Chapter Text
Max always thought his sons would grow up to love racing. He supposed raising them in Monaco might not have been the best place to accomplish that. Tourists stood dazzled by the supercars rolling down the streets, but his sons only had eyes for the glittering ocean beyond. They didn’t care about the dips and curves of his polished trophies, only the raindrop shapes of the fish in the harbor that flashed silver on sunny days.
Max thought he would be able to impress his boys with his knowledge of cars and tracks. That he would teach them to be champions. But they only cared about finding time on the water, for the slippery scales of Bonitos and Bluefins.
Instead, Max had to learn. He learned the names and colors of fish and the pieces of equipment to catch them.
He tried, anyway. He paid to go on fishing trips when he wanted nothing more than to find a karting track or a road course or anything to satisfy the itch he’d been born with but his sons had not.
He jokingly said in an interview once that he wanted to return his sons, that the stork must have mixed up his kids for someone else’s.
They played that interview clip all over the internet now. Every time he opened his phone, he saw his own face smiling back at him, laughing with the reporter.
“Max,” his mother called. “Someone is here to see you.”
His boys looked just like him. Little twin clones, chubby-cheeked with wideset eyes and full lips. The same blond hair. He loved them with all he had.
Max stood up and wiped his nose on his sleeve. He shuffled out into the hallway and didn’t look his mother in the eye when she stepped in from the foyer.
No one knew what to do with him anymore. Max didn’t even know.
Max bit the tip of his tongue until his pain receptors started to fire up, forcing feeling back into his face. He crossed his arms and kept his eyes on the floor and made himself stay standing.
“Oh, Max.”
Max lifted his chin at the sound of Daniel’s voice, but kept his gaze on the shadow of him that loomed in the threshold.
“Daniel wanted to see if you might go for a walk with him,” his mother said, pressing a shaking hand to his spine.
Max wished she would punch him. He had half a mind to go visit his father, because at least he could guarantee Jos would beat him bloody if he ever laid eyes on him again.
Leandro loved Mahi-Mahi.
Vibrant yellow with green fins and sad, droopy faces. Leandro absolutely adored their speckled scales. He bounced up and down for a full hour after Max helped him catch one on their first charter. The fish has been as long as Leandro was tall, flopping around in the sun as Max tried to hold it still for a picture. He remembered the way Leandro looked at him, full of adoration and gratitude, full of—
“Let’s go, mate,” Daniel said softly, fingers curling around Max’s wrist.
“I’m almost ready, Dad!”
Max whipped around, wrenching free from Daniel.
“Liam?” Max called, rushing back toward his bedroom. “Liam?”
Liam loved Amberjack. A long, ugly fish with a sagging face and big lips. Streaked with coppery scales running down their sides, another bland color on top of the dark grey and silver. Liam loved their short, curved fins. Shark fins, he called them.
“Liam?”
Max stumbled back into his bedroom, frantically searching for his son.
His made bed stared back at him. His clothes sat neatly piled on top of his untouched duffel. His leather shoes sat polished, only worn once.
Max crashed to his knees, gasping for air.
He remembered the black eyes of Liam’s first Amberjack as it lay on the floor of their charter boat, gulping down air as their guide measured and tagged it. Liam wriggled in his arms, talking about breaking records and maybe we caught the biggest one ever, Dad.
“Max,” Daniel whispered, putting a hand on his back. “Let’s go for a walk, okay? You need help with your shoes?”
Max stared at the rug and sat there breathing through his mouth. He reached out and plucked a blond hair from the fibers.
“Liam’s here somewhere,” Max choked out in a whisper. “I can’t leave without him.”
Daniel began to rub his back. “Liam’s not here, mate.”
“Is he with Kelly?” Max asked, twirling the hair between his fingers. It had to be Liam’s or Leandro’s. Had to be.
“No, Max,” Daniel said quietly.
Max looked at him then.
Daniel’s face had changed so much. Age sharpened his features, though he still looked the same to Max as he had seven years ago when they last raced together. His eyes didn’t have any mischief anymore.
Max moved his jaw, jerking it left and right as he stared at Daniel and tried to find something normal to do or say. Sunlight filtered in through the curtains, dappling Daniel’s tan skin.
“Hey there,” Daniel soothed, reaching up to card his fingers through Max’s hair. “It’s me. It’s your Daniel.”
Max stared right through him. The sunlight washed out, gold turning to grey.
“Kelly’s screaming,” Max whispered.
She always screamed. From when he closed his eyes at night to when he woke up in the morning, she screamed.
“Nobody’s screaming,” Daniel said, scooting closer. “Hey, can I have what you’ve got there?”
Max jerked Liam’s hair away from Daniel. “What about Leandro? Where is he, Daniel?”
Daniel went very still. Max softened on instinct, finally closing his mouth.
“You know they aren’t here, Max,” Daniel said. “I know you know that.”
Max shoved the piece of hair at Daniel. “I’m sorry.”
Daniel took it and offered a closed-lipped smile. “Let’s walk.”
********
Max followed Daniel down the street, one hand in his pocket, the other twined with Daniel’s. He listened to Liam and Leandro’s shrieking laughter and reminded himself that it wasn’t real. Daniel’s hand was real—everything else imaginary.
Kelly was going to press charges. That was what Max’s lawyer told him when he called two days ago. She would probably win. His lawyer didn’t say that part, but Max knew she had a case. Besides, it was the truth.
Daniel sang a country song into the stagnant air, completely off tune. He swung their hands in time with a beat Max couldn’t hear.
He froze when he smelled saltwater.
“Dad, pleeeeease,” Leandro begged, tugging at his jeans. “Just for an hour. You can come pick us up in exactly one hour and we’ll be ready, promise.”
Max made a soft noise as his knees started to buckle.
“Hey, hey,” Daniel said, swooping in to hoist him back up to his feet. “Eyes on me. Right here.”
“Daniel,” Max choked out. He had no other words.
Kelly started screaming again, low and ripped open. The sound echoed off the houses on his mother’s street.
“We’re walking,” Daniel said, hooking an arm around his waist. “C’mon, Verstappen. You’re still nine years younger than me, let’s go.”
“It’s harder to fish in the rain,” Liam chimed in on his other side. “If we catch stuff, it’ll be twice as cool.”
Waves crashed against the cliffs of Monte-Carlo. Brackish water, frothy seafoam filling his lungs.
“Daniel,” Max breathed.
Blue-grey skin, cold to the touch. Just sleeping.
Max gasped against concrete, curled in a ball. Daniel folded over him, cheek pressed to his ribs. He loved Daniel once. He swore they would be together forever. Back when his life consisted of cars and the men who drove them. Back when he cared about trophies and winning and legacy.
He found Liam first.
“I’m taking you home,” Daniel said, his voice vibrating through Max’s broken body. “The ranch will keep you busy. You need busy right now.”
The coroner said Leandro fell and didn’t feel a thing.
But when Kelly left the room he said that the waves probably beat him dead against the rocks.
“Does it rain there?” Max asked.
He found Leandro second. The storm threw him to shore, God’s sick joke.
It might have been easier if the sea swept both of them away so they never had to look.
“Not much,” Daniel said. “But sometimes.”
Max found himself standing in his living room in Monaco, his hands on each of his boys’ heads as they stared up at him with that same fire he used to have when he begged his father to let him drive more at the karting track.
Rainclouds gathered over the sea. Maybe a storm, he thought. Maybe a real challenge.
“Okay,” Max said. “But you have one hour, so you better catch something quick.”
********
Daniel put him to work in Perth. He meant it as a distraction, but Max saw his sons everywhere. They laughed in the swirling dust as he drove Daniel’s ATV down the fence line in search of snarled wire. They tugged at his shirt when he grabbed bales of hay for the cattle. They woke him from his sleep almost every night, asking for a bedtime story.
“Just one more,” Liam whispered in his ear.
Max’s eyes flew open.
“Dad, read us a chapter about the old man and the swordfish,” Leandro whispered.
Max sat up, blinking away sleep.
Daniel shifted beside him. A sleep-warm arm curled around his waist, tugging him back toward bed.
“Dad, take a picture!”
Max turned to see the gaping maw of a barracuda, fangs glinting in the dark. Liam grinned at him, head tilted back to keep his headlamp level on his forehead.
“This is the best birthday ever!” Leandro cried.
The moonlight turned their skin blue.
Warm lips pressed to the nape of his neck. Max shivered, folding a hand over Daniel’s.
“What are they saying?” Daniel asked, resting a cheek on his shoulder.
The boys chanted bear-rah-coo-dah bear-rah-coo-dah as they danced around the deck. The tiger stripes of the barracuda flashed in the light of their headlamps as they wiggled it around.
“Liam caught a barracuda,” Max explained quietly. “It took him hours. He never gave up.”
Someone found pieces of a fishing rod two weeks after. They called the number engraved in the tag still attached to the reel. They said it looked expensive.
********
Kelly decided not to press charges. She told him so in a notarized letter. She also reminded him that his sons’ deaths were his fault, that she would never forgive him, and she would take every cent from him in the divorce.
Max went to church on the boys’ birthday. Liam and Leandro didn’t follow him there.
Sunlight filtered in through four pillars of stained glass as he sat in a pew alone on a Wednesday afternoon. Bricks walls arched above him in a typical cathedral style, though the church had nothing of the majesty cathedrals carried in Europe. Brick didn’t have the same effect as marble.
Max thought he knew God once. Victoria, his sister, loved God. All of her kids were good Catholics. She went to mass every Sunday. She said she forgave him for his sin.
She didn’t call him anymore.
His father called him a murderer for allowing his sons to go fishing alone during a thunderstorm. His father also said if he showed his face in Europe again, he wouldn't leave alive.
Daniel said Jos should shut his cunt mouth, that leaving his son at a gas station in the cold as punishment for losing a race was actually criminal, but Max’s choice was a reasonable one. Max trusted his kids. It was a horrible accident.
“If I come back in an hour and you haven’t caught anything, we’re going to sit here all day until you do,” Max said with a pointed look to his boys in the backseat. “When you decide to do something, you see it through. Understand?”
The windshield wipers had been going at full blast.
He should have asked where they planned to fish from. He should have thought to tell them not to go down by the boulders.
If his boys wanted to be fishermen, Max wanted them to be the best.
That was what he thought instead.
Max bowed his head and prayed for forgiveness.
He thought he knew what it felt like to be God, a long time ago. Now he knew better. Now he knew what it felt like to leave his sons to die.