OK Number 57 - Ashes

As the Kimigayo faded in recognition of Kallen's success, her posture fell from a respectful alertness, with her back as straight as a ruler, as she kicked immediately into celebration mode, leaping off the top step with her champagne in tow, landing on her haunches, shaking the bottle a bit more for good measure, before popping the cork and letting the froth roar out of the end, off the podium and down towards the crowd of engineers as she laughed with them. It was only once she felt the back of her head get sprayed by Suzaku that she turned to inflict her alcohol-based wrath on the two men above and behind her as the Camelot representative collecting the prize for fastest constructor leaped out of the way.

She had only led for 310 meters off the start from Pole, around 49,000 meters in the middle, and 173 meters at the end out of the 308,000 meters the race spanned, but that last 173 meters had been all she needed to lead to get the win. With all her skill, speed, and courage, she had only regained the lead out of the last corner, but it had been enough; she had taken the win out from under Suzaku's nose at the final turn of the final lap, and if that didn't get her blood running, nothing else would.

"Cut that one a little close, eh?" Kallen laughed down to her engineers from her elevated position, as they laughed in unison and cheered along, acknowledging that, while it was quick as all hell, it certainly had put both car, driver and crew under extreme pressure, with the race having to be conducted flawlessly to put them in contention. However, since perhaps Canada of 2018, Kallen was not one to choke, particularly not when the task was simply to drive as quickly as possible, something she had down to almost a fine art.

Her gloves were still on though, Kallen being the only person among the top three to not have taken them off yet as the other two, with sweaty palms and worn out fingers which had spent the last two hours gripping onto two ends of a twisting wheel, were barely able to wait to get off fast enough. Kallen by contrast was in no hurry to reveal the state of her hands, as the grip sensations of her clenched fist against the champagne bottle reminded her; spiking, searing pain.

The glove was fused to her hand by dried blood, with her wounds opening with the frequent opening and closing of her hand between manhandling the wheel and flurrying across the array of buttons to alter the brake balance, differential locking and battery deployment across the laps. This stretching, retracting, loosening before tightening again, had left her hands in agony, and Kallen could see the blood dried mid-flow down her wrist. Her hands could still move, but it was nothing short of hell, and Kallen had no intention of revealing to the public, and perhaps more importantly her doctor, the extent to which her hands had been burned by pulling the gloves off.

Particularly given that, with the blood now conjoining her hands to her gloves, the latter would not be separating from the former without a fight, and the violent separation of skin from body as the force trying to pull the gloves off would pull quite a bit more along with it. And so, instead, she was content to simply wave the bottle about with her gloved hands clasped around its neck, hiding the spikes of pain.

However, as Kallen clinked her bottle of champagne against Suzaku and Rolo, each with their own Jeroboam and tried to escape, she caught sight of Jeremiah approaching with a microphone and a devilish grin, causing Kallen to roll her eyes.

"Ach, can't get drunk 'till I'm done with you can I?"

"No you can't." he laughed. "And of course, for the boys and girls at home, obviously, you should never get drunk, our friend Kallen was just kidding."

Kallen's face suggested otherwise, however Jeremiah, ever noble, soldiered on, and began to ask, however meanderingly, "So, that's two wins from the last three races, and your third win of this season. Would have been three in a row but… well Hungary…"

"Nothing more needs to be said on that front. Eight kilograms is the difference between first and fifth."

Jeremiah, somewhat put off by her immediacy, nodded, and replied "Aye. Ifs and buts, but hardly as if the other drivers are immune to bad luck. Anyway-"

"No." Kallen interrupted. "I'll let you go on, but it wasn't bad luck. We made a mistake, and we can learn from it. But lets not say that there was nothing we could have done differently, or else it'll happen again. It was on us."

Taken aback, Jeremiah took a moment to recompose himself, not used to this sort of self-criticism from Kallen, before regaining his flow and resuming "Well that's fair. No team is ever perfect, and complacency will be the ruin of any front running team, but we're celebrating your success. As I said, two wins in the last three races, you've scored the most points out of anyone in the last three races at sixty, with your brother having the closest tally at forty-nine out of the last three, that places the pair of you third and fourth in the standings, hundred and thirty and a hundred and twenty-two respectively. Given the nosedive Li Xingke has been experiencing… he's only at a hundred and seventy-three, some forty-three points ahead of you, and with this momentum, are you now looking at a run at the title?"

"I mean…" Kallen mulled through, breathing out in a huffed sigh as she tried to explain. "I just try and enjoy each race. Two years ago I was green as grass, and… I mean, if you ask someone would they like a championship and they say no they should be admitted, so the answer is obviously yes, but it's not the big driving force. But I'm keeping an eye on the points, and making sure that gap to first and second isn't getting bigger, it's getting smaller."

Jeremiah nodded, before continuing "Your style is fast, and I think I'm right in saying the folks at home love to see someone do to these cars the sorts of things you're doing with them, throwing them into all sorts of shapes, but sometimes it can be very fast and feel very nice, but you lose a lot of time, and you don't always get the best result you could have done. It's worked out at Monaco and Britain for you, but sometimes it's like Bahrain last year, and even here it only just worked out for you, you only picked up the lead at the last corner. Could this possibly compromise any run at the title, or is it just… enjoying the race is more important than that?"

"I picked the lead up though, didn't I?" Kallen replied, with a sceptical eyebrow raised at Jeremiah's line of questioning. It had won her the race after all on this strategy, about as good a thing for her championship as could happen. "Mightn't have left myself much wriggle room but you don't get points for leading the most laps, you get points for leading at the flag. Not sure if there's a contradiction between enjoying what I do and being successful."

"Okay, hehehe… very good, very good, now go get drunk."

"Oh, with pleasure Diethard, with pleasure."

Suzaku saw Lelouch visibly withhold his breath, right arm flopped limply on the desk and left pressed firmly into his brow ridge, with the end of the thumb and the length of the forefinger massaging the pliable flesh. It wasn't anger as much; Suzaku had seen Lelouch be angry, be livid even as he stewed away, homeless on the couch of Suzaku's home as Genbu stayed out late for his work, and it was not at all like this. Back then there was a more calculating, quiet rage, a private, silent insistence that someway, somehow, he would get back at whoever had wronged him, and would spend every waking moment plotting and scheming to make that a reality. This Lelouch was neither calculating nor hyperfocused; he was distracted, letting out sighs, constantly adjusting his posture, seeming mainly exasperated and impatiently trying to deal with his frustration.

Suzaku was quite similarly on edge, though perhaps from slightly different perspective. Both a shark and a cod might be uneasy when they encounter in the depths of the ocean, however to equate the position of the two would be a grave error. Lelouch seemed to be approaching the end of his tether with the conduct of his subordinates, holding the leashes and simply undecided on how to apply them. By contrast Suzaku, firmly at the end of such a leash, was incredibly unsettled more as a function of nerves, being in a position where Lelouch was angry, but any reasonable response Suzaku could give was liable to set him off, which, given that Lelouch was now his employer, was probably not the wisest course of action.

"Faire chier…" Lelouch sighed. "What a bloody…"

Suzaku gulped, fearing the worst. Suzaku and Lelouch knew it. Rolo, by contrast, seemed quite relaxed, however as Lelouch tried to morph his face into a faux-civil grin, like something out of A Clockwork Orange, Suzaku expected that the smile would be wiped from his face fairly quickly, no matter how close a relative to Lelouch he was.

However, for the time being Lelouch, perhaps wanting to build up to Rolo so as to not surprise him with a sudden explosion on his lap, "So… Suzaku, would you like to explain, from your point of view, what happened on the last lap?"

It was Suzaku's turn to let out an exasperated huff, as he spoke through how events had gone down from his perspective, stumbling through how it had unfolded.

"So… Kallen was behind me, who was in front of Rolo. My priority was, as you had said, to keep her behind. She was blisteringly fast on fresh, soft tyres, and so I needed to keep her behind. I did that, I pushed her, forced her wide and away from the apex, and was leading up to Eau Rouge."

"And what happened then Suzaku?"

Lelouch had spat out the sentence with sudden venom, snapping very suddenly and seeming to be trying to send the thought flying off from his tongue as quickly as he could manipulate it. Growing frustrated at Lelouch's leading line of questioning, as Lelouch was hardly subtle about what he wanted Suzaku to explain. "Rolo was able to get a much better exit because he wasn't taking a horrible line to try and hold up a much faster car."

Pausing, Suzaku then used his hands to demonstrate the action as he explained "Rolo then snuck ahead while I was keeping the faster car behind, and led out of La Source, and proceeded to try and keep the lead despite the situation."

"What happened… after that?" Lelouch replied, barely containing his impatience as he tappeted his index finger off the table.

"You made a radio call telling us to hold station, to not attempt to overtake."

"And yet you did." Lelouch insisted. "You decided your own wants and desires were higher than the needs of the team. This could have been our very first win, all you needed to do was keep behind and not impede Rolo, not slow him up and not allow Kallen to close up. You managed to do all of these things and lose us a chance to get our first win, less than a hundred kilometres from France, just five hundred kilometres from our factory, in our first season, but no, you have to make it all about you!"

Suzaku let his shoulders fall as he shook his head, not grasping what his friend was missing, as he tried to explain "Lelouch… I lost almost two seconds through the second sector, just following him. He's a rookie, he's just a kid, and leading a race… he wasn't up to the job."

Seeing Lelouch's gaze wilter, Suzaku tried to justify what he had said, continuing "He was practically trundling through Campus, and I was just terrified that Kallen was going to get me. If I was limited to Rolo's pace, I was just a sitting duck, and then Rolo would be toast once Kallen was past. If Rolo had let me past, there would be a Schwarzenritter on the top step of the podium, however he just kept his foot in it through Blanchimont, forcing us to lose even more time going side by side. You can't prioritise minimising the time lost to fighting, and then let Rolo fight."

Lelouch pointed his index finger into the desk, pressing it firmly into the desk before insisting "There is a reason for that. First of all, his passing you on the Kemmel straight did not lose either of you time, he went past with the better exit speed and there was nothing that could be done. Furthermore, Rolo had the upgrades we made for this race, and is ahead of you in the championship. That doesn't mean you're worse or he's better, but he was the driver in front and with the faster car, even if not the faster package. I sent out that message once he passed you to avoid exactly this."

"Then why was he so slow?" Suzaku replied, now growing deeply irritated. "Kallen was breathing down my neck all the way through Pouhon, and without disrespect to Rolo, keeping him in the lead was not the way to maximise our points haul."

"Well then why did you hold Rolo and yourself up so much through the Bus Stop, allowing Kallen to win?"

"Because Rolo was stretching his elbows and fighting me off!" Suzaku snapped back, now fully angry. "You yourself stressed two laps earlier about how important it was to not lose time to one another, and I was losing time hand over fist from Rolo's bad wake. I needed him to increase the pace to win, and he wasn't budging, so I tried to make it painless with a pass through Blanchimont. Instead, he kept his nose in all the way. If you're asking about who acted without the best interests of the team in mind, Rolo's done as much harm as I have!"

Not able to immediately counter, Lelouch, sat glowering in a wicker backed chair, bitterly pressed his left fingers into his temple, before shaking his head and trying visibly to start again.

"Look… Suzaku… we- I've been depending on you."

Suzaku immediately moved to a position of greater attention as Lelouch moved to a new position of conversational intimacy. Through Lelouch's entire career, he had been at pains to depend on as few people as possible given his operating and substantial memory of crutches and people he had leant on before suddenly leaving him falling without warning. For him, the goal was always to be as autonomous as he could, to have his welfare and the welfare of his family as disconnected from the decisions and actions of others as it could be, disconnecting himself from whatever threads he was dependant on, as he had long known from experience that all he could rely on completely was himself.

In some sense, this was why Kallen's injury had been as impactful as it was; beyond the direct physical impediments, his hard-fought independence, which he had been seeking since being thrown out of his house by his parents to fend for himself, had suffered a major blow, as he had to reintegrate himself however begrudgingly with systems of dependency, which for all he knew could fail with the scribble of a pen.

The upshot of all of this was that Lelouch stating unambiguously that he had, without reservation, been depending on, put himself in a position where he was relying on, where he was placing some element of his own success in the hands and skills of Suzaku, was not a small statement. While it lacked the dramatic flair of "I trust you", "I believe in you", or anything slightly more emotive, saying "I am depending on you." was probably even more impactful given Lelouch's particular context, such that even Rolo leaned forward and widened his eyes, though borderline imperceptibly.

In light of this newly injected sincerity, Suzaku retreated somewhat, becoming less antagonistic as Lelouch presented himself with more vulnerability and trust, before he continued.

"We've all been depending on you, and that isn't… something I find intuitive. You have proved that you're… a spectacular driver, an incredible talent with winning last years championship with a team on deaths door. I know you didn't get into racing to just sit behind and hold off another driver so that the team can score a win with another driver, I com… completely get that. But right now we can't afford to just be doing what we want. We need to put the team first."

"Yes sir."

At once irritated by and understanding of Suzaku's usage of the term, given both the lengths Lelouch had gone to to emphasize and assert his authority, and the more submissive approach Suzaku was taking in light of Lelouch's usage of the word 'depending', Lelouch sighed and, though sympathetically, chastised "You disobeyed a direct team order. This isn't like you. You've been immeasurably great in helping to direct the development of the car, and you're a vital element of this team, but a great driver knows when to push and when to play it safe. You made the wrong call today, and cost us our first win."

Suzaku bit into his bottom lip uncertainly, before raising his finger and commenting "I have a question."

"Please."

Suzaku held his breath for a moment, before going on "You said Rolo was getting the upgrades because he needed more assistance, that he wasn't as skilled and that I would be able to work around not having it better than he would, and that may well be so. But if it is, if giving that upgrade to him was because he needed it more to jump onto my pace, and it's worked and he's faster than he was before, he'd still only be maybe at about my level of speed and lap time."

Pausing briefly to highlight his point, Suzaku, keeping a close eye on the colour of Lelouch's skin, continued "That was borne out by how close we were all race, we were at about the same pace. If you were prioritising the faster package, Rolo wasn't any faster than me, even if his car had the upgrade. Heck, if I was keeping up with him without the upgrade, I must have been going at quite a lick, if there wasn't any difference in pace between us then I was extracting a much higher percentage out of a worse car."

Lelouch blinked, before asking "What are you saying?"

"If team orders were key, Rolo would have observed the earlier one to not fight before he overtook at La Source. This whole affair would not have happened if Rolo held station into Les Combes. He'd have filed in behind me and played defence over the length of the Kemmel, or at the very least taken more margin. But you can't have your cake and eat it too, either Rolo needs to observe team orders too, or neither of us should."

The room went deathly silent, as Suzaku quietly realised he may have crossed some sort of third rail. Lelouch now wore a face of stone, before he shook his head and scribbled a note into a post-it in front of him.

"I'll bear that in mind in the future." the team principal curtly replied. "You're getting the new parts for Italy, so you'll have the chance to prove it. Show that you need it more, that you're more deserving, and we'll change the order of priority for the next upgrade."

Lelouch did keep his word as the sport moved to its final track of the European leg of the season, the Autodromo Nazionale Monza in Italy, the third oldest dedicated motor racing circuit on the planet buried within the deep forest of the Milanese hinterlands. Suzaku, perhaps for having been so combative in the post-race briefing, was amused to receive several prolonged explanations and visual comparative demonstrations that he had definitely received the upgrades. They propelled him up to second on the grid, behind Kallen, who started on Pole position in something that almost seemed to be a given at this phase in the season. He definitely felt the effect, particularly on the long runs where air would now be funnelled out and away from the tyres, reducing drag slightly but reducing tyre heating immensely, almost by an order of magnitude, a relief which would be welcome at a track like Monza, which consisted almost entirely of slow-speed acceleration zones into long straights, which would be light on the front tyres but lethal on the rear tyres, which would have to endure full throttle accelerations from an almost stationary position one hundred and fifty three times over a race distance.

Moreover, with the financial might of Camelot finally now delivering an equivalent upgrade to both of their 2019 cars, there could not be a better time for Suzaku to have something to fight back with.

"Let's see who's faster now that we've got equal cars." Suzaku hissed to himself as he sat at the wheel of his car having arrived at the grid, waiting for the off. Rolo was starting fourth, and was just now behind him as the first of the five red lights lit up.

Suzaku steeled his lips and grasped the wheel, flexing his fingers as they sat wrapped around the moulded handles. Time to remind this rookie of his place.

Li Xingke – 173 (5 wins)

Gino Weinberg – 141 (1 win)

Kallen Kōzuki – 130 (3 wins)

Naoto Kōzuki – 124 (1 win)

Rolo Lamperouge – 107

Suzaku Kururugi – 92

A bit of drama, though it is hardly resolved. The various characters have significant foibles, which inherently bring them into conflict due to their inability to reconcile their opposing incentives.

As such, I'm sure this can only end amicably.

Beyond this, please leave a review on this chapter if you would be so kind, and thank you so much for reading. Have a great New Years!

~G1ll3s