#devastating thought in this universe: lewis gets a vision at the start of the 2021 season that he's going to lose

[sionisjaune]

today @blorbocedes-main and i discovered during this wip game that we are both entertaining a brocedes superpower au! in MINE most drivers have subtle psychic powers...lewis can see the future and nico can turn his emotions off at will (i don't really elaborate on this):

There are two kinds of futures, Lewis learns. Probable futures and certain futures. The only problem? You don’t know which is which. 

If Lewis sees a crash ahead, he doesn’t know that it’s real until he’s reeling from the shock, already in the wall. Doesn’t know that it’s only a possibility until he weaves left and narrowly avoids a five-kart pileup. 

So, Lewis learns, you can choose to change the future. But only sometimes. And then—is it even a choice at all?

-

Lewis watched Senna, the fastest man alive, on the television when he was eight years old. His dad sat on the couch, and Lewis sat on the carpet leaning back against his legs. He clutched his crash helmet, bright yellow, in his lap because he’d forgotten to put it away when he arrived back from the track.

The camera panned over the pitlane, mechanics spilling like insects from every garage, and landed on Senna. He was standing in the shade of his garage, head ducked down and speaking rapidly to the team boss. He was pointing to his helmet, gesturing passionately with one finger. Lewis wondered what he was saying. 

He elbowed his dad in the calf. “Why does he have to wear that?” Lewis asked.

“Everyone has to,” his dad explained. “It’s the regulation.” 

“No, the dampener. Senna can’t run in the car. How could he use his power to cheat?” 

“They say he can think faster, too. The FIA doesn’t want to take any chances. You know how often the teams protest.” 

Lewis crossed his arms, stared at the TV. Senna was tugging his race suit up his torso and fastening it at the neck. His helmet remained tucked under one arm. 

“Well, he wins anyway,” Lewis said sulkily. “It’s not like there’s a point.” 

His dad patted him on the head and then left his hand there, palm warm. “There are rules, sometimes, and you have to play by them,” Lewis’s dad said. “Otherwise, people complain.”

-

In the days of Senna and Prost and slim cars with open cockpits, the technology was in the helmet, some kind of rudimentary dampening field that wasn’t for the drivers or the mechanics to understand. Now it’s a millimeter-thick chip sewn into the collars of their race suits. It doesn’t feel like anything, really—Lewis just doesn’t get the visions. It’s better that way, actually. That way they don’t distract him. He doesn’t bleed tenths trying to figure out if they’re real. If they’re actually going to happen, or if they just might. 

-

They keep track of whose turn it is to tell the story. Nico tells it best, because he’s the one who didn’t believe it. 

“Did you ever picture this, the two of you in Formula 1, competing for race wins with the same team?” Jennie Gow asks them. She’s asked this question before, and she knows it, and Lewis and Nico know it, but it’s what the fans clamoring at the barriers want to hear. 

“It’s funny,” Nico says. He talks animatedly in that voluble, media-pleasing way he’s mastered. “In between karting championships, we took a trip to Greece. I can still remember talking about it then, fourteen years old. Lewis and I said that one day we would both make it to F1 and drive for the best team on the grid.” He shrugs, and Lewis smiles, lips pressed together, for Jennie Gow’s camera. “How many kids can say that? That their dreams came true?”

Lewis remembers it too. Except it wasn’t a dream, it was a certainty. 

-

The both of them were spread out on a towel on the cooling sand under the stars. The last vestiges of daylight were melting on the horizon, glimmering on the still water in a deep red spot. 

Lewis saw it, staring at the sky, Nico’s hand clutched in his. It came to him softly, a truth slipped into his head, notching into place like something he’s always known. He had turned his head, feeling the sand against his cheek, and Nico had turned too. 

“I’m gonna be in F1,” he told Nico. 

Nico scrunched his nose. “I don’t believe you.” 

“I saw it,” Lewis insisted, squeezing Nico’s palm. 

“What about me, huh?” Nico said, turning his nose back to the sky. “Did you see me?”

Lewis didn’t do it, back then, still doesn’t, but it’s possible for him to look further. It’s like peeling back a heavy curtain, straining to keep it open wide enough that what needs to be seen can be seen. For Nico, he would try to peek. 

On the beach, he squeezed his eyes shut and looked as hard as he could, until white spots flashed behind his eyes. 

The danger of looking was always what Lewis saw when he looked too far. The Nico in his mind’s eye was older, mouth twisted underneath a black and gold cap. Lewis knew he shouldn’t look further. 

“Well?” Nico said, poking him in the arm. “Do I make it too?” 

Lewis opened his eyes. Nico was looking at him, again. “You do.”

Nico smiled, slowly, joy unfolding across his face. Lewis wanted to kiss him, but Nico had already declared he was all out of kisses, rolling off of Lewis at the end of the afternoon. “I still don’t believe you, you know. I don’t think I’ll believe it until it happens or it doesn’t.”

-

“He didn’t believe me,” Lewis says to Jennie Gow. The PR team says that the gap between his front teeth is marketable, so he smiles wide. 

Nico pats him on the shoulder. “Still don’t. Unbelievable. Just unbelievable.” 

-

Lewis kissed a girl for the first time in Greece. He remembers tasting a trace of Vaseline on her lips, faint like it had been mostly licked off. When he pulled away, she was smiling, and the sea-salty air tossed the dark ends of her hair around her face like a storm cloud. He pulled away from her face and held her in his arms.

Sometimes the future came to him clearly, like a page read from a book, and sometimes it hit him like a knee to the gut, invading his sense of sight and overlaying his vision double-exposure style. It happened like that, punching the breath from his lungs.

He was on the beach, but he was also on another beach. The girl was in his arms, but so was Nico. Nico was staring at him, eyes wide, but the girl was smiling still. The sun was setting, but it was also bright midday. 

The vision faded like bath water spiralling down the drain. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, sheepish like his dad taught him. His arms slipped from around the girl’s waist. She was still smiling, probably because she didn’t speak much English, didn’t understand the importance of what Lewis was trying to tell her. Lewis didn’t either, at the time. 

Lewis turned away from the sea and ran down the coastline back to Keke’s boat, bare feet slapping the sand. He saw himself arriving before he was halfway there. 

-

The day everything ends, Nico asks, “Be honest with me, for once.” He paces the cooldown room, agitated. “Did you really see me, on the beach? Tell the truth, Lewis.” 

“I saw you,” Lewis says, twisting his fist around the neck of his water bottle.

Nico’s mouth twists, and he stalks over to the chairs and throws himself onto the cushion. Lewis knows, with an incurable certainty, what he would have seen if had looked any further, that night in Greece. He knows it’s coming before Nico throws it, but doesn’t move to catch the hat anyway. 

Later, Nico confronts him about it again. He’ll push any issue, poke at any soft spot, these days. Lewis doesn’t know what he turned off, but it must be whatever made him human, before. 

“You didn’t see me, did you?” Nico says, and he sounds hysterical. “You hate that I’m here, Lewis, don’t you, because you thought it was only going to be you. I fought to be here. You followed the fucking path you always do, already laid out, ten steps ahead of everyone else.”

“I saw you,” Lewis says, calm. I saw this, right now, he doesn’t say. “Get out of my trailer.”