❝ you deserve to be loved the way i can't love you ❞
✧˚. ❃ ↷ ˊ- a story in which two former mercedes juniors find themselves reuniting again in the bitter circumstances of him finally climbing up to the pinnacle of motorsport that she's spent the pa...
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ੈ♡˳ ONE a million emotions
TICK, TICK.
THE CLOCK was deafening. each sharp tick grew louder. every footstep was heavy on her heart, the scratch of pen on paper was dizzying.
tick, tick.
the voices were muffling, the most important conversations of her career disappearing under her grasp no matter how hard she reached to reel it back towards her.
tick, tick.
it was the worst part of the year. dozens of red bull racing employees all shoved into one room, each breaking out into their own conversations that talked over the next person. there were no children in the room, but it only felt like an overwhelming playground full of screaming children, voices drumming louder with every beat of her heart.
tick, tick.
"breathe, catie."
quick to recognise the hand that was gently rubbing her shoulder, it was like the foggy filter had lifted. cato could breathe again.
"sorry," she quickly mumbled, the oxygen trickling back into her lungs. "did i miss something?"
max verstappen felt his sister's head collapse down onto his shoulder. "no," he mumbled back. "mel just got here."
it was the same every season. the same people entered the same room in milton keynes to discuss the upcoming season and it's changes. it was something cato used to be able to skip when she was with force india and renault, but red bull didn't deal with bullshit. she was lucky she had enough talent because otherwise she would've been dropped years ago. she'd seen it tragically happen with nyck de vries; it was cutthroat to be at the top.
melissa, the red bull team principal, wasn't one to play games. she pulled the team into gear and kept them at the heights they'd stolen back from mercedes. she'd put in blood, sweat and tears to go from a engineer to a team principal against all the men that tried to tear her down, and so she didn't back down. melissa was a loaded gun. and she was always what she deemed fashionably late to meetings. she said it was to keep men on their toes, and cato could tell it worked.
"alright, then," she sat down at the head of the table, flipping open the navy blue notebook that no one ever saw her without. the amount of power radiating from one woman was both suffocating and inspiring — and cato understood it firsthand. "lets get this show on the road, hm? what have we got?"
andrew, the head engineer, cleared his throat. "there aren't too many changes this season. i think mclaren and mercedes will start to challenge us this season, probably ferrari, too. the teams have learnt from our dominance last year."
