Chapter Text
It’s a blink and you miss it kind of event.
Max almost misses it — and he is standing at the center of it all. He blinks, once, in baffled anger then suddenly his field of vision is glossed with black fabric and dashes of light.
He doesn’t miss the sound of contact, though.
The crack of bone hitting bone followed by the barrage of gasps and disbelief that halts the world. Everything stops though the buzzing of recording cameras continues in the air.
Max blinks again, lets his mouth drop open with a question he hasn’t formed yet, and that’s it, really.
There is no pain. No bubbling anger under his skin, no itch in his knuckles to return the favor. Instead, the world tilts on its axis for a moment, watching, then it straightens with a hand to their jaw. Thumb brushing under a busted lip, pupils dilated, a deep frown in their brow, and the stark trickle of crimson down their chin.
“Fuck,” George mouths as red colors his thumb.
And that is the thing — the important one — when Max blinked the second time, he had turned and put a face to the body. Brown curls still weighed down by sweat, skin still clammy from being under the helmet, the lines imprinted on skin also from the helmet — from his angle, Max couldn’t see George’s eyes to decipher what even was going through his mind, but he could see his lashes. Still. Frozen. Framing his eyes, processing the happenings around them.
Processing what he had just done — as much as Max did.
George rolls his shoulders but drops them again when he coughs into the back of his hand. He kisses more red into his skin. It’s jarring — Max blinks again, waiting for the image to disappear so he can pretend this is all an illusion.
It isn’t.
The noise rushes back to them like a pack down a straight. A mess of voices and engines — the roar of people and the clicks of cameras. Max waits for a corner, for a chicane, the moment he is forced to slow down and take it all in.
He blinks, again.
The next thing he sees is George’s twisted body, arm thrown in the air like a car lunging into a corner.
It’s dive bomb, in a way. Fast, brutal, contact is made — someone hits the barrier and eats concrete before George is leaving the scene like it’s none of his business.
Max decides to stop blinking then.
His senses mute to a humming in the back of his mind like the lull of an engine. A proper running engine. The kind that creates vibrations that travel right through his bones and settle into his very core — it shuts the outer world and it’s just Max at the cockpit. Hands gripping the wheel tight with a single goal in mind.
He follows the clear path, eyes fixed on George’s back, waits for his opening and his chance to strike ahead.