„He is an idiot."
„You too."
_-_-_-_-_
Haydée and Arthur.
DeeDee and Artie.
You can say it how you want but it still has same meaning. It's always these two, brunette girl and brunette boy.
Since her birth they know each other. They were their first...
"He doesn't care that you don't like cars, DeeDee. He's just happy when he can see you."
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~•~
"Sweetie, you know how important this is to me," Olivier Panis looked at his daughter, who was standing in the doorway to his hospital room, giving him the same piercing look his wife, Anne, often did.
Haydée didn't resemble her mother much; she looked more like her father. Hair color made a big difference in appearance, and since Haydée inherited her father's brown hair, she seemed to have inherited almost nothing of her mother's features. Sometimes it bothered her that she didn't get her mother's blonde hair, but over the years, she got used to the brown and even stopped wanting to dye it.
In behavior, however, she was more like her mother, especially in wanting her father to stop racing and focus on something else. Something less deadly. Something normal fathers do when they're not working, like golf. But people who race professionally in cars or on motorcycles, basically anyone involved in motorsports, know very well how hard it is to quit. The adrenaline you experience in every race becomes addictive, and you realize you can't live without it.
"You could have died, Dad," Haydée said with a cold calmness that could stop glaciers in Antarctica from melting. She tried to appear composed and not freak out because she knew this scenario all too well. She knew that raising her voice and yelling wouldn't help—something she learned from her mother, who was currently standing next to her husband lying on the hospital bed with a bandage around his head and an IV in his arm.
A look his wife knew from past years when he was still racing Formula One. Haydée had also experienced these scenarios, but she never learned to accept them. She didn't want to accept them. He was her father, and she shouldn't be okay with seeing him in a hospital bed with some injury. She shouldn't be visiting him in the hospital at all.
"I know," her father nodded, "it's just part of my job." His answer never changed. He'd been giving this response ever since Haydée learned to talk and always accused him of getting himself killed in that car. She hated this answer because it felt like her own father was mocking her. She really wanted him to come up with a different answer, but that didn't exist. He knew it. Everyone who ever started with motorsport knew what they were getting into the first time they sat behind the wheel. Her father knew it too, and that was something she couldn't fault him for.
"You're a father. Your job should be to tease me with stupid jokes and forbid me from dating boys because I'm your little girl. At your age, you definitely shouldn't be driving those ridiculously fast cars where one wrong blink can put you into a wall," Haydée explained. She couldn't bring herself to enter the room, still standing in the doorway.
She was glad she wasn't treated like a little girl by her father. She had freedom, and for that, she was grateful because she saw her classmates complaining about their fathers embarrassing them in front of their boyfriends. But he couldn't embarrass her simply because he was rarely home. She never moved out of her parents' house because they were only home for two days every two weeks.
