Chapter Text
The thing about Formula 1 is that nobody tells you the dream has a sequel.
You spend your entire life chasing one thing — the seat, the number, the grid, the moment they put your name on the side of a car that actually matters — and then you get it, and someone hands you a new dream immediately, like a receipt you didn't ask for. Congratulations. Now prove you deserve to keep it.
Gabriel had been in Switzerland for approximately four hours and he was already revising his definition of terrifying.
It wasn't the factory. The factory was fine. The factory was… okay, the factory was incredible, all clean lines and the smell of carbon fibre and something mechanical underneath that made his brain go quiet in the specific way only cars could manage. He'd walked through the front doors with his bag on his shoulder and his expression carefully set to I've definitely been in buildings this impressive before and had immediately clocked at least three people clocking him back with the particular look of: rookie.
He knew that look. He'd been getting it since karting.
He smiled at all of them. He was good at smiling.
The engineer assigned to walk him through the day was named Marcus; mid-thirties, short-haired, hints of wrinkles around his eyes, and patient in the way people are when they've done this exact thing enough times that your nerves no longer register as anything remarkable to them, really. Facilities tour. Car fitting. A simulator session that humbled him in a way he was going to be thinking about at three in the morning for the next week. A debrief that was mostly Gabriel nodding and trying not to let on how much new information he was absorbing at once.
You're fine, he told himself, somewhere around hour two. This is what it's supposed to feel like. This is the learning curve.
The learning curve, as it turned out, had no discernible top.
He thought about Kimi. He did this sometimes, briefly, the way you press on a bruise to remind yourself it's still there. Kimi Antonelli, nineteen years old, successor to Lewis Hamilton's Mercedes seat. That seat, the one they'll probably put in the Silverstone museum someday. The kind of opportunity that didn't happen to people so much as it happened to people who had been specifically selected by the universe for maximum symbolic weight. Gabriel liked Kimi. Genuinely. That was the worst part. It was very hard to resent someone who was both talented and kind, and Gabriel had tried, briefly, and failed entirely.
It wasn't Kimi's fault. It wasn't anybody's fault.
It was just that Gabriel was here, at Sauber, which was fine. Sauber was fine. Sauber was a Formula 1 team and he was a Formula 1 driver and both of those sentences still hit him somewhere behind his sternum when he let himself think them. He had a contract. He had time. What he had less of was a car that inspired confidence — the Sauber was, by general paddock consensus, a tractor. He'd laughed at that joke before he'd signed. He wasn't not laughing now. He was just going to have to be good enough that people could see it anyway, through the machinery, which was a different and significantly harder thing than just being good.
Marcus handed him a coffee somewhere around the simulator debrief and Gabriel accepted it with genuine gratitude, and just a hint of distaste, as he stared at a wall of telemetry data and thought: I belong here. I earned this. The title is not just a receipt.
He thought this approximately eleven times. It helped about thirty percent of the time.
He'd read the interview in November.
He hadn't been looking for it specifically. He'd been doing the thing he sometimes did late at night when he couldn't sleep, which was reading everything ever written about the drivers he respected most, and Nico Hülkenberg had years of material, which meant Gabriel had made himself very comfortable with a problem that hadn't technically existed yet.
The quote was buried in a pre-season preview piece, conversational, almost offhand: at the end of the day, it's competition. He wasn't interested in being Gabriel's mentor. He wasn't positioning himself as a teacher. He had a teammate. Not someone whose job it was to make Gabriel's transition easier, just a driver sharing a garage, which was all Gabriel was owed. He knew that, and that was fine.
Gabriel had read it three times. Closed the tab. Opened it again.
It was completely reasonable. It didn't mean anything about him personally. He wasn't bothered.
He was still telling himself all three of those things now, standing in the Sauber factory in Hinwil, Switzerland, watching Marcus pause outside a doorway and say, "Nico's probably in the engineering suite. Do you want me to—"
"No," Gabriel said. Then: "I mean — yeah. Sure. Fine."
Marcus looked at him.
"I'm fine," Gabriel said, which Marcus had not asked.
The corridor to the engineering suite was longer than it had any business being. Gabriel's footsteps were too loud on the floor. He was aware of his own heartbeat in a way that was both medically informative and personally inconvenient.
He's a person, Gabriel told himself. He's just a person. You've met famous people. You're the Formula 2 Champion. You're fine.
He heard the laugh before he saw him.
Not a big laugh, not performed for a room. Something dry and quiet, the sound of a man who found something genuinely funny and wasn't making a production of it. Gabriel came through the doorway and Nico Hülkenberg was standing at a monitor with two engineers, pointing at something on screen, saying something in German that Gabriel didn't catch. One of the engineers was shaking his head. The other was laughing. Nico looked comfortable in the specific way of someone who had been standing in this exact building long enough that the building had learned to accommodate him.
He'd expected Nico to be taller. They were the same height, which Gabriel found inexplicably disappointing and immediately did not think about why.
Nico looked up, clocked him in the doorway, and Gabriel had approximately one second to arrange his face into something that passed for normal.
"Bortoleto," Nico said.
Not hey, or hi, or any particular warmth attached. Just his name, delivered like a fact.
"Hi," Gabriel said. Excellent opening.
Nico said something to the engineers in German, quick and easy, and they moved off. He turned around properly and looked at Gabriel with an expression that was polite, calm, and entirely, infuriatingly unreadable.
"Good drive at the sim today," he said. "Marcus told me."
"I crashed it twice," Gabriel said.
"He told me that too." A beat. "First week always." Not reassurance exactly. More like information, offered without ceremony.
Gabriel looked at him. He looked at the monitor behind him. He looked at the floor for one brief, humiliating second and then back up.
Nico Hülkenberg had been racing Formula 1 since Gabriel was in primary school. He had survived backmarker machinery and mid-grid obscurity and a sport that had cycled through its opinions on him multiple times and kept arriving back at the same conclusion: useful, consistent, impossible to fully get rid of. No podium on the books. No championship. Just years of extracting something from nothing, season after season, in cars that had no business making him look that good.
He didn't need this man to teach him anything. That wasn't what this was. He just wanted him to think he was good, that was all. A completely normal, proportionate thing to want from the person you were sharing a garage with for an entire season.
Absolutely, said some part of his brain, in a tone Gabriel did not appreciate.
"I'll get there," Gabriel said, meaning the simulator.
"I know," Nico said. Flat, certain, no performance in it whatsoever. He held Gabriel's eyes for exactly one second and then turned back to his monitor, one hand moving to the keyboard, already somewhere else. Like the conversation had a natural endpoint and he'd reached it and moved on, and Gabriel was still standing there catching up.
Gabriel stood in the doorway for one more second. Nico didn't look up.
Except Nico had just told him I know like he'd already formed an opinion, and the opinion was good, and Gabriel had felt it land somewhere it had absolutely no business landing.
That was the problem. Not the wall. The wall was fine. The problem was that Gabriel had spent five minutes in the same room as this man and already wanted to be seen by him in a way that points and positions couldn't justify.
Five minutes. It had taken five minutes.
Well, Gabriel thought. That's going to be a big problem.