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Naivety: that’s a thing that Liam didn’t think would be such a large part of his Formula 1 career.
When Yuki was his neighbour, back in their days at Faenza, he’d yelled at Liam about it. They were in Yuki’s apartment like they always were. Both XBox controllers were finally working again, and Liam was saying something about how he thought a Robovac could really help Yuki maintain just a semblance of adultness.
Yuki didn’t get angry at Liam for that. He knew he was a bit of a slob, he knew Liam was the opposite. If anything he appreciated Liam’s tendency to call him out on it, and then show up at his door after a vacation with a roll of bin bags and a stern, almost fatherly set to his jaw.
Even so, “Oh my god!” he’d exploded. “Why are you so obsessed with that? You’re always going on about how we need to act like grownups and we have to have all our birds in a line and you think that’s going to help with anything? No one cares if my kitchen isn’t spotless!”
Liam suppressed the “I do,” that rose in his throat. It’s not the point that he wants to be able to come over for dinner anytime he likes, that he’ll cook even when Yuki isn’t in the mood to. “It makes things easier.”
“No! You’re like a child sometimes! You think if we do everything the way you think we’re supposed to that we’ll have success? No one cares about that stuff.”
Liam didn’t say that people caring about that stuff is exactly why they’re here in Italy not Milton Keynes.
Yuki continued. “Like, you’re so smart about some stuff and so dumb about others.” Neither of them took their eyes off the game the whole time, but the cool affection in Yuki’s voice is clear. He doesn’t mean to hurt, he’s just being honest. And he doesn’t know that it’s an echo of things Liam has heard his whole life.
~~~
He’s three years old and he’s telling his kindergarten teacher he’s going to be an astronaut because his best friend is a space dinosaur.
He’s going to his first race and telling his dad that’s going to be his name in the club room’s honour roll one day.
He’s spending nights stroking his sister’s forehead while she sleeps, convinced that she’s so small still that she can’t be real.
He’s meeting Kenny Smith and somehow convincing him to let him bunk off school to spend the day with cars in his workshop.
He’s getting his first crush and telling her, and then asking his mum if it’s okay that he borrows three dollars fifty to buy her a Juicie at the canteen.
He’s packing a bag, just the one, even though everyone says he’ll wish he’d taken more, and moving hemispheres.
He’s telling a joke that makes the adults at the factory laugh and he’s thinking, dad would be proud .
He’s getting his first crush on a boy and he’s not telling him because he’s seventeen and he’s not reckless but he does tell his nana and she blinks at him over Skype and says, yes well you’re in the right job for it aren’t you? Lots of choices.
He’s winning and winning and winning and sure it’s going to break and it doesn’t until it does, but even then his phone calls home are always full of determination.
He’s getting a plastic organiser for his bathroom and video calling his mum because he’s genuinely excited to show it off.
He’s choosing to follow Yuki to Faenza because it can’t be worse than Milton Keynes and not at all because there’s a tiny part of his brain raised on hero worship and legend that still thinks Italian air is just faster.
He’s been through enough in his short life that when people call him naive he knows they’re not saying he can’t look out for himself. Someone once said, maybe it was a teacher somewhere, that he was guileless. When he’d looked it up, he thought that’s probably what most people saw when they said naive . They saw someone sincere, straightforward, honest. Or, someone trying their best to be, anyway.
~~~
Liam knows about it, is the thing. What Pierre has, what Danill had for a while, what Max doesn’t need and Checo might still. Hell, Liam had been the one to tell Yuki about what was waiting for him. The Red Bull effect. Being the number one driver at Red Bull might elevate you to certain heights, but being the number two gave you something else. Compulsion.
He and Juri used to wonder about it, and then he and Logan. Would it trickle into the seats at Alpha Tauri? He thought probably not. The whole reason for its existence was Max - Max the golden boy, Max the one to beat. It sets in as soon as the second driver starts to flounder, begins to lag behind, to run noticeably different races. It solidifies itself once he gets his feet back under him, once he begins to toe the line of podium contention. With no great height to fall from, there’s no reason to grow wings.
An evolutionary response , Liam remembers calling it.
There’s none of that at Alpha Tauri. Sergio definitely doesn’t have the Compulsion - he’s always done too well for that - but there’s definitely still something going on at Red Bull. Maybe it’s normal paddock politics. Maybe it’s something else. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that Liam is pretty sure everything at Alpha Tauri is… if not normal, then something as close as it gets.
He still would have taken the job even if it wasn’t.
Even if he knew that Yuki had suppressed it around Pierre, even if he knew how hard Pierre, in turn, fought not to take it with him to Alpine, how everyone knows it’s no longer a thing that happens at Red Bull, it is the team. It’s no longer just in the drivers under the yellow camera casing, it’s in the oil and the grease and the carbon fibre.
‘A losing battle,’ the engineers are told, even as they’re trained how to recognise the signs of an enemy they’ll never be able to defend from.
Even if Liam had known all that, he’s still a driver. His whole life has been building to this, his ( the ) dream. A little strangeness was never going to stop him.
He just didn’t think about how it would feel.
~~~
It hurts when he realises Yuki has started doing whatever he asks.
(But Yuki is doing what he did to Pierre - he can resist it.)
Once Liam knows that, it hurts in a different way, in a different place. A place that stings tender and sweet because Yuki really did give Liam the last bite of his breakfast croissant, not because he was asked, but because he wanted. The place in him that’s scared he’d made Yuki want that, too.)
He doesn’t view Yuki as an enemy, as something to be defeated. He hates that there are parts of his body that are actively fighting Yuki. He hates that even as he wants to be close to Yuki, there are pieces of him pushing him away, pieces of him that actively want to see him fall.
Their friendship was always built around a solid base of competitiveness. Liam still wants to beat him on the track (has run Yuki off the road a few times and felt not the slightest flicker of guilt - and he knows those feelings were all him because it’s the same way he feels when he beats Yuki at COD). He just also wants to be able to stand in his garage after a DNF and cheer along with the rest of the team when Yuki gets his fifth points finish in a row.
He still does, because he is determined not to be beholden to this thing that wants to find an engineer and ask them to stick Yuki with a shit strategy, to feed him team orders and excuses about saving the engine.
The Compulsion makes other people do what you want, it can’t make Liam do anything. He only ever uses it by accident, when he’s really tired. But the fact the thoughts are there, the fact there’s a part of his brain that holds them up as a genuine option, that hurts.
~~~
Of course Yuki notices.
“Hey!” He jogs the width of the paddock, catches Liam’s arm outside Ferrari catering. “You’re avoiding me.”
“I had dinner with you last night.”
“And you barely said a word. I can’t shut you up, usually.”
“Maybe I was just tired.”
“As if. I saw you were still online at 2am.”
“What were you doing online, Goody Proctor?”
“You know I don’t know any of that shit. You’re avoiding me.”
“Okay, fine. You win,” Liam doesn’t want to fight Yuki when it’s not fun. His eyes are worried. Liam thinks he shouldn’t be allowed to look at people with those eyes. “I was avoiding you. I’m not now. Happy?”
“Yep. Come to my room after practice?” Yuki, because of those damn eyes, catches Liam’s hesitation. “It’s not a question,” even though it very much was, even though everything they say is couched in questions and you don’t have to’s and any way to avoid the accusation of control. “We’ll have steak.”
And so Liam goes.
~~~
Yuki knows his way around Liam’s mind like a labyrinth. He’s marked the doorways and tread the hallways and he still needs a map to navigate it, but he’s the one Liam sees using the map the most often. He’s the one who actually bothers going in.
And because he’s Yuki, he uses his knowledge for evil. Once they’ve finished eating, Yuki twists on the bed and shoves his feet right in Liam’s lap.
He doesn’t couch it in a question, he just looks right into Liam’s labyrinth and knows that neither of them will get anywhere if he doesn’t Say It . “Talk.” He doesn’t flinch at the betrayal Liam knows is showing on his face. He doubles down. “You have to tell me what’s wrong.” This one, at least, only has the force of a concerned friend behind it.
“I’m telling you what to do,” he says, because how can he not when Yuki looks so worried?
“When?”
How honest does he want to be? How honest can he be?
Into Liam’s silence, Yuki speaks. “You know I can resist it. We’ve tested it.”
They had. Yuki fully clothed at the edge of an ice bath, Liam in his own, telling Yuki to jump in. Yuki had ignored him and held Liam’s shoulders under the water 43 seconds over time.
“The look in your eyes, sometimes…” The red wine from dinner has decided Liam is taking his honesty for a full-throttle shakedown lap.
“That’s just how I look.” Yuki sounds so sure. But…
“No. It’s not. When I want you to look at me-” Liam’s throat closes around words like sunshine and sparking carbon fibre, around heat and rest and the pit in his stomach that fills with fire every time Yuki’s eyes start looking like they might also be seeing the two of them atop crisp white sheets long ago turned rumped and soft. “The way you look at me… That’s me.”
“Liam,” just from the tone of his voice it’s obvious Yuki has his map out, is trailing fingers along hallways. He’s always tender in his cartography. “ That’s just how I look .”
~~~
Of course Liam tests it.
In little ways. In big ways. In ways like telling Yuki he’s going to have his wagyu well done; like suggesting Yuki advocate for a radically different strategy in his next race. Ways that end in running away from Yuki’s punches, in giggling over the imagined fury on Mattia’s face if he did.
Nothing happens. Still, Liam’s not quite satisfied.
“I’m having lunch with Pierre.” Liam announces one day. Yuki looks up from his computer. Shrugs. Nods. Tells him to smack Pierre’s ass for him.
Liam does, not because of the Compulsion, but because even though he’s not there, Yuki finds it funny. If Liam wasn’t so scared, he’d see the proof in it, would have his answers before even talking to Pierre.
Because he is, he doesn’t. And because Pierre is Pierre (wonderful, insightful, surprisingly calm), he lays the proof out in front of him..
“There’s a lot he would do for you,” he says. It’s so earnest and so knowing that it freezes Liam. In a good way, this time. “A lot he wouldn’t do for you, too.”
He doesn’t just leave it there. He offers examples, hypotheticals. Asks if Yuki has ever done something out of character. If Liam has. “You’d know, afterwards,” he promises. “Yuki used it on me, a couple of times, when I wasn’t expecting it. I wasn’t prepared against it. I knew afterwards, that it was him who made me do it.” Seeing the horror in Liam’s eyes: “He told me to eat an orange upside down. It came out my nose!”
Their lunch comes, and they share their stories of Yuki, and Liam’s heart cools to something like a soothing lake - little waves and a temperature calming and soft. The memories of Yuki sharing his food float on the surface of it, and they’re no longer tainted with doubt.
He’d wanted to. He wants to.
Right before Pierre has to leave, he grabs Liam’s elbow. “It’s fading,” he promises. “I don’t need it, any more.” The team insignia on his back as he jogs to his car is the green on relief.
~~~
Later, much later, after enough time has passed that they’re both as sure as they can be, they go to their bosses.
If this were a movie, they would walk down the hallway hand in hand, presenting a united front as they tell Franz that the chemistry the PR team keep raving about is more than just teammates, that they’ll submit to separate interviews with a psychologist to ease HR’s minds, but that the Compulsion doesn’t work on them.
But it’s not a movie, and yes they’re fucking and they’re maybe sort of dating, and Liam might really want to kiss Yuki’s eyelids in the same breath as wanting to box his ears for throwing another controller though the wall, but they’re professionals and they’re not anything public, so they do it on different days and barely acknowledge it when Yuki arrives at Liam’s house in Milton Keynes, because it’s better to keep the thing you’re afraid of within arms reach than across the ocean.