Chapter Text
Atman — the individual self — the soul as it exists inside a specific body, a specific life, a specific set of experiences. It's the thing that persists through change, that remains itself regardless of what vessel contains it.
Brahman — the universal — the absolute, the everything, the thing that contains all individual selves and to which they ultimately belong.
Jeeva — the individual living soul — the self that transmigrates between bodies.
The ugly dog finds him first.
Something too wet and way too insistent connects with his face, and George surfaces from sleep like a man dragging himself up from the bottom of a very, very, very deep lake. He reaches up on instinct to push it away, which only encourages it. It smells weird, and the smell comes with a great deal of enthusiastic sniffing.
"Off, off!" he half manages.
The dog, small and beige, apparently very much unbothered by the concept of personal space ; sits back on its haunches and looks at him looking profoundly satisfied to have ruined his efforts at having an acne-free skin.
George looks back at it. He figures that he’s probably still half asleep. Then he looks at the ceiling.
Then he looks at the ceiling more carefully, because it is definitely not his ceiling. It sits higher than his ceiling, and there is a light fixture that he does not recognize because it’s tacky, and the general…quality of the room around him is different in some way he can't immediately articulate. The sheets are a different thread count. The pillow smells different. Everything is slightly, uncannily wrong in a way that took a moment to identify because his brain wasn’t cooperating enough for him to emerge quickly.
He sits up abruptly. The overly pleased dog makes a small, annoying, eye-piercing sound.
George looks down at his hands. He stares at them for what is probably too long. Since when did they look like… that?
"No," he says, to no one in particular.
He gets up and crosses to the nearest mirror with the dreadful deliberateness of a person suspecting they already know what they're going to find. He is giving himself a few too many extra seconds before he has to deal with it.
A barely-awake Charles Leclerc looks back at him.
“What the fuck,”
George stands very still. He raises one hand and it’s Charles's hand that comes up in the mirror. He turns his head slightly to the left. Charles turns to the left. He pulls an expression that no one would ever describe as Charles Leclerc's natural resting face. Charles's face does it anyway.
George has surely gone mad.
The dog, who had followed him to the mirror, is now sitting on his foot. What is he even waiting for?
"Right," George says, to Charles's reflection, in what he will later recognise was a remarkably calm voice for the insane circumstances.
—
Twenty-four hours ago, he had been in Shanghai.
The promotional tour had wrapped early. Some scheduling thing, a venue issue, Toto waving it off in that way he had that meant handled, don't ask. And George had found himself with three unexpected hours and a city he didn't know particularly well. He'd walked, mostly. Turned down streets at random. Nobody seemed to care too much about him, which was weird considering he got greeted with a bunch of bouquets yesterday at the airport. He ended up, eventually, in a part of the city that didn't show up on the tourist maps, in front of a shop so narrow it barely interrupted the wall it was built into.
He wasn't entirely sure what had drawn him in. Herbs, mostly, was his first impression— a few bundles of them hanging from the ceiling in various states of dryness, clay jars lined up along the shelves, the smell of something smoky and faintly sweet underneath the whole thing. An older woman was behind the counter, she looked at him with an expression that let him assume she had been doing nothing but wait all day.
She didn’t look Chinese, so he wondered if it was insulting of him to just go directly to speaking in English rather than trying Mandarin.
He'd asked, “hey is this an all-natural traditional pharmacy or something?” The older woman slightly shook her long black hair in a nod that answered neither yes nor no.
“We have things from everywhere around the world for anyone around the world.” Amazingly clear reply.
"Well do you have anything for— I don't know, getting what you want?" He was distracted, still looking around, when he heard her answer.
"And what is it that you want?"
George had laughed, a little awkwardly, and said what he always told journalists in interviews and paddock scrums and dinners. What had been his truth since he was old enough to know what Formula One was. "To win. A championship. That's the only thing I've ever really wanted in my life, I think."
The woman had held his gaze for a moment longer than what felt comfortable. From up close, he could see her golden drab skin and even flecks of burgundy in her dark eyes. Then she'd turned and reached for something on the shelf behind her; a small tin, unlabeled, filled with dried leaves that didn't look like anything in particular.
"Tea," she said. “It’s from where I was born. I save it for special people.”
He'd paid for it. He wasn't sure why. It felt rude not to.
He'd made it last night in the hotel, mostly out of curiosity, also because he'd run out of things to do and his schedule tomorrow was early and he wasn't sleeping anyway. It tasted like grass and something almost muddy underneath, faintly bitter. It really wasn’t that good, he'd still finished the whole cup.
He'd gone to sleep in Shanghai.
He had now woken up as Charles Leclerc, in Monaco, with probably what was his dog on his bed. George looked at himself, or more like, at Charles, in the mirror for another long moment.
"What a fucking bitch," Leo— of course, he knew the dog’s name— made a small, enquiring sound from somewhere around his ankle. Did Charles never teach that damn dog to just chill and lay down?
His phone, well Charles's phone, was on the nightstand. It was already showing three notifications. There was a schedule somewhere, presumably. Obligations. A whole other person's life, just sitting there waiting for him to figure out what to do with it. Out of all the guys he could’ve been, why would the universe pick freaking Charles Leclerc.
He never won a championship with Ferrari, some distant part of his brain noted as he went to find where Charles kept the damn coffee.
—
It turned out the coffee machine was a problem.
Not conceptually. George understood coffee machines just fine, had operated many of them successfully throughout his adult life. But this one was Italian, very much elaborate, and it had at least four more components than any coffee machine reasonably needed, plus the instructions were also in Italian, which he obviously did not speak.
He stood in Charles's kitchen in Charles's pyjamas and stared at it for a good whole 10 minutes before giving up.
The dog was still there at his feet, asking for things George could not comprehend. He was going insane.
"I am not your dad. He’s in a different country." He paused. "Well, at least I hope he is." An empty George Russell, somewhere, sitting in Shanghai… It would be worse, actually. It would be much much worse.
The coffee he ordered finally arrived, he took it to the kitchen table and sat down with his growing headache.
Right. Right. Time to think.
He was Charles Leclerc. He was in Monaco, in Charles's apartment, with Charles's dog and Charles's coffee machine and Charles's phone that unlocked with Face ID just fine, which was face-up on the table and had now accumulated six notifications. He was in the middle of pre-season. Charles Leclerc was, well, also in the middle of pre-season, which meant there were probably places to be, people expecting to see Charles's face.
The question was what to do about any of it.
Option one: stay in the apartment, not interact with anyone, wait for the whole thing to reverse itself? This seemed optimistic. The woman in the shop had not said anything about a time limit. Maybe he just needed to flush his body free of the tea? How long could it take to take it out of his system? A day? A week? She hadn't said anything about much, actually, which in retrospect was a significant gap in the terms and conditions.
Option two: figure out what Charles was supposed to be doing today and do it just badly enough that no one noticed.
He really needed to call Charles.
If the swap had worked symmetrically— and he was choosing to believe it had, because the alternative was a massive headache that he couldn't deal with before he'd finished his damn coffee— then Charles was currently in his body. In his hotel room, presumably. With his things. Yikes. George pulled Charles's phone toward him and opened the contacts, and scrolled until he found his own name.
George Russell. There it was. Of course, Charles had perfectly saved him as what he was to him. The sight of his own name in someone else's phone was a bit strange.
He pressed call. It rang four times. Then voicemail. His own voice, tinny through the speaker: Hi, you've reached George, leave a message—
He hung up. He tried again. Voicemail.
"Pick up," he said, quietly, to the kitchen. "Come on. I know you're there. Pick up the phone." Third attempt. Voicemail. Damn, maybe his body was indeed vacant, sitting lifeless in that damn hotel. Fuck. Do not panic.
George set the phone down on the table, pressing the heels of his palms against his eyes and breathed through his nose for a few seconds. Charles was probably in his body, too busy freaking out to even think about answering his phone. It could mean nothing. Or maybe Charles was asleep, maybe he was in the shower, maybe he was doing exactly what George had done for the first twenty minutes and was simply standing very still in front of a mirror working through the… stages of it.
Or it could mean Charles had woken up as George Russell, panicked, and was currently doing something irreversible. Like jumping from the window in front of his hotel bed. Boom. Death.
Neither of them had a schedule for this. There was no protocol. There was no one he could call. He really doesn’t want to end up in prison or in the news or anything. He thought briefly about Toto and then decided against it so firmly it was almost physical.
He picked up the phone again, not exactly knowing what he was looking for. And then it rang.
Unfortunately, it was not his number calling back.
No, the name that came up was just Max, no surname, no emoji, nothing. No Verstappen either though. Just Max, like it was obvious which Max. Of course, it was obvious which Max. George looked at it for one full second.
Curiosity killed the cat as they say. He couldn’t help it, he half reluctantly answered.
"Finally," Max said. There was road noise in the background, the peculiar ambient sound of a car moving through a busy city. "I've been calling for twenty minutes. Where are you?"
George opened his mouth. He was aware that several things were true simultaneously: he was supposed to know the answer to this question, he did not know the answer to this question, that any amount of silence was going to be suspicious, and that Max had in fact not called before. Or had he?
"I was in the shower," he said. His voice came out as Charles's voice. He was still not fully accustomed to that.
"The shower." Max's tone made it clear what he thought of this. "You told me ten. It's ten forty."
"I know, I'm—" George cast around the kitchen as if it might contain useful information. "I'm running late, I'm sorry."
A short silence. "You're sorry."
"Yes?"
"You're saying sorry." Max has this unmovable deadpan tone, at least, that is familiar to him. Does this dude ever feel joyful about anything at all?
"...Yes?"
"Okay," Max said, like this was suspicious. "Fine. Are you coming or not?"
This was the moment. George could say no. He’s so glad Max asked. He could plead illness, could invent something, could buy himself a day to work out what was actually happening. Max would be annoyed, but annoyance was… manageable. And not out of the ordinary. He also could say yes, meet Max wherever they were supposed to be meeting, and gather information.
What could Max possibly want with Charles anyway?
The question had arrived fully formed and brought several others with it. They weren't— he hadn't been aware of them being particularly close. They raced each other. And have been for a long time. It wasn’t too different from him and Max, yet it still felt different in a weird, inexplicable way. They were occasionally photographed at the same events. He didn't think he'd ever seen them have a conversation that lasted more than—
"Charles."
"Yes," George heard himself say. "Yes, I'm coming. Just— send me the address again, my phone's been—"
"The same place as always. Listen Charles, were you sleeping or something because—"
Right. Of course. The same place as always. "Right, yes. But just send it anyway."
A beat. "...Why."
"Because I want you to send it," George knew it was not a good answer, and he knew it the moment it left Charles's mouth, but hey… it was what came out.
Max made a short sound that could have been a laugh but wasn't entirely. "Fine. Twenty minutes, Charles, or I'm leaving."
He hung up. The address came through thirty seconds later.
A place in the 9th arrondissement. Of Paris. George stared at it for a good moment.
He was in Monaco.
Fuck.
He dropped his head back and looked at the hideous ceiling yet again.
There wasn't time to think about it too hard, which was possibly a mercy. He found Charles's calendar unlocked, open, apparently Charles did not believe in password-protecting anything, which was either very careless or very trusting. Knowing Charles it was the latter, but in that classical presumptuous way of his. He really thought he was above passwords. There was a Ferrari meeting at two. Pre-season review, some technical briefing, the kind of thing that required faces, attentiveness and the ability to respond to questions that assumed years of context he did not personally have but that, he could manage to bullshit his way through.
He needed help. Who plans a meeting in Paris when they were an hour and a half away from the place and had serious things to attend in yet another country? Charles was an eco-terrorist. Not so perfect after all. He’d love to know people’s thoughts on this. But knowing it was Charles they were talking about here, they probably wouldn’t mind too much.
He scrolled through the contacts again until he found Nicolas Manager and pressed call before he could think too carefully about what he was going to say.
"Charles!" Nicolas picked up immediately, he sounded like he had been waiting for this call. "Finally, you got my messages?"
"Yes," George said. "Walk me through today."
A short pause. "Are you alright?"
"I'm fine, I'm just— it's been a morning. Walk me through it."
The Ferrari meeting was at two at the factory so obviously he'd need to get back to Maranello, which meant he had to get ready for the flight he would be technically late for in about less than 45 minutes. There were people expecting him. There were things to be reviewed and approved and signed off on. And there was, apparently, a whole separate thing with the simulator at the end of the week that George was now going to have to find a way to navigate without anyone noticing that he'd never driven this particular car in his life. He really hoped muscle memory was a real thing.
One thing at a time.
"The Paris thing," George carefully tried. "This morning."
"What Paris thing?"
"Nothing," George immediately corrected. "Never mind."
So Max was operating entirely off the books. That was— fine. That was something to think about later. He had a flight to catch, a Ferrari meeting to sit through and somewhere in the world his own body was walking around with Charles Leclerc in it and he was still not answering his damn calls.
He looked down at Leo, who had followed him through the entire phone call with the patience of a creature who had never attended a dog training session in his life.
He went to find out which of Charles's suitcases was already packed.
—
Maranello was very much red.
He knew that, obviously. Everyone knew that. But knowing Ferrari was red and then walking into Ferrari, the actual physical compound, the buildings, the floors, the walls, the general atmosphere of the place… They were two different experiences entirely. He wasn’t scared to admit that it was always red in a way that felt very aggressive to him. Their commitment to that colour went beyond branding, it was just grotesque. He had always thought it was too much, but now he’s afraid it might be a faction-esque type of problem.
George walked through it in Charles's body with Charles's lanyard and Charles's face and felt, very acutely, like a man who had just broken into somewhere. Except, naturally nobody stopped him.
That was the strangest part because he kept waiting for it. He expected the hand on the shoulder, the politely confused look, the sorry, can I help you. But Charles's face opened doors. Literally. He passed two security points where people glanced up, clocked him, and nodded him through without a word.
Of course. He was Charles Leclerc. He belonged here. He had belonged here for years. The gods had planned the day he was born for his noblest soldier to represent the most patrician team of them all. El predestinato or whatever they call him.
George kept his expression neutral and followed the signs.
The meeting room was already half full when he arrived.
He was— he checked the clock on the wall— exactly four minutes late, which he had spent the entire car ride from the airport deciding was barely acceptable and now, standing in the doorway, revised immediately to not ideal. Several people looked up. An engineer he didn't know said his name in a tone of mild relief. “Thank you for being on time,” he found a seat near the middle of the table, which seemed like a Charles sort of place to sit, and put his phone face-down in front of him. On time?
Across the table, his race engineer (Charles's race engineer) gave him a look that communicated something specific, maybe about the lateness, possibly about something else entirely. George gave a small, apologetic tilt of the head and hoped it read correctly.
"Right," said the man at the front who was the head of race strategy. "Let's start with the car."
He pulled up the first slide.
It took George about six minutes to understand that something significant was happening.
Not because the data was immediately legible, because it wasn't, entirely, not without the context of having lived and breathed this specific development program for the past eighteen months. But because of everyone in the room. There was this sort of stillness that settled over a group of engineers when the numbers were very good. He'd been in enough technical briefings in his career to recognize it.
These people thought they had something. That did it for him, he leaned forward slightly and started paying closer attention.
The car— the 2028 car, the one that was going to be on track in about a month— had come out of the regulation changes well. Better than expected, from the sounds of it. Better than the simulations had suggested at several points in the development cycle. There was something in the floor concept, something in the way they'd interpreted the new aerodynamic rules that had translated from CFD to physical testing— he kept his face completely still. He was very glad he'd had practice at that this morning.
"The correlation held through the final aero map," the engineer was saying. "Which gives us confidence going into Bahrain. The balance isn't where we want it in low-speed, there's still work to do there, but the platform is, to say the least, strong."
"How strong?" Someone blonde asked.
The man at the front glanced at the slide, then back at the room. "We think we're ahead," he said. "We think, well pending what we see from the competition in testing, we're ahead. So, pretty fucking strong."
The room absorbed this while George sat with it.
Ahead. As in… potentially the fastest car? As in, going into the first season under new regulations, Ferrari, Ferrari, had cracked something that the others hadn't and if it held up in testing, if the times bore it out and the upgrades actually came through and nothing catastrophic happened between now and Melbourne… Charles Leclerc might win the 2028 championship.
The old hag. The tea. Wow.
The thought arrived so cleanly, so completely, that for a moment George couldn't locate any other thought around it.
He'd asked for a championship. He'd gone into a weird ass shop in a foreign country, asked for his biggest wish, drank a cup of tea and woke up as Charles Leclerc. Now Charles Leclerc was sitting in a room being told that he might be driving the fastest car on the grid this year.
She really did it. Fuck.
The rest of the meeting happened around him. He listened, and nodded, and asked one question that he was almost certain was a reasonable question for Charles to ask in this context, and received an answer that he understood about seventy percent of. When someone brought up the low-speed balance issue and expected of a response out of him, he simply answered ‘we can look at that in testing’ like a man who had opinions, George was certain that was the right answer because no one pushed it.
Afterwards, in the corridor, Charles's race engineer fell into step beside him.
"Good meeting," he said. "You were pretty quiet."
"Just thinking." The engineer nodded and they walked in silence for a moment. "How are you feeling about Bahrain?"
George considered this question. He has no idea.
"Honestly?"
"Always."
"I think it's going to be an interesting year." The engineer smiled a small, private smile. He clapped George once on the shoulder and turned off down a different corridor.
George stood there for a moment in the red hallway of the Ferrari factory, he pulled out Charles's phone and called his own number again.
Voicemail.
"Charles," he said, after the beep, abandoning all pretense, "I don't know if you've figured out what's happened yet, but when you do call me back. We need to talk. And in the meantime, please don't do anything with my life that I can't undo and I’ll try to do the same with yours." He paused. "Also, the coffee machine instructions are in Italian, which I feel is super unnecessary."
—
He felt it before he opened the door.
Not an alarm, not a voice, it was just the uncommon characteristic of silence that meant an apartment wasn't empty. George stood in the hallway outside Charles's door with Charles's keys in his hand and ran through the possibilities. Housekeeper, maybe. A family member with a spare key. Someone from Ferrari who had reasons for being here. His manager, needing him to sign some things.
He turned the key, struggled for a bit to understand how the lock worked and pushed the door open.
Max Verstappen was on the couch.
He was sitting with one leg crossed over the other, phone in hand, Leo curled up against his thigh like this was a perfectly normal arrangement. He did not look up when George came in, his face bore a monotonous expression, reminiscent of the ones one bore when they’ve been waiting for a while.
"Finally," Max said after a few seconds. "I was starting to think you'd stopped for dinner on the way."
George stood in the doorway.
He had spent the entire flight back from Maranello fielding emails and running through increasingly elaborate contingency plans for the upcoming days, and not one of them had included Max Verstappen having a key to this apartment.
"Sorry," George lightly apologized, which seemed safe, and closed the door behind him.
"So." Max set his phone down on the armrest and looked at him with outstanding flatness, a look that didn't invite negotiation. "What do you want to eat? I was thinking the Argentinian place, the one that does the spice-free menu."
"Sure," George said, even if he doesn’t mind spices. But this wasn’t about him.
"Sure," Max repeated, with a faint inflection that George couldn't fully interpret. He picked his phone back up. "Fine."
George set down his bag and sat in the armchair across the room. Not on the couch, he noted, and then noted himself noting it.
Max Verstappen has a key to Charles Leclerc's apartment.
He filed it. He moved on.
So far, he thought he was doing well.
That was the thing. George genuinely thought he had it under control. He answered when answering was called for. He kept his responses short, which was easy enough to pass off as tiredness, and Charles was allowed to be tired, Charles had had a full day, no one could argue with tired. When Max asked about the meeting he said fine, I'll tell you later and Max made a noncommittal sound and went back to his phone.
The food arrived. They ate. The dog begged for food before relocating from Max to the floor between them. Max didn’t seem like he was about to leave just yet. George didn’t want to be impolite and ask him to.
George genuinely couldn’t wait until he closed the door to spend time with his own thoughts but he was handling the situation just fine despite everything.
And then Max said: "So, are we gonna talk about how you had me waiting like a damn idiot for an hour all by myself, before cancelling on me like I was the one who bugged you for two weeks straight about going back there?"
George tried not to panic but that was pretty difficult considering he didn’t understand a third of what Max had just said. It also didn’t help that Max talked even faster when he was mad.
"I'm sorry I told you," he repeated again. "I woke up late, I barely slept all night. I forgot I had a team meeting, I’d have come if I had organized my day better."
"That never stopped you before." Max said it the same way he'd said sure— he was not arguing, not agreeing, just holding it up to the light. "If you want to make me pay, I’m telling you this clearly isn’t the way."
It wasn't said aggressively because it invited for something else. Max probably had a theory and was just waiting for George to confirm it. This was a trap. He kept his expression neutral and said nothing, which was also an answer in itself. Did Max just come here to pick up a fight with Charles?
Max put his fork down.
"This is still about what I told Daniel, isn’t it."
The sentence landed in the room and sat there. Obviously, George had no idea what Max had told Daniel and how this was relevant to Charles. One thing he knew, was that Daniel probably referred to Ricciardo, or the other one, Juncadello or something? He tried to search his memory for a bit, was there anything related to Max, Charles and a Daniel talked about in the press these days? George was always aware of this sort of things but nothing came up to him in his mind.
"I’m past this," George placed all his hope on this safe answer.
Something shifted in Max's face.
"Past this," he repeated. There was an edge coming into his voice now, he was still careful and controlled but very present. Not so different from a current sitting beneath water that looks still. "Right. We're both past it. That's why you've been acting like a fucking douchebag all day."
"I haven't—"
"I already said I'm sorry, Charles." He said it with a force that still wasn't exactly anger or hurt, but it felt uncomfortable. "I really don't know what else you want from me. What is it, are you just going to make me pay for it until you decide you're satisfied with my reaction?"
"I never said that." He did his best not to sound defensive.
"Then what? What did you say?" Max leaned forward slightly. In the ambient light of the apartment, he looked focused, impassive, in the special way of his that made paddock journalists choose their questions carefully at press conferences. "Because from where I'm sitting, it feels like you've already decided something without telling me what it is."
George opened his mouth. He closed it again. The silence stretched as George’s panic started to fully unroll.
When Max sat back, he noticed his hair. It was freshly washed, it looked so blonde when it was freshly washed. It also had volume, most likely because he finger-combed his hair many times since George got here. His skin looked like it had been recently moisturized. He wouldn’t have taken Max as the kind of person who even owned any type of skincare. In fact, he thought he would be the kind of guy to make fun of anyone who used it regularly.
But apparently he didn’t know Verstappen as much as he thought he did. Damn, he didn’t even know Leclerc that much either, it appeared.
He exhaled through his nose as he ran a hand through his hair (again), and then he was just sitting there, the edge had gone out of him as quickly as it had arrived. What was left looked unexpectedly like pure exhaustion.
Leo got up from the floor to go put his chin on Max's knee. Neither of them said anything for a moment, Max probably because he was weighing his words and George because he was dealing with an increasing internal crisis. George looked out of the window, he couldn’t do much else anyway.
Then Max quietly said, "Charles." He stood up from the couch as he sighed.
As George watched him cross the room, he noted a shift in how he was carrying himself, in his features. It was something George genuinely did not have a word for, simply because he had never seen it on Max Verstappen's face before. The way his shoulders dropped, the way his feet moved like he didn’t carry any weight. He looked unguarded but careful, deliberate. Like he was putting a heavy helmet down after holding it for too long.
He stopped in front of George by the barely opened window. It was raining outside so not a lot of light was coming out of it. From how high Charles’s appartement was, you could barely see the rain land on the ground but it was still there. Still hurting the glass with rhythmic hammering.
Up close, George could see how effortless it looked. The way Max was choosing this, specifically and consciously. He stood there with his hands at his sides for a moment, and then he raised them and placed them, carefully, on either side of George's neck.
George's entire nervous system sent up a flare.
He did not move. He was committed to not moving. He had survived this morning, and the late flight, and the meeting, and the dinner, and he was going to survive whatever this was too, through sheer force of will. He was a professional athlete with exceptional physical discipline, after all.
Max's thumbs were very close to his jaw. George would have been worried for Charles’s life given Max’s track record ; except now his thumbs were moving and slowly brushing the lower side of his cheeks.
"Please don't be mad," Max said. Almost mutely. Then, in a murmur, "I promise I won't do it again."
George detached his gaze from the drizzly glass.
He stared at him for what felt like a very long time. His brain was stalling, buffering, his processing queue had simply filled up and new information had nowhere to go.
"Okay," George said.
Because what else could he say? Max was looking at him with those eyes from approximately five inches away, with his hands on George's neck and his expression completely unguarded. It was beyond odd to him and almost terrifying.
But nothing felt as eerie as when Max haltingly closed the gap between them to press his lips to his. Softly, briefly. Carefully, like a question.
George's brain went white. Everything in him screamed in achromatic hues.
The way a screen goes when you've overloaded it, full of nothing and everything at once, and he sat there in Charles Leclerc's body in Charles Leclerc's apartment while Max Verstappen pulled back and looked at him with something that might have been relief, and he thought, with the one and only functioning part of his mind: What the hell.
He needed a minute. Or ten.
—
He deserved an Emmy.
He deserved a BAFTA and a Golden Globe and some kind of special recognition from the Academy for outstanding achievement in the field of not reacting visibly to disconcerting things. He really should be given something! A trophy. A certificate at minimum.
Max went back to the couch, apparently satisfied, apparently lighter, and he picked up his phone again like the preceding two minutes hadn't happened. The dog followed him, and the apartment settled back into its previous quiet. George sat in the obnoxious red armchair and thought Oh.
Oh, so that's been going on.
He turned it over slowly in his head. Charles and Max. Max and Charles.
He wasn’t dumb. He lined it up against everything that had happened since this morning— the call, the off the schedule rendez-vous, the key, the too familiar way Max had been sitting on the couch when he'd walked in, the same place as always, the Argentinian restaurant with the salt free menu or something, the specific kind of argument they'd just had, the particular register of hurt underneath the frustration Max let out. It all pretty much resolved into a shape that had apparently been there, floating around the entire time.
He felt, genuinely, a little stupid.
How long had this been going on? It did look like something established. Max had waited, eaten, started a fight, and then crossed the room and kissed him. These were people who knew each other in ways that took time. So really, how long has it been?
Were they like, together together, or was it just a complicated undefined thing, an arrangement with its own private rules that Charles, of course, hadn’t bothered to write down for him? George genuinely couldn't tell, both seemed possible. Fuck, he can’t believe this.
Was anyone in the paddock even aware? He searched his knowledge of the last years, the paddock sighting, the inside jokes, and came up with nothing solid. Nothing he could point to. Which meant either they were genuinely good at this, the whole hiding thing— well obviously, they were because it had taken a whole kiss for him to notice while living in the man's apartment (or more like, in his whole damn skin) ; or they had just started it. Was it so hidden that even the people close to them didn't know about it?
Fuck Charles for not telling him. That was the other thought. Fuck Charles for not answering the phone, for not calling back, for not giving him even a single piece of useful information before throwing him into this, and now here George was, on day one, having accidentally sat through a half argument, and then been kissed by Max Verstappen, and he had questions.
He had a truly extraordinary number of questions, none of which he could ask the person currently in this room. Not directly.
He thought about their respective teams and felt a new wave of exhaustion wash over him. Ferrari's opinion of this. Red Bull's. Were they aware? He couldn't begin to construct the conversation. He could barely construct the concept.
He tried to imagine Max in a relationship. He tried to build the image from everything he knew: the attitude, the driving style, the particular brand of directness, the little patience for anything that wasn't exactly what it was. He kept arriving at the same wall. He just could not see it. And then he looked over at the couch, at Max sitting there with Charles's feisty dog peacefully sleeping against his leg, his phone in his hand, seemingly entirely at ease.
You can, actually.
And with Charles Leclerc, apparently. Of all the things.
Leclerc had hidden an entire relationship from the grid, from his team, from, mayhaps, most of the people in his life. Why exactly would he put himself through something like that. That was beyond what George could fathom at the moment.
What else was in here? What other surprises was this garish apartment holding? He wasn’t sure if he wanted to know anymore. He mentally asked himself to stop speculating and simply react to things as they happen to survive whatever comes next until Charles calls him back. And if he didn’t by the end of tomorrow, he was gonna fly back there and get everything sorted out by himself.
From the couch, still not looking up from his phone, Max asked, "Are you falling asleep?"
"No," George said.
"You look like you're falling asleep.”
"I'm thinking."
Max made a small sound. "About what."
"Nothing," George said, "Everything." That part was genuine.
Max got up from the couch, finally set his phone down then rested his arms on George’s tense shoulders from behind the armchair. George took a deep breath as discreetly as he could.
Max then bent down a bit more to gently rest his chin on his left shoulder, voice even more velvety from that meager distance to his ear. “Well I’m tired. Let’s go to sleep, okay?”
If F1 didn't work out for him in the end, he thought, he would have genuinely no problem selling this story. No problem at all. It would be the most remarkable thing anyone had ever read, it would all be completely true, and no one would believe a single word of it.
—
Max wasn’t there when George woke up and Charles hadn’t called.
Nothing from his own number. Nothing new. Just a backlog of messages from people he didn't know well enough to answer and a notification from a weather app set to Monaco, which was pointlessly redundant. Maybe just look out your windows, Charles?
No notes were on the side table. Not that he expected any, but the disappointment at seeing the empty round table was there nonetheless, it was in all likelihood due to the fact George was desperate for anything that gave him more context.
Max had probably gone back to his apartment. Did he sleep the whole night with him? The last thing George recalled was Max brushing his teeth, he most likely fell asleep before he even came out of the bathroom. He also didn’t remember being disturbed while sleeping, which he always was whenever he slept with someone, even in that kind of ginormous sized bed.
Charles’s dog jumped on the bed and George attempted to chase him off, again.
"Your awful dad is still not calling," George senselessly told him. “I might have to kill him.” The dog blinked slowly.
He gave himself until after breakfast.
He made it work this time— the coffee machine, by the grace of a YouTube tutorial he found by searching Charles Leclerc coffee after skipping three mortifying brand partnership videos. He drank his not-so-delicious Italian coffee standing at the kitchen window and watched Monaco exist. That city never felt right.
He tried calling again. Voicemail.
He put the phone face-up on the table then picked it up and opened the messages.
He told himself it was necessary. Reconnaissance. He tried not go on the more personal side of things during his flight yesterday ; but clearly that had been a mistake, he needed to understand the situation he was in and the life he was blindly navigating. The phone was the most complete map available to him, the modern portal of the soul.
He opened the messages from Max first because that was the obvious place to start, and immediately regretted it.
There were a lot of them. That was the first thing. Not constant, not overwhelming, but a steady thread going back— he scrolled, and kept scrolling— to a long time. Further than he would have guessed.
There were a lot of references he couldn't decode without the proper context. Arguments that started and resolved within the space of an afternoon. Long gaps that he suspected corresponded to race weekends, followed by catch-up messages at odd hours, the kind of thing you send when you're somewhere loud and thinking about something else.
There were photos. He briefly looked through the gallery. He didn’t examine many, and saw nothing that would mean anything out of its context. A picture of a view from what looked like an apartment window in a city George didn't recognise. A photo Charles had sent of his dog doing something undignified. Max had replied with a single period, which George is certain was affectionate. A selfie taken from a sunny beach, Max’s reddened face half hidden in Charles’s neck.
He put the phone face-down. He picked it up again. He stumbled upon a photo album titled MV and put it face-down again.
"I'm not doing that," the dog was sitting across the kitchen table with the gravity of a witness. "That's a line. I'm not crossing that."
George turned the phone back over, opened Instagram instead, because that felt like neutral territory, and immediately found that Charles followed a truly baffling array of accounts— fashion things, food things, an inexplicable number of pages dedicated to vintage Ferraris, a dog account that was not Leo. Somewhere buried in the following list was a private account with no profile picture and zero posts that George was nonetheless quite certain he knew the owner of based on the reels sent.
He kept scrolling.
He found other things. Other corners of Charles's life that were none of his business, that he catalogued briefly and filed away: a thread with Pierre that appeared to be conducted almost entirely in French with occasional emojis that suggested a level of friendship George had always known about. At least, this wasn’t a surprise. A message from Carlos that was just a voice note, eight minutes long, sent three weeks ago, unreplied to. A contact saved as Maman with a two-digit unread count that made George feel, suddenly, very guilty.
He put the phone down properly and pushed it to the other side of the table.
He needed Charles to call him back. He needed it with increasing urgency. He was living in this man's life and he didn't know the shape of it well enough to inhabit it, and every hour that passed was another hour where something could go irreversibly wrong, and Charles was out there somewhere in George's life not answering the phone and—
The phone buzzed. George grabbed it.
It was Max. Taking Nino out in 5min, coming?
Below the text, a photo.
The dog in it was— he searched for the right word— committed, was perhaps the most charitable option. It had a darker kind of coat that probably required no effort to look after. Typical Max choice. Short legs, enormous eyes, an expression of existential uncertainty that suggested some awareness of its own appearance. Since when did Max even have a dog? It suddenly hit George that he totally looked like the less grubby version of Charles’s dog. Amazing news.
He considered the text. Going out meant more Max, more performance, more sustained presence. Not going out meant staying in this apartment for another lonesome morning, which he had now been in long enough to know every corner of, and was starting to feel like a very well-appointed cell.
Also, he realised, he genuinely needed to give Leo a walk, and he had no idea what the usual route was. Having Max there meant he could simply follow rather than navigate.
But he didn’t like being around Verstappen. The man, for starters, never liked him. He was sure of that. It would be a blatant lie to say George never cared, there was a point in his life where he tried to change that, and then was met with the Great Wall of Max Verstappen’s icy demeanor.
Either way the feeling was absolutely fully mutual now. He was probably the last person on the grid George would’ve chosen for this. He wasn’t even attractive.
Sure, he typed. Give me 15.
He set the phone down and went to find Charles's shoes, which took twenty minutes because Charles appeared to own approximately ninety pairs and had not arranged them according to any system that George could identify. Being in someone’s messy apartment was already George’s idea of personal hell. But having to sort out and go through a chaotic and disheveled 400 square feet closet? Ablaze Pandemonium.
Max was already outside when he got there, which George was starting to understand was simply how Max operated— he arrived first and then expressed, through posture alone, his opinion on how long he'd been waiting. He was standing with a lead in each hand ; one attached to Leo's matching lead, which he'd apparently retrieved from wherever Charles kept it, and one attached to the other dog, who was trotting in a small, anxious circles around Max's ankles.
"You're late," Max said.
"By four minutes."
"Yes."
George looked at the new dog. Up close it was exactly what the photo had suggested. Deeply sincere, aesthetically sleek, apparently very pleased about the concept of outdoors. It looked up at George with enormous wet eyes and made a sound that was close to a bark.
They walked around the block, then joined a small path that had a view on the awakening seashore.
It was, George thought, objectively a pleasant morning. Monaco in January benefitted from the particular cool clarity of the off-season, the city returned to itself, the harbour moving slowly in the pale light. He walked beside Max with Leo on his lead and Nino occasionally appearing between them to create major navigational hazards. For approximately thirteen minutes, it was almost relaxing.
Then Max broke the silence.
"You're still doing it." George kept the same pace.
"Doing what."
"The thing." A bicycle passed by them and the dogs almost tried to obliterate the guy. "You're walking next to me like you’d rather be anywhere else."
George said nothing, Max didn’t even give him the time to process his reprimand.
"You haven't—" Max stopped. George stopped too, because Max had stopped, and turned to find him standing on the path with both leads in hand and an expression that was complicated to analyse. The edge wasn't there this time. It was something more exposed, which was somehow harder to look at. "Since you came back from Maranello and you were different, and I thought— last night, I thought it was fine, I thought you were fine, but you're still—"
He marked a pause again. Nino sat down on his foot. Max looked down at him briefly, then back up.
"Why didn’t you bring me anything," he said. Flatly. It was not accusatory. He was asking a question he'd decided to simply put down.
George stood on a tortuous path in Monaco in someone else's body picking up poop from what wasn’t even his dog, and Max Verstappen was watching him with an openness that George was beginning to understand wasn't something he offered cheaply or often.
He could not explain this. He could not say: I'm not Charles, I'm George Russell, I woke up like this three days ago, the one you want answers from is somewhere in my body and not answering the phone, and I have been doing my absolute best. He could not say any of that, for so many reasons. One of them being the uncertainty of his actual situation, what if Charles was not occupying his body? What if George Russell was lying dead and rotting away and this was how he was going to be in this world moving forward? He simply could not afford to burn all his last cards by being weak-minded. Get your shit together, George.
What he could say was the truth, or the closest thing to the truth that the situation allowed.
"I'm sorry." Who would’ve thought he’d ever apologize, for what felt like the hundredth time, to freaking Max Verstappen. "It's nothing you did. I'm just not quite myself at the moment."
Max was trying to digest his answer the best he could. Once he was done chewing it up, he subdued.
"You know I don’t want anything from you, I always tell you you shouldn’t bring me anything when you travel, and I still mean that. You always travel. It’s just—” Leo was starting to tug on Nino’s harness. “When you came back and there was nothing—”
"I've been in my head. Really, it's not you, Max. I just keep fucking up apparently.” With you.
“You're always in your head these days," he said, but the edge now completely gone out of it.
"I know." Charles had so much explaining to do.
"It's annoying."
"I know, I’m sorry."
Max didn’t add anything as they were making their way back to their appartement complex. Then, somewhere between conceding a point and putting something away: "Just let me know if there’s anything I can do, okay?"
After a few steps, without looking over, he transferred Nino’s lead to his other hand and let the back of his hand knock, very briefly, against George's.
George looked straight ahead, he was intelligent enough to know it would not be a good idea to acknowledge that.
He was beginning to genuinely understand how Charles Leclerc had kept this hidden from the entire Formula One grid, because if George hadn't been standing directly inside the situation, he would never have seen it from the outside. They had developed a language so small and private it was practically invisible. It made sense and was also, he thought, the most languish possible way to love someone.
He reflected on that for a second or two. Would he ever inflict on himself such a thing? Surely not. He liked his freedom too much, he didn’t think he could ever handle having someone in his space that often. He had been in a few relationships before of course, but not with anyone that shared his life as much as Max did. How did him and Charles not get sick of each other? His old relationships were all healthy and well balanced ; George had worked really hard on that perfect work / personal life ratio. They also lasted what George considered a relatively average amount of time, and were enjoyable enough while they perdured. Except none of them had really stood out as the one, he had never thought any of them added anything valuable enough to his life to keep.
Their relationship was a headache to George now, but he couldn’t understand how it wasn’t for either of them. Wasn’t their job hard enough as it was? They all had to deal with massive invasions of privacy all the damn time, why would they voluntarily add a layer of difficulty to their lives?
Of course, being perceived was also part of the whole deal. Some of them were naturals at it, others managed. Charles was a natural, he couldn’t remember a time where he wasn’t. He didn’t need to be close to him to know he actually loved that part of the job. He could relate to that to some extent, that’s why everything he had learned about Charles so far made little sense. His life choices didn’t align with everything he seemed to be. Max managed, he was the perfect exemple of someone who handled that side of the job simply because he had to. So really, not much was set up in their favor to work.
The two odd shaped dogs had somehow managed to wind their leads into a configuration that was going to take both of them to unravel. Max crouched down to sort it out, he obviously had done this before. His dog took the opportunity to attempt licking his ear, and Max said something in Dutch that most likely wasn't suitable for the street.
George stood above him and watched the two dogs but his thoughts were with a slightly old woman in Shanghai and a tin of unspecified leaves and what, specifically, had been meant by biggest wish.
He wanted so bad to be in the right car to win a championship. He'd said it to Toto, once, after a race that had gone badly. I just want to be in the right car. That's all I need. Back then, he hadn't phrased it as winning. He'd phrased it as getting the right conditions.
This didn’t feel like the right conditions, if anything he felt so out of his element it was manifestly vertiginous.
He thought about the Ferrari meeting and about those auspicious numbers.
He could so clearly see it. Charles Leclerc winning. Jumping up and down, champagne dampening his skin, delightfully being cheered on by every single person in the crowd. Some would cry from uncontrollable happiness, some would scream his name, some would probably hug complete strangers. How did it feel to have the stars so perfectly aligned not a single soul was praying on your downfall? Not every single soul, it seemed.
"Are you just going to stand there?" Max said, from below him, one hand still full of leads.
"Yes, you’re handling everything exceptionally well," George was being sarcastic, he didn’t know if it read well with Charles’s voice.
Max made a sound that was close to a laugh.
George looked down at him, then crouched on the path in the January light. Fruitlessly helping, his brain had decided to generate Max’s reaction to a Leclerc championship win. He couldn’t come up with anything tangible enough to write down.
—
The call came on Tuesday morning.
George was on his third successful attempt with the coffee machine— a milestone he had stopped mentioning aloud because there was no one to mention it to. Charles's phone lit up with his own face and his own name. He picked it up so fast the first ring hadn’t even finished.
"Where have you been."
A sharp intake of breath could be heard on the other end. "...George?"
"Obviously George. I have been calling you for two days—"
"I know, I— wait." A pause that implied Charles was doing rapid arithmetic. "Two days? It's been two days?"
"It's Tuesday."
"Tuesday." The word came out like it had slapped him across the face. There was rustling— probably sheets, and the unmistakable sound of someone sitting up quickly. "I fell asleep, I was— I woke up and I didn't know what was happening. I thought I'd just close my eyes for a moment and then—"
"It was the end of the weekend," George provided.
"It was the weekend," Charles repeated, as if this explained it.
"You were asleep for two days in a hotel room. In Shanghai. While I was actively managing your entire fucking life."
A silence.
"In Shanghai. For two days." Charles carefully examined. "This mattress must be very comfortable."
“You have to stay for another two days, you have a tight promotion schedule with Toto. Your flight back is on Friday.” George looked at the ceiling.
"I’m assuming all the things I’ll need are in your suitcase? Since you still haven’t unpacked, I wasn’t sure—" Charles asked, shifting quickly.
“I never unpack when I travel for less than seven days. It’s a waste of time.”
"Right. Okay.” Charles clearly still needed time to grasp everything that had been going on. Did that guy ever panic? “Is— is everything alright on your side?" Ah, finally.
"I’ve been to a Ferrari meeting." A pause. He purposely chose what he thought to be a comforting and familiar topic to him. "The car looks very fast."
The silence was loaded this time.
"Yes," Charles carefully said. "It does." George moved to the kitchen table and sat down."Did you go through my phone?"
George left a beat too long. "Well, I needed to understand the situation." Two whole days without any sort of direction was hard enough.
"My phone is private."
"I was orienting myself. What was I supposed to do? Lock myself up for two days straight? You’re a sought after man, you know."
"Yeah. You’re right, I—" He could envision Charles’s hand nervously combing through his hair. Sorry it’s just— I also went through your phone." Hypocrite. George found that he didn’t care. "Your calendar has seventeen colour coded categories."
"That's an efficient system."
"One of them says miscellaneous informal."
"Well that's a relevant category in my life.” George had now moved over to the scarlet armchair. “Now that you mention it, you’d also probably benefit from colour coding," Charles let a fleshy silence fill out the space between them. Why wasn’t he asking more questions? Did this guy never wonder about anything in his life? It was once again left to George to make all the efforts."By the way, your dog is fine." A long halt, then he just went for it. "The other one too."
The temperature of the call converted immediately. Whatever lightness had been creeping in evaporated in an instant.
"Is he," Charles started, "I haven't—" This obviously wasn’t about the sheeny dog. What felt like an eternity later, he asked: "Did you talk to him yet?" There it was.
Nothing would’ve been more futile than asking who him referred to.
"He called the morning it happened," George shared, keeping his voice even. "Before I had any idea what was going on. And then he came upstairs that evening."
"He—" A sharp sound. Not quite a word.
"He was already angry," George continued. "About you being two hours late to wherever you were supposed to be."
"Obviously," Charles said, and the word came out with a heat that surprised George slightly. It better not be directed at him but at the situation, or at himself. "Obviously he was, I should've— you should have waited for me to call back before seeing him,"
"I didn't exactly have a choice, he has a key by the way—" George was getting frustrated. "Manifestly, you know him better than I do but I’m pretty certain he'd never have let two days go without an answer,"
Charles exhaled. Something between frustration and abdication. "He was very angry?"
"At first. Then there was a whole thing about something he told Daniel—" Silence. George waited.
"What did he say to you," Charles said finally, voice still barely audible. All the heat had gone out of it. George felt obligated to give him something to munch on.
"He thought you were punishing him for it. That you were making him pay for whatever it was."
The very long pauses were starting to irk George, he was never fond of wasting time on redundant things.
"What did he tell Daniel?" George asked.
"Nothing that concerns you." For the first time during the call, George felt Charles get defensive.
"Are you sure about that? Because I had to sit through a pretty long argument about it."
"It still doesn't concern you."
"Charles." George leaned forward slightly, his patience was thinning. "You know I’m gonna find out stuff by myself anyway, right?"
The pause that followed had a different shape, a bulkier one. Just malleable enough to decide how much to let out.
"What did he—" Charles restarted. "How did it end."
"He apologised. He was—" George kept his voice neutral. "He was fine. We sorted it."
"He apologised." Charles was turning it over, checking the weight of it. "How."
"He just— he said sorry. Said he wouldn't do it again."
"That's—" A breath. "Okay. Okay, good." George didn’t understand how Charles didn’t lose more hair with how often he ran his hand through his hair. "Did he seem— was he alright after? Did it seem like he was—"
"He was fine," George curtly replied, and then, because it was relevant and because Charles was going to need to understand the full scope of what he'd walked into: "He did ask why I didn’t bring him anything from Maranello. The next day, on the walk."
A silence.
"What walk."
"He texted me, he was going out with Nino, so we walked the dogs."
Charles said nothing for a moment. "Right. Of course he did." Resignation was natural to a man who knew how his own life operated. "What did you say?"
"That I'd been in my head. That it wasn't about him."
"Good." He really didn’t need Charles’s approval to know he did well. "That's— yes, okay that's good."
Another silence settled between them, it was thinner, so George was aware that there was something else Charles wanted to say. Charles, being the perfect mixture of politically correct and forthright he was, took time to work out how to say it.
"Don't be too yourself," Charles settled on.
George frowned. "I'm sorry?"
"With Max. While this is— just." He seemed to be making choices carefully. "Don't be too yourself with him."
"What does that mean, Leclerc."
"It means what it means."
"That's not an answer."
"It is an answer, you just don't like it." How did this man manage to get in the good graces of the bluntest guy ever? He was on the verge of telling him just that when Charles decided to give him more. "If Max wakes up tomorrow and his boyfriend is suddenly acting like everything is fine from a very correct and professional distance— he’s gonna hate you, to put it plainly." Hearing Charles finally use the word boyfriend was beyond eldritch. It almost distracted him from the poorly concealed insult Charles just threw in his face.
"I am not—"
"I'm not saying you are. I'm saying make sure you don't become it." His voice had an evenness to it now which told George he was probably content to have let it all out. "I think you understand what I mean."
"Not really," George was slightly dishonest, but he was also becoming pretty tired of always playing the bigger person.
"What I'm trying to say," Charles started, before taking time to reformulate, "when this is over, I want my boyfriend waiting for me at home. That's all. Just— keep that in mind? Please."
The kitchen was uneventful, George had no idea where Charles’s dog had went to.
George leaned against the American fridge with all the information he finally managed to gather from mister taciturn himself.
The straightforwardness of it landed off-centre. Charles talking about Max like this, plainly, with only half of what he had expected in terms of deflection. The whole my boyfriend stated without any apparent self-consciousness. It was more than George had been anticipating and he wasn't entirely sure what to do with it.
They were not close to say the least. Charles and him. They were colleagues who had coexisted on the same grid for years with mutual civility, the occasional friction and precisely zero conversations that had sounded like this.
"Obviously," he kept going back to the armchair. Three seconds. Hands on either side of his neck. Please don't be mad. Max's eyes a few inches away.
"Obviously," Charles repeated, the word had a honed edge, faint enough to ignore.
"Nothing happened," George declared. "I managed the situation. He's not angry anymore, he thinks everything is fine."
"Everything is not fine." That was a fact he couldn’t deny.
"Well, he doesn't know that."
"No," Charles agreed. "He doesn't." Yet.
"I'll call every morning," Charles sounded way too composed for someone who had never experienced anything remotely metaphysical before. "Before nine."
"Before nine," George consented.
"And George—"
"Don't." Enough was enough.
"I wasn't going to say anything." Charles was a mediocre liar.
"You were about to say something."
"I was going to say thank you," Charles said, with some dignity. "For managing. It can't have been easy. So, thank you."
The dog finally came back from wherever he was busy making a mess.
"Call me tomorrow," George was ready for this cramped call to be over. "Before nine."
When he hung up, the average tasting coffee in his cup was now below-par. His Tuesday morning had just become significantly more complicated than it had been twenty minutes ago, which was not the outcome he tremendously wanted when he had been impatiently expecting the call. How dumb of him to believe Charles Leclerc, out of anyone, would have answers and a solution.
He also hadn’t been completely honest with Charles. It had felt pointless to mention he may have been the reason their mutual problem started to begin with. Something roaring told George sharing this piece of information would double down on the issue, if anything. He tried to shut down the little voice in his head telling him his self preservation instincts probably got damaged on their way to Charles’s body.
When this is over, I want my boyfriend waiting for me at home.
Max was probably in his own living room downstairs right now, or next door, or wherever he was in his flat that was technically separate and functionally wasn't, going about his morning in the complete and reasonable belief that the person upstairs was Charles.
He picked up the phone to reply to Max's message from forty minutes ago— ‘coffee outside?’ with ‘give me half an hour’ ; and immediately questioned whether that was what Charles would have said, and decided it didn't matter that much anyway, it was just a quick text.
He was doing great.
He was handling this extremely well. Charles would’ve probably done way worse in his shoes.
He went to find a pair of non-glory hound trainers to go meet up with a man he could barely stand on a good day.