Chapter Text
Lewis
The dream always began with light.
Not the harsh flare of camera flashes or the sterile brightness of a press room, but something softer. Afternoon sun through a dusty window, catching the particles suspended in the air of a karting garage somewhere in Europe.
The specifics never stayed with him — whether it was Kerpen or some forgotten track in Belgium — but the quality of light remained, golden and thick, like something you could hold in your hands.
In the dream, he was laughing. He could feel it in his chest, that particular ache of laughing too hard, though he couldn't hear the sound.
Someone was beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched.
He knew, without looking, that the hair was blonde. That the hands gesturing wildly while telling some story were long-fingered and elegant, even back then.
He never looked directly at the face. Perhaps he was afraid that if he did, the dream would end. Perhaps he already knew what he would find there.
They were working on something — a kart engine, maybe, or just pretending to while they talked about everything and nothing.
In that strange logic of dreams, he understood that they had all the time in the world. That tomorrow wasn't a race day. That the future was a distant country neither of them had to think about yet.
Then the light would shift, the way it does when clouds pass over the sun, and he would feel a hand on his arm. A question he couldn't quite hear. He would turn, finally, to answer—
And wake up.
Lewis opened his eyes to the ceiling of his hotel room in Bahrain.
For a long moment, he didn't move.
The air conditioning hummed its constant note. Through the blackout curtains, a thin line of brightness marked the edge of morning.
His body knew, before his mind caught up, that it was early. Too early.
The pre-dawn hours that had become familiar territory in the eighteen months since Abu Dhabi.
He lay still and let the dream dissolve, the way he had learned to let many things dissolve.
The light was already fading from his memory. The laughter was gone.
What remained was only an impression, like the warmth left on a pillow by someone who had already risen.
Nico.
He didn't say the name aloud. He rarely did anymore. But in the silence of the hotel room, in the space between sleep and waking, he allowed himself to think it. To hold it for a moment like a stone worn smooth by years of handling.
Twenty years. More than twenty years since that garage, if it had ever existed at all.
The dream might have been a memory or might have been a fabrication, his sleeping mind constructing a past that was simpler than the one he actually lived. He had stopped trying to determine which.
What he knew for certain was this: they had been close, once.
Before the championships and the contracts and the crash at Barcelona.
Before the silence that followed 2016 had calcified into something permanent.
They had been two boys who loved the same thing, and for a brief window of time, that had been enough.
Now Nico appeared on his screen sometimes, doing interviews for Sky Sports or his YouTube channel. Lewis had never watched any of them in full. He would see a clip on social media — Nico's familiar gestures, his careful English that still carried a trace of German precision — and scroll past before he could register the expression on that face.
He sat up in bed and reached for his phone. 5:47. The first session of pre-season testing began at nine. He had time.
He had, perhaps, too much time.
The Bahrain International Circuit had a particular quality of light as well, though nothing like the dreams. Here the sun was white and unforgiving, bleaching the sky to a pale haze by midmorning. The desert air smelled of nothing — no grass, no rain, no memory. Lewis had always found it clarifying.
He arrived early, as he always did now. There was a time when he would have cut it close, when the adrenaline of rushing served some purpose he no longer needed. But since Abu Dhabi — since that night when everything he thought he understood about fairness and control had been stripped away in the space of a single lap — he had developed new habits.
He arrived early. He sat in silence. He let his mind empty of everything except the car.
Angela was already there, of course, matching his rhythm as she had for years. She handed him a coffee without a word. He took it without thanks. They had long ago moved past the need for such exchanges.
The Mercedes garage was a hive of quiet activity, mechanics running through their checklists, engineers murmuring into headsets.
Lewis walked through it like a ghost, nodding at faces he knew, letting his hand trail along the cool surface of the car.
The W14. Another machine that might or might not deliver what he asked of it.
He found himself thinking, as he often did, about endings. How many more seasons he had in him. What would be left when this was over.
The thought didn't frighten him the way it once might have. Since 2021, many things that once seemed essential had revealed themselves to be negotiable.
Winning was still important. But he had begun to understand that there were other questions worth asking. Questions about what kind of man he wanted to be when he finally climbed out of the car for the last time.
He hadn't found the answers yet. But he was learning to sit with the questions.
He saw the boy before he knew who he was.
A flash of movement at the edge of his vision, near the McLaren garage.
Dark curls bouncing as their owner gestured emphatically at a mechanic, his whole body involved in whatever story he was telling. His race suit was half-unzipped, the sleeves tied around his waist in that way the younger drivers did, too impatient to dress properly between sessions.
Lewis paused.
It wasn't that the boy was remarkable in any obvious way. The paddock was full of young drivers, each of them hungry and confident and convinced of their own destiny. Lewis had been one of them once, and he had learned to view their certainty with a mixture of amusement and something close to envy.
But something about this one made him stop.
He watched as the boy threw his head back in laughter, exposing the line of his throat. There was an ease to him, a brightness that seemed unforced. And the curls — dark and unruly, resisting whatever product had been applied to tame them — caught the harsh Bahrain light and held it.
"That's Norris," Angela said, appearing at his elbow. "Lando Norris. McLaren's new rookie. Been in the junior categories for a while. They say he's the real deal."
Lewis nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
It wasn't the boy himself. It was something about the way he stood, perhaps. The angle of his shoulders. The particular quality of his laughter, which carried across the pit lane like something Lewis had heard before, in another life, in a dream that was already fading.
Ridiculous. He was being ridiculous.
He turned away and continued toward his garage. There was work to do. Data to review. A car to understand.
The pre-season testing would tell them where they stood, what needed to be fixed, whether this year would be different from the last.
Behind him, he heard the boy — Lando — call out something to a teammate. The words were indistinct, but the tone was clear: joy, uncomplicated and whole.
Lewis walked on.
But later that morning, during a break between sessions, he found himself looking toward the McLaren garage again. Found himself watching as Lando Norris reviewed telemetry with his engineer, his face serious now, those curls falling forward as he leaned over the screen.
And he felt it again. That strange pull, something just out of reach like a word on the tip of his tongue. Like a dream he was trying to remember after waking.
He didn't know what it meant.
He wasn't sure he wanted to find out.
That night, back in his hotel room, Lewis stood at the window and watched the lights of the city spread out below him.
Manama at night was a constellation of gold and white, beautiful in a way that felt unconnected to him.
His phone buzzed. Messages from his team, his family, his publicist. He ignored them all.
He was thinking about the boy. Those curls. The way he had laughed, his whole face transformed by it.
He was thinking, too, about the dream. About the light in that long-ago garage, and the presence beside him that he had never quite been able to look at directly.
Twenty years was a long time. Long enough to build a career, to win championships, to become a version of yourself that the boy in that garage would hardly recognize. Long enough, surely, to let go of whatever had once existed between two young men who had been foolish enough to think that love and ambition could coexist.
He had let go. He was certain of it.
And yet.
Lewis pressed his palm against the cool glass of the window and closed his eyes. Tomorrow there would be more testing. More data. More work to fill the hours and quiet the questions he didn't want to ask.
But tonight, in the silence of a hotel room far from home, he allowed himself one small admission:
He had never stopped dreaming of that light.