Chapter Text
December 2024
The thing about window seats is that you have to commit to them.
You climb over people, you wedge yourself against the wall of the plane, and then that's it — you've made your choice, and the choice has consequences. You can't escape to the aisle. You can't pretend you need the bathroom and not come back. You are there until someone lets you out, which means you are, in practical terms, at the mercy of whoever ends up beside you.
Alex had booked the window seat anyway. He always did. There was something about having the wall to lean against that made long flights survivable, even if survivable was doing a lot of work in a sentence about economy class on a transatlantic red-eye that wasn't technically a red-eye because it left at seven in the morning, which meant Alex had been awake since four, which meant he was already half-dead before he'd even found his row.
He'd gotten through security on autopilot. He'd bought a coffee even though he hates coffee and a box of lemony mints he'd already lost in his bag, and he'd found his seat — 34A, the very back third of the plane, which he'd chosen deliberately because the back of the plane was where people left you alone — and he'd settled in with his notes open on his lap and his headphones around his neck like a suggestion, like a warning.
The notes were from last Thursday's pharmacology lecture. He'd been meaning to review them for five days. He'd brought them to New York in his bag and not looked at them once, and now he was looking at them on a plane at six forty-five in the morning with the specific focus of a man who had not slept and was not going to absorb a single word.
Adverse drug reactions in small animal practice, the heading read. Classification by mechanism.
Alex stared at it.
Around him, the plane filled slowly. The overhead bins clicked and slammed. Someone's child was already crying somewhere in the rows ahead, a thin, sustained sound that Alex was trying to decide whether to feel sympathy about. A man in the aisle seat of his row had fallen asleep before the doors were even closed, neck at an angle that was going to cause him significant problems later. Alex envied him unreasonably.
He turned a page. Read the same sentence three times. Gave up on it and looked out the window instead, at the grey tarmac, the ground crew moving in their orange vests, the pale early sky over Queens that was the colour of nothing in particular.
He was going home.
Not home home — his flat, which he'd had for two years and which still felt faintly like a place he was borrowing. But home to his mum's old house, where his siblings were, which was the closest thing to the real meaning of the word that Alex had been able to locate in recent memory. He was going for a week. He had seven lectures' worth of notes in his bag that he was failing to study, a connecting tube journey to look forward to at the other end, and eleven hours of travel between him and the moment he could stop performing functionality.
He was, all things considered, extremely ready to be unconscious for the next seven hours.
He put his headphones on. Found a playlist. Closed his eyes.
Someone stopped at his row.
This happened. Alex didn't open his eyes. Alex shifted slightly toward the window without meaning to, making himself smaller, the unconscious defensive manoeuvre of someone who has done this journey often enough to know that the aisle seat passenger always, without fail, claims the armrest within the first ten minutes.
He kept his eyes closed.
"Alex."
He opened his eyes.
Later, he wouldn't be able to account for the specific quality of the pause that followed. It wasn't long. Objectively, it was probably two seconds, maybe three — the time it took for his brain to catch up to what his eyes were telling it, to run through the processing sequence that started with I know this person and arrived, with a lurch he felt somewhere behind his sternum, at oh.
George Russell was standing in the aisle with a carry-on bag in one hand and a boarding pass in the other, looking at Alex with an expression that was doing something very complicated and not quite managing to land anywhere in particular.
He looked — the same, except for a better haircut. That was the thing Alex's brain kept snagging on, uselessly. He looked the same, which was absurd, because ten years had passed, and people didn't look the same after ten years, except George apparently did. Taller, maybe. Or Alex had just forgotten how tall he was. Same jaw. Same way of holding himself like he was bracing for something, shoulders back, chin level, the particular posture of someone who had learned early that the world would not make room for you if you didn't take it.
The same eyes. Which were currently looking at Alex with an expression Alex couldn't parse, which had always been George's most infuriating quality, even when they were teenagers and Alex had spent significant portions of his adolescence trying to work out what was happening behind that face.
"George," Alex said.
It came out almost normal. He was unreasonably proud of that.
George glanced down at his boarding pass, then at the seat number on the panel above the row, then back at Alex, in the manner of a man who was hoping very much that he had made some kind of error. He had not made any kind of error. The seat number matched. The universe, apparently, had decided that this was happening.
"Right," George said, mostly to himself.
He put his bag in the overhead bin. He did this with the particular controlled efficiency of someone who was buying time, which Alex recognised because he was currently doing the same thing, using the seven seconds it took George to stow his bag and close the overhead and turn back around to arrange his face into something that communicated this is fine with a convincingness he did not feel.
George sat down.
There was no middle seat. There was no buffer, no accidental stranger to diffuse things, no eighteen inches of upholstery between them and the situation. There was Alex's window seat and George's aisle seat and approximately nothing else, which meant that when George settled in and fastened his seatbelt, the small click of it landing in the silence between them was very loud.
Alex looked at him.
George looked at his phone.
"So," Alex said, because he was constitutionally incapable of sitting next to someone he knew in silence, even — especially — when the someone in question was George Russell, even when his brain was still running the processing sequence that had started with I know this person and had not yet arrived anywhere useful. "New York."
George glanced up from his phone. "New York," he agreed.
"Were you visiting, or—"
"Work trip." George paused. "Conference."
"Right." Alex nodded.
Outside the window, the ground crew had finished whatever they were doing, and the plane was beginning to back slowly away from the gate. The seatbelt sign chimed on. A child somewhere in the rows ahead had achieved a truly impressive sustained note and shown no signs of stopping.
"How long has it been," George said. Not quite a question.
"Ten years," Alex said, because there was no version of this where pretending he didn't know was more comfortable than saying it.
George nodded, as if this was information he'd been in the process of confirming. "Ten years," he agreed.
Alex looked at his notes. Looked at the window. Looked, against his better judgement, at the side of George's face.
Ten years, and he still held his jaw like that — tight, slightly forward, the expression of someone braced for a verdict. Alex had spent a significant portion of his adolescence looking at that jaw from various angles and he recognised it now with the particular clarity of something you don't know you've memorised until it's in front of you again.
"You look well," Alex said, which was both true and deeply insufficient and the only thing his brain had produced under pressure.
George turned to look at him properly for the first time since he'd sat down. Something moved across his face — there and gone, whatever it was — and then he settled into something more neutral, more managed.
"You too," George said.
He said it the way you'd say the weather is what it is. Factual. Careful. Alex had the sudden, irrational impression that George had already decided, before he'd even sat down, exactly how much of himself he was going to allow this to cost him, and had drawn the line somewhere Alex couldn't see.
Which was fine. That was fine.
Alex looked back at his notes.
Classification by mechanism, the page read. Type A reactions are dose-dependent and predictable.
He read it four times. He did not retain it.
The plane reached the runway. The engines changed pitch. Outside, New York fell away in grey and pale gold, the city making itself small beneath them in that way it always did from altitude, the impossible density of it collapsing into something almost comprehensible. Alex watched it go and was aware, in his peripheral vision, of George also watching it go, both of them looking at the same window, and not at each other.
The seatbelt sign chimed off.
George put his phone away. Folded his hands in his lap. Looked forward at the headrest in front of him with the focused neutrality of a man attending a meeting he had not requested.
Alex watched him for a moment.
"George," he said.
George looked at him.
"It's seven hours," Alex said. "We don't have to—" He stopped. Started again. "We could just talk. If you wanted. Or not. But we're here, so."
He said it lightly, easily, the way he'd learned to offer things to people without making the offering feel like pressure. George held his gaze for a second — two seconds — the same unreadable expression that Alex had spent years trying to decode from the other side of a classroom, a dinner table, a late night in his mum's living room.
Then something in it shifted. Not much. Just enough.
"Okay," George said.
September 2009
Alex was going to be late to double maths.
This was not a disaster — Mr Hendricks took the register slowly and had never once noticed a student arriving after the bell if they came in quietly enough — but it was also not ideal, because Alex had left his calculator in his locker and his locker was on the other side of the building from the maths block, and the most direct route between the two took him through the year eight corridor, which at ten past eight on a Thursday morning was chaos.
He'd forgotten about the younger years. The year eights had only started Monday, and Alex had spent the first three days of term successfully avoiding the lower school entirely, which was the natural order of things. They were loud and confused and took up space in a way that hadn't yet been socialised out of them, spilling across the corridor in clusters, getting in the way, looking at everything with the slightly glazed expression of people who had recently learned that secondary school was significantly larger and significantly less forgiving than they'd been led to believe.
Alex navigated through them with the practised ease of someone who had done this for two years and knew exactly where to put his shoulders, and he'd almost made it to the end of the corridor when he heard it.
Not loud. That was the thing about that particular kind of mockery — it was never loud enough to get anyone in trouble. Just loud enough to carry.
There were three of them, year nines from the look of it — Alex recognised one of them vaguely, a boy from his geography class whose name he'd never bothered to learn — arranged in the loose, practised way of people who had identified something worth their attention. The target was a year eight Alex didn't recognise, slight and sharp-faced, blazer a half-size too large in the way that meant it had been bought for growing into. He'd clearly taken a wrong turn somewhere, ended up in the wrong part of the building, and was now standing in the corridor with a timetable in his hand and the specific expression of someone who was refusing, on principle, to look lost.
He wasn't doing a bad job of it, actually. His chin was up. But the three year nines had clearly been watching long enough to clock the timetable, and one of them was saying something Alex could hear the shape of without catching the words, and the year eight's jaw had gone tight in a way that suggested he'd heard it fine.
They were Alex's year. His people, technically.
He changed course without deciding to.
"There you are," he said.
He said it to the year eight, who looked up at him with an expression of pure startled confusion, and Alex gave him the look — the one that said play along, I'll explain later — while keeping his face pleasant and unhurried, the face of someone who had been looking for this specific person and had simply found him.
The three year nines glanced over. Alex looked at them the way you look at something mildly uninteresting in a shop window, registered them, found them insufficient, and looked back at the year eight.
"Maths block's the other way," Alex said. "Come on, I'll show you."
He started walking.
There was a pause — he could feel it, the half-second where the year eight was deciding — and then footsteps behind him, and then the boy was beside him, and they were around the corner and out of the corridor before anything else could happen.
Alex slowed to a normal pace.
"I didn't need help," the year eight said immediately.
Alex glanced at him. Up close he was even more pointed-looking — angular jaw, big eyes doing a lot of controlled work, the particular expression of someone who had decided in advance that whatever just happened, it hadn't happened to them.
"I know," Alex said easily.
"I was handling it."
"Yeah, looked like it."
The year eight gave him a sharp look. "That was sarcasm."
"Little bit," Alex agreed.
The year eight's mouth pressed into a flat, unamused line. "I don't even have maths first period."
"Neither do I," Alex said. "My locker's this way though, so." He shrugged. "Where are you actually going?"
A pause. The timetable came out, consulted with somewhat aggressive dignity. "English. Block C."
"Block C's back the other way."
Another pause, longer this time. "I know that."
"Sure," Alex said, in the tone of voice that meant obviously you did.
The year eight looked at him — really looked at him, the assessing kind, like he was trying to work out whether Alex was taking the piss or not and hadn't yet reached a verdict. Alex let him look. He had a good face for this, or so he'd been told — open, difficult to read as anything other than straightforward, which was useful in approximately equal measure for getting out of trouble and getting into it.
"I'm George," the year eight said finally. Slightly grudging. Like a concession he'd decided to make on his own terms, before it could be extracted from him.
"Alex." He nodded down the corridor. "Block C's the next building, through the covered walkway. You'll make it if you don't hang around."
George looked at him for another second. Then he looked in the direction Alex had indicated. Then, apparently deciding something, he tucked the timetable back into his breast pocket with a precision that seemed habitual — the gesture of someone who put things back where they belonged, who found disorder personally objectionable.
"Thanks," he said. Not warm, exactly. But present. Like he'd weighed the word and decided it was fair.
"No problem," Alex said.
George went. Alex watched him go for a second — the straight-backed walk, a little stiff, the too-large blazer, the complete absence of any acknowledgement that anything in the last five minutes had been in any way difficult — and felt something warm settle low in his chest. Not quite amusement. Something that included amusement but was slightly larger than it.
He went and got his calculator.
He was four minutes late to double maths. Mr Hendricks didn't notice.
A week later, George started sitting with him at lunch.
He didn't ask. He just arrived one Tuesday with his tray and his book and sat down at the end of the table where Alex usually ended up — a year eight, alone, at a year nine table, with the calm self-possession of someone who had decided this was simply where he was going to sit now — and opened the book, and didn't say anything for ten minutes.
Then, without looking up: "That calculator you're using is wrong for the specification."
Alex looked at his calculator. "It works fine."
"It works, but it's not the right model. You'll need the Casio for A-levels." George turned a page. "Your teachers won't tell you until year eleven and then it'll be too late to get comfortable with it."
Alex stared at him. "We're in year nine."
"You are," George said. "I'm in year eight."
"Right." Alex paused. "How old are you?"
"Eleven." George turned another page, with the serenity of someone who had answered this question many times and found it consistently beneath him. "I skipped a year."
Alex looked at him. Looked at the calculator. Looked back.
"Okay," he said. "Which Casio?"
George looked up for the first time. Something moved across his face — brief, almost imperceptible, the very beginning of something that wasn't quite a smile and wasn't quite surprise, but occupied the space between them.
"I'll write it down," he said, and produced a pen from his breast pocket with the same habitual precision as the timetable, and did exactly that.
Alex watched him write it, neat and deliberate, the letters small and even.
He filed it away. The feeling in his chest. The way George had looked up.
Later, he wouldn't be able to say exactly when it started. But this, he thought, was probably somewhere near the beginning.