Work Text:
George stared down at the cap in his hands.
It was painfully dry. Innocuous, against the plain hotel room.
Just the way it was supposed to be. Functional. Simple. Team branded, with a logo that haunted his dreams and followed him everywhere he went.
When does a dream start becoming more defining than yourself? George never finished school, but he knows enough to know that Shakespeare wrote this some many lifetimes ago. Ambition, destruction, grief. He wonders if Shakespeare is something Kimi knows.
George is glad, in a true, wholehearted sense, that Kimi graduated high school. Maybe the honesty of his joy for the Italian makes it worse. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe the fact that his feelings for the teenager and his despair about his own future are not mutually exclusive is the crux of his confusion.
He looks to the side, where Carmen placed a fan drawing from who-knows-where on the bedside table. Notes briefly that there is an unhealthy amount of glitter, and that he will be upset about that later. Glitter gets everywhere. Sinks its way into your life so thoroughly every shift of furniture is accompanied by a cloud of the shiny dust, to the point where the silver particles stuck in sneaker treads are an unobtrusive and unarguable fact.
George thinks of Kimi, of how nervous he had been last year. Of how he had felt being the driver to be looked up to, after years of being the rookie, the lesser, the side note. Kimi with his wide eyes and incriminating prema stories seemed to not have gotten the memo. Because where the rest of the team was aware of George's painful inability to be accepted as the face of the team despite his even more obvious desire to be, Kimi just followed right behind him.
Looking for his approval after debriefs, gravitating towards him during fan stages, lighting up when they reserved the gym at the same time.
George doesn't know when he starts thinking of Kimi as his, but it was enough for him to break during Qatar.
When the hate came flooding in, The Brit felt an anger he thought he had learned to put in a box and push far, far, away. Nobody wanted his anger, and it only fueled the fire they lit beneath him like a witch pyre. This was different. This was righteous and hot, hot enough to feels it under his skin and behind his teeth and feel in the back of his neck.
He had shown up to his teammate's hotel room with room service pasta and hot chocolate, and the sight of the teenager opening the door and bracing himself had wrapped around his heart and never really let go.
The night devolved over decent food that in its attempts to mimic comfort food only made the pangs of homesickness worse. Kimi looked at his hands for most of it, while George felt himself sitting stick straight and hating himself for it, wishing he could relax and offer something easy and warm to the boy.
Because he was a boy, not a man. Not yet, anyway.
That's what happens when you're a prodigy. Not that George would know.
No, he had gotten to experience the painfully humbling path where enough people cared for mistakes to be shameful and important, but not enough people cared for accidents to be allowable.
Still, Kimi is a boy. One who had sobbed into the corner of George's team polo that night, admitting that he didn't want to race next week. That he didn't want to face Max, face his father, face Toto.
George had held that boy, and understood that Kimi had never looked up to him. Not truly. Should he have been upset at that? Maybe. Then again, what had he done to deserve any idolization.
Admittedly, he could acknowledge the use in his own humble image in Kimi's eyes. Because he was never put on a pedestal, there was no shame in his weakness before him.
George held a boy in his arms and felt with sudden clarity the slow weight of being what someone needed not because of who he was, but because he was all there was.
He wished it would make the weight of that need less.
Proximity seemed to do the work, then. Kimi began brushing his knees during social clips and dull debriefings, began letting himself into George's room without making it a deal, began to make a spot in George's life while maintaining homeostasis on his part. It seemed that after a single night, George had both become significantly more fundamental to Kimi's awareness of the paddock, so much so that his teammate bled into the mundane, taken-for-granted nature that belonged to the mediocre hospitality coffee at every race.
Now, it is Monaco. Now, he has broken every streak he had going for him; every line and thread of consistency and character and performance, no matter how small.
Canada, his blessed track, cursed him with a dnf.
Now, pointless in Monaco, where the eyes watch and care for first only. The carnage that follows the top step is only marginally interesting to even the most devoted fan. It is expected, at this track.
Cars are torn, futures sealed at the start, contained by walls he's raced years on end and yet still maintain an air of superiority fueled claustrophobia.
George wishes that feeling was more alien in his life than it is.
Kimi's name lights up as a new notification pops up on his screen.
3:45
little kimi: hey r u coming to the party?
little kimi: you don't have to
3:48
little kimi: sorry abt ur race.
And because George somehow hates the thought of Kimi thinking he isn't happy for him hurts more than the disappointed glance from Toto earlier, he sighs and begins to put on a nice linen shirt.
He could be home, with a wider selection of options, but home has a peace he hasn't disturbed since the season began. Back when he had hope, when the preseason had been filled with smirks and light-hearted digs about favorites.
Carmen stayed there often, but even during summer break, George had done everything to avoid his own doorstep. His capsule wardrobe had become as worn as him, and realizes this shirt is the one he had been wearing to celebrate Kimi's first win.
He smiles. It had been an amazing race.
They all had been for Kimi.
Humans are complicated things. He wishes it were simpler, that he could pick between feeling crushed by his own troubles or ecstatic for his not-a-kid. As it is, whatever evolutionary trait decided human feelings could contradict and coexist and dig into his throat and chest and the palms of his hands prevents him from continuing about dressing up. A party, for Kimi. He can be sad for himself later, if he can force his own pain to the side.
He told Carmen to go to the flat, that he would be fine in the hotel room. He didn't plan on sleeping much. He hasn't been.
His shoes are on now, and he has nothing to do but go outside, drive, and exist for a few more hours in the presence of other people. Let Kimi run up to him with sweaty curls and a delirious smile and a hug that carries none of the coordination of a professional athlete but all of the honesty of a son.
George smiles. Unto him, a son, a child was given.
A boy who would walk on water, glide to greatness, raise armies built on love and armies built on hate. He would one day be a driver some wide-eyed rookie did idolize, not some pathetic version of companionship George had to offer.
A boy who would leave him behind in every way. He would be left known as the teammate as greatness, nothing more. His name will be spoken in envy and reverence; not because of his own feats of racing or grace or merit, but branded by drivers who owned the garages George lived quietly in. First Lewis, now Andrea.
If anyone ever prayed about George now, to or for him, it would always be tangential to him. He had no power, no identity alone. If not from his teammates, then from his team. The brand, the expectations.
Kimi would save Mercedes.
George couldn't even save himself.
As he stepped out of the door into the night, he looked to the sky. Thought about last year at this time, when the child clamped to his side causing chaos had been amusing and light, where now he only sees the growing distance between them.
A year ago, he couldn't have known.
Nobody would.
That didn't change that now he only saw the future as a growing distance between them. Perhaps it is good that he never finished school. If he can't even handle the emotional barrage of loving your teammate and losing your future, he would have never survived calculus, he reasons.