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The door closed with a soft, magnetic click, and Yuki didn’t even look up. He was face-down in the ridiculous king-sized bed Red Bull had booked him for the weekend—one of those hotel rooms meant to impress sponsors, not cradle emotional damage.
The soft footsteps behind him told him exactly who had entered.
Pierre, first. He always walked like he had good news—which, to be fair, he kind of did. P6 in that slow tractor wasn’t nothing, even if he tried not to smile too wide about it.
Then Esteban, one of the unlucky ones with the traffic and the endless virtual safety car phases, walked a bit slower, more hesitant, like he still wasn’t sure if Yuki wanted company.
“I brought crisps,” Esteban said gently. “And Kinder Buenos. And Pierre’s stealing your robe.”
“Our robe,” Pierre corrected, dramatic as ever, sliding the plush navy fabric over his shoulders.
“We are one in this relationship. Which meant everything in this room was communally owned—including that overpriced minibar.”
Yuki didn’t move.
He felt like a stone. A tired, molten, about-to-crack boulder.
“Fifteenth,” he mumbled into the pillow.
“I know,” Esteban replied. “I saw.”
“I started in eleventh.”
“I know.”
“Almost on points.”
“I know.”
“I got overtaken by a Sauber.”
“I know.”
That finally got a noise out of Pierre. It wasn’t a laugh—it was something between a wince and a sympathetic groan.
“That car was a fucking war crime,” he muttered, settling onto the bed next to Yuki’s legs. “Max himself looked like he wanted to quit today.”
“Max did say the steering felt like it had been possessed by demons,” Esteban added, lowering himself into the armchair. “I heard him in the debrief.”
Yuki didn’t laugh. But he did shift slightly, just enough to roll onto his side and face them.
His face was blotchy, his eyes tired, cheeks still red from the helmet pressure. His lip trembled like he might cry—or scream—or both.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he whispered.
“This was supposed to be a promotion. They said I earned it. Five years. I spent five years fighting tooth and nail in that Racing Bulls seat—for every upgrade, every point. I helped build that team up. I finally had a car that listened to me.”
His voice cracked at the end. He swallowed hard, biting down the burn behind his eyes.
“And now I get this—this death trap dressed in Red Bull livery. They called it a step up, but it felt like they had taken everything I worked for and tossed me into a fire. And I was supposed to thank them for it.”
“You did earn it,” Pierre said firmly, voice quiet but burning with certainty. “You did everything right, Yuki. It wasn’t you. That thing they put you in—it wasn’t a car. It was a cursed go-kart wearing Red Bull stickers. Max couldn’t drive it. No one could. They gave you a box of promises and a vehicle that actively wanted to kill you.”
He exhaled through his nose, rubbing slow circles into Yuki’s back. “And still, somehow, you made it look like it might work. You held it together with spit and sheer force of will. That wasn’t failure. That was survival. And I don’t know how you were still doing it.”
Esteban’s voice was quieter. “You didn’t deserve this.”
Yuki’s throat tightened. He clenched his jaw, hard enough to ache.
“Last year I was fighting for points,” he said. “Now I was fighting for fourteenth... I was basically last on the grid...”
“That was cruel,” Pierre agreed. “No one should have to do that.”
That made Yuki huff a wet laugh. It cracked something.
He buried his face in the hotel pillow again—except this time it was to hide the tears. He didn’t want to cry in front of them. He didn’t want them to see what the season had done to him.
But he didn’t flinch when Pierre crawled closer, one hand resting lightly between his shoulder blades. Or when Esteban rose to kneel beside him, carding slow fingers through his sweat-mussed hair.
“You’re still our Yuki,” Esteban said softly. “Even if the world forgets who you are.”
“Let them forget,” Pierre added. “We won’t.”
Yuki sobbed once, sharp and quiet.
They didn’t push. They didn’t ask him to talk more or tell him to be strong. They just stayed there, one hand warm on his back, one hand steady in his hair, while he let it all out—the frustration, the rage, the bone-deep exhaustion of having to smile through interviews while being slowly dismembered by the most undriveable car on the grid.
Pierre watched him with an ache he didn’t say aloud. He knew this feeling. He had lived it—2019 Red Bull, a half-season trial by fire. The pressure, the headlines, the way the car turned on you faster than the team would admit. But even then, Pierre thought, Yuki had handled it with a kind of grace he never had. He had been louder, yes. Angrier. But he never crumbled. Not really. Not the way Pierre once did.
And maybe that was what hurt most. That Yuki was better than he had been. That he had deserved more than this, and still they had handed him a trap with wings and called it a gift.
They stayed with him through it all. Because that was the thing about love. About them.
No matter how broken the season was—no matter how unlucky Esteban got with strategy, or how Pierre kept hiding his smile because he had actually finished sixth and felt guilty for it—they still found their way back to each other.
Three lovers in a room. One of them hurting. Two of them staying.
Always.