NOTES: The chapter is from Max's POV and it's maxiel, because we’re in the period in which Daniel was in Max's life and for me it’s right to talk about it and give him the role that I think he had, a very important role. I know that the fic is lestappen, but I said that there would be maxiel and piarles parts. The journey is long and we’re still at the beginning. Happy reading. Kisses Akane

4. SECOND LIFE

* June 20, 2017 *
/Max/

“Rock music blasts at full volume through the walls of my house.
My house, it’s always nice to say, even though I don’t particularly like this music, but not the opposite either. Let’s say that even if there was silence for me it would be the same, but it was Daniel who insisted on putting it on and among other things he was the one who chose it.
He says that this way we can make all the noise we want and by noise he means the moans and noises we make when we bang the bed or any other piece of furniture in the house. The table in this case.
When we go to his house it’s the same, the music that blasts at full volume from the speakers is always of this type, loud, rhythmic, angry and I’m fine with that.
It almost reflects my soul from a year ago, maybe he likes it and puts it on because reminded him of me at the beginning, just arrived at Red Bull as his teammate.
I don't actually know, I just remember that he immediately started making me listen to music, telling that it was absurd I didn't listen to any and it was impossible that I didn't like it. That there's no way someone doesn't like music, but I simply didn't know what I liked and to find out I just had to listen.
Too bad that he always made me listen to rock, which is what he likes, but I don't mind. It's not bad, even if I don't put it on by myself because I don't listen anything in general.
Daniel increases the speed and force of the thrusts he gives me while he takes me from behind and I scream with pleasure asking him not to stop, that we're almost there.
I feel his cock hitting me from behind, making me shiver from the inside. His fingers squeeze my hips with force and when he increases the thrusts my pleasure expands more and more, it crawls under my skin and goes everywhere. I arch on the table that finally stops making noise on the floor and I close my eyes, freeing myself in a spectacular orgasm that disconnects my brain.
Again that wonderful feeling that I'm addicted to.
Pleasure is a drug and I can't stop, there's nothing that has the same effect on me, except maybe racing in a car. That's also powerful and considering that before when I was off the track I felt like I was going crazy, I have to say it was just magical.
Since I've been fucking with Daniel this madness has also subsided outside the car.
I can't say that everything is fine now, I don't think I'll ever be fine, but I'm definitely better than when I arrived in F1.
Especially since I got rid of my father because now in F1 and with my damned 18 years, he was uprooted from my life.
I was able to go and live on my own because I simply could and the team provided me with their engineer and their trainer, so finally my father could just be a father and with a brusque 'now it's your turn, my job is done', he simply gave me the final blow. More or less. I mean, almost.
There was nothing I wanted more than that, too bad that once I had it, fear darkened and crushed me.
The fear that without those shitty ways he always used to keep me in line and make me do well in the races, I wouldn’t have really made it. That in the end he was right to do this. I was hallucinating when I became Daniel's teammate and only he slowly brought me back into the world.
I collapse on the table without strength, feeling that he too, after his orgasm exploded inside me, is leaning on me, on my back.
I pant sweatily and the smell of sex and the sweat that covers us triggers me again, but I don't have the strength to start again and I doubt that he would have it too, as he’s on top of me almost lifeless. If it weren't for the beating of his heart against my back and his panting breath, I would really think he was dead.
I smile mischievously trying to turn my head to look at him, but obviously it's not possible because his face is resting between my shoulder blades and he doesn't come off.
The rock music continues to thunder overbearingly, but I now feel it as a side dish. I like the smell, for some it’s an unbearable stench, but for me the specific smell of sex is an absurd trigger. Usually when I smell him and lick him after orgasms, he tells me I'm sick and always runs off to wash himself without even giving me the post-fuck human warmth that everyone needs.
So the smell brings me back to life after this spectacular fuck, but he always needs more time. After all, he's the one who does the most physical exercise and luckily he's a gym nut. He's also passing this on to me, as well as the ability to smile that I forget from time to time.
I've never had an easy smile, partly because I don't like when I laugh, partly because I never felt like doing it while I was dealing with my father and his lack of sweetness.
Daniel really brought me back into the world, sometimes I feel like he grabbed me by the hair while I was drowning. He doesn't know, nobody knows and I don't want anyone to find out, these are my private things. My paranoia. My fucking dramas.
But if I have to say that someone saved me, it’s definitely Daniel.
I let him recover, it always takes him a while, so I wait patiently, letting my mind wander into memories of a year before, when he welcomed me as a new teammate in Red Bull at the start of the season to replace Kvjat.
I remember his huge radiant smile, his powerful handshake and a spontaneous joke that made me laugh, then I immediately closed my mouth and he looked at me strangely.
From then on I don't know what went on in his head, maybe he thought I was too sulky and that I needed it, but it's as if he had made an effort to make me laugh.
However, I think that more than his cheerfulness, what saved me was making me come and live in his building in Monte Carlo.
When I said that I wanted to go and live alone but I didn't know where to go, he took charge of the situation by saying that there was a free apartment on the top floor and that it was a beautiful area, close to the sea and everything else. I don't remember the rest because he added an endless series of words to convince me to come, but it was his 'You'll see that we'll have fun together'.
The rest was a fairly fast vortex that sucked me in without even realizing it or asking myself questions; while he took away bad habits brought by the complicated relationship with my father and the experience with him, he put new positive things in me, making me discover life as a free boy.
Sex with him was one of them, but it was a normal consequence. After a few months of spending almost always and only with him as if we lived together instead of just in the same building, I was totally taken with him. Whatever he said or did, I was fine with it and when I realized that I was laughing and that I was happy, I threw myself at him without hesitation.
I had never had any instincts before him, I had never even liked girls or boys, never had anyone, no personal experience of any kind, I had always and only thought about racing, but as soon as I spent time with him and with his contagious cheerfulness, while he was trying to convert me to his beloved rock, I just wanted to kiss him and then I did.
Finding out I had gay tendencies was never a drama, I wanted to kiss him and I did. Shortly after we were fucking on the couch like hell. When it happened it was simply enlightening, like the first time I usually get on a go-kart car. I knew it was my environment, my thing, in short, and I accepted it like everything else that has always happened to me in my life, both the successes with racing, as well as the failures or the kicks from my father. It was simply life, right?
And so Daniel.
Daniel and sex with him is simply life. My life.
Now I couldn't be more serene than this, at least compared to before. It's not up to me to say if I've really improved, I've never been objective with myself. I've always and only done something, basically what my father told me to do. No thoughts, zero considerations or emotions. Just running well, as best as possible, mainly winning.
No thoughts, I've always been like this, I don't know how much good it does to be like this. There are those who always think and analyze everything, but I just act and if I like something, I continue otherwise I stop, very easy.
I like fucking with Daniel, as well as racing with cars. So I do it.
- Dani are you alive? - I ask with a hoarse voice, moving my shoulders to lift him up. He's been leaning completely on me for a few minutes, I don't know how long I can stay bent over like this, my back and face are starting to hurt.
- Mm... - he answers lazily, more on the other side than here. I smile.
- The table isn't comfortable, you know? - I remind him amused.
- But you do though! - his answer is prompt and funny as usual and I laugh for a change.
If this is my second life, the first one I lived takes on a different perspective, becomes more acceptable. Almost as if in the end it makes sense, even if I don't really know what it is and I don't even care. As long as I can have him fucking me like this and making me have all the orgasms I want, I don't give a damn.
- Oh, what time are we leaving tomorrow?
When I ask him, Daniel stays a bit above me, moaning, he tells me the time after having exhumed it from his brain prey to pleasure hormones and when I tell him the current time I hear him sigh. Probably he’s thinking about everything there is to do before leaving.
He and I now practically live together and run with the same team, we also travel with the same private plane, his.
We’re practically a couple, but we never talk about these things or any feelings. If we were to do it would be a mess because I don't really know what to think, what would I answer him?
We fuck and we're fine, is that something?
Luckily I think it's the same for him and we never talk about it. We've been doing this for a few months, for me we can go on forever.
In the end Daniel huffs and gets up and while he frees me, he slaps me on the buttock leaving on it his five fingers. My father's were always strictly on my head, so I don't have any problems receiving his. I giggle and watch him go to the bathroom for his beloved shower. I straighten up, detaching myself from the table with a thousand grimaces, I was starting to really hurt and the skin remains on the surface after having sweated on it, creating a suction effect. The pain from the tear makes me curse and out of spite I take the remote control of the stereo that Daniel gave me and close that thing. I hear him yelling at me from the bathroom but in response I turn on the television and put Sky Sport F1 on.
The news does the usual roundup while one in particular catches my attention; I go to the fridge to drink something cold and rehydrate after the lost liquids. Liquids of various kinds. With an amused smile I look at the stain of my splash that ended up on the floor.
At this precise moment, the voice of the sports news fills the apartment.
- Hervé Leclerc, father of Charles Leclerc, died today at the age of 54 after an illness that had kept him in hospital in recent times. The Monegasque driver, who competes with Prema Racing in Formula 2, is due to race in Azerbaijan this weekend.
I almost choke on hearing the news, I go to the sink and spit while coughing. Once I come to my senses I go in front of the television while a strange sense of shock hits me.
Hervé Leclerc comes to mind in his version from a few years ago, when in the last race Charles and I ran together he went away hugging his son, kissing him affectionately and complimenting him on his second place in the championship. I remember Charles's discontented frown and then the smile he resigned himself to returning, accepting the hug.
I remember how much I envied them, thinking they were a beautiful father-son couple. I remember that when I went to mine, he didn't even touch me by mistake and I didn't even make a sign to come closer. That time we were happy because I had won the karting championship, the last race before switching to single-seaters, but he never complimented me, he belittled me anyway, saying that I would have been a truck driver anyway. Woe betide me if I go to my head and don’t aim for the best.
My eyes suddenly burn hearing and realizing that that man so clever and kind is dead and my mind quickly brings back to me also the other news about Charles from a few years ago. At that time Jules Bianchi, a great friend of his, had died, and everyone was also talking about him, considered his heir, a natural connection with the F1 driver who died due to a horrible accident on the track.
As if it made sense I think of his face, that day with his father he was beautiful and joyful even if he was angry for not having won the championship, but when I saw him again last year, when he did the first free practice in F1, his face had a shadow, it was only the vague memory of a smile. At that moment I thought it was my fault, that he wasn't happy to see me again, even if I was. I remembered how much I had enjoyed racing with him as kids, how much I enjoyed teasing him and how nice it was to have someone who could keep up with me with my exact same hunger for victory.
Similar and equal in many things and so opposite in many others.
Like our fathers and their approaches. Mine was a racing maniac asshole who beat me if I made a mistake, his was so positive and calm that he supported him even if he didn't win or did badly.
Mine: alive, from whom I ran away, whose shadow doesn't leave me alone even now that I'm free.
His: dead, despite the goodness he had that you could see, who won't be able to be next to his son like they both would like so much.
Fuck, how unfair life is. What shit.
Daniel is just getting out of the shower, he's wrapped in a towel around his waist and he's still hot, wet and dripping. He comes to tell me that I can go and wash myself, but as soon as he sees me standing like a pole in the middle of the room, still naked and raw, he understands that I'm different than before. I'm dark.
- What happened? - he asks, putting his hands on my hips with his typical sweetness and without the fear of touching me, the fear that many always have.
Frowning and without looking him in the eye, I tell him bluntly, brusquely and dryly: - Leclerc's father is dead. We raced together in karting, I knew him.
Not well, but I knew him. But it's more for his son that I'm like this now. Like this how? I hope he doesn't ask me, I hope it shows for itself, I hope I don't have to talk about it, because I don't want to. I don't want to talk about the bad things because they sink me and I can't get up again if I do, that's why I never talk about my father. Because I want to get rid of him and if I talk about him I can't.
So I don't even want to talk about why I feel this way and it hits me so hard to hear this news about Charles' father.
But Daniel's arms wrap around me naked, strong and warm and with a silence that I would never have imagined, he limits himself to kissing my lips and holding me close even if he’s clean and I still have sex on me.
When he does that, I melt and relax almost instantly, I don't realize it right away, but it's only when I hug him back and close my eyes, only when I hide my face against his scented and toned neck, that I notice it and I think I feel a little better.
As I abandon myself to him who does me good once more, the smiling face of sixteen-year-old Charles emerges joyful and bright as he goes away with his father, hugging him.
Will that smile ever go back to the way it was?
Sometimes I think about him, when I read or hear something about him, but this wasn't the way I wanted to do it now. It definitely wasn't this way.

Daniel didn't ask me anything, he made me eat insisting that I had to, then we started watching a series that he's forcing me to follow. It's another of the things he's making me do because I've never done it on my own.
With TV series he's more successful than with music, because it engages my brain while I'm watching since I have to follow the story, but normally I prefer playing with SIMs because it's a bit like racing with real cars. That's why I've always preferred it to anything else and I put up with that piece of shit of a father of mine.
I put up with him to the point of justifying him and accepting the explanations he gave to my mother. Because I was too stubborn and if he hadn't done that I would never have reached the level necessary to be successful in racing. Because racing for fun isn't really fun when you have to stop because you're rubbish and you don't get the results you need.
It's only funny if you win and you're successful and to get to that point you have to make sacrifices and work in a certain way and only he who had already been there, could understand. Only he who hadn't had the success he wanted, knew what he was talking about.
Getting to F1 was difficult but not impossible, however if you got there but you were crap then they would dump you. Having a contract in an F1 team was not rare, staying there and keeping up with the pace of the races was. Up to 40 years old it was reasonable to think you could race, if you were lucky, but you had to be good and supported by the right teams and to reach those levels you had to work from a young age.
That's why he did what he did.
The images of the TV series that he forced me to watch and that I usually like, scroll before my eyes, but I don't really follow.
The death of Hervé Leclerc threw me into a tunnel that took me back in time.
Charles with his father's sweet and understanding methods is still in F2 and it’s not certain that he’ll be able to come to F1 and even if he does it’s not known if he’ll stay there. Many who get there then disappear because they’re abandoned by their companies, because they're not happy or ready enough. But I know that if I’m here, there’s no reason why he cannot make it too. He was strong like me, we just had different driving styles and opposite methods of conceiving racing, even if both obsessed with victory, with first place. Only first place.
Competitive was an understatement.
However, the environment around us was different, our parents.
In the end, mine was certainly right to do so and we don’t know if Charles's was also right, I assume we’ll find out next year or a little later. But that's not the point. The real point is another.
I don't know why thinking about his father makes me understand that there was something wrong in my life and I don't want, I cannot think about it.
Now it's over, what's the point of thinking about it?
I've never thought about the things that happened to me or even about what he did because if I had, maybe I wouldn't have acted. So thinking isn't for me, but today, stuck on the couch hugging Daniel as if I were his puppy, I'm cold even though it's mid-June.
I shiver without realizing it and I do it while I think about what kind of life I would have had with a father like Charles's. Because the truth is that I've always envied him. That's why I think about it so much.
I'm sure Charles will get to F1 like me and he’ll have done it with less traumatic methods than mine.
But if I had had a father like his and then he had died at the most important moment of my life, the beginning of the most difficult part of my career, what would have become of me?
Having a bastard father who forged a driver and didn't raise a son will allow me to go on great even without him and never collapse or even feel bad. He made me strong, his punches in the head and his kicks in the ass. His shitty punishments for every mistake, every time I was left stranded after a race where I went off the track because of my own fault. These are things that have made me strong, because now I can do without him and even if I was scared when I first arrived here, when I was freed from him, I was scared that without those kicks I wouldn't have made it, now slowly I'm understanding that it just takes me a little time to rebuild myself and understand how to do it, find a balance, in short, but I can do it. Without him I will always be better.
But Charles? Without a father like his, I wouldn’t be able to do it anymore.
In Charles's place, after losing first my best friend and mentor and then my father, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I, because of how I am, because of my character.
I know that saying it is stupid because now I’m made this way because my father forged me with slaps and the character I have now would be different from the one I would have if he had raised me in an understanding and sweet way.
But I wouldn’t be able to do it and I wonder if I’ll see Charles one day in F1 as I have always thought. If he weren’t to arrive, it would sadden me.
I have often thought about him in these years and I don’t know why, since as usual I never stop to ask myself questions or reflect. But I wouldn’t have wanted to think about him now in this way. What will your eyes be like if tomorrow I cross paths with you in Baku?
We've never actually bumped into each other since we're in different categories and always do everything at different times, but if by chance I were to see you tomorrow I... then I'll realize.
What an idiot.
He just lost his father. But imagine if you come racing. Obviously he'll have someone replace him for this race. Everyone would do it in his place, and racing in these conditions would be dangerous.
- Is everything okay?
Daniel's voice shakes me out of my ruminations and only when I see that the episode is over and I haven't said anything, I realize that it's obvious that I'm not well. I smile and shrug.
- Yes, just a little thoughtful.
- Do you want to go to bed? - he asks softly. His ways are the opposite of what I've always received. Thinking about my father and the way he raised me and finding myself now with a Daniel who goes from comical to sexual to tender mode making me ‘drunk’, I feel like I've hit the jackpot.
- Together? - I ask since he doesn't always stay to sleep with me. I lift my head from the comfortable position represented by his chest and he smiles sweetly at me.
- If you like...
I immediately say yes and wrap my arms around him. I don’t want to play the part of the pathetic boy in need of affection, I’ve never done it and I don’t want to start now, but his closeness, his warm and solid physicality, makes me feel good now that after so long I feel lost again. And like the first time I felt it, he arrives and saves me.
He bends down lifting my chin with his finger and kisses me, I let his lips reach me seeking him with my tongue. We intertwine and kiss for a while until without asking me anything we move to bed and hugging each other we go to sleep.
You’re really bringing me back to the world, Daniel Ricciardo. Thank you for having happened to me and for having understood me without ever asking me annoying questions. I don’t know what you saw in me and why you accepted me that day when I kissed you, but I’m happy that you went beyond like no one has done so far.”

NOTES: I won't lie and say that the maxiel/piarles part will be short, it will be what it takes. Also I don't know if Max could have really been affected by the death of Charles' father, nor if they talked about it somewhere, it could be, at the time I don't remember how things went, but I wanted to make him reflect on certain things, including fathers in general and Charles in particular. The thing about their races for that weekend is true, they both raced in Baku in those days. It's also true that Max and Daniel traveled together and lived (I still think) in the same building. It's true that Max doesn't listen to music in general, but since he's a friend of Martin Garrix, he listens to his. At the time, however, I don't think he was already. Jos has always justified his severity with Max in that way, and Max himself has always justified him a little, at least in public (from what I perceived from the interviews). Thanks to those who read and comment. See you next time. Kisses Akane