Chapter Text
Somewhere in between bars, George had lost the rest of his party. Toto, Lewis, the engineering crew, Aleix, Carmen… He couldn’t see one of them by the time he was staggering up to the counter in a bar where the cocktails were so obscenely priced that it made his stomach clench in horror, despite the fact that the fancy, expensive cocktails were the sort of thing that George Russell, Mercedes driver and now three time grand prix winner, would be able to afford as a staple of his daily dinner.
No one else in the bar seemed to hold the same compunction that he did. He saw women in glittering dresses and men in dramatic suits, colourful glasses held carelessly in hand or left unattended on tables as they shimmied their hips to a low, pulsing tune from the back, where a DJ stood spinning his disks in a raised booth, and watched as bartenders poured measures of vibrant liquids into glasses and shakers with a performative flourish making it more an art form than anything else.
Everything about Las Vegas was simply too much. George had celebrated in Vegas before, of course - which Formula One driver had not hit up the strip when the nights were young and company the star-studded sort that they could attract in a city like it? - but there was something about tonight that was different in an intangible way that George could not name. He felt like he was floating somewhere outside himself, in a strange and distant place he had not traversed before and was lost with no hope of ever dragging himself back down to earth; his mouth tasted faintly of stale alcohol and - if he concentrated really hard - the vague sweetness of champagne still lingering on his tongue.
His night had been a succession of slamming back drink after drink. There had been the first bar where the whole team had packed themselves around a set of commandeered tables and George had let them treat him to trays of shots and cocktails and hard core liquor; there had been a second club, where George and Carmen had twirled around the dance floor to some old club classic playlist and slowed only to let passing well-wishers press glasses into their hands; there had been a party, full of celebrities that George had recognised in a niggling, nameless sort of way, where he and Aleix had staked out a corner of the bar and ordered each other the most horrific drinks that they could come up with on the spot, all thoughts of diet plans and hangovers set to the wayside. And there had been more of all of that, an endless parade of the same all fuelled by sheer euphoria. Toto had excused himself, Lewis had followed - but George, feeling incandescent, like he was being eaten from the inside out from a slow burning inferno, had stayed.
He did not ever want this night to end. He thought, that if it did, then he would melt away with it, like everything he was and had been and could be would vanish like it hadn’t been there in the first place.
So, he was in a bar. Another bar. One of many, many bars - but this time he did not know where his friends were, where Carmen was, where he was really.
It was a freakishly upscale sort of bar, masquerading as the type of place that people went to in the corny coming-of-age movies for their university ragers. Besides the strip of lights behind the bar, dimmed to be only the merest of yellow glows, most of the bar had been plunged into all consuming darkness, all the better for the throbbing strobe lights that flashed and cut across the dance floor from where they were attached to the DJ booth. The people beneath them were nothing more than a blur of frantic movement, edged in shadows and a faint stir of hysteria. The reek of sweat and perfume and cologne hung in the air. It felt frantic, alive, tainted by the simple people -ness of being people. Sidling his way through the whirling mass, George felt as he was pummelled by stray elbows, as soft, grasping hands reached out to trail over the expanse of his back and shoulders, as his own hands caught on handbags swinging like bludgeoned or a stray hip as it thrust to check him. Claustrophobic, maybe, but he let it swallow him all the same, as feeling of being part of something much larger than himself - of not being George - pervaded every sense.
By the time that he had pushed his way though to fetch up against the bar, wriggling between the crush of patrons, someone had swiped the sunglasses from his face, and he felt every bone-deep beat of the music at what he knew would be the beginnings of a truly crippling hangover niggling at the base of his skull. His eyes stung and cramped, and he scrubbed his hand over them before combing lank strips of sodden hair from where it flopped over his forehead.
This, maybe, was a sign that George should stop drinking. Order himself a water, maybe. He would thank himself for any belated modicum of restraint that he could muster tomorrow, he was sure. He flagged the bartender down and ordered another shot of tequila with the most winsome smile that he could manage and then tacked on an order for the rest of patrons clustered around the bar with him, feeling an odd sense of kinship with the other trodden on fellows who were not fighting their cause on the dance floor.
“Splashing the cash, huh, Russell?” jeered the patron to his right.
It took George a moment to orientate himself enough to shuffle to one side and turn and look, wincing as the twisting motion of his head sent pain lancing from his temple to the nape of his neck and a blur of nausea rising like gorge at the back of his throat, bitter and acrid. And when he looked, he was not entirely sure that he was seeing wholly straight - because Max Verstappen was sat beside him, glitter in his hair shining all the colours of the rainbow under the bar lights and streaked across his face like war paint.
The last time that George had seen Max Verstappen had been at the track, at the post-race media duties, getting steadily drunker with cans of Budweiser (not the non-alcoholic sort that Max had been promoting) and flasks of gin and tonic. He had clapped Max on the back, tried not to wince at the rank smell of alcohol and sweat and car oil that had clung to him (not that George would smell much better, of course) and dutifully offered up his congratulations. He hadn’t expected to see Max after that, swept away by a sea of Red Bull employees in their new tee shirts and engulfed whole by Las Vegas.
If George felt that he had been swallowed up by the blinding city lights, then he could only imagine that Max Verstappen felt it doubly so. Max Verstappen, an official four-time champion of the world, his glory crowned once again before the eyes of the entire world. It was not the season he had enjoyed last year - all but three races, and a long period of such dominance that it had been a drought for the rest of them - but maybe that made it all the sweeter. George would not know. He had only won the race, after all.
But here was Max, grinning at him all teeth and sharp eyes, wearing that stupid Red Bull polo shirt that he never seemed to shed like a second skin, in some stupid Las Vegas cocktail bar with the shot of tequila that George was going to pay for, looking at George like he was a particular interesting insect he had caught crawling along the bottom of his shoe in the prime place for squashing.
There was along, drawn out moment in which George half thought that he would compound the moment by hurling up his guts all over that Red Bull polo and its four-time champion occupant - yet Las Vegas was kind, and George was burning still, and alcohol made everyone friends if they had all drunk enough. George had drunk enough. He felt it in the jitteriness jumping under his skin, in the sudden snap of clarity he felt meeting Max’s unnervingly blue eyes, and the way that his stomach lurched like he was taking a chicane flat out.
“ Max! ” he crowed. His voice sounded a little funny, all low and tinny and distant in his own ears. “Wha’ - wha’s a four-time champ like yourself doing h - here? All ‘lone?”
“Drinking tequila,” replied Max, holding his shot glass aloft.
And really, that was just about the funniest thing that George thought that Max could have said. His laughter caught him by surprise, braying from his mouth before he could stop it in an ugly, snorting cackle that George thought he would hear on his deathbed, when his seven-minute flashback began to replay a compilation of the sort of excruciating moments that he would be hoping to forget. Max’s eyebrows catapulted themselves somewhere into his hairline, lost in the sweaty blonde mop. Then Max Verstappen giggled - honest to God giggled , sat with his tequila shot glass held clumsily in hand, some of the alcohol sloshing out over the rim, the droplets carving out a racing lane across the broad planes of his hands where his tendons flexed, and his knuckles clenched.
“Are you drunk ?” George whispered.
He had to lean in close to be heard over the music and chatter, but he found it impossible to judge the difference, slipping from his barstool with a sharp intake of breath to land halfway in Max’s lap, one hand plant on his thigh and the other braced on the bar. Still whispering to him, George felt his lips brush against the lobe of Max’s ear, the pantomime of kiss - and felt the full body shudder that wracked Max as his eyes flew wide open and his back lock straight like he had been electrocuted. The rising now fell just enough that George could hear the rapid panting of his breathing, ragged and mingling with Max’s. The air was much too hot and stifling; George felt the fire that had been steadily burning in his chest fan out across his limbs and extremities to smoulder with an overwhelming heat, too heavy to fight against.
“Are you drunk?” Max hissed back, his voice taut.
George cackled again. Max shook with the motion because George was still sprawled across him, unable to coordinate his limbs enough to heave himself up and off him, though Max seemed to be holding himself aloof, every inch of his body held strenuously away from where their skin brushed, and their bodies met.
“I am,” George said, still cackling.
Everything was funny, really - the look on Max’s stupid face, his stupid giggling, that stupid Red Bull polo - and they were in Las Vegas and Max Verstappen was four time champion of the world and George was a grand prix winner for the third time ever and he and Lewis had shared what could be their last ever podium as teammates and George was really, really sure that he was actually quite drunk. If he stopped existing after tonight, when even the Las Vegas strip had packed itself away and the champagne was just some memory to be packed away with it, then he wanted to keep the night funny.
Almost despite himself, Max’s lips twitched at the corner. “Can’t hold your alcohol, Russell?”
“There was a lot of drinking,” George confessed, leaning in closer to confide in Max. He didn’t want anyone else to hear - celebrating was good, yes, but it wouldn’t do for people to see a Mercedes’ driver out of control and black out drunk. “ So much . But - but ‘s rude to say no, y’know? ‘S presents from people. Gotta drink ‘em, gotta be done by someone.”
“And where are your people?”
“Lost, somewhere. Or I’m lost. Not entirely sure, honestly. They’ll find me.” George paused, pulled back to squint accusingly at Max. “Wha’ ‘bout you, Mister Champ? No en- enter-”
“Entourage?”
“-group,” George finished lamely. He wasn’t that drunk, really; it was just Vegas, the infectious air of excitement, that was making him lose his grasp on the English language to such an extent that he was relying on Max Verstappen - who was Dutch and Belgian or something - to correct him. “They should be.” He wafted his hand incoherently. “All over you, Mister Champ. All over , y’know?”
“They are lost,” Max said flatly, batting George’s hand away from his face.
A stray hair was hanging in his eyes. George had only thought to brush it away because Max was wrinkling his nose and huffing at it like it was the biggest inconvenience he could think of. But Max knocked his hand away and - when George had gone to brush it away again, frustrated, unable to find the words to tell Max that he was helping , gosh - Max had kept his hand on George’s and pinned it to the bar.
His hand was much smaller than George’s. His fingers not dainty, obviously, but almost delicate . George found himself staring, fascinated, at the sheer difference in the sizes of their hands, of how Max’s looked so very different when it was so starkly contrasted with his own and set side by side like they were.
“‘S sweaty,” George informed Max crisply, when he caught the Dutchman staring in bemusement at George’s consideration of their hands. “An’ you have a hair in your eye. Jus’ gettin’ rid of it, stupid.”
“Fuck you, Russell,” Max snapped.
He used the hand that he had covered George’s with (God, George thought, how warm his hands must have been, for George’s to be so cold so soon after Max had removed his) to comb away the hair, fingers tangling with the mussed strands. George followed the motion with idle eyes and found that in doing so, he had listed closer to Max, slumping until the only thing keeping him upright and off the floor was Max’s body.
He groaned. The room was swirling behind his eyes, spinning faster and faster and faster, and George felt as though he was being tossed in the opposite direction just as fast. He buried his head in the crumpled fabric of Max’s polo shirt; the smell of car oil and motor fumes was comfortingly familiar, and George gulped it down to try and quell the rising nausea, feeling his breath shudder in and out.
“Are you sniffing me?” demanded Max, his voice outraged and distant.
George clenched his fists into the shirt and shook his head tightly - but he couldn’t bring himself to pull away. He would throw up if he did, he was certain of that. And Max might not like George so close to him as he was - what an antisocial prick, honestly - but George was sure that he would like George spewing all over him a lot less. He should have stopped drinking a long time ago, really - never accepted those monstrosities that Aleix had passed to him - and whatever high he had been coasting on, letting it carry him past feeling the slow drag of the inebriation, had vanished along with his friends. Max Verstappen was just the unfortunate casualty standing near by as George came hurtling helplessly down to earth.
“I think I’m drunk.”
“I think you are.” Max’s hands were steady under his arms. “Where are you staying, Russell? Or where was the last place that you saw your people?”
Someone was smoking weed nearby. George inhaled a lungful alongside Max’s sweaty polo stench and choked on it, nose wrinkled in immediate protest. He hated the strange reek of it, all sickly and cloying, and his throat seemed to close up in distaste. Max called over the bartender, asked for some water, and moments later, George felt his hand nudge at his shoulder, and he passed George a tall glass of sparkling water with ice cubes bobbing in it, condensation already rolling down the side of glass in fat droplets. He gulped at it eagerly, felt it bite at the back of his throat, and the coolness of it dislodged some of the fuzziness that was clinging like a malaise in his head.
“You’ll drown yourself,” Max said, pushing George’s glass down. “Honestly.”
“I’m going to the bathroom,” he announced.
He could see the person smoking, some guy in a creased dress shirt and lopsided fedora, blunt between his fingers as he waved it like a conductor’s baton in front of an orchestra. He was only three seats away, and the hazy wreathes of smoke drifted nearer with every puff he took. George massaged absently at his throat, hoping to coax a little more air into his lungs; he wondered if he was enough of a square to ask that the guy put it out and decided that he was not. Bathroom then, and away from the smell and heaviness of the smoke.
He thought that Max might have called after him as he went, but George was away and pushing through the crowd. There was a little neon sign at the back that proclaimed that there were RESTROOMS and George moved towards it. Splash a little water on his face, rest his eyes where the lights would be normal, take a breather away from the noise, maybe try and call Carmen or someone to come and get him; he would call it a night - would have to, if he didn’t want to bring up his guts all over some poor bystander.
Maybe he would convince Aleix to have a nightcap in the hotel bar with him. Maybe Carmen would spend some time in his room to play cards or something equally boredom evading, like they always did when travelling.
Some woman, drunk and giggling, collided with him, trailed a sultry hand across his chest. George shifted around her with a muttered apology, and with that, managed to break out of the crowd into a bubble of free air. The wall of the club was comparably deserted compared to the floor, and it left George free to push open the heavy swing door and into the bathroom.
Fancy, was his first thought.
Empty, was his second, so there was no one to see when he staggered into the faux marble vanity top, knocking his hip against the corner.
They were not particularly large bathrooms; it took George only a second to cross from the door in the corner over to the sinks, feet slipping on gleaming, mirrored tiles so cold that the frigid touch seeped past the soles of his shoes and into his bones. There were three stalls sectioned off, two urinals set against the far wall, and four sinks in the vanity top with a tall wall of gilt framed mirrors looming large behind them. Catching a look at his face in them was a horrifying experience.
George looked - He could not find the words to describe how he looked. Hollow, maybe. Drunk, definitely. Pale, sweaty, gaunt, and glazed eyes. He looked like he completed a gruelling fifty lap race pushing his body to limits that it shouldn’t reach and then flung himself into drinking and dancing without a break afterwards. Ha.
He swept his hands through his hair, trying to make it look as though it was artfully mussed rather than a simple bird nest, dampening his palms under the tap to smooth it down and make the strands settling in place. Rolling his sleeves up over his elbows and unfastening the top buttons of the shirt that George had shrugged on once out of his race overalls, hoping to look slick and debonair in an effortlessly stylish sort of way, he splashed water on his face, wincing as some of it dripped down onto his shirt. He would look a mess, but the shock of cold to his face was working wonders snapping him back to the present, luring him back from the precipice. He splashed another handful of water in his face and drew in a breath, inhaling the smell of bleach and sterile cleanliness. Faintly, through the door, he could feel the pulsations of the music, but it was all muted in the bathroom. Just George, and his breathing, and the beat of his heart in his ears.
Until the door swung open, the music flared, and Max Verstappen burst into the room, with the sort of agitated look on his face that George felt he was always wearing, on track as he manoeuvred around his competitors and in press conferences when he was the grudging possessor of a microphone.
“You look like shit,” he said. His eyes were fixed on George, and he looked vaguely disgusted.
“Your polo shirt looks like shit,” George replied. “But I’m not saying anything.”
Max made a noise like a scalded cat in the back of his throat. “I am saying that you do not look well, Russell. And there is nothing wrong with my shirt.”
George twisted to look at him. The vanity top behind him was low enough that he could perch on the edge of it, so he did so, with his legs flung out in front of him and his arms crossed over his torso. He flicked a look up and down the length of Max, at the jeans that clung to the length of his legs and the way that the stupid Red Bull polo shirt hung from the broadness of his shoulders.
“You’re wearing team merchandise on a night out,” George said slowly, sounding it out like he was talking to a toddler. “That’s seriously uncool, mate.”
Lifting one shoulder, Max gave an indifferent shrug. “They are paying. I don’t care.”
“I can see that. Everyone can see that.”
“You look like you are dressing for your own funeral with all -” Max gestured encompassingly at George, head tilted to one side. His eyes really were unnerving, especially when they were focused like they were on George and George alone. “I said already, you don’t look well.”
George scowled at him. “Why are you here, Max?”
“I told you. You do not look well. You talk nonsense and then stagger off to some ugly bathroom to die. I cannot just leave you to choke on your own vomit.”
“That was,” George considered his words, grimacing, “awfully graphic.”
His head was still a little bit fuzzy - but he was thinking so much clearer than he had been before, in the stuffiness of the dimly lit bar. And remembering how he had giggled into Max Verstappen’s ugly polo, practically molested his ear, and inhaled his scent like some desperate and pathetic loser was humiliating, quite frankly. Enough that George could feel his face mottling a burning red, an itchy flush spreading underneath his skin like a rash. God, Max would never let it down. George would be battling him on track, jockeying for some corner or stretch of tarmac, and all he would be thinking of when he saw Max Verstappen’s car charging beside him would be how he had found the smell of the garage and sweat to be comforting when it hung around Max like a second skin. In that case, he was pretty sure that he would let Max have track position, just to avoid the mortification of having to relive that.
And the way that Max was watching him, unblinking. Irrationally, stupidly, paranoidly, George was half convinced that Max would be able to read his thoughts and follow their spiralling pathways as he descended into madness. He turned his back to Max, could still see him in the mirrors just standing there and watching George’s back like it was a wall of paint, drying, or a fascinating documentary (somewhere in between the two that George could not identify), and splashed his face again with the water, letting it distract him. Hair slumped over his eyes.
“I’ll call Aleix in a minute,” George informed Max gruffly, scrubbing the heels of his palms into the skin underneath his eyes, kneading at a growing tension beneath the sockets.. “I’m sure he’ll be somewhere.”
Max made a noise from behind him. One of the incomprehensible, back of the throat noises that he seemed prone to making, like language was failing him but he impatient to talk.
“A mess,” Max repeated, glaring at George.
But he was stepping forward, closer. And his hands were outstretched, reaching up for George’s face. George half-turned back to him but found with Max’s approach that he had been pressed against the counter, nowhere to retreat to without knocking into the other driver. His backside was squashed to the vanity top. And Max was right there, his eyes fixated just to the top of George’s head.
His fingers sunk into the hair in George’s eyes, peeling it carefully away and pushing it away from George’s forehead. One hand at first, but then Max’s other was plunging forward to add some arrangement into his haphazard attempts to straighten George’s hair, with such lacklustre success that all Max was really accomplishing was to caress his hair. The strokes of his hands grew slow and languid. One of them, trembling , charted a path from George’s hair to the skin of his temple and then down his face to rest over his cheek, his jaw, the pulse point at the side of his throat.
Max was so very close at hand. George could count his eyelashes. Could feel the warmth of his breath puffin across his face. Smell sweat and car oil and alcohol.
“You try and mess with my hair but yours looks like this.” Max tsk ed at him, shaking his head. His finger were very warm; his stupid Red Bull polo brought out the unnerving blue of his eyes, George noticed.
And so, George did what any straight man confronted with his work rival sinking his fingers into his hair and cradling his face whilst drunk in Las Vegas bar would do. He thrust his face over the distance still lingering between them and kissed him square on the lips.