#i don’t gen write brocedes but akira is tired rn and i love her and i can’t give her a hug but i can give her this

[milflewis]

Brocedes Shot glass of tears

1.

“So,” Jenson starts, shaking an unnecessarily large amount of salt onto his side of roast potatoes. “I learned something new the other day.”

Nico sips at his glass of Viognier — he’s having seafood. “How to spell your name?”

Jenson smiles at him. “You always were funny, Britney. No, did you know that it doesn’t matter if you don’t fuck — that it doesn’t actually kill you if you get that,” he waves a careless hand in the air, salt shaker shaking, “Fuck Or Die drug thing?”

He pauses. Frowns. “Or is it a flower pollen?”

“It’s a drug made from a flower, like heroin,” Nico says, instead of saying, no, he did not know.

Jenson hums consideringly. His faux pensive expression is hideously exaggerated. It isn’t as charming as Nico suspects he thinks it is. He also suspects that Jenson doesn’t much care at the moment.

“Or,” Jenson continues. “At least, it didn’t kill Lewis.”

2.

James isn’t returning his calls. Nico doesn’t even bother trying Valtteri or Bono. He has no desire to be laughed at so Susie and Sebastian are also out.

Toto picks up on the seventh ring.

“This is Wolff” he answers, already sounding tired.

“Is it true?”

“Ah, Nico, hello,” Toto starts. “Is what true?”

Nico makes an annoyed sound in the back of his throat. His gut is doing something weird and cramp-like, and his head feels hot and stuffed even though he only had three glasses of wine with a full dinner.

“Lewis. And the drug. Is it real?”

“Hmm. Is this Friend-Nico talking, or Sky-Nico talking?”

It is a question that Susie likes to regularly ask Nico, though her version of the term ‘Friend-Nico’ is distinctly more mocking.

Nico does not snap at him. He is in control, even when he isn’t. He is.

Nico has never carried a bag of sweets around in his pocket. He is not one for setting himself up for failure. He knows what he is good at and what he isn’t. It is it’s own form of self discipline.

Nico isn’t sure Lewis ever really believed that. Other people definitely didn’t.

“Toto,” Nico says, and Toto sighs heavily.

“It is true. He — he had no one, and nothing happened. He has been medically cleared. No lasting side effects.”

Toto says the words like they’re not the first times he spoken them, and still, there is a note of slight reluctant disbelief. He has e never been one for awe.

Nico hangs up without saying goodbye.

3.

The fan had been aiming for Sebastian.

Apparently they had taken offensive to his excessive flirting with everyone in his five foot radius. Nico understands their pain.

He doesn’t know what happened after Baku. No one does. But, even three years later, whatever it was meant that it wasn’t surprising to find Lewis hanging off of Sebastian’s elbow at races, laughing at his terrible jokes.

It is because of this that Lewis gets a face full of Amyl Nitrite, instead of Sebastian.

The layers of irony here amuse Nico for a nice long moment. It helps that Nico knows from Jenson that Lewis was left to deal with it on his own. No Sebastian in sight.

“His poor dick must be stripped raw,” Nico says over the phone.

Mark makes a high despairing sound. He doesn’t like it when they talk about Lewis’s dick.

4.

Ted makes Lewis laugh seven times in his three minute paddock pen interview on Thursday. Nico is used to seeing Ted make Lewis laugh. They're both pretty shameless in that regard.

There are no circles under his eyes - no visible ones anyway, concealer is a thing - or tightness around his forehead. Nico squints at the screen to see if he has any of those tiny broken blood vessels he gets he presses his knuckles into them, trying to sleep. He can't see any.

His braids are neat and pulled back from his face in a high pony and his shirt is loose around his neck, thick silver chain glimmering. He is wearing his usual amount of jewelry.

"You know what it's like, man," Lewis is smiling, face scrunching up behind his mask. "We always try to start off on a good vibe and see where we go build from there. We've got a good team and a good car, and I like where we're at."

He does not look like he's in any form of discomfort, let alone pain. He does not look like his dick is raw. This means nothing as Nico knows.

Ted says something else and Lewis laughs for an eighth time. Nico turns off his tablet.

5.

It is from Fernando that Nico finds out what happened in the end.

Fernando tells him that Lewis came to stay in his hotel room for the night, to ride out the drug’s effects, like this set of actions were obvious and he couldn’t imagine why Nico was even bothering to ask.

Absence, Nico realises, does not always make the heart fonder. At least where Fernando Alonso is concerned.

“Where else would he go,” Fernando says slowly as if Nico is particularly dim. “I don’t do that sort of thing, and I always have a lot of alcohol on me.”

He is filling another two shot glasses from a bottle of clear vodka he already had at the table when Nico arrived.

“Right,” Nico says. “Of course.”

And then: “Is that how he survived then? By drinking himself limp?”

The thought isn’t as funny as Nico would like it to be.

Fernando rolls his eyes. “I told him he didn’t need it. People are just weak. This drug does not kill. People get scared. They give in. They want. After, they are ashamed, so they make up stories, is all.”

Fernando’s mouth twists into something sour. The lighting in the hotel bar is low and dark, throwing shadows across his jaw.

“Hamilton is not weak,” Fernando tells him and Nico does not snap back that he knows.

Instead, he informs him calmly that his opinion on drugs and people’s susceptibility to them and their effects is outdated and uneducated and privileged. He leaves Fernando to pick up their tab. This seems to piss him off more than the lecture.

+1.

Lewis flips the pancake high in the air, grinning to himself as it lands perfectly back into the pan. He’s shirtless, shorts low on his hips, and barefoot. The curve of his belly is softer than it was back when they were racing.

“Morning,” Nico murmurs, pressing his mouth against the knob at the top of Lewis’s spine. His skin is still shower warm and only slightly damp.

“Hey,” Lewis says, reaching a hand back to squeeze Nico’s hip. “You hungry?”

Nico checks in with himself as he takes down two glasses from the cupboard. He opens the fridge to grab their jug of water — already Britta filtered and with several slices of lemon bobbing on the surface.

“Nah, not really, I’ll only have one or two.”

“Mhmm, okay.”

Nico pours them both out two glasses and grabs a pair of forks. He sits up on one of the island stools and sips at his drink.

He should really have his shot of apple cider vinegar and greens but his stomach is feeling kind of weird this morning and he wants to eat first.

Lewis’s cross tattoo is fading. He’ll need to get it touched up soon.

“Bon appétit,” Lewis declares sweepingly, setting Nico’s plate down in front of him with a flourish. He’s in a good mood this morning which means he deliberately butchers the pronunciation, saying it like “Bon apple teeth”, to annoy Nico.

Happiness on Lewis has always looked childlike.

It is strange — the times Nico thinks about it, after all these years.

You were going to kill yourself before letting anyone fuck you again, Nico does not say to Lewis. He cuts into the top pancake, smothered in syrup, and chews slowly.

Lewis turns back to the stove, already sure it will be liked. It’s a well used recipe.

Did you know that it was an old wives tale, or did you just not want to pick up the phone that badly?

Nico’s therapist has been pushing him to ask Lewis for years. Nico told her he will when he is no longer afraid of the answer. He is trying to be more honest, if not with Lewis than with himself and his therapist. She had looked remarkably unimpressed.

“This is enough for me,” Nico tells him. “Thank you.”

Lewis hums, throwing a grin over his shoulder. He is shimming slightly to the music coming from the speaker perched on-top the fridge.

Roscoe is snoring on the couch in the sitting room area of their open floor plan.

“I’m thinking of going swimming later.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“How much later?”

Nico thinks for a second. It’s a Saturday and he has no meetings. Neither does Lewis.

“I told my Dad I’d give him a call at around eleven, so,” he checks his phone. It’s a little before ten now. “Maybe have an early lunch after that and then go at around two or so?”

“Okay.” Lewis turns off the stove, plating up the last of his banana pancakes, and comes around to sit next to Nico. He turns a little so he’s facing him, knees nudging his thigh. “Sounds good.”

At this angle, one of Lewis’s nipple piercings keeps catching off the light when he moves to eat his food and winking at Nico. It’s vaguely distracting in a distant this is your favourite meal but you’ve just eaten kind of way.

“We’re having dinner on the yacht tonight,” Nico decides.

Lewis glances at him, that half amused look he only ever gets around Nico on his face, like he doesn’t even have to thinking about being that way, it just happens naturally.

“Okay,” he says again. “Sure.”

“I want to suck you off under the stars after,” Nico tells him and rinses off his plate before putting it in the dishwasher, and leaving the room to call his dad.

“And they say romance is dead,” Lewis calls after him, grinning, eyes hot. It would be embarrassing for him, the way Nico knows Lewis’s dick twitched when Nico said that, if Nico wasn’t just as easy for him.