OK Number 71 - This Is The End

Qualifying on the Saturday was less of a blitz of pace than expected, with many drivers playing their hand strategically for the race. Naoto and Gino did their Q2 runs on the Medium compound tyres to try and get an advantage from running a long first stint in the race, with Suzaku, Kallen, and Rolo having enough pace to deliver a barnstormer first stint, and the latter end of the top ten, like Xingke, Bradley and Nu not having enough pace to make it to Q3 on anything except the fastest tyre.

Surprisingly, it was Naoto who took pole, with the Rebellion having developed to the point where it was definitely ahead of the Camelot. Even more surprisingly than Kallen not claiming her nineteenth pole and first since Japan, she didn't even start on the front row. Neither did Suzaku.

Alongside Naoto on the front row was Rolo Lamperouge, a sentence that read more like a bit from Whose Line Is It Anyway? Suzaku set up his car for the race, and for the first time in four races did not claim Pole position, lining up fifth, with Gino in fourth separating him from Kallen in third. Xingke meanwhile languished all the way back in tenth.

Kallen, not satisfied with the setup, had done all she could. She couldn't change the setup to make the car more racy though, not without violating parc ferme rules. She would just have to work with what she had, which was a car with an unusually vague front end, a consequence of a lack of running in the second Practice session to sort out the setup. It felt like driving with thick, rubbery gloves, lacking the clarity and definition that Kallen normally preferred to feel out the texture in the road surface.

Leaving the disappointing session behind, Kallen walked back to the paddock and towards the bathroom, annexed to the end of the circuit changing room and communal showers. After a face wash and a pause in the toilet, she shook herself dry and left back out towards the washroom. She grabbed a towel, and was about to leave, before a sound suddenly broke the silence settled in the room that Kallen up to this point had assumed was empty but for her.

It was a hollow howl, a wheeze punctured with irregular, inhuman retching from deep within the wells of the chest and the heart. Kallen immediately panicked, trying to look around for the source before noticing a foot stretched out from underneath a shower curtain.

"Holy fuck-" Kallen immediately shouted, as she leapt across the room to check on whoever was behind the curtain. Pulling it away, she saw Li Xingke, laid down prone on the tiled floor with his face faced downwards, knees, crotch and elbows guarded from the hard, wet floor by the towel he was kneeling on, though his exposed ass received no such protection.

"I'll get another towel." Kallen assured as she rushed away, grabbing a hand towel before returning. She turned Xingke around, up and onto his front, sitting him up against the wall with his exposed legs, stretching out like a spider.

With his modesty protected from the front by Kallen's hand towel, and his rear cushioned by the towel she had found him with, she could finally get a view of what was visibly a very ill man.

His skin tone was about the same as Kallen's and Naoto's, normally, however now it was closer to Suzaku's, with a sickly pale undertone to his veins and subskin colouration. Briefly confused by the dissonance in Xingke's appearance, Kallen only caught on to the problem when she looked up to the shelf, and noticed the several pads and containers of powder foundation.

Xingke was hiding his deteriorating flesh by literally hiding it, using makeup subtly to cover up that anything was happening.

Realising this, she stepped back, and saw Xingke for the first time not hidden behind his fireproofs. His body was disturbingly skinny, with ribs so clearly visible that they could be counted without so much as a difficulty. His muscles were barely existent, and his limbs were about as thick as a twig, to a degree that was definitely unhealthy.

Suddenly, his lack of stamina made sense. That he had been doubled over in exhaustion after Monaco, after China, after he had been an Endurance champion notorious for tanking six hour hero stints and not even sweating. It was medical.

And then the final penny dropped; the coughing.

Kallen bent down and gave Xingke some support to lean back into a more comfortable position, before she asked "Do I need to call a doctor, do we need to get someone?"

"No, no." he sighed, coughing out into the towel his final dregs, "No, this is fine. I just need… I just need a minute, stay."

"Are you going to pass out on me, because if so I am definitely going to need to get someone."

Xingke laughed, before replying "No… just need to let my respiration calm down. I've had it happen before."

Kallen was able to support Xingke as they moved over to the chair, again sitting on his towel and hiding his crotch with the one Kallen had fetched, he feebly tried to wipe at his forehead, realising he couldn't charge his wrist with enough force to hold it enough to wipe, and had to ask Kallen to wipe his forehead and clear his eyes. This she did, and Xingke looked down in shame, likely humiliated at having been seen in this stature. Certainly, what he said next indicated as much.

"I guess I owe you an explanation."

Kallen shook her head. She had crippled Lelouch, preyed on her brothers fears, and tried to kneecap Suzaku's career. Be the latter two points a response to trauma or not, she was in absolutely no position to deserve the receipt of anything. All she could say was "You owe me nothing. Only say as much as you want to."

Xingke's eyes flitted up, before he shook his head. She caught his eyes, and was shocked by what she saw.

He was in tears.

Kallen had absolutely no idea how to respond, before Xingke's weeping grew in intensity. Sobbing, almost hulking from deep within the lungs, the Han pilot sunk his claws into Kallen's shoulders, pulling himself up and burying his face into her arm. She felt uneasy as his lungs pulled in and out, drawing his wracked torso up and down. He just clasped onto her, like he was dangling off the edge of a cliff and Kallen was the only thing keeping him from plummeting down the twenty seven stories to the ground. His wells ran dry, with no more tears in his reserves to let out, however he still went through the motions of his lungs wheezing and choking.

His squalls finally faded, with the convulsive control of his lungs over his entire torso being relieved, before he finally released Kallen, sitting back into his chair. Xingke's eyes fell, as he shook his head again. He sat silently for almost five minutes, just looking into some uncertain middle distance.

Xingke's eye's displayed only one emotion, as he finally dared to look back up at Kallen; terror.

"Do you know how long I have been racing professionally?"

She blinked, surprised by this strange turn in the already strange last fifteen minutes. Almost unthinkingly, she tried her best to do the maths. He was thirty-six years old right now, which was near enough the end of most people's careers. Aggregate that back, most people started between eighteen and twenty-two, which put Xingke between fourteen to eighteen years.

But she was wrong, as he simply said "Twenty years."

Leaving a gap for Kallen to digest this, he eventually, though not without an immense amount of sadness, continued "Longer than you've been alive. Touring cars, GT cars, Endurance, and single seaters. Since 1999."

Kallen, who was born in March of 2000, nodded, before Xingke, with a mournful stuttering, explained "In that… time, I have lost… all of my friends. Everyone I've ever driven with… they've all been killed, behind the wheel. Hu, Ning, they all are dead. They don't get to see what happens tomorrow."

Xingke paused to punctuate the point, as Kallen understood. They would never know that their teammate would win the championship, they would never see their friend experience what could be the best day of his life. They had been robbed of that moment, they would never see their friend in the ultimate triumph, just as he would not see what they might have gone on to do.

Kallen tried to imagine Britain 2017, Hungary 2018, or even Japan from this year, without Naoto there to celebrate with her, to watch on with pride. It was not a prospect she was comfortable lingering on, and indeed, from the period between Malaysia and Britain of this year, she had experienced a glance at that emptiness, though more borne of resentment than absence.

However, Xingke had momentum, and continued with a hollow chuckle "But that's the funny thing about death. No one ever thinks it's going to happen to them. Everyone internalizes the belief that death is something that happens to other people, never them. It's like the sun, you can't stare it in the eye, you can only glance it. And I-"

He shook again, and his eyes began to let out tears again.

"I lost… Hu Guiying, in 2014. Ning Zhihao died at Spa in 2017, then Yating last year. I'm… I'm the last one, left from the original team from Le Mans, before it closed up shop. They all died, and that left me. I was the last one. Now two hundred engineers attend to the task of keeping me alive."

Kallen, now concerned with Xingke's use of the past tense, firmed up. Survivors guilt could ravage a person, she had seen how badly Naoto had been wracked with guilt, agonizing that it should have been him that was burned, it should have been him that helped, it should be him with fourth degree burns in Tohdoh's stead. This was a very dangerous thread of conversation, and one Kallen was now paying her complete attention to.

However, that did not seem to be the direction Xingke was taking this tangent, as he instead continued "Since I was five, since I saw the first one, the race in 1988 at Adelaide… I have always wanted to be there. At that time it was twenty six, the twenty six best drivers in the world, all standing under the podium proudly flying their flags, standing as the best their people could do. I wanted to be the very best, I wanted to be the best of the best, for the huárén, for the People's Republic. I wanted to be the first to do it, like how Tohdoh was for you. And then, at Bahrain I was told…"

Xingke's voice faded, before he shook his head and reached underneath him. He pulled out the towel he was sitting on, the towel he had been coughing into, and held it up into the light. It was red.

He had been coughing up blood, almost by the pint.

Kallen's heart immediately hit the floor, as everything became clear. Suddenly, everything made sense, and she was struck with a sudden but fierce sense of injustice.

Xingke was dying.

How dare it? The sudden outrage struck Kallen. How dare any disease do this to a man? The unfairness, for him to be afflicted by a crippling condition just as he finally got his chance. Kallen could only feel helpless, looking on at Xingke, miserable, closer to a shell than a man.

Barely able to even comprehend what she was seeing, she could barely even muster the three words she ultimately did whisper.

"How much time?"

Xingke's eyes glared gloomily into his shoes, as the cogs turned in his head.

"Eleven, twelve months." he calculated, with some degree of fatalism in his voice and body language. "They say it's a long term illness, well it could sure do with being a bit longer, I'm not-"

Xingke stopped, before guarding the bridge of his nose with his wrist, and he began to cry for the third time.

"I'm not finished yet." he whispered, the words barely audible. "I don't want to go, I haven't got it yet. I don't want to die. I could have done more… I could have done so much more!"

As Xingke's voice rose to a hoarse roar. Kallen could only stand over him, stunned as the man sat, wracked with grief for what could have been. She couldn't even begin to find a word that might come within a postcode, within a latitude of glancing the weight of the realisation. This was the first year Xingke had a chance, and it could be his last.

He recognised it too, whispering again, "I thought this year would be the year but…"

His momentum died once again, as he visibly wondered how he had let this year slip away. Bitterly, he now began to hiss.

"I wasted it. I wasted it all for nothing. With this qualifying… I am going to lose tomorrow. I am going to lose to your brother, I… I can't… I'm not fast enough. Not in this condition. I'm not fast enough."

Kallen was not here, however. She was back in Hungary, remembering Naoto, and his face when he was pleading for help in the garage fire. The same synapses and brain connections were firing in the most fundamental pits of Kallen's brain, as she looked down at Xingke in the depths of horror and misery.

But she was not helpless.

In Malaysia, Kallen was inflexible. If she wasn't first, she may as well be last. Second, third, fifth, tenth, or last; she would not settle for any of these if first was on the table. That she would voluntarily surrender an open goal was not just impossible, it was beyond that which she had the capacity to understand.

But there was something, some humanity crying out. This was simply impermissible, beyond the pale. Even the lizard occupying the space between her ears had to call time.

For the first time in her life, she saw the call to give way and let someone else win, and she obeyed it. She was not helpless.

"Xingke…" she whispered, "I can have a word, with the other drivers. If this is going to be your last Brazilian Grand Prix… mate, I'm gonna have maybe a few dozen more Brazilian Grands Prix, a dozen more chances to get the title, but this… if this is going to be your last one…"

It ran against everything she held in her heart, however she would readily force it to take a backseat to basic decency. Stammering, she could only take a sharp breath, and reassure, almost in spite of herself and her fundamental instinct, "I can do that. It's a year. I get the title in 2020 instead of 2019. For me, it's maybe five percent of the length of time I've been alive. I can wait that long. But if you can't wait a year-"

But he was already shaking his head as viciously and as loathingly as he could.

"No." he bitterly insisted. "No. To win like that… it's not winning. I want to be indisputably the best, of the twenty drivers on this grid I don't want any uncertainty that I was the best. I want people to look at this year and say without debate, without contest, without a cloud or a wonder, that out of the twenty drivers, I went out and gave the best performance. Literally, over my dead body."

Kallen looked on, dumbstruck, before asking, feeling small and pathetic, "So what are you gonna do?"

"Not all dreams come true." Xingke replied stoically with his face faced dipped down, seemingly resigned to his fate. "But I'll drive tomorrow for all I can. What will be will be. I just need to not think about it. If it let it… creep in, the idea that this could be my last Grand Prix… I will distract, I will get distracted. There's only the race."

"Big day tomorrow."

Kallen, trying to guard her eyes, turned back around after she put her coat up on the back of the door, and nodded back to Euphemia.

"Aye… big big day."

Kallen finally hooked up her coat, and let out a heavy sigh as she slumped into the couch, still feeling emotionally overwhelmed.

"As an aside, before we begin." Euphemia replied, with an unusual harshness in her voice. "I don't appreciate my lessons being weaponised."

Kallen looked up through her browbone, and confusedly asked "You what?"

Scowling, Euphemia scolded "What I tell you in this room is meant to help you become a better person. Become more accommodating, more empathetic. It is not meant to help you be faster, and if you are using it in that capacity I fear you are not understanding much of what I have been saying to you."

Kallen blinked, before replying, completely nonplussed, "I think we're on different levels of knowing what it is you're talking about."

"The press conference." she explained, quickly losing her patience. "We discussed how externalising your problems was a bad, maladaptive way to move past trauma, I don't expect to turn on the nine o'clock news and hear my own words repeated back to me in the context of just trying to go a bit faster. Removing yourself, removing your emotions, just so you can brake a bit later? If that's all the good I'm worth, I don't want to enable that facilitate of reckless behaviour. I am not here to improve your skills, I'm here to improve you. You need to look after your own health first, and I don't appreciate my lessons being used towards-"

"Here, fuck." Kallen hissed, interrupting Euphemia as she stood up and turned around. She reached over for her bag, as she venomously continued "Just fucking forget it if you're going to lecture me, I'm in no mood. At all, you can fuck right off. I don't need that right now."

Euphemia blinked, taken aback. Kallen was certainly not reticent to bouts and volleys of expletives, but they were less specific, borne more out of a casual place of those words within her personal lexicon. This was different, more particular and more pointed than her traditional application. It was filled with hate, already unusual, but there was another emotion that caught Euphemia's attention even more; Kallen was fed up, a distinctly resigned sort of frustration.

Kallen was never resigned, something was wrong.

"Kallen… what's happened?"

Kallen sighed. She shook her head, before finally blurting it out.

"Xingke is dying."

The room went silent for a moment, as Euphemia absorbed this information. This was undoubtedly a sudden shock, certainly to Kallen, which explained her change in behaviour. Not having anticipated this, and recognising that this was not the time to explain to Kallen why her application of principles learned in therapy was unhealthy.

Caught off guard, Euphemia could only ask "What are you going to do?"

"Nothing I can do." Kallen shrugged. "He doesn't want it handed to him, he's just resigned to die. It's like you talked about; he doesn't want to be seen as having been gifted it."

"Kallen..." Euphemia stuttered, wholly unprepared for this hot potato to be placed on her lap. "I… I don't have an answer. This is something… if Xingke doesn't want to be handed the title, I… I'm not you, I don't know how… I'm not your brain. You have to make your own decision. I'm sorry… but it's up to you. But-"

Euphemia sighed, shaking her head, before taking a breath and trying to outline a more calm and reasoned reassurance. "You don't have an obligation. You saved Tohdoh. You can make your decision, but don't make it… thinking that you have an obligation to him. That you are still trying to make up for last year, that you deserve more punishment in retribution for what you did. That you haven't already made up for it, that you haven't saved three lives. Whatever your choice, it must be yours."

Kallen sighed, her breath shivering. Xingke was the protagonist of his story, and his story was ending. He had the right to decide how it ended, even if it was with a loss. But he was so devasted, so desperately devasted by the knowledge that he would not see the trophy. There might be different motives; for Xingke, it was for his country, for Suzaku, it was for his pride, for Kallen, it was for the excitement, but it was the drive, the tunnel vision. There was no life outside of that tarmac; Xingke had even sacrificed four years of life for a chance.

"I… I think I've found it." Kallen whispered, the penny dropping. "I've found the answer, to that question. Are we all just selfish gits, have I just been living in an Ayn Rand novel this whole time…"

Kallen sighed, before continuing with a tone not dissimilar to Xingke's.

"When you said that… I knew immediately what decision I would make. I don't like it, but it was instant. I made it without a second thought. There wasn't a moment, not one second of hesitation before I knew what I would do."

She turned her neck, before clarifying "It's not… that you have to be selfish. That was the wrong phrasing."

With Euphemia's attention, Kallen whispered "You have to be… completely solipsistic. There is no reality other than yours, you literally have to… forge your own reality, ignore everything that doesn't conform. It's not an if, it's not optional, you have to. You need to create a reality in which you are the best, you will win, you need to create one where you will win as surely as day follows night, so long as you keep at it. It's… obviously not true, it's kinda absurd when I'm describing it out loud. But it's true. If there's even a hint of doubt, if there's even the slight chink in your armour, in your absolute, total, unfailing self-belief, you'll be destroyed by just endless worrying."

This made sense to Euphemia. She had seen it in her sister, Cornelia; there was never an internalisation of any weakness, not a single moment where she believed anything except that she was the absolute best. It was not genuine self-aggrandisement; it was a defence mechanism.

"On track…" Kallen stuttered, building the tracks for the train of thought as she drove it down them, "You need to be totally focused. Driving a car at these speeds requires your full attention, and if there's… if there's some nagging, some doubt, some conflict, you're a danger to yourself and others out there. You need to exist entirely within yourself. On track, you do believe you are the best, and nothing is your fault. You become selfish almost by virtue of what it is you need to do to… well, not just have a mental breakdown. There is no past, there is no future, there's just… right now, and right now you have to believe you are the best."

Euphemia sat down, knowing where this was going.

"Suzaku, I think with retrospect, wasn't wrong, with the hangup about hard work. I misinterpreted him, I didn't have an appreciation for it at the time, but he was right, just not in the way I was expecting. We all put in so much work, and to keep your sanity and edge, you do unironically have to on some level believe in your heart that that that work is correlated with your success. It's one of the very few jobs where you need to believe your own hype, or everyone else will just psyche you out with their own complete self belief. It's self-reinforcing, it's a shield against the confidence everyone else puts out there. If you see the nineteen best drivers in the world all claim to be the best, you must never, for even for a second, allow yourself to even consider that they might be right. I did… get at Suzaku for his sort of… almost farcical hangup about hard work, but considering what he was going through, which was a perceived slump in form, he had to find some way to rationalise it within that framework. From that perspective, he was completely right in saying what he said, even if it was wrong."

There was only one more question, one Euphemia already knew the answer to.

"So what are you going to do tomorrow? Are you doing to race for the win?"

Kallen didn't answer the question. She didn't need to.

And the Japanese pilot, the best one in the world, despised that fact.

Be safe. Please review if you'd be so kind.

~G1ll3s