Chapter Text
January 25th 2025, Wisbech, England.
Every year without fault, George would drive to the hospital he was born in, and he would wait for someone to die.
He’d allocated the winter break for it—not because more people would die in winter, but because summer was a break only in name; meetings and calls and stress-inducing messages still running aplenty. And he would hate drawing attention to himself by pacing around on the phone, groaning at coworker texts, no, I really am busy right now, yeah, yeah I know, sorry.
George didn’t come here to disturb the peace. Quite the opposite, really. It was what brought him the much-needed quiet that no season of Formula One could ever hope to offer.
But the lovely people who worked at this hospital were bound to notice at some point, that his clockwork visits always coincided with the fortuitous disappearance of a corpse—and he’d rather they notice that later than anytime soon. So he kept to himself.
He knew they didn’t like talking about it, that when they mentioned the missing bodies—one every year—it was in hushed whispers of incidents prior, incredulous, as if it’d never really happened; and George never stuck around for long enough after the immediate act to be privy to their worries. But he could smell them all the same.
The blessing of Awareness, the elders back home liked to call it. George just called it keeping tabs. It made the scent of fear familiar. Too much.
George always tried to be careful, kind when he had the choice. It was only human. There were all sorts of dying people, and he always tried picking the ones who didn’t get visits; the ones whose death was a matter of paperwork and crematory rather than a truly sad affair; the ones whose bones would have had no one to mourn them, anyway.
Although, he could still tell it disturbed the living to have a dead person disappear into thin air, loved or not.
If George could give explanations without putting his own life in jeopardy, he would.
But he did what he could.
So he always made sure to feel sorry for the people who’d inhabited the bodies he took, and then had learned a couple prayers in all common religions, to say before their remains. He did not know if it pleased them, in truth, but they did not speak of it. Death was never one to make much noise, sacred or not. So George would tell himself it was kindness, and he liked believing it.
This year, however, George had no such choice to make.
He’d been waiting for close to a week now, away from the noise, a hallway on the first floor. They’d moved the urgent care unit to a different wing a couple years back, and now, traffic here was few and far between.
He would get glances here and there for sure, but hospital workers didn’t tend to be at a want of things to do, and they wouldn’t bother if he kept his head down and looked sullen.
He’d taken a few walks up and down the stairs and maybe to the parking, on the first days, and then he’d thought about how many people had seen his face already. So then he had stopped. And gone back to waiting.
The only person close to death in those premises was a little girl, five or maybe six; or perhaps older, but skimmed down by her illness. It was a slow and painful thing, George could tell, even a floor below. He could hear the struggle in every one of her breaths, and how they grew fainter and more desperate at night, when there was no one in her sickroom to truly see how weak she had become; how her heart tried and fought to beat harder when she got visits from her family, so that they would not go back home buried deeper in grief than they already were.
George would feel truly sorry when her time came. She was sweet and lively, when she had the strength to be awake. She’d liked playing football with her friends before, and she was an Aston Villa fan, he’d heard.
He would feel even more sorry for leaving her family no bones to cling onto in grief—albeit he’d thought of leaving something behind for that purpose; but he then imagined that the sight of their child’s mutilated skull on the sterilized sheets of her hospital bed, one morning without warning, would be much worse than no sight at all, so he’d just spent his waiting time making peace with the idea, bleak as it was.
He could take a gamble and wait for that other man down in the entry floor to die, middle-aged and with a punctured lung, but he did not stink of death as she did yet, and he only had three days left before he had to take that flight back to Monaco, already booked.
He sighed, shuffling in his uncomfortable plastic seat. One of the neon lights flickered for a moment. It happened, George had calculated, every seven minutes and a half on average, although sometimes it was nine, and sometimes barely three.
No, he couldn’t afford the risk of waiting. And her time was near. Maybe, just maybe, if he found her family’s address, he could try sending them something for the trouble. He could not imagine what just yet, but he supposed it ought to make him feel better nonetheless. And them, he hoped. And them.
He was broken out of his wonderings by a feminine voice and a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Excuse me Sir, are you here for a visit?”
George looked up and blinked, dazed. Her face was polite, and it struck him brighter than headlights in the dead of night. He hadn’t said a word in days, and his own voice was an alien thing crawling through his throat.
“Yes,” he croaked. She looked at him expecting a name. “’m here for Hubert Keys.” It was the man with the punctured lung, he knew the name because they’d uttered it on his admission, but he hadn’t heard it since. They just called him room 079.
Her eyes opened wide in surprise, and she strangled a sound that meant she’d been expecting anything but that.
“Oh— he… he didn’t tell us— I think you’ll be able to see him now. He must be awake.” George knew. He could make out the scent of his dawdling awareness amongst all the others, pained and resigned. He was only truly at peace when he slunk back into the morphine-induced dreams, into scents of infancy memories and sounds of unbroken sleep.
“No,” he muttered weakly. He didn’t dare make himself stand out by being room 079’s only visitor before his passing. It was already bad enough that he was being talked to. “I fear I would be too sad if I saw him now. But I want to be here in case he…” George let his untrained voice dissipate into a drawl of something he hoped would sound like sorrow.
“Ah, um, alright,” she nodded, giving a curt, hesitant bow. “We will do our best.” She struggled to meet his eyes.
George could tell she found it strange, but she didn’t insist.
Grief made people do all sorts of strange things, he knew. And a nurse, of all people, more than certainly did too.
He waited another two days, chose a different, plastic-chair lined corridor for it, and wasn’t bothered again. In those two days, nobody died—they all ought to thank the ever-bettering tools of modern medicine for it, he supposed—and strangest of all, the scent of sickness that poured out of that little girls’ room day and night was growing fainter by the hour.
It was the last night. He had a flight to catch tomorrow morning.
At that time, the hospital seemed quieter, even though it wasn’t really. It was always quiet. Starlight filtered in through high windows, and the sound of wind outside was his only companion, save for the occasional gown-clad people in a hurry.
Every two hours, he heard a nurse go into the girl’s room, bringing her some water and checking that her vitals had not declined. George knew they wouldn’t, not anymore.
He waited patiently for one of them to come in and then out, and quiet like a shadow, made his way up the antiseptic-white staircase.
They didn’t close her door with lock, only handle. He pushed it gently, parting it slowly as if not to disturb her, even though he could hear her wide awake; even more so when she caught the movement.
He hadn’t seen her—had tried to imagine her through conversations and scents—but he’d done a poor job of it.
Her hair was cut too short to be messy, and it was damp with sweat and dark. Her arms were thin but not quite bonelike, and a tube was strapped to one of them, ten seconds the interval where a drop would fall from a recently filled sac and into the tube, supplying her with precious nutrients. Her eyes were bright and blue, larger than life, intelligent and honest-looking, and they reminded George a little of— of Max Verstappen’s, he thought idly, making no sound as he closed the door behind. They looked straight at him, and when he didn’t move, they started to cloud with fear.
So he spoke first. “Hush, don’t worry, everything’s okay. I’ll leave in a minute, alright?”
He tried to make his step forward look more like that of a caring father’s rather than that of a predator on the hunt, but he must’ve been doing it wrong. Her weak muscles tensed up when he approached, and she made a sound like she was trying not to scream. But she was brave, and she didn’t. He did really have the sneaking suspicion she and a certain dutchman would really get along, should they ever meet. He hoped they would. He hoped she’d have the time to.
“Who are you?” Her voice tried to shake, but she didn’t let it. George fought back a smile—it would not do, it would scare her even more.
“Nobody,” he spoke truly, for once in his life. “I’m here to give you good news, and then I will leave, and you’ll never hear of me again, is that alright?”
This time, he must’ve done something right with his tone, because she relaxed back into her sheets, gaze still nailed to him suspiciously. She smelled of fresh meat, lively one, and something in George’s stomach rumbled, but it wasn’t fear—no, not now. It was something more like hope.
“Tell me,” she demanded, bold. She really did remind him too much of—
“You’ll live,” he said, allowing himself the smile this time. “You’ll grow up.” He reached one hand out, to take or not, at her discretion. Her hand was small and cold to the touch, but it was not the cold of death under her skin, only that of lack of movement, weakness kindling itself back into something more, little by little. Brave thing.
She raised an eyebrow at him, pursing her lips, but her little fingers clung on tighter to his hand. “For real?”
“Yes,” George hummed. “How old are you now?”
She tilted her head to the side and choked back a cough. “Seven and a half.”
“I was seven when I was born.” He remembered, sometimes. It was not this room it happened in, but all of them in Wisbech Hospital looked something like it.
He remembered the boy in bed, and he remembered the thing in the shadows watching him. He remembered that the shadow would pray, at first for the boy’s death, but then it started praying for his health; the prayers of its land, only freshly lost then. He was a fierce, brave thing, that boy, braver than any boy so young should ever have to be, and the shadow had grown fond of him.
When his body gave out, it was as if the world shuddered with him. But it was the world who had done this unfair thing to him, hadn’t it been? The shadow had cursed the world.
They’d called it a miracle when George recovered from one day to another, something the likes of which they’d never seen. But it’d been a quiet miracle. No news, no hordes of journalists, no interviews with the family. No one spoke of how the heart monitors had logged an hour of flatline. Maybe nobody had noticed, too glad to risk ruining it all by pointing out the thing that just didn’t add up.
People were good at that. Extrapolation, blurs—things that do not make sense and do not fit are quick to fade into the background. Meaning is shape and shape is memory.
Besides, it had been quick work.
They’d been right, George would agree. It really was a miracle that he was born.
“Everyone is zero years old when they’re born,” the girl frowned at him. Smart thing, he thought. Smartass, more like.
“Not always,” he replied. “When you get out of here and smell some proper fresh air, it’ll be like you’re born again, I’m sure. You’ll be playing football with your friends and they’ll be like, jeez, where’d you learn all that? And you’ll tell them it was when you were born.”
Her eyes went wide. “How’d you know I play football?”
George put one finger to his own lips. “Hush, secret.”
“You’re weird,” she chuckled, squeezing his hand. It seemed warmer now. A little warmer than before.
He smiled back, and then let go of her hand. “And now like I promised, I’ll go. I don’t tell any lies, you know.”
Anyhow, he had told none in that room. He hoped. No, he knew. Next time he came to this place, she would not be there anymore.
No one saw him slither out of the hospital, still hungry.
The next morning, he was on the plane, first class and sitting comfortable, if only for the prickling pinch at the pit of his stomach—but that was easy to ignore.
He could go a year without eating, it would only be a small pain. His body was made to endure worse. Or he could come here during summer break, make a little tweak to the tradition; drive straight from Silverstone to here and be done with it.
Yes, he would be busier at that time of the year, but so would the hospital, and he could take his pick then, do someone a kindness. Make the world a little less sad, maybe.
Adjusting his seatbelt, he thought of a little girl, and then he thought of a woman, lifting a golden trophy crowned with a ball of plated gold; he thought it ought to be her fourth by then, not yet near the cusp of her thirties and with so much fight yet to give. He imagined himself, twenty years older and a little more wrinkled if he started neglecting his skincare routine, watching it on the TV, the biggest screen the technology of twenty years in the future could fetch him, and he thought of how he’d jump up in joy and cheer and swell with that strange kind of fondness that came from nowhere but was everywhere all around in every nook and cranny of the world they lived in.
As the familiar feeling of a plane taking off pulled at his chest for the first time in a very long two weeks, George Russell smiled to himself, and he did it truly.
⁂
February 1st 2025, Bree, Belgium.
Max had gotten a lot of gifts in his life. Dirt cheap or expensive enough to crash a small economy; some generic and some so imaginative he had to pause and do a double take to make sure he wasn't dreaming.
But he only had two favourite ones, and both of them were those he got from his mother.
The first, of course, was the gift of life. It was a little cliché, to think of it like that, but the FIA couldn’t sue him for being kind of corny in the privacy of his own mind. He’d like to see them try.
On a second thought—no, he wouldn’t. They were capable of it, the freaks.
There were a lot more perks to being alive than not. Like for example driving his cars, petting his cats, and Gin Tonics. All of which he could not have if his mother had never decided to give birth to him—which, Max thought, had been the right choice, and something he could not truly finish thanking her for.
Max’s second favourite gift was a golden brass necklace, a thin chain made of even thinner links; she’d pushed it into his hand the day of his eighteenth birthday and told him that it would protect him from everything in the world that was evil.
He’d never taken it at face value—believing in spirits and all of that business had always been her thing. But he’d taken it nonetheless.
He’d worn it for every race up until the stewards had started getting pissy about jewellery in the car somewhere a couple years ago, and even then, he sometimes managed to sneak it past security checks.
He always felt protected with it around his neck, like whatever would try to harm him could not really reach him as long as he had it.
It wasn’t about spirits, not really. Max had never seen one, and probably never would, because they weren’t a thing.
But it was the intent, he liked to think. The fact that his mother had meant it, that nothing would harm him, the fact that it was what she truly, honestly wanted, and it was all wrung into that simple gift.
Brass was cheap, poor man’s gold, he’d read that somewhere.
But there had never been a truer embodiment of it’s the thought that counts. And hers, Max liked to think, was the only thought that had ever really counted.
She leaned over his shoulder, peeking into the pan, and Max felt himself blush in shame. Those pancakes he was making looked nothing like hers, and they probably never would; burnt around the edges and somehow still raw and soupy in the middle, they were leaving the kitchen imbued with a sooty perfume that didn’t quite manage to smell edible.
But his mother laughed brightly. “Aw Maxie, you didn’t have to. That’s sweet.”
He peeled one of those devil’s creations out of the pan and onto a waiting plate, laughing along. It was contagious. “What you really mean is fuck, that looks horrible, please never try to make breakfast again,” he teased, more to himself than to her.
She ruffled his hair, making a sound of soft disapproval. “No, no, I’m glad. But give me that pan now.”
Max let go of the handle, glad to be relieved of the herculean task of trying not to make a complete fool of himself in the kitchen. He would have to leave tomorrow, to start the season again. The pancakes were just something he’d wanted to do.
Because he would miss her, he really, really would. “Mom?”
“What’s the matter, Max?” She turned back from the pan, her eyes soft but focused like she was trying really hard not to mess up. Max knew she could probably do it with her eyes closed, anyway.
He toyed with the necklace, warm against his skin, careful not to pull too hard. He always was.
“I think you make the best pancakes.”