Tuesday, November 20th, 2018- Monaco-Ville, Monaco
The Private Collection of Antique Cars of H.S.H. the Prince of Monaco
"Isn't this just a little too on the nose? Even for you?" It was early enough in the grand scheme of things for Daniel to start trying Max's patience in earnest.
"Didn't feel like switching it up? Trying something, anything, even remotely new? Of course not because why bother? Not when the same cars that you've seen again and again are still just waiting to be stared at by you for the umpteenth time in a row."
"Has your dad gotten a little..." Daniel pauses mid thought, bending at the knees until he's on Kaia's level before continuing, "predictable in his old age?"
While it might not be the most grownup of choices, it was more fun than it looked, especially when one was as damn near to being an expert at taunting the young Austrian as he was.
But still, nothing. Not so much as a sideways glare or a grumble of agitation. Not even a huff of annoyance or a sigh of frustration.
"Or perhaps," he playfully taps the tip of the toddler's minute upturned button nose, giving her a quick exaggerated wink, "he's just painfully, soul suckingly boring?"
"Leave off," Max snorts and then swings, catching him soundly upside the head, "still younger than you last I checked."
"Only on paper, never in spirit," he retorts, rubbing at the back of his head with an absent hand despite the fact that the smack had really just sounded like it hurt.
The only lingering pain that Daniel could still feel was the rather lasting effects of the blow he'd just taken to his pride, considering the fact that he'd been caught lacking by the very man he'd quite loudly declared to be easily predictable.
"Whatever makes you feel better. Or younger. Dealer's choice, really."
He doesn't bother to stop long enough to put any actual, conscious thought into what to say next because he infinitely prefers to just go in blind and mad lib it, filling in the blanks with whatever he touches first while rummaging through some dingy backroom of his brain.
"And you, Verstappen, are an absolute filthy, fucking slag," though somehow, he manages to swallow that very first laugh when it rises to the surface, there's no smothering the laugher that follows.
Not even if Daniel had wanted to, which for the record, he hadn't. No, not when the look on Max's face had been too genuine, too dazed and far too surprised to not let that mirth that starts in his chest as a rumbling which builds in his throat until it spills over, burbling up and out of him unrestrained, sounding contagiously happy, even to his own two ears.
And for a moment, if only for that very moment, life feels suspended, like reality has been reduced to a single snapshot in time, the world around them narrowed down to the scene they stand in, together and laughing and relishing in the now— the three of them, just himself and that young, lost boy he'd met on a race track what felt like a lifetime ago, the one he'd watched become first a Formula 1 pilot, then a father and then a man, and the little girl who'd saved a golden boy by making him a parent.
Yet, Daniel knew without having to ask that something was missing in that instant, the moment robbed from the grasp of nostalgia but a singular absent component— the last facet, the final piece, the person who took three cobbled together parts and made them a whole.
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Friday, November 23rd, 2018- Milton Keynes, England, United Kingdom
