Archive of Our Own ^beta

The night pressed soft and heavy over Montreal, humming with the electricity of celebration. It was the kind of evening that remembered heat even in the breeze, the kind of night where champagne felt like an afterthought to something deeper. Something burning underneath the skin.

George stood at the edge of the penthouse balcony, the city lights flickering below, while Max watched him from the doorway—silent, spellbound, as if afraid to break the moment.

He was still wearing the smile he’d barely dropped since stepping off the top step of the podium.

Mercedes had done it, a double podium. Pole to win for George, a redemption that tasted more like sweet defiance than glory. Kimi, his young teammate, had finished third.

And Max, second place, this time, watched all of it with eyes that burned brighter than the fireworks overhead.

"Still staring at me like that?" George’s voice broke through the night, soft and low, the faintest amusement curling in it. His fire-wet hair clung to his temple, the top buttons of his white linen shirt undone, throat exposed like a promise.

Max leaned against the railing behind him, camera hanging from his fingers like an extension of his own thoughts. “Can you blame me? You look... unbearable right now.”

George cocked an eyebrow. “Unbearable?”
“To look at,” Max said, his voice quieter now. “Because I want to do more than just look.”

The tension was velvet, familiar. Not angry like it had been in Spain when carbon fiber and tempers collided. Not cold like it had been when George stormed off without a word.

Tonight, it shimmered between them, heat waiting to be touched.

They hadn't said the words since Barcelona. Not really. Not "sorry," not "come back," not "I missed you." But they had said them anyway, in glances. In the way George had waited in the cooldown room. In the way Max had reached for the back of his neck during the team photo.

And now, Max lifted the camera.

“Do it,” Max said. “The calendar. You should. For me.”

George huffed, but there was laughter in his chest, deep and rich. “Right. You just want to make me your art project.”

“You already are,” Max murmured, lifting the viewfinder to his eye. “Just don’t move yet.”

***

They were tucked away in the penthouse Max had rented high above the city, where the skyline shimmered like a promise and the chaos of the paddock felt like another lifetime entirely.

George had peeled off his shirt without hesitation, the fabric sliding over his shoulders like the exhale of a storm.

Max stood in the hush, camera raised, breath shallow.

George didn’t need direction. He moved like he’d known all his life how to be watched. Not posed, but seen.

He leaned against the glass wall, one hand braced beside his head, the other trailing lightly down his bare stomach. The city lights painted gold and silver across his skin, and Max thought: He is everything I try to beat, and everything I crave.

Click.

The camera shutter whispered through the air. Max's fingers trembled around the lens.

“You’re not going to make me laugh, are you?” George said, glancing over his shoulder, lips curved, not in arrogance, but in something softer. Something open.

“I’m not going to do anything,” Max said, voice rough, “except remember this forever.”

Click.

George tilted his hips, the angle of his body like sculpture, his long lines shaped by years of control, carved into something elegant. His back curved as he turned, exposing the pale, strong planes of his chest, the deep cut beneath his ribs. There was vulnerability in his bareness, and Max honored it with silence.

Click.

He moved closer.

“You do this to everyone?” George asked, quieter now.

Max didn’t answer immediately. He circled him, clicking, breathing, studying every shadow that danced across George’s skin.

“No,” he said at last. “Just you.”

***

George lay on the velvet chaise by the window next, long legs tangled, head tipped back. His hair was damp from a shower, dark gold and disheveled. One hand rested over his thigh, the other against his jaw. He wasn’t smiling anymore. He looked - unguarded.

A man who had won, yes. But more than that: a man offering himself to be captured not in triumph, but in truth.

Click.

Max caught the curve of George’s lip. The hollow at his collarbone. The way his chest rose slowly as he breathed, like the sea folding in on itself.

“Say something,” George said quietly.

Max lowered the camera. “I don’t have words for what you look like.”

“Try,” George whispered, not looking at him.

Max stepped closer, camera hanging low now. “You look like you were carved from heat and defiance. Like a painting I’d destroy my hands trying to copy.”

George blinked, and for a moment his eyes were glassy. “You make me nervous when you talk like that.”

“You make me human when you let me.”

***

He had George stretch out along the carpet next, hands behind his head, every inch of him long and unraveled. The shadows hugged him in all the right places, thighs, ribs, the line of his neck like a drawn bow.

Max clicked slowly. Reverently.

“You think we’ll crash again?” George asked, voice soft, floating up from the floor.

“Probably,” Max said.

George looked up at him, that slanted grin breaking through. “Will we sort things out again?”

“We always do.”

***

There were more poses. More silences.

George in a soft armchair, legs folded beneath him like a prince in exile. George standing, back arched slightly, like he was waiting to be touched.

George laughing at Max’s curse when the flash jammed, the kind of laugh that broke through all the layers Max had tried to build back up since Spain.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Each photo a confession Max could never speak out loud.

Each image a thread in a tapestry that no one else would ever see.

The clock ticked somewhere, but neither of them listened.

Max had forgotten the world outside the room.

The mechanics, the press, the fans. He even forgot the weight of his responsibility and the championship slipping through his fingers, a team slowly falling back - for once, it didn’t overwhelm him.

Not when George was lying on the floor, the silver gleam of the moon brushing over the angles of his face like paint on parchment.

"Why do you keep these?" George asked, propped now against a cushion, glancing toward the table where Max’s camera bag lay.

The photos.

Dozens of them—silly, stolen, strange. George mid-bite of a sandwich. George flipping him off in Monaco. George asleep on a flight, jaw slack, mouth open.
Max didn’t answer. He just lifted the camera again, framing George’s eyes through the lens.

“I keep them,” Max said eventually, “because I like to look when you’re not looking back.”

Click.

George’s gaze softened. “So you can win?”

Max laughed under his breath. “So I can miss you without admitting it.”

George didn’t speak. The silence was a weightless thing between them. No longer tense. Just there—familiar, like the space between every lap when they weren’t side by side on track.

"Do you remember Las Vegas?" George asked, his voice a faint ripple.

Max lowered the camera slightly. “You mean when we both won and then you kissed me behind the FIA garage?”

George shrugged, smile lurking. “That one.”

Max stepped forward, close enough now to see the goosebumps on George’s arms. Close enough to see the fine scar beneath his ribs, the one from a karting crash years ago.

"You were impossible that day,” Max murmured. “You’re impossible every day.”

"And yet," George said, his voice hushed now, "here we are."

He lifted his arms over his head again, a pose half-staged, half-instinct. His body arched gently, spine in motion, and Max felt a shiver that wasn’t just aesthetic.

It was ache. An ache to memorize him. An ache to preserve this one version of George: open, bare, undone and uncaring of what anyone else might think.

Click.

“I wish I didn’t need a camera to hold you like this,” Max whispered.

George’s breath caught, a visible shift in his chest. “You don’t.”

But Max didn’t reach for him. He circled instead. Circled like a hawk, like a ghost, like a lover too afraid to touch lest the moment end.

He took a photo of George’s feet next, bare and tucked beneath him. Then the stretch of his thigh, the crease at his hip, the soft muscle that hid none of the power beneath it. Then his hand—veins like rivers, long fingers resting carelessly over his knee.

The details mattered. Max couldn’t race past them like he usually did in life.

Click.

"You always see me like this?” George asked, not moving.

Max paused. “Not always. Just when I miss you.”

George looked down, smile bittersweet. “Then you must’ve missed me in Spain.”

“I did,” Max said. “Every time I watched the replay and saw myself hit you, I wanted to go back and undo it. Not for the race. For you.”

For a long while, neither spoke.

Max adjusted the focus, then asked, “Will you stand for me again?”

George rose, slow and fluid. He moved to the glass again, but this time he didn’t brace himself. He let his arms fall loose by his sides. His silhouette against the Montreal skyline was almost mythical, man and storm and statue in one.

Max drank him in.

The way the muscles in his back slid like tidewater under skin. The swell of his shoulder blades.

The curve of his waist, slim and endless, like it had been designed with symmetry in mind. His skin caught the light like it remembered every place Max had ever touched him.

Click.

“You want to keep me like this forever?” George asked, not turning around.

“Yes.”

"You’ll get bored.”

“I never do.”

George turned then, slowly, eyes lowered, lashes shadows against his cheek. He stepped forward, toward the camera, each footfall deliberate. The space between them closed like a breath returning home.

Max’s hands shook.

“You’re not just beautiful,” he said. “You’re unbearable. In every possible way.”

George stopped inches from him.

“Then keep clicking,” he said. “Before I change my mind.”

***

Later, George sat with his knees drawn up to his chest on the low couch, one arm around them, chin resting lightly on his wrist. Max caught that, too. That rare look of fragility that didn’t belong to a race winner, but to the man underneath.

George Russell, now a four times race winner, the leading man of Mercedes: untouchable in the paddock. Untethered in front of Max’s lens.

Click.

“You gonna keep blackmailing me with these?” George asked, smirking just a little.

“Only to get you to bring me coffee in the mornings.”

“And crash less?”

“No promises.”

They laughed together then, soft and real. The kind of laugh that stitched cracks shut.

And Max, finally, let the camera fall into his lap.

He sat across from George, suddenly exhausted by how much he wanted to say.

“I’m afraid to ask you to stay,” Max said, not quite looking at him.

George blinked slowly. “Why?
”
“Because we always break it.”

George reached across the space, fingers brushing Max’s wrist. A light touch. Not urgent. Not desperate. Just there.

“Maybe this time,” George said, “we just... bend.”

Max closed his eyes.

In that moment, he didn't need the camera.

George was already etched into him, frame by frame.

***

The penthouse was quiet now.

No more laughter, no more click of shutter. Just the faint hum of the Montreal skyline outside the window, and the soft breaths of two men who had run out of reasons to stay apart.

George sat on the edge of the low couch, his back to Max, shoulders bare and relaxed. The air around him felt reverent, like a cathedral made of silence and skin.

Max reached out and touched the base of George’s neck.

A simple gesture. But it carried the weight of every apology neither of them had said out loud.

George turned his head slightly, and their eyes met.

No heat now. No fire. Just the ember glow of something sweeter. Gentler.

Max leaned forward, slowly. Like he wasn’t sure if he was allowed.

George closed the distance for him.

Their lips met, quiet, soft, like the first note of a song only they could hear. A kiss not meant to claim, or to ignite. A kiss meant to remember.

George tasted of salt and champagne and sleep. He kissed like someone who had been waiting a long time to stop pretending he didn’t care.

Max kissed like someone who finally knew how not to break the thing he held.

They stayed like that, foreheads brushing, noses grazing, breathing in each other’s air.

"You taste like midnight," George whispered.

Max smiled against his mouth. “You taste like something I can’t win. Only hold.”

Another kiss. And then another.

Until it stopped being about kissing and became something quieter.

Just closeness.

Just skin against skin.

George pulled Max down onto the couch beside him, their limbs folding into each other naturally, instinctively.

Max rested his head in the hollow of George’s shoulder, one arm draped across his stomach. George’s fingers lazily threaded through Max’s hair, neither of them saying anything more.

The camera sat forgotten on the table. The photos, half-stacked, glowing faintly in the streetlight glow.

Max didn’t sleep easily, not usually. But he did that night.

With George’s heartbeat under his ear.

With George’s breath syncing to his.

With peace, for once, not something he had to fight for.

***

Max woke to sunlight filtered through pale curtains and the soft indent in the couch where George had been.

His arms reached instinctively, finding nothing.

The ache came quickly. Not sharp, just deep. Familiar.

He sat up slowly. The camera was still there. The room smelled like him, sweat, and cologne, and something Max didn’t want to name.

Then he saw the note.

Folded neatly. Tucked beneath the camera strap.

Max was written in a looping, unmistakable hand.

He opened it with careful fingers.

Max,

You were asleep when I left. I didn’t want to wake you, you looked so peaceful for once. You hardly ever let yourself rest.

I’ve gone to New York for the premier thing, the one you pretended didn’t exist.

This time with you felt... different. You saw me like no one else does. Like I’m more than just what I do on track.

Thank you for holding me without asking for anything back.

And thank you for the pictures. Even the ones that’ll haunt me when you tease me about them in six months.

I hope you print the ones from last night. Keep them close.

Keep me close, if you want.

I’ll see you in Austria.

I promise.

– G

Max closed his eyes.

Folded the note. Slipped it into his wallet.

Then looked toward the photos still drying by the window.

George, caught in golden light. Smiling without armor. Arching into nothing but the night.

Every image a version of him that only Max had been allowed to see.

He touched the edge of one print, his thumb ghosting along George’s cheekbone.

Not goodbye.

Just space.

Just time.

Just enough room to let the thread between them stretch—but not snap.

He whispered into the still air, “Come back in one piece.”

Then he picked up the camera.

And took one last photo:

The empty couch. The folded blanket. The hollow warmth where George had been.

Click.