#CAN CHARLOS FIC WRITERS NOTICE THIS???

[dolcepuccino]

giving the vibe “you drive the boat, i’ll take care of our baby” 🧸

[leclercsbf]

I need the director's cut for the hours i lost because this was so beautifully heartbreaking i'm not over it yet 🥺🥺🥺

ant, hello! ♥️ really sorry for breaking your heart and charles’. i’ll write a happier fic next time (or at least i hope i will), but for now you can find the outline and some commentary for the hours i lost under the cut! this is pretty long, so consider yourself warned.

↳ fanfic writers: director’s cut !

i wrote this on the exact same day that the idea came to me, which is pretty rare considering the fact that i have more than a thousand ideas in my phone’s notes prompt graveyard. like most fic ideas, this stemmed from a Shower Thought, and this was the general premise i typed out as soon as i stepped out of the bathroom:

charlos future fic where they’re both old and retired and charles has won multiple wdcs like he’s been dreaming he would for so long but now he wonders what life would have been like if had just allowed himself to love carlos like he wanted to, if he had allowed carlos to love him like carlos wanted to. he wonders if having his name permanently etched into the history of the sport is worth not being with the one person who matters most. he wonders if it’s worth watching carlos walk down the altar, if it’s worth watching carlos build a home with someone who isn’t him. it had felt worth it at the time. now he’s not so sure. it’s too late, though. no point thinking about things he can’t change. when he wakes up, the world will still be turning. life goes on.

from there, i hashed out a few bullet points using the things i wanted to include in the fic. my outlines are typically more elaborate, but i knew this piece wouldn’t be very long so i didn’t put too much weight in planning. if you look through some of the sentences below (and in the general premise above), you’ll notice that some of them remained unchanged and were added to the fic as is. some details were altered just so i could get my ideas and words to flow better.

fic is structured in a way that shows snapshots of his life

maybe charles lives in monaco or ibiza (if it’s ibiza maybe it’s because it’s carlos’ home but it’s not, and maybe this is the closest charles could be, the closest he could allow himself to be)

maybe charles gets called into maranello for some event or other, maybe he bumps into carlos there

show him spending some time with family, arthur is in f1 so every free day counts

during his last summer break in formula one, charles meets a redhead who doesn’t recognize him, who doesn’t remind him of anyone he knows. for a night, charles lets himself forget.

carlos had retired before charles did, and by the time a year had passed he was already married and expecting his first child. carlos confesses that he had needed something to anchor him outside of racing, because if he didn’t have anything to hold onto he would have gone back to the sport (“he would have gone back to charles remains unspoken”, but they both know the words are sitting in the back of carlos’ throat)

charles had only let himself give in once, in singapore. they had been drunk—charles on whatever he’d found at the hotel bar, carlos on champagne and club liquor and the high of a race win—and in the dim light carlos had called him cariño, tesoro, mi cielo. in the dim light, charles stops himself from saying i love you, but he thinks his eyes might have given him away. in the morning, they don’t talk about it. [i wrote more in this bullet point, but it remained relatively unchanged in the fic save for a few words.]

carlos visits charles and they get to talking. “i think about us sometimes.” “i do, too. we’ve had a good run, no?” charles watches him leave. he would never dream of tearing down the life carlos had built for himself.

charles thinks about arthur, and he thinks about ollie, and he thinks about bravery. he thinks about all the ways he and arthur are similar, about all the ways that they’re not.

these notes already fairly long for such a short fic, but because i’m usually incapable of writing without having a shit ton of planning beforehand, i also made a timeline of years and the important events that occurred in each one.

2024: max wdc 2025: CL1 (charles’ first title) 2026: CL2 2027: CS1 (carlos’ first title) 2028: CS2 2029: CL3 2030: CL4 2031: CS3, carlos retires after the season 2032: CL5, carlos is married with a kid on the way 2033: CL6 2034: CL7 2035: CL8, charles retires after the season

it’s extremely optimistic of me to create a timeline where charles was able to beat schumi’s record, but i figured that losing carlos is painful enough that charles at least deserves to set a bunch of new records in exchange for his loneliness. but yeah, this timeline made it easier to work around the non-linear narration since it allowed me to create reference points for myself. i always write fics from start to finish regardless of the actual order of events, so having a roadmap of sorts basically greased the gears. but yeah, that’s pretty much it in terms of my writing process for this fic! i’m not entirely sure if my long and winding notes are of any interest, but if they are, i hope this was an interesting read. again, thanks so much for this ask! ♥️ babbling about notes is pretty fun.