#this is just me processing daniel's homecoming through 2k+ words

[vicsy]

hold down, rewind

2,6k, mature, Daniel/Max. read on AO3.

I want to say huuuuuuge thanks to @leclerctops for putting up with me, reading through this mess and reassuring me that all of this makes sense. 💕 As usual, shout out to the Bread server, I love you all so much for inspiring me to write again.

Daniel processes his journey back home, curses time for its existence and kisses Max like a deja vu.

Time is a flat circle or whatever shit people keep saying on the internet; Daniel doesn't really keep up with the buzz, can't grasp the full meaning of it even if he tried amidst the turmoil of his homecoming. And yeah, everyone keeps calling it that.

For all Daniel knows, time is not some fucking circle; it's something he's constantly running out of. Time is never on his side. 

Daniel wouldn't, by all means, call himself a believer in fate or a higher power but he'd send a thank you card to the universe if a chance ever presents itself. Or if he goes completely off the rails. His journey back home – and, yeah, he's calling it home now, he's rolling with the punches – to him reads more like returning from a failed conquest, dragging his battered body to where he can lick his wounds in peace; to somewhere he feels safe enough to admit to the failures that befell him. 

Time, that bitch, would never be kind enough to him so he stops treating it like a commodity. Slaps a handle with care sticker on the whole thing and keeps on living. Without an ounce of regret, though, just with a bunch of lessons learned, a bruised ego, thicker skin and a face card that never declines.

Maybe something is wrong with time. Maybe Daniel has some screws loose in his head, not a surprise after the year he's had. Reality feels off, warped, tilted on its axis as he signs the dotted line and jokes around with Christian; poses for some photographs and records a couple of videos for good PR; greets the mechanics and Red Bull staff, who still consider Daniel one of their own more than a driver for a rival team. Frankly, he always kind of hated the taste of papaya.

It doesn't truly hit him until he's clad in dark-blue colors for the first time in what seems like forever. In what seems like lost time. It's then that he feels something catching up to him, scratching the back of his neck; asking him to turn around and witness the chances he's missed. Daniel won't look back, no way in hell. Only forward now, where the future is still uncertain but ignorance offers familiar comfort.

They say that the greatest and most impactful historical events tend to circle back and repeat themselves, like a curse of a lifetime. In Daniel's case, this for sure isn't that, barely an event. Those words are too big for an Australian boy with braces who just wanted to race all around the world, lost his way in the process, and defied all odds for a second chance. 

This time, the whole Red Bull shebang would not be the same. Daniel isn't an active part of the grid but he wanted it that way, even if some fuckers on the internet call him a show pony now. He feels indebted to the team, all the squabbles laid to rest in the past where they belong. He'll put the work in now, he'll prove his weight in gold. A time comes when Daniel would get back into a race car under his own number or abandon it altogether, douse his life in gasoline and light up a match. In his wreckage of a mind, the decision is still up for grabs. 

Daniel is not always there, at the Red Bull garage. He kicks back and lets time slip through his fingers like sand in the hourglass. Stays in Perth for so long he forgets where his passport is. Makes up for years of lost time with his family, fools around on their farm like a kid; goes on elaborate adventures with his friends, indulges in his every insane whim and finally laughs, unburdened. Time, ever the killjoy, only feeds his hunger. 

He gets the itch under his skin the moment a new season actually starts, an alarm going off in his head, shrieking you should be racing, you should be training, you should be driving. And Daniel isn't in that place, doesn't miss it, he doesn't– except he fucking does. Has to google what FOMO is because Scotty won't stop bothering him, saying he has it like some kind of disease. Daniel promptly tells him to fuck off. Time's still not right. 

Thing is, he fucking hates his friends for being right. And it's not like Daniel is… absent or something. He went to pre-season testing, all smiley and full of joy, fresh off vacation. At the track, Daniel didn't stay still for a single second. He chatted with Red Bull mechanics about the changes in the car, grilled them for all the details; distracted Max by telling him the most annoying jokes he knows, like Max hasn’t heard more of them during the short time they spent together off-season — tucked away safely on Daniel's farm, a secret to the outside world. He even got on well with Checo, not minding some tension. It was all fine. Daniel didn't feel out of place, sticking out like a sore thumb. It was fine.

When the lights go out in Bahrain, Daniel is not fine. Sitting in front of the TV in his Monaco apartment, not fine. He wants to curse the natural passage of time for the fact that his life is playing out on the screen while he's on the fucking sidelines. By choice, he has to remind himself, and yet he yearns to feel the fire ignite inside of him, but there is a dull ache in its stead. Daniel stares at his phone, at the thumbs-up emoji Max sent him as a response to his good luck message. On the screen, they're five laps in. 

Daniel spent a month leading up to the season giving out interviews, repeating word for word, it's a new exciting chapter of my life and Red Bull does feel like home to me, like coming back to family and people have different, uh, reactions to me joining the team as a third driver and I'm focusing on doing what would be best for me in the long run. This and so many other rehashed sentences that Daniel treats like a doctrine, like the only true testament to exist in the world — the one he desperately wants to believe in. But all of it is pure bullshit. People telling him he came back to Red Bull because it’s easy and he’s washed is bullshit; trying and failing to accept that he’s back at square one, not even a real driver, is bullshit. Time is unfair and cruel to Daniel and he has no one to place the blame on, wandering like an exile in a world that was once at his feet. 

He wishes for many things, honestly. To rebuild his career brick by brick; get back on the grid; not read dumb comments about his life on the internet; quit racing for good if it keeps hurting him. Stop worrying about time. But whatever Daniel wants to build from scratch is already there, waiting, after he willingly let it slip away. A couple of years ago, Daniel would have laughed at the prospect of crawling back to his old stomping grounds. You can’t go back in time, you can’t come back home and find it as it was. Right? Right. 

As the Daniel Ricciardo he is today, he couldn't not appreciate the irony. 

Time is a weird fucking concept, an indomitable force of the universe, but Daniel wouldn’t mind taking control of it, mould it to his liking, do some minor time travel while he’s at it. If he’s not behind the wheel of a Red Bull car, maybe a Delorean will do; he’ll take it for a spin, blissfully ignore Doc Brown’s lessons on messing up a timeline — it’ll do shit to whatever he wants fixed.  

At the back of his mind, Daniel knows the universe is teaching him a lesson, but he's never been good at those, so he wishes he could skip this part straight to the one where he finds atonement.

“I missed you in this, in– blue,” Max blurts out, shy, cheeks flushed a lovely pink and Daniel doesn’t need a fictional car to fling himself into the past anymore. 

On the dingy couch in his driver’s room, sitting an arm’s length from Daniel, Max looks too young again, eighteen again, with a puppy crush written all over his face. Daniel does an honest to god double take and his memory hits him with a flashback, the same setting about six years ago. Maybe he is wrong in the head. Or maybe he's just been blind and busy trying to grasp the concept of forces beyond his comprehension to see how Max was always the one who stayed, an unchanged constant of Daniel's otherwise turbulent being. A lifeline he's been clinging to as if he was drowning. 

"Aw, Maxy, you're gonna make me blush," he jokes in self-defense, throat tight, and– it's weird since Daniel's been wearing Red Bull colors for a couple of months now. He gets it a beat later — missed you at the races, Max means. Daniel missed himself that way, too. 

Max looks soft and happy, not wearing a cap for once, and Daniel reaches out to him with a quiet come here, sweetheart, forever unable to resist. Max climbs into his lap eagerly, with practiced ease, and loops his hands behind Daniel's neck. He can’t help but stare with warmth in his eyes before tilting his own head back and bringing Max down. 

It’s a gentle press of lips to lips at first, a quiet hello between them, an I missed you that they won’t say enough times. It doesn’t take long for Daniel to turn things around, slip his tongue past Max’s plush lips, tug at the hair behind his ear and make it dirty. Daniel deepens the kiss, swallows a whimper Max lets out, the inside of his mouth smooth and hot. It makes them both dizzy. Daniel strokes Max’s side up and down, draws circles on his hip, squeezes his thigh before slipping his hand underneath the hem of the tiny shorts Max is wearing, palm flat against supple skin. He gasps at the teasing touch and Daniel reminds himself not to get carried away now. 

Their first time back together in the same time zone, Daniel locked the flimsy door of the room shut, spread Max naked on that same couch, screwed two fingers inside of him and told him to keep quiet, the thrill of getting caught hanging heavy in the air. And certainly, Max couldn’t, not later when Daniel started fucking him in earnest, messy and fast, little ahs echoing in the small space they shared. Daniel moved forward with a harsh thrust and clamped his palm over Max’s mouth mid-shout. Kept fucking him shallow, eyes locked on his, waiting for a reaction, a sign. Max nodded against the stiff cushion, chest heaving with rabbiting breaths. Daniel got them both off like that. Came into the tight heat of Max with a hard gasp, pushing his head into the couch, feeling his mouth try to move under Daniel’s palm with a stifled moan; watched Max come undone beneath him, his stomach sticky with come and sweat, legs trembling at Daniel’s sides. 

Today is race day, so anything beyond would be a no-go, but there’s less rush. Daniel is in the paddock for the first time as a Red Bull driver and on his home soil, too. It feels special and nerve-wracking. Daniel forces himself not to think about it, dials it down a bit, and chooses to focus on mapping Max’s back with his hands, moving to place them on the curve of his ass. Slick sounds of kissing ring loudly in the silence around them. Max cards through his hair messily and Daniel grips him by the jaw, fingers pressed firmly into the bone there, feeling it move as they kiss, losing the sense of time. 

Max is a changed man now, too. Bigger, a new broadness to his shoulders, and so much bolder, unashamed to arch his body into Daniel’s with a lazy roll of his hips. It makes Daniel desperately want to crawl back into his own skin from years ago, dig that part of himself up and dust it off. With time, perhaps, he’ll come around. Until then he’ll just lick into Max’s mouth with renewed vigor, his weight solid and grounding on Daniel, wring ungodly sounds out of Max and relish in the thought of things suddenly falling back into place. 

Max chuckles into the kiss, inadvertently breaking it. His eyes get all crinkly, in that special, endearing way that makes Daniel think about finally letting the words he’s been keeping on the tip of his tongue free. 

"What?" he simply asks, lips stretched into an easy smile, something unspoken sticking to the back of his teeth. 

"Nothing, it is just," Max ducks his head, rubbing his thumb against a pulse point on Daniel's neck. "It is funny how we are doing the same here again. Do you remember?"

Daniel remembers, too much sometimes, to the point where he wants to scrub his memory clean and hit rewind on the banged-up cassette player inside his brain, relive it over and over again, until the record jams and breaks for good. But time, he learned, won't let him do that, not even in exchange for the most precious riches of the world. Daniel wouldn't wish for it, though, not anymore. He's hit with an overwhelming clarity that he’s not alone at ground zero; that Max might just be the catalyst he’s been missing — a pleasant handful in his lap, the reason his heart always beats out of sync. 

He still won't believe in fate, but the universe just might be his gal. She relented, guiding Daniel to the right place at the right time, rewarding him a Red Bull contract, his name written in blood on paper. Took matters into her own hands to bring him back where he belongs or whatever. Gave up on the torture and let Daniel circle back to the beginning, give it another go with some knowledge to back him up this time around. He probably needs to throw some of his old convictions in the trash, but it's not the worst he's ever had to do.  

For now, Daniel needs a place to start anew; Max tethers him to it, illuminating the path home like a lighthouse.

"'Course I remember, Maxy," he manages, voice hoarse as he traces Max’s kiss-swollen lips with an index finger, touches a freckle there. “I seduced you with my wild charms and weird noises, yeah? You never stood a chance.”

Max punches him playfully on the shoulder as Daniel laughs unabashedly, his heart ten times lighter. Of course, it’s a lie. He was gone for Max from the start, his gangly limbs and all that blunt demeanor — hook, line and sinker. Took them some time to figure each other out, but here they are, signed to the same team again, sneaking away to make out on the couch like teenagers. 

To hell with time and its tricks, then. 

"It is a little bit weird, but of course in a good way," Max concludes, grinning crookedly, pressing his chest closer to Daniel. He feels Max’s heartbeat mingle with his, nothing but a layer of navy-blue fabric between them. "How we end up in the same position like years before. And you are back on the team now. It is almost the same."

Daniel thinks back to the string of events leading up to this, like he’s some hero in search of redemption with a chip on his shoulder the size of Australia. 

“You know how some folks out there say,” he drawls, tugging Max down to kiss him stupid. “Time is a flat circle, baby.”