Chapter Text
Carlos has been acting very, very strangely this season.
Of course, Charles has known for a while that 2024 would be difficult for his teammate. Fred essentially sacked him, knifing him in the back to make way for Lewis. Carlos can say as many diplomatic things to the media as he likes – “it’s understandable,” or “no hard feelings,” or “I don’t blame anyone” – and usually, Charles even believes he means them. Mostly. When he’s looking at the move from a purely logical standpoint, anyway.
Emotionally, though, it is understandably a different story.
There’s a tension in the garage that there wasn’t before. An elephant in every meeting room. A bitter undertone in press conferences, a subtle distaste when they’re coordinating team strategy. When he wins in Australia, there’s a hard glint in Carlos’s eyes when Fred pulls him into a celebratory hug in parc fermé, a dark twist to his usually affable smile.
You should have picked me, it says silently. You should have kept me, instead. Why would you do this? I have delivered both of the team’s only two wins in the past two years. I’m leading Charles in the championship. Do you really think an ageing Lewis Hamilton, years past his prime, can do any better?
You should have backed me.
Carlos never voices these thoughts out loud. He doesn’t need to. He’s been with the team for three years by this point, more than enough time for them to get to know him well enough to see what’s written on his face. Everyone from marketing down to the pit crew can see what goes unspoken.
Charles understands the resentment. He anticipated it from the moment Fred first pulled him aside the year before to breathe life into the quiet mutterings around Maranello about a potential world champion being signed. He sympathises with Carlos. He agrees with his frustrations, even, because God knows Charles has mixed feelings himself on partnering the most decorated driver in the history of the sport. He expects the anger, the hurt, the grudge. He expects Carlos to lash out, to push back, to rail against team orders in what could be his last year in competitive machinery, if not his last year in Formula 1 at all.
What he doesn’t expect is the…well, he’s not really sure what else to call it other than moodiness.
One weekend, Carlos is grim and taciturn and difficult to work with. The next, he’s professional, but cold and closed-off. A few days later, he’ll be back in his usual good spirits – joking in Italian with the mechanics, throwing himself into whatever nonsense they have to do for social media, badgering Charles for yet another chess rematch and then wailing theatrically when he loses. Then he’ll come into the garage the next day in a towering temper, dominant fury leaking from every pore, and most of the Ferrari employees will scatter and do their best to avoid him until he calms down.
It's wildly unpredictable, and wildly unlike him. Carlos Sainz is generally a likeable, level-headed person. He’s good-natured and approachable, even-keeled, his sharp intelligence usually tucked away behind a bright smile and easy laugh. He’s not the type to be so – so volatile, so out of control.
Charles doesn’t really understand why he’s acting like this. He initially assumed it was about the betrayal of finding out in the media, of Ferrari ripping the rug out from underneath him with no warning. He certainly seemed angry enough about that when Charles tried to talk to him before the season.
“Carlos, mate, would you just –”
“No.”
“Would you listen to me for one –”
“No. I am busy.”
The words came out crisp and irritated as the Spaniard was unlocking his car after a day of pre-season prep at the factory. Charles knew it was bullshit – he’d overheard his teammate chatting to Felicio ten minutes earlier about his plans for the evening, which amounted to a fat lot of nothing. He had time for a quick conversation. He just didn’t want one.
Well, too bad, Charles thought to himself. He jogged over to Carlos’s car, catching the door as he tried to shut it, positioning his body in such a way that Carlos wouldn’t be able to close the door without hurting him. His teammate glared up at him from the driver’s seat but thankfully didn’t squish him, because Carlos is not by nature a violent man, even in the face of another dom blatantly inserting himself into his space and looming over him in a way that would’ve definitely put his hackles up.
Charles winced, knowing he was overstepping, but pushed onwards. “I am sorry about the Lewis situation,” he said earnestly. “It is not fair. You have been – you know you have performed well, just as well as me most years, and they should not be –”
Carlos scoffed, cutting him off. “Save it. You knew, didn’t you?”
Charles frowned, confused.
“Monaco. In May. ‘Hello, Lewis’ you said,” Carlos mocked, voice pitched high.
“Ah.” Charles winced again. He’d forgotten about that. “Well. Yes. There was…but you know that I could not say –”
“I know,” Carlos interrupted sharply, “that you could not tell me. I have been in this sport for ten years. I know how contract negotiations work.” The hand on the steering wheel clenched, knuckles white against the leather. “I know. I do not care. I am – I am angry anyways.”
Something vaguely guilty stirred in Charles’s stomach.
Carlos took a deep breath. His grip loosened slightly. “We will talk when I am not so angry, Charles. But for now? Fuck off.”
The last two words practically rang off the concrete, the tone vicious and laced with a heavy dose of dominance, a hair’s breadth away from an order. If Charles was submissive, it would’ve been borderline unacceptable to be so forceful.
He’s not, though.
Charles felt the instinctive irritation brewing at another dom’s posturing but quashed it ruthlessly, because he’s well past the age where indulging his dynamic instincts in a pointless pissing contest is acceptable. He took a deep breath, nodded, and stepped aside. The car door slammed, and then Carlos peeled out of the carpark, leaving Charles alone in the bone-deep cold of the January evening.
They did talk, eventually. In Bahrain, after testing, once Carlos had a few weeks to digest the news. They’d spoken over room service in Charles’s hotel room, cross-legged on the bed as they ate their dietician-approved chicken and conversed quietly about Lewis, Ferrari and what 2025 would hold for each of them. They’d cleared the air. Buried the hatchet. Things between them had settled, but they were both aware that the tension would not fade until the situation was resolved.
How it would be resolved was unclear at that point. Maybe Carlos would find another seat. Maybe Mercedes would want him. Maybe Red Bull, if Perez continued to underperform. Maybe a backmarker if one of the veterans retired, or if they lost patience with one of the rookies in development.
Maybe he wouldn’t find another seat. Maybe he’d have to retire.
The thought of Carlos being forced out of F1 at his peak, after some of the best performances of his career, was demoralising enough for Charles. He couldn’t imagine how that possibility would be affecting Carlos himself. That’s why when the rapid mood swings set in as the season got underway, Charles raised his eyebrows at the uncharacteristic behaviour, but ultimately didn’t pry. Pressure and uncertainty affect everyone differently, and Carlos was under a tremendous amount of both. Charles liked the other man enough to try to avoid adding to it where he could.
When the Williams contract is announced in July, Charles assumes it’ll start winding down. Carlos has a seat, he’ll keep his career, and the Williams project looks promising from what he’s heard. When he congratulates him, Carlos seems in a better mood than he has all year. There’s a lightness to him now that the stress has abated. His shoulders are looser. He smiles more readily. When Charles teases him in the garage, he merely laughs instead of biting his head off.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t last.
The lead-in to the summer break is chaos in the paddock. The aftermath of Lando’s crash in Silverstone is messy for everyone. All the drivers face an increased level of scrutiny as the public wonders if Norris could hide a secret submissive side for years, what could the others be hiding? The attention doesn’t do anyone favours, but Carlos takes it worse than most. He gets curt in his interviews, waspish when the media start asking personal questions. Charles assumes it’s a solidarity thing – Carlos is still thick as thieves with Lando, and it’s all too obvious how much the frenzy’s been bothering the McLaren driver – but that doesn’t fully explain the sudden animosity.
Carlos’s move to Williams fans the flames of silly season speculation as well. He’s removed himself from the picture, but the journalists still won’t leave him out of the discourse. Perez is continuing to shit the bed each week. Ricciardo is underperforming, as well. After Antonelli smashed the car on debut, the sharks smelled blood in the water. Their rookie prospect doesn’t look ready, so why didn’t Mercedes offer Carlos the seat? Or Red Bull, when two of their four drivers look washed?
They go into the break and come out the other side with the stories still coming thick and fast. Carlos vacillates between cheerful pleasantries, surly silence and nasty shouting matches each weekend. Charles grows increasingly baffled by his teammate’s instability as the season continues to unfold. He doesn’t understand it at all. Yes, the media is being obnoxious, but surely Carlos is through the worst of it?
They finish out the European leg. They go to Singapore, and Carlos’s crash with Perez doesn’t help matters at all. Then the triple header starts, and it’s a rollercoaster from start to finish. Charles wins in COTA. Carlos wins in Mexico. Both victories are celebrated raucously, because the team really is fond of both of them, and they’re all too aware that they likely won’t have the opportunity to celebrate like this again. Unless their car has a miraculous change in performance characteristics, they won’t do well in the last three races of the season. Unless McLaren completely fall off, they won’t win the constructors.
It's a bitter pill to swallow, but they made their peace with a mediocre season some time ago. They move on.
Vegas is the tipping point. Like all of Ferrari’s greatest debacles, it comes out of nowhere. They go into the weekend with a plan. Minor tweaks are made in practice and the pre-race briefings, but nothing particularly unusual is decided. The strategy is simple – for a Ferrari strategy, at least. Carlos seems a little out of sorts in the days leading up to the race, but that’s nothing new by this point in the season. Charles lines up on the grid expecting a fairly standard race, with the only possible excitement being a potential podium finish.
The lights go out. He and Carlos both get a decent start. The race unfolds, and it appears to be simply business as usual. Follow the racing line. Manage tyre degradation. Nothing crazy.
Then it’s time to pit.
It’s not their smoothest operation, that’s for certain. They maintain the order – Carlos in P4, Charles ahead of him – but the gap between them shrinks, and Charles exits the pitlane on cooler tyres than he’d prefer to have with this delta behind.
“Carlos has been told to not overtake,” Bryan’s voice crackles in his ear.
Okay. Good. That’s only fair, when the team were the ones to erase the gap Charles had built between them.
They round the corner, onto the straight.
Carlos has DRS.
He sails past him into the next corner with ease, and Charles seethes.
“Fuck!” He bites back the worst of his fury, but can’t resist the urge to jab the radio button. “Maybe try in Spanish next time.”
Bryan doesn’t really respond. Charles didn’t expect him to – none of his engineers have ever been the type to actually hash things out, especially not over a signal broadcasted to the rest of the paddock. At Ferrari, they like to stew on arguments instead, resentment brewing until it inevitably overflows behind closed doors. It’s a stupid approach to conflict resolution, but Charles knows better than to fight it. In a team as old as this one, some things truly cannot be changed.
Honestly, it’s getting ridiculous. This is not the first time bullshit like this has screwed him over. Carlos has always been slightly too willing to do his own thing. The team has never disincentivised it strongly enough to stop him going rogue. If this dynamic flows over to when Lewis comes onboard, it’s not like they’re going to tell Lewis Hamilton of all people off, so Charles has to nip it in the bud now.
Charles loves this team. He’s dreamed of winning a championship in red since he was a boy. Driving for Ferrari, after years spent in their development program, is a cornerstone of his identity at this point. But before he’s a Ferrari driver, Charles Leclerc is a dominant. It’s not in his nature to take this sort of thing lying down.
The post-race briefing is going to be fucking spicy. Charles will make sure of it.
He broods throughout the rest of the race, the rush and adrenaline doing nothing to soothe his ruffled instincts. Once he crosses the line, Bryan’s voice is in his ear again, saying something bland and noncommittal. Charles snaps back, thoroughly fed up with the whole situation. Being nice fucks me over, all the fucking time! It’s not even being nice. It’s just being respectful.
Because ultimately, that’s what this really comes down to: respect.
Charles is not the type of dom to be ruled by his base urges. He tries to avoid the caveman stereotypes of his dynamic. He tries to be rational, to be fair, to set aside his gut reactions and take the high road. He’s above the pettiness he participated in back in the day when his rivals got on his nerves. He’s grown out of pushing people into puddles now. He’s learned, like all responsible doms learn, to leash the parts of himself that aren’t fit for public consumption and to only set them loose when it’s appropriate to do so.
This, though? The false promises, the empty apologies? The way his fucking team is just completely unwilling to enforce basic fairness, and then tries to gaslight him for being annoyed about it?
This shit really pushes his buttons.
His instincts are chomping at the bit by the time he climbs out of the car in parc fermé. He gets weighed, does his media, and then disappears back into Ferrari hospitality to shed his race suit and wash up while Carlos is busy. Most of the Ferrari staff are out by the stage for the ceremony, but one of the pit crew lingers long enough to let him know that the debrief was cancelled as a result of the late hour and early flights scheduled to Qatar.
“When was this decided?” Charles asks in Italian.
Dante shrugs. “I think Fred was pondering it earlier, apparently, but our timeframes for pack-up were only confirmed a few minutes before the race ended.”
So a last-minute call, then. Probably to avoid any unpleasantries from Charles. What a joke.
“You’re still flying with us?”
Charles frowns. “Of course. We board at four, right?”
“Yeah, it’s still four,” Dante assures him. “Just checking, since Carlos changed his plans. He’s flying over on Tuesday now.”
The Monégasque driver’s frown deepens. “Ah.”
That’s odd. He and Carlos both usually travel with the team, especially during back-to-backs. They’d spoken about playing chess on the flight a few hours ago. He had no idea his plans had changed, and rather abruptly so from the sounds of it.
Charles scowls. He’s probably going to an afterparty. He has a podium to celebrate, after all.
“I’ll see you at the airport, anyway!” Dante tosses over his shoulder as he heads out to join the crowd by the barriers.
“Right. See you then.”
They touch down in Qatar on Sunday. Carlos’s absence further delays the team briefing, so it’s Wednesday morning by the time they settle down to discuss what happened in Vegas. Charles is prompt. He’s been anticipating this meeting, his ire barely fading over the days since the last race, so he’s there nearly ten minutes early. By the time the rest of the senior staff file into the room and the clock ticks over to the hour, he’s eager to get on with proceedings.
This is made more difficult by Carlos’s absence.
They give him a few minutes, because while Carlos is meticulous and organised and never misses any team engagements, he does tend to run on Latin time. Being a minute or two late isn’t unusual for him. When he hasn’t shown up by 10:05, people start making noises. Riccardo frowns and pulls out his phone, presumably to text him. Bryan looks vaguely uncomfortable. Fred doesn’t react overtly, but Charles has known him long enough to recognise the muted slant of displeasure to his brow.
Carlos stumbles through the doors at 10:08, harried and apologetic. Fred waves him off and starts the meeting, but Charles is distracted. There’s nothing overt out of place – Carlos is wearing his usual Ferrari polo and jeans, his hair is only slightly ruffled from running late, and he has his usual notebook and pen with him. Something about the picture is slightly off, though. A small difference in posture. A slight sheen of exhaustion in his eyes that shouldn’t be there, even accounting for the jetlag he wouldn’t have thrown off yet. A subtle nervous energy about him, twitchy and unsettled.
There’s also the way he’s absolutely refusing to make eye contact with Charles, which is…interesting.
Doms don’t really do that. They tend to do the opposite, actually. Eye contact is an assertion of power, of presence. Every fight they’ve ever had over the four years they’ve been teammates has been fought while glaring daggers at each other. That’s how doms usually argue, especially when they don’t believe they’re in the wrong.
Is this an indicator of guilty feelings? Is this some sort of weird inverse powerplay?
Charles doesn’t know, and they longer they sit there, the less he actually cares. He came into this meeting itching to throw down the gauntlet and make his grievances known. As Fred meanders through the standard spiel on team unity, Charles finds his anger draining away. His instincts don’t settle, but they shift. The need to assert himself, to establish himself as top dog, to get his own way and win, it diminishes. A new urge emerges as Carlos shrinks under the team’s scrutiny, as he meekly accepts Fred’s critique of his actions. An urge to pause, to check in, to see if Carlos is all right, because right now Charles’s instincts are telling him that there is something else going on here.
What, he doesn’t know. Why his dominant hindbrain is insisting he fuss over his teammate the way he’d fuss over a frightened submissive, he has no idea.
Maybe it’s the way his gaze is lowered, eyes only flicking up hesitantly every so often. Maybe it’s the way Carlos lets the team set the tone and control the narrative, the way he accepts their account of events without even trying to push back. Maybe it’s the way he isn’t trying to lead the discussion, instead willing to follow where Fred takes it, even as he looks more and more uncomfortable with the direction it’s moving in.
Carlos has always been fairly easy-going for a dom, but this is on a whole other level. He’s acting like he’s not even a dom at all.
This whole situation is very, very odd.
With Charles distracted, and Carlos uncharacteristically biddable, the tension present earlier fizzles out into something unsatisfyingly vague. They don’t reach any real conclusions. The team don’t really seem to know what to make of their usually fiery drivers being so disengaged in the aftermath of one of their most contentious issues on track. The meeting wraps up with Fred dismissing them, and in another uncharacteristic display, Carlos is the first one out the door.
Normally, he’d hang around and chat. This time, he vanishes.
Charles, of course, gets up to follow him.
What? He’s curious. He’s confused. He’s almost a little concerned, because as much as he’s irritated by how things went over the Vegas weekend, Carlos is his friend and he’s acting as if he’s been, like, possessed or something.
The Ferrari hospitality suite in Qatar is one of the larger ones on the calendar. Their driver rooms are tucked away at the back, away from the hustle and bustle of the common areas. The corridor is quiet, the noise of the paddock softened to a hush by the bland white walls. Charles rounds the corner, footsteps muffled by the carpet, as his teammate disappears into his driver’s room and shuts the door behind him.
Charles jogs the last few steps and knocks. “Carlos?”
There’s no response from inside.
Charles knocks again, slightly more insistent. “Carlos? Can we talk?”
Soundproofing is not a priority in these rooms. Charles can hear the rustle of fabric, a sharp inhale from behind the door. He still doesn’t get a response, though, which is unusual. Generally, if Carlos doesn’t want to be disturbed, he has very little issue expressing that. That time in the Maranello carpark is far from the only time his teammate’s told him to fuck off.
“I saw you go in, mate,” Charles says, now slightly worried. “You left the briefing very quickly. Is everything alright?”
There’s a loud bang from inside, followed by a series of smaller crashes. Charles winces.
Carlos curses under his breath, his voice muffled through the door. It’s oddly thick, though. Wavering. Watery, almost. Charles frowns, pressing his ear to the doorframe. There’s a choked, shuddering gasp, followed by an almost inaudible groan that has his worry blossoming into proper concern.
Right. He can’t ignore that. He’ll just have to apologise for overstepping later.
“I’m coming in,” Charles warns, pushing down on the handle and shouldering the door open. “Are you –”
His words trail off as he lays eyes on the scene inside.
The room is a disaster. There’s clothes and equipment everywhere, tossed aside haphazardly in a far cry from Carlos’s habitual neatness. The massage table usually set up in the centre is upended on its side, legs twisted and half-collapsed. There’s a dirty towel on the floor next to it, slowly being soaked by an upturned water bottle. The air smells sour, tinged with old sweat and a faint hint of iron.
Carlos is sprawled in a heap in the corner as if his legs had just given out, halfway out of his shirt, dishevelled and panting. When the door opens, he jerks like he’s been hit and scrambles to turn around, eyes wide and glossy. He’s paler than Charles has ever seen him. There’s a subtle tremor to his arms where they’re propping him up, back to the wall almost defensively.
None of that distracts Charles from what he saw in the scant moments before he’d turned around.
Lashes. Bruising. Blood, even – dark, dried and crusted in patches, rosso corsa red in others. Tanned skin flushed, swollen and inflamed. Marks scrawled across his shoulders and the planes of his upper back, splattered carelessly close to his spine. Ugly uneven splotches of colour, blue and black and green-tinged yellow peeking out over the waistband of his jeans.
Charles, for once in his life, is genuinely lost for words.
There’s a long moment where neither of them blink. Carlos looks terrified. He’s practically shaking. In their four years as teammates, Charles has never seen him anywhere near this rattled. Even at his most emotional, after vicious fights in debriefs or after gut-wrenching losses, Carlos has always come across as composed, in control. He’s never seen him look so – so small, so vividly unsure.
The expression triggers something in Charles’s brain, and Carlos’s strange behaviour all season is rapidly rearranged into a shape that makes more sense. The moodiness. The sudden, seemingly uncontrollable swings from one extreme to another. The way the media’s focus on Lando, on Lando’s submission, got under his skin so much. The twitchiness in the garage. The subdued, shamed deference in the meeting just now. The visible fresh marks littering his torso, unmistakeably from impact play.
Putain de merde, Charles never even suspected that he was –
Abruptly, he shakes himself out of it. That’s not important right now. There are more pressing things to be concerned with than the exact nature of his teammate’s dynamic.
Charles steps over to the table and rights it, settling it back into place. He picks up the water bottle, screws the lid back on, and leaves it on a shelf. The towel gets used to mop up the rest of the spill, and then gets kicked into the far corner along with the rest of the clutter on the floor. He then digs out a fresh towel from one of the cupboards, one of the ones in a rich Ferrari red, and spreads it out over the faux leather of the table.
They’re lucky they don’t stock the white ones in Qatar. It’ll be easier to hide the stains.
Charles looks down at his hands where they’re braced on the table. He takes a deep breath, arranging his expression into something more collected than his face naturally wants to assume. He knows he has to tread carefully, here. He knows he can’t afford to fuck this up.
Then he crosses over to where Carlos is still frozen in the corner, crouches in front of him, and extends a hand.
“Come, Carlos,” he says, in a tone he’s never used with his teammate before, kind yet firm. “Let’s get you up, yes?”
Another long pause. Carlos’s eyes dart nervously from his hand to his face to the floor, still assiduously avoiding looking at him directly. Charles waits him out, and eventually, his patience pays off. Hesitantly, Carlos takes his hand.
Charles can feel him trembling. It takes a concerted effort not to react.
He straightens, pulling Carlos to his feet as well, awkward and unsteady. Charles steers him over to the table with a hand on his elbow, lingering slightly closer than he would otherwise. Carlos is wobbling enough that he’s not convinced he’ll make it, but he manages to stagger close enough to lean against the edge of the table, a pained wheeze escaping through gritted teeth.
“Yes, very good. That’s it,” Charles murmurs. “Lie down for me, if you can. On your front.”
There’s a hitch to Carlos’s breathing. His shoulders hunch forward, ashamed. After a long moment, he obeys wordlessly, and it’s so viscerally foreign and unlike him that it’s off-putting. Charles has to clamp down on the impulse to ask questions, to demand answers. Anyone with eyes could tell that Carlos isn’t in a state to provide them. Instead, he takes another breath, and helps Carlos ease down onto his stomach, legs outstretched but arms curled up almost protectively by his ribs.
He looks like a shell of his usual self. He’s still tense. He’s still shaking, ever so slightly. He’s still avoiding eye contact religiously, head turned away from the side of the bench Charles is standing on, and he still hasn’t said a word.
Charles rests a hand on Carlos’s upper arm, a few inches below the marks on his shoulders. Now that he can get a good look at them, he’s disgusted. They’re – they’re fucking hideous. Totally uneven, the left side far heavier than the right. Most of them are crooked, intersecting each other, clustered far too tightly in certain areas. Dealt by some sort of flogger, for the most part, and then a cane. Whoever did it didn’t warm the skin up properly for either implement. The smaller dots are a dark purple, tiny scabs dotted here and there. The lashes are deeper, thin welts interspersed with the occasional cut, a few of which have broken open and are weeping sluggishly.
Usually, that alone wouldn’t be too concerning, but Charles is experienced enough to tell that these marks aren’t quite as fresh as he’d first assumed. If they’re still in this condition two to three days after they were administered, then they were probably deeper at first. Too deep for a play session less than a week out from getting back in the car, experiencing forces that would chafe healing wounds when Carlos’s back is pressed against the seat in the cockpit. And they definitely weren’t treated properly afterwards.
The work of an amateur, Charles thinks in distaste. A cocky one, at that. One who obviously cares far more about their craft than about their canvas.
His eyes travel downwards, and Charles wants to break something. At least the shoulders are a safe enough area to work with. The flog marks continue down to his lower back, over his kidneys. They’re far too close to the knobs of Carlos’s spine, too close to the nape of his neck at the top. There’s bruising along the upper swell of his ass, right across his tailbone, and that’s what Charles can see while Carlos has his pants on. He’s sure it’s worse, underneath.
Charles, he realises, is furious.
He can’t decide if he’s angrier at the bastard who did this, or his idiot teammate who let it happen. Anyone with an ounce of common sense would’ve safeworded at the first strike to a no-go zone. The neck, spine, kidneys, tailbone – it’s simply too dangerous. Does Carlos genuinely not know? How? How can someone get to thirty without an awareness of the basic safety elements of such a common kink?
On either side of the equation, at that!
Charles has known Carlos for years. He’s felt the press of his instincts often enough to be very confident that Carlos does, in fact, have a dominant streak – Charles has seen too much evidence to believe otherwise; Carlos can’t have been faking it so convincingly for the entire time they’d known each other. He’d always assumed the older man simply was a dominant, just because most of them in the paddock are, and switches tend to be a rarer breed.
In hindsight, that was a rather bold assumption. Looking back, there were clues. But still.
Carlos Sainz is a smart man, far too smart for this sort of stupidity. From the very rare conversations they’d had about it in the past, Charles had always got the impression that Carlos was a reliable scene partner, responsible with his submissives. Did he completely misread him? Because Charles can’t imagine anyone but the most ignorant, skeevy doms brushing over such an obvious scene safety violation, and he really didn’t think Carlos was the type.
Surely, on the receiving end, Carlos would’ve said something.
(Or is it something darker, more malicious? Did he say something? Was he ignored? Is this the result of a failed safeword?
Fuck, he hopes not.)
But there’s no point getting worked up about it now, Charles reminds himself. Carlos is in no state to discuss these matters. He’s nervous. He’s frightened. He’s in pain. He’s probably going through some sort of drop, Charles thinks grimly. It’s a conversation that can be had later. At the moment, he needs to focus on dealing with what’s in front of him.
Charles makes sure his voice comes out steadily when he speaks. “This bit here is quite dangerous,” he says, artificially calm.
He ghosts his fingers over Carlos’s lower back. Carlos makes a miserable sound in the back of his throat, flinching away from the touch.
“You have not seen the doctor, I assume.”
Silence.
Charles sighs. “It doesn’t look too bad, I suppose. I’ve seen worse. But it does not take much to do damage in this area.” He pauses. “You need to be honest with me, Carlos. Has there been any serious pain? Anything unusual, I mean.”
More silence. Carlos’s shoulders are creeping upwards again.
“Nausea? Vomiting? Any blood when you – ah, when you use the restroom?”
It takes a moment, but Carlos clearly his throat weakly. “No. Just – just surface pain,” he mutters.
His voice is quiet, strained. It cracks midway through the sentence, and there’s a distinct wetness to it by the time he finishes that Charles knows well. He usually hears it in slightly more pleasurable situations, and never before from Carlos, but he’s very familiar with the sound of a submissive fighting back tears.
Putain.
“Good. Thank you.” In more careful, gentle tone, he continues. “Now. Would you like me to get Rupert?”
Carlos makes a quiet, dismayed noise. “No, I.” He gulps. “I’m fine.”
“You are not fine,” Charles says, not unkindly. “These marks need tending. I can find your trainer, or the doctor, or I can do it myself. What will it be?”
Charles tacked on that last option almost as an afterthought. He’s not expecting it when Carlos takes him up on it.
“You – you can.”
Charles blinks down at him, shocked. Carlos shrinks under his gaze. There’s another beat of silence. After a long, tense moment, Carlos turns his head back towards him and meets his gaze for the first time since before the race in Vegas.
“I…Charles, please.”
It’s hardly any more than a whisper, raw and hurt. Dark eyes swim with something fractious and scared, an aching vulnerability that tugs at Charles’s instincts, hooking something buried deep in his chest.
“Of course,” Charles says softly. He takes another deep breath, mulls over his options. Then he squeezes Carlos’s arm. “Let me fetch my kit.”