#and when i shuffled my gerlonso playlist it came through for me with a perfect song

[onadarklingplain]

🔀 malex!

bad skin day - bell x1 they're all different shades of the same song “Please tell me I wasn’t,” Alex starts, but he can’t make himself finish the sentence.

He’s holding onto the railing of the parade bus too tight, pulling his arms straight, trying to get some of the tension out of his shoulders. It’s damp, the grandstands nothing but a blur of ponchos, the crowd dark and indistinct — they’re probably all hiding under umbrellas, looking at their phones, but Alex makes himself unclench a little and raises a hand to give a halfhearted wave anyway.

“What do you mean,” Max says seriously, clearly not feeling generous enough to forget that Alex started a thought and abandoned it halfway through. He’s leaning against the side of the bus, hip cocked, but his hat is throwing a shadow across his face so it’s hard to see his expression properly.

“I mean, like,” and Alex looks pointedly down at the other end of the bus, where Logan is talking to Oscar and George. “The tension is unreal. I keep cracking and laughing by mistake, so I look like an even bigger cunt than usual.”

He feels it all the time, but it’s worst in the briefings, when the sourness in his stomach is inescapable — watching Logan on the other side of the table, hunched over his laptop, quiet, the data black and white. It's an old familiar panic itching under his skin, a sensation not even alleviated by being nice; everything he says comes out too much like pity. It should feel better to win. It shouldn’t feel so much like fucking up.

“Is it true then,” Max asks leaning closer, gleeful at the prospect of paddock gossip. “Is Vowles honestly not talking to him?”

“Stop, please,” Alex groans. “I’ve got it bad enough in the media pen, having to second-guess literally everything I say.” He glances guilty up at the front of the truck, where Will Buxton is interviewing Lando, like even thinking about paddock reporters is enough to materialise a microphone in front of his face.

He hasn’t often had cause to be gracious in his life, and he’s realising too late that it doesn’t suit him — he doesn’t know how to act without the pressure of a boot on his neck, all his habitual self-criticism starting to feel like a kind of parody.

“Well if you ever want to not worry about it,” Max says, with a shrug. Even though Alex can only see the side of his face, he looks relaxed, like a man who knows he out-qualified the rest of the field by half a second and who’s sure he’s going to make up his entire grid penalty by turn three. “We can have some drinks, and you can talk, and I won’t think you’re a cunt.” Alex could say yes. He could go back to Max's and he could tell the truth about how he much wanted to lie whenever Logan asked for advice, the engrained drive to dominate impossible to suppress entirely even when the impulse wasn't even needed anymore, even though it might as well be redundant. It was an old feeling, hard to swallow down and impossible to explain, but Max would know — Alex had seen it in his face almost every weekend in 2020, a satisfaction that was innate.

“Thanks, mate,” Alex says instead, letting sarcasm bleed into his voice. “We can reminisce about the time you lapped me at Barcelona, sounds great.”

“Maybe,” Max says, bumping his shoulder into Alex’s lightheartedly. “That was a fun race.”

It hadn’t been a fun race for Alex. It had been a nightmare, the car snapping going into every corner, uncontrollable. Just thinking about it brings a visceral memory of starting to spin out, the anxiety of being on the back foot again. He pushes the feeling down and shoves Max back, harder.

“Fun if you like looking up at the top step, I guess. You came P2, didn't you? But maybe that’s a novelty for you, these days.”

Max laughs, louder and longer than the joke deserves, and Alex can feel his skin starting to itch. Getting it out hadn’t helped at all. He just feels dramatic, and he wishes he could go back five minutes and just keep the whole thing bottled up. He’s about to say that to Max, say that they could just forget it actually, that Alex was just being an idiot — when, materialised from the other side of float, Daniel is there, and Max’s gaze swings round.

“Can I grab you for a second?” he asks Max, and Alex recognises the grin on his face—too wide and overeager. There’s an energy in his body that hasn’t been there for an age, like someone’s breathed life into him again: the prospect of the second seat.

Well good fucking luck to him, Alex thinks.