Chapter Text
I always wanted to know what the sea would be like, what it would feel like not to be surrounded by fire and pain. You are my salvation, my punishment, and my home. My reaper and my shelter.
I am pain, I am blood, and I am death. And you are a sweet, foolish angel who thinks you can hold me, save me, love me. I would rather burn and let my own blood boil than corrupt you. The blessing of my days, the strength of my eyes, the blue-eyed archangel who pulled me from the vastness of a desert of pain and drought.
God would never pour His rain over me, but your tears, the ones I caused myself, are enough to drown me, to strip away the pain, the flames that dissolve my bones, and make me feel. Feel you.
Stay away from me. Let me perish, so that while I am in hell, I can serve the devil knowing you are safe with God.
The air in the Spa-Francorchamps Paddock was not made of oxygen and nitrogen alone; it was a heavy emulsion of burnt kerosene, pulverized rubber, gray water vapor, and the static electricity that precedes major disasters. The fine drizzle, which until a few minutes ago seemed like a mere annoying veil, transformed into thick needles, falling with the oblique violence of the Ardennes winds. The porous asphalt of the technical corridor reflected the lights of the motorhomes in blurred smudges of yellow and red neon, creating an almost liquid landscape where human figures moved like hurried shadows beneath the storm.
Max Verstappen advanced down that corridor with the weight of a wounded beast. The carbon fiber helmet hung from his left hand, held by the chin strap, swinging with a dangerous lightness, like a severed head or a primitive weapon ready to be struck. Water trickled down the mirrored visor, met the waterproof fabric of his Red Bull race suit, and seeped into his collar, hitting the hot skin of his neck with a violent thermal shock. But Max's internal boiler was far past boiling point to feel the cold. His footsteps crushed the dark puddles, splashing muddy water against the heels of the tall, slender figure walking a few meters ahead of him.
“You fucking idiot! When do you intend to learn how to drive?!” Max's voice tore through the curtain of water, a harsh, strident yell, modulated by the Dutch accent that grew more guttural as fury consumed his throat's control.
Another thunderclap exploded directly above the mountains. It was not a distant boom, but a dry, mechanical crack, as if the very structure of the sky were melting under the tension of a tectonic fault. The sound reverberated in both men's chests, making the concrete ground vibrate subtly beneath the soles of their racing shoes.
George Russell did not even turn around. The Brit kept his stride long and frantic, shoulders hunched inside the silver and black Mercedes suit, his head low like a man walking toward a firing squad. His helmet rested against his hip, held by rigid fingers, white from lack of circulation. George's vision was partially blurred, not only by the water dripping down his eyelashes and plastering strands of hair to his forehead, but by an internal haze of exhaustion and cognitive stress.
Five hours. It had been five grueling hours of waiting inside the garage, listening to the monotonous hum of tire warmers, the incessant dripping on the zinc roof, whispered conversations on encrypted radios, and FIA weather reports promising "a window of improvement in twenty minutes" that never arrived. Five hours in which cortisol destroyed reflexes, in which the mind fed the monsters of fear and doubt. The FIA, in its unyielding pursuit of commercial spectacle and broadcast contracts, preferred to gamble the physical safety of twenty drivers in the Russian roulette of a flooded circuit rather than reschedule the race for Monday morning. And now, race control signaled preparation for a second start, ignoring the sky that was collapsing in shades of lead and violet.
George tried to ignore the Dutchman pursuing him like a personal demon, a nervous hedgehog bristling with electric spines, spitting an unintelligible mix of Dutch terms and English insults. He wondered, in a sudden jolt of purely practical thought, how on earth Max intended to get into that cockpit so soaked, with his shoes slipping on the titanium pedals and his clothes weighing twice as much as usual. Max's lungs crackled as he pulled in the humid air, his facial muscles contorted in a grotesque twitch of pure disgust.
“You could have taken us both out and ruined everything on that stupid start that didn't even count!” Max shouted from meters away, his voice cracking from extreme exertion. “I'm going to crush you!”
Another thunderclap, uglier, fiercer, and more threatening, cracked the horizon behind La Source. The rain showed no mercy; on the contrary, it gained volume, pasting Max's dark-blonde hair to his skull, carving the harsh lines of his young face, already worn by the invisible scars of high-level competition. And yet, there was a tragic irony to the scene: the rain seemed to have a visceral affinity for Max. It was as if the water recognized him, as if the storm were the only ecosystem in which his hyperactive aggressiveness found a perfect symmetry. Everyone in that Paddock, from the most senior engineer to the youngest mechanic, knew with an almost mathematical certainty that if those cars were released onto the track, Max Verstappen would cross the finish line first. It was not a matter of luck; it was a law of physics.
But George was at his absolute limit. He was sick of the noise, sick of team politics, sick of the inhuman weather, and above all, sick of Max Verstappen and his innate ability to make everyone around him feel minuscule and incompetent.
George stopped abruptly. His heel spun on the wet concrete and he turned to face Max's charge. The Dutchman, caught by the sudden movement, had to slam on his brakes, his chest nearly colliding with the Brit's. The distance between them shrank to a few inches. Both of their breaths turned to steam in the cold air.
Max's eyes, a stormy, razor-sharp blue, mirrored the gray sky above them.
“Damn you, Verstappen!” George spat the words out, his face red with fury, teeth clenched to the point of making his jaw crack. “Go to hell with your complaining and your fucking squeaky voice!”
George's response echoed between the walls of the team trucks. For exactly two seconds, time seemed to slow down to an atomic scale. The storm continued to fall, but the background noise evaporated.
Something strange, fleeting, and deeply disturbing crossed Max's gaze, a dangerous mixture that George would not dare to name. It was not his usual anger, nor the armored arrogance that characterized him. It was a subtle shadow of weakness, an open wound, a raw and helpless sadness that flickered in the depths of the Dutchman's dilated pupils before the roof of his ego closed again. George blinked, caught off guard by the sudden vulnerability of that boy who seemed made of iron and stone. But there was no time to decipher the flaw in the armor.
Max uttered an incomprehensible grunt in Dutch, a deep sound that came from the bottom of his chest, spun around on a violent heel turn, and marched away into the rain. He towed his helmet by his side, the visor slapping against his leg, dragging his safety gear by the straps as if carrying a bloody scythe, ready to mow down whatever stood in his path.
George remained standing for a few seconds, his lungs struggling to draw in the water-saturated air. His chest rose and fell rhythmically beneath his race suit. Doubt and anger twisted into a tight knot in his stomach while Max's figure disappeared into the pit lane fog.
The reopening of the pit lane was announced not by a siren, but by a shift in atmospheric vibration. The restart procedure under extreme rain was a masterpiece of precision engineering and human insanity. The cars were lined up in the pit lane behind the Safety Car like carbon-fiber reptiles waiting for the moment to wake.
The mechanics of fluid in motion transform Formula 1 in the rain into something entirely detached from the purely aerodynamic physics of dry asphalt. At 300 kilometers per hour, Pirelli's full wet tires acted as gigantic hydraulic pumps, clearing approximately 85 liters of water per second per tire, throwing that liquid mass into the air in dense, opaque plumes. The result was not merely a wet track; it was the total loss of the visual field for anyone not in the lead.
When the green lights finally illuminated and the Safety Car pulled into the pits, the race restarted with a muffled, monstrous roar. Twenty V6 turbo-hybrid engines fired in unison, creating a shockwave that made the grandstand structures tremble.
Max Verstappen did not start; he claimed the track.
While the other nineteen drivers felt out the throttle pedal with the delicacy of someone stepping on crushed glass, fearing the moment the rear tires would lose grip and send the car spinning on its axis, Max operated in a different cognitive dimension. To him, the car was not an external object to be controlled by a steering wheel and pedals; it was an extension of his central nervous system. He felt the micro-fissures of the asphalt through the steering column, sensing the variation in water density beneath the tread milliseconds before aquaplaning could set in.
Up the Raidillon, the blind and terrifying sequence of uphill turns where compressive gravity crushes the driver against the seat, Max kept his foot pinned to the floor. The number 1 Red Bull rose into the fog like a silver and blue arrow, tearing through the curtain of spray he himself created. Behind him, visibility was zero. Drivers like George Russell, Lewis Hamilton, and Charles Leclerc fumbled blindly inside a thick white cloud, guided only by the red rear lights flashing like dying fireflies in the chaos.
It was a masterclass in absolute dominance. The Dutchman drew impossible lines, avoiding the rubberized ideal line—which in the rain became as slick as soap—and searching for the rough asphalt on the outer edges of the track where friction was still possible. While his rivals fought desperately against oversteer, arms crossing in feverish and fearful correction maneuvers, Max's steering wheel remained almost motionless. Minute micro-adjustments, imperceptible to the naked eye, kept the machine at the exact limit of physics. The water seemed to slide past his tires not as an obstacle, but as a lubricating fluid for his insatiable hunger for speed.
With every corner cleared—Rivage, Pouhon, Stavelot–the gap to second place grew exponentially. One second. Two seconds. Three and a half seconds by the end of the first flying lap. It was a grotesque demonstration of superiority that bordered on humiliation. But behind the barrier of the mirrored visor, the reality inside Max's helmet was not one of triumph, but of a slow, suffocating agony.
The rain intensified. It was no longer an ordinary storm; it was a tropical downpour displaced to northern Europe. The sky was not gray; it was a blanket of purplish darkness that seemed to physically lower itself over the Ardennes treetops. The air inside the cockpit was heavy with the smell of dirt, ozone, and Max's cold sweat.
With each completed lap, Max's heart rate spiked. He looked at the digital display on his steering wheel: 165, 172, 180 beats per minute. It was not physical exertion. He had driven in worse conditions, for longer, under blistering heat. This was different. His heart was not racing out of fear of crashing at 300 km/h; it was racing due to a dark, almost mystical connection that he could not rationalize.
The rain and he were the same substance. Max felt each fat droplet hitting his helmet as if striking the exposed bone of his skull. The noise of the water against the carbon chassis was not metallic or distant; it was a guttural echo inside his own ribcage. He felt as though the atmosphere were falling directly into his body, as though his veins had abandoned warm blood to carry the freezing, mineral water of that enraged sky. His skin seemed to crave absorbing every drop, a desperate, biomechanical attempt of his organism to wash away an ancient pain, an emotional rot he kept hidden deep beneath his racing instinct.
The pain of being who he was. The burden of perfection demanded since childhood, the silent violence of expectations, the freezing solitude that awaited him every time he removed his helmet and the roar of the crowd faded. The anger he had unleashed on George minutes earlier was not about an-on track maneuver or a racing incident; it was the toxic overflow of a forced decision that had pierced his heart long ago and, consequently, bled without end. Max hated thinking that he no longer knew where the obligation to keep George at bay and hurting had turned into an addiction, a strange urge to see the pain on his face, a futile desire to have Russell's attention even if it meant screaming and hatred. And he hated himself for being unable to stop. For not having that choice.
Instead of easing off the right pedal to preserve the car in those impossible conditions, Max did the opposite. He buried his shoe even deeper into the accelerator.
Faster.
Engineers on the pit wall stared at the telemetry screens with wide eyes, their breath held in their throats.
“Max, the rain is getting worse in sector two. Back off the pace, we have a comfortable gap,” his race engineer's voice came over the radio, distorted by static crackles.
Max did not even reply. He simply pressed the overtake button on the steering wheel, demanding more torque from the electric motor. The car lurched forward down the Kemmel Straight, rear tires spinning at 280 km/h over a two-centimeter-deep sheet of standing water.
Faster. Wash it away. Clean this out.
Yellow flags began flashing on the LED panels along the circuit. A Haas had spun at the Bus Stop; a Williams had gone straight off at Malmedy. The track was becoming unnavigable, a graveyard of carbon fiber and floating rubber debris. But race control hesitated to bring out the red flag again, paralyzed by bureaucracy and fear of the crowd's reaction in the grandstands.
The sky raged with apocalyptic rhythm. The deep blue of the clouds was torn open by internal lightning, silent flashes that illuminated the forest background with a skeletal, cold light, turning the cars' spray into a spectral mist. The storm was no longer a weather event; it was a living metaphor for Max's internal collapse. Every thunderclap reverberating through the mountains sounded like the universe's response to his own contained rage, an acoustic mirror of the invisible courtroom where he judged and condemned himself every second of his life.
Lap after lap, the Dutchman's pace kept climbing, defying the logic of physics and the limits of friction. The Red Bull seemed to float over the track, millimeters away from absolute disaster, while Max's pulse pounded on the verge of tachycardia. The air in his lungs burned like liquid fire. Invisible tears, those that his pride and brutal upbringing had never allowed to fall from his eyes, mixed with the sweat trickling into his mouth, leaving a bitter, metallic, salty taste on his tongue. The rain tried to rip those tears out by force, stripping his sanity layer by layer, but Max clenched his teeth. He would not yield. He never yielded. He would keep accelerating until the world dissolved into pieces around him.
Blanchimont was approaching. A terrifying left-hander taken in seventh gear, where the entry speed exceeded 300 km/h and the margin for error was strictly zero, just a narrow curb and the unforgiving concrete wall lined with a thin layer of old tires.
The water pooled on that section of the track formed a continuous river running across the asphalt. Visibility was practically non-existent, just the dark outline of the barriers reflecting the flashes of lightning now popping incessantly on the horizon.
Max did not lift. He pointed the nose of the car toward the invisible apex of the corner. His heart struck a violent blow against his ribs, a sharp, stabbing pain that paralyzed his diaphragm for a fraction of a second.
The seamless connection, the biomechanical harmony between man and machine that had sustained him up to that exact millisecond, simply snapped. The front-left tire struck a pool of water too deep for the tread grooves to clear. The front of the car lifted a fraction of a millimeter. Air rushed beneath the floor. Downforce evaporated instantly.
A terrifyingly loud thunderclap shattered directly above the track, a crack so dry and massive it felt as though it split the concrete in two, coinciding with a blinding, bluish lightning bolt that sliced through the sky, illuminating the scene with the cruel clarity of a flash bulb.
And then, the official broadcast radio cut into the commentary with a desperate gasp, the commentator's voice rising two octaves in pure panic:
“Max Verstappen has just spun and hit the wall hard!”
The cold did not begin on the skin; it was born in the center of his stomach and spread through his bones like liquid nitrogen. When Max Verstappen's consciousness emerged from the anesthetic depths of shock, the first sensation was not physical pain, but a suffocating, wrong, and impossible internal wetness. He was dry on the outside—he could feel the rough, sanitized texture of a hospital sheet or a luxury hotel room against his arms, but inside, he felt as though he had been drowned. It was an aquatic nausea. There was water in his lungs, a heavy density preventing air from flowing; there was rain embedded in his cellular tissue, as if every drop of the Spa-Francorchamps storm had been absorbed by his skin and filtered into his circulatory system.
His throat tore in a fit of violent, convulsive coughing, a physiological defense spasm of someone trying to expel an invisible ocean. Max sat up in bed in a feverish jolt.
The light of the room attacked his pupils with the violence of an incandescent blade. The artificial glare, a white, hospital-grade, relentless luminescence, made his head throb in a rhythmic symphony with the quickening pulse in his neck. He squeezed his eyes shut so hard that red and gold halos exploded behind his eyelids. His fingers, rigid and pale, dug into the cotton sheets, wrinkling the fabric until the knuckles of his hands turned white from the pressure.
His breath came in short, noisy, uneven gasps. Slowly, pure air-conditioned air began to replace the harsh taste of ozone and gasoline vapor that still burned at the back of his tongue.
Where the hell am I?
He tried to piece together the puzzle of time. His immediate memory was a broken mosaic smeared with gray. He remembered the track. He remembered the climb up Raidillon, the impenetrable fog of Blanchimont, the water crossing the asphalt like a living, hungry river. He remembered stepping on the gas pedal with the suicidal recklessness of someone seeking his own absolution in a disaster. He remembered the thunder, the lightning that split the Ardennes sky in half, and the instant loss of the rear axle. The impact. The terrible sound of carbon fiber shattering against the tire wall, the chassis cracking like a bone structure snapping under the weight of a hydraulic press. And then, the freezing silence.
But beneath the memory of the accident, submerged in the storm that always inhabited his mind, was the true cause of his collapse. The cause of his stupid choices. The ghost that haunted him every day of his adult life.
George Russell.
Not the furious George from the Paddock, with his red face, wet hair plastered to his forehead, and eyes spitting the contempt Max had worked so hard to cultivate. But the George from years ago. The boy with gigantic, expressive, terribly kind eyes who seemed to be the only intact thing in a world built on violence and inhuman demands.
Max was fifteen when he realized he was hopelessly lost. Back then, karting was not a passion or a sport; it was a military training ground managed by Jos Verstappen. Every tenth of a second lost on the track was paid for with humiliation, screaming, and, with terrifying frequency, physical abandonment. Jos did not hesitate to use rejection as a pedagogical method. When Max made a crucial mistake on a hot lap or failed to overtake with the required aggressiveness, the punishment was mechanical: the team van would pull over at a rundown, deserted gas station on the side of a secondary highway in Belgium or Italy, the doors would lock, and dust would rise as his father drove away, leaving a fifteen-year-old boy alone in the cold, without money, without a jacket, and with the relentless order to "think about what you did."
And on almost all of those nights of punishment, a battered white van or a silver family car would emerge from the darkness of the asphalt.
The Russell family.
They never asked questions. They never looked at Max with the humiliating pity he hated so much. The passenger door would simply swing open, and there was George, with that wide, boyish, easy smile, holding out a sandwich wrapped in aluminum foil and a thermos of hot tea.
“What a coincidence, Max,” George would say, in that voice that hadn't fully settled into the deep tone of adulthood, the calm and natural tone of someone lying effortlessly to save a friend. “We were on our way home and decided to stop for coffee. Come on, hop in. It's on the way.”
It was never on the way. The Russell home was on the opposite side of the county, more than an hour's drive back. They drove dozens of kilometers in the middle of the night just to make sure the Dutch boy didn't freeze on the side of a road. George would drop him off at the corner of Max's house, wait for him to walk to the door under the dim light of the streetlamps, and wave from the window.
“It's all good, mate. See you at the track tomorrow. It's casual.”
"Casual." That was the word George used. As if saving Max's life and sanity were the most natural, unimportant thing on the planet.
It was during that time that the obsession transformed into something deeper, frightening, and sacred. Max began to see George's eyes not merely as facial features, but as an element of nature. They were strange, immense eyes, of a translucent blue-green that seemed to change color with the light of day. To Max, those eyes were the sea itself. A calm, deep, infinitely welcoming sea. Max, who had spent his entire life being drowned by the currents of air and water from his father's storm, felt an almost suicidal temptation to surrender to that vastness. He thought, with the sad, secret poetry he kept deep in his soul, that he wouldn't mind dying as long as it was by plunging into the calm waters of George's eyes. If the world meant pain, suffocation, and the relentless search for an approval that would never come, sinking into those eyes would be the only form of peace he would ever know.
But the sea was a forbidden privilege for a boy raised to be pure fire.
The discovery was quick and brutal. Jos was not blind to the subtleties of his son's emotional dependency. When he noticed the frequency of their encounters, the way Max stared at the timing screen looking for George's position, the subtle hesitation in overtakes against the Mercedes car in junior championships... the monster acted.
The memory of the day his father found out hit Max like a blow to the chest, making his stomach sink into the bed. The beating had not been merely physical; it had been a moral slaughter. Jos had pinned him against the private garage wall, his fingers dug into his throat until air ran out, his face contorted with the fury of someone who saw his "investment" threatened by something he considered a disgusting weakness.
“If you even dream of... listen to me, boy!” Jos's voice was a low growl, spitting saliva onto Max's forehead. “If you want to continue with this madness, I will destroy that boy. He will never drive anywhere again! That stupid fucking fag and his cursed family who put these ideas in your head! I'll ruin his career before he even sets foot in Formula 3! Do you want to see Russell on the street, working at a gas station, never touching a steering wheel again in his life? Is that what you want?!”
The threat was real. Max knew it. Jos had the money, the connections, and the sociopathic coldness required to destroy George's life and his family's.
From that day forward, the sea became unreachable. The only way to protect George was to build a wall of thorns, poison, and aggression between them. Max turned into the worst kind of asshole Formula 1 had ever seen. He started pushing George off the track, ignoring him in the corridors, spitting insults through the press, screaming in the Paddock in front of the cameras, just as he had done moments before the accident at Spa. He needed to be the villain. He needed George to hate him with every fiber of his being. Because if George hated him, if George thought he was an insufferable monster, he would never try to get close. He would never try to understand. He would never be in danger.
The price of that protection was absolute solitude. Max's life was reduced to racing, winning, and fighting with the only man he had ever loved in his entire existence. He drew the spotlight to himself, becoming the embodiment of arrogance and selfishness, all so George would stay safe under the light of normality, far from the clutches of the Verstappen family and the rot surrounding Max's life.
Sitting on that unfamiliar bed, the lack of air returned with devastating force. The pain in his chest was not neurological or muscular; it was the pain of a decade's worth of suppressed emotions. Air would not enter. He pressed his hands against his own lungs, trying to contain the internal collapse.
And then, the tears came.
They were not subtle or silent tears. It was a flood. The water that seemed trapped in his skin and lungs finally found a way out, pouring from his eyes with the same violence as the Ardennes storm. Max Verstappen's iron structure collapsed. He pulled his knees up to his chest, his throat emitting strangled sounds, the faint cries of a wounded animal that had spent years unable to bleed. He felt pathetic, weak, miserable. Every sob was a reminder of how much he missed George. Missing the touch he could never have, missing a hug he never received, missing the ability to look at the sea without having to pretend he wanted to destroy it. Missing the freedom to be, if only for a second, who he truly was, rather than the unyielding driver the world demanded.
He tried to force himself to stop. Biting his tongue, digging his nails into the flesh of his thighs, controlling his diaphragm. Stop it, you idiot. Stop crying. You're a world champion, you're a weapon, you have no right to be like this. But the pain was too vast for the container of his body. He suffocated in his own weeping, hiding his face between his knees to muffle the feverish sobs.
It was at that moment, in the middle of his silent and desperate breakdown, that a voice broke through the dimness of the room.
It was a low, wavering voice, clearly in the middle of changing, heavy with teenage hesitation and an unmistakable Dutch accent.
“What the fuck...?”
Max froze instantly. His crying choked in his throat in a painful knot, his breath cut in half. He raised his head slowly, tears still streaming down his hot, stained face, his blurred vision trying to focus on the figure standing a few steps from the foot of the bed, leaning against the wall in the dim light.
There stood a boy.
He was no older than sixteen.
The youngster wore an old CRG karting suit, faded and stained with grease at the creases of his elbows and knees, with the zipper partially open to reveal a dingy white t-shirt. The fabric of the race suit exuded a strong smell of two-stroke oil, high-octane race fuel, and track dust. His cheeks were rounded, dotted with reddish pimples along his jawline, full and swollen with adolescent tremors. The boy's mouth was slightly agape, his lower lip mildly split and swollen, the trademark signature of a physical and brutal race weekend. Above his left eyebrow, a shallow, fresh cut still oozed a thin line of dried blood mixed with track sweat.
That boy was Max himself. The sixteen-year-old Max. The boy who had just emerged from karting before Formula 1 turned him into a legend carved out of bone and ambition.
Young Verstappen stared at his older self with a mixture of shock, disgust, and terrifying incomprehension. His small blue eyes blinked slowly, trying to process the tall, muscular man wearing million-dollar team gear, weeping convulsively on a bed like a beaten dog.
The rain continued to hammer hard against the double-paned window of that room, a monotonous and distant patter that seemed to connect both eras in the same space-time. The air between them grew thick, saturated with the static electricity of the impossible.
Max opened his mouth to speak, to scream, to ask what sick hallucination his crash-traumatized brain was generating in those final seconds of life. But his throat refused to produce any sound. The presence of that boy—the living embodiment of all his original pain, from a time when Jos's beatings were still a daily occurrence and the salvation brought by the Russells' van was still a frequent reality—was a voltage shock too high for his exhausted nervous system.
A sudden wave of dizziness hit the base of his skull. The room began to spin, the outlines of sixteen-year-old Max blurring into vertical lines of light and shadow. The white lighting seemed to flicker and extinguish like a blown bulb.
Darkness, dense, viscous, and merciful, advanced once more along the margins of his vision, swallowing the boy's wide eyes, the rain on the window, and the ghost image of George Russell, plunging Max Verstappen once again into the unfathomable silence of unconsciousness.