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Michael was the first in the sport, George thinks; concludes, restless and sure. Papers spread out across the table in front of him, covered in frantic scrawl and most lightly crumpled. A racer of an entirely different calibre, near a different breed to all that came before him.
Isn’t it interesting, George thinks, that just 30 years ago there was only one.
They’re all of the same calibre now, the same make. Destined to burn fast and loud and blinding.
When the dots started connecting, George couldn’t remember. Maybe it was the fourth time a driver told him about having the same restless dream. Formless, shapeless in its details, but the overall description always the same; of a deep burning cold and a rushing sensation, a full-body pressure, stronger somehow than the first time they sat in a Formula 1 car and floored it. Like being in a rocket, forced back against the seats and being propelled into the atmosphere.
George dreams it too. For him, the dream always ends the same, with him waking up homesick for something he’s never known. No other driver has mentioned this to him, the uneasy loneliness the dream leaves in its wake, but George can tell they feel it too.
He’d always known they were all driven by the same urge. So intrinsic to who they are and what they do it’s not even necessary mentioning. That near biological urge to race, to fucking floor it, to replicate the heavy rushing pressure from the dream in any way possible. To George, it feels as necessary for his survival as eating or breathing air. There’s an awful pounding ache that takes him over when he goes too long without it, like his very blood is protesting.
Like he was born to race. Like it’s hard-coded into his DNA.
He sits on this for months before the realisation comes. It’s — there’s no logic, no rationale. Any sane mental health professional would consider him tilted.
But one day he wakes up from the dream and finds that lingering homesickness tied, finally, wavering and fragile still, to an understanding.
Not an answer that he can immediately parse out or verbalise, but a realisation he can finally see the shape of, the edges sharpening.
It doesn’t give him the direct answers about what they all are, and he will probably never know. And yet, like he’s learned another language, this understanding sits inside him like the second side of a coin finally revealed.
That he’s not human and he never has been, that the reason he appears human is because it’s what he was born to do.
That there’s a select few with the same make as him, the same dream, and they’ve all gravitated to the same narrow corners of the Earth. It’s enough to make him wonder if he had any other choice.
Was he always destined for this, for Formula 1? Where else could he even go to fulfil the urge — are there others out there with the dream, who have found their way without the hum of an engine underneath them?
Has he just been running down a paved path blind his whole life? Was there ever any choice?
Most importantly, perhaps, is that when he’s finally got the dream in his hands, delicate and restless after all this time, does it really matter if he was born for it?
“You were an incredibly quiet baby, George, until, well I’m not quite sure, really, but one day you… It was like you woke up a different child. You became frightened of things you had laughed at before, and laughed at things that had frightened you before. But you were so curious. And you never got sick after that, not for years. Honestly, it was the strangest thing.”