Work Text:
0.
It starts with Lando texting a string of short messages to their group chat:
hot milky: help
hot milky: im bored
hot milky: theres nothing 2 do
hot milky: help
hot milky: did i mention
hot milky: iM BORED
and a missed group call George had no idea about because he’d been busy training, which he says to the group chat. The reply is instantaneous.
hot milky: busy training to find the best angle to flash your abs on ig yeah
Which, to be fair, true, but he doesn’t have to be that real at 2.34 p.m in the afternoon. He hasn’t even taken his 50th photo yet, which means he’s behind schedule, blamed on the state of his knees today; they’re weirdly knobbly, but if he keeps it underwear-line-up it should be fine. He’s not vain, he just knows how good he looks, is what he almost sends but by the grace of God somehow Alex manages to come online at just the right time to save him.
alex <3 lily: Hi guys :D Sorry Lando about the call
hot milky: its fine
While engaging in some idle chit-chat about their latest streams George is suddenly struck with the weird feeling of his skin being too small for his organs being too small for his blood being too small for every single atom in his body, that the house is indeed so small and that he never noticed until he was forced to sit in it every day with the same people for an extended period of time. And then a second realisation that hits colder than the first, that it must be bad for Alex and worse for Lando who literally vibrates in his chair if he’s not given anything to do for more than an hour too - and then the resulting guilt for not checking up with his best friends on how they’ve actually been doing through the whole lockdown scenario.
georgeous : let’s do a video chat
Since they’re all online, it’s probably a good time to check on them now? is what he figures, and when he starts the Skype call the ringtone doesn’t ring for more than two seconds when he sees Lando’s pixelly 480p face and Alex’s thankfully-at-least-760p face on his desktop monitor. Lando’s lip is(?) out in what should be a pout but George knows it’s not genuine because a second later it’s wiped clean with a smile that’s equal parts gremlin-esque and fond. There’s even the hint of stubble on his cheeks, which is kind of surprising because did Lando’s hormones ever work that hard to produce facial hair?
Alex says "Did lockdown help you get facial hair or is it dirt on your webcam?" at the same time George himself says "Your hormones are working harder now?” It’s almost worth all the married couple jokes Lando likes to make about the two of them, to see his smile slide off his face into a familiar scowl.
“I feel so welcome here - love you guys too,” he snipes back, but George doesn’t miss the hand that comes up to rub absently at his jaw. “Also, why Skype?”
“We were literally chatting on Skype before this?” Alex says.
“Yeah, but Zoom—” Lando gets that wistful look in his eye that George doesn’t associate with anything good. Or with anything sane, for that matter. He actually kind of misses it, except in this instance he’s horribly wrong.
“Google Meet is the best one, there’s actually no competition.” The shock-and-horror gasps from both of them are hilarious: Alex sounds like he’s wheezing out his windpipe and Lando sounds three seconds away from a full-blown asthma attack. “What? It’s true!” He can’t believe he actually has to defend something so intrinsic, so basic, so fundamentally true - not acknowledging that Google Meet is the best is a bit like acknowledging that vaccines give children autism. Which is fundamentally fucked-up and untrue. For clarification purposes.
“Of course you would use Google Meet,” Lando wheezes out. Which—
“What’s that supposed to mean? And there’s a 45-minute time limit? For the free version of Zoom! Google Meet is free!” George will die on the hill he’s defending, meaning the Google Meet Hill. Fuck Zoom and their 45-minute time limit and even worse, security breaches - they’re capitalist and unsafe, is what he tells Lando (paraphrased for length).
“George, we earn millions a year? Just upgrade your Zoom account or something,” Alex supplies unhelpfully.
“Get the Pro membership!” Lando crows.
George tries to talk sense to them to no avail - his perfectly logical arguments are drowned out by Lando chanting “One of us! One of us!” and Alex reading out the terms for each different paid Zoom plan as if it will somehow convert him into being a Zoom member (no, he doesn’t need 1GB of cloud space for recordings!) - and somehow, through the three people simultaneously talking together, the vapid mindless conversation, there is one thought clearest in his mind (apart from the fact that he’s absolutely right), bright and shiny and warm:
That he’s missed this very, very much.
1.
In the middle of it, Alex begs George to stop being a Kirby main.
“Kirby’s too overpowered!” Is the argument he gives as George hammers Yoshi’s ass off the map for the third time this game.
“You can be Kirby if you want to,” Lando points out, jumping around the top of the map with Cloud as he watches Alex get decimated by George. “And Yoshi’s decent.”
At the start of the lockdown, Animal Crossing had somehow surged in popularity - cute animals, relaxation and clean graphics, maybe? - and as bored young people with not much to do besides exercise and stare at the wall, all three of them had also hopped on the bandwagon to buy newly-minted Switches. Which quickly devolved from being each other’s friends on Animal Crossing and visiting each other’s camps to hosting mini Smash tournaments. Which quickly devolved to realising that Alex was a total button-masher when it came to the game, despite his other inclinations in a host of other games. Which quickly devolved to this.
“But—”
Alex is pushed off the ledge by Lando.
“Oh, fuck you both,” he groans. Lando winks at him and Alex shudders (in fear or disgust, it’s hard to tell).
“You can be Kirby next round,” George offers as Alex doesn’t respawn, having used up all his lives in the stock battle - and tries his best to concentrate as Lando attacks him, because Lando’s skill level is higher than Alex’s by a substantial amount. Apparently, he actually read websites about Smash Ultimate strategy and what fighters to use, which is why he uses Cloud ranked #1 on some random SSBU website. George can’t relate - which makes him feel a little better when he loses to Lando (“Hell yeah!” he says in a way that makes George hunger for a win next round).
So when the next round comes around, George moves away from Kirby and instead picks—
“Really? Peach?”
“She’s cool - just trust me on this,” George says. She really is, though: she fights in heels and a full gown, which is more than what George could probably achieve in his life. And he respects women. Peach is the obvious choice.
“I’m going to beat at least George today,” Alex promises, “or I’ll mail you my Switch controller so I don’t embarrass myself anymore.” Lando huffs in disbelief but—
Five days later, George receives a controller in the mail.
2.
“Is that a guitar in the corner of your room?” Lando squints at his webcam, and because George doesn’t actually have a guitar, and also because the tips of Alex’s ears are flushing a dark cherry red - that same flush that appears when they talk about how he used to spell words like marriage as marraige and his Lucy Liu phase (which, understandable) - it’s probably Alex’s guitar in the corner of Alex’s room. And when he squints, oh it’s actually an acoustic guitar leaned against the white wall in his room, made of cheap red Suzuki plastic and wood, the capo(?) still attached, the bag strewn on the floor.
“I- yeah, I actually started learning how to play the guitar,” Alex is rubbing the back of his neck, that nervous tic that appears when he’s got something more to say but has no idea how to say it.
“What for?” George asks.
“Why not?” he replies, but after a couple of blinks from all three of them to each other, he eventually relents, “...I’m learning songs for Lily.” Which is so sappy and stupid and so like Alex that there’s no way either Lando or George is going to stop cackling about it in the next three minutes - songs! Serenades on the guitar! It’s not like he wasn’t expecting anything from someone with his actual username being alex <3 lily , but George is equal parts tickled and impressed by Alex’s devotion to her.
“What a romantic,” Lando says in a fake-swoon and Alex blushes even darker. “Are you going to drive to her house and sing under her window?”
“I’m not!” Alex replies in a way - a guilty shift of his eyes and the way his hands have started twisting into each other betray his otherwise flippant tone - that says that he totally was contemplating doing just that. “At least I can play an instrument, right?”
“I can play the triangle? Castanets? Maracas?” Lando lists, counting off his fingers for each one and looking disproportionately proud when he manages five including recorder and handbell. “Holy shit, we should start a band .” He sounds suspiciously optimistic for someone who can play five instruments which don’t usually show up in a typical band. “I can sing, Alex plays the guitar and George—”
“—will stay at home, because no.” Lando doesn’t even sing! And knowing the chords to Riptide and Hey, Soul Sister doesn’t exactly make for band material, is what he wants to say, but he isn’t going to be that much of a wet blanket.
“We’ll be called The Rubber Band,” Alex says after a moment’s deliberation, “because rubber. And our jobs. And rubber bands. It’s smart!” George starts to shake his head but Lando beats him to it by aggressively nodding, and oh no , there’s no stopping this flaming dumpster of an idea; the arrow has been loaded and shot, and now it’s going to worm its way into implicating George into this plan because they’re all rotting away at home with mild inactivity and too much money to know what to do with. Alex and Lando agreeing on something wholeheartedly is rare and is certainly no match for George’s influence, and mentally he starts calculating how much money it would cost to buy a keyboard or a drum set to appease them. He’ll have to learn things.
He’ll have to learn things .
“It’ll be awesome,” Alex says at the same time George realises that it would be absolutely terrible , because he definitely hit his learning peak at 14 when he voluntarily read encyclopaedias and looked at plant cells under the microscope and other scholarly (read: nerdy) activities like that - if he’s lucky he reads one book a year now and gives the rest of his time to racing. But you don’t have racing now, his brain offers. Which he wants to politely decline, but now Alex and Lando are musing about potential songs to learn and he doesn’t have the heart to tell them no anymore.
He gets a link for a bass guitar, a drum set and a keyboard in the group chat later, ends up buying all three and pretends not to regret it; covers his pain with a :) sent to the chat (when it should really be an F).
————
“You’re really serious about this,” is the first comment Lando makes the week after. His set-up now looks monstrous and also ridiculous - a whole six-piece kit looms in the background, accompanied by a bass guitar and keyboard on its stand, and he looks a few jam sessions away from transforming his room into a functional studio.
“You two suggested the idea! I’m just being serious about it,” George tries his best to defend himself, but his peeling fingertips give away just how much practice he’s put into it over the week - Alex’s fingers in the meantime still look nice and intact, so George’s efforts must mean something, because now he’s willing to lay his life down for The Rubber Band if it means he does a hell of a good job on the instruments he’s decided to champion. Now he just needs to figure out how to play the drums and the bass and the keyboard at the same time. He’s going to do it. Even if it kills him.
“I regret this so much,” Alex says. George can’t hear him over the sound of practice.
(The Rubber Band is disbanded the following day.)
3.
The cooking fiasco has been omitted for safety purposes. There’s a cast-iron skillet in George’s kitchen that has the burnt remains of something unidentifiable half-scraped at the bottom, and there’s a permanent tea-brown stain on the counter as well as the ceiling. The cooker hood is broken but he’s pretending that it isn’t.
None of them speak of the incident again.
4.
The curtains are drawn where he’s sitting in front of his computer monitor, but through the gap in the curtains where the two sides meet George can see grey-white light spilling through, can hear the patter of raindrops - which means the sun isn’t out, which means it is raining. At the bottom corner is the date: it’s a Monday, which means it’s almost an excuse to stay in, which is why he’s dressed in gray sweats and sat in front of his computer rather than planking in the garden, or whatever mindless exercise he does to fill the time, talking to—
“You’re not actually thinking of writing a book if you win a championship.”
“I could! I’m perfectly decent at writing,” Alex squawks. There’s not enough evidence to claim so, but also not enough to claim conversely either, so when Lando raises his eyebrows at him through the gritty webcam and flaky connection, he shrugs.
“He- he could be?”
“Not you, too!” Lando groans.
"But I think… look, my redemption arc would be incredible - Lando, stop rolling your eyes - and I have the best writing skills out of the three of you—"
George says "Fair enough" at the same time Lando says "I don't believe you?" in that same astonished tone he used when George called him for tips on his social media game, early on into the lockdown. It’s not like he could just keep posting videos of him working out, right? And Lando streamed on Twitch! He had to be cooler than George in some aspects (though he would never admit it out loud).
"He did win the rookie presentation with his sick bars ," George says, because it's true, but he can taste the collective cringe - Lando is fake-gagging and Alex has buried his face in his hands, which means he’s the only one breaking out into a stupid silly grin, which also means he did a great job, thank you very much. He’s just too cool and too modern for them sometimes.
“I’m just saying, I could be a better writer,” Lando huffs, once he’s given up on the fake-gagging and once George is done cackling in the distance while he goes to grab yet another glass of water (why are you so thirsty , said Alex). George blinks once, twice. Alex clears his throat and makes a face that makes him look like a soggy loaf of bread.
The silence immediately succeeding is almost as telling as the yelling that ensues over that Skype call three seconds later.
And at the end of it, when they’ve all logged off and eaten dinner and when George is just about to fall asleep, phone blearily plugged into the charging port—
hot milky: racers start ur engines
hot milky: n may the best writer WIN
hot milky: btw deadline nxt week
————
In his 22 years of existence, George has accumulated an average number of regrets - they’re normal, after all - but he doesn’t tend to devote an excessive amount of time thinking about them (who would, in this sport?). It’s exhausting constantly beating yourself up over things that already happened, so it’s easier to get up and keep moving after shit hits the fan, like a hermit crab or a particularly resilient creeper vine. He’s always been a tough cookie.
But sitting in front of his monitor again, two days later, with no two gremlins chattering on it and instead a white Word page with nothing but the worst mishmash of cheesy song lyrics and Rupi Kaur quotes typed in, the cup of regrets runneth over for George Russell, 22 years old, literally (figuratively) illiterate and creatively challenged.
Not even a cup. The whole bathtub runneth over. A whole bathtub filled with the tears of his own suffering - melodramatic, yes, but George legitimately cannot remember the last time he had to be artistically inclined. The most glaring evidence of his creative prowess would probably be the macaroni art - macaroni art! - still embarrassingly stuck to his mother’s fridge he made when he was six. At least Alex can write decent raps(?) and Lando actually enjoys art; George is stuck with the wallowing realisation that he has no idea what to write, let alone how to write it as his only weapon against this sad, sad document, almost like he’s David against Goliath but with no plot armour.
“Fuck,” he curses to no one in particular, and bonks his forehead against his desk in half-desperation, half-pity. Why did he even agree? Why does he agree to everything they ask him to do so long as they poke at him enough? He fucking regrets the decision and all decisions that led to him agreeing to Lando’s proposition for a Great British Write-Off or whatever he tried to term it - and if it’s all British, why wasn’t Lewis invited?
(Internally, George knows the answer. It’s probably because Lewis would crush the three of them in ten words flat.)
Well. The deadline’s not in another five days, right?
George spends the rest of the day going through his exercise regimen twice, learning how to fold an origami crane, making a surprisingly delicious chocolate-and-almond brownie, buying a Game Pass on his Xbox to give him an excuse to play a bunch of video games, playing an unhealthy amount of Minesweeper on Google, even singing in his bedroom—
which is to say he doesn’t think about the deadline until Alex sends a picture to their group chat; it’s blurry, but behind the peace sign Alex is holding up, there’s the unmistakable glow of a computer screen with actual sentences typed in, black and sprawling across the page with a bright blue rectangle in the top left corner. Of course Alex would use Google Docs, because he’s just that kind of person: all nice and collaborative and sometimes flakier than a fresh croissant.
horsey stan: Just finished 2000 words today!! Hope you guys like to read ;))
“Fucking prick .”
————
Since Alex’s message, neither Lando nor Alex can shut up about writing: as some weird peacocking gesture, the next day Lando had sent an image of his word count - an impressive 4000 words - and then the day after Alex had raised him one with 5000 words, and then they couldn’t stop bickering whether the moon or the stars were more overused as imagery. George had wisely kept mostly quiet when the last of that conversation included Lando saying ill moon ur face and then a photoshopped image of Alex’s face as a moon. If he had to remove a couple of moon/stars metaphors from his measly 500 words, no one would have to know.
And somehow, through the utter flaming trainwreck of it all (or is it because of it?), the conversation somehow derails to—
“Have you ever read fanfiction?” Alex asks while biting the end of a pen. “Not about you specifically, just- like, fanfiction?” It’s probably the correct thing to say, because George’s own face rearranges itself from something that looks less like he swallowed a lemon-flavoured porcupine whole to mildly intrigued, mostly dismissive. He sees Lando’s facial muscles relax into something less pained in the little square he’s trapped in on his screen.
“My sister used to, I think? I don’t know,” he says. He’s definitely seen her swiping on her phone a couple of times, huge walls of text that scare the shit out of him because the font is so tiny and she’s even using dark mode for it, which means she’s got the dedication to finish it even if it kills her eyeballs, but she always turns her phone off when she senses his eyes on her screen for just a quick peek - which, to be fair, is quite accurate as far as no-look sensing goes. Like 80% accuracy rate. “I’ve never thought too much about it.”
“That’s great, because I found the WikiHow article on How To Write Fanfiction, with pictures, and I think it’s pretty great, if I’m being honest,” Alex even shares his screen to a tab of the said WikiHow article and - is that Chewbacca in a Friends setting? - the pictures are indeed pretty great, but they’re not writing fanfiction? is what he says in response while Alex scrolls up and down the article like allowing George to read one word from each point will somehow allow him to absorb the content from the whole article.
“But the outline! They’re telling me to begin my action early on! It’s solid writing advice—”
“Yeah, mine too, actually - as in my sisters, they’ve uh- they’ve asked me to read some stuff before, but nothing too weird,” Lando says belatedly - he looks distracted, his fingers keep typing and his eyes keep squinting at a particular point on his screen and it takes one look from Alex for George to grasp what exactly Lando is doing when he should be calling them.
“Are you working on the challenge?” George asks, slightly impressed and vaguely acknowledging the panic rising in his throat at his measly 500 words.
“Are you two-timing us?” Alex asks as an echo, tone decidedly not impressed.
“God, okay, okay - and it’s called multitasking!”
“You can’t even stream and cook at the same time!”
Alex has a point, but George makes the executive decision not to say anything as the conversation yet again devolves to figuratively measuring each other’s dicks - and instead wisely spends the time slowly updating the word count on his Word document.
————
Strangely enough, after that call there’s radio silence from the two of them for the next two days, which means it’s a Saturday and George is irrevocably fucked to oblivion and back. It’s so bright and sunny outside too; it could be so easy to just ignore the 1000 words sitting in his Word document and do something more mindless like maybe neck training in the backyard, maybe actively ignoring the fact that he has to birth something decent in two days (including this one). It’s really his fault he procrastinated on all this: he probably shouldn’t have gotten way too sucked into Forza Motorsport 7 if he could help it, or have spent half a day searching for ‘beginner baking recipes’.
(The brownie was really good, though. Like really, really good. George doesn’t regret that one bit.)
He’s looking at a couple of tabs on how to be a Good Writer when one sentence catches his eye:
Draw from your own experiences.
Which - yes, makes a lot of sense once he digests the idea: it’s not like he’s going to be able to worldbuild something convincing enough in two days such that it’s something vaguely presentable, and it’s convenient too - reflecting back on his current memories to make a story out of it seems like the easiest route, all things considered. And then a couple of lines down in the website:
Think of your happiest memories this year.
This year’s been… interesting, and it’s barely even started: of course it hasn’t been easy being cooped up at home, unable to race, and those are not the happiest memories either - most memories this year have been tinged in a hue of uncertainty or frustration or even anger and sadness, all the quarantine angst that creeps up on him when he’s doing the most mundane things like pouring milk into his cereal in the morning or checking his social media before he goes to bed. It’s not like it’s been actively negative; it’s just been precariously so. Like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop now that they’ve seen the extent of the first.
It’s like he wants the other shoe to drop faster, but also hopes that it won’t drop at all - it’s a confusing bundle of feelings he didn’t expect to have, being at home, considering being at home is a great gift to have in this industry where he’s jet-setting to 32 different countries a year. It’s definitely not happy by most definitions of the word.
But his happiest memories this year - the best ones?
He starts a new document and types in the first line.
.
.
.
+1.
“You’re an awful sap,” Lando says, but his voice is strangely thick with what George suspects may legitimately be tears. “The worst. I hate you.”
“I hate to admit it, but this is weirdly fond,” Alex’s face is arranged into an expression of pleasant surprise. Their reactions, strangely, warm his insides with a gentle heat - it’s not like he expected their reactions, rather thought their reactions would err on the side of poorly crafted jabs and harmless ribbing - and he’s slightly caught off-guard. How is he supposed to respond now? It’s not like he intended for this to happen: he just didn’t have the means nor the prowess to pull off the 20k-word monstrosity that was essentially Alex’s thesis paper on why the metric system is better than the imperial system (facts), or Lando’s in-depth analysis on why F1 2019 is the worst racing simulator game on the market that had to be cut for length.
“Uh, thanks.” His ears must be so red - this is so embarrassing.
“The pinnacle of eloquence is here!”
“We were having a moment —”
[cut for length]