Mon Amour | 𝑪.𝑳

Part 51

TW: mentions of suicide, death, vomiting and addiction

Talia. Antonio. Michael. Jules. Herve. Anthoine.

Six individual people.

Six different souls.

Six people buried six feet under.

Six angels watching down.

Six important people that Lyla had lost in the last decade.

At 2am on race day, Lyla was thrown down onto the bathroom floor vomiting more than her body weight into the toilet with none other than Kimi Raikkonen glued to her side.

He was holding her hair back and rubbing her back. She had tried to convince him to go to sleep because he had a race later that day but the Finnish man had refused and said that he cared more about her than getting into that car later on.

It was like a hobby to him after all.

Her head was spinning when she finally stopped being sick. Not from nausea or dizziness but from the amount of things going on inside her mind at that moment. Lyla wished that she had the power to switch everything off like they did in 'Vampire Diaries' and to be honest, she would trade her soul to the devil to be able to do that.

She had barely finished throwing up when she started sobbing and after wiping her mouth on the towel Kimi handed to her she let herself be enclosed by the father-like hugs he always gave her.

She hated feeling like this - weak, vulnerable and unable to stop crying.

She wasn't meant to be the struggling one. She was the supposed to be the happy-go-lucky one.

The one who was able to pick up the shattered pieces of hearts she found scattered across the paddock and pit lane.

The one who was able to put those pieces back into place.

She wasn't allowed to cry.

But in this moment, at 2am on June 6th 2021, having just thrown up more than her bodyweight in the toilet, now sobbing into the shoulder of her father figure.

She let herself cry.

She cried for herself. She cried for Charles who had lost his godfather and father. She cried for Arthur who had been forced to enter adulthood without his father. She cried for Lorenzo who had to become that father for his younger brothers after the death of Herve. She cried for Sebastian who had lost his mentor. She cried for Mick who had been the one to discover his father in the snow and had then lost the man his father had been.

She cried for Arden, who had never met his biological mother and had lost the only mother he'd ever known. Who had been forced to deal with the repercussions of his fathers cancer and later death. Who'd had his shell of a younger sister thrown onto his shoulders and been forced to deal with the addiction, the running away, the attempts, the disappearing for days on end.

Kimi felt his heart shatter as he held his daughter.

Lyla had been this happy, perfectly imperfect soul as a child. Happiness had just seemed to follow her wherever she went and Kimi used to call her his little angel because she beamed of good luck during race weekends.

That had all changed when Talia was declared missing.

It was expected.

How do you expect a 12 year old to go on as the same person when she doesn't know where her mother is?

But Kimi seemed to be the only one who could spot that perfectly imperfect soul shining through recently. He had known that Lyla would eventually recover from all the hardships she'd been forced to go through throughout her teenage years and he'd known that it would take her a while. But it seemed like being with Charles was fixing the fractures she'd found herself with.