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le-chevalier-au-lion · 5 months ago

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the game lasts 14 hours: rosquez [e], part 1

Marc had been dreaming—yes, dreaming is a good word for it. One minute, he’d been upright on the bike, panting like a dog inside his sweat-damp helmet, Pecco half a heartbeat behind, the grandstands around Sepang a blur of color and heat-fuzzy people. The next, he thinks he’d been down, or dead.

Now there’s someone hammering on his door. Hard enough he can feel it pulse on his teeth, on the tips of his fingers that are cold and numb.

His eyes are gritty. Everything about his body moves a heartbeat too slow, unresponsive. It takes Marc a moment to drag himself upright, to convince his legs to move. Dead fits better, he is sure of it.

The pounding becomes deafening. Marc forces air into his lungs once, twice—and off he goes. He swings the door open, almost closes it again once he sees who’s there. He could be dreaming, still. Or very high on the good painkillers.

“Marc,” Valentino croaks.

He’s panicking—maybe. Probably. It’s there in his wide, watery eyes, in his hands, wobbly and clammy. He jitters, looms on Marc’s doorway shaking worse than an addict.

“You have to believe me,” Valentino spits once it becomes clear Marc won’t speak. One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, his fingers tap on the wall. His mouth pulls to the side, like he sucked on something sour. “I’m in a time loop, it’s—”

“Alright,” Marc cuts him, “do you want to come in?”

Valentino blinks. His shoulders jump, grow stiff, and he sways a step back before he remembers himself.

“You always say that.”

There’s a strain in Valentino’s voice, a knot unswallowed. Marc wonders if he should bring that up, decides against it. It’s easier to move to the side, invite Valentino in wordlessly. He should ask how he got his room number, how he bribed the staff to let him come up.

Or not. It wouldn’t be that surprising.

Valentino stumbles like a baby deer, all long, uncooperative legs. Sweat prickles on his throat, on his forehead. His gray shirt is fucking soaked with it. He looks—it must be said—like shit.

“You look like shit,” Marc decides to inform him. It’s a little—mostly—because he can’t think of anything else to fill the silence. He never can.

“You always say that too,” he scoffs.

Offense is better than panic—Marc hates when people panic around him. And it makes Valentino suck in a breath, convulsive, short, and then another, one more after that, each one easier. The minutes tickle by until he collapses into a plush arm chair, a puppet with his strings cut, sleeplessness carved into the bags under his eyes, into the gray sallowness of his face.

Marc checks the clock on the wall, the aggressive, bleeding red of the numbers. 05:13 AM. It’s early, still, but he needs to go on a run, have breakfast with Álex, sit down with his crew to smooth out his tire choice. Five points between him and Pecco, he can’t afford to make a mistake.

He doesn’t have time for Valentino going on a full freak-out, and yet—

“You believe me.”

Marc sighs, gets around brewing himself a mug of coffee. Only one, he isn’t sure if Valentino should be taking any caffeine when he’s this close to a heart attack. It’d be funny, for this to be a loop where he dies so early, doesn’t learn anything from it.

“You don’t contradict senile people.” He’s smiling, a little, a sharp grin tucked on the corner of his mouth.

Ha ha, Valentino barks. He’s clinging to the armchair so hard the fake leather creaks under his bitten bloody nails. “You believe me. I know you do.”

It isn’t usually this difficult to not be an asshole before 7 in the morning.

Marc could be cruel—it’s not often he gets to catch Valentino wrong-footed, genuine. His anger is so mirror smooth, an opaque, enchanting thing. Few people can dig into him and make it hurt. He could be much kinder, too. Say something like you’re obviously afraid, it’s not the time to question anything, of course I’d help.

Not a good idea. There’s a timeline where Valentino punches him for that, he thinks.

Marc is also very tired of offering kindness to Valentino.

He swallows. “Let’s say I do.”

Valentino lets out this noise—like Marc stabbed him right between the ribs, right where it hurts. It’s the thing about him, one of the worst ones. Doesn’t he know that a good third of Marc’s life has been spent dealing with what he says? Rolling with those wild fairytales, bracing for the next hit.

It sticks to the roof of his mouth. I believe you believe that, soothing in the same twist where it’s mocking, an oystershell of the unkindness that Marc has been rehearsing once he stopped showing his soft underbelly.

“Is this the first time you’re coming to me?” He asks, raises an eyebrow.

“No.”

“Really?”

Valentino hums an unwilling assent, kisses his teeth. The sharp tsk sound is so familiar that Marc feels like he was plucked from his body, tossed ten, eleven years ago. The sense of vertigo has him braced against the narrow, non-descript counter, watching out for the trickle of coffee that will—maybe—ground him. He’s an optimist.

“Twenty-six,” he huffs out, scowls. It sounds like it was pried from him laboriously.

The coffee machine beeps. Marc does the unwise thing and turns his back on Valentino, fiddles with the buttons. He will take it with sugar today. He fucking deserves a spoon or two, something sweet to soften the blows.

“I’m guessing I’m not exactly helpful.”

Marc feels a hand pressed between his shoulder blades, hot as a brand, that touch raking over his nerve endings even through the protection of a shirt. It’s proprietary, tugs on his guts like a fishhook. His insides might as well spill out, redredred and so overly honest it hurts. He flinches, remembers he shouldn’t have. His mouth twists, lips pressed together.

Everything suddenly aches.

“Are you ever,” Valentino breathes out because he never had a problem with being cruel.

It’s easier to hold on to that—it’s the gentleness that has Marc grinding his teeth, dull pulses of pain settling in his jaw.

He closes his eyes, then forces them open—you can’t run from a tricky corner, or from Valentino. “Any reason in particular you’re messi—”

“I’m not messing up with your weekend,” Valentino hisses. Time loop, right. Marc is still annoyed at being interrupted.

But his face is so close, Marc can spot each new wrinkle, the skin of his earlobe sagging under the weight of his earring, the patchy, half-shaved stubble on his oddly cadaveric cheeks. He forgets to not be charmed, forgets how abrasive Valentino can be.

“In my experience, you typically are,” he counters, mostly to be difficult.

Valentino’s face spasms. Marc counts down the seconds until he hardens, becomes a naked blade under sunlight. His expression crystalizes into his usual mask, except for his bottom lip wobbling, the manic glint in his horribly blue eyes.

“Allora, it’s always a fight with you.”

“Something like that, yeah.”

Marc curls his hand around his mug, sinks into the heat radiating against his palm. Valentino tightens his grip on his shirt, turns him around. He has to look up—if it’s through his lashes, well, it’s so very early, and he hasn’t taken his coffee yet, and he’s bleary and good as dead.

Neither of them speak.

It’s 05:28 AM, the clock cheerfully informs him. He needs to get going, or he won’t have time to go on his run.

Marc doesn’t move. Valentino keeps him boxed against the counter, gripping his arms. It’ll bruise. His bones creak under that hold, but it’s the closest to tethered he’s felt in a while. He lulls himself into that false security, knowing it’ll bite, knowing he’ll take the bite anyway.

“So why come to me?” He asks, once the silence grows boring, once it starts gnawing on his sanity.

Valentino lets out this laugh—a little hysterical, choked. “It’s not my first choice. Uccio tries to give me Alprazolam and Luca tells me to go back to bed.”

Marc hums, faux-commiserating. “It’s good advice, have you tried it?”

“Right?” He keeps laughing or making that noise that looks like a laugh and sounds like it’s tearing him apart stitch by stitch. Marc could try looking into it, divining the omens of his day on his spilled guts.

Or—

“What happens next?”

He wants to know what Valentino will say today—it’s his favorite part of any game they play, getting roped into those stories. Falling for Valentino’s deranged Cesar on death row charm.

This time, Valentino skips the charm. Marc wishes he weren’t so disappointed.

“You’re going to die.” He nods, yes and?

Valentino grows stiff, death-serious, mouth wrenched in a snarl that bares his sharp canines. The press of his fingers goes from settling to a permanent ache, right over the place where he broke and didn’t heal right. It’s good, the kind of pain Marc can sink into and enjoy, constant, so dear by now.

“You can’t not care. You believe me.”

He smiles—bland, strained around the edges. His face feels like clay. “There’s always tomorrow, no?”

It’s a joke. Almost one. Marc has barely spoken when he notices how flat it falls, how he misses the apex of comedic timing by a mile.

There’s barely enough time to set his coffee on the counter. Valentino crowds into him, or wrenches him closer. They’re chest to chest like this. Blurring into each other, Valentino’s thumb splayed over the longest scar on his arm, Marc panting hotly over his protruding collarbone.

“You just don’t—”

“Valentino,” he sighs.

Marc has—they’re both bleeding, the walls of his hotel room pressing into him grimy and suffocating like a slaughterhouse floor. It’s too much blood, too much history, too much. Marc has made him angry. The ugly anger. A knotted mess Valentino can’t smoke-and-mirrors his way through, that pours out of his flashing eyes, his grinding teeth, his hands digging into Marc like he’ll crack open his ribs.

He doesn’t remember how many times he’s seen it before. Not many. Valentino is pathologically non-confrontational, his smiles slick and meaningless right as he lines a shot. Maybe he’s losing his mind, fraying, shattering.;

And maybe Marc is losing his mind too. I got you, he thinks, triumphant—the poisonous, acrid triumph of racing even when his arm twists like it’s trying to kill him. He still can make Valentino lose his footing. No one else but him.

“You’re going to die,” Valentino repeats, takes a step away from Marc like he’s scalding. He starts pacing, a caged thing, a Russian doll of nervous ticks. “It’s going to be—it’s going to be fucking terrible. It’s going to hurt. Why isn’t that enough for you?”

Marc looks—briefly—heavenward. Valentino scoffs.

And that’s it. Another one.

“How many times have you gone over today?” He asks, hopeful and hating himself for that hope.

Valentino smirks—like he has a knife tucked between his lips, joylessly, scraped raw. “Once or twice. It’s not like you ever take it seriously.”

The sound of the door slamming closed echoes in his chest. Marc tries to breathe, fails. Has to bend over the counter, the cold marble a blessing against his overheated skin. The chilly shock hoists back to his own body, but the nausea remains, a mouthful of thorns and bile he can’t swallow.

He wishes that Valentino would answer once—just once—how long he’s been on a time loop.

But he can’t linger too long on that. Marc has to go out now, go on a run, have breakfast with Álex, talk with his crew about his tires, die on T5 of lap 12.

Ater sixty-two runs, he’s pretty damn good at it.

#rosquez #motogp #motogp rpf #rpf #marc marquez #valentino rossi #time loop fic #chev fics #hahaha delirious time loop fic in which no one communicates #also don't trust marc's pov he IS lying to you #and to himself #and to valentino #manic pixie dream boy #i don't know what came over me but i'm glad it did #did you run here?

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