Chapter Text
George would call himself quite a few things if he was ever in a situation where he was asked to describe himself. He’s sure others would use varying other descriptors. Unobservant would not be one of them however.
He’d been curious when he heard they were getting new rookies, – even with the pang of hurt for the fact Daniel wouldn’t be with them for the new season – and was especially more curious upon finding out they were two of his best friends' new teammates.
Logan had slipped into the Williams seat without much fanfare, and George had already heard about ten different stories from Alex about the conversations they’d had, and the whispered moments in between JV talking.
George was mostly really glad that Alex had a seemingly good teammate with him. He really really wanted his best friend to have a good year.
He somehow manages to know less about Oscar Piastri, despite that he’s Lando’s teammate, and that everybody knew of the contract debacle before he’d even properly settled into the seat.
He didn’t even know it was possible for Lando to he quiet about things until now, but the McLaren driver had been surprisingly tight lipped.
He does end up asking Lando about it point-blank one night, when him, Alex and George have managed to get the time for all three of them to call while they did various things individually.
George knew he didn’t have too long left before Lewis would be knocking on the door, because tonight was one of his scheduled regression nights they’d agreed on, and George knew that Lewis knew he’d been floating in that in-between for hours.
“So, Lando, how’s it with your new teammate?” It’s shamelessly nosy, and far less tactful than George would usually be about something; but he was really curious; and a bit off kilter from Lando actually managing to keep things from them.
“Oh, Oscar? Yeah he’s good, keeps to himself mostly.”
George and Alex both wait for Lando to elaborate.
He doesn’t.
“And….?” Alex starts tentatively.
“I don’t know what else to say, I don’t know him very well. He’s been very quiet so far, he’s not like Carlos or Daniel were.”
George didn’t know how to tell Lando that of course it was going to be different, because he was the older teammate now.
Alex ends up saying what he’s thinking anyway,
“I mean… you’re the older teammate now, Lan, no wonder it feels different. He’s probably terrified.”
Lando makes a noise between consideration and a laugh, albeit not in any sort of mean way.
“I don’t think he gets terrified. He’s so… put together so far.”
“Everyone seems put together in comparison to you.” George pipes up teasingly, making it clear that he’s joking as he says it.
Lando gasps in offence,
“You’re so mean! I’m going to tell Lewis and you can say goodbye to your later bedtime.”
“Oh yeah? I could always tell Daniel about what happened the last time we all stayed up?” George retorts, before freezing when he looks up directly to make eye-contact with an amused looking Lewis.
He checks the time. It was nearing the three hour mark, which was what Lewis was willing to let him have for the night.
He needed to bail immediately before he accidentally slipped up and said more things that he definitely did not want to.
“I’m going to go guys, I’ll talk to you guys tomorrow. Lando, I expect more information about Piastri.” He waits long enough for their answering goodbyes, before he’s clicking off the call and shutting down his game.
He turns to stare at Lewis.
“Do I even want to know what it was Lando got up to?” Lewis asks, moving to sit on George’s bed.
“Umm… no, probably not.” George says, remembering very distinctly how hard him and Lando had to lock in to avoid getting found out.
“Uh huh,” Lewis says with amusement, making it clear that he probably did have an inkling of what went on, but George was happy to not look too closely at it,
“Discussing new teammates then?”
“Yeah. I’ve heard heaps about Sargeant, but barely anything about Piastri.”
George liked knowing things, not in any sort of evil way, he just liked knowing the facts and what was going on at any given time. It made everything feel better when he could organise the information and had a full story.
“Well, I don’t know too much about him, beyond that he’s Mark Webber's protege, and basically his kid.” Lewis says, clearly trying to think of anything he knows, “and Sebastian says that Alonso is incredibly fond of him.”
“Hmmmm, Lando says he’s hard to read.” George shares, because Lewis probably needed to know this too.
“He’s just joined the grid, bub, he's probably nervous.”
“That’s what I told Lando, but…it’s weird someone gets to Formula 1 and you still don’t know much about them.”
“I seem to remember a certain somebody that managed to make it to their second team before people started figuring things out about them.” Lewis says lightly, reaching a finger out to teasingly pull one of Georges’ curls.
“That’s… different. People knew things about me.”
People knew things that George had very specifically cultivated and allowed them to know, but George felt that bringing that up right now would not be very productive to his argument.
“Not much though, hm? I knew less about you than I did Valterri at the beginning.”
“Well…” George couldn’t argue with that one, there wasn’t really anything he could say in his own defence; because Lewis was right.
“You’ll get to know him once the season starts properly, I’m sure it won’t take too long.” Lewis reassures, and George had to admit he had a point, it usually took a few months before people really started warming up to each other; with a few notable exceptions.
He was sure he could come up with a way to speed along the process, there had to be a faster way to achieve the same result.
Lewis has to interrupt the brainstorming he had started though, with the reminder of their routine and the looming fog in the back of his head.
“Come on, toilet time and teeth time.” Lewis says lightly, standing up and stretching with a quiet groan, “then you can play with toys for a bit.”
George lets out a whining noise at having to get up, mostly involuntarily,
“Noooo, I don’t want to.”
“You also don’t want to be yucky for bedtime, do you?” Lewis counters, and George groans at it, even as he concedes to Lewis’ logic. He didn’t want to go to bed gross, even if there were still a couple hours until bedtime.
“I guess.”
“C’mon, if you do it properly, I might even put on a movie before bed.”
George lets Lewis pull him up until he is standing upright, his legs taking a moment to stabilise underneath him.
George scrubs a hand across his eyes as they head towards the bathroom, a sudden tiredness rearing his head now that he’s paused and moved away from talking to his friends.
He fiddles with the fabric of his pants as they walk, trying to deliberate whether he wanted to say about what had been bothering him, and what was gradually making his anxiety about bedtime grow.
He decides to go through with it after a moment, taking a few deep and braver breaths before speaking up,
“I don’t wanna sleep in my room.” He’d been hating it more lately, even if he was fine with it when he was big; there was something about it when he was little and tired and felt so incredibly surrounded by everything that he couldn’t stand.
When he’d gone to Papa’s for a few nights last week, he’d practically spent the night sleeping in George’s bed with him because George was sure something would get him otherwise. It had been a very stressful few hours before Nico had figured out that that was what he had wanted.
“Hmmm, what about my bed then? We can put something on the tv there.” Lewis offers, dropping George at the door to the bathroom before leaning against it as they talked.
This was the best offering he could have gotten. George loved when he got to sleep in Daddy’s bed, and got to watch movies or tv shows in there. It was just better than his own bed.
George nods, focusing for a moment on making sure his toothpaste got perfectly on his toothbrush, so that his teeth would be properly cleaned, before he tried talking again.
“Peanuts movie?” George asks, because even though he was pretty sure he’d watched it three times in the last four days, he was kind of obsessed at the moment.
“I think we can arrange that. You haven’t gotten sick of it yet?”
George just shakes his head, prompting an amused laugh out of Lewis before he continued talking. George just listened mostly, letting Lewis explain what the plan was for the rest of the night so far, and a little bit of what tomorrow had in store for them.
Which… the markets. George loved the markets. It was one of his favourite thing to do with Lewis when they had the time for it, and the noise of it all wasn’t too overwhelming; and they hadn’t managed to properly find the time for it since last December.
“Can I have a hot chocolate tomorrow please?” George asks, once he’s spit the toothpaste out and rinsed his mouth out a few times.
“I definitely think you are allowed a hot chocolate. Maybe even some sort of danish, hm?” Lewis continues, leading them back towards the bedroom. Danishes and hot chocolate weren’t technically part of his diet plan that he really did try to follow at all times; but there was a certain level of leeway given to Market Days when he was small.
“Woo!” He cheers, because he had been craving a blueberry danish for about three weeks now, and he was one step away from getting creative to make it fit his meal plan.
“I’m going to go get some bits and bobs, okay? You have a think about what you’d like to watch.” Lewis says, waiting until George nods in agreement before he turns.
George climbed onto the side of the bed that he had basically designated as his when he was here, shuffling under the blankets immediately.
He didn't start thinking about what he wanted to watch though, and instead let his mind get caught up on thinking a bit more on what the grids' new rookies might be like.
He didn’t mean to be thinking about it again, but his brain really really liked latching onto things when it didn’t think that it knew the full story, and this was definitely a situation where George didn’t know everything about it yet.
He would figure it out though, he just had to figure out how. But for now, his focus was entirely on the armful of toys that Lewis was walking back in the room with.
______
He meets Oscar during the various duties they all had during pre-season testing, and media and FIA things, but he doesn’t properly understand what Lando had been talking about whenever George had prodded him for more information; when he’d just infomed them simply that Oscar was ‘quiet’ and very ‘put together’.
Despite Lewis’ previous attempts to dissuade any curiosity, George knew that even he was a bit curious too.
He’d heard Lewis discussing it on the phone once, when he was supposed to be upstairs and getting ready for bed, that nobody had a clue what Oscar’s classification status was, that he’d managed to hide it for so long and slide under the radar.
George was a bit impressed with the level of secrecy that the rookie had managed to maintain. He was hardly the first driver to keep things a secret, and he probably wouldn’t be the last.
George did, however, think that everybody was just a bit blind. He was reasonably sure he had figured out what his classification was almost immediately.
He did have the advantage of having kept his own designation a secret until he’d found himself in the Mercedes seat, and Lewis had gotten it out of him. So he knew the way someone held themselves when they were keeping something quiet.
The rookie was flighty during the few times in interactions with other drivers that the subject of regression came up, or littles as a whole.
Not in the way that would come off as any sort of bigotry – which was something Max had copped allegations of in full force, and George himself had – but in the way where he was clearly anxious.
There wouldn’t be any real reason to be anxious like that if he was a caregiver, or a flip, or even a neutral; so George came to the only logical conclusion.
He was keeping his regression a secret, Logan Sargent definitely knew, and George was sure that there was a reason for it.
George really didn’t understand how nobody had picked up on the fact that nobody really hid their classification so completely and entirely unless it was related to regression - especially with the grids repeated experience with the same situation by now.
Surprisingly enough, - or maybe not surprisingly enough considering well… everything - it’s Max Verstappen that ends up being the only other person to have figured it out, or at least have somewhat of an inkling about what was going on.
They hadn’t discussed it officially, with neither of them wanting to possibly be wrong and admit to that; but George had caught Max more than once staring at Oscar with something like consideration.
And they’d exchanged a few pointed looks when something would happen. That sort of brief moment of acknowledgment that they were both seeing the same things and quite possibly making the same connections
It’s not until Azerbaijan that Max and him go from the quiet acknowledgement they were sharing that something was up with Oscar, to an outright conversation about it.
Max corners him around the back of the Mercedes hospitality, just out of view of almost all of the cameras and lingering people. Or well, people that weren’t their teams.
“What is up with Oscar?” Max asks immediately, his voice lowered enough to not be overheard.
“He’s sick, I think. Lando said something about food poisoning.”
Max makes a sympathetic wince. They had all been there when it came to food poisoning once or twice, Oscar was just particularly unlucky with it being a race weekend.
“Poor kid. He looks miserable.”
“He looks like he’s battling regression.” George says bluntly, because both of them were mostly just beating around the bush right now; and it was clear what they both knew.
“Do you think anyone knows?” Max asks, sounding both like it’s a genuine question and like he already knows the answer.
“Did anyone know about you?”
“Did anyone know about you?”
It’s a fair comment, even if it’s rude. And eventually accurate.
Neither of them had told anybody about their classifications for as long as they possibly could keep it quiet.
It had taken a bad race during Max and Checo’s teammate era before somebody found out, and George had made it until halfway through the first year with Lewis.
They’d seen all the tricks and redirection techniques before.
“He’s going to make himself sick.” Max says after a moment of considering silence.
“We don’t know that he’s not told someone. He could just be not involving the grid.”
“Unless it’s someone travelling with him, it’s still dangerous.”
George didn’t say a word about Max’s hypocrisy, because letting yourself do that was very different to standing by and watching someone else go through it. George understood that.
“We could… help?” George suggests tentatively, the idea leaving his brain before he really even properly processed it.
Max looks surprised, but he responds after just a moment of hesitation.
“Us? How? Lando would probably have better odds.”
George sent an unimpressed look in Max's direction, because really? The best person he could think of for somebody who was clearly as anxious as Oscar was, was Lando?
He loved Lando, he was one of his best friends; but even he got overwhelmed sometimes when with Lando.
“Okay, yeah, I see your point. What would we even do?”
At least Max was sounding somewhat open to the idea. George wasn’t opposed to enacting some sort of plan all on his own, but it would be easier if he had some sort of company to help him.
“We could just… be friendly, look out for him like Lewis and Checo do for us.”
“Hmm. Okay. But we can’t tell anyone, he won’t want this to get out.” Max agrees, and George resists the urge to physically pump his fist in excitement.
“Of course, I’m hardly going to snitch.” George sniffs in mock offense, before pausing to get more serious with the conversation, “We’ll keep it quiet. We’ll build up to it all, yes?”
Max nods, and George nods in response before they split off in two different directions. George feels a little bit like he’s just negotiated some sort of super secret deal.
_____
He ends up running into Oscar on his walk around the paddock, getting a bit distracted on his way to Williams’ to see Alex.
The kid does not look well.
Food poisoning was a nasty thing, especially when you still had to pull it together and race.
He catches Oscar before they have to go and get ready for free practice. He looks like he’s about to pass out in the middle of the paddock, and George feels a flash of concern.
“Oscar? You okay?” He speaks up before he can deliberate on it more, feeling bad when Oscar startles at the sudden appearance of him.
“Oh! Sorry, yeah, just… got a bit nauseas. I’m fine.” The words come out rushed, and George feels a rush of fondness for the flustered state.
“Surely McLaren would let you get out of some of the media? Let you rest more in the hospitality?” George asks, because even when Toto was being a hardass, he was pedantic about his drivers resting.
“Oh, um, they offered, but I’d feel bad if I skipped out. It’s not that bad.”
George could respect the work ethic, if he wasn’t so concerned that Oscar might actually pass out in the middle of the paddock.
“What do you have next?”
“Uh, nothing I don’t think. I have like, half an hour before a meeting.” Oscar sounds endearingly confused, and George only feels more sure of his guess of his classification at the way the boy rocked on his heels slightly.
“Were you going back to McLaren?”
“Yeah, or well, I was planning to. Didn’t quite make it there. Clearly.” Oscar says, clearly aiming for joking and wincing slightly when it falls flat.
George is even more endeared than he was before.
“I will walk with you, do you feel okay to move?”
“Um… yes? Yes.” Oscar lets George grab him and walk him back to the hospitality, the boy mostly content to walk beside him while George quietly rambled about anything he could think of for the moment.
Hopefully Alex never found out about the stories he was spilling about him right now, because retaliation would be lethal.
He felt more sure than anything else about his ideas and plans so far now, because he was more than confident that his guess was shaping up to be right.
But he wouldn’t push, he would save any ‘I-told-you-so’s’ for Max to deal with, because he usually deserved it. He wanted Oscar to be comfortable.
“The grid has been okay so far?” He remembers to ask partway through their walk, because he knew how easy it was for tensions to rise and things to slip through cracks.
Oscar looks surprised that he’s being asked that, and George really hopes that doesn’t mean that somebody is being mean to him. He thinks he’ll be legally obligated to go torment them and then he’ll be in trouble with Lewis.
“Yeah, it’s been good. Haven’t been here very long yet.” Oscar says with light humour, still looking vaguely green as he took in steady breaths. George respected his commitment to not puking in front of everyone.
“You know you can come to anybody if that changes, yes? Or if you need company or anything. Everyone looks out for each other mostly.” The words come out slightly rushed, and a bit more rehearsed than he wanted them to sound; even if he had spent ages rehearsing it.
“Oh, okay, thank you George.” Oscar flashes him a hesitant smile, and George can already feel himself getting ready to defend this rookie with his life.
He is glad when they get to the hospitality though, because he’s pretty sure he is one step away from absconding with Oscar entirely.
“Get well soon, okay? I’ll see you later.” He says before he departs, catching Lando’s eye from around one of the various McLaren mechanics.
“Bye George.” Oscar nods, before turning and heading closer in, and George stays long enough to watch him be intercepted by Lando, before he turns to move.
He had plans to make now, and ideas to come up with. Secretly. With Max.