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When something first breaks inside Charles, he doesn't dare say what it is.
*
Charles wakes to the sound of rain against the window. Monaco rain is different—sharp, impatient, as if it wants to wash the whole city down into the sea. The air is heavy, damp, and his body aches in a way that feels both familiar and foreign.
He lies still, listening. Beside him, Oscar breathes evenly, face half-buried in the pillow, sun-washed brown hair messy from sleep. Charles studies the curve of his shoulder, the way his chest rises and falls, steady, reliable. It should be grounding. It isn’t.
His hand drifts down to his stomach, to the space that feels too empty now. He presses his palm flat, as if the pressure could erase the absence, but all it does is remind him. The silence inside his own body is unbearable.
He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t even let his breath catch. He just lies there, hand against himself, watching the rain streak the glass until the blur makes it impossible to tell if it’s the world outside that’s crying or something inside him. He barely closes his eyes and lets the air settle in his lungs. He thinks if he doesn’t move, if he gets small enough toward Oscar, he can pretend the silence inside him is natural.
Oscar shifts in his sleep, murmurs something Charles can’t make out—if he had been awake enough to hear it any longer, Charles would have thought how much it sounded like a prayer.
Oscar's scent curls faintly toward him—warm, safe, tinged with the sharpness of adrenaline and the faint undertone of motor oil that never seems to leave them. Charles closes his eyes, swallows, and pretends to sleep when Oscar stirs fully.
*
Charles has always rebuilt himself where he was broken. He finished the wound before it grew—except this time. Now the skin is tearing, further and further with each inch, and all his bones are doing is spreading them even wider.
Charles grieves at how little he's lost on this path he swore he'd never take. And he's not sure if that's a good thing. All he knows is this slowness is a quicksand, and this lost is sky.
*
It’s a few weeks after Jeddah when Charles finds out he carries two pulses instead of one.
At first, he thinks it's some strange food poisoning or a contagious disease that's causing him to vomit up the little bit of food in his stomach every hour.
But it never stops. The nausea, the pain in his bones, and that other voice in his chest. It says, I'm coming, are you ready to accept that you want to accept me? Charles isn't, never has been, but his words come out as vomit while the four different tests Andrea took for him all show the same red double lines.
Charles almost feels desperate, except it’s worse.
*
Oscar first notices a cooling warmth on Charles's skin, a growing glow, and the dark circles under his eyes. Then Charles's scent sweetens until it's the softest thing in the world, and Charles looks like he's about to throw up—every time. It's hard to miss. Oscar doesn't. How could he when Charles's scent is shimmering and heavy with something of its own making?
He can smell it on him. The emergence of new life and the way a little heart beats—the way it pushes against his veins, preparing to see the light beneath Charles’s skin. He can already imagine every shade of color its eyes can take and the shape of its little mouth—it takes Oscar a little to figure out that all of these are just his wishful thinkings.
*
Oscar finds a strange sense of belonging in Mark's house. It's quiet, calm, and Oscar can feel like everything that happened hasn't happened and he's sixteen again in his stained couch.
But when he pulls the covers over his head, all he finds is darkness. And Charles's face, pale, his mouth repeats—I wouldn't make a good parent, I don't even like the idea of carrying a living thing in my womb for nine fucking months. Scary, if you ask me. And I still have—Oscar blinks, because yes, he already knows, like everyone else—Charles still has a championship to win.
So, it’s fine. It should be fine. He shouldn’t be selfish, he shouldn't be feeling like his ribcage is being ripped open when Charles’s sweet scent takes the form of a whole graveyard and everything disappears. Yet he does.
*
Charles doesn't know exactly when he lost it, just as he doesn't know exactly when he first had it. There's discoloration on his wrists and a burning feeling in his belly, as if something were being reached in and taken from him. He can't name it, all he knows is that it hurts—and the next thing he knows, he's empty inside, that he no longer has a baby.
*
It gets hard to focus on the red lights, Charles comes to the realization, forcing his breathing steady becomes difficult. The emptiness inside him isn't just physical; it’s a hollow ache that echoes louder than he can allow himself to knowledge. He remembers not wanting this. He remembers being thirteen and then being given a name that would make him look inferior to everyone else. He remembers being smelling like sugar candy, that they told him he could carry two pulses in his mouth. He also remembers that they never asked him if he wanted to.
But perhaps they knew he was lying to himself. Because now Charles had two hearts; a little dead one alongside his own half-pale one.
*
He sometimes remembers the fleeting warmth, the terrifying flutter he’d felt only briefly before it vanished. He’d wanted it. Against every instinct screaming danger, against the career ticking away, he’d wanted that fragile possibility.
He wanted Oscar to know, too. To turn and hold his face in his hands and kiss the corner of his mouth and say—I wanted him, I wanted him as much as I wanted you, I wanted to carry what was yours, I wanted, but I failed like I do every time.
*
The season just keeps rolling, rolling, rolling. Oscar might win his second title by the end of it, but Max and Charles are breathing down his neck. Charles keeps stumbling, but it doesn't really matter. Sometimes Oscar's hand trembles on the steering wheel, dreaming of a smaller hand holding him. Then the world slows down and nothing feels real, and Oscar tightens his grip and puts a pole again. After the qualifying, while posing for the photo, he stands slightly away from Max and a little too close to Charles, and once they get back to the hotel, he considers hugging Charles a little—just a little tighter and offering going to the cinema together with him.
*
The race doesn’t start well, doesn’t go well, doesn’t end well.
The laps blur. Pit stops are mechanical exchanges, voices crackling over the radio devoid of inflection. Charles focuses on the track, the feel of the car, the precise dance of braking points and throttle application. Yet, beneath the focus, the instinct whispers. It’s a dull, persistent ache beneath his ribs, a phantom pull towards warmth and softness that has nowhere to go. He sees a child waving frantically from the grandstand, a blur of color and movement, and his breath hitches. The instinct surges, sharp and cruel, a biological imperative mourning what biology itself failed to sustain. He grits his teeth, shoving the feeling down, deep into the seat, the chemical sting a welcome distraction from the internal ache.
After getting DNF in the race, he's not forced into media duties. He doesn't hear anyone talking about how much weight he's lost in two months. He doesn't hear about the crash. He doesn't think about it. It'll all pass, he'll get over it. That's what he was built for.
Still, he can't stop himself from wrapping his arms around his belly, as if he could still hold what's gone. It's already too late, but that's not even the worst part.
*
They don’t talk about it.
It folds into the rhythm of their lives the way a bruise disappears beneath clothes: unseen, but always tender when touched. It is easier, in the way pain sometimes folds itself into silence, to act as if nothing ever happened. Oscar doesn’t ask. Charles doesn’t say. They slip into their routines with a precision that feels rehearsed. Oscar makes coffee in the mornings; Charles ties his shoes before runs along the harbor; their clothes mix in the same suitcase, their schedules bend around each other.
When Oscar presses his mouth to Charles’s throat before a flight, inhaling deeply, Charles doesn’t flinch. He lets himself be scented, lets Oscar’s lips linger on his skin. He leans into it even, as if by force of will he can pretend that the same place wasn’t once carrying the altered tang of pregnancy.
*
To be lost is nothing to fear. In this city of rain, I have wandered so long only to find that I am the street.
Charles repeats it in his head like a prayer. If he is the street, maybe he can be unbroken pavement. Maybe he can forget the cracks underneath.
*
The paddock doesn’t change, which almost makes it worse. Reporters still swarm, cameras still flash, and the scent of rubber and burnt fuel still clings to the air.
Charles arrives in red, Oscar in papaya, and they walk side by side as though nothing in the world has shifted. Charles smiles at the journalists, practiced and sharp. Oscar jokes with the mechanics, his laugh easy, his hand brushing Charles’s briefly when no one’s looking.
Inside, though, Charles feels the weight. The suits fit the same, the helmets shine the same, but his body feels like it’s lying every second he’s in it. He knows Oscar must feel it too—the way his scent flickers, the way his eyes soften when they catch Charles’s—but Oscar never speaks. And Charles is grateful for that. Grateful, and furious, and so, so tired.
*
He wants to reach out, to shake Oscar, perhaps break him in the same way his legacy did—by eating Charles up from the inside and then disappearing without leaving a trace.
But he can't. He can't because they've always known each other through the lines on their palms, and how naked they are in front of each other at times like these. Now Charles doesn't know how he can afford to be so naked—having just lost the thing that felt completed him.
*
After qualifying days, they sit together in the back of the motorhome, mostly sharing a plate of pasta. The TV hums with highlights, voices of commentators rising and falling.
Now, Oscar twirls spaghetti on his fork, his knee brushing Charles’s under the table. Charles stares at the fork, at the endless circle of pasta, and thinks absurdly of cycles, of things beginning and ending with no explanation.
“Eat,” Oscar says softly, nudging the plate closer. For a few seconds, he sees his teeth. And he thinks, okay, now he'll speak. But just as Oscar is about to say more, all he gets is silence again. And all the things he could say are in the emptiness inside Charles. Hey, that thing you lost, I would die for it, for us to have it together, I would—Charles picks up his fork. He eats. He doesn’t taste it.
*
Sometimes Charles thinks Oscar knows. Sometimes he thinks Oscar can’t possibly know. It doesn’t matter. The result is the same—they don’t talk about it. They won’t talk about it.
*
When Oscar scents him after a shower, nose pressed into his damp neck, Charles tilts his head without protest. When Oscar’s fingers lace with his under the table at dinner, Charles holds on, tighter than he should. They laugh with Alex at media day, share headphones on flights, argue mildly about movies. To anyone watching, they are the same.
But Charles feels hollow in ways he can’t name. He doesn’t know how to mourn something he never dared speak aloud. He doesn’t know how to grieve when grief itself feels like betrayal. It just there, standing so close to him, he can touch it, he can sense how colorless the thing people call grief—but he doesn’t have to. No one can know better than him what that word means.
*
Ferrari pushes for results, and Charles drives harder, sharper, with a desperation that borders on recklessness. Every lap feels like a penance. Every corner he takes too fast is another way to prove that he isn’t just an Omega who lost something. He is still fast, still worthy. He has to be.
Oscar watches him, always. In briefings, in the garage, on the track. His gaze is steady, but his silence is louder than any question could be. And when he opens his mouth, Charles is always faster than him.
He can taste every word Oscar says quietly as he kisses him as if he'll die if they're separated, even for a breath. Most of them sound like, I’m sorry. And Charles hates it. Because he's sorry, too, and he doesn't know how to let it go.
*
One night, weeks later, they go to dinner after a race. The restaurant is quiet, tucked away, a place they’ve gone before. The lights are dim, the tablecloth white, wine glasses catching the glow of candles.
Charles orders fish; Oscar orders steak. They talk about tire strategy, about Monaco traffic, about Lewis’s stupid group chat memes. They sip wine. They share dessert. They keep up the rhythm of their lives like nothing broke.
And Charles lets him. Because if Oscar believes it was Charles’s choice—if he believes Charles ended it—then the silence is safe. Then the grief can belong only to Charles, and Charles alone.
But then there is a moment, brief, when the conversation dips into silence. Charles feels it then—the urge to tell him. To open his mouth and let the words fall out: I didn’t choose this. I wanted it. Do you hear me? I wanted it, I wanted to keep it, to have it, to hold it. I lost it. He imagines Oscar’s hand over his, Oscar’s voice breaking. He imagines the relief of being known fully, the comfort of being held in his grief instead of alone with it.
But he swallows. He smiles faintly, makes a joke about Ferrari’s strategy team instead. Oscar smiles, it’s almost a breakable thing. The moment passes. Charles tells himself it’s better this way. Safer. Cleaner. He assures himself that later, he can lock himself in the bathroom and cry until there’s no tears left.
*
Oscar’s mother calls him on a Sunday evening after a race. He is lying in a hotel bed, Charles already asleep beside him, hair spread across the pillow. His small face, contrasted by his pursed pink lips and closed green eyes, is tired, sad, and just like Charles. Oscar loves him for all the beauty and good he reveals beneath his shell. He lowers his voice as the line connects.
“Hey, mum.”
There’s the rustle of movement on the other end. “Osc, dear, how are you?”
“I’m fine.” A pause. He looks at Charles’s still face, the soft rise and fall of his chest. “We’re fine.”
“I had a chance to talk to Mark,” his mother's voice is sad now. Oscar wants to reach out to her on the other end of the line. He wants to tell her it's okay, that they'll be okay. Maybe when it comes to Charles, all he can really do is some wishful thinking. “Oh, Osc, honey, I'm really sorry.”
Oscar swallows, throat tight. “It’s okay, mum,” There’s a beat of silence. Oscar doesn’t know what to say, he didn't know what to say when he realized they were going to have a baby, and he didn't know what to say when he realized there was no such thing anymore. His mother chokes on the other end of the line, and maybe there’s some tears coming from Oscar’s eyes. He doesn’t know, maybe all of it could be a dream. “It was his decision, mum. I’m not going to… it’s not mine to question. I can’t.”
Silence hums over the line, heavy but not unkind. Then his mother probably starts wiping her tears. “No, no, darling. You should speak to him, okay? It was yours as much as it was him. It’s not about only him, or you, it’s about both of you. Promise me, Osc, you’ll talk, okay?”
Oscar presses his hand to his forehead. He’s to weak for this. There are so many things he wants to say Charles that it suffocates him. Be my mate, you don't have to carry anything from us—no, you don’t have to carry my pups—I would love that, but I swear I'm okay with just the two of us. Charles, just stay and smile, please. What we lost—it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have to matter.
“Okay, mum.”
They hang up, and he lies awake long after, listening to Charles breathe. (And maybe Oscar hugs his now empty belly almost too tightly. And maybe he repeats to himself, over and over again. It doesn't matter. Charles, it doesn't matter. This is just the greatest thing we've ever lost.)
*
Charles sits in his mother’s kitchen during a rare free weekend in Monaco. The windows are open, the air smelling faintly of salt and rosemary. Pascale sets a plate in front of him, fusses over whether he’s eating enough.
He smiles faintly. “You don’t need to worry, Maman.”
“I always will.” She sits across from him, eyes soft but searching. She doesn’t ask. She doesn’t need to.
For a moment, Charles wants to speak. Wants to say, this isn't like the emptiness when we lost Papa, Maman. It's bigger, it's more resonant. Tell me how I've been drenched with its absence—without even hearing its name, without even holding it, Maman—the words hover at the back of his throat, aching for release.
But he swallows them. Instead, he eats a bite of bread, chews, and says, “The car feels good this weekend.”
Pascale’s hand rests briefly over his. Warm. Knowing. She doesn’t press further. But that tired, broken smile on her face is so full of mourning that Charles lets her hold him in his arms a little longer than she should when he leaves the house. When they say goodbye, she kisses his cheek and lingers there a moment too long, like she wants to shield him from the world.
And Charles's face is already wet with tears. Because his stomach is still empty, and if he had realized it a little sooner, maybe he too could have stood between their baby and the world as a shield.
*
His brothers notice too, of course.
Arthur hovers more than usual, offers to drive him places he doesn’t need to be driven. Lorenzo lingers in conversations longer, as though watching over him in silence. Charles feels them circling like protective gravity—two Alphas shielding their Omega brother without ever naming why.
At dinner, Arthur makes jokes about the simulator, about Ferrari strategy, but his eyes keep darting back, gauging Charles’s reactions. Lorenzo, quieter, reaches across the table once to squeeze Charles’s hand, brief but grounding.
“You’re okay?” Lorenzo asks later, when Arthur has gone to fetch dessert.
Charles smiles. “Of course.”
Lorenzo studies him. Doesn’t press. Just nods, and sets the plate in front of him like an offering.
Charles eats. It tastes like nothing. But their presence feels like peace, he doesn’t know how to thank them for.
*
Oscar lies awake sometimes, watching Charles breathe beside him. He desperately remembers the faint change in scent weeks ago, the way it had been softer, rounder, edged with something new. He remembers how it had shifted back suddenly, how he had told himself not to ask, not to pry. Because it was Charles’s choice—to keep it or not. No matter how hard Oscar wanted to hold it so tightly.
But Oscar doesn’t ask. He can’t. Because if Charles chose to end it, then asking would cut open something that Charles has already stitched closed. And it would hurt Oscar more—to hear that Charles didn’t want to keep their baby, to hear that he chose the other way around, and not even talk to him about it—he keeps the silence. He holds Charles at night, presses his face to his neck, and breathes him in. He laughs with him, eats with him, drives with him.
He ignores the bleeding, spreading, open wound, saying it will go away if he gets a little closer to Charles. It doesn't, but it's close.
*
Sometimes, Charles dreams.
He dreams of a small hand curling around his finger, of laughter that doesn’t exist, of a life he never thought he wanted until it slipped away. He dreams of Oscar’s smile, softer than the world ever sees, bending down to kiss a child’s hair. Look at how what you lost becomes glorious, look at how everything you lost becomes beautiful when your hands slip off them. Maybe the very touch of you corrupts—he wakes from those dreams with his chest aching, his throat raw, his hands trembling. Oscar is always there, waking up before him, arms wide open, just waiting for him to fall in it—and Charles never says a word as he does. He just holds Oscar’s shoulders so tightly until the shaking stops, until the silence settles again, until he remembers he’s empty inside.
*
At the next race, Charles finishes on the podium. Las Vegas is beautiful, and when the champagne sprays, the crowd roars— the trophy is heavy in his hands. He lifts it high, smile bright for the cameras.
The corners of his mouth are raised as if he knows better than anyone what it means to have it all, in this red jumpsuit—because Charles is an omega, and every year he's the one who carries on in his place while his alpha teammate is sent off—because he drives, drives to earn it, drives as if he's dedicated his entire life to it, drives as if he's lost another pulse to it. And the world doesn't know it. Maybe Oscar doesn't know it either.
Later, in the quiet of the hotel room, the trophy sits on the table, gleaming under the lamp. Charles stares at it for a long time, then turns to Oscar, who is scrolling through his phone.
“I’m tired,” Charles says.
Oscar looks up, studies him for a moment, then nods. “Come here.”
Charles goes. He curls against Oscar’s chest, lets himself be scented, lets the warmth of Oscar’s body seep into his own. He closes his eyes and listens to the steady beat of Oscar’s heart.
He doesn’t say what he wants to. He doesn’t say what he’s lost. He just lies there, silent, breathing in the rhythm of someone who stays.
And the silence, heavy as it is, holds them both.
*
Nearly two months later, they're in the shower, Oscar kissing his neck underwater—and Charles still wants him to know.
He feels drunk, something dead still between them, and they carry it wherever they go—Charles inside him, Oscar all in his hands.
There's a moment when Oscar's arm wraps around his belly so gently and securely—Charles almost forgets the emptiness and foreignness inside, all the ache eases, perhaps stops. And then Oscar speaks, and Charles feels as if he's actually sunk underwater. “It's okay,” His light fingers trace shapes on Charles's stomach, and Charles instantly shrinks back against his chest. “It always was.” With every word, he feels like he’s now free.
Oscar kisses his shoulder blades, and Charles chokes a sob. “Charles, it’s fine—ssh, it’s okay—you did nothing wrong, it’s alright,” He shushes him, as if calming a small, lonely, broken-legged animal. And Charles wants to say, I’m ready to be every animal you leave behind. “I’m not mad at you, okay? I love you, no matter what. It was your choice. I know you couldn’t keep it, you still have all those years with Ferrari and you still have a championship to win—” Oh, no. No, that can’t be it. Charles sobs even louder as water rushes from every opening. He's shattering in Oscar's arms, but he wouldn't even be able to stand at his own feet as whole without his arms.
“Osc,” It feels like a plea, a broken sound—hear me, know me, feel me, I didn’t take it from you. I didn’t take it from us. “I didn’t abort it,” His voice shakes. It breaks at the end of every letter. It's like poking a wound that has never healed from the inside. “I lost it.”
*
Charles can see the water streaming down Oscar's face. Most of it must be tears; they linger longer on his skin, pooling around his collarbone. At one point, Charles almost hears him let out a broken sob. And then the arms around his belly hold him tighter and tighter. They sit together on the shower floor, the warm water flowing over everything that's been lost, washing away the corpseless dead. Oscar continues to cry, his chin on Charles’s shoulder, and Charles lets him. As long as Oscar holds him this tight, he can't feel the emptiness in his stomach. And that’s good.
After the shower, Oscar wraps him in a towel, Oscar dries him off, Oscar dresses him, Oscar kisses him, Oscar scents him, Oscar puts him to sleep, Oscar holds him so tightly. And Charles remembers—this Oscar was going be a father. This Oscar was going be his mate. He was going to have a child with this Oscar.
*
Charles dreams. And it's a peaceful home. A green-eyed little girl sits on Oscar's lap, leaning against him while touching his chin and giggling, and Oscar holds her gently, with all his love, as if she were indispensable to the world. Charles realizes once again that he wants to be Oscar's mate, to have his pups.
The emptiness in his stomach grows. And perhaps it won't stay that way for long. He nuzzles closer to the Oscar.