#and files it away under

[hiding-in-my-blanket-fort]

Gilmore Girls is really just:

maternal narcissism, generational trauma, religious trauma, parentification, scapegoating, the mother wound the mother wound the mother wound, emotional incest, if I don't find a way to laugh about it I'll cry, absent fathers, gifted child syndrome, emotional neglect, abandonment, psychological abuse, financial abuse, my mother will never apologize as long as I live, complex post traumatic stress disorder, oh god I'm just like my mother, thank god I am nothing like my mother, golden child privilege, golden child anxiety, the pressure of perfectionism, undiagnosed neurodivergence, ADHD on caffeine, the hellscape of emotionally immature parents, the burden of family expectations, projecting blame, parental avoidance of responsibility, gaslighting, love bombing, triangulation, silent treatment, covert abuse, passive-aggressive tantrums, hoovering, enabling abuse, obliterated boundaries, emotional manipulation, endless microaggressions, guilt tripping, shame shame shame, learned helplessness, smear campaigns...

...all wrapped up in a quirky bow.

[aurosoulart]

why can’t I hold on to it / why can’t I just forget

[sainz100]

Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen in Tokyo ahead of the 2016 Japanese GP | x

[robo-dino-puppy]

horizon forbidden west | nil 3/?

[bitter-honey-apples]

I just realized that their shirts are pretty complementary in design, especially the uniquely-shaped panels of pintucks.

[chryza]

Ooooohhhh thinking about how alone Saria was, thinking about how she grew up emotionally neglected, thinking about how she loved Kirsten and devoted everything to her changed her own dreams for her and Kirsten loved her but not enough and Saria pushed everyone away and was cruel and unfeeling because it was easier that way to block everything out (if you don’t care you don’t get hurt) and

Ifrit Ifrit Ifrit that terrified, sick little girl that burst through the dam in her heart. She could care about one girl, couldn’t she? And Silence who reminded Saria so much of Kirsten in her idealism and devotion to her research, maybe she could care about her too.

Until it all went to hell and Saria glimpsed for a moment what was behind the curtain and then forcefully drew it shut again (out of sight, out of mind). She could clean up the mess because that’s what she was good at, she could fix it and hold Ifrit and Silence in one part of her heart, and Kirsten and all her (their) sins in another. But Silence saw through it too quickly and said she didn’t want Saria’s help and she was absolutely justified. It didn’t matter if Saria’s heart ached with the loss of a friend and a sick little girl because she had kept the hurt out before and she would do it again. It didn’t matter if she was alone.

No Ifrit, no Silence, no Rhine, no Kirsten, just Saria diligently picking up the pieces of a mess that might have partly been her fault but it didn’t matter anymore because she was doing what she was good at. And of course there was Muelsyse who was the closest thing to a friend she had left. Even if Saria wasn’t sure where her loyalties truly lay. Maybe she didn’t need a friend at all. But the important thing was that Kirsten had gone too far now, and she had to do something about it.

But maybe in a vivarium hovering thousands of meters off the ground she at least wanted Muelsyse to understand why she had to stop Kirsten (from hurting herself, if anything). And Muelsyse said “I can’t hold on to both of you” and chose Kirsten over her which frankly Saria understood because hadn’t she chosen Kirsten over Silence and Ifrit so long ago? So maybe it was all right that if she couldn’t get Kirsten to stop they could both go up in the conflagration of Kirsten’s dreams, though she didn’t count on Kirsten knowing her too well. Maybe her death would be deserved, alone, because she gave up on Kirsten. And wasn’t alone how you always wanted it anyway Saria?

…

But maybe it wasn’t all lost. The fall hurt like hell but at the bottom was forgiveness she didn’t feel like she deserved but was offered nonetheless.

[nico-di-genova]

Hi. Can I kindly request n°44 "If you die, I'm gonna kill you" for strollonso??? But it is Fernando talking to Lance. Thanks <3

Um, yes, absolutely you can. I raise you, Fernando is talking to Lance but Lance is definitely not talking back. 44. "If you die, i'm gonna kill you."

Fernando isn’t sure how they got here.

Mentally, he is still leaning over the edge of Lance’s car, discussing balance settings, with one arm propped on the halo, hand resting on the top of Lance’s helmet, and the other motioning at the wheel.

Mentally, Lance is still laughing at the lewd joke Fernando had made under his breath about control of the car. He can still hear the way Lance’s laughter had come out muffled by the helmet, already far away despite the fact that they were hardly separated by more than a foot.

He isn’t sure what he’s doing here, still in his race suit, nomex stiff with dry sweat, his hands crusted with dried blood. Lance’s blood, he thinks, he knows, but he isn’t really sure.

In his mind, he’s in the Aston Martin garage, watching Lance pull out first and crawl out of the pitlane with one last wave at Fernando as he went. Or maybe it was a middle finger, jokingly thrown and playfully received. Maybe there was no wave at all, maybe Fernando just wishes there was.

His brain can’t seem to catch up to the fact that Lance is lying unconscious in the hospital bed before him. It can’t even catch up to the crash that landed him here in the first place. It’s stuck on muffled laughter through polystyrene.

His hands shake, Fernando can’t stop the tremble.

“You need to change,” Lawrence remarks from where he sits across from Fernando. His suit jacket is thrown over the back of his chair, sleeves of his button-up pushed to his elbows. He holds his son’s hand, careful not to disturb the IV that’s been inserted into the vein there and drips a steady dose of morphine. There’s some of Lance’s blood smeared across his cheek, Fernando feels sick at the sight of it.

“You have his blood on your face.”

Lawrence winces, gives Fernando a once over.

“You have it everywhere.”

The tremble in Fernando’s hands worsens.

“Go. Clean up. I’ll stay with him.”

Fernando thinks about fighting, but he can’t even bring himself to look at Lance’s prone form in the bed, can’t even get past the crusting crimson under his own fingernails and the scent of smoke that seems to linger in the air. He isn’t doing much good. At least Lawrence can touch Lance.

He stumbles to the bathroom attached to the room blindly, washes his hands and face robotically with fingers that do not feel like his own. Watches the pink tinged water run down the drain until it runs clear and then stares at the porcelain until he can force his eyes upward.

The face that stares back at him in the mirror cannot be his own. In the harsh fluorescents his skin appears pale, the circles under his eyes stark. There’s a gash of red still smeared along the underside of his jaw.

Lance blindly reaching for him, trying to say his name around the blood in his mouth, his gloves stained crimson from where he’d tried to staunch the flow of the stuff from his body.

Fernando blinks, the ghost in the mirror blinks back. Through the thin wood of the bathroom door he can hear the steady beep of Lance’s heart monitor, it’s the only reason he doesn’t vomit.

‘You’re okay,’ he can hear himself saying to Lance, ‘you’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay.’

He tries to say it to the man in the mirror, but the words stick in his throat, along with the bile.

‘You like control, yes? Do not let this car fuck you, that is for me to do.’

Lance’s laughter plays on a loop in his head until he cannot distinguish it from the drone of a flatline, the roar of flames, the way he had screamed when they tore Lance away from him. Wild, primal, unthinkingly reaching for the man even as he was carted away by frantic hands and hurried chatter. Screaming until his voice was hoarse, until the gravel digging into his knees forced him back into his body.

Lance’s blood has soaked through his fireproofs, dried tacky on his skin with the sweat. He tries to pry it from his body like it will reveal something new and untainted underneath. Instead, he ends up on the cold tile with the fabric half over his head and his own tears choking him.

He isn’t sure how long he stays on the floor, only that when he comes out, shirtless and skin rubbed raw from cleaning the blood from his body, there is an Aston Martin sweatshirt waiting for him in his seat. Maybe from the rest of the team waiting in the lobby, maybe pulled from a swag bag someone in PR had been lugging with them. He doesn’t care, he pulls it on and is grateful that it smells like the factory and not gasoline.

“Thank you,” he mutters to Lawrence, who only musters a grunt in response.

The circles under his eyes are worse than Fernando’s, darker, heavier. His grip on Lance’s hand has grown tighter, like he’s trying to force his son back into consciousness by breaking his fingers.

“You next,” Fernando says, motioning at the death grip he’s keeping on Lance’s already bruised hand.

“No. No I- I can’t.”

“He is not waking up soon.”

It sounds harsh, mean, but Fernando only means it as the truth. He’d pulled Lance from the car, before the flames could get to him, seen the steering column pierced through the fabric of his suit and into his intestines. He’d weighed the cost of moving him against the cost of hoping the medics would get to him before the flames did and taken the road he though would let him keep Lance.

He isn’t sure he made the right call.

“I have to stay,” Lawrence states, like if he goes Lance will suddenly cease to be. Fernando knows the feeling. Or maybe it’s that he thinks Fernando will finish the job. As if he meant to push Lance off the track, send him flipping at top speed over the tire wall and into the concrete barrier that held the fence up. Like the blood on Fernando’s hands was something that was still there, something that would never be washed off.

“An accident, Lawrence.” He forces out, “It was an accident.”

“I know.”

“So go wash your fucking face, yes? Before your son wakes up to the sight of his own blood.”

Lawrence looks at him then, finally seeing him, eyes darkening with a hatred Fernando is almost grateful to see. It feels righteous, deserved. It is not the same look Lawrence had first given him when Fernando had signed that contract, lying through his teeth that he would play nice. That he would treat Lance with respect. But Fernando is not the same man who signed that paper.

“You were told to stay. Told not to fight,” Lawrence spits, and finally there is emotion in his voice instead of a dead emptiness.

Fernando remembers thinking fuck that, remember Lance demanding he lose the kiddy gloves, remember how he’d tried to slam on the breaks even at the expense of his own safety. It was a bitter taste of his own medicine, and somehow Lance was still the one in the hospital bed.

The worst crash in decades, he’d heard the news from a room across the hall. Fernando at the center of it all, again.

“I know.”

“Then why the fuck did you?!” Lawrence demands, voice growing, grip on Lance tightening. The heart monitor doesn’t spike, Lance doesn’t twitch.

Fernando finds he does not have an answer. That’s maybe the worst part of it. Lance bleeding out in the gravel all for the risk of P9. For measly points in a championship already lost and bragging rights only between the two of them that they would have wrestled out on the mattress later.

“I don’t know.”

“Stupid,” Lawrence spits.

Fernando doesn’t disagree.

“You want me to go?” He asks instead, because Lawrence is Lance’s father. He’s bandaged scrapped knees and wiped away tears and been there for birthday parties and graduations and the six year old who’d gotten into a kart for the first time. It’s him Lance should wake up to.

If he wakes up, the dark voice in the back of his mind whispers. Fernando tells it to go back to hell.

Lawrence’s jaw ticks with tension. He looks between Lance’s slack face and Fernando’s miserable one, weighs something between them that Fernando can’t see, maybe the cost of Lance’s body in Fernando’s arms. And then he sighs and shakes his head.

“No.”

Fernando breathes.

“No. You don’t have to- Jesus. Just- just stay here and sit with him, yeah?”

Fernando nods.

“I have to call his mother.”

She’d already been halfway to the airport when Lance had gone into surgery. By now she probably would have landed. Soon Fernando will have to give up his seat, wait it out with the rest of the team, pretend like he didn’t know what it sounded like when Lance snored in his sleep or how he looked with sunlight filtering across his face in the morning. Lawrence doesn’t have to gift him this moment alone, but he does, because they both know it’s what Lance would have wanted. He casts one last weary glance at the both of them from the doorway before sighing again and going into the hall.

Fernando stares at Lance’s hand for a moment, wrapped in gauze, index and middle finger splinted together because they’d been shattered by the force of the wheel breaking off in his grip. It takes him a moment to go any higher than that. He deliberately avoids looking at the rise and fall of Lance’s stomach beneath the sheets, knows the stitched together mess of skin and muscle and intestines are bound and wrapped there beneath the white linen like a macabre present.

There’s bruising along Lance’s neck, his chest, mottled and already dark against paper white skin. There’s the tube down his throat, because he’d flatlined in the airlift and they’d had to intubate him. Because he stopped breathing.

Fernando is thankful he hadn’t been allowed in the helicopter. He isn’t sure how he would have responded, isn’t sure how Lawrence stomached it.

There’s bruising around his eyes as well, swelling, pressure of the impact rattling him even with the helmet and the hans. Fernando tries to picture warm brown eyes, amber in the sunlight, crinkling with laughter and glinting with some sharp witted remark. But he closes his eyes and instead all he sees is Lance blinking up at him, already glassy and fading, pupils blown, brown swallowed by wide-eyed and frightened black.

‘You’re okay.’

Hesitantly, he hooks a finger around Lance’s pinkie, traces his thumb along the knuckle. It’s the only part of him that seems safe to touch.

When he opens his mouth, it is an apology that spills out, and then another, until Fernando is sobbing with the words ‘I’m sorry,’ dripping onto the sheets alongside his tears.

Lance does not respond.

“Please,” Fernando begs, the plea unfamiliar on his tongue, tasting of smoke and bile.

“Come back. Wake up. Please. Cariño, I’m sorry, please.”

Outside, through the sliver of a glass pane on the door, he can see Lawrence pacing the hall – phone pressed to his ear, eyebrows furrowed, lips twisted in frustration. It is shockingly similar to the way Lance looks when he’s in the media pen. Annoyance lacing with the overwhelmingly stifling need to get out, away, safe. Fernando thinks, twistedly, that at least he got his wish today. If any cameras come within the radius of the hospital he’s sure Lawrence would be serving them with papers for harassment, maybe would even go as far as to run them over with his car.

“Your father is a bastard,” he says, meaning it only as a compliment, in a way he knows only Lance would understand.

“I think he will force you from your beauty sleep if you do not wake soon, princess.”

He pauses like Lance will answer, or laugh, his only response is the continuing beeping of the heart monitor.

‘Substantial injuries,’ he can hear the doctor in his head, ‘Internal bleeding, swelling, pressure on his brain’ a laundry list of bad, bad and more bad.

‘He will wake up?’

‘There’s a possibility, yes. But also the potential that he doesn’t. It’s too early to say.’

Lance cannot breathe on his own yet, still needs the tube to do it for him. Fernando thinks they are wrong, thinks Lance would hate the feeling of the thing down his throat the same way he hates when clothes are too tight and people too loud.

He thinks of ripping it out.

Instead, he reaches out to brush his finger parallel to the butterfly stitches keeping Lance’s brow together and says, “If you die, I will kill you.”

In his head, Lance laughs.

“So you will not die.”

The heart monitor beeps, Lance doesn’t move, and Fernando waits. Mentally, he is in the Aston Martin garage.

Edit: Good news for those that like angst, there's a part 2 to this!

[dreamaze]

❀ The Day the Flower Bloomed ❀ KANGHYUN's surprise birthday vlive kiss relay

(cr. STUDIO WEVE)

+

(earlier)

[rosemaryfuckingwalten]

I just talked to my friends about this but I feel like Felix is a little too well liked in this fandom. Like yeah he’s realistic, he’s a coward, he’s selfish, and he’ll do anything to help himself

And there are millions if not billions of people out there who are exactly like him

It’s not a bad thing if you like Felix but I feel like it’s really not that well understood just how actually dangerous he is. There are people who will hurt you either intentionally or by accident and what is often the first thing you hear them say?

“Don’t tell anyone.”

If Edd and Molly had lived, I have no doubt in my mind that is exactly what he would have said to them

[capn-twitchery]

Sweet pea for Twitch and Lilac for Grace? (or each for both, if you want)

Lilac - Does your OC have a comfort item? If so, what is it?

Grace lost most of his stuff when his entire ship ended up in the neath, and the crew had to abandon it to look for help on foot. all he really had was his clothes & sword, and uh, twitch has both of those

but he still has his hat & waistcoat! so as the last things he still has from the surface, they're comforting to him, at least.

Sweet pea - What colour are your OC’s eyes?

VERY SNEAKY ok i'll bite >:3c

uncensored version under the cut for mild eye horror/spookiness (& in case someone wanted to keep their face a mystery)

(there are eyes there, i promise, they just look fucked up)

[wheels-of-despair]

The Last First Day Pairing: Eddie Munson x You Summary: This is it. Eddie Munson's last first day at Hawkins High. His final senior year. Class of '86, baby! Contains: Eddie and Evil Woman being annoying and ridiculous and so in love they don't care about making a scene, Higgins being So Done with them, a little suggestive humor. Words: 700ish

"BABY!"

You whip around in the crowded Hawkins High hallway, packed full of students hustling toward their next class on that always-awkward first day of school, searching for Eddie's voice. Where is he? What's wrong? He's not in trouble already, is he?

When you finally spot him and make eye contact, his jaw drops.

"It IS you! I haven't seen you in FOREVER!"

He literally saw you an hour ago, when he picked you up for school. And every day of the summer. And almost every day of the previous school year. But you know what he's doing, and you can't deny him this. Not on the first day of his last senior year.

You'd bullied the guidance counselor into putting you and Eddie in most of the same classes. It had taken some work to convince her that it really was for academic reasons, but in the end, she'd given in. What's the worst that could happen? He'd already repeated his senior year twice. The only way to go is up. Or, as most of the administration hoped: out. And since the faculty didn't seem to care about helping him get there themselves, they decided to let you give it a shot. You'd show them. You and Eddie would show them all.

Right after this happy reunion with your one and only.

"MY EDDIE! YOU FOUND ME!"

His face lights up when he sees that you're going to play with him. You stretch out your arms, thankful you'd shoved everything in your backpack after your last class, and rush toward him. Eddie takes off too, and after several grunts from people who'd been rammed into, the student body begins to duck to the side and clear a path for you.

You collide with a thump and hold each other in a crushing hug when you meet in the middle of the hallway, like you hadn't seen one another in years. Eddie finally lets go and reaches for your face, and holds it in his hands like a treasure.

"Oh my god, you're so beautiful! I'd almost forgotten what you looked like!" He's loud and he's obnoxious and you'll never love anyone more.

"I missed you!" You lean in to punctuate with a kiss. "So!" Another. "Fucking!" Another. "MUCH!" A longer one, which ends in a wet smack worthy of a cartoon. "Please don't ever leave me alone for that long again. I'll die. I swear, I'll die without you." You're also being loud and obnoxious, but not entirely untruthful.

You gaze into each other's eyes, in the middle of that crowded hallway full of people scoffing at you, and you think this just might be the happiest you've ever felt. The bell rings, but you can't bring yourself to pull away from him. Not yet.

A grown-up presence announces itself with a sigh, and you and Eddie break eye contact to look at Principal Higgins.

"That was the warning bell, which signifies that it's time for The Munsons to proceed to their next class," he says tiredly.

Eddie gives him a mock salute and hooks an arm around your neck, pulling you away from Higgins and toward your next class. Which you have together. You smile and lean into him, basking in the fact that you were just referred to as The Munsons.

"Pretty sure we just got married," Eddie observes.

"Oh yeah?" you grin. "Is Higgins an ordained principal?"

"Yup," Eddie says, eyes forward. "I've been studying in this place for a looong time. I know how things work. We're married now."

"Are you gonna carry me across the threshold into English class?" you tease, giving him a playful poke in the ribs.

"Don't tempt me, Mrs. Munson," he smirks. "I'm gonna wait 'til science. There's a human anatomy unit during senior year." He waggles his eyebrows at you. He should know; he's failed it twice.

"Is the unit… hard?" you ask seductively.

He stops just outside the classroom door and leans down to whisper in your ear, so only you can hear. His hair tickles the side of your face. "Not as hard as the unit that'll help you earn extra credit after school."

[radarchives]

[everybodyloveshippos]

Valentine and their Friend, Jacquerie

[theelderscrotes]

'astarion is bi/pan' 'astarion is gay' 'astarion is ace' astarion is a bi he/him lesbian hope this helps

source: he will be when i'm through with him

[the-bae-spencer-shay]

🩷 💜J e r r y T r a i n o r 💜🩷

[nico-di-genova]

strollonso + marriage proposal.

Genuinely, thank you so much for sending this, it is such a simple request, and yet the idea of them married has now fully consumed me.

Warnings: NSFW, they are fucking nasty style.

The thing about them is that they’ve never been normal. Not when Fernando kissed Lance for the first time post Bahrain, all sweaty and roaming hands, crowding Lance against the door of his hotel room and then standing before his father the next day saying Lance was already like family. Not when Lance went down on him for the first time, choking himself on Fernando’s cock while the man sat on the phone with his engineer discussing set-up of his car. Normal was not something that came to them easily, Lance supposed their proposal wouldn’t be any different.

He just hadn’t expected Fernando to ask him right as he was bottoming out.

Right as Lance was muffling a moan into his pillow and gripping the plush material in his hands with white knuckles.

“Marry me,” Fernando grunts, and Lance hardly hears him over the blood rushing through his ears.

He moans as Fernando thrusts with practiced ease.

“Yes or no?”

Lance cannot even follow the question. He’s too busy thinking of how Fernando’s cock feels inside him, too busy arching and pushing back for more. Fernando gives it to him, leans forward so he can rest a hand on the mattress next to Lance’s face pushed into the pillow, his other hand gripping Lance’s hip tight enough to bruise.

When Fernando begins thrusting at a brutal pace Lance lets him. He lets punched out noises fall from his lips and tangle in the sweat soaked sheets beneath them.

When he comes, it’s with the shape of Fernando’s name in his mouth.

"You did not answer,” Fernando muses afterward. Lance’s head is resting on his bare chest, his fingers threading through sweat soaked strands of jet black hair.

“Answer what?” Lance mumbles, fucked out and limp against Fernando – like a sack of potatoes Fernando had once teased, boneless and immovable. He was falling asleep, his voice groggy with the promise of it.

“Marry me,” Fernando says again, a statement instead of a question.

“Later,” Lance grumbles, curling closer to Fernando.

He is rarely the little spoon, what with the size difference between them, but his thigh slots perfectly across Fernando’s hips and his head can rest nicely beneath his chin if he maneuvers enough. He can feel Fernando’s come dripping out of him, his own drying against his stomach, but the need to give into the oblivion of sleep is stronger than the need to shower.

“But yes?” Fernando asks, to which Lance makes a noise that might have been agreement, at least he aims for that.

It’s not romantic, certainly not how Lance thought his proposal would go. For one, he did not think he would be the one proposed to. In his mind there had been an expensive trip to Bali, rose petals in the sand, a girl who he’d get down on one knee for with a prenup and a ring. But the girl never had a face, nothing distinguishable about her other than the dress she wore that would flutter in the breeze and her giggle when Lance slid the expensive rock onto her finger.

This is better, half asleep against his childhood hero with his limbs still aching from how hard the man had drilled him into the mattress. Feeling warm, content, wanted – not just for his trust fund but because he was also really good at sucking dick.

Maybe it was a self-deprecating thought. He didn’t care. He falls asleep like that, with Fernando’s fingers in his hair and wrapped in the scent of him. When he wakes, it’s to the man easing him out of the bed and into the warm bath that waits with steam rising in tendrils from the water. It’s easy to let himself be taken care of, to let Fernando massage the knots from his shoulders and clean the come from his body. Easy in the same way it is to let a nameless driver cart him around Montreal or let the rotating staff dust his frequently empty loft, different in that Fernando presses kisses to his neck, his shoulders, his spine, the crown of his head and tells him how good he was.  

Lance rests his cheek against the curve of Fernando’s neck while water is poured down his back, soap lathered into his hair, whispers of praise warm against his ear. Fernando uses his own shampoo, his soap, so that Lance no longer smells of sex but of citrus and sandalwood.

Fernando doesn’t mention marriage again, but he does dress Lance in a pair of his own boxers and eases him into bed with a gentleness that Lance has learned to associate with post-coital bliss.

It’s the sun that wakes him up next, and Fernando’s hand thwacking against his face when the man shifts in his sleep. He smells of Fernando and is wearing clothes are too small for his frame, and it’s familiar. At some point, it became almost normal.

A month later he gives Fernando a ring, a silver band rimmed with a strip of carbon fiber from his own car and his name engraved in Hebrew on the inside. It matches the font that’s inked across his ribs. Hurt a hell of a lot less though and cost him significantly more. His dad’s accountant questions the amount, asks Lance if he bought a new place, and Lance just shrugs it off – says he bought a snowboard or a car or a race track just to see the way the man’s lips press into a thin line as he jots something into the books.

“I’ll marry you,” he says, when he slides the ring in its velvet box to Fernando across the table of the taco place they’re at. It comes to a rest beside the chips and salsa.

Fernando stares. There’s a stray piece of cilantro sticking to the corner of his downturned mouth.

“If, uh, if you still want me to. I’ll marry you.”

“A ring?” Fernando asks, motioning at the box with the overfilled end of the taco in his grip. A stray piece of carne asada falls, plops onto the paper lined basket beneath him.

“Yeah, it’s stupid, but you know-“

“It’s not stupid,” Fernando cuts him off, annoyance lacing his tone as he sets the taco down next to the escaped piece of meat, “Don’t say that. It’s not stupid.”

Lance blushes, ducks his head, stares down at his own untouched taco and the box that Fernando still has not reached for. There’s chip crumbs sticking to the velvet. His dad would have a conniption if he saw, the same way he did when Lance would show up to events in a suit that was too big on him with an untucked button-up peeking out from beneath the oversized fabric. His dad would hate that they were even eating here, which is maybe precisely why Lance had chosen it. Something bold, something his, something that wasn’t stamped with the Stroll name and wrapped in a pretty package.

“It’s not stupid,” Fernando repeats, “But it’s for me?”

Lance feels his palms go clammy, feels suddenly like he is getting hit by a bus. His appetite leaves him with the whoosh of breath from his lungs. They hadn’t talked about it since Fernando proposed the idea when he was balls deep inside him. When Lance was moaning his name into the pillow and choking on his own tears from the pleasure. He feels suddenly stupid, hollow, the same way he feels when reporters ask him why he bottled it into the wall on the easiest part of the circuit with condescension lacing their tone. Like they could do any fucking better.

“You- fuck.”

“Lance?”

“You didn’t mean it did you? Oh, man, uh. I’m- fuck.”

Lance doesn’t cry, at least not in public. He’s become well trained in blinking back tears and biting off the quiver in his voice that gives him away. But he comes close, feels the stinging heat of them building in the corners of his eyes and has to blink violently until his vision clears. Fernando watches him, watches as he fights against the rising tide of not good enough, stupid, never enough that rises inside him suddenly and rapidly and threatens to drown him while he swallows down the bile and sour cream taste that’s building at the back of his throat.

It takes him longer than it should to stop the shaking of his hands.

“Sorry,” he says when the world settles a little beneath his feet, when he doesn’t feel like he’s going to say something spiteful just so he can see Fernando’s expression twist with the same hurt he feels. It wouldn’t work anyway, Lance has thrown nearly every well aimed bullet Fernando’s way and they land, but they never seem to hurt.

“Let’s just- let’s just forget about it, yeah? It was a dumb thing, I don’t even-,” he reaches to grab the ring box but is halted by Fernando’s hand over his own. Fernando’s fingers wrap around his wrist, strong, sturdy, unyielding.

“Stop calling it that. Let me answer, yes?”

Lance nods, braces himself for the inevitable rejection, for the floor falling out feeling and the rush of wind in his ears and the impact of his body against the pavement. It’s not a strange feeling, to be dumped by his hero and hung out to dry, doesn’t hurt any less the second time around though. He just wishes Fernando would be mean about it, the niceties hurt more, he’d rather it just be quick – it’s what he would have expected from the man anyway – a sharp dagger to the side or the bite of a blade against his throat, not the gentle press of the knife sliding between his ribs in some false semblance of mercy.

Fernando brushes his thumb along the inside of his wrist, over his pulse point, parallel to the surgical scars left from his accident. He sometimes gets phantom twinges, the memory of a snapped bone, but nothing now. Now he just feels empty.

“I did not ask you properly,” Fernando explains, sounding, strangely, sad.

“I didn’t answer properly,” Lance counters, nodding to the box that still sits between them, unopened, next to the chips and a bottle of hot sauce like it is another spare condiment. It cost him a quarter of a million, and Lance threw it down like it was the spare jalapeno sauce the waiter had left them.

“I should have,” Fernando presses, exasperated, like he’s frustrated that Lance is not understanding him, “it’s important to me. This. Us.”

Us.

Lance feels like that twelve year-old boy standing in the Ferrari garage when he says, “I don’t understand.”

Like he’s watching the race unfold with noise muffled by the earmuffs over his head and his father’s hand heavy on his shoulder. Like he can see it all, close enough to smell the rubber and the gasoline, but far enough away that it still seems unobtainable. Fernando may as well still be in that car, separated by a screen and Lance’s idolization for all the difference it makes now.

“You want to marry me, yes? Honest. This is- this is you? Your choice?”

“Who’s else would it be?” If Lance has a gun held to his head it’s one that he hasn’t spotted yet, metal pressing against his temple, and he’s somehow mistaken it for a kiss.

Fernando’s lips press into a thin line, the curl of his lips curving further downward.

“I’m sorry, Nando.”

“Stop being sorry. You do not need to be sorry. I am sorry. How I asked, when I did, it was…wrong. I should have waited. I should have asked correctly.”

Fernando’s grip on his wrist tightens, instinctively, enough that Lance winces when it shifts something beneath the skin, and he feels the hint of pain. More of a familiar ghost than anything real. Fernando pulls away anyway, sudden, leans back in his seat and tucks his hands beneath the table like his touch has somehow burned Lance.

Slowly, Lance understands.

“Wait- you- baby did you think I wanted a proposal? Like down on one knee ‘will you marry me’, proposal?”

Fernando arches an eyebrow, “You do not?”

The floor stabilizes slightly, stops feeling like it’s going to fall out beneath him. Lance breathes and when he exhales a laugh accompanies it.

“No, Fer. Fuck no. Please no, actually.”

“But you got me a ring,” Fernando points out, points at the jewelry itself, like rings and proposals must always go hand in hand. Like they’re supposed to be the blushing bride and groom. Like there’s not a seventeen year age difference between them and their first kiss wasn’t accompanied by Fernando spitting the name ‘princess’ into his mouth like it was a slur.

Lance can’t stop laughing.

Fernando still can’t seem to find the joke.

“This is not funny.”

“It’s kind of funny.”

Funny that his boyfriend became his fiancé when he was fucking him so hard Lance probably wouldn’t have even remembered his own name. Funny that he bought a ring before they’d even discussed it when their dicks weren’t out. Funny that Lance mistook Fernando’s chivalry for abandonment. It’s funny in a way that isn’t, and so he can’t help the laughter that bubbles out of him in heaving breaths and spills across the table, the floor, the whole of the crowded restaurant. He knows what he must look like, wide grin and crinkling eyes, and the familiarity of his face nagging at the brains of those who turn to stare at him.

He doesn’t care if they recognize him, or, more realistically, Fernando. He doesn’t care and it’s one of the first times that he thinks it and realizes it’s probably true.

“Stop laughing.”

“I can’t,” Lance wheezes, “We’re both so fucking stupid.”

Fernando rolls his eyes, shifts in his seat, waits until Lance’s laughs fade into breathy little huffs and passes the time by picking at his now cold taco. Lance watches him, watches the twitch of his lips and knows Fernando is biting back laughter too.

Finally, he leans forward on his elbows and says, “I want to marry you. Of course I want to marry you.”

He pushes the ring box further along the table with an index finger, until it’s touching Fernando’s plate. The man looks from the velvet box to Lance’s finger and travels along his arm until there’s nothing between them, but the table and the chips and Lance’s name engraved in Hebrew on a solid gold band.

“Do you want to marry me?”

He doesn’t have to wait for Fernando’s answer, it comes in the darkening of the man’s expression, his pupils blowing wide with want and the way he hooks his foot around Lance’s ankle beneath the table.

“Come with me. I will show you how much I want to marry you, Lance Stroll.”

Three months later, Lance wears a matching gold band, Fernando’s name engraved across the inside and resting warm against his skin. When people ask if he’s married, always as a joke, always assuming the impossibility, he laughs and tells them yes. Fernando wears his on a gold chain tucked beneath his nomex. It is the last thing they take off before getting in their cars, the first thing they put back on when getting out.

“Mine,” Fernando will whisper to him at night, Lance’s fingers pressed to his lips and warm breath ghosting along the ring.

“Yours,” Lance will say when he loops Fernando’s chain around his index finger and pulls until the man comes to him, and there is no separation between them at all.