from the stuff i’ve heard marc’s former honda teammates (dani jorge and pol in their media careers but joan also i guess) say about him now that they’re racing is generally quite positive, both on a professional/riding level but also seemingly on a personal level? i’m wondering what you make of that given that, yeah, marc doesn’t seem like a very good teammate (unless you’re alex who i’ve left off this list). like MARC wants to separate on and off track stuff and it seems like all of these guys are willing too at least in retrospect, so he can’t have truly burned bridges with them. do you have any thoughts on that
(x, x) most riders are quite good at not burning bridges with each other! it's not like marc's competitors don't know that this stuff is kinda part of the game. I mean, all of marc's past teammates were also trying to assert themselves within the internal hierarchy... you can say that certain teammates engage in 'worse' behaviour than others, but, like, these people do understand they're supposed to be fighting each other! a baseline degree of nastiness is factored in and will be accepted to a greater or lesser extent by your rivals - especially when it comes to asserting yourself in intra-team power struggles. you might hate the other guy in the moment, but generally speaking once the active part of the rivalry is done with... you will probably get over it. marc's fellow riders are aware of how ultra-competitive marc is - and to a certain point they do respect it, not least because they're aware that this is part of the reason why marc has ended up with all those titles. it's like dani said, right, it's marc's strong suit. and in general, you do have to say that there's relatively few teammate pairings that devolve to the level of toxicity that it completely destroys the interpersonal relationship. you might need some level of preexisting animosity... most of the purely competitive sins can be healed with a little time
on the 'separating on-track and off-track' thing... well. this is kind of a question of how you define these things, you can say that marc generally speaking isn't going to massively hold grudges over isolated on-track incidents or whatever... but he doesn't just leave his fighting to the track, and personally I've also never felt he can entirely separate these things out in his mind. can you really say his professional and private relationships with other riders are completely detached from one another? mostly, he's opted to be pretty disengaged from his fellow riders as a collective, and obviously that's a good way to not take things too personally... it's all part of the game, isn't it? sometimes it's good to go with the straightforward approach: marc tells you he will make your life hell, he does indeed make your life hell, and then you both move on with your lives and can maybe actually have a pretty amiable relationship with him in years to come. he's not really defying your expectations at any point here, is he now? it's still a question for each of them as individuals as to whether they think that kind of behaviour is above board and acceptable or not... but everyone by now knows that marc plays these games, so it's not like they're going in blind
and it's not like other former teammates are constantly badmouthing each other. I mean... look, let's just cut to the chase here and bring in valentino as our reference point (as he is for the sport as a whole, which by the way does also help create a certain baseline of acceptability for marc's antics - maybe goated riders are just supposed to be dicks who knows). vale's premier class teammates were 1) nobody (2000-01), 2) tohru ukawa (2002), 3) nicky hayden (2003; 2011-12), 4) carlos checa (2004), 5) colin edwards (2005-2007), 6) jorge lorenzo (2008-10; 2013-16), 7) maverick vinales (2017-20), 8) franco morbidelli (2021), and 9) andrea dovizioso (2021). of these eight men (let's just exclude 'nobody' for now), do you know how many had serious complaints at any point about valentino as a teammate? that's right, it's one guy. one. some of valentino's other teammates, like hayden, checa and edwards, were even quite actively positive about their whole experience. this is the thing - you do need some specific circumstances for teammate rivalries to escalate from 'being kinda bitchy every other month' to 'actively fantasising about stabbing each other'. not accounting for natural interpersonal animosity, let's list some circumstantial factors that you need to get a bridge-burning-worthy level of feud:
you need a competitive bike. it is possible to beef about development direction when you're in the trenches (cf late 2010's yamaha, 2020's honda)... but generally speaking this is going to be quite low-level petty stuff, not actual war
you also need something that approaches competitiveness between teammates. if one teammate is unquestionably stronger than the other one, then it is very unlikely that you are going to get any open hostilities. the tension comes when the two sides are close enough to each other for the internal hierarchy to actually be a contentious issue (this is also basic self preservation... if you're the far weaker teammate then you do not want to make the situation troublesome, because then you will be the one to be fired)
following on from those first two things... well, it doesn't hurt to have a title fight in the mix. there are also other ways you can generate competitive stakes, like, for instance, if you and your teammate know that one of you will be out of a job soon. basically, it helps to have something to squabble over
it is maybe easy to forget how rare it is this century for teammates to be fighting directly for a title, let alone over the course of multiple seasons. only two 1-2's since the year 2000 and they're both for the factory yamaha's (though 2006, 2011-13 and 2017 did all prominently feature two factory hondas). which means that for valentino, the prerequisites were met just the once in his premier class career... and yes, the results were pretty memorable, but (topic! for! another! post!) it's worth pointing out that even that relationship was pretty much 'fine' whenever there was a sizeable disparity between the two of them performance-wise (2008 and 2013 are the most clear cut examples). I think the way I'd frame it with marc is that he has a bunch of mildly dubious strategies up his sleeve to assert himself within the team, which don't really deviate that far from what you'd expect from a rider of marc's calibre and only need to be escalated under specific circumstances. that doesn't mean he doesn't have the potential to be ruthless, but up until now it's mostly been a fairly 'acceptable' level of ruthlessness on the intra-team level... and not something that is likely to make other riders actually hate him
taking marc's teammates one by one... dani was the closest to meeting the bridge-burning prerequisites, though he was only a title rival in marc's rookie season. and marc did go further with him than he did with anyone else, and dani has made some pointed comments about marc's style as a teammate... but yes, he is fonder of marc these days. partly I'd just emphasise again that this is a fairly natural progression when you've stopped directly competing for long enough, and partly it's also just a question of individual personality - dani's not massively into holding grudges. then there's jorge, who... I mean, they might as well not have been teammates, given that jorge was either too slow or too injured to even be sharing any track space with marc. you have to put that one down primarily to circumstance, seeing as jorge's own track record on the teammate front isn't exactly spotless. marc and jorge beefing in 2019 would have been pretty dumb and also a massive waste of everyone's time in a year in which marc singlehandedly won the team's championship. even those two needed more to get things going
moving on to the dark years, pol and marc had an extremely stop-and-start partnership on a honda that was generally pretty uncompetitive... so the only stuff they could get ever so mildly irritable about were riveting incidents like 'marc saying pol wasn't the biggest championship threat' (neither of them were) or 'pol saying he'd copy marc's set up' (which proved entirely useless). not exactly title decider territory, is it now, and marc very much had pol covered as a challenger throughout their partnership. also, those two do have a longer history! they've known each other since they were kids and hold a pretty significant place in each other's careers. now that pol's more or less retired, it's natural there'll be quite a lot of sentimentality there - which will paper over any small cracks that appeared during those two years. and joan was a one year teammate at a time in which the bike was consistently close to offing them both. they only managed to start a sunday race together as teammates on thirteen occasions. it would take some serious effort to engineer a feud with that little opportunity, and, really, why on earth would you bother. maybe if honda had gone for rinsy rather than joan for the factory seat, it could've been a bit more prickly, but it's unlikely that it would have escalated beyond that
this is the thing, right, the only one of these partnerships that would have been worth burning bridges over was dani, and even there marc pretty much had him handled after the first season. in general, marc has been pretty clear on how he's not interested in making friends with the other side of the garage while the teammate relationship is ongoing... which is fine! there's some prominent-ish teammate pairings that are actually good friends, some teammate pairings where one of them is actively helping out and advising the other one, but some riders prefer to just keep their distance. it would have been a little silly of marc to start a feud with a teammate who is galaxies away from being a competitive threat, let alone a title rival, but generally it is possible to toe the line between 'attempting to suppress your internal rivals enough to stop them from becoming a problem for you' and 'taking radical enough action to make your internal rivals despise you'
especially in the post-dani era, marc never really had any need to push things too far... and, let's face it, how many of your teammate relationships end up with burnt bridges is also quite frankly a question of luck and circumstance. do you want to guess which top rider on paper has the worst track record this century with premier class teammate feuds, in terms of a) how many they've had, and b) how little public reconciliation there has been since the end of the rivalry?
yes, that's right, it's the first name that comes to mind when you're thinking of toxic and conflict-prone riders: andrea dovizioso. that old devil, constantly causing trouble. just couldn't stop undermining his poor, innocent teammates. can somebody please stop this ruthless bully before it's too late
I think you get the point. I would personally suggest that dovi is not in fact the worst teammate it is possible to have in a motogp top team. he just happened to find himself in a situation where he was teammates with two separate guys he did not click with at all, in situations that involved a pairing of riders who were (or had the potential to be) competitive with each other, as well as some proper stakes attached to the rivalry. in general, situational factors are going to determine this stuff more than anything else... and marc more often than not does have a reasonably good feel for picking his battles. he's flirted with the line, but he's mostly avoided crossing it. he hasn't had to
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50 jyn/cassian? 👀
50. the hands of fate (from this prompt list)
After such a crushing defeat, Cassian decides that what he and his teammates really need is another round, and since everyone else is still arguing over the finer points of the last question, he decides it’s up to him to make that happen. Luckily, the bar is not particularly crowded at that moment, so he’s able to get the attention of the bartender right away.
“What can I get for you?” she asks, leaning slightly across the bar to hear him better.
It takes him a minute to remember why he’s there, because he’s been doing trivia at this bar for the last few months and he’s never seen this bartender before, which is only notable because she’s exceptionally pretty. She’s got bright green eyes, and hair that manages to be messy in a way he suspects might actually be fashionable, and she’s wearing a black tank top that shows off some very cool-looking tattoos on her biceps. The usual Thursday night bartender barely even looks at him when she takes his order, let alone going so far as to actually speak to him in full sentences.
“Did you want to order something?” she asks, warily, and her expression shutters in the way of an experienced customer service professional who’s used to dealing with drunk people and skeevy men with alarming frequency.
Cassian shakes his head, as if to clear his mind so he doesn’t (rightfully) earn this bartender’s wrath by staring for another minute. “Yeah, sorry,” he says, adopting what he hopes is a genial expression. “We just got our asses handed to us at trivia, so my cognitive function hasn’t fully returned yet.”
The bartender offers him a half-smile at that and nods. “Take your time.”
“Uh, I think I’m just going to get another round for everyone,” Cassian says, and then rattles off his team’s drink orders. The bartender nods and, even though she doesn’t stop to write it down, he has a feeling she’s got it memorized.
She starts making a drink in front of him, and only looks up a moment later when she realizes he’s still there. “I can bring them over when I’m done,” she says, pointing her chin in the direction of his table while her hands are occupied pouring vodka into a cocktail shaker.
“Oh, right,” Cassian says, stupidly. “That would be great. I, uh, already mentioned my brain’s not working, right?”
She laughs a little, which feels sort of like a victory, and shakes her head. “Must have been a tough loss.”
“We came this close to winning for once!” he can’t help griping. “But no one on my team knew the names of the three Fates in Greek mythology.”
The bartender tosses the shaker from side to side in a practiced motion, and gives him a barely interested look. “You mean, the Moirai?” she asks.
Cassian barely stops himself from gaping at her. “I, uh, think they wanted the individual names, actually.”
“Oh, so like Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, then?”
“Jesus, do you write the questions?”
She smiles and pulls a glass out from under the counter. “No,” she says, as she deftly pours the contents of the shaker into the glass. “I just went through a very intense Greek mythology phase when I was a kid.”
“Thank god. I was beginning to think I was just stupid!”
“The two ideas are not mutually exclusive,” she replies, breezily, as she tosses an olive into the drink. “I’ll bring your drinks right over, unless you want me to keep talking to you about mythology.”
There actually isn’t anything Cassian wants more at the moment, but he’s already lost so much dignity at trivia that he can’t afford to lose anymore getting shut down by this beautiful bartender, so he nods and thanks her before he heads back to his table. Bodhi has finally stopped reading Wikipedia on his phone (a time-honored post-loss tradition for them) and is sitting with his head resting on Taidu’s shoulder. Melshi, on the other side of the table, is slumped in his chair, staring into the dregs of his beer.
“Another round incoming,” he says, clapping Melshi on the shoulder.
“Thank god,” Melshi replies, sitting up.
“We are bad at trivia,” Bodhi proclaims, which is also a time-honored tradition.
“We did better this time,” Taidu counters.
“Yeah, but we still lost.”
“Progress over perfection.”
“Stop being reasonable,” Melshi groans. “The wound is still too fresh.”
“You know what’s great for treating wounds?” a voice over Cassian’s shoulder asks. “Alcohol!”
The beautiful bartender appears then, with their drinks on a small tray and starts depositing them on the table, where Taidu immediately helps divvy them up to their respective recipients.
“What are you doing here?” Bodhi asks her, which seems like an odd response. Cassian looks between the two of them, puzzled.
“I told you I was working tonight,” the bartender replies, resting the now-empty tray on her hip.
“No, you didn’t.”
“I sent you a text!”
“Oh,” Taidu says. “That was your first mistake. He never reads his texts.”
“Shut up,” Bodhi says, thumping him lightly on the shoulder. “I read texts! I even reply to them! I am a functional person!”
Taidu and the bartender scoff at the same time, and Cassian is definitely missing something.
“So, why are you working tonight?” Bodhi asks, before Cassian can figure out a way to ask what’s going on without seeming rude. “I mean, I read your text, for sure, but like…remind me?”
“Kennel no-call, no-showed and Baze asked me to fill in.”
“What?! Tell me everything!”
“I just did. She didn’t call out or give notice so I have no idea what happened.”
“Okay, that’s more boring than I expected,” Bodhi says, sounding disappointed. “I always thought she’d get fired for coming after you with a knife or something.”
“You and me both, buddy,” the bartender says.
“Kennel is the usual Thursday night bartender?” Taidu asks, speaking for all of them.
“Yeah,” Bodhi says. “She’s fucking nuts.”
“Good riddance,” she agrees. Then, she turns her attention to Cassian, pointing at him with her elbow. “I put the drinks on your tab, by the way.”
Cassian blinks at her in surprise. “Oh, right. Yeah. Good. Did I—sorry, I don’t think I gave you my name, so…”
“No, but I know Bodhi, which means I also know Taidu, naturally, and I’ve met Melshi before, so I guessed you were probably Bodhi’s other co-worker, Cassian, who he does trivia with but whom I’ve never met and there was a card with that name behind the bar, so…”
“Okay, seriously, are you some kind of savant or something? Between this and knowing all of the trivia answers…”
She smiles. “I have the distinct advantage of being more sober than almost everyone in the room, which gives the impression of genius where there is none.”
“Bodhi, you didn’t tell Cassian your roommate worked here, did you?” Taidu asks suddenly, sounding amused.
Bodhi smacks himself on the forehead. “She doesn’t normally work Thursdays,” he admits, miserably, before looking up. “Cassian, this is my roommate, Jyn. She works here.”
“Jyn. Right,” Cassian says, feeling some puzzle pieces slot into place. “I’ve heard a lot about you. It’s nice to finally meet.”
“Same,” she says, extending a hand for him to shake and giving him a mysterious smile. “Though Bodhi did say you were the ringer on the trivia team, and you didn’t even know the names of the Moirai.”
“Cassian is the ringer,” Melshi says, “which just goes to show how terrible the rest of us are.”
“I think Kay was technically our ringer,” Cassian replies.
“Until he got perma-banned,” Bodhi adds, dejectedly.
“Kay?” Jyn asks.
“My roommate,” Cassian specifies. “It was for the best, he argued with the host too much.”
“Oh, that guy,” she says, nodding. “Baze and Chirrut have his picture hung up in the office. We throw darts at it, uh, lovingly.”
Cassian waves away the sheepish look she gives him. “I live with him. I understand the impulse. Anyway, that’s how Taidu ended up joining us.”
“Lucky them,” he says, raising his glass in a mock toast. “I know nothing, it turns out.”
“I mean, if they ever need someone to answer a question about the intricacies of Formula 1, you’re their man,” Jyn says.
“Taidu watches a lot of F1 at our apartment,” Bodhi explains. “He’s trying to get Jyn into it.”
“It’s not nearly violent enough for my tastes,” she says, mildly. “Anything else before I go back to the bar? Need me to name all the Argonauts, perhaps?”
“Oh, you’re going to be insufferable about this, aren’t you?” Bodhi asks, covering his face with his hands.
“It’s going to be like the eagle, pecking out Prometheus’s liver every day, only it’ll be me taunting you with Greek mythology facts.”
“Mythological facts, huh?” Melshi asks.
“I’m sorry,” Jyn says, leaning in close. “I have trouble hearing people who’ve never won bar trivia in their lives.”
“You’re right,” he replies, holding his hands up in defeat. “You got us there.”
“Next week,” Cassian says emphatically, “is going to be our week. I’m calling it.”
The pitying look Jyn gives him before she leaves their table does nothing to bolster his confidence—nor does it quell the spark of attraction he felt when he first saw her. He was really hoping the revelation that she’s Bodhi’s roommate might help with that, but no such luck. If anything, he likes her more now; Bodhi has always talked about Jyn in glowing terms and Cassian can see now that she lives up to her reputation.
He realizes only a little belatedly that he’s been watching her walk away, which feels like a bridge too far, and catches Melshi giving him an unimpressed look. He schools his expression into something overly innocent and Melshi snorts before returning his attention to his beer.
They hang around, replaying their demoralizing defeat for the tenth time and vowing (as always) to do better next time, until their drinks are finished and then everyone gets ready to leave. Melshi heads off for the train with a sardonic salute and Taidu and Bodhi head off in search of a cab, while Cassian lives close enough that he’s just going to walk home. He is already halfway out the door when he realizes he left his credit card at the bar.
He does a heel turn and heads back in, waiting at the least crowded corner of the bar until he can get someone’s attention. He’s seen a few people milling around behind the bar all night, but as far as he can tell Jyn is the only bartender on and she’s the only one there now, which means she’s busy, so he settles in to wait once he catches her eye and she gives him a nod to say she’ll be right with him.
“Sorry about that,” she says, when she finally makes her way over to him around five minutes later. “We’re short-staffed, as you know. I didn’t know Thursdays were this busy!”
“No problem,” Cassian says, signing his receipt and handing it back to her while he pockets his card. “I’ve got nowhere to be.”
Jyn drums her fingers on the bar as she considers him. “You should know,” she says, after obvious deliberation, “I only date people who win at bar trivia.”
He could not possibly have heard that correctly. “I…what?”
“I think it’s only fair that you know this about me, since you’re making your interest known.”
“I wasn’t—that’s not what—I wasn’t saying I’ve got nowhere to be like that, just that I wasn’t in a hurry! I was not trying to—”
“Sure.”
“I’m serious. It was just an expression!”
She treats him to the most exaggerated, patronizing nod of all time. “Right. And you were absolutely not checking me out earlier.”
“I was not doing that,” Cassian says, and it’s frankly embarrassing how transparent of a lie it is.
“I don’t blame you,” Jyn says, shrugging her shoulders. “I’m very cute.”
“Huh. Now that you mention it…”
She smiles, one of those mysterious, knowing ones he finds so intriguing. “Bodhi did always say he thought you and I would get along if we ever met.”
“Too bad you have such high standards,” he replies, easily. “I could think of a few ways we could get along better.”
“Well, there’s always next week,” she offers.
“You mean, next week when we’re going to win trivia and you’re going to give me your number? That next week?”
Jyn shakes her head, but he can see she’s fighting a smile. “I admire your optimism.”
“Get ready to admire my intellect too,” he says, “when I win bar trivia.”
“Whatever you say, Cassian.”
*
“So,” Cassian says, as he leans up against the bar a week later after trivia has wrapped up, “are you absolutely sure you couldn’t be talked into dating someone much much dumber than you?”
Jyn’s answering laugh, surprised and delighted and unrestrained, makes him feel so much prouder of himself than winning trivia ever could. Not that he knows for sure, of course, never having done the latter, but if he had to guess.
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