Pairing(s): Pre Galex
Wordcount: 1,7k words
Summary: George should enjoy his christmas break this year. He's in a cabin in a snowy landscape and his friends are with him. What could ever go wrong ?
It is when the snow settles in the backyard that George finally feels winter is upon them. From his vantage point — the cosy armchair furnishing the corner of the room he'd chosen, on the second floor of the cabin they had rented for the holidays, he probably has the best view of all his friends of the lawn and the landscape beyond.
He can hear Lando and Max laughing from downstairs, making hot chocolate and coffees in the cold December morning. He himself has been up for less than half and hour, just the time to take a hot shower, using the soap he's specially taken for the trip. It's cinnamon and sugar scented, and the smell had filled the bathroom as quickly as the steam had been. To contribute to the Christmas spirit, he's decided to wear his ugliest — and favourite — Christmas jumper. Red and green wool with a reindeer wearing a hat, dancing around with little Christmas elves.
Now he is safely and warmly sat in the armchair, he can feel himself getting back to sleep. But the day awaits, and the group need to be fitted for their skis if they want to get to pistes anytime today.
The cabin they are renting this year is no more than twenty minutes by foot from the actual station, and so they are lucky in this regard. Last year, they had to trust Max to bring them to and from the station everyday, as the mad man could not bear to think about anyone else behind the wheel. And he did drive them around the whole week. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that he truly deserved the name of "mad" Max. The man drove like a lunatic. And because he refused to relinquish his car keys to anyone and refused to get into a car if he wasn't the one driving, they had to trust him with their lives for a full week; meaning seven days, a whole lot of hours.
At least this wouldn't happen this year. With this happy thought running around his mind, George put on his fuzzy slippers (specially bought for this year's trip) as to not get his feet too cold, and gets out of his room, following the sound of his friends arguing about the way to tend to the wood-burner to find his way to the living room.
They had only gotten to the cabin late the night before, and so he had taken the room still available after Max and Lando played rock paper scissors to decide who would sleep where. This meant that he did not know the layout of the small house well enough (during the day) to get anywhere but to the bathroom.
He would love to tell you that the scene he walks right into is unusual. But the truth is that when you're friend with these two, anything is possible, and nothing is surprising anymore.
The living room is filled with smoke. He had noticed a slight smell in the corridor, but had thought it could be explained by a fire starting in the wood-burner. Not by his friends trying to incinerate the whole place. The small door of the wood-burner is wide open, and the fire isn't inside. No. It's both in the bucket made for the cold ash and in Lando's hand, who is holding a burning piece of paper with his arms extended, the farthest they can be away from his body.
"Drop it, you idiot!", is what comes out of George's mouth as he runs to get closer. Not the best idea, he'll admit. In his defence, he meant into the bucket, because it was the most logical course of action. But no. Of course not.
Lando drops the paper. Not in the bucket. He does not throw it into the wood-burner either. He drops it right onto the carpet. Which is in a cabin. A wooden cabin. Fuuuuck.
While Lando dumbly watches the carpet go up in flames, Max goes to take a wet rag and George takes his phone out, directly going into the urgent calls section and types the right number for firefighters. Fortunately, he had remembered to learn the numbers to call for the country before coming. While he's doing this, he sprints upstairs to get his essentials, cursing himself for being organised and putting his clothes and toiletries away yesterday before going to sleep.
"Hello, my name is Alex. How may I help you and what's your name ?", a man's voice interrupts his frantic search for what could be considered the most important to least important. He waits not a second to rush the words out of his mouth. The smell of smoke is worsening, and his eyes feel like they're on fire. Fitting for the situation he's found himself in.
"My friend let a burning paper fall onto our carpet and now it's catching on fire. I don't know what to do." His voice is shaky and he probably swallowed half of the words, so he takes a long breath and tries again. This time, he makes sure to enunciate all the words and not to speak to fast. "And I'm George. Sorry."
"…" There is a second of silence at the other end of the line, before the man on the phone speaks again. "You have nothing to be sorry for. Please do not worry. I need you to tell me your current address and the number of people present in the building. After that, please don't worry and stay on the phone."
Following directions, George rattles off the address he learnt by heart, thanking his brain for being neurotically obsessed when going on vacation, but just as he starts to tell the guy that they're only three in the house, he starts coughing, the stinging in his eyes he felt earlier worse than before, making them tear up. He brings the inside of is elbow to his mouth to try and breath easier, but this doesn't work.
"George, please focus on my voice and try to speak to me if possible. Are you still here ?" The man has a soothing voice. George understands why he's the one who's been chosen for answering the phone.
"Yes, yeah, I'm still here. Sorry. I meant that we're three people. What should I do ?" He's crouching now, the pain in his eyes only growing, and the tears are tracing a path onto his cheeks down to his neck. The room is hot. Alex-the-guy-on-the-phone is quick to answer.
"Is there any way for you to get out of the house safely ? We are currently on the way to the location you gave me." George cannot hear any background noise from the phone, but he wants to believe this Alex. The main problem right now is that he cannot really see anything because of his tears and that the smoke coming into the room is getting darker and darker by the second. He grabs his laptop, the only thing he managed to put at the top of his list of "most important" earlier, and goes for the door of his room.
He would go for the balcony behind the glass doors, but he remembers some article he reads years ago about fire or some things like that. From what his brain can conjure up, you shouldn't open the windows of a house on fire — and the house is quite on fire, he gathers from the blackness of the smoke — because this could create an air suction or somethings that could worsen a fire and be really dangerous.
Once he's down the stairs, he takes a moment to think about where he needs to go. The heat is unbearable down here, and he could feel it when he was on the stairs, but he didn't think it would be this hot. Stupid of him, maybe. The flames are bright, and they eat up the walls, devouring everything they can on their way. If it wasn't so dangerous, he could stay for hours there, bearing the heat to watch the flames dancing.
But with the addition of the smoke, George really has no idea where to go to get out of the house, and he tells this to Alex. After this, he cries out the names of Max and Lando, in the hopes that one of them could answer him and tell him where to go. Or at least tell him they're safe. But no answer from the house. The only person he can still hear is Alex, still talking to him on the phone, saying things that George can't compute because he's too fascinated by the flames dancing around.
The phone drops to the floor of the house, bouncing, and George closes his eyes, falling alongside it, not hearing the cries of "George, George!" coming from it.
He wakes up because the nausea. The bed below him is moving around, and brightness blinds him when he opens his eyes. An angel is above him, tan skin, dark hair and white smile all for George, wearing the dark and large outfit made for firefighters.
"Will you go on a date with me, angel ?" The angel only chuckles, and then tells him to close his eyes, because they're getting to the closest hospital. Drat. George is missing out on a potential date with an angel because he's going to the hospital. He'll find the angel later then. And then he'll woo the shit out of him.
Such a good plan from himself. George pats himself on his metaphorical back.
The next time George wakes up, he's hooked to machines beeping and hurting his brain. On his left, he can see Lando and Max resting on a small blue sofa. Even while they sleep, he can see dark circles, stark under their eyes. His eyes stumble upon a piece of paper folded on his nightstand. With his left arm, the one not hooked to the incessant machines, he grasps it and bring it close enough to be able to open it with both his hands.
With a cheeky grin is written If you still want to take me on a date, I'm available". This, of course, because George can't catch a break, is accompanied by a signature wearing the name Alex. Along with a little drawing of an angel and a phone number.
Well. At least this holiday season might bring him some luck.
Decapitate the shine - a galex soulmate au fic written for @weegreenbean in the @f1-fic-secret-santa fest! Merry Christmas 🎄
george/alex (galex), 1/1 chapters, 27k words, rated M, finished
“Something is wrong. I can’t— I literally can’t lie!”
“You could be cursed,” Kimi offers, with a practical tone. “Or maybe you accidentally... took something. Drugs! Or maybe it’s just you.”
“Thank you,” George says dryly. “That’s very helpful.”
Everyone carries their soulmate’s first words to them on their skin. George has always kept his soulmark hidden. But when he is suddenly losing the ability to lie, it means it won’t stay that way. Especially not when the soulmate in question is Alex Albon.
read here
link to collection
title name by the song Before you I Just Forget by Fontaines D.C.
transformed into a cat!alex, feat. galex (and piñón) (t, 1900 words)
(i saw this fantastic fanart of george and a cat from @terminalvelocityraptor and the perfect tag "a cat you say. Alex Albon transformed into a cat I say" from @ctimenefic, and got briefly possessed by the spirit of galex for the rest of the day. thank you for the amazing idea and i hope you don't mind it being stolen!!)
Alex’s first thought upon waking was that he felt profoundly smug about something. He stretched, twitched his whiskers, wondered why he had whiskers, and realized he had turned into a cat in the night. “Ah,” he said, “that is something to be smug about,” and trotted off to locate someone who would give him a whole roast chicken.
The Williams motorhome on a Saturday morning was a moving jungle of human feet, chair legs, alarming noises, and pieces of metal in boxes which winked like the sun. All of these Alex ignored with ease, even the tiny glittering bits—“which,” he said to himself, “any other cat would have stopped to play with. It’s terribly lucky for the team that I’m a professional.” Instead he lightly batted no more than two of them under a chair and continued on his way.
In doing so he was accompanied by a variety of surprised noises. Several people in Williams uniforms said sentences that included the word Alex; others reached down to seize him with great pink hands, which Alex evaded promptly and beautifully. He was so pleased with his work that another of the Williams personnel, taking advantage of his distraction, actually got her hands around his midsection and tugged. With incredible dignity, Alex turned into a liquid, streamed through her hands to the floor, and made himself scarce.
He understood that, if he were in possession of a human mind, he would have been at least a little upset about the situation in which he now found himself. It was highly clarifying to be a cat. In fact, now that he had experienced it, it surprised him that anyone was ever anything else; he felt quite sorry for the human version of Alex, who was tired, and had a meal plan, and who thought often about how he was going to lose the things he liked someday, and who could not even jump three times his own height, let alone six. Human Alex worried about whether his sisters had enough money, and about what he would do if something in his body broke again, and about how he couldn’t remember the last time he had slept in one bed for longer than a month. Cat Alex was currently having a difficult time understanding what a month was.
“Pets are not allowed to roam in the Williams motorhome,” someone behind a door said in a low growl.
Alex’s tail fluffed out like a bottlebrush. “Who said I’m a pet, mind your business, fuck off,” he said. Fuck off is an expression that cats have over one hundred ways to say; he chose the eighty-fourth rudest.
There was a long, suspicious silence. “You smell like Carlos’s friend,” said the voice.
The name Carlos was accompanied by a spectrum of emotions untranslatable into human words. “Oh, Piñón,” said Alex. He was surprised by how pleased he was that one of Carlos’s friends thought of him as Carlos’s friend, even if that friend was—heinous!—a dog.
“Carlos said I had to be here,” said Piñón. There was a faint whine in his voice. “He said he wasn’t allowed to take me to his meetings. He said I couldn’t help him make coffee, or help him make dinner, or help him drive his car. Why are you allowed?”
The point about the car hadn’t occurred to Alex. He supposed Williams would need to make the car smaller so that he could drive it. How long would that take—a whole day? Maybe even two? “I’m a cat,” he told Piñón, in answer to the question.
This earned another growl from Piñón. “You’re not allowed,” he said, low. “One of the bosses ought to come get you.”
“Oh, please,” said Alex, which is an expression that cats have over three hundred ways to say. He understood that by bosses Piñón meant human beings, and he found his ears had gone flat against his head.
Piñón whuffed. “Promise you’re going to go back to Carlos’s friend’s room where you’re supposed to be,” he said. “Promise it or I’ll shout for help.”
“Listen,” said Alex, with unbelievable magnanimity. “When I’ve got a roast chicken from the kitchen, I’ll take it back here. Then I’ll unlock the door—” he’d sort out the issue of thumbs somehow—“and let you out, and you can have a scrap or two. Maybe even a leg—”
“Help!” Piñón barked. “Thief! Help! Thief! Criminal! Help! Criminal! Robbery in progress! Citizen’s arrest! Somebody help! Help me!”
“Boot-licker,” said Alex, and fled.
Unfortunately, though dogs had apparently no skill whatsoever at maintaining omertà, they were very talented at raising an alarm in a crowd. Alex found himself at the center of a thunderstorm—here hands, here legs, here people running, here someone with an enormous blanket whose hem he only just dodged in time. “Don’t they know I’m a racer!” he said, outraged.
But it was dawning on him that he was getting a little lost. And, what was worse than this, the hunt was becoming noisier and noisier: there was the stomping of boots on linoleum, the shouting of incomprehensible grating words out of huge red human mouths, the sharp bronze scents of alarm and suspicion and confusion, the barking of Piñón several hallways away. His instincts were beginning to tell him that someone was out to get him; which, of course, they were, but he was increasingly unsure whether he was being chased by humans alone, or perhaps by a wolf pack, or by some kind of hawk or raptor, or a car—but he liked cars, didn’t he?—only he was no longer sure of this, he was no longer sure of anything, his tail was enormous and his claws were click-clacking on the tiles and his eyes were as wide as saucers, he was majestic and talented but he was quite conscious now that he was nine inches tall and nobody else in the motorhome was shorter, and any of them might fight him, or eat him, and he did not really know how to get home, and he did not really know where home was, and he did not really know if home was anywhere at all, and he did not know where to go or what to say or what to do except run and run and hide and run and hide and hide and run and hide and hide and hide and hide and hide.
He found himself in a dark little space beneath a sofa in what was apparently an unused conference room. It was cramped and musty; he had to tuck his tail all the way around himself in order to be sealed in properly. It was unfortunate that he was going to have to spend the rest of his life here, Alex thought, but such was fate. He put his chin on his folded paws and stared at the little crack of yellow light on the linoleum, feeling sorry for himself.
“Alex,” called someone from the hallway. “Al-ex.”
Alex was far too clever to come just because he’d been called—he wasn’t a dog—but his ears slowly unflattened. He knew the voice.
“Alex,” the voice went on. There was the creak of hinges, a sigh, and a click. “Alex, are you down here? Everyone’s too busy to tell me where you’ve gone.”
Another door opening and closing, this one nearer; and then a third creak, this one very close indeed. “Albon,” said George. “Albon-oooo. Are you hiding somewhere?”
“Yes,” said Alex, slithering out from under the sofa. George, who had been closing the door to the conference room, stopped and blinked. Alex went over to him and hit his head on George’s shins three or four times. “Georgie, I’ve had the most awful morning. Pick me up.”
George picked him up—not with very much skill, his hands clumsy under Alex’s arms, but Alex submitted to it with good grace. It was sort of pleasant to be patient with people, as long as people were George. “They’re going to need to delay the third free practice until they can make my car smaller,” he informed George. “Can you have a word with the race director about it?”
“Hallo there,” said George. “You’re a handsome old thing, aren’t you?”
George’s observational skills were fantastic, thought Alex with a wave of possessive pride. He wriggled a little to get George’s hands under his back legs and, when he was stable, plastered himself limply over George’s silver-jacketed chest and propped his chin on George’s bony shoulder. “Blimey, you’re friendly,” said George, petting the back of his head. “Whose cat are you?”
Cats have only one expression that answers this question. “I’m my own cat, thanks,” said Alex, though he softened it slightly by purring. It had occurred to him that it was a little strange that he could understand what George said, when everything else humans said had sounded like so much nonsense; but then again, George always talked a lot of nonsense, and Alex had always managed to understand him before.
“You’re Alex’s cat, I bet,” said George. “You're new. He didn’t tell me he’d brought one of them. I thought they lived at home with his mum.”
“Not for a long time, Georgie,” said Alex.
“Well, anyway, I bet he’s looking for you,” said George. “I don’t suppose you know where he is?”
Alex yawned. He was feeling very comfortable now, despite the roughness of the silver polyester, and very sleepy. The desire to venture forth questing for food had left him, replaced by a distinct, almost physical sense of safety. “I’m ready to go back to my room now,” he instructed.
“I’d better take you back to Alex’s room, then,” said George. “He always turns up when you really need him."
Alex was not at all sure that this was true, which was how he knew he was not going to be a cat for much longer. He let George carry him through the motorhome—George walked like he had springs in his soles, but that was all right, it kept Alex from falling asleep—and half-listened to him saying things to the Williams staff like yes, I think he must be, and I know, I’m just going to find Alex now, and no, no, he didn’t give me any trouble at all. When they finally reached his room, he trickled out of George's arms onto the desk and sat with his tail wrapped round his paws, blinking up at George very slowly.
Like this, he could see himself reflected in George’s sunglasses. He hadn’t known what kind of cat he’d become, but there he was now, sleek and athletic and black and very lovely. It was nice to see himself like this, if only for a minute.
“You should clear out of here before I turn back,” he told George. “I don’t want to give you too much of a shock before qualis.”
“I’ll look for him somewhere else,” said George. “You keep safe, all right? Don’t go running off again.”
“No promises,” said Alex, but when George was gone, he leapt down to the floor, curled up, and folded his paw over his eyes.
Despite it all, he thought, he was looking forward to being human again. He wanted to walk through the motorhome and the paddock, and to scratch Piñón behind the ears without Piñón's getting upset about it, and to prepare for practice and for qualis after, and to call his mum and sisters and make faces at Horsey through the phone screen. He wanted to have a proper chat with George. Other sorts of lives were good to visit. But after a while, you were ready to come home.
I was rewatching Brazil 2024 qualifying yesterday just to upset myself a bit and I noticed you can see George saying to lando in the little after qualifying lineup photo 'i feel really bad for Alex' and I was just like oh 😫 it still hurts, I have no idea how to screen record f1tv but my eyes didn't deceive me
theartofmadeline
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