The color of the Dying

by Wawakidk

Summary:

Charles sees something nobody else can: a washed-out blue haze that clings to people moments before something goes wrong. Pale for small dangers. Thick and dark for death.

He learns the rules young.
He learns the cost even younger.

Every time he pushes the blue away, it hurts him—nosebleeds, headaches, exhaustion—but he can’t stop. Not when it saves lives. Not when he feels responsible. Not when he’s terrified of what happens if he doesn’t act.

Or:
A boy who sees death before it happens.
A gift that hurts him every time he uses it.
A story about the color that follows him, the boy he’ll one day love, and the cost of saving a life.

Notes:

You can blame TikTok for this one.
All those edits comparing Charles Leclerc to Will Byers from Stranger Things finally broke my brain.
The resemblance is insane.
And honestly? You can also blame Noah Schnapp for looking so much like Charles.
From that chaos, this entire idea was born.

Thank you for reading. 💙

Chapter 1: Prologue: the boy who saw blue

Prologue.

 

The first time Charles notices the color, he is six years old and worried about a fish.

The fish is small and orange and called Rocket, because Arthur said that’s a cool name and Charles agreed. Rocket lives in a round glass bowl on the kitchen counter, gliding in slow, unbothered circles through his tiny world as if he doesn’t know it’s small.

One afternoon, while Maman stirs sauce at the stove and the apartment smells like garlic and tomato, Charles climbs onto a chair to say hello to Rocket.

The bowl is at his eye level this way. The light from the window hits the water, scattering soft ripples across his face.

That’s when he sees it.

A faint haze. Not really a glow—glows are warm and golden, like the way the sea looks when it swallows the sun at the horizon. This is different. It’s a thin, translucent ring hugging Rocket’s body, a washed-out blue, almost grey at the edges, like a bruise suspended in water.

He blinks.

It’s still there.

He glances at his mother. “Maman?”

“Mmh?” she answers, stirring.

“Rocket is… bleu.”

She laughs, distracted. “He is orange, mon chéri.”

“No.” He frowns. “Around him. He has blue all around.”

“C’est la lumière,” she says, still not looking. “The reflections on the glass.”

He squints at the bowl.

The blue doesn’t behave like light. It doesn’t flicker when he moves his head, or when the bowl shifts—doesn’t change at all. It just sits there, a soft, quiet shroud suspended over the fish.

He leans close, nose almost pressed to the glass. Rocket swims past, leaving nothing behind except disturbed water.

The blue stays.

“Okay,” Charles tells the fish, serious. “If you explode, I will tell Maman you were blue first, and it’s not my fault.”

Rocket blinks his gold-rimmed eyes. He is a fish. He does not answer.

Charles decides it is weird but not important. Lots of things are weird when you are six and mostly smaller than the furniture.

That night, Rocket floats at the top of the bowl, belly up, blue eyes staring at the ceiling.

Maman says something soft and sad in French and gives Charles a long hug and a biscuit. Papa flushes the fish away with a gentle hand, saying, “C’est la vie, hein, that’s life,” like it’s something Charles should already know.

He stands on the cold tiles with his socks getting damp and thinks: I told you you were blue.

He doesn’t say it out loud.

It sounds silly, even in his head.

 

---

 

The second time, it’s a bird.

He’s in the courtyard behind their building, kicking a ball weakly against the wall while Arthur complains that this is boring. The wall doesn’t mind; it’s old and cracked and has survived much worse.

A sparrow lands in the patchy grass a few metres away.

It hops twice, then freezes, head tilted like it’s listening to something only it can hear.

Charles forgets the ball.

The bird carries the same strange color—damp blue, clinging close to its tiny chest, a thin mist that shouldn’t exist.

His stomach twists.

“Arthur,” he whispers. “Look.”

Arthur, eight and full of opinions, doesn’t even lift his head. “What?”

“The bird,” Charles says. “It’s blue.”

Arthur squints. “It’s brown.”

“No, around it.”

Arthur sighs with the long suffering of a younger brother. “Charles, you’re being weird.”

“I’m not,” Charles whispers, but his voice trembles.

He almost runs to get Maman, to tug her hand and make her look, make her see what he sees. But she’s upstairs, Papa will be tired after work, and yesterday Lorenzo said Charles was becoming “too dramatic,” which made him feel like he was doing something wrong.

So he just watches.

The sparrow hops again, then shivers.

It doesn’t fly.

A minute later, it tips sideways into the grass and goes still.

Charles stands frozen.

His skin feels too tight.

Arthur finally notices and wrinkles his nose. “Ew. It died.”

Charles’ throat is dry. “It was blue. Just like Rocket.”

Arthur laughs. “Fish die, birds die, everything dies. That’s normal.”

Maybe it is.

But Charles hasn’t seen normal look like that before.

 

---

 

The third time, it’s Madame Aubert from the second floor, and that’s when he starts to be afraid.

She’s old in the way that makes him think of raisins—small and soft and sweet. She smells like lavender and baking sugar. She gives him caramels from a glass jar that he’s fairly sure existed before he did.

One morning, she calls down from the stairwell as he and Arthur leave for school.

“Bonjour, les garçons,” she says, leaning on her cane. “You are handsome today. Very chic.”

Arthur beams.

Charles looks up to wave—and stops mid-motion.

The color is not faint this time.

It pools in the hollows of her cheeks, clings to her shoulders, drifts from her like cold smoke. The same washed-out blue, but denser, layered, almost opaque.

His fingers tighten painfully around the strap of his backpack.

“Charles?” she prompts gently. “Tu ne dis pas bonjour?”

He swallows.

“Bonjour, Madame Aubert,” he manages.

She smiles, slow and warm, and he notices how tired she looks. How slowly she climbs the stairs.

Arthur tugs his sleeve. “We’ll be late.”

They leave.

Charles glances back from the top of the stairwell. The blue follows her like fog.

That night, sirens wake him.

He wanders into the hallway in his pyjamas. His parents are there already, faces tight. The stairwell smells like metal and something sharp.

He catches a glimpse of a stretcher through the bannister. A white sheet. A hand, limp and thin.

Maman kneels, hands on his shoulders, blocking his view. “Charles, retourne au lit. Go back to bed.”

He looks up at her face.

She is not blue.

He nods, numb, and lets her lead him back.

From the bed, under blankets pulled to his chin, he can still see a sliver of the stairwell through his door.

No more blue.

No more Madame Aubert.

Just a quiet space where someone used to be.

His heart hammers.

He thinks of Rocket. Of the bird.

Of the blue.

He doesn’t sleep much after that.

 

---

 

He doesn’t talk about it either.

For days, he watches everyone.

Lorenzo reading the newspaper. His mother pouring coffee. His father tying his shoes. Arthur complaining about mornings.

None of them are blue.

At school, he scans every face.

Nothing.

Maybe he imagined it.

Maybe something is wrong with him.

He tries to be normal—copying handwriting exercises, doing sums, fighting Arthur for the last biscuit. But the knowledge sits like a stone behind his ribs: he saw something, and then someone died.

A week later, it happens again.

Not the dying.

The blue.

He and Arthur are at the little park near home, all sand and one crooked slide that squeaks when you go down. A swing set too—rusted chains, plastic seats that leave marks on your thighs in summer.

A small boy, maybe four or five, is pumping his legs hard on a swing, laughing with his head thrown back.

His mother scrolls on her phone a few metres away.

Arthur is arguing with someone near the sandbox.

Charles wanders closer, uneasy.

The blue is there.

Not thick. But visible—clinging around the boy’s feet, pooling beneath the swing.

He looks at the top bar.

One metal hook is bent, the chain straining with each upward arc.

Charles doesn’t think.

He runs the last few steps and shoves the swing sideways with both hands.

The boy yelps and tumbles into the sand.

The empty swing flies up and slams against the bar with a sharp crack.

The weakened hook snaps.

The chain drops. The seat hits the ground exactly where the boy’s head would have been.

For a moment, the world is silent.

Then the boy cries, shocked but unhurt. His mother jumps up, shouting, “Qu’est-ce que tu fais?! Pourquoi tu as poussé mon fils?”

Charles stands trembling.

The blue flickers—then disappears.

His vision blurs.

Arthur rushes over, voice high and defensive. “He helped him! Look!”

The mother cradles her son, relief sinking through the anger once she sees he isn’t hurt.

The edges of the world go soft.

“Charlie?” Arthur asks, panicked. “You okay?”

“I—”

The word dissolves.

Warmth trickles from his nose. He touches it.

Red.

“Oh,” he murmurs, staring at his hand.

Then the ground tilts and he sits hard in the sand.

He doesn’t pass out. Not fully. Voices swirl together—Arthur’s frantic defense, the mother’s shock, someone calling for help.

Maman arrives fast, breathless and scared. Her hands cup his face, thumbs gentle and urgent.

“Charles, regarde-moi. Look at me. Tu m’entends?”

He nods slowly.

The pressure in his skull ebbs.

The boy is fine—sniffling into his mother’s jacket, staring wide-eyed at the broken swing.

There is no blue anywhere.

Charles clings to Maman’s hand all the way home.

He doesn’t tell her why.

He doesn’t know how.

 

---

 

The doctor says it’s low blood sugar, or heat, or overexertion. “Children faint,” the man says. “It happens.”

Charles almost corrects him—I didn’t faint—but stays quiet.

Maman asks about the nosebleed. The doctor waves it off. “Sensitive capillaries.”

Sensitive.

That’s one word for it.

That night, Charles lies awake, replaying every second. The hook. The color. The push. The pain.

He presses his face into the pillow and whispers into the fabric:

“I knew.”

He doesn’t know who he’s talking to.

“I saw it. I pushed him. The blue went away.”

His head throbs in memory.

“And then it hurt,” he adds softly.

The rules don’t come all at once. They form slowly, like puzzle pieces clicking into place.

But that night he understands three things:

One: the blue means something bad is coming.

Two: if he acts fast enough, he can stop it.

Three: stopping it hurts him.

He doesn’t know why.

He only knows it’s real.

 

---

 

After that, the blue appears more often.

A cyclist wobbling too close to a car door—Charles shouts, and the man swerves just as the door swings open. The color dissolves; pain blooms behind Charles’ eye.

A toddler near the fountain’s edge—Charles drags him back. The blue vanishes; his hands shake afterward.

A delivery man on a steep staircase—Charles holds the door, takes packages from him. The blue fades; he spends the evening bone-deep exhausted.

He categorizes them.

Thin blue—morning-mist light. Easy to dispel. Cost: headache, nosebleed, shaking.

Heavy blue—clinging deep in creases of the body. Harder. Needs bigger actions. Cost: full-body trembling and pretending he’s cold.

He never sees black.

Not yet.

He doesn’t tell anyone.

He imagines telling Maman—her spoon pausing, her face opening into worry or fear. He imagines doctors. He imagines being believed.

He imagines being dismissed.

There are too many ways to get it wrong.

So he folds the secret tight and keeps it pressed behind his ribs.

 

---

 

There are limits.

He learns that too.

When he’s ten, a man collapses outside the supermarket. Charles sees the blue around his mouth before he falls—thick, heavy.

He shoves through the crowd.

By the time he reaches him, the blue has changed—darker, streaked with grey, clinging almost beneath the skin.

He touches the man’s sleeve.

Nothing happens.

He pushes harder, desperate.

Pain spikes bright and sharp. Blood drips onto the man’s jacket.

The blue does not move.

A paramedic drags him back. They work for a long time.

The man doesn’t get up.

That night, Charles adds new rules:

Rule #1: The blue means death is close.

Rule #2: If it’s pale, I can help.

Rule #3: If it’s thick and dark, I can’t.

Rule #4: Trying anyway hurts.

He hates rule three the most.

He hates having rules at all.

 

---

 

Patterns emerge.

The blue likes certain things.

Cars. Fast ones, especially.

Scooters cutting corners. Tourists stepping into traffic. Drivers reversing blindly.

He yanks people back, he shouts warnings, he pretends he tripped.

It’s exhausting.

He cannot not do it.

Every hesitation fills with the hollow where Madame Aubert used to be. With a fishbowl waiting to be emptied.

He doesn’t know how to live with that.

So he lives with this instead.

With the buzzing alertness. The ledger in his head. The color only he can see.

With the knowledge that something in him is wrong.

Or right.

He hasn’t decided yet.

 

---

 

Years later, he’ll have words like survivor’s guilt and hypervigilance and compulsion.

He’ll want to reach back through time and touch the boy he was and say, 'It wasn’t your job.'

But right now he is ten and small and tired and stubborn, staring at himself in the bathroom mirror.

There’s dried blood under his nose. His eyes look too big. His mouth is set too tight for a child.

He splashes cold water on his face.

“Okay,” he tells the boy in the mirror. “If you see the blue, you help. That’s the rule.”

He doesn’t add: even if it hurts. Even if it scares you. Even if no one ever knows.

He doesn’t have to.

The boy knows.

He dries his face, squares his shoulders, and steps back into the world—into the bright Monaco sun, into the noise of scooters and traffic and footsteps.

He walks among people who don’t see the thin halo around the woman about to step into the road without looking, or the smudge around the cyclist whose shoelace dangles too close to the chain.

He sees it.

He breathes in.

He moves.

He is good at pretending he isn’t afraid.

He doesn’t know yet that there will be some blues he can’t chase away.

He doesn’t know yet that love will make it worse.

He just knows he can see death coming, and it makes every life around him feel like a test he might fail.

He doesn’t fail today.

He will, later.

But for now, the boy who sees blue keeps walking, and helping, and hurting, and staying very, very quiet about the way the world really looks to him.

Notes:

TBC...

Chapter 2: The boy the Blue couldn't see

Summary:

The first time Charles sees Max Verstappen, there is no blue.

There should be.

Notes:

This chapter is a quiet beginning — a small heartbeat of a story that will grow louder over time.
Thank you for stepping into this world with me.

The first time Charles sees Max Verstappen, there is no blue.

There should be.

On paper, there absolutely should be.

They’re eleven years old at some nowhere circuit that smells like petrol and cheap fries, all grey asphalt and prefab paddock buildings, the kind of place that blurs into every other weekend. Charles is already used to scanning crowds the way other kids read lap charts. He watches people the way some drivers watch the sky for rain.

Not their faces.

Not really.

The halos.

Most of the time, there’s nothing. Just ordinary noise: laughter, shouting, the distortion of an announcer over the PA. And if there is blue—around someone who will trip on a loose cable, or faint in the heat, or step too close to a moving kart—Charles sees it early enough to nudge, to warn, to grab.

Blue, then gone. Pain behind his eyes. A nosebleed if it’s bad. That’s the pattern.

So when he hears the name “Verstappen” hissed and muttered and spat around him like it’s weather, he looks up automatically, already half-expecting a cloud of navy clinging to some reckless idiot.

He sees a boy instead.

A boy with a too-big suit and a too-tight jaw, blond hair messy under his helmet, eyes hard and sharp in a face that still has the soft roundness of childhood. He climbs out of his kart like he’s storming a battlefield, ripping off his gloves with quick, jerky movements, shouting in Dutch at a man Charles recognises from television: Jos Verstappen, all harsh lines and folded arms.

Max is vibrating. Fury, frustration, adrenaline—Charles can almost taste it from metres away. He watches as Max gestures wildly back toward the track, helmet dangling from his fingers, voice cracking with the sheer force of what he’s feeling.

Someone else would see a brat having a tantrum.

Charles sees a boy burning.

He looks for the blue.

There’s nothing.

Not a flicker, not a thread, not the faint haze he sometimes sees around kids who climb fences they shouldn’t or wander too close to jack stands. Max is fire and motion and recklessness, and the air around him is clean.

Charles blinks, uneasy.

He tells himself it’s better this way. Blue means danger. Blue means you have to do something. No blue means everything is fine.

But the disconnect bothers him. No one who drives like that should be untouched.

Later, when they end up in the same heat—numbers close, colours different, Charles in red and Max in Dutch orange that screams against the grey sky—he feels that unease crawl deeper under his skin.

From the first corner, it’s war.

Max dives where he shouldn’t, elbows wide, kart twitching as he brakes later than is reasonable for someone with bones. Charles fights back on instinct, the way Hervé taught him: calm hands, sharper exits, choosing his battles. He passes clean; Max returns it dirty. They trade places three times in two laps and spend the rest of the race glued so close the marshals sweat.

When the chequered flag falls, Charles finishes ahead by a nose. Barely.

In parc fermé, Max rips off his helmet and glares at him like he’s just stolen oxygen.

“You pushed me,” Max snaps in accented English, stepping into his space.

Charles’s heart is still pounding from the race, but his voice comes out level. “I gave you room.”

“You forced me wide.”

“You left the door open.”

Max opens his mouth again, and this time there’s something almost like disbelief under the anger, as if he can’t quite fathom someone not folding under that tone.

'No blue', Charles thinks again, distracted, cataloguing the unmarked air around him. 'How are you not glowing?'

“It was clean,” he says, because they’re not in Formula One yet, but they’re in front of stewards and mechanics and parents who pay attention. “You know it.”

Max bristles, breath puffing sharply through his nose. For a second, he looks like he might shove Charles just to prove something.

Then Jos calls his name, sharp and short. Max flinches, very slightly, like a dog hearing a whistle, then cuts his glare away.

“This isn’t over,” he mutters, and stalks off.

Charles watches him go, that strange hollow feeling opening in his chest. He’s used to people not liking him; it’s easy to mistake quiet for arrogance. He’s used to anger. He’s not used to feeling like the universe missed a spot.

Someone like Max should be wrapped in danger like smoke.

Instead, there’s only air.

 

---

The years blur the way karting always does: a carousel of circuits and hotels and homework done in vans between races. Categories tick by. Chassis change. Mechanics rotate in and out of his life like planets. The one constant—aside from his own relentless, grinding drive—is that flash of orange near the front of whatever grid he’s on.

Max is always there.

If Charles qualifies on pole, Max is lurking P2. If Charles starts P4, you can bet the Verstappen kid is P3, ready to throw his kart up the inside of Turn 1 just to see who flinches.

They collect penalties like stickers. Arguments, too.

“You’re insane,” Charles tells him once, hands still shaking as they climb out of their karts after yet another near-miss into a hairpin no kart should take two-wide.

“You’re slow,” Max fires back automatically, though they both know it isn’t true.

Their rivalry is its own weather system. It follows them across countries, across years. Other boys come and go; Max remains. He is a problem and a benchmark and an irritation and a magnet.

Charles hates him, he decides.

And then, at night, when he’s staring at the ceiling of another unfamiliar bed, he realises hate is too simple a word for what Max does to him.

So instead, he watches him.

Not the way the adults do, tracing sector times and telemetry. Not the way scouts do, eyes already seeing F3 and GP2 and beyond.

Charles watches the space around Max.

The way he moves through the paddock. The near misses. The times he doesn’t look when he crosses a live lane. The way he throws himself at gaps that aren’t really there and somehow comes out the other side.

He watches for blue.

He never sees it.

He sees it on other people. A mechanic who nearly walks into the path of a kart still rolling into its box—Charles grabs his sleeve, murmurs something about a tyre needing checking, feels that familiar spike of pain behind his eyes as the blue thins and fades. A younger kid about to step off a curb into a van reversing too fast—Charles hooks fingers into his jacket and pulls him back, pretends he was joking around, wipes blood from his upper lip where no one can see.

Again and again, he pays the price.

Again and again, he checks Max and finds nothing.

It’s infuriating.

It’s also… comforting, in a way he doesn’t want to examine too closely. In a world where danger comes coded in colour, where his days are punctuated by flashes of azure doom over ordinary faces, there is something almost holy about the absence.

He tells himself that’s why he starts to rely on it.

If Max isn’t blue, Max isn’t going to die.

Simple.

Safe.

Something in him relaxes around that assumption, settles into it like a chair he didn’t know he was allowed to sit in.

 

---

He’s fourteen the first time that faith cracks.

It’s a mid-season weekend at some anonymous European track with a pit lane too narrow for comfort and paddock tents crammed together like books on a shelf. The sky hangs low and heavy, the air full of the smell of hot engines and the lingering tang of last night’s rain.

They’ve just finished a heat. Max won this one; Charles came second, furious with himself for a missed apex that gave the orange kart the tiny gap he needed. The adrenaline is still loud in his veins, making everything too bright.

He’s heading back toward his team tent, helmet hanging from his fingers, suit peeled to his waist, when he feels it.

Like a cold fingertip down his spine.

He freezes.

There’s no pattern to when it hits, no warning beyond that instinctive tightening deep in his chest. He’s learned to trust it anyway. Slowly, he turns his head.

Blue.

Not much—just a thin, translucent smear at the edge of his vision. Pale, almost white, like chalk dust hanging in the air. It’s there, then gone, there, then gone, as people move in front of it.

His heart lodges in his throat.

He pivots fully, one hand closing around the nearest canopy pole to steady himself, eyes scanning the narrow lane between the tents.

There.

Max, storming away from parc fermé, helmet under one arm, the set of his shoulders familiar now in a way Charles could pick out in pitch dark. He’s half-hearing Jos still muttering behind him, jaw working, eyes fixed somewhere two metres ahead and to the left—at the steward’s office, probably. Of course. There’d been some incident into Turn 1, some side-by-side that looked worse outside the kart than it felt inside.

Max is walking fast.

He’s not looking.

Behind him, a mechanic from another team is hauling a kart trolley backwards out of a tent, the frame clattering over the lip. The kart itself sits on top, all metal and weight and exposed edges. The mechanic is talking to someone over his shoulder, not watching his path.

Charles can see it, clear as if it’s already happened: wheels hitting uneven concrete, trolley jerking, the kart sliding. It’ll catch Max behind the knees, knock his legs out from under him, send him down hard. Helmet-less. Head first. Onto a floor scattered with tools and dropped bolts and the metal brackets everyone always trips on.

The faint blue around Max pulses.

Thin, he thinks automatically. Pale. The kind he can still move.

Charles moves.

He doesn’t think about what he’s doing; thought is for after. His body just goes, a sharp, instinctive lunge forward that cuts off a marshal and makes another driver swear as he squeezes past.

“Max!” he calls once, but the engine noise and clatter swallow it whole.

He doesn’t need Max to hear him. He just needs to reach him.

He does, at the last second, fingers catching the back of Max’s suit where the sponsor logo stretches across his shoulders. He yanks sideways with more force than he means to, using all the strength in his arm, bracing his own weight wide.

Max stumbles.

“What the—”

The trolley rolls past the space where his legs had been half a heartbeat earlier, one wheel catching on a crack. The whole thing jolts. The kart tips just enough that the mechanic curses and grabs for it, metal frame thudding onto the concrete with a heavy, hollow clang.

A wrench clatters to the ground exactly where Max’s head would have been.

Charles’s vision goes white at the edges.

The blue vanishes.

He sways.

The only reason he doesn’t go down is because his hand is still knotted in the coarse fabric of Max’s suit.

Max wrenches away, spinning on him, face already flushed with indignation. “What the hell is your problem?” he snaps, batting at Charles’s hand. “Are you insane?”

Charles blinks, the world resolving back into messy colour. His head is pounding, a hot, sharp ache behind his eyes. His nose prickles; when he drags the back of his wrist under it, it comes away streaked with red.

Of course.

“I—” He glances at the fallen kart, the scattered tools, then back at Max. “You weren’t looking,” he says, the words coming out thinner than he intended. “They almost hit you.”

Max follows his gaze, as if only now registering the near-miss. The mechanic is still apologising distractedly, already hauling the kart upright again.

“That wouldn’t have hit me,” Max says dismissively, but his voice wavers just enough to betray the aftershock.

“It would have,” Charles insists, sharper now, anger kicking in to cover the fear. “Look where you walk.”

Max’s eyes narrow. “Don’t tell me what to do.”

“You nearly got yourself killed because you were too busy being angry,” Charles shoots back, surprising himself. His heart is still stuttering; the adrenaline makes his tongue looser than usual. “Maybe pay attention.”

For a second, it looks like Max is going to go for him, hands curling into fists, shoulders coiling up. Then he really looks at Charles’s face—at the faint tremor in his jaw, the tiny smear of blood under his nose, the way he’s leaning, just a fraction, like the ground isn’t entirely steady.

“You’re bleeding,” Max says, tone flattening.

Charles wipes at his nose again, annoyed. “It happens.”

“That’s not normal.”

“It is for me,” Charles says before he can stop himself.

Max frowns, thrown. “What does that even mean?”

It means pale blue, move fast, pay the price. It means you got lucky. It means I didn’t fail.

“It means I’m fine,” Charles replies instead, shutting the door on the topic with a finality that doesn’t invite questions.

Max stares at him a moment longer, jaw ticking. The fight drains out of his shoulders in a small, reluctant exhale. He glances again at the dark scuff on the concrete where metal met ground, then back at Charles.

“Still didn’t have to grab me like that,” he mutters, but there’s less heat in it now.

“You’re welcome,” Charles says, and turns away, because if he stands here much longer the pounding in his skull is going to send him to his knees.

He makes it to the end of the row of tents before he has to stop, one hand braced on the flimsy wall of his own awning, breathing carefully. It hurts. They all hurt, every intervention, but this is the first time he’s felt it for Max, and that makes it worse in a way he isn’t prepared for.

Because there hadn’t been blue before. Not for him. Not once.

What changed?

Why here, why now, why him?

His stomach flips.

He’s still balancing those thoughts like spinning plates when footsteps scuff behind him.

“Hey.”

Max, again. Helmet still under his arm, expression unreadable now, all the edges filed down.

Charles straightens, smoothing his face. “What.”

Max shifts his weight. Looks past Charles for a second, then back at him, as if checking no one is close enough to hear.

“That thing back there,” he says. “With the kart. I saw it better after. The angle, I mean. The—” He stops, scowls, like the admission physically hurts. “I would’ve gone down hard.”

Charles doesn’t say yes, I know. He just watches him.

Max huffs out a breath, eyes dropping for a heartbeat before meeting his again. “So. You know.” His mouth twists. “Thanks.”

It’s rough and reluctant and the closest thing to genuine gratitude Charles has ever heard from him.

For a moment, the pounding in his head eases.

“You’re welcome,” he repeats, softer this time.

Max nods once—a quick, jerky dip of his chin, as if staying longer might undo the brief truce—then turns and walks away.

Charles watches him go, the absence of blue around him suddenly feeling heavier than its presence ever has on anyone else.

He presses his fingers lightly under his nose until the bleeding stops, then wipes the last smear away with the back of his hand.

'You don’t glow for anyone', he thinks, watching the orange suit disappear into the crowd. 'Not even for death.'

It should reassure him.

Instead, it plants a seed of fear so deep he won’t recognise it for years.

Because now he knows two things:

Max Verstappen is the boy who never shines blue.

And the first time he did, even for a second, Charles bled for him without hesitating.

He has no idea yet how much worse that is going to get.

Notes:

TBC...

Chapter 3: You were supposed to live

Summary:

By the time Jules crashes, Charles already believes he knows what the blue means.

He believes that seeing it gives him a choice.

Jules teaches him what happens when it doesn’t.

Notes:

This chapter is not an origin story.

It’s a consequence.

Charles never knew a world that didn’t include Jules Bianchi in it.

 

Jules simply existed, the way sunlight existed—warm, constant, casually miraculous. Long before the world learned his name, before helmets and flags and Ferrari red, he had been a boy with summer freckles, scraped knees, and a laugh that filled Brignoles like music.

 

The Bianchis and Leclercs were one wide, tangled family. Their lives knitted together through weekends at the kart track, late lunches that turned into dinners, engine oil and sunscreen, Arthur chasing butterflies between tires while Lorenzo and Jules argued about everything from tire pressures to which Pokémon would win in a fight.

 

Charles had been five when Jules lifted him by the ribs—too confidently, too easily—and dropped him into a kart for the first time.

 

“You’re tiny,” Jules had said, grinning like the sun itself. “But you’ll be faster than all of us. Promise.”

 

Charles believed him instantly, wholeheartedly. Childhood devotion is uncomplicated like that: absolute, bright, gravitational.

 

And then there was the other thing. The thing he never said out loud.

 

Jules never glowed blue.

 

Not a shimmer. Not a flicker. Not the faint halo Charles sometimes saw on strangers about to slip on curbs or elderly neighbors carrying groceries up too many steps.

 

Nothing.

 

Jules was untouched.

 

Protected.

 

Safe in a way Charles never questioned. Safe in a way he thought meant forever.

 

He didn’t know yet that safety wasn’t a promise—just a story children tell themselves because the truth is too sharp to hold.

 

He didn’t know yet how wrong he was.

 

—

 

Years passed in the rhythm of karting: suit zippers, petrol stink, blistered palms, sunburn, adrenaline. By the time Charles climbed into national championships, Jules was already rising—Ferrari Academy, French pride, whispers of “future F1” floating behind him like a comet tail.

 

Yet he always found time for Charles.

 

“Keep your elbows in. You’re not trying to fly away.”

 

“Don’t stare at Verstappen’s rear bumper. Pass him.”

 

“Don’t let that Dutch kid in your head.”

 

Charles looked up at him. “Why not?”

 

“Because he’ll run you off the track if you hesitate,” Jules said, rolling his eyes. “And because his dad will probably flip a tent if he loses.”

 

Charles scrunched his nose. “He yells a lot.”

 

“And you brood a lot,” Jules shot back, tapping the top of his helmet. “But you’ll be better.”

 

Charles flushed.

Jules always talked like that—like the future was already written, and he had read ahead.

 

—

 

The Suzuka GP was held on a Sunday that felt too quiet.

 

Charles didn’t wake with dread—not exactly. But something in his stomach felt wrong, like a shift in the air before a storm. He went through the motions: breakfast, brushing his teeth, arguing with Arthur over the remote. They ended up watching the race together, the screen glowing bright in the dim living room.

 

Jules started strong. Even halfway across the world, Charles could feel the steady hum of him—confident, fierce, precise. The kind of driving that made people believe in destiny.

 

Rain began to fall on the circuit. Harder.

 

Lorenzo leaned forward on the couch. “That doesn’t look good.”

 

Arthur mumbled, “He’ll be fine. Jules is always fine.”

 

Charles didn’t answer.

 

The camera cut to Jules’ car. For a second—just a second—Charles felt pressure in his chest, like something was pushing outward against his ribs.

 

And then, just in the corner of the screen, barely visible—

 

A flicker.

 

The tiniest smear of washed-out blue.

 

Charles’ breath stuttered.

 

He blinked.

Looked harder.

 

No.

No, no, no.

 

He leaned toward the screen so fast Arthur flinched.

 

“Charlie—?”

 

But Charles couldn’t hear him.

 

The blue pulsed—weak, faint—and before he could even stand to get closer, before he could convince himself he was imagining it—

 

The world exploded.

 

The crash didn’t look real.

It looked like metal folding into itself, like something enormous being shattered by invisible hands. The TV commentators screamed incoherently. Arthur dropped his phone. Lorenzo’s hand flew to his mouth.

 

Charles sat frozen, the blue still imprinted behind his eyelids like lightning scars.

 

“No,” he whispered.

The same way he had whispered it years ago at a fishbowl.

 

“No, no—”

 

Lorenzo was already grabbing keys.

Their mother was calling someone.

Arthur was crying.

 

Charles didn’t move.

 

He couldn’t.

He felt like the world had reached into his chest and torn something loose.

 

The blue.

On Jules.

 

That had never happened.

Not once.

Not ever.

 

Something was very, very wrong.

 

-

 

Japan smells like recycled air and worry.

 

The flight blurs—hours pressed together into a single stretch of stale oxygen, murmured voices, hands clenched too tight on armrests. Charles sits by the window and doesn’t see the clouds. The crash replays every time he blinks: rain, spray, a flicker of blue, impact. His mind catches on that sequence and loops it, again and again, as if some part of him believes that if he can rewind far enough, he’ll find the exact frame where everything went wrong and pry it open with his bare hands.

 

He presses his fingers into his eyes until sparks dance behind his lids. It doesn’t help.

 

Arthur is quiet beside him in a way that feels wrong. Lorenzo talks to adults—phones, emails, logistics—in a low, steady voice that frays around the edges every time he says Jules’ name. Their mother sits with her hands folded too neatly in her lap, knuckles white, lips moving around silent prayers.

 

No one says 'he’ll be fine.' No one dares. The words would sound like a lie now.

 

When they land, the airport feels too bright, too loud. Announcements echo. Neon signs shout in languages Charles can’t read. People move around them with ordinary urgency, pulling suitcases, checking phones, living lives that haven’t been split down the middle.

 

Charles feels like he’s wrapped in glass. Everything reaches him a second too late.

 

He notices details he shouldn’t: the strain in Lorenzo’s jaw as he argues with a taxi dispatcher; the way Arthur walks closer to their mother than usual; the tremor in his own hands when he reaches for his passport. His body knows something his mind refuses to shape into words.

 

The hospital is a building like any other from the outside—concrete, windows, a sliding glass door that opens with a soft sigh. Inside, it smells like all hospitals do: antiseptic, metal, stale air, fear that’s been scrubbed but never quite erased.

 

Charles hates it on instinct.

 

They take an elevator. The numbers climb. His heart climbs with them, banging against his ribs. Every floor feels like a choice point, a place where they could stop this, go back, pretend they never saw that crash on the television.

 

The doors open with a chime.

 

There are corridors. Too white, too bright, too long. The sounds are wrong: beeping, footsteps, murmured Japanese, the occasional sharp ring of a phone. Charles walks between Lorenzo and their mother, Arthur a step behind, and feels like a child again, too small for his own feet, except his bones ache with something that has nothing to do with growing.

 

They stop outside a door.

 

There is a thin slice of silence in which no one breathes.

 

Then someone—he doesn’t see who—opens it.

 

The room is colder than the corridor.

 

The first thing Charles sees is the machines. They huddle around the bed like strange, blinking animals: screens glowing, lines spiking and falling, numbers counting things he doesn’t want to know. Tubes snake into pale skin. There is a hiss, a whirr, a steady mechanical rhythm that pretends at calm.

 

Then he sees Jules.

 

For a moment his brain refuses to accept it. The face is right—Jules’ mouth, Jules’ lashes, Jules’ hair a little too messy on the pillow—but everything else is wrong. Too still. Too arranged. Jules has never been that tidy in his life.

 

Charles takes a step forward.

 

Then another.

 

He reaches the side of the bed and feels the world tilt.

 

The blue is there.

 

It hangs around Jules like mist clinging to low ground—thin in some places, dense in others, pooling in the hollow of his throat, the dip of his collarbone, the curve of his closed eyes. It pulses faintly, not in time with any of the machines, but in some deeper, slower rhythm that Charles feels in his own chest.

 

He grips the railing of the bed to keep his knees from buckling.

 

“No,” he says, very softly.

 

No one answers. People are talking behind him—doctors, nurses, family—words like condition and stability and monitoring threading together into meaningless noise.

 

He doesn’t care.

 

He moves closer until his hip presses against the metal rail. Jules’ hand lies on the blanket, palm up, fingers relaxed. There is a cannula taped along the back of it, feeding something invisible into his veins.

 

Charles reaches out, hesitant, and wraps his fingers around Jules’.

 

Warm.

 

Too warm, he thinks wildly, as if the heat is wrong too, as if it’s borrowed from the machines.

 

“Jules,” he whispers.

 

No response. Not even a twitch.

 

The blue hums at the edge of his vision, steady, present, wrong.

 

It was never there before. Not once. Not in all the years of scraped knees and late braking and stupid risks. He had checked. He knows he had. Jules was supposed to be safe. Jules was supposed to be the exception.

 

Seeing the color on him feels like standing in a church and watching the ceiling cave in.

 

Something in Charles snaps.

 

It isn’t a clean break. It’s a desperate lunge. He closes his eyes and reaches for that strange place inside him, the one that has always reacted on instinct: to a loose hook on a swing, to a cyclist near a car door, to a boy with an orange suit walking into the path of a kart trolley. The place that says move now and makes his body obey.

 

The pain hits instantly—white-hot, stabbing behind his eyes.

 

He leans closer, fingers tightening around Jules’ hand, breath shredding in his chest.

 

'Go away. Go away! Get off him. He doesn’t get blue. He doesn’t—'

 

His vision flickers. Something warm spills over his lip.

 

He doesn’t notice until a drop of red lands on the bedsheet.

 

“Charles?”

Arthur’s voice cracks, small and frightened. “Charlie—what are you doing? Are you okay?”

 

Charles doesn’t answer. He can’t. His whole body is shaking now, muscles locked in some internal tug-of-war.

 

“Charles!”

Lorenzo’s tone sharpens, panicked. “Arrête— you’re bleeding, mon Dieu— Charlie, sit down.”

 

Hands grab his shoulders, trying to pull him back, but Charles clings blindly to the rail, still trying to rip the color away with nothing but will and desperation.

 

He doesn’t hear Arthur’s soft sob.

He doesn’t hear Lorenzo calling for a nurse.

 

He only feels the blue resisting him—heavy, immovable— and then the pain spikes violently, ripping through him.

 

His knees buckle.

 

The world tilts.

 

Lorenzo catches him just before he hits the ground.

“Charlie— Charlie, look at me. Hey. Charlie. Stay with us.”

 

Charles’ head lolls against his brother’s chest. Blood drips from his nose in a thin, steady line. His breaths come shallow, jagged.

 

His mother’s hands are suddenly there too, trembling as she cups his face.

“Charles, mon amour— what is happening? You’re scaring me—”

 

He tries to speak, tries to say 'I can fix it, I can save him', but all that comes out is a broken, wet sound.

 

Then the room washes out in white, and he sags completely, consciousness slipping.

 

To everyone else, it looks like grief —the shock finally breaking him open.

A boy overwhelmed.

A boy fainting at the sight of the person he loves hanging by a thread.

 

Only Charles knows the truth.

And the blue, still clinging softly to the edge of Jules’ body, knows too.

 

-

 

When he finally wakes, the world feels wrong—too bright, too loud, too far away. His family speaks to him in soft, terrified voices, doctors ask questions he barely hears, and somewhere down the hall a machine alarms before falling quiet again. But all Charles can think about is the echo of that blue, the way it clung to Jules even as he tried to tear it free, the way it swallowed him whole before darkness did. The panic sits heavy in his chest, a stone he can’t cough out, and though everyone tells him to rest, to breathe, to take things one moment at a time, the truth is simple and devastating: something inside him broke on that hospital floor, and the pieces don’t fit back together anymore.

 

—

 

Time stops meaning anything after that.

 

Jules is moved to a hospital in France. Days blur into each other, marked only by the rising and setting of a sun Charles rarely sees, by tray meals he doesn’t eat, by nurses who come and go, by the regular, indifferent beeping of machines that keep humming whether anyone is looking or not.

 

Charles sits in the same chair at Jules’ bedside until the cushion remembers his shape. Sometimes he talks. Sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he just watches the blue—how it shifts, thins, darkens, flickers as if deciding whether to stay.

 

He tries, again, to move it.

 

Not like the first time. Never that deep. The memory of that pain lives in his bones now. But small pushes. Nudges. Fleeting pulses of intent that leave him with headaches and tiny nosebleeds he wipes away before anyone can see.

 

The color never leaves.

 

It wavers, fades at the edges, but never fully goes. The message is clear:

 

This is not one of the lives you get to save.

 

His body begins to tally the cost: exhaustion that sits in his limbs like lead, hands that shake when he tries to hold a glass, breath that stutters when he climbs stairs. Everyone around him chalks it up to stress, to travel, to grief. No one thinks to ask what else he might be doing besides watching.

 

He doesn’t offer.

 

What would he say? 'I can see death trying to take him and I keep throwing myself at it until my mind bleeds?'

 

It sounds mad even in his head.

 

So he curls tighter around his secret and watches Jules sleep.

 

Sometimes Arthur leans against his shoulder and dozes. Sometimes Lorenzo stands guard by the doorway like he can keep bad news from entering. Sometimes their mother strokes Jules’ hair back from his forehead and murmurs things too soft for Charles to catch.

 

“He knows you’re here,” she tells Charles once, hand warm on his neck. “He feels you, mon cœur.”

 

Charles nods.

 

He doesn’t say, 'then he must feel me failing too.'

 

—

 

On July seventeenth, he wakes with the certainty already lodged under his ribs.

 

The world feels wrong the moment his eyes open. Too still. Too quiet. His body is heavy, his head thick, his mouth dry with the taste of dread. He doesn’t need to look at the calendar to know the date will matter.

 

He moves through the morning like someone wading through water. Dress. Shoes. Corridor. Elevator. The route to Jules’ room is a path his feet know without instructions.

 

The door is half-open when he gets there.

 

There are more people inside than usual. That’s the first thing he notices. The second is that the machines sound… different. Not louder or quieter—just tuned to a frequency that makes his skin prickle.

 

The third is the color.

 

Or rather, the lack of it.

 

He steps inside and the world narrows to the bed.

 

No blue.

 

No flicker, no mist, no floating halo. Jules lies there, skin pale, features soft, mouth slightly parted as if he might be about to say something funny, roll his eyes, complain. But the air around him is clean.

 

Charles’ heart stutters.

 

For one wild second, hope flares.

 

Maybe—maybe that’s good. Maybe the danger has passed. Maybe Jules is safe now. Maybe—

 

A hand lands on his shoulder.

 

He looks up.

 

Lorenzo’s face is wrecked.

 

“Charlie,” he says, and his voice is not a voice at all, but something cracked and leaking. “Il est parti.”

 

The words don’t land all at once. They fall in pieces, shards that don’t fit together.

 

Gone.

 

Past tense.

 

Not coming back.

 

Someone behind them is crying—the sound jagged and raw. Arthur, maybe. Or Jules’ mother. The room tilts. The machines have stopped their steady beeping; some are dark, others making low, final noises as they’re turned off. Silence gathers in the gaps like dust.

 

Charles walks to the bed because he doesn’t know what else to do.

 

Jules feels different under his hand now. Not dramatically so—not like in movies where death is a sudden, theatrical transformation. Just… stiller. The warmth has bled away from his skin, leaving something cooler, flatter, like the air after a storm.

 

There is no blue.

 

The absence feels like mockery.

 

“I’m sorry,” Charles whispers, voice shredded. “Je suis désolé. I tried. I swear I tried.”

 

He touches his forehead to Jules’ arm, as if bowing. The fabric smells like hospital detergent and faint metal, with a hint of something that might be oil, sweat, memory. If he closes his eyes, he can almost pretend this is just another post-race nap. That Jules will wake up any second, tousle his hair, say his name.

 

He doesn’t.

 

The tears come quietly.

 

They don’t arrive in a single cathartic rush. They leak out, slow and shaking, the way grief has been leaking through him for months. His shoulders tremble. His fingers clutch at linen. His breath hitches around the words he can’t quite form.

 

'Don’t go.'

'Come back.'

'Take me instead.'

 

None of them make it past his teeth.

 

Hands try to pull him back eventually. Gentle at first, then more insistent. Lorenzo’s voice in his ear. Arthur’s sobbing nearby. His mother’s fingers in his hair.

 

“Charlie, laisse-le…” Lorenzo says, choking on the words. “Let him rest, mon cœur. Il ne souffre plus.”

 

He doesn’t suffer anymore.

 

The phrase hits something hollow inside him.

 

Charles lets himself be drawn away. His legs carry him out of the room and down the corridor on autopilot. The walls blur. The lights smear into bright, meaningless streaks.

 

He presses his back to a blank stretch of wall and slides down until he’s sitting on the floor, knees drawn up, hands hanging uselessly between them.

 

For the first time since he was six years old, there is no blue buzzing at the edge of his awareness. No halo around strangers. No flicker. No warning. The world feels strangely flat, as if someone has turned the saturation down.

 

The silence in his head is deafening.

 

He should feel relieved, maybe. Or numb. Or grateful the pain behind his eyes has eased.

 

Instead he feels one thing, sharp and clear and final:

 

He failed.

 

Not a stranger.

Not a boy on a swing.

Not a cyclist.

Not even Max Verstappen, the orange anomaly he never quite understood.

 

Jules.

 

The person he loved first.

The person who made him believe in the future.

The one he thought the rules didn’t apply to.

 

His gift, his curse, whatever it is—

It wasn’t enough.

 

The knowledge settles into him like lead sinking into water. It will never really leave. It will just change shape, hardening into the quiet conviction that every blue he sees from now on is a test he cannot afford to fail.

 

He sits there on the cold hospital floor, head bowed, tears drying sticky on his cheeks, and thinks:

 

'If I had been stronger, faster, better—'

'If I had understood sooner—'

'Maybe he’d still be here.'

 

The thought is not true.

It will still become one of the pillars of his life.

 

Years later, he’ll look back on this day and see the fracture line running through everything that comes after—through every risk he takes, every person he tries to save, every time he looks at Max and feels his chest tighten for reasons that have nothing to do with racing.

 

For now, he is just a boy in a foreign hospital, lungs aching, heart broken, sitting in the echo of a color that refused to move.

 

Jules was supposed to stay.

 

But death doesn’t care who is loved.

 

And fate, Charles learns that day, doesn’t negotiate.

Notes:

TBC...