation, hallucinations, disordered behaviour and a bunch of other things i will probably have to tw.

in terms of characters, i envision charles as the white swan and max as the black swan. however, i don't want them to have the same kind of jagged rivalry as nina and lily in the beginning – it doesn't make sense with their personalities now and i think it's going to be even more devastating if max is genuinely trying to get close to charles and charles is a bit hesitant but he starts to lean towards the freely given affections until Something (if you've watched the movie, i think you know what im referring to) happens and he gets a rude awakening, gets stuck in his head and start to twist things. this is where their rivalry starts to lean towards something more tense, an amalgamation of internal strife and becoming a victim to the turbulent flow of events and expectations that start to control you.

(of course, it doesn't help that he hallucinates a more volatile and cunning version of max, which pushes him in the wrong direction. that's neither here nor there.)

this is already too long i am SO SORRY, i will try to keep this brief

silverstone

"Perfection is not just about precision, it’s not always about predetermination,” starts Max, his eyes boring into him with the intensity of nuclear fission. His thumb brushes gently over Charles’ jaw, back and forth for a moment until it settles underneath the bone. The calming movement coaxes Charles to exhale some leftover dregs, softly so as to not obscure Max’s face. The calm before the storm.

Max takes Charles in, kneeling before him and teetering on the edge of something. Max’s gaze maps him out, trying to find the stray thread and pull. “You cannot save yourself from this if you stifle your driver instincts in the process,” he continues. “You’re not here because you can do calculations in your head. You’re here because you can feel the car better than most, because you can find that golden balance between sending it and staying in control, between holding on and letting go.”

His thumb digs further, hand almost painfully grasping his chin and bringing Charles’ face even closer. “You’re so afraid of not having a contingency plan that you con yourself into believing you can account for all of it. And when something goes astray, like it always does—” Max’s voice catches on the exit, barely louder than a whisper at this point, aimed directly at his lips “—you shatter to pieces because you still cannot bear the fact that some things are bound to be out of your control."

france

He looks up, lets his head fall back listlessly and pull on the pain in his neck, and closes his eyes. He doesn’t seek guidance or explanation or a sign because he knows this is all on him. He doesn’t deserve any consolation and it’s not like he will get any. The gods above have forsaken him, the ivory of their statues crumbled into remnants he can brush off of his shoulders like lint. There are only the gods on earth who he is accountable to, who will weigh his guilt on the unbalanced scale of justice and demand their pound of flesh. He feels the hairline fractures on his skull proliferate. He feels the anger, thick and heavy, seeping from his ears and staining the car at his feet. He feels pure unadulterated rage, something disfigured and depraved squeezing the nerves from his limbs like wet rags.

He opens his eyes and sees only the sun and the blue sky. He wants to swallow them up like Chronos.

zandvoort

“Let go, Charles,” barely a breath but it resonates like a church bell, a clandestine command. His lips the belladonna petals, his tongue the dagger at his jugular.

Charles listens to his – their – skin whisper and he lets himself go.

Charles drags Max back to him and plunges into this, into Max’s mouth and his iron-clad embrace with an iron-willed determination, metal scraping against metal a siren call that clogs his ears and brain with cotton. He doesn’t grow pliant – he meets Max blow for blow, bruise for bruise. He doesn’t extinguish the fight but leans into it, sinks into the embrace of violence and rejoices.

He feels Max’s teeth in his neck, in his heart and Charles hopes the bite hurts, hopes that Max’s teeth reach bone and everything shatters

the ripple of tenderness (a corrupted tide)

i cannot for the life of me write normal people romance and this silly little story exists solely bc of a friend of mine who incites all kinds of gooey feelings in me. in the beginning i thought it's going to be a nice break from the seriousness of my longer wip but now it's sitting there at 15K and still unfinished.

it's a very standard magical realism trope aka charles falls under a love spell that makes him fall in love with the first person he sees, which surprise surprise, is max, who has been in love with him for ages! wow, who would've thought.

however, i wanted to subvert this take a little bit by making charles not completely lose his mind. i want him to be freely affectionate but with enough rational thoughts online that he feels very disconcerted about not being in control, about potentially making max uncomfortable, about showing so much vulnerability against his own volition. and max, who is such a sweetheart, tries to reassure charles at the cost of his sanity and slowly fraying heart since all of charles' affections are obviously fabricated. i think the slight angst with the inescapable tenderness of their interactions will make for a good combination! but what do i know

snippy snip

Just when he starts to focus a bit too much on all of this, he feels Charles envelop the hand resting on his cheek with his own and push further into it in a complete act of heatstroke-induced insanity. He turns his face back around where Max’s palm doesn’t obfuscate it and finally, painstakingly, opens his eyes.

Max stops breathing for a second.

In Max’s opinion, he hasn’t spent nearly enough time looking into Charles’ eyes. Eye contact has always been a painstaking affair, trying to find an optimal balance between looking into Charles’ eyes and away during their talks in such a way that it would not allude to anything more. Charles’ eyes can look vastly different under different lights – striking green in direct sunlight, molten hazel on rainy days, overtaken by specs of yellow under fireworks. But there is always a simmering warmth there, which can either reach the fiery heights of ambition or the honeyed flames of attentiveness.

Max looks into Charles’ eyes now and feels like Charles is looking through Max’s eyes and into him as a whole. It feels innocently invasive, like a caress that catches on a hangnail. His eyes sparkle with something unnatural and the blush across his cheeks unfurls and fans out until it reaches his neck. The rosy colour of it looks almost sickly. Max unclasps the tunnel visions from his eyesight and realises that Charles’ features as a whole are glossed over with a sheen of misplaced sentiment, spelling something resembling foreboding.

“Max,” Charles whispers, spilling the breaths incasing his name almost into Max’s mouth. His voice is soft like gossamer, his gaze a gentle brushstroke on the contours of Max’s face and Max knows something is undeniably wrong.

Fuck.

so yeah! (lame ass concluding sentence again) thank you so much for asking ! and i will send you your bereavement damages check for dealing with all of this in the mail in 3-5 business days!

[putyourreddresson]

Hi ! Could you share with us a bit more of the vulnerability of a magnifying glass please 🙏

hi!!!!!!! it will be my pleasure <3

the vulnerability of a magnifying glass is a story told in four podiums and one summer; a little 4+1 experiment. it's a birthday gift to a very dear friend of mine who was so trusting and kind to let me take the reigns on this one (and who i hope won't stumble upon this here). it's currently at around 11k and if it turns out the way i want it to, will probably amount to 15k.

the premise is pretty simple; the progression of maxcharles' relationship through their austria podiums, from 2019 all the way to 2022, and one fateful summer where the unsaid and unresolved things come to light. i think austria is a great catalyst for certain realisations to take place and especially since it's such a staple in the maxcharles lore. the first part is an argument that follows the battle in 2019 and during which some things are said that linger even years later. 2020 is this weird liminal stage, hesitant and swollen; max looking at charles from the crowd but turning away. 2021 is max on the podium, thinking about the weight of a championship fight and whether it could feel different if he shares it with charles. 2022 is a life-line and a life-sentence and the first time the pov splits between max and charles. then the summer comes and it's all very whimsical and self-indulgent, but with an underlying thread of tension and hesitance that threatens to snap. the warm air softens their resolve and they – surprise, surprise – communicate properly without only relying on their innate understanding of each other.

this is already too long (I'M SORRY!!) so i'll contain the snippets to the three main time periods <3

2019

"Disgustingly entitled?” Charles finally laughs, jaw hinged on somewhere between sinister glee and disbelief. “You have everyone eating from the palm of your hand, tripping over themselves to adhere to your every whim.” The mirthless laugh drops from his face like a stone into a river. “Don’t ever try to talk to me about entitlement.”

“Fucking hell,” says Max, wide-eyed surprise and bubbling frustration sitting twistedly on his face. “You’re so delusional it actually hurts to watch. You aren’t even aware of how much everyone handles you with kid gloves, like you’d wither if you meet the consequences of your actions. And now that shit went wrong, now that you,” Max dares to point a finger right at Charles’ sternum, “fucked up and lost the win, you lash out like a wounded animal.”

"You have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about,” Charles snarls through his teeth, pushing Max away by the shoulder. “I’ve always taken accountability for all the shit I’ve done. It’s you who are allergic to accountability, it’s you who can do no wrong, where every single person should’ve driven better, gotten out of your way like you’re the only person on the fucking track deserving to be there!”

2022

He loves battling with Charles. The hunger will always be there, making them push and prod and smudge the lines in an act of divine retribution. But where Austria and Silverstone before felt a bit too jagged around the edges, the bite down to the bone, now it feels like they are fighting for something more than they are fighting each other. They waltz into violence, pirouette into a pas de deux choreographed around the topography of their halcyon days. This trust that accompanies all of that is apparently something that doesn’t hinge on amicability, on closeness – it pulses despite the lack of sustenance.

Charles meets Max’s gaze and the latter is taken aback when he looks into green eyes and sees a mirror. The problem is, he doesn’t know if they reflect off of each other or if Charles is reflecting back only what Max wants to see.

summer

Moments like these, the comfortable atmosphere and the familiar banter, make Max almost forget the things swept under the carpet. Make him almost forget the words that catch in their throats and get expelled only as a silent breath, staining the thinning air with peach juice and efflorescence.

thank you for asking <3

[putyourreddresson]

I’d die for any snippet from you my dear!!

But this one is calling my name:

lavender bruises and forget-me-nots

I’d love to know everything, please! ❤️😍🥰

HI MY LOVE!!!! i hope you know that the feeling is mutual and i can't wait to dive into your wips folder <3

lavender bruises and forget-me-nots, contrary to the title, is actually my silliest work. it's a birthday gift for a friend of mine who requested a scrappy physical fight between max and charles as a result of an on-track crash AND the subsequent reflections and reconciliations, orchestrated in parts by seb and kimi (acting in their roles as grid dads).

my vision for it is to keep it equal parts lighthearted and fun (which has been the biggest challenge for me because i am just not a funny person) and tense and reflective. besides the banter and silly little 'the grid as a family' moments, i want to highlight how even if you make progress in a relationship, a single moment can still exacerbate things to a point which you never though you'd find yourself at again; how it's easy to find yourself shackled to old habits when you haven't really learned to put effort into kindness, letting the natural flow of time take the wheel instead.

(no idea if this makes any sense, but anything i say rarely does.)

a gritty snippet

He thought they were better. He knows they got better. This is why he feels unbalanced when he touches the string of tension between them and feels it brimming with something swollen and volatile.

Charles is not a stranger to their brand of tumultuous relationship; he can map out the arguments and the chasms with his eyes closed, can pinpoint the divots in between the parallel lines of their lives with expert precision. He knows where his fingers will snag on uneven terrain, where they will slide over a glossy sheen of incongruous understanding, surviving despite the predatory jaws of teenage grudges.

But now, there is a shadow that bears an exoskeleton of years past – the midnight blue turning into nightshade, the red turning into blood. Distorted, pulled out of its sockets and exposed like live wiring.

and a tender snippet

They are also shades of lavender and phantom cruelty that bloom in rosettes across their skin. Charles raises his hand, reverently this time. He brings it up to the highest point of Max’s cheekbone and lightly cups his face, making sure to not dig into the bruise there.

Max leans into the touch anyway, even if it must sting.

It’s easy to fall back into old habits when these old habits are so much more ingrained in them, in the nature of what they are to each other than kindness ever has.

And it’s not like they have given kindness opportunities to flourish either. They have watered the seeds with rushed smiles and half-moon embraces given in between the latticework of asphalt and smoke, but they haven’t learned to be kind to each other with intention, with purpose.

so yeah! (lame ass ending sentence)

[putyourreddresson]

wip game

rules: post the names of the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. let people send you an ask with the title that most intrigues them, and then post a little snippet or tell them something about it! tag as many people as you have WIPs.

tagged by the lovely @xiaoluclair thank u for thinking of me kiss kiss

my wips are only maxcharles and i only have seven of those (technically five, but i want to tag more people so i can snoop into their google drives) because i am mostly focusing on (read: despairing over) one monolithic cesspool of unhinged late night thoughts

wips:

unwinding of the fall (BLACK SWAN AU BABY)

the ripple of tenderness (a corrupted tide)

lavender bruises and forget-me-nots

the vulnerability of a magnifying glass

PHARMAKON (premonitions pt 2)

all time ever does is pass (all i ever do is let it)

render unto ceaser

(i usually come up with a title fairly early in the writing process so im sorry for the pretentious poeticism and vagueness i have a debilitating problem)

i'd love it if you do it (i'm on my knees) @verstaclerc @drivestraight @cupidskissx @stylestappen @carronyaflowers @lecppen @lecstappen ❤️

[putyourreddresson]

Max- Anatomy Of A Champion, Episode 1. 👇🏻

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

[putyourreddresson]

little lion man [ ph: dan istiene via getty images ]

[putyourreddresson]

Verstappen’s divinity is universally acknowledged, giving full expression to the eternal qualities shared by the pantheon.

(x)

[putyourreddresson]

I Have Never Been Forgiven for not Understanding

You Shall Know our Velocity!, Dave Eggers// @heartmush // "Outbreaks", Kitchen McKeown// "Cures for Shame", Rookiemag// The Allure of Shame, John Dalton// "Outbound", Hieu Minh Nguyen// Visual Overdose//

[putyourreddresson]

Lewis Hamilton’s comment on Nico Rosberg’s karting blog from 2003.

the silver war: childhood friendships and remembering a love that is no more

[putyourreddresson]

share your lock screen, the last song you listened to & the last photo you saved

tagged by the lovely @lecppen kiss kiss

lockscreen: self-explanatory. maxcharles austria 2022. i understood communion, i understood eucharist. something shifted.

song: i've had it on repeat for more than 6 hours yesterday because it was the unofficial soundtrack i've assigned to one of the most heartwrenching fics i've ever read in my life. i cant let go of it yet.

pics: went to a pancake house for my bf's sisters' bday lunch! i could not finish that monstrosity! but it was so GOOD

tagging: @vernoengine @aatrafi @lukitasmodric @rdbllroadkill @1estappensupremacy @drivestraight @crimsolsun if you want to do it ofc <3

[putyourreddresson]

it's always hard to get to sleep when you stay up past the "old world dying" part of the night and have to sleep through the sounds of the new world struggling to be born. like aagggh fuck it's the time of monsters again, god damn it

[putyourreddresson]

[putyourreddresson]

[putyourreddresson]

dear teacher sory i did not do your assignment.unfortu nately i have Died FOREVER!!!!!!! ok i will see u tmrw