Supporting Oscar Is Not Enough I Need To Steal The Red Bull Blueprints, Build Him A New Car From Scratch,

I cant tell if Im crying because it is so beautiful or because this is the saddest fvcking thing I have ever read

Though I Have To Travel Far, Remember Me. | D. RICCIARDO

summ. Of grief, love, & the art of moving on. pairing. daniel ricciardo x genderneutral!driver!reader w.count. 3k a/n. Warnings for descriptions of race accidents, death, and panic attacks. Relationship can be read either platonic or romantic. Don't know why I made this, but I guess it's angst hours. Enjoy!

He knows you.

He knows that you don’t much care for the debate over coffee or tea, and that you despise doing PR duties on race weekends. He knows you can’t take your alcohol well even when you say otherwise, knows you always enter your cockpit on the right-side because of some silly superstition you believe in.

You could be lost in a crowd and all you’d have to do is stay still, and he’d find you somehow, someway.

You know me too well, you always say. (There had been a time he hadn’t seen any fault in that. You are a part of his heart, after all, and everyone understands it.)

But right here, right now, in the aftermath of flames and debris and the flash of reds illuminating the downpour— he wishes he didn’t know you at all.

They’re okay, Tom speaks over the radio, because it was a race engineer’s job to keep Daniel calm, because it was the right thing a friend would do. They’re okay. Let the marshalls handle it.

He sounds so sure of himself that perhaps, in another world, Daniel would have believed it.

He doesn’t.

It’s muscle memory carrying him out the car. Nothing is broken, he tells the marshalls. He’s fine. His ears are ringing, but he’s fine. He needs to see you. Where are you? You should be out by now. It’s a bad crash, yeah. Aquaplaning. A bad clip to the rear, and a bad corner. But you’ll be fine. You’ll be okay. You have to be. 

It takes 2 and a half minutes.

The fire isn’t even out, yet, when they manage to drag you out from underneath the crumpled remains of your car, unmoving.

Your visor is shattered, helmet melted across the crown. It’s a horrific sight. 

From where he’s standing near, there had been no need to check for a pulse, or to search for your eyes.

One look is enough, because, well.

He knows you, like that.

This doesn’t feel real Tell me this is some sick fucking joke. Come back to me.

The circuit pays tribute to you on Race Day.

A replica helmet of yours sits on a pedestal. Before the memorial, the drivers had brought flowers to the corner that had taken y— The commentators speak on your history, your records, your defeats, your victories.

Daniel hates it. They don’t know you. They don’t care. Even in the minute of silence, he can hear the shutter of cameras going off. Netflix crawls and buzzes around the garage and his motorhome like flies. They trail him wherever he goes, now, with a camera to his face and a boom-mic as a listening ear. The survivor, media call him. The one left behind.

Lando makes note to sit close to his side through it all. He’s never seen Danny look so… empty, before.

He muscles through the media-training, now twice more intense, sits through the PR-fed script that Daniel has to recite perfectly, and brushes elbows with him through several painful silences when Daniel just… isn’t. He’s grasping at straws trying to get the man to brighten, even if only for a little while, but he’s out of his element. All he can offer is company and company alone. 

He hopes it’s enough.

10 minutes before they start, the team tells Daniel they’d hold nothing against him if he’s uncomfortable with proceeding the race.

Daniel disagrees, says he’ll win this one, for you.

And he does, miraculously. Everyone rejoices, because, well, it’s the perfect story, isn’t it? A perfect tribute for an old friend now lost, the articles would read. The other half who are bold enough, claim the race had been rigged in his favour. He doesn’t really care.

When he crosses the finish line, there is only relief. No closure, no nothing. 

You’re still gone.

On the podium, Daniel looks up to the sky and comes to the sad realisation that colours aren’t as bright, anymore, without you.

I won the race. Wish you were here with me Everything feels wrong.

They bury you on a sunny Tuesday.

Everyone comes. Daniel can’t remember most of it. 

He knows you would have liked the flowers, though. 

Don’t go where I can’t follow. Remember that promise?? Fuck you I needed you

I’m sorry. I miss you I love you Should have told you that more.

He smiles less, now.

Figures that if he can’t truly do so, he shouldn’t. 

The crescendo of life rings flat since your absence. The fans notice. Everyone does. His world had plummeted the moment it tipped on its axis, and ofcourse, they capitalised off of it, because there’s always a story to dig out; always a meaning behind the blue looks and the fragile words.

They say, It’s like he’s lost his shine. They say, Formula 1 didn’t just lose one driver that night, they’d also lost—

“Daniel?”

He blinks. He’s in a post-race conference… somewhere. He can’t remember exactly how he did for the race, really; can’t even remember the past week or when he got here, sitting alongside Lewis and Alex. 

Grief warps time in a way; makes it feel meaningless. Minutes blend to hours and hours blur to days. It does nothing for him but serve as some sick reminder that it had taken you, instead, and that it will take and take and take a—

“Would you like me to repeat the question?”

“Ah, yeah, sorry.”

“What do you feel about the FIA’s take on the recent viral post regarding ██████’s accident?”

It’s like his brain absolutely refuses to hear your name. 

He knows the post. It had been a photograph released, days following your crash. 

A grainy capture of Daniel, walking away in defeat, rain coming down with his head in his hands. An immortalised snapshot of the moment he just knew. In the backdrop— the bright lick of flames that was your car, and a glimpse of your silhouette limp against the arms of medical marshalls.

It divides the world of Motorsport, for some reason. Disrespectful, they cry, to you, to Daniel. The other half crow in delight— a parallel, they sing, like Purley walking away from Williamson’s fatal crash.

“Yeah,” he tries again. His voice comes out unfamiliar even to his own ears. “Yeah, I did. I…”

He remembers he drowned himself in alcohol after seeing the picture, until he fell asleep; thought that maybe he could erase the abysmal sight from his brain that way. It didn’t. 

“I—” I saw it. 

I saw nothing, and then I saw everything. 

I saw the back of your car too little, too late. I saw the spray of rainwater and the blinding fire before I saw the wreckage between the smoke. I heard the sound of metal screeching against metal, and the sound of gravel hissing underneath your tyres. I saw the dented halo and I saw the nose of your car crushed into the barrier like paper and I knew, I knew.

I knew when your arm went slack onto the ground after they’d lifted you out. I knew when they removed your helmet, and when they tried to get you breathing. I knew you were gone. I knew.

I just knew. 

I, I think— I—

“—can’t breathe.”

“Yes, you can,” says Lewis. They’re off-stage. Daniel must have managed to stumble out of his seat, somehow, and avoided answering the question. “You’re alright, man. You’re okay. Breathe with me.”

They stay like that until the trembling stops.

Until it feels like he’s breached the surface of the tide.

I can’t do this without you Just come back to me Please.

The thing about loss, Daniel realises, is that the reminders will come in waves. 

The water recedes, and it’s not until he sees glimpses of the life you lived;

An unfinished puzzle set he’d started with you, headphones left on his hotel room table waiting to be picked up again, a pair of linen slippers beside his own waiting to be worn, your scent still lingering in the shirt he’d let you borrow before free practice.

—then the next wave comes and pulls him under.

He used to rely on those memories to carry him through the rough patches, and now it just makes those patches rougher. 

Sometimes it's the second-nature. Habits he’d picked up from you. He’d use a word that you use while in the garage, catch himself in a mannerism he’d adopted from you mid-interview, because time is funny like that. Sometimes he’d scroll so deep in his phone and forward a post to you, only to hover before he presses send, because I forgot you aren’t here, anymore.

He breaks his phone the third time it happens.

When he picks it up, the screen is shattered.

It sends him spiralling. It had looked too similar, too familiar; the crack of your visor, the chip of metal, the the sight of—

This time, no one is there to help him breathe through the attack. 

The tide ebbs, flows. It climbs up his ankles and to his knees, up his chest, to his neck. He wonders if he’ll drown.

He doesn’t.

“That was fucking reckless,” Pierre snaps, rattled to the bone after a harrowing clash that leaves them both with a DNF. “Are you insane?”

It had been Daniel’s fault. The media will eat this up, and blow it out of proportion, because it’s part of the story, because it’s part of the arc they’d forced onto Daniel. 

“It’s racing,” he snarls in reply, stopping short in the graveltrap. He still can’t recognise his own voice.

“No,” Pierre says, sharp. “That was fucking suicidal.”

Later, when the adrenaline has waned, and the race ends, they apologise to each other. There are no cameras watching, this time. It’s sincere. 

“You have to look around,” says Pierre, who is just as familiar with the haunting weight of life, and of death. “Don’t you think you still have so much to lose?”

I dreamt about you today Kinda wish I didn’t wake up Im scared I’ll forget the sound of your laugh.

Survivor’s guilt, their FIA-mandated psychiatrist diagnoses. It’s often a symptom of Post-traumatic stress disorder. Do you know what that is, Mr. Ricciardo?

“Yeah.” He lets out an empty laugh. “Self-explanatory, don’t you think?”

Their little therapy sessions are compulsory but ineffective, in his opinion. He talks, and she writes, and she writes again. Better off he saves himself the trouble by licking his own wounds.

“I know grief,” says Charles, one day. He says it like the name of an old friend. He may not fully understand Daniel’s guilt, but he can understand loss— he’d been shaped by it. Maybe, just maybe, that will be enough, to share with Danny.

It’s a Sunday evening. They’re celebrating a mutual friend’s birthday. Daniel plasters on a fake smile for the pictures, eats cake, and uses the party as an excuse to drink himself numb. Another year older! they cheer, and he ignores the pang in his heart when he remembers he will never celebrate yours, ever again. 

“You say you knew them well, no?”

A frisson of something runs through Daniel. It sobers him in an instant. “We grew up together. I would know better than anyone.”

Daniel amends himself, when he realises his tone had come off harsher than intended. He’s been doing that recently. But Charles dismisses it with a kind smile. Grief had a strange way of changing people, often. He’d know.

“What were they like?” Charles leans back into his seat. “Tell me about it all.”

So he does.

As fondly as he can, at least, without choking up.

Dumb little anecdotes about you that had never held significance until you’d gone; like the flavour of ice-cream you like, and the way you reacted to his first tattoo, insisted on being there for the rest. Or all the troubles they’d gotten into as children, thick as thieves, how you always stood up for Danny, above all and despite it all.

They talk until their bottles run empty; until the satellites and the stars light the sky, and for a brief moment, it feels like you’d never died.

It’s better than all the sessions he’s ever been forced to take.

“I think… I think that, they will be sad to see you this way.” 

Perhaps it had been the stumbled, child-like way that Charles speaks, that has Daniel reeling to a stop. 

“The question you should ask yourself, maybe,” says Charles, whose simplicity has always offered him a different perspective, “Is how would they feel about you surviving?”

I know you would've wanted me to live to the fullest. But it’s hard to be happy nowadays I’m trying, though. You always said the answer is in the attempt I hope you’re proud of me

He arrives on set for a final interview with Netflix that season.

“What was it like to love them?” the woman asks, at the end of it. 

If he’d been surprised they didn’t ask: what it was like to lose you?— it didn’t show.

Daniel gives a sad smile. “As easy as breathing.”

I keep thinking you're still here Like i'm waiting for a knock on my door. It’s the end of the season When are you coming home?

The fans shower him with gifts. Sometimes, there are letters for you. He doesn’t have the heart to open it. You would’ve hated that— their private, you’d argue.

In Abu Dhabi, he receives a booklet from a fan. It's titled, in bold: For the Darker Days.

It’s a fan-project, she says, We collected photos and messages, for when you have the time to read it.

He leaves it on the top of his luggage bag, and when the end-of-season celebrations had ended into the early hours of the night, he finds he still doesn’t have the strength to open it.

He doesn’t have to wonder if he ever will, though.

Come next morning, when he slips out of bed, it’s flipped wide open. Daniel doesn’t believe in divine intervention. Never has, never will. Coincidence, he chalks it off, until he’d read the message on the page—

Danny, don’t let the walls you built to protect yourself become your prison. 

“Trying to talk to me?” he says to the silence. Desperation is strange like that. 

No answer comes, of course. It takes him a moment to realise he’s crying.

He slides to the floor by his bed, and flips through the pages with shaky hands. Bahrain, Australia, Miami, Monaco— There are photos of you, and him, and fans; sometimes all three, throughout the races. You smile in all of them. He reads through the fan messages.

By the last few pages, you stop appearing in the pictures.

Lewis coordinated a dinner, by the way Sebastian’s retiring You’re probably the only one who could’ve convinced him to stay, i think.

They left a seat open for you at the awards ceremony Everyone keeps looking at me  I hate it I don’t want their pity

Mick pauses at that, when Daniel mentions it idly in passing. 

“You’re mistaken,” he says, kindly. “You confuse pity with… compassion,”  

It hits him then, that this is Mick he’s speaking to— the only one who’d know best, what the unwanted condolences and the unwelcome consolations would feel like, every step he takes in his life.

He soaks it in for a while. Daniel is not so used to the younger ones giving him advice, these days. 

Growing old is a gift— Sebastian starts, when the Autosport Awards emcees invite him for a speech— And I forget that, sometimes.

He glances to the empty seat they’d left in tribute to you, and then towards Daniel.

Daniel doesn’t see pity, this time. He’s glad.

I miss you I love you I wish I could hear your voice one last time

The waters of Australia are freezing, and so you scream whenever he kicks the shore up like a child. 

You’re childish, you yelp. There’s a taste of saltwater in your mouth, and the breeze is drifting across the both of you. In about an hour, the sun should set past the horizon, soon. 

A childish world champion, he wiggles his eyebrows. You’re in his jeep now. One hand of yours is out the window— the one with the shared friendship bracelet— and your hair is whipping from the winds. Both of you are in Austin, Texas, this time. 

World champion? In your dreams, you laugh. It’s bright and airy and full of life. Daniel knows you don’t mean any harm. Regardless, he’s too busy getting drunk on the sound of you alone.

Speaking of drunk, he should get wine for tonight. Both of you are in Monaco right now, anyway. It’s always beautiful this time of the year. Flowers are in full bloom, and good food is around every corner. What should we get for dinner? 

You look over your shoulder to see he’s slowed to a stop. What’s wrong, Danny?

…I’m dreaming, aren’t I? 

He sees the answer in your hesitance.

Yes, you admit, finally. You are.

Oh. The scene shifts and blurs. The rooftop of his childhood home is solace for the both of you. Can I ask you something, then? 

Daniel reaches for your hand. You squeeze. Anything.

Will everything be okay? he asks.

You smile. He makes sure to carve it into memory. 

Everything will always be okay in the end, Danny.

I think i’m learning to be okay without you Feels weird to say. But i know you’ll be fine with that Because, well. I know you.

Charles demanding to be left alone in the kitchen like an overworked single mom and insisting everyone always eats well in his house only to then feed them all pasta that's 1) stolen from Ferrari hospitality and 2) still crunchy is the most Charles-coded thing I've ever seen in my life

This man is literally insane! I was having heart palpitations and he was having fun 😭

genuinely sobbing. this weekend is so so hard for him every year and he wears his heart on his sleeve and he gives and he gives and he deserves this. so much. 

missing oscar piastri rn. need f1 to create a drama so bad and so chaotic he has no other choice but to tweet something that's completely unrelated to the drama again and show how he's just living in his world

I want to take a heaping batch of #charles leclerc and spread it all over me like I’m that peanut butter baby. You know the one.

i think people who hate self insert are honestly just stunted deep down with their own feelings / accepting joy to at least some minuscule extent bc inserting yourself into some fictional media at its core is just the subconscious experience. like that’s why hogwarts exists at universal and why you meet mickey and minnie at disney to an extent. there is nothing wrong with enjoying a piece of media and falling for the world it’s been built on and the characters that are in it and finding ways to enjoy it in a way that includes you too—that’s why people buy the wands and robes and drink the butter beer. you will subconsciously always want to experience what you love, and that exists outside of selfshipping too so dogging on people who selfship is silly because just like you can wishfully want to experience what it’s like to be a hogwarts students, some people want to experience kissing sirius black it’s really not that deep. peace and love ✌🏽

Arthur: None of this new year, new me thing. Last year I was fabulous and next year I will be fabulous.