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Chapter Text

All things considered, Oscar would say that he was doing pretty well. Not in the race, obviously—that had been fairly shit—but in terms of damage control. He and Lewis had resolved their whole situation peacefully. In his post-race interview, he had remained calm and given the usual neutral answers of "it is what it is" and "we're always pushing to do better." Yeah, he hadn't looked his best during the interview (he had seen a clip of it on Twitter and immediately grimaced—why did he look like he was about to cry?), but that was fine. Team debrief had been not awkward but also not not awkward. Honestly, Oscar didn't blame them. A lot of shit had happened during the race, and when Oscar was in the middle of so much of it, it was bound to be a little difficult. But it was fine, really.

That was why hours after the race, finishing picking up his drivers room and getting ready to go back to the hotel, he was decidedly not thinking about it. Nope. Not at all.

When there was a knock on his door, he called for them to come in without a thought. It could be any of a number of McLaren staff with any kind of information to tell him, so it was important to be responsive.

However, when the door opened, it wasn't a staff member at all. Or, well, it was, but— it was Lando. From where he was sitting on the couch, rearranging the contents of his bag, Oscar stilled. They hadn't really talked since the race, outside of debrief, so Oscar couldn't gauge whether Lando was mad at him or not for their near-incidents on track.

"Hey," he said, deeming that a safe enough greeting.

"Hey yourself," Lando responded, though he stayed by the door, hands shoved into the pockets of the joggers he always wore post-race.

"Congrats on the P8." With this strange atmosphere around them, racing was the only conversation topic that Oscar's brain could handle. "It was a good drive considering that the car doesn't really suit the track." Luckily, it seemed to break the ice a bit. Lando let out a short laugh.

"Yeah, jolly good staring at Alex's ass the whole race. Honestly, on the one track Williams are suited to this year, why did we have to get stuck behind them?"

Then, Lando underwent a change in expression, landing on more of a grimace as Oscar could only imagine he remembered how his teammate's race had ended.

"For what it's worth, mate, I'm sorry about what happened to you. We should've been up there together in the points."

"Yeah, well. It is what it is," Oscar said, parroting himself from his interview.

"I mean, yeah, but you're like, not upset about it?"

Oscar shrugged, focusing on shoving a few more data sheets into his bag.

"Lewis apologized. I finished the race in not-last. I got the fastest lap. I shouldn't be upset about it."

Well, fuck. He hadn't meant to say that last part, or at least to say it in that tone, his voice quivering like he was about to cry, just like in the interview—and he was supposed to be not thinking about it, dammit. When he glanced up, Lando had acquired this look in his eye like he knew something that Oscar didn't, shuffling closer to the couch.

"Oscar," he said, in the way that Lando always did, missing the "r." He sounded cautious, like he was approaching a scared animal. "You know you're allowed to be upset that your race was ruined."

"It's not— ah." Oscar cleared his throat. "No, I'm not, not when I did so many things wrong myself. I held you up in the first half of the race, and I was too hasty out of the pits and nearly took us both out, and I pushed too hard with Liam and got myself a penalty and I still couldn't get back into the points. It's— it's stupid, is what it is. I should be over this kind of stuff." Again, his voice wobbled, and he pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes to distract from the burning of unformed tears. Then, so quietly he almost thought Lando wouldn't hear him: "I'm supposed to be better than this."

There was silence. Oscar didn't realize Lando had come closer until the weight on the couch shifted to his left. He removed his hands from his face and Lando was there next to him, not lounging back like Oscar had seen him do so often during interviews but alert and looking at Oscar with an indecipherable emotion filling his gaze.

"Oscar, you know some of the stuff people say about you is insane, right?" He was gesturing with his hands, although slowly, like that would help him prove his point. Oscar wasn't really sure what that point was, but Lando barreled on. "'The best rookie F1 driver since Lewis Hamilton?' I mean, it doesn't matter if it's true, it's just— it's so much pressure, you know?"

At this, Lando paused and looked at Oscar expectantly like everything had been explained. Oscar simply stared back at him, not really in the mood to figure out what Lando was insinuating.

"Okay, so no, then," Lando sighed, then rearranged himself on the couch so that he was sitting crisscrossed and facing Oscar directly before he started again. "Mate, I don't know if you know this, but there's a lot of F1 fans who say that you're so good you make them forget that you're a rookie."

Yes, Oscar did know this, but if Lando was trying to make him feel better by reminding him, it wasn't working.

"It's true," Lando continued. "Hell, I sometimes forget it's your first year, and that's incredible, Oscar—you are incredible—but I think you also forget that you're a rookie. You're putting so much pressure on yourself that every mistake you make feels like you're failing not just the team or yourself but the whole world, and it's your job to fix it or let everyone down. There's no room to be sad about it."

And ouch. That hurt. No matter how straight-faced or apathetic Oscar thought he appeared, if there was one thing he had learned from the past several months at McLaren, it was that Lando could see through it every time. Oscar knew that, he did, but damn if it didn't hurt to have his emotions laid out in front of him like he wore them on his sleeve.

Maybe he didn't sense Oscar's internal conflict, or maybe he did, but Lando kept speaking. "But that's what's not true. You don't have to be some balls-to-the-walls, no-mistakes wonder child in your rookie season. None of us were. Max wasn't. Lewis wasn't. And now between them they have ten world championships and a hell of a lot of broken records."

Although Oscar had taken to staring intently at a smudge on the wall, he could still feel Lando's gaze boring into him, burning with an intensity that he was too afraid to face, lest it spark the pressure behind his eyes and make him start to unravel. A few moments passed like this before Lando sighed, and Oscar heard him relax into the couch, voice slightly muffled from where he was pressing the side of his face into the backrest.

"I guess I'm just saying that your time will come. So, just—I don't know. Take right now to feel things. And I realize you're not big on dramatic shows of emotion, but that doesn't mean you have to bottle them up either. Everyone has an outlet. Yeah, it sounds corny, but, like, go jogging, mate. Make some art. Put a whole loaf of bread in the toaster piece by piece until they're all burnt. Or, you know, talk to someone. I'm sure your family wouldn't mind. Mark, too, or Logan."

Lando paused for long enough that Oscar pulled his eyes away from the wall to glance to his side. As soon as they made eye contact, Lando perked up, leaning forward to place a hand on Oscar's shoulder. The contact burned through the thin material of his t-shirt, but if Lando felt it too, it wasn't apparent.

"And, Oscar," he started, slowly and evenly like he wanted Oscar to hang on to each and every word forever. "It doesn't matter if we scrap a bit during a race—I hope you know that I'm here as well, if you want me. Some would say I'm not the most emotionally mature, but I think I can give a pretty mean hug." Lando cracked a small smile, but it was gone quickly. "Seriously, though. I'll be there for you, Oscar. No matter what happens. Always."

And that was it. Lando was speaking to him in that warm-honey voice and that emotion in his eyes was unfiltered compassion and Lando's hand was a steady pressure on his shoulder like the pressure Oscar had been putting on himself and the pressure behind his eyes that was building into an unstoppable force— really, what else was there to do?

"Lando," Oscar said, and his voice broke. And he launched himself into Lando's arms. For a split second, Lando froze, and Oscar worried, but just as soon there were arms around his torso, drawing him impossibly closer until their bodies were flush together. When Oscar processed the wetness on his face as tears, his instinct was to pull back, wipe them away, and pretend that he was fine. But Lando's words flashed through his mind: everyone has an outlet. So he buried his face into Lando's collarbone and sobbed.

Oscar couldn't have said how much time passed as they sat there, tangled together while Lando held him tightly and whispered little nothings in his ear. But eventually, the tears subsided, and although they didn't pull apart they were left in silence.

"I've completely ruined your shirt," Oscar finally said. He felt more than heard the huff that Lando let out.

"My shirt's hardly more important than you, mate."

A few more moments passed.

"Thank you," Oscar said, and he was thanking Lando for more things than he could probably count.

"No problem. I said always, right? I mean it. Always."

With a snort, Oscar pulled back, a hand on Lando's chest.

"Fuck off, mate, or I'll start crying again, I swear."

When his hand dropped down to their laps, Lando picked it up and held it like it was second nature, and no thank you, heart, that was a problem for another day.

"We should get going, yeah?" Lando asked, rising from the couch and taking Oscar with him. "I think we both could use some rest."

Oscar couldn't agree more.

When they exited Oscar's room, they were met with Jon and Kim, who were trying very hard to look like they had just been passing by.

They stared at each other, daring someone to be the first to speak. Jon coughed.

"You guys alright?" He asked, obviously looking down at their joined hands while Kim scrutinized Oscar's probably-flushed face and puffy eyes.

Lando and Oscar made eye contact and came to an unspoken agreement, Lando squeezing his hand in support.

"Yeah," Oscar said, and he wasn't lying. "I'm good."

And, from that point on, if anyone ever heard sniffles coming from Oscar's drivers room after a bad qualifying or a DNF, and Jon swore that he had seen Lando enter the room too, then, well. There was no point in anyone mentioning it.

Chapter Text

Monza had been the end of some things and the start of others.

In the rollercoaster that had been Oscar's season recently—from the highs of Silverstone and Hungary to the low that was Spa's feature race—Monza was the end of the tenuous hope that Zandvoort had given him. Much to the team's (but more importantly, his own) disappointment, it seemed that the race-results-rollercoaster was back down in a dip.

However, it had also been the start of something he couldn't quite articulate.

It was a Saturday in Singapore, just shy of two weeks after his dramatic breakdown in Lando's arms. Had he been very ashamed and apologized a whole bunch when he was in a better state of mind? Yes. Had Lando assured him that he was more than happy to help? Also yes. Did Oscar necessarily believe him? Well— he wasn't sure.

Certainly, it wasn't in his teammate's contract to hold his hand through Oscar's weak moments. He had heard of no such thing from other pairings on the grid, either, even if the drivers were friends. Even Logan, who had confessed to Oscar how nice it was that Alex would always offer him a listening ear and advice, had never spoken of such intimacy.

So, there was no precedent to explain Lando's behavior, and, truly, no reason for Lando to view the incident as anything other than a momentary lapse. By all means, everything should have returned to normal afterwards.

But this was what he was struggling to articulate. Since the incident, Lando had been treating him not differently, per se, but perhaps with a bit more... warmth? It wasn't that Lando had been unfriendly before, not at all, but suddenly Oscar was finding himself with an arm over his shoulders in the paddock more often that not. There were all these little nudges, winks, or comments from Lando that hadn't happened before. The day prior, after FP2, Lando had barged his way into Oscar's driver's room and talked his ear off about the dream he had had, his distaste for the diet-friendly dinner he had planned, and the new curtains in his parents' house that his mom swore were gorgeous but were actually so ugly, Oscar, you wouldn't believe it. All the while, Oscar had been getting packed up to leave, ignoring the fluttery feeling in his stomach every time he looked up to see Lando's gaze fixed on him, steady despite the disjointed storytelling.

It was odd, was what it was. Not unpleasant—during media day, he had kept turning to look for Lando only to find Lando already looking at him, and it hadn't felt creepy, like it maybe should have. Instead, it had been comforting to know that there was someone familiar looking out for him. So, no, not unpleasant. Just something he didn't completely understand. Something odd.

He was out of time to ponder it, though. It was time to focus on Saturday's climax event: qualifying. They'd both put in pretty good times the previous session, but the grid had been incredibly close together, so there were no guarantees. This qualifying was important.

However, as he was putting in his in-ear, none other than Lando came strolling along, seriously pushing how late he could come back to the garage after disappearing to who-knows-where following FP3. As Oscar had gotten used to in the past few days, Lando slung one arm around Oscar's shoulders and patted his chest a few times with the other hand.

"One-two starts today, mate." Lando said, flashing him a cheeky grin. "We have this one easy-peasy."

"Me on pole, and you behind me, then?" Oscar replied, easily playing along. Lando scoffed and dramatically clutched at where his heart was.

"I'm wounded, Oscar, mate. Wounded. To think you think so lowly of me. Breaks my heart, really." This was accompanied by equally dramatic fake sniffles, at which point Oscar broke a little and had to work hard to smother a laugh. Lando, clearly seeing this, hammed it up even more. "Oh, the tragedy! The betrayal! From teammate of mine own! How can I ever move on?"

Right then, a mechanic passed by them and dropped the least subtle side-eye Oscar had ever seen. Lando, from where he was now essentially hanging off of Oscar's shoulder, paused to look at the mechanic, then turned to look back at Oscar. There was a moment of silence. He wasn't sure who started laughing first, but soon they were both giggling and snorting like children.

After a minute, Lando gave his shoulder a solid squeeze and pulled his arm away.

"For real, though, mate," Lando said, wiping the maybe-actual-tears from laughing out of his eyes. "Let's nail this."

"I'll do my best." And although Oscar thought his voice sounded neutral as ever, he couldn't suppress the stupid little smile that grew and remained as he watched Lando walk towards his side of the garage, wishing that they could've chatted some more. Odd, indeed.

Still, regardless of Oscar's feelings, qualifying was inevitable, and it was time to shift gears into the racing mindset. He pulled his helmet on and stepped towards the car, reviewing the run plan in his head.

Okay, Lando. Let's nail this.

-

If the goal had been to nail it, Oscar would say that he had bent the nail and broken the hammer. Broken his arm too, probably. Why not?

Awful, he thought. Truly, wonderfully, bitterly awful.

He was grateful for his helmet as he—more automatically than not—went through the motions of releasing himself from the restraints of his car. The sting of disappointment after a less-than-ideal qualifying position wasn't unfamiliar, but it was the first race weekend since Monza, and damnit if it didn't feel like rubbing salt into a wound that was barely healed over. It was a crack in the solid lining around his heart, allowing a steady drip of hot, sticky doubt to collect and curdle in his stomach.

Bile rose in his throat, and for the briefest moment he imagined fleeing the garage, fleeing the paddock, and finding somewhere to sit or lie down or maybe throw up.

However, if the watchful eye of the FIA spared few (he did still have official duties to adhere to), the eye of the fans spared none, and Oscar couldn't risk being seen. The last thing the team needed right now was "McLaren Rookie Driver, Thought Unflappable, Seen Having Breakdown Over Single Bad Qualifying Session." He had reputations to uphold. Expectations to meet.

So, take a deep breath, as he gripped the halo to pull himself out of the depths of the car, ignoring the slight tremble in his arms.

School your expression, as he yanked the strap to take his helmet off, wincing at the harsh lights in the garage and reaching for a towel. The dusk had done little to curb Singapore's pervasive heat, and sweat clung to his hair.

Wave to them, as he passed by the all-seeing gaze of a broadcast camera while walking down the pit lane to be weighed. He desperately hoped it would cover up any imperfections in his visage.

It is what it is, as he spoke to the media. It was no one's fault, really, that Lance had lost control of his car. No one's fault that it had been in the last seconds of Q1. No one's fault that Oscar had been right behind him, just barely unable to complete his lap even though he had been so close and he was sure he would've made it through and P17 was his worst starting position since the beginning of the season and—

Anyways, it was what it was.

Then, he was in his driver's room. With a start, Oscar sat up from where he had been near-melded into the couch. How had he gotten here? He wracked his brain. He supposed, between the cotton mush that composed his thoughts, he could recall the team telling him that they'd hold off on the debrief until a little later, and that he should go to his room to relax in the meantime. Right, that made sense. They wanted to wait until Lando was done qualifying. Well, Oscar wasn't complaining. The extra time would give him the chance to get some things done. His race suit was still on—that was silly, he usually changed out of it as soon as he could, and today specifically there was extra sweat dried in between the layers of it all. His backpack across the room was still a mess—really, he should have organized it by now, or gotten a bigger bag. Lando was always teasing him for coming to paddock with his bag so full he had to put some of his stuff into his pockets. Or, Oscar thought, standing up to go get his backpack, he could look at the data from what he did get to do in Q1. Even if he hadn't set a good quali lap, he could make sure he was taking individual corners the right way. Stuff like that was important if he was going to make up places from P17.

He brought his bag back to the couch, stretching out a kink in his neck that he hadn't realized was there. As he moved to unzip the biggest pocket, the tv screen mounted on the wall caught his attention. It was showing the ongoing qualifying session, but— huh. They were in the middle of Q3. He didn't know what time it was when he made it back to his room, but media duties hadn't felt that long. And surely he hadn't been sitting on the couch for that long, either. Oh well. Maybe media had taken that much time.

And, if his squinting at the screen was correct, Lando was in Q3. Well. Good for him. Actually, the camera was focused on Lando at that moment, darting through the second sector on a flying lap after a green first sector. The hand that was intended for Oscar's bag dropped to his leg. He could only sit and stare as Lando carried the lap through to provisional third.

After that, he found himself entranced by the screen. The cars went in to change tires. Carlos improved on his provisional pole time. Others tried to best him, but no one could—and now that was strange, where was Max? Was that Liam in Q3? Then it was George P2. Charles P3. Lando crossed the line. P4. The post-quali interview started, but by that point, Oscar was no longer paying attention.

Lando had been P4. P4. Tomorrow, they would be starting P4 and P17. What a joke. His engineer had assured him over the radio that the team would do their best to get him up into the points on Sunday. Damage control, if you will. Though it was all damage control these days, wasn't it? The team wouldn't need to do damage control if he had made it through Q1. He would have made it through Q1 if he had started his lap earlier, if he had been ahead of Lance. If he had been ahead of Lance, maybe he would've been up there with Lando, fighting for pole.

Singapore was not known as the easiest track to overtake on, either. He'd fight tooth and nail, but the curdled doubt in his stomach told him that it was doomed to be another race like those in the start of the season. Another failure. Another big, red, mark on the record of his rookie year. Another thing for people to point at and say, "Wow. Yikes. Did we really sack Daniel Ricciardo for him?"

McLaren were actually supposed to announce a few days after Singapore that they had just signed a contract extension with Oscar. That meant they still had time to go back on it. What if they were sick of the inconsistency, sick of, as Carlos had called it, his "lack of experience?" They could probably find someone better than him. There were a hundred drivers out there that deserved a place in F1. Who said that he was one of them?
Maybe—

"Oscar?"

That was strange. Oscar hadn't noticed before, but he couldn't see all that well. Something was blurring his vision, and even trying to blink it away, he couldn't.

"Hey, Oscar?"

Then there was that. Someone calling his name, although it was a bit muffled, like through a wall. It was accompanied by that banging sound, too. He tried to focus on it, hoping it would clear away some of the static in his head.

"The team's asking where you are, mate." Oh. That was Lando's voice. Oscar's still-blurry gaze darted around, catching the tv screen playing some random commercial. Lando was knocking on the door to his driver's room. And if the team was wondering where he was... what time was it?

"You should've gotten a text about debrief, it's in— well. It's now." Well, that was bad. Oscar knew that was bad. Still, something kept him rooted to the couch, unable to move even a muscle that would help him get up.

"Oscar, mate, are you in there?" A pause. "I'm coming in. I hope you're not naked. Or dead. Or both. That would be really embarrassing for you."

Oscar both heard and saw in his peripheral vision the door open. There were a few seconds during which he assumed Lando was taking inventory of the room before he heard a sharp intake of breath, and that meant Lando had probably just spotted Oscar, frozen in place, staring at the wall straight ahead with hands clenched tightly on his thighs.

"Shit."

Before he could really process him moving, Lando was in front of him, crouched to be at eye level. He looked really out of focus, but once again, blinking only made the blurriness worse, and suddenly a wave of ohmygodIcan'tsee crashed over him with tidal force.

"Oscar," said Lando's smudgy form. "Oscar, you need to breathe."

But Oscar was breathing. He could feel his chest expanding and contracting, the movement erratic and shaky and making him lightheaded and—oh. Well. He was hyperventilating, wasn't he? Another wave of panic washed in. Holy shit, maybe he couldn't breathe.

"Can— I can't—" was all he managed to voice of that thought, although his muscles unstuck enough to shake his head a bit too.

"Hey. Look at me, mate." Oscar did his best to meet Lando's eyes through the blur. "You can. I know you can. Just breathe with me, 'kay?"

There was a pressure on his right hand. First, it squeezed tightly, then slowly let up until it was barely there. Gradually, the pressure returned, and it began a pattern. A few times through the cycle, Oscar got it. On the next squeeze, he tried to match it to an inhale, sucking in as much air as he could. As it let up, he released the air. His breath hitched several times, and his lungs sort of burned, but he tried again anyways. Squeeze. Inhale. Let up. Exhale. Repeat. Bit by bit, breath by breath, he felt the air return fully to his body. His heart rate slowed and the waves of panic calmed into water at rest. Finally, he blinked and found his vision clear. Looking back at him was Lando, eyes wide and concerned yet with a twinge of relief as he seemed to notice Oscar's awareness.

"Hey," Oscar croaked out, feeling all of a sudden a bit like a bug under a microscope. Lando flashed a small grin.

"Hey yourself," he replied. Quickly, though, his face turned serious. "You back with me completely?"

Oscar felt another squeeze to his hand and glanced down. At some point during the process, Lando had managed to peel one of his hands off of his leg (his dark-gray and orange leg; how was he still wearing his race suit?) and was holding it firmly with his own hand. So that had been the squeezing. Which meant—oh god, Lando had just sat with him for who-knows how long, literally holding his hand through a panic attack.

"Oscar—"

"You didn't have to do this." Oscar looked back up at Lando, who blinked owlishly.

"What?"

There was was a lump in Oscar's throat.

"Stay here. With me. You didn't have to."

"Of course I did." There was no hesitation to that statement. Lando sounded so... certain. Oscar tried to tamp down his confusion, but if the offended huff from Lando was any indication, he failed. "What, you wanted me to just leave you there?"

"I mean, you didn't need to trouble yourself." With the hand that Lando wasn't still holding, he began fiddling with the seam of his race suit. "You could've just gone and gotten Kim. It's not your problem to deal with, yeah?"

Oscar was looking down now, but a hand on his jaw gently tilted his head back towards Lando. Lando's thumb came up to wipe Oscar's cheek, and finally, finally, he processed why his vision had been so blurry: he had been crying.

"Oscar," Lando started, drawing his attention with a soft, steady tone that made his heart flutter. "It is my problem, you know why?" Oscar shook his head as much as he could within Lando's grasp. "Because you're my friend. And I care about you, and your problems are my problems."

Oscar searched the depths of Lando's eyes for any hint of deception. Instead, he found the same raw, unadulterated compassion he had seen two weeks ago. Oh, he thought.

"Oh," he said. At this, Lando broke out into a great big smile. He took his hand off of Oscar's face and instead gave him a playful shove on the shoulder.

"Yeah, 'oh,' you muppet." Lando stood up, stretching his whole body with an unnecessarily loud groan. "Ow. My legs hurt so fucking much." Oscar couldn't help but smile at that, too. Once satisfied with his stretch, Lando plopped down next to Oscar on the couch. "Now," he said, opening his arms wide. "Hug?"

Oscar may have rolled his eyes with enough force to push even the RB-19 into the wall, but he also conceded quickly that, yes, he wanted a hug. He leaned in, letting himself settle in Lando's arms and disperse the very last of his panic with one more deep breath into the other man's hoodie. Lando leaned in to put his chin on top of Oscar's head, and for a minute, Oscar was content to just sit there, soaking in the comfort. Then, something occurred to him, and he pulled back. Lando let him go easily, but had an eyebrow quirked in a silent question.

"Why, though?" Oscar asked, after a moment had gone by. Just like earlier, Lando stared back at him sort of blankly.

"Why what?"

Oscar struggled to articulate his thoughts.

"Why do you care so much?" he settled on, wincing as soon as he said it and both of Lando's eyebrows rose to create an incredulous huh? look. "Sorry, I mean—since Monza. You've been acting differently, watching me, touching me more, all of it. Why? It's not like we weren't friends before and we are now, so, just, why?" As an afterthought: "I'm not— I'm not fragile now or anything."

Lando seemed to consider this. Oscar watched ten different emotions flash across his face, before settling on what he could best identify as resignation. Lando then shifted himself back more comfortably into the couch, and when he spoke, it was soft again, but more melancholic, more nostalgic.

"I don't know. I guess it's because I was really remembering what it was like to be a rookie, and having all of these doubts. You know, you wonder, am I actually good enough to be here? What if I can't improve? What if I fuck everything up and throw away my dream right after I achieved it?" Lando looked away, taking a shaky breath. "I struggled with it, in 2019. More than I sometimes want to admit. And I guess I also remembered how nice it was, with Carlos those first two years, when he always had my back. I'd have my doubts—the big, scary thoughts, you know—and I'd fall into a slump, and he'd be right there to pull me out of it kicking and screaming, no matter how deep it was." That was sort of news to Oscar. Of course, everyone knew how close Lando and Carlos were, but Oscar hadn't really considered just how far the connection went. Regardless, Lando continued, picking at his fingernails.

"In Monza, when I was—" He glanced at Oscar this time, and Oscar could've sworn there was a dusting of pink across his face. "When I was holding you, I realized that I wanted to be that person for you. I wanted you to feel like you had someone in your corner you could always rely on, always talk to." A pause, and he looked at Oscar more fully. "I'm sorry if I made you feel fragile. I can stop, if you want me to—"

"No," Oscar interrupted. He refused to let Lando think he was doing anything wrong. "No, please don't. It's really nice, I promise. I, uh— I like having you looking out for me." Acting completely on impulse, Oscar grabbed Lando's hand, who immediately returned the grip.

In hindsight, the conversation absolutely could have ended there, but Oscar was hearing the echo of Lando's voice from two weeks ago. Everyone has an outlet. Talk to someone. And, yeah, there were still things weighing on him. And, yeah, it did feel good to talk to Lando. So, he talked.

"It just scares me a little, honestly," Oscar confessed, before he could think about it too hard. "I feel like I don't deserve your support." Lando opened his mouth, looking very much like he wanted to tell Oscar exactly what he thought about that, but Oscar held up his other hand. "Just listen for a minute, mate."

"You were right about all of the stuff I've been thinking about lately. Going into quali today, I was telling myself that Monza was an anomaly. I could believe that it was just sort of a blip on the record. Then, Q1 happened, and it was like nothing had changed. I was back in Monza, almost crying during an interview with this burning feeling eating me from the inside out, and I just started thinking. What if I was wrong about everything? What if it was actually a race like Silverstone that was the anomaly? What if that was the peak of my season and it's all downhill from there?" Oscar took a deep breath, fighting the sparks of anxiety that threatened to relight themselves. "I came back here after media, and watched Q3, and saw you, and I couldn't stop thinking about how I could've been up there too. How it felt like I fucked everything up, again. Doubts." Oscar laughed, a short, grim little thing. "Yeah, doubts. I was thinking about whether I deserved my seat, what would happen if McLaren rescinded my contract extension. God, it sounds stupid saying it now, but I was pretty caught up in it. As I'm sure you could tell."

Oscar ran the back of his hand quickly over his eyes, wiping away the tears he could feel starting to form.

"I guess I sort of spiraled from there, and here we are."

The first time hadn't stopped the tears at all, so he moved to scrub at his face again, but Lando gently grabbed his wrist before he could.

"Hey. Hey," Lando said, while giving the hand he had already been holding a reassuring squeeze. "It's okay, to cry and everything. I'm sorry you've been feeling like this."

Oscar meant to laugh, or maybe scoff, but it came out as a weird choked-up sob.

"Not your fault, mate."

"It's not yours either."

"Yeah," Oscar said, not sure himself if he was agreeing or just placating. He was calming down, though, and they proceeded to simply sit in silence, holding each other's hands until the tears stopped falling. At some point, Lando let go of one of his hands and instead ran his fingers through Oscar's hair, smoothing out the sweat-dried mess.

"I can't promise you that the doubts will ever really go away," Lando eventually said. "Like, a hundred percent." His hand in Oscar's hair stilled, then dropped down to grasp his shoulder, forcing Oscar to look at him directly. "What I can promise is that I'll be there to help you not struggle with them so much. I'll be like..." Oscar recognized the way Lando's eyes suddenly lit up with the twinkle that meant he had a stupid idea. "Like your professor! Like I'm giving you lessons. We can start right now, actually, ready?"

Lando cleared his throat, moved his hands to adjust an imaginary tie, and began an impression of an uptight teacher (or at least Oscar assumed that was what he was going for—the impression wasn't very good).

"Welcome, class, I'm Professor Norris. Lesson number one: your worst one day is your best another day."

Oscar was feeling back to himself enough to put on his familiar deadpan, and said, "Mate, I'm not listening to a word out of your mouth in that voice."

In a mirror image to before qualifying, Lando clutched at his heart.

"Betrayal! Again! That's strike two, mate. I don't know if I can take any more."

"You'll live, I'm sure."

Lando shot him a playfully angry glare before seeming to sober up again.

"Seriously, though," he said. "I meant what I was saying. Your worst one day is your best another day. A lot of the time, in F1, it doesn't really matter what place you end up in—it matters how hard you fought to get there. If you remember that, and you place out of the points every single race for the rest of the season, I'll know that it won't be for lack of trying. I'll know that you were doing your best for those days, and I could never fault you for that. You shouldn't fault yourself either. Got it?"

Oscar let himself think about that for a moment, then slowly nodded.

"Yeah. Yeah, I think so."

Lando smiled.

"Good. I'm glad." He glanced down at his watch. "We should probably head out soon. The team will be waiting for us and—"

"Oh my god." Oscar stood up in one whole-body twitch, looking down on Lando, who, in a comedic reversal of their usual roles, seemed entirely too calm. "Lando, debrief. Didn't you say debrief was 'now,' like, however long ago it was when you came in here? Have I been holding the team up this whole time?"

"No, mate, relax," Lando said, waving a hand. "I convinced the team to postpone debrief in case you had left and I needed to go get you."

"Oh," Oscar replied, the panic fizzling out. "Thank you."

"Mhm," Lando said distractedly, checking something on his phone at the same time. Oscar stepped closer to him, shins nearly hitting Lando's knees.

"Lando," he said, firmly so that Lando would look up at him. He did, placing his phone face-down on his lap. Oscar tried to imbue his next words with everything he had said before and with everything he hadn't, hoping that Lando would get it. "Thank you."

"Yeah, mate." Standing there, with Lando saying yeah like a promise—no, a vow—that he intended to keep for as long as he lived, the hot, sticky, doubt in Oscar's stomach melted away completely for the first time since Silverstone. "Always."

-

It was a Sunday night in Singapore, and Lando was standing on the podium. Oscar was watching on from below as he, Carlos, and Lewis sprayed each other with champagne. It was the first (maybe only) non-Red Bull race win of the season, but truthfully, Oscar only had eyes for Lando, who was just about glowing, between the adrenaline of a podium and the bright lights. A mixture of sweat and alcohol dripped from his perfectly ruffled curls onto his cheeks and lips, which were curved around a beaming smile, and Oscar could only think to describe him as radiant.

And although seeing Lando and Carlos embrace and slap each other on the back and look into each other's eyes like that left a bitter taste in his mouth that he didn't really understand, he resolved to commit the scene to memory as at least bittersweet.

Oscar himself had done... okay.

It was improbable, because he was camouflaged in a crowd of similarly McLaren-orange-clad team members, but Oscar swore that for a split second, from up on the high platform, Lando's gaze met his.

I'll know you were doing your best, said Lando in his head. Your worst one day...

And, shit. That was it, wasn't it? P7 wasn't his best result by a long shot, but today had been different. Today, he had ripped that P7 out of the weekend, carved it from the ashes of qualifying bloodied and screaming but not beaten.

Yeah, Oscar thought, a little toothless smile of his own finally appearing. Yeah, I can live with this.

Today, Oscar had done his best, and maybe, just maybe, that was enough.

Chapter Text

Come to think of it, Oscar wasn't really sure how one was supposed to feel after one's first podium finish in F1. Excited? Probably. Proud? Definitely. Inspired? It would only make sense.

Nauseous? Almost certainly not.

Yet, it was a Sunday evening in Suzuka, and there Oscar was: post-first podium, sprawled out on the bed in his hotel room, feeling all four at the exact same time.

For sure, he had been excited while pulling his car up to the P3 board. There had come over him an exhilarating thrill that he hadn't felt since F2 in 2021, an unparalleled energy that just seeped through him and made it feel like his bones themselves were vibrating with excitement. He had been proud while embracing his McLaren team members—proud of himself, yes, but also proud of how hard they'd all worked, how far they'd come from being backmarkers in Bahrain. And when he'd been standing on the podium... well, he could hardly find words big enough to describe that feeling, but "inspired" would absolutely be on the list.

But, somehow, between one emotion and the next, a sort of lump had formed in his gut: an acidic, misshapen lump with sharp edges that clawed its way up his body and lodged itself in his throat. Since the post-race press conference it has been sitting there, choking him and whispering things like not good enough and burning like how it felt right before you were about to throw up. Therefore: nausea.

Oscar was no stranger to his anxiety. It had been better and worse throughout different periods of his life, but it tended to be there no matter what. After his worst moments (e.g. panic attacks), some of the anxiety would linger in his subconscious like little phantoms haunting his mind. They would choose randomly when to rise from their graves and bring the panic back with them—sometimes he was in the shower, and sometimes he was trying to fall asleep, but the worst times by far were the good times. He'd be reveling in the joy of a family gathering, or laughing hard with a close friend, or achieving something totally awesome, but the phantoms didn't discriminate. They spoiled everything they touched, leaving dark stains on the memories of what should have been happy moments.

It had happened in Silverstone, for example—a dreadful feeling creeping in at the edges of the team celebration, whispering conspiracies in his ear that P4 was nothing but a gross failure, and suddenly Silverstone existed in his memory as bitter. And, as was evidenced by the internal voice asking him whether his podium was because of his hard work or if everything had just fallen in place and put him there accidentally, Suzuka was falling down the same path.

In a funny-but-also-not way, it reminded Oscar of a smoothie. He was the blender, all of his happy emotions were different fruits, and the bits of anxiety were the pervasive banana that choked out every other flavor until they were unrecognizable as having been there at all.

So, there was the situation. Oscar blinked up at the blank, colorless ceiling. The phantoms of Monza and Singapore refused to get out of his head, everything good about his day was unconsciously being ruined, his current state of existence was a sad, tired, defeated banana smoothie, and there was nothing he could do about it. What a way to end the best weekend of his career.

Something that was part-sigh, part-scoff, and part-laugh escaped him. This was really his first podium in F1, actively being marred because of nothing other than his own brain refusing to leave him alone. God, this was so, so stupid.

Suddenly, with a force that agitated his post-race soreness, Oscar sat up.

God, this was stupid, wasn't it? Why the hell was he just sitting there, doing nothing, letting his brain take away such a special experience?

His thoughts raced, but one conclusion shone out definitively. It was time to be proactive. It was time to take control. It was time to do something he'd been avoiding for basically the whole season thus far: reach out and talk to someone.

For an awkward moment, Oscar was just sitting on his bed, rigid in determination but not doing anything. Huh. He'd sort of been expecting a studio audience to come out and applaud him or something—it felt like such an applaudable occasion. Then again, he realized with a grimace, talking to someone when you felt bad probably wasn't an occasion for most people.

With a fresh burst of shame but no less determination, Oscar got out his phone and texted Lando.

Hey, you wanna come over to my room and hang for a bit?

Dman Ebro stake me out of diner first

srry

damn bro tske me out to diner frst

good enough

😐

ok jeez i cn take a hint

but sure

gime five min ;)

With an obligatory but fond eye roll at Lando's atrocious spelling, Oscar locked his phone and tossed it somewhere on the bed. Already, some of the weight lifted from his chest.

He had been talking to his mum on the phone about this, actually—"this" being all of his recent anxieties and how he'd been talking to Lando about them (though he'd omitted some of the nitty-gritty details, not wanting to worry her too much). She'd been nothing less than thrilled by the news, taking the time to hold it over Oscar's head that she'd been telling him this for essentially his whole career. Indeed, he'd heard some variation of "find someone you can always go to" many, many times from her.

He wasn't sure when, exactly—somewhere between crying in Lando's arms and the man himself admitting that he wanted to be Oscar's person—but Lando had, indeed, become the person he went to. He suspected that pouring out your worst fears and the shattered, delicate pieces of your heart to a person and having them not only pick them up but help you put them back together sort of did that on its own. Regardless, Oscar would have to concede that his mum had been right. Talking to Lando made him feel a lot better, and knowing that Lando didn't mind and actually welcomed him he was a comfort that left Oscar feeling warm inside.

He usually tried to stop that train of thought there, though. If he followed it any farther, he'd be forced to square up with the box he'd eloquently labeled "FEELINGS ABOUT LANDO," and he'd rather stand in front of the cars during a race start than do that right now.

With that pleasant image, there was a knock on Oscar's door. He got up and briefly surveyed the mess of clothing strewn across his hotel room. He grimaced. Really, he'd meant to tidy that before Lando got here, but had gotten too caught up in thought. Oh well, it wasn't the end of the world—like Lando was one to judge on appearances, anyway.

Oscar crossed the room, opened the door, and immediately regretted that thought. Because while Oscar was sporting a random hoodie and gym shorts, there Lando stood wearing perfectly tailored black jeans that complemented his figure wonderfully (since when did Lando have a "figure?") and a white button-down with far too many buttons undone. Not only that, but he had clearly taken a shower recently, and the remaining dampness clung to his curls and made them shine under the the hotel hallway's fluorescent lighting.

Without even trying, Oscar flashed back to standing on the podium but a few hours earlier. Everything about it was something he'd remember forever. The way the champagne had felt, sticky in his hair; the way that Lando had been the one spraying it, how he'd jumped down from the podium quick as a flash with Oscar as his sole target, his sole purpose; the look that Lando had given him. He'd barely seen that look, his mind so focused on the triumph and the crowd and Lando's damn curls. Still, he'd seen it—and it was the same look he'd had when Oscar had landed P2 in qualifying, the one that made Oscar feel like Lando was truly proud of what he had done.

The thought of Lando looking at him like that again...

"I didn't realize I was signed up for a staring contest, mate." Oscar blinked back to reality. He felt a rush of warmth to his cheeks at being caught staring, which he desperately hoped was not super visible. Lando's cheeky little grin did not give him confidence. "You lose. Now budge up, let me in."

Lando accentuated this by poking him hard in the shoulder. Oscar was too flustered to care. He cleared his throat and then stepped back, letting Lando slip past him.

"I see you still refuse to use autocorrect," he said while closing the door, desperate to change topics.

"Oh, what, my texting?" Lando was facing mostly away from him, hands on his hips. Probably taking in how it looked like a hurricane had come through the room, Oscar thought. "Nah, mate, I've got autocorrect on. It can't keep up with me. I'm too speedy." Lando finished whatever analysis he was doing and turned to face Oscar. "Lucky thing you texted me, actually. I was about to text you."

And, oh. That wasn't anything surprising, really. Lando texted Oscar all the time—mostly stupid stuff, like memes about Oscar that he had found on his burner accounts. But this felt different, somehow.

"Do I dare ask what for?"

"No need." Oh, boy. Now Lando had a mischievous glint in his eyes. "You," he said, clapping to emphasize the word, "are going to rummage through this endless clothing and find a decent outfit. Assuming you actually posses one right now." Oscar sent him a glare at that, which Lando resolutely ignored. "Then we," he paused for dramatic effect, "are going out. Trust me, you learn the club scene around here after a few years, and it's really great. There's this one place that—"

"Wait, what?" Oscar's brain had just caught up to what Lando was saying. Lando was trying to take him clubbing?

"C'mon, mate, you heard me." Lando slid an arm around Oscar's shoulders to herd him towards his suitcase, to which Oscar numbly complied. "Time is of the essence. We're gonna meet up with this group in, like, half an hour, and they're tons of fun. Great people."

Oscar felt like he was short-circuiting. This was not what he had had in mind when he invited Lando over.

Something prickled in the back of his throat. Stuck hovering above his suitcase but unable to do much else, he managed to utter, "Lando, I don't think I really want to go clubbing tonight."

"Nonsense." Lando waved a hand dismissively, having pulled away to focus on texting probably the people they were meeting. The prickly feeling got worse. "I think we can break Mr. Introvert out of his shell for a night, huh? Few shots, bit of dancing, a little DJ action from yours truly, and you'll be good as gold."

"Lando—" Oscar tried to protest again, but before he could, Lando looked up from his phone and saw him clearly not getting dressed. He rolled his eyes and pocketed the phone.

"Oscar, mate, must I do everything myself? Fine. If you won't pick out an outfit, I will." Lando knelt down and started rooting through the suitcase. Any other time, Oscar would have scoffed and stopped him, but he was currently frozen in place. The prickly feeling—ah. The lump of nausea, small but sure, had unfurled back into his throat, latching onto the soft flesh with its sharp little claws and making it hard to speak.

"This is ridiculous. You carry so much stuff around with you all day but have no clothing variety. Is this eight identical team shirts?"

Lando was speaking, but Oscar was barely listening. It was the anxiety, worming its way down to grip his lungs, sending his heart rate not yet flying but definitely jumping. Shit, this was exactly what he was trying to not do right now.

Uncaring or perhaps oblivious to Oscar's silence, Lando rambled on, tossing clothes left and right.

"Have you been taking fashion tips from Max V, mate? Never listen to him. He'll be buried in that Red Bull shirt if he can. Don't tell him I said this, he will kill me, but that navy blue kind of washes him—"

"Lando!" The volume of Oscar's own voice sort of shocked him, and it must have shocked Lando too for the way he whipped his head around, wide-eyed, to stare at Oscar in alarm. Still, Oscar took a deep breath and repeated, with more conviction this time: "I don't want to go to the club with you tonight."

There was a moment of charged silence. Then, Lando's face screwed up into a weird expression, and immediately Oscar worried. Would Lando roll his eyes, accuse him of being boring, and leave? Would he think that Oscar was ungrateful for the offer? Would he be insulted? Truly, Oscar didn't want to insult him, it was just that when he thought about it, he really didn't want to go to the club. The music and the lights and the people were overwhelming at the best of times, and now was far from the best of times.

He could even already imagine how the night would go: they'd arrive to the club, Lando would try to get him to loosen up, but the lingering tension would be wound so tight around his bones that it would be impossible. Lando would inevitably get bored and ditch him for someone more entertaining, and Oscar would be left standing there spiraling like he had been on his hotel bed, except this time there would be a hundred other people crowding in around him and music so loud the bass shook his soul and lights bright enough to burn color into the backs of his eyelids. He'd end the night early by stumbling out of the club on the verge of a panic attack and leaving Lando to be sorely disappointed in him the next morning.

In the present, Oscar braced for the worst. It felt like time hung suspended while Lando quietly put down the shirt he had been holding, stood up, and took the few steps to close the distance between him and Oscar. Oscar was reluctant to meet his eye, but when he did, Lando was searching his face, looking a cross between concerned and straight-up confused.

"Oscar. Mate, we got a double podium. Your first podium!" Lando was attempting to sound enthusiastic, even trying for a small smile and bumping Oscar on the shoulder with a closed fist. "This is a celebration, you're meant to be celebrating!"

"You think I don't know that?" Oscar snapped, harsher than he wanted to. Lando's enthusiasm instantly disappeared, replaced by a flash of hurt. Oscar groaned, turning to march back to his bed and sit on the edge. He scrubbed his hands over his face. "God, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have snapped at you, it's just— I'm not— aghhhh." He dug his fingers into his eyes, hoping it would distract him from his still-jumping heart and how much he was absolutely screwing this up.

"Hey. Hey, stop that." He heard padded footsteps across the carpet, and then there were gentle hands around his wrists, pulling them away from his face. When he opened his eyes, Lando was standing in front of him, having completely ditched the confusion for 100% concern, but his gaze still searched Oscar's face. "What's wrong?"

Oscar turned his head. He didn't want to bear the full force of Lando's worry.

"It's stupid," he said.

"No. Oscar— Osc," Lando said, and the nickname did nothing to help Oscar's heart. "It's not stupid if it's making you upset. I've said you can talk to me about anything, right?" Oscar felt one of Lando's hands disappear from his wrists only to reappear as a light touch on Oscar's jaw, guiding him to meet Lando's eye again. "'Always,' right?"

Oscar could only sustain that burning, intoxicating eye contact with Lando while his hand was caressing his face and he was saying "always" for about two seconds before he starting feeling weak in the knees.

"Yeah," Oscar finally confirmed, partly so that Lando would ease up the soul-searching stare. Maybe that had been the tactic, though, because once he started talking, he couldn't stop. "Yeah, that's part of it, actually. Look, I know I'm supposed to be happy right now. And I swear, I am. I'm happy. I want to celebrate this. But also, sometimes, my mind just decides to fuck me over, because it can, I guess, and makes me think about anything and everything terrible and miserable instead of this great thing that just happened. It makes me sad, and it makes me nauseous, and it makes me lie in bed hours after my best race of the season questioning if I really deserved it or not." Oscar did avert his eyes at that, not wanting to see Lando's pity. His hand was no longer on his face, anyway.

"I'm not really merry company right now, Lando. I'm wrung out and I'm spacey and I know you love the club scene here, and I'm sure your group are great people, but I can promise you I'll only be a mood-killer. I don't want everyone to be sad tonight just because I am." Oscar wrung his hands together. A lump separate from the anxiety one suddenly appeared in his throat, and he had to struggle to not choke on his next words. "The reason I asked you to come over, actually, was because I wanted to talk to you. About it. Or something. I don't know. Or, at least, I wanted to spend time with you. I guess I figured it could distract me enough to make tonight sort of happy again."

Oscar picked at his fingernails. Lando was silent. Lando was silent for long enough that Oscar couldn't help but glance back at him, only to discover that he looked, for lack of a better term, horrified.

Oscar was confused. Why would Lando be— oh. His heart dropped as he realized what he had been unintentionally insinuating, and he scrambled to backtrack.

"Not that that's your job, or anything, mate. Obviously, you don't have to stay here, you're totally free to go clubbing. I'm fine, I promise, it's just a— oof."

Oscar found himself cut off when Lando stepped forward, crouched slightly, and flung his arms around Oscar's shoulders.

Lando drew him in tight, practically squeezing the air out of him, and because one of them was standing and the other sitting, Oscar's face was awkwardly squished near Lando's armpit and Lando's head was on top of his. Though a part of him wanted to relish in the touch, and he did for a few seconds (while a silly little voice in his head yelled, "He does care! He does!"), it soon became clear than this was a more-than-a-few-seconds thing from Lando's side. And, ow, Lando's chin was really pointy from this angle.

"Hey, Lando?" he tried to say, though it came out muffled. Lando responded with a hum that Oscar felt the vibrations of through his chest. He twisted his neck a bit to be able to speak clearly. "Listen, I really appreciate the sentiment here, I do, but this might be the most uncomfortable hug I've ever gotten."

"Oh." Lando instantly pulled back, though he left his hands resting on Oscar's shoulders. "Sorry."

"All good, mate."

For the second time that night, the silence between them felt charged, although it was different this time. Oscar was picking at his nails again, unsure of what to say. Lando was drumming his fingers on Oscar's shoulders. The rhythm was steady, almost grounding, but it was also hard to become grounded because Lando was doing his freaky soul-searching eye contact again. However, Oscar thought that he could actually see something in Lando's eyes now. It was perhaps some concern, but it was also something deeper, more raw, that Oscar couldn't place his finger on. If he were a bigger person, he would have questioned it, demanded to know what part of sad, tired Oscar Lando was observing to possibly evoke such an emotion. As it was, he was sad and tired, and also a massive coward. As it was, he let it go.

Lando gave his shoulders a firm squeeze and dropped his hands, and the moment broke.

"I'm gonna ask room service to deliver us some cake," he suddenly declared. He pivoted to walk towards the hotel phone, then stopped halfway, turned back, and looked at Oscar appraisingly. Whatever he saw was presumably bad, because he added, "And alcohol. Definitely alcohol."

And Oscar was clearly getting a little too tired for this, because he barely comprehended what Lando had just said. Rather eloquently, he verbalized that thought:

"Huh?"

Lando looked over from where he was now rummaging around for the room service number.

"Cake, mate," he said, like it was something obvious. "We can just have them bring it up, no hassle—"

"Yeah, no, I got that," Oscar interrupted. "Cake. And alcohol. But... why?"

Lando had picked up the phone, but paused before he could enter the number. Even from across the room, Oscar could clearly see his raised eyebrow.

"You want to celebrate," he said, again like it was obvious. "Can't celebrate without some cake."

"I thought you wanted to go to the club, though."

Lando's whole face scrunched up.

"I mean. I could, but why would I when we're celebrating here now?"

"Wait, 'we?'" Oscar asked. Lando was just going to throw away his plans? His club scene he'd been looking forward to? His own commemoration for his objectivity better achievement? "Surely you can't just ditch your friends."

"Who says?" Lando challenged. "They'll have fun whether I'm there or not."

"Lando, come on," Oscar tried to reason. "I know you. I know you want to go out. So you should go celebrate your P2 how you want to."

Lando slowly put down the phone and ambled back to the bed. Oscar looked up at him warily. His face was indecipherable.

"Clearly, you don't know me as well as you think you do, then," Lando said, pointing an accusing finger at Oscar. He plopped down cross-legged next to Oscar on the bed and nudged him with his elbow. "What if I'd rather celebrate my P2 by being here with you, huh? What if going out won't be fun if you're not there, and it also won't be fun if you are there having a miserable time?" Oh. Lando actually cared about that. "Besides, you said yourself you wanted a distraction." Lando pointed back at himself with both thumbs. "Boom. Distraction."

Oscar shifted the weight of his legs, feeling a flush of—shyness? Embarrassment? Guilt?—something spread across his cheeks.

"Look, about what I said earlier, it is stupid. You really don't have to be stuck here with me."

"No, but I want to be. And it's not stupid." Grin wide, Lando elbowed him in the ribs again. Ow. Oscar would probably have a bruise soon if he kept that up. "C'mon, mate, why'd you think I gave you the most uncomfortable hug ever?"

"Because you're spatially unaware?"

The grin became a scowl.

"No, mate. I was clearly expressing that I wanted to stay here with you. I'm a master of expression. Don't be dense."

For the first time since setting foot in his hotel room that night, Oscar had found a reason to crack a smile.

"Eh, sure. Whatever helps you sleep at night."

"Of course, 'sure.'" Lando side-eyed him before standing up. He kept talking, but refused to turn around, walking backwards in the direction of the phone. "Anyways, point is, we're celebrating here because I want to celebrate with you, and no, it's not inconveniencing me or anything, and no, you can't talk me out of it. Now let me order our cake, and then we can move on with our evening, with cake."

Oscar was so touched by the little speech that he decided to actually warn Lando that he was about to trip backwards over a chair.

Lando did eventually order the cake, though he couldn't do it without shamelessly lying: "It's my mate's birthday, can you, like, go all out? Yeah, sprinkles sounds great. Could you add some ice cream too? Perfect." He gave Oscar the dopiest thumbs-up-and-grin he'd ever seen at that, which was definitely the pot calling the kettle black, but Lando somehow made it look extra stupid.

There was a pause in the conversation, and Oscar figured that Lando was about to order the alcohol—probably champagne exclusively for the cliché of it. However, he glanced over his shoulder at Oscar first, was silent for a few seconds, and then his stance set like he had made a decision.

"And a hot chocolate, please," Lando said. "With marshmallows. Yes, that's it. You can charge it to the room. Okay. Thank you."

Lando had put the phone down and was saying that their stuff would be here in ten minutes or so, but Oscar could only focus on the warm sensation that was spreading throughout his body. It felt like his heart was swelling, and also like it was melting, but also like it was racing, but it couldn't have anything to do with anxiety because how could a feeling like this ever be bad? This was some kind of fever, maybe. Certainly, he felt hot, like a flame was curling around his stomach and lungs and face. Whatever blush was left from earlier had surely come back ten-fold, and Oscar wasn't even sure he cared anymore. Oh, god. What was happening to him?

In his peripheral vision, he saw Lando coming back over to him. One thing and one thing only was searing itself into Oscar's brain: Lando had gotten him hot chocolate. Hot chocolate. Not coffee, not tea, because Oscar didn't like either. And not alcohol, even though Lando probably wanted it, because apparently he remembered that one time during the early season when Oscar had confessed that hot chocolate cheered him up better than anything else.

Out of nowhere, and for the briefest of seconds, Oscar imagined jumping up, grabbing Lando by the face, and kissing him senseless.

And—

Oh.

Uh oh. Oh no. That was not a normal thought to have about your coworker, was it?

Fuck.

Oscar was so, unbelievably, undeniably fucked, wasn't he?

He heard Lando say his name and scrambled to stuff whatever had just happened into the "FEELINGS ABOUT LANDO" box. It was bursting at the seams at that point, everything inside kicking and thrashing to get out, but it did fit. Barely. Just in time, too, since he became aware that Lando was standing in front of him, giving him a funny look.

"You good, mate?" he asked. "You seem a little, like, freaked out."

Oh, if only he knew. Oscar cleared his throat, hoped that his flaming red face could be waved away as fatigue, and realized he should probably say something.

"I, um. You—" he stammered out. "The hot chocolate. You remembered. That was— um, thank you."

Lando smiled in that way that made his eyes crinkle, although it seemed a little shy, and Oscar's box kicked at its seams a tiny bit more.

"It's nothing, really," Lando said. He moved to sit down again next to Oscar on the bed, but sat normally this time. As well, he ran a hand through his curls, messing up the styling he'd probably done for the club. Oscar frowned, some of how flustered he'd been being replaced by worry. Those were both nervous habits for Lando. He continued: "And, uh, Oscar? For the record, I also wanted to apologize."

Oscar's frown deepened.

"What for?"

"For not checking with you beforehand about the whole clubbing thing." Oscar opened his mouth to argue, but Lando cut him off with a hand in the air. "Nope, nope, let me apologize. I said you could always talk to me, and you were trusting me enough to reach out and do just that, and I sort of totally stepped all over it. I feel pretty sucky about it, so I imagine you must feel, like, eighty times worse." Lando wrung his hands, his eyes flickering from Oscar to the ground to Oscar again. "I'm—not that this excuses it, or anything—but I'm sometimes still getting used to being the older person here. To, you know, being relied on instead of the other way round." His next words were rushed, like they were spilling out of him uncontrollably. "But I hope this doesn't discourage you from asking again in the future, because I really do care about you, Oscar, and I want to help you. I just need to be better myself." Lando seemed to gather himself then, and straightened up to look at Oscar properly. "So, yeah. I wanted to tell you that I'm sorry."

The part of Oscar that was still so terribly exhausted urged him to just say that it was fine and dismiss the apology. Yet, the part of his brain that was still working knew that that wouldn't be fair to Lando. It was a genuine apology, and it deserved a genuine response.

"Thank you," he started. "It, um, yeah. It did kinda make me feel sucky. Like I mentioned, I'm not doing too well tonight, and that didn't help a whole lot." Lando's gaze turned sad, and Oscar couldn't stand to see that for long. "But you're more than making it up to me," he clarified. "With the cake, with staying here, with the apology. I really appreciate it, more than I'm really good at saying through words. And I'll still reach out to you, if you want me to." Oscar quirked his mouth, hoping he could lighten the mood by getting a rise out of Lando. "As much as I really question why sometimes, I do like talking to you."

However, Lando seemed to gloss right over it. Instead, he grabbed Oscar's right hand with his left, intertwining their fingers and squeezing with surprising force. Oscar stared at him in alarm, and suddenly saw a crack in the usual visage Lando presented; not goofy, not carefree, not even the seriousness he'd shown in Monza or Singapore. There, right now, was raw, unfiltered insecurity, blunt and arresting.

"You promise?" Lando asked, though it held an edge of desperation that Oscar didn't know what to do with. This side of Lando was unfamiliar territory, and he didn't really know what to make of any of it. "You'll still reach out?" he added.

"I promise," Oscar said, because it felt like the only answer in the world. As soon as he said it, Lando visibly relaxed, though the ridges of tension were still clear along his neck and shoulders. In a split second, Oscar made a choice. "Stand up, mate."

He stood up himself, tugging Lando via their joined hands. Lando looked confused, but complied, getting to his feet. Without giving him time to ruminate on it, Oscar wiggled his hand free, circled his arms around Lando's body, and drew him in by his waist.

Lando made a little squeaky noise as he stumbled forward, clearly startled, but he quickly adapted, wrapping his own arms around Oscar's back.

For a moment, Oscar wondered why he had done this. He was hardly ever the type to initiate contact with someone else, much less a hug. Yet, as things often did, it felt different with Lando. Was this to comfort Lando? Was it to comfort himself? Then, Lando fully melted into Oscar's hold, resting his chin on Oscar's shoulder. Their small height difference made it so that when Oscar himself relaxed, his nose was practically in the side of Lando's hair. He dragged in a deep breath, inhaling the scent of shampoo and curl products. Maybe, Oscar thought, this was meant to comfort both of them.

He wasn't certain exactly how long they stood there, Oscar gripping the back of Lando's stupid white button-down hard enough to give it wrinkles and Lando finding a way to tuck himself perfectly into the topography of Oscar's body. He only knew that it was long enough that when they parted, it was for a knock on the door and a call of "room service!"

Their cake had arrived, two slices of chocolate with vanilla frosting that were topped with a ridiculous amount of rainbow sprinkles and—the result of Lando's lie—candles. There were also two bowls, each with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a scoop of chocolate. Oscar's hot chocolate came in a ceramic mug with whipped cream and three whole marshmallows topping it off. Oscar swore that he vicariously felt Kim and Jon having heart attacks at the amount of sugar in front of them, but frankly, he couldn't have given less of a shit. Lando was right: this was a damn celebration, so let them eat cake.

For the next several hours, the two McLaren drivers indeed ate their cake, made a mess by dropping ice cream on the carpet (Lando), called the front desk to come clean it up (Oscar), very awkwardly sat on the couch while a sleepy older man sprayed down and vacuumed the carpet at the speed of a sloth, had a very mature giggling fit once he left, and talked about anything and everything.

Lando revisited his complaints about Max Verstappen's fashion sense:

"I'm telling you, mate, the blue washes him out. I've been watching those seasonal color analysis videos, and I'm an expert now. Red Bull blue is a solid warm autumn. Max is not warm autumn."

He theorized on what the result of Qatar would be:

"Let me paint a picture for you. Stop snickering, Oscar, I'm an artist." He pronounced this as 'arteest.' "This is high art."

"Sure."

"Exactly. Now there's you, on the podium. Second place. The crowd at your feet, cheering wildly. Me, up there with you. I'm looking down on you from P1, of course, though—let's not be ridiculous."

The third category, however, was the one that Oscar liked the most, and that was talking about today. The conversation never got as serious as it had been before, probably due to a combination of general exhaustion and sugar highs-slash-crashes, but Lando found his own ways to speak to Oscar's self-doubt:

"C'mon, mate. You beat Nico Hulkenberg to a podium! And he's, like, old and wise and stuff."

"He's 36."

"See? Practically one foot in the grave! Look how good you are."

The more they gossiped and teased and cackled, the more Oscar felt his anxiety being cleansed away (perhaps slowly sprayed and vacuumed?). No longer did he feel like there was banana in his smoothie, and neither was there a lump in his throat to choke him and make him nauseous. It was like the night shone in a completely different light now, brilliant and warm and forged through his bond with the man next to him, bright enough to chase off the little phantoms for good.

"Just sleep here, mate," Oscar said after Lando, sprawled face down on Oscar's bed, grumbled about having to get up and walk back down the hall to his room. To cut him some slack, it was nearing two o'clock in the morning, and the sugar crash was clearly taking its full toll on their sore bodies. Oscar dragged himself over to his suitcase, where this had all started, and pulled out a t-shirt and loose shorts. With all his remaining effort, he chucked them at Lando, hitting him in the face where he was starting to sit up. Lando glared, then saw what was thrown and smirked.

"So you do own more than team shirts, then? That's a shocker."

Oscar flipped him off on the way to the bathroom.

When they were both changed and in bed (there had been an unspoken agreement to share the bed; they were both too tired to argue about it), Oscar reflected on his evening. It had started great, then gotten sort of dicey in the middle, but it really had turned around, hadn't it? And when examining why, there was only a big neon arrow pointing directly at his teammate. Suddenly, Oscar had the most pressing urge to tell him so.

"Lando?" he asked into the darkness, hoping the other hadn't fallen asleep yet.

"Yeah?" came the response.

"You were a really great distraction tonight."

"Yeah?" Lando repeated.

"Yeah. More than that, really. I'll always remember today as the day I got my first podium. But now, because of you, I get to remember it as the good times instead of the time I wallowed in my hotel room miserably." Oscar turned his head left, catching the glint of Lando's eyes in the dim moonlight. "Thank you."

"Good. I'm really glad. You deserve to be happy. Always."

Oscar thought that was it, and though a part of him begged to analyze that statement, he was already dozing off, completely ready for a night's sleep. However, Lando's voice startled him back awake. Bizarrely, he had some weird accent, high and reedy.

"Lesson number two, class: celebrate every small victory, lest you become sad and jaded and—"

Oscar grabbed one of the numerous pillows on the bed and placed it very gently on top of Lando's face. The big "oof" noise and the cursing were completely coincidental.

With that settled, Oscar was able to snuggle peacefully into the sheets, sleep near-instantly washing over him. In his last moments of awareness, though, one more thought struck him. With a Formula One trophy in his cabinet, chocolate cake in his stomach, and Lando Norris at his side, Oscar realized that this was how one was supposed to feel after a first podium, wasn't it? All smiley and happy inside? Damn. He'd just have to get that second podium, then, and maybe it'd be twice as good. It would probably be a while before that happened, though. Oh, well. For this, he could wait all the time in the world.

Chapter Text

The first sign that something was wrong came in Qatar.

See, the thing was; if asked, Oscar would say that he did not consider himself to be an aggressive person.

Aggressive on track: maybe. Aggressive mentally: sort of. Aggressive in a single-minded-focus-on-a-goal-until-it's-done kind of way, the kind that anyone needed to be a Formula One driver: definitely.

Physical aggression, however, was a whole other can of worms. Sure, he got frustrated, and he got angry, but Oscar would say that his anger was the quiet, simmering type that mostly stayed on the inside because he didn't like letting it out for other people to see. Instead, he projected calm, cool, and collected, a break in the hurricane of emotions that tended to ravage their sport. It was kind of Oscar's brand at this point.

But sometimes—

The thing was; in the grand scheme of life, there were occasions that brought out the worst in anyone. Oscar was not aggressive, he was not angry, and he certainly was not violent.

But he was sweating in places he didn't know were possible, exhausted down to the last bone in his body, and concerned about more people than he could count on both hands. As a result, one thought did manage to slip past his veil of calm, rattling around in his body like a coin in a tin can, echoing upon itself, ringing louder and louder and louder until it was so loud that it drowned out even his own engine as he took the checkered flag:

Oscar Piastri was going to fucking throttle whoever had scheduled the Qatar GP.

To give it some credit, the weekend had started out innocuous enough. Sure, it was hot. Whatever. Oscar had other things to focus on, such as the fact that he was coming off of his first ever podium in F1 and everyone (read: the media) seemed to already be demanding another. Something about being the first rookie driver in six years to stand on the podium just had the reporters really foaming at the mouth. Which, yeah, Oscar knew it was impressive, and he also knew that the car was at the best it had been in several years, but he still found it all a little bit presumptuous. If there was anything that ten races spent struggling through the back of the field to barely score points had taught him, it was that not every weekend could be perfect.

To be clear, he wasn't trying to be pessimistic. It was just kind of hard when every single question asked of him on media day was some variation of “Can you do it again?" which was thinly veiling the real "And also while we’re at it can you win a race and fight for the championship and prove that you really are Hamilton 2.0?” which was even then covering up the real question: "Are you good enough to be here?"

So, yeah. Pleasant.

Luckily, another podium wasn't actually looking off the cards. Their FP1 session hadn't been remarkable—he and Lando running in P9 and P10 respectively—but Oscar knew that they hadn't really been pushing the car to its limits yet.

It may have been his first time racing in Qatar, and he was still kind of getting a grip on their most recent upgrades, but Oscar was certain he could feel the qualifying potential buzzing through his McLaren like an electric current. It was just lying low, waiting to burst out and shock everyone—not literally, hopefully. It was just all going to show that the team's great turnaround really wasn't a fluke.

Or, it could've had something to do with the Qatar circuit in particular, which really—

"Lends itself well to our car, doesn't it? Good high speed corners."

If Oscar were a more skittish person, he would've jumped about a foot in the air. As it was, he suppressed a small shudder as Lando appeared in the meeting room out of nowhere, hovering over Oscar's shoulder.

"Well, hello," Oscar said, being forced to twist his neck backwards to look up at Lando, which was decidedly not comfortable. Lando was holding a chocolate chip muffin, looking unbothered. "Is this your new way of saying hi to people, then? Just spring some circuit trivia on them and hope for the best?"

"Is burning holes with your eyes into a track map your new way of saying hi?" Lando instantly retorted, moving his hand to indicate something in front of Oscar. "Or is it just being rude for no reason?"

Oscar turned back to look at where Lando was gesturing, and startled. He hadn't noticed it, but, indeed, he had been zoning out in the direction of a paper copy of the Lusail track map, sitting on the table.

"Oh," he said, keeping his deadpan on. "Whoops. Didn't see that."

Oscar gave it a second. As if on cue, Lando finished processing what Oscar had said and immediately began laughing, because apparently this sort of thing was hilarious.

Despite presenting calmly, Oscar did feel a flush creeping in under his eyes. The flush then doubled when he realized that it wasn't there from the shame of being wrong so much as it was from the sound of Lando laughing at him, bright and infectious and pretty.

Oh, god. Oscar wanted to crawl into a hole and never come out. That "FEELINGS ABOUT LANDO" thing wasn't going away any time soon, was it?

To prevent himself from doing something stupid like turning around and telling Lando to his face that he had a pretty laugh, Oscar grabbed the offending track map and began fiddling with a corner of it. He willed his blush to go away, please. At least from this angle—Lando standing behind him—Oscar's face wasn't super visible.

Argh, feelings were so inconvenient.

"Why're you still in the meeting room, mate?" Lando asked. He was apparently done laughing, but even through a bite of his muffin, his voice still sparkled with it. Then he sobered a tiny bit, just to say: "You alright?"

And that was Lando not-so-subtly checking in with Oscar's anxiety. It hadn't been two weeks since Japan, and Oscar hadn't even seen Lando for most of it, but he had seen him enough to pick up on this new habit: quiet "you good?"s and "everything okay?"s whenever Lando thought something might be wrong, just making sure nothing was eating away at him. Oscar thought that Lando probably thought he still needed to make up for the clubbing blunder. Oscar also thought that this was so hopelessly endearing it hurt.

It really didn't help with the whole feelings thing either.

Oscar glanced down at the track map, trying to force all of the fluttery sensations in his heart tightly back into their box, and twisted to look at Lando again.

"Yeah, I stayed after the team meeting," he said. "Air conditioning's stronger in here. It's literally the only place that makes me feel like I'm not suffocating."

Lando made a face at him.

"Really? Aren't you Aussies supposed to be, like, immune to the heat or something?"

Oscar made a face back.

"This is nothing like Aussie heat. They're completely different types."

"Sure, sure.” Lando paused, and then added: “Or maybe you're just weak. Don't see me going around complaining about the heat, do you?"

Oscar barked out an incredulous half-scoff, half-laugh.

"Mate, what? Absolutely, I've seen you complaining about it. Multiple times, actually."

"Oh no!" Lando dramatically gasped, reaching around to place his non-muffin hand on Oscar's forehead. "Oscar, you're having illusions. Or, uh, illuminations. No. Hal... o? Halogens?"

"Hallucinations?" Oscar suggested, dry and unimpressed. He reached up to grab Lando's wrist, moving it away from his head. "Stop that."

"Bang on, Oscar! Heat stroke's set in already, mate. Might be too late for you."

"Whatever," Oscar said, rolling his eyes to cover up the smile threatening to bloom on his face. He always forgot and then always remembered how much joking around with Lando like this made him feel all bubbly inside. "Why are you here?" he shot back at Lando, which wasn't a redirection. No, not at all.

Lando shrugged.

"Got bored in my driver's room. Went to go bother Zak, think I bothered him too much—y'know how his eye starts twitching?—and he started dropping very obvious hints that you'd be in here to try and get me to leave. I wouldn't have given in so fast, but I figured you'd be more entertaining than Zak, anyways."

"Ah, so that's all I am to you, then?" Oscar teased. "Entertainment?"

Lando shrugged again.

"You're an interesting guy, Oscar, what can I say?"

There, Lando was using that weird tone of his, where he said something that could be a joke just flat enough that it was impossible to tell whether he was actually joking or not. Oscar and his underdeveloped social skills were never good at guessing which one it was. Selfishly, he chose to believe that this time, Lando wasn't joking, partially because he swore there was a glint of sincerity in Lando's eyes, and partially because his entire being preened at being called interesting by Lando Norris, and, yeah, maybe he was weak. Sue him.

However, the moment was promptly ruined as Lando took another big bite of his muffin, showering crumbs onto the table and—much to Oscar's displeasure—Oscar himself. He grimaced, brushing crumbs off of his shoulder, and gave Lando his best stink eye.

"Are you even supposed to be eating that?" he asked.

"No harm in some casual snacking," Lando replied, which notably was not an answer.

"Wouldn't Jon—" Oscar tried to object, but Lando cut him off.

"What's Jon gonna do, fish it out of me?" Lando paused, and his whole face scrunched up. "Ew. Gross. Thanks for making me think of that. Ugh." He then waved a hand dismissively. "Nah, mate, it's fine."

"Suit yourself, I guess," Oscar conceded.

Absently, his gaze wandered back to the track map he was holding. Oscar traced over the long, fast corners with one thumb, working through the racing line in his head. Lando had been right, of course. This circuit worked seamlessly into the direction their car had been developing.

So this weekend won't be about the car, Oscar suddenly thought. It was a strange thought to have, mostly because he had already known that. The sim data, the FP1 data, and basically the whole team now were predicting that the car could easily get them into Q3, so that wasn't much in question. No, the pressure here fell onto the drivers, relying on them to not fuck it up somehow. The pressure fell onto him.

Can you do it again?

Oscar's stomach did a little flip, and he took a deep breath, glancing up and back at Lando. Lando was busy folding his muffin wrapper into increasingly thinner pizza-slice shapes, but he paused when Oscar met his eye. After a second of silent eye contact, he made an inquisitive hm?

"Do you think we can do it?" Oscar blurted out. It came out shakier than he would have preferred, rushed yet delicate like he was afraid to ask. To be honest, he kind of was afraid. Since Japan, he had rapidly gotten better at recognizing these specific fears—and (yes, mum) accepting that telling someone was actually helpful—but that didn't mean that they were easy to vocalize. "Do you think we can be on the podium again?" he clarified.

Do you think I can be on the podium again? went unsaid.

"Yeah," Lando instantly replied, with a perplexed expression like he was offended that Oscar would ask. "Yeah, of course we can. It's—" Lando cut himself off, and his eyes widened. After a second, a now-familiar softness washed over them, and he spoke in a gentler tone. "Ah, it's the media, innit?"

Oscar hesitated, then nodded, not even surprised that Lando had known about it. He went back to fidgeting with the track map.

"Bunch of wankers, media. Really," Lando muttered. He pulled out the chair to Oscar's right and fell into it. Oscar's neck thanked him for no longer having to strain backwards just to look at the other man.

"Of course you can be on the podium again, Oscar," Lando continued gently, placing a grounding hand on Oscar's shoulder. He looked right into Oscar's eyes as he said: "There's no doubt about that."

The feelings came surging up out of their box, chanting a chorus of kisshimkisshimkisshim.

Oscar silently pushed them back down.

Lando, oblivious, raised his eyebrows and gave Oscar a very intentional look, as if daring him to disagree with what he said next.

"But, I mean, it doesn't really matter whether you are or aren't, right? You're still a great driver, even if you're not podiuming all the time. Right?"

"Yeah, I know." Oscar breathed out a long sigh, leaning back in his chair and stretching. "It's just been a lot."

Lando dropped his hand from Oscar's shoulder to his knee, giving it a few pats.

"I get it. I'm here for you, yeah?"

An easy, genuine smile graced Oscar's lips. Simple as this whole thing was, he found that he did actually feel better—less of a crushing pressure around him—and his smile got even wider.

"I know. Thank you. I, uh, think I needed to hear that."

"Of course, mate." Lando smiled back, and Oscar's stomach flipped for a completely different reason. Before he could dwell on it, though, Lando reached forwards and extended his hand for a fist-bump. "Come on, then. One-two in quali?"

Oscar fist-bumped him.

"One-two."

And for a moment, everything seemed right in the world.

-

The keyword in that statement was, unfortunately, “moment.”

A couple of hours and one (very sweaty) qualifying session later, Oscar would dare say that everything did not seem right anymore.

They weren't one-two, which, to be realistic, wasn't a massive surprise. They were, however, two-four, which was still pretty nice. Yes, he was seething internally just a little bit about not putting together a truly clean lap, but complaining about a P4 was looking something of a gift horse in the mouth, so he could convince himself to suck it up and be happy about it.

He'd been gearing up to do just that while pulling into parc fermé. It wasn't until he had turned his car off, gotten out, taken his helmet off, and was mid-getting weighed that he caught sight of a papaya-orange motion in his peripheral vision. He turned towards it as he stepped off the scale and was promptly baffled to see Tom, his race engineer, jogging up to him. His headset was still on and he was out of breath, betraying his evident rush to get here from the pit wall.

"Oscar," Tom wheezed out. "You need to be up front for the interviews. Right now."

Oscar furrowed his eyebrows, not any less baffled, but now a little bit concerned at how Tom was bent at the waist, still wheezing.

"What? I'm P4, mate. No interviews."

"No. Not anymore. Lando's time just got deleted. He's P10, you're P3, and they need you up front for interviews, now."

"Oh," was all he could say. Yikes, was what he thought.

"Here, give me your helmet." Tom straightened up and held out a hand. "And here's a cap." Oscar automatically made the exchange, relinquishing his helmet and nestling the offered cap on top of his (very sweaty) hair. Tom then forcibly turned him by the shoulder toward the front of the pit lane, clapping him firmly on the back a few times.

"Congratulations," he said simply, and then he left.

Oscar just stood there for a moment, completely and utterly dumbfounded.

Jeez. Tom sure knows how to drop a bombshell, doesn't he?

He quickly shook his head. The media would be all over this, Oscar knew, and the media were nothing if not a ravenous, all-consuming fire, eager to jump on the smallest of imperfections for a headline. He did not want to add fuel to that fire by doing the interview looking like some wide-eyed idiot who couldn't handle shocking news.

If Oscar craned his neck in the direction Tom had pointed him, he could pick out Max, a short distance away, already thoroughly “max-plaining” his pole lap to whichever poor interviewer had to be subjected to it today. George was loitering off to the side while fiddling with his own microphone.

A spark of oh shit, I do need to be over there hit Oscar like a slap to the face. It kicked his body back into gear enough to actually start walking, and he began to make his way over.

However, while weaving his way through the pit lane, dodging mechanics and their various equipment, Oscar couldn't help but notice how bad this whole situation felt. It was an upgrade to P3, for god's sake, so he definitely should have been happy. Not for nothing, he was happy. But there was also this itchy, squirmy feeling rising in his gut—not anxiety, at least not in the traditional sense, but something oddly related, oddly familiar. Something like... guilt? Concern? Sympathy? He couldn't quite pin it down.

It continued to bother Oscar as he got closer to Max and George. He took a moment to scan the surrounding area, noting Lando's car at the P2 board. That meant Lando must have been there before his lap got deleted, but Oscar couldn't see him anywhere. He wasn't terribly surprised—if he were Lando, he wouldn't want to stick around either.

In his gut, the feeling squirmed again.

It bothered him some more as Oscar listened to George discuss his "P3" (clearly no one had told him he had moved up a place). A staff member intercepted Oscar to give him a microphone. Absently, Oscar mourned the fact that Lando wasn't doing this interview with him. Even if they wouldn't be literally together, and even if Oscar had gotten more comfortable throughout the season, having Lando nearby still made speaking in front of cameras that much less painful. Oh, how stupidly sweet it was that Lando was basically his comfort person now.

Oscar's heart fluttered in a familiar way.

The feeling in his gut squirmed.

And—

Oh.

Those were the same feelings, weren't they?

But that didn't make sense. The one in his gut was all concerned and guilty and frantic. The others were his mushy feelings, the ones that blushed when Lando laughed or gazed into Oscar's eyes. The ones that Oscar was still very much learning to coexist with. The ones that were ever-present and opinionated and made his heart twist to imagine Lando being sad because his lap was deleted and Oscar had taken his place and yearned to fix it by wrapping him in a blanket with a hot drink and a massage and music and affection and—

Okay, wow.

Yeah, that actually made a lot of sense, didn't it?

Underneath that earth-shattering epiphany, Oscar vaguely noticed that George was done with his interview. He was asking where Lando was, joking that he had gotten lost, and Oscar snapped himself back to reality. Now was probably when he was supposed to go put an end to this confusion.

Still, in the back of his mind, he started ruminating on what he should do about Lando. Perhaps not all of the impulsive things that his feelings wanted him to do (a massage? Really?), but there must be something, just to clear the air and make sure the other driver was okay. Even putting his feelings aside, Lando had done so much for him that returning the favor only seemed natural. So what was something that could be passed off as casual but still be meaningful enough to help Lando?

He thought about it, and thought about it, and thought about it some more, and eventually decided on something. He'd just go talk to Lando after media duties were over, and figure it out from there. Boom. Problem solved. He was a genius.

No, the heat was not getting to his brain.

"Are you here for me or for him?" George asked when Oscar stepped up for the interview, pointing back at Max.

"For Lando," Oscar responded, and George pulled an oop face that was definitely going to get him memed online.

Yes, Oscar's feelings crooned, all heart-eyed and doting and gross. You will be there for Lando.

Oh, shut up, Oscar thought back, getting into place for the interview. For right now, it didn't matter who had or hadn't had a lap deleted. It didn't matter that half his attention was diverted onto caring probably a little bit too much about his teammate, a man who was theoretically his biggest rival. It didn't even matter that there was still an indecipherable sense of foreboding in the back of his mind, looming like something was wrong but he didn't know what yet. He had his P3, he was happy about it, and everything else could wait until later.

So maybe everything wasn't quite right anymore. Oh well. He could suck it up. At least he still had a P3 to celebrate—glass half-full, and all that.

Oscar raised his microphone and began to speak.

-

The thing was; in the grand scheme of life, some things were a matter of luck. Pushing the throttle that tiny bit more, pressing the brake that tiny bit later, and praying that you stayed on the right side of a white line. It was a matter of millimeters, and it was definitely a matter of skill, but, peeling those layers back, it was sometimes just one big matter of luck.

And oh boy, did luck really seem to fucking hate Oscar sometimes.

As was the way of these things, his lap time got deleted.

As was the way of these things, Oscar was starting to think that maybe the glass half-empty people were onto something.

It was impressive, honestly. Every single time he tried to be optimistic, to look on the bright side, some greater power pulling the strings of his life was determined to say, "no-can-do, buddy," and squash it out like a pesky little ant under its foot. Qualify on the front row? Nah, give him P3. Just close enough to taste it but not quite all the way. Enjoy the result with his teammate? Nah, crush the teammate's hopes too. Why should the people he cared about get to be happy, anyways?

Enjoy the result on his own?

Well. Go figure.

Oscar was not an aggressive person. Despite this, a wave of fury, both white-hot and icy to the touch, had crashed over him after his interview. It had roared and thundered and made him maybe want to find an FIA official to punch the daylights out of, but by the end of the short walk back to the McLaren building, it had already fizzled out.

Instead, in its retreat, it had left behind a dull, bone-tired ache; a full-body frustration, hot and sticky and cold and embarrassed and sweaty all wrapped up into one giant bundle of exhaustion. And this exhaustion dug its claws in hard. It worked an insatiable itch under Oscar's skin, whispering at him like a siren song to just ditch team debrief, ditch the circuit, speed back to the hotel, and crash and burn into bed. He was not proud to admit how close he came to scratching that itch.

Unfortunately, extreme exhaustion did not actually overrule his moral compass, and he knew he owed it to the team to stay. It was an etiquette thing, after all: no matter who on the team you were, if you fucked up, you sat your sorry ass through debrief, no ifs, ands, or buts. So, Oscar would drag himself there, even if it was the last thing he wanted to do.

And then there was the Lando thing.

Oscar's lap getting deleted kind of threw a fork into his "talk-to-Lando" plans. He'd had a whole internal debate about it, actually, once he'd calmed down from the interview. Well—maybe not a debate. It had been more of a circle, looping his brain several times through thoughts like Lando must be sad and I want to support him and but I'm really sad too and will be of no help to Lando and but Lando must be sad! before his feelings had thrown in some very convincing images of, go figure: Lando being sad, and that had tipped the scales pretty quickly. He would check in on Lando, and he would support him, damnit. So what if Oscar was dead on his feet? That didn't matter. He could still be there as, like, an open listener. Or something.

Maybe the heat was getting to him.

Anyways, he had made up his mind.

The problem was, when Oscar went to actually check in on Lando in the time they had before the debrief, there was no response. He knocked on the door to Lando’s driver's room again. Still nothing. Huh.

Oscar was certain that Lando was here. He'd even run into Jon in the hallway, who had confirmed it for him (while also giving Oscar a suspicious eyebrow raise that said I know what you are, which Oscar thought was entirely unnecessary. It wasn't that weird that he wanted to talk to Lando after qualifying. Even if it was becoming more of a talk-to-Lando-all-the-time thing. That was none of Jon's business, certainly).

All that to be said; Lando was in his room, without a doubt. For some reason, he was just acting like he wasn't.

"Lando?" Oscar tried. He pressed an ear up against the door, feeling like a major creep, but, hey, man, he was really tired. This would be the easiest way to call Lando's bluff, if he could just hear something—

There. The sound of faux leather sofa cushions crinkling as someone shifted their weight on them. Oscar knew this sound well from his own sofa. Satisfied, he pulled back.

"It's Oscar, mate," he called. "I can hear you moving around in there, you know. Can I come in?"

Oscar didn't need to have an ear to the door to hear the long sigh that came from behind it. A second later, Lando's voice followed.

"Door's open."

Bingo.

When Oscar opened the door, the first thing he thought was pretzel. This was, of course, because Lando was sitting scrunched up on his little sofa in a way that could not have possibly been comfortable. He had his knees up to his chest while his ankles were crossed, and his neck was tucked in and bent sideways to lay his head on one of the armrests. He was also holding his phone up to his face in an unsupported position that made Oscar's own arm hurt to look at.

The second thing he thought was I can work with this. Lando was almost certainly feeling tense after a quali like that, but Oscar could break the ice by making a witty comment about how he was sitting; probably something about pretzels. Lando would crack up, the conversation would start flowing like normal, and he could breach the topic of qualifying smoothly. Then, he'd be free to help Lando in whatever way he needed it.

Just as he went to execute this plan, however, Lando moved his phone away from his face, and the words all died on his tongue.

Oh.

Lando looked terrible.

The thing was; Oscar had spent the past ten months with McLaren watching Lando. At first, it had just been the nerves of being the new guy, looking for guidance from the person who actually knew what they were doing. Over time it became more of a habit, more of a second nature, as easy as breathing. During meetings, he would look at Lando. During fan stages, he would look at Lando. Even when it was just the two of them, hanging out somewhere in the hospitality, Oscar was always drawn to look at Lando, mapping out the details of his face to commit to memory forever.

So, while Oscar may have been working with a heat-addled brain and general exhaustion, everything jumped out at him; Lando's eyes were dull and red-rimmed. His hair was an oddly-shaped, tangled mess (from running his hands through it, undoubtedly). His lips were set in a grim line, so far from the pretty heart-shaped smile they often wore. Even his posture, as much as he could have a posture in his scrunched position, seemed heavy and defeated.

He was so... un-Lando-like.

Oscar's heart twisted in concern. His feelings had been imagining bad, but not nearly this bad. What was he even supposed to do?

"Not with the team to celebrate?" Lando suddenly spoke up, snapping Oscar to attention. His voice was acrid, abrasive like sandpaper.

Oscar met Lando's eyes and immediately recoiled, a shiver going down his spine. The other man’s gaze wasn't just dull—it was near full-on glaring, accusatory in a foreign, hostile way that made Oscar, despite not doing anything, want to shrivel up and apologize profusely. In reality, he cursed at himself. Not only had he just let his chance to start the conversation slip by, but Lando's question had also taken the tension he'd known would be there and dialed it up to eleven.

Just great.

Well, then, if he couldn’t pick up the energy, he might as well match it. He moved to sit down next to Lando in the small gap left on the sofa. He was not anticipating, however, that Lando would not budge to give Oscar any room at all. He glanced up at Lando, hoping to communicate a help me out here, mate, but all he got in return was more of the cold stare. Thus, Oscar was left sort of forcing himself into a space that didn't fit him. He grimaced. Sitting on Lando's foot while Lando's left elbow jabbed him in the ribs was not really how he had wanted to do this.

"My lap got deleted too," Oscar sighed. The sigh sunk him further into the sofa, where he discovered that, even while squished, the plain act of sitting felt like heaven on his sore muscles. He groaned, completely lacking the energy for any embarrassment.

"Oh," Lando said. Oscar watched as the hostility seemed to deflate out of him, returning to plain dullness. He turned away from Oscar to focus on his phone again.

"Yep."

Silence. Oscar couldn't suppress a yawn. He really hoped that he wouldn't fall asleep during debrief later.

"But I saw you going to do the interview and all that?" Lando suddenly said, half-question and half-statement.

Oscar glanced back over at Lando, who had fully put his phone down and was looking at him with a hint of curiosity. This was promising.

"Yeah," Oscar supplied. "They told me during the interview, actually. It wasn't fun." He was surprised by how bitter the statement tasted coming out of his mouth, some grit of lingering anger coming with it.

At this, Lando perked up even more, eyes widening.

"Oh. Oh, shit. That's fucked up, mate. You alright?"

"Eh," Oscar said. He put his arms up in a shrug and narrowly missed elbowing Lando in the face. "Not much I can do about it, is there? Just learn from today, focus on tomorrow."

"I guess. But, I mean, you're… okay about it? Like, mentally?"

Oscar managed half a smile at Lando doing his anxiety-check again.

The fact that he would care about Oscar even though he must be miserable himself—

Focus, Oscar. This isn't about you.

"Yeah. Well... I'm pissed, of course," Oscar conceded. "And even more pissed about the way the FIA handled it. Like, they couldn't have figured out who the top three were before the interviews?" Lando hummed an acknowledgment, nodding. Oscar sighed again. "But no, I'm not in my head about it too much. I'll move past it."

Despite the bitterness, Oscar was pleasantly surprised to find that he actually meant what he was saying. He really wasn't hung up on the incident any more than he should be.

"Good," Lando said. “I’m glad.” His voice and eyes took on a softer edge that made him sound like he was genuinely glad that Oscar was doing well.

Oscar's heart warmed, spreading a fluttery sensation throughout his body.

"And so will you, huh?" Oscar said, hoping to give some support in return. He grinned and moved to poke Lando on the shin (the most available part of his body as per the pretzel shape). "I heard your lap was P2 before it got deleted. You must be proud of that."

But as soon as Oscar said it, he knew it was the wrong thing to say. Lando visibly tensed up, any softness vanishing in the blink of an eye, and the same horrible hostility froze over him like a wall of icicles. He scoffed, a mean, bitter thing, and looked away.

"Nothing to be proud of if I can't even keep it."

For the second time, Oscar cursed himself out.

"I mean— I don't agree," Oscar countered, feeling very much like he was tip-toeing around broken glass.

"Really?" Lando bit back, dry and sarcastic. Any other time, Oscar might have laughed at how much Lando sounded like him. Now, it just made his heart hurt again.

"Yes, really. I'm still decently happy about my P4 lap, y'know?" Oscar tried to sound sure of himself. "Even if it didn't pan out, half of it is knowing that it's possible, and what’s possible is really good, yeah? P2 and P4 are really good." Lando was still looking away from him, so Oscar couldn't gauge his response, but he pressed on. "And, yeah, neither of us wanted to be starting where we are, but if it's like you’ve been saying, it's about our best for the day. These lap times were what we achieved, and if that was our best, then—"

"Yeah, well, it wasn't our best today, okay?" Lando snapped, turning the full weight of his glare onto Oscar. "From either of us. And some of us fell eight places, not three, so sorry for not living in fucking— dreamland, or whatever, and trying to actually be realistic for once."

Oh.

Silence fell.

It crept up on Oscar slowly, then hit him all at once with a force like whiplash. Lando had just yelled at him.

And that was—

Well.

The shrivel-up-and-apologize feeling came back, ten times worse, in a way that made Oscar want to maybe shrivel up and die, actually. It resonated throughout his body, tender to the touch and stinging, and when it came into contact with the bone-tired ache already weighing on him, they twisted together into an ever bigger, even uglier weight on his chest. It took Oscar a second to realize that part of the stinging wasn't just internal, and was in fact the hot tears pressing against his eyelids. He had to look down, unable to bear Lando's glare on him any longer.

And then there was a lump in his throat, a prickly little thing that said he doesn't want you.

Maybe Oscar shouldn't have come here. Maybe that would've been better for both of them.

"Do you want me to leave?" Oscar finally forced out. He stared at where his hands clenched the hems of his shorts, hating how his voice barely carried, how it was small and broken around the vowels.

Another couple of seconds passed with no response. As they did, the silence seemed to warp and grow thick around him, pressing inwards from all sides as if to squeeze the very air out of his body. The exhaustion echoed through his bones. The itch to run away crawled under his skin. The lump in his throat grew. Try as he might, Oscar couldn’t hold back a sniffle. He felt dampness on his cheeks.

A moment later:

“Fuck.”

Out of his blurry peripheral vision, he saw Lando break himself out of his pretzel and lean towards Oscar. His hands reached out to hover above Oscar’s shoulder and leg, twitching like he wanted to make contact but couldn’t quite find the confidence to. Unable to help himself despite everything, Oscar turned his head slightly towards Lando, just enough to see the other man's face. He was immediately taken aback. Lando looked, for lack of a better term, frantic—wide-eyed and panicky and overall upset.

"Fuck, Oscar,” Lando said when Oscar made eye contact with him. Now, in combination with the pleading voice, Oscar found the better term: desperate. “Please don’t cry because of me."

“I mean, s'not all you, mate” Oscar mumbled, trying to wipe away his tears. “Kinda shit day all around.”

“But still—” Lando’s fingers twitched again, and he looked down at them. Then he looked back up at Oscar. Oscar almost hoped he would ask— "Can I hug you?”

“Yeah.”

Lando practically jumped across the sofa to wrap his arms around Oscar’s shoulders. Oscar, in turn, placed his hands on Lando’s back and squeezed him tightly, releasing a shuddering breath into Lando’s neck.

“I'm so sorry,” Lando said, and Oscar heard it right next to his ear. “Even if it wasn’t all me, I shouldn't have said any of that shit. You didn't deserve that from me. I didn’t mean it, I promise.”

Oscar couldn’t help but chuckle, though it came out sort of sob-like.

“You were kind of right, though. Bit naive on my part.”

“But I shouldn’t have said it like that,” Lando insisted, squeezing him tighter as if to emphasize this.

“No, maybe not.”

A minute passed, and Oscar's tears slowly passed with it. He took a slow, deep breath. He was about to say something when Lando suddenly pulled back from the hug, just enough to be kneeling on the sofa and holding Oscar at arm’s length. He looked away, picking a spot somewhere off to the right to stare at, and ran a hand through his already-messed-up curls.

Oscar made an inquisitive noise.

“I'm just—god, I’m so frustrated with everything right now," Lando admitted.

"Yeah,” Oscar agreed. With his head clearer now, he had a certain hunch. In a move that felt fair because Lando had done it to him before (and didn't that make him feel weak at the knees), Oscar brought up a hand to tilt Lando's jaw, forcing him to look Oscar in the eye. “I mean, I get it, Lando. You know I do.”

“I know. Really. It’s just—” Lando’s gaze darted around Oscar’s face, seemingly searching for the right word. “Hard. Not just today. Been hard, lately.”

And there it was—the confirmation of his hunch, the reminder of why he was here. All of Lando's bite and hostility had really been masking this deep frustration. Oscar found himself swamped by a rush of feelings, all fluttery and distraught and proud combined. Mostly, though, he felt determined. Here was his chance to redeem himself, to do what he'd been imagining doing since qualifying ended; the thing he’d been trying to do since getting here, trudging through this wild conversation laughing and crying. All he wanted to do was help Lando.

“Do you want to talk about it?" he offered.

And Lando—

"Can we just, like, not talk about it, actually? Commencerate in silence?"

Oscar was going to shove himself through a brick wall.

Not aggressive, he reminded himself, and grumbled at the thought.

Lando, meanwhile, was looking at him with an emotion that Oscar couldn’t explain; something unexpectedly raw and pleading, something so similar to Oscar's own bone-tired ache that it felt like looking into a mirror. He was struck by a sense of déjà vu, then. Just like in Japan, he was seeing a rare window into Lando's soul, the wobbly, vulnerable pieces that he usually kept tucked away under a sharp wit and charm (or, as Oscar was learning, a prickly exterior). They were the pieces that no one really ever got to see, the pieces that Oscar was seeing right now. That realization swept his breath away a bit.

The moment hung in the balance around the two of them—looking into each other's eyes, Oscar's hand still on Lando's jaw—taut and ready to shatter at a pin's drop.

Oscar could practically feel his mind tearing itself in half. One half screamed that Lando was clearly not okay; he had proven that beyond a shadow of a doubt, had basically admitted it himself. This was the part of Oscar's mind that housed his feelings, which were kicking and struggling against their box, begging Oscar to help Lando through whatever this was.

The other half was spinning through a paradoxical mix of logic and anxiety. Did Lando even want his help? He had essentially offered it already, and look how well that had gone. And he was practically begging Oscar to let it go, so that was probably the polite thing to do, really.

What was the right move, then? Did he push it? Did he not? The two halves of his mind tore at each other, an all-out war, and then—

Oscar raised an eyebrow.

"You mean commiserate?"

It was a total cop-out. It was the wrong decision, Oscar knew it was. It was letting Lando win, and, he belatedly realized, it was letting his anxiety win.

But he was so, so tired.

Unfortunately or fortunately (Oscar couldn't decide which), Lando took the bait, hook, line, and sinker. He scoffed in the way of their usual banter, light and teasing. Oscar's heart only sank as he watched the brief window into Lando's deeper emotions shutter itself up.

"Whatever, you freaking nerd,” Lando said, settling back into a better position on the sofa with a grin. “Can you believe this guy? Breaks into my room and then tries to correct me on my words.”

Oscar laughed, forcing himself to play along.

The feeling in his gut squirmed.

-

It was extremely late that night (the next morning, really), when Oscar ironically couldn't fall asleep and was doomscrolling through his Twitter feed, that he saw the clips from Lando's post-quali interview.

"How are you feeling?" the interviewer was asking, the voice slightly tinny through his phone speakers.

"Pissed off," Lando replied plainly. His face was set in a severe expression that Oscar recognized from earlier in his driver's room.

Oscar frowned into the darkness of his room and tapped on another video.

"I just think of the job I'm meant to do today, which is put in good laps, don't make mistakes. And that's all I did today, so not a good day for me."

The frown deepened.

"The team has done a good job," Lando continued. "I just messed it up."

Oscar stared at his phone long enough that the auto-lock kicked in and turned it off. He sighed. That was a tomorrow (today) problem. For now, he put his phone down and rolled over in bed, the image of Kim berating him in the morning serving as his only motivation to actually get some sleep.

When he did finally drift into hazy unconsciousness, though, it was to bizarre, feverish dreams that he would only remember bits and pieces of. A glimpse of himself sprinting down the Lusail circuit on foot, suffocating in his own sweat. A brief but overwhelming sense of dread. The dregs of a voice, jumbled and staticky, that uttered the same words over and over again until they became a physical monster, dragging Oscar desperately downwards like weights around his ankles in the ocean.

They sounded a lot like I just messed it up.

-

The rest of the weekend was honestly kind of a blur.

Oscar woke up on Saturday to the news that the FIA had literally moved the track overnight. Due to Pirelli concerns, they had adjusted the lines at turns 12 and 13, and were adding a ten-minute practice session to the day to help the drivers "familiarize themselves" with the new boundaries.

Weird.

In other, crazier news:

They qualified one-two for the sprint race.

For the fucking sprint race. Because of course Oscar could only pull a P1 out of his ass on the day it mattered less.

Luck, remember?

The team was thrilled, though. Being the only team this weekend actually challenging Max, being better than Ferrari and Mercedes (and Red Bull, question mark?); it all counted for one hell of a morale boost in the garage. Oscar begrudgingly agreed.

In addition to that positive, it seemed like Lando was back to normal.

Kind of.

He had nearly broken down Oscar's door before sprint qualifying when he burst in to go on a fifteen-minute rant about the dog he had seen by the hotel and Quadrant's upcoming merch drop and how he was really craving stroopwafels and was thinking of giving his good mate Martin Garrix a call, not to catch up or to hang out, but to tell him to mail him a package of stroopwafels because, in his words, stroopwafels are my lifeblood, and I'm bleeding out, Oscar. He had then promptly passed out on Oscar's sofa. This was normal for Lando.

What was not normal for Lando was this kind of freaky duality he had gained overnight. He was behaving normally in public, but behind closed doors, Oscar suspected there was something else going on.

For example: while Lando had been sleeping on his sofa, Oscar had left to go sign some caps. When he came back, he was expecting Lando to be gone, but instead walked in on Lando staring blankly at a wall, completely shut down. He had flinched when Oscar called out to him, then smiled widely and went back to business as usual. After sprint quali, Lando had punched Oscar lightheartedly on the chest, grasped his hand tightly, and said an earnest congratulations. However, Oscar caught him in his garage afterwards, watching the replay of himself binning his SQ3 lap in the last corner with a weird, distant look in his eyes.

Most bizarrely, when sent to retrieve Lando before the sprint race, Oscar found him tucked into some random corner in the hospitality on his phone.

He caught a glimpse of his own face on Lando's phone screen before Lando realized that Oscar was looking and scrambled to turn it off.

Oscar cocked his head, actually recognizing where that image was from.

"Are you watching my sprint pole interview?" he asked.

Lando shoved his phone into his pocket and scowled up at Oscar.

"Not you specifically, mate. Quit being nosy." With only slightly less bristle, Lando added: "It's Sky Sports. Just curious what the commentators had to say."

Oscar shrugged.

"Okay," he said.

Lando refused to look at him.

When Oscar saw him in the garage twenty minutes later, it was like nothing had happened at all.

So that was…

Odd.

And then the sprint race had happened.

After eighteen laps, five retirements, and three whole safety cars (what???), Oscar was officially a sprint race winner, Max Verstappen was officially a three-time world champion, and Lando, in P3, was—well, Oscar was still trying to figure that one out.

During the post-sprint press conference, he was a weird mix of his two personalities, both cracking jokes and sounding kind of in pain while doing it.

“Any chance to go backwards I pretty much took,” Lando said while grinning (grimacing?), perfectly in his is that a joke? tone.

Oscar and Max politely chuckled.

“With myself, I don’t think I’ve ever been so frustrated," he elaborated.

And don't I know that's true, Oscar thought. Maybe better than anyone.

“A big congratulations to Oscar, obviously,” Lando also said. “He deserves it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes and he hasn’t.”

Oscar was caught between worrying and blushing after that one.

But the sword really fell when the interviewer asked:

“What is it about the car that’s been proving so frustrating?”

And Lando answered:

“Nothing, just a lack of talent.”

And then Lando had disappeared.

Like, vanished-off-the-face-of-the-Earth type shit. He wasn’t in the hospitality, he wasn’t in his driver’s room, he wasn’t terrorizing Zak or Andrea (he figured it was worth a look), and worst of all, Jon, his trusted insider informant, wouldn’t spill the beans.

"Sorry, mate," Jon had said. "I think he's not feeling well. He said he wants to be left alone."

So Oscar, again, spent a night (morning) in his hotel room, scrolling on his phone at a time when he was, again, supposed to be sleeping. He was instead lying awake, worrying. Again. And—because the AC unit in his hotel room decided that Qatar was too hot for even it to handle, and shut down—he was sweating. Profusely. Oh, what his life had become.

And then Oscar woke up to the news that Pirelli were a bunch of idiots.

Not really, but he'd been through enough this weekend that he wouldn't have been surprised.

He actually woke up to the news that the FIA had mandated an 18-lap maximum on every new set of tyres, and had gone through the rest of the used tyres to declare how many laps they could be used for. This was all because Pirelli had discovered some microscopic flaw in the tyres where they might, y'know, just explode if they were used for longer than that. Comforting stuff, really.

Oscar knew that the FIA knew that this would cause a near-complete elimination of pit stop strategies. Everyone would be boxing at least three times, probably at pretty similar times. Oscar didn't know if the FIA had thought about what this would change for the drivers; namely, the fact that tyre conservation was a dead concept. When it was literally impossible to extend a stint, every driver would do qualifying lap after qualifying lap after qualifying lap, because as long as they had the battery for it, there was no reason not to.

Except for maybe the heat.

Oscar gasped for breath, sitting on Max's P1 car-park-platform-thing, stuck between drinking his water and pouring it over his head. He opted to do both. The water mixed with his sweat, dripping in rivulets down his face and neck. Every time he moved, he discovered a new way that his muscles could hurt, strained to hell and back over the 57 flat-out laps. His legs were shaking. His hands, too. The beginnings of a headache, both sharp and cotton-filled, tapped at his skull.

Yeah, definitely the heat.

You did it again! a part of Oscar's mind pushed through the heat and headache to yell, jubilant and relieved and far more excited than his body could handle. You're on the podium!

I guess I am, Oscar reflected. That was what finishing P2 tended to mean. He closed his eyes for a second, just relishing in it, knowing that he didn't need to be on the podium, and by all means maybe shouldn't have been (thank you, Mercedes crash), but he had done it anyway. He had done it.

A small, prickly voice piped up in the back of his head, murmuring about Max Verstappen, about 4.8 second gaps, about the top step. It tried to plant its seeds of doubt, ready to reap the harvest of anything Oscar would give it.

Go fuck yourself, Oscar said to it instead, and the voice hissed like a vampire exposed to the sunlight. What's done is done, this was my best for today, and I'm proud of it.

He opened his eyes, immediately finding the P2 board he had pulled up in front of. It stared back at him.

I’m proud of myself.

And like the sweaty, talented, anxious, proud mess that he was, Oscar smiled.

After that, Oscar couldn't help but kind of just ride the current. The floaty happiness and floaty headache and the flow of his team around him took his body where he needed to go. He floated from the interview to the podium to the media pen to the team photo ("We will postpone our meeting until Wednesday at the MTC," Andrea announced to a chorus of cheers. "It is late and we are tired. Go rest tonight. If I find out there were parties, I will not be mad, but I will be disappointed." Andrea gave the whole team a fatherly sort of stern look, and there was a unanimous decision that the podium celebrations would not be happening that night).

Oscar floated all the way back to the hotel. He attempted to float himself directly into bed, too, but immediately discovered that his AC had not fixed itself since last night. He did try to ignore it at first, he really did. But he then spent maybe forty-five minutes tossing and turning and throwing the blanket off the bed and then throwing the sheets off the bed and flipping his pillow over probably eight times and still sweating through it all. Oscar groaned and pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes. All he wanted was to sleep, damnit.

Could he call the front desk? No, it was literally too late for that, given how late in the night (morning) it was. Could he get Kim to give him his cooling vest? No, that was impractical, and probably packed up somewhere at the track already. Could he—

Oscar sat up, struck by an idea. He fumbled for his phone on the nightstand, was momentarily blinded when he turned it on, and quickly navigated to his contacts.

Hey mate are you awake

no

this s landos ghost

😐

your no fun osc

Does the AC in your room work?

ye

why

I'm coming over

See you in a minute

oscr what

why

oscar?

ugh

As soon as Lando said yes, Oscar was out of bed and pulling a t-shirt on. He pocketed no more than his phone and his room card, shoved his trainers on with no socks, and made a beeline out of his room, bidding it good riddance as he walked away.

When he knocked on Lando's door, Lando was there to greet him right away. Oscar did not wait for Lando to greet him, and instead pushed past him to flop down face-first onto the floor. He closed his eyes and soaked in the cool air that flowed over his back for the first time in what felt like years.

"Wow." Oscar heard Lando close the door, and then the padding of his footsteps as he moved to stand next to Oscar's left hip. When he spoke again, his voice came from somewhere above Oscar's head. "Cheers, mate. What's this all about, then? This is the kind of behavior I expect from me, not you."

"AC in my room doesn't work," Oscar mumbled into the carpet. "S'like a sauna. Was gonna sweat myself to death."

Lando laughed. Oscar felt a foot prodding at his side.

"Jesus, Oscar. This weekend's taken the Australian right out of you, hasn't it?"

"Shut up."

Lando laughed some more. Oscar couldn't bring himself to care, more caught up in the bliss of not actively sweating.

This was why he groaned in protest when Lando's hands reached under his shoulders, trying to drag him up and off of the floor.

"Alright, mate, I'm not letting you sleep on my floor. You're gonna fuck up your neck and back, and then the team are probably gonna sue me for like, property damage, or something."

Oscar groaned again, being a dead weight.

"Oscar," Lando said, his tone a warning. Oscar didn't move. Some part of his brain that hadn't been fried off in the race recognized that he was being childish, but didn't he kind of deserve a break after this hell of a weekend? Plus, the floor was surprisingly comfortable.

"Fine," Lando sighed, and his hands went away. Oscar had just enough time to think good before his hands came back, stronger, flipping Oscar over onto his back. Oscar's eyes flew open, and his vision was filled with Lando, wearing a big t-shirt and joggers, standing over him with a shit-eating grin.

"Hey—" he tried to protest, but Lando reached down again, shoving one arm under Oscar's knees and the other under his back. Oscar realized what was happening a split second before Lando stood up, taking Oscar with him. Oscar did not shriek, thank you very much, when Lando picked him up. It was more of a noise of surprise as he automatically flung his arms around Lando's neck to hold himself steady.

And then any part of Oscar's brain that was still working shut down. Straight up Error 404: Oscar not found. Lando could carry him. Why could Lando carry him? He knew that Lando was strong—of course he was, he was a professional athlete—but Oscar was not small.

Lando shifted him slightly in his arms, glancing over at the bed. And, right. The bed. Oscar's stomach made an impressive show of doing backflips, struck by a rush of images of Lando carrying him to bed for a different reason, and Oscar genuinely forgot how to breathe. He tried to think about something, anything else, and got caught on the searing contact points of Lando's hands, gripping his thigh and under his armpit. Then he had to immediately backtrack on that, because oh, god, why were Lando's hands so big? And why was he so affected by that?

Oscar was a very weak man, indeed.

Back in reality, though, the whole thing didn't actually last that long. Lando walked the few steps over to the edge of his bed, and leaned over to place Oscar down gently. Then Lando's hands retreated, and Oscar was left with only static and a constant stream of holyshitholyshitholyshitholyshitholyshit running through his head.

"Holy shit," he stuttered out, not really wanting to look up at Lando but unable to look anywhere else. God, his face must be on fire. "Was that necessary?"

Lando shrugged, but his shit-eating grin stayed.

"You didn't move. I had to make you."

And then, as if he hadn't absolutely destroyed Oscar already, Lando winked.

"I'm going to sleep," Oscar loudly announced, over the sound of Lando cackling. He tore his shoes off and chucked them at a wall somewhere. "Good night." He didn't bother getting under the covers, just laid down on his stomach and shoved his face into a pillow. It was hard to hear over how fast his heart was pounding, but Oscar swore that, from behind him, he heard a fond sound like aw.

Eventually, footsteps sounded leading away from the bed. He listened to Lando walk around the room for a minute before the light leaking through his eyelids disappeared, and a second later, the bed dipped down next to him. He felt Lando tugging at the blankets to actually get underneath them. Oscar was just immensely grateful that he didn't try to make any more conversation—he wasn't sure his heart could take it.

Lando rustled around for another moment, getting comfortable, then fell still. Oscar exhaled into his pillow. His body beginning to exit full-blown panic mode and his heart rate slowing down, the floaty feeling from before was creeping back in, and the pull of sleep threatened his consciousness. Finally, this great, hot, godawful weekend was over, and Oscar wasn't sweating his ass off, and his comfort person was next to him, and he could finally, finally sleep.

But of course nothing could ever be that easy. From an outside perspective, all of the loose ends in Qatar really had been tied up. The media had gotten their fill of drama. McLaren had gotten their double podium. Oscar had gotten his little personal glory. It all looked perfect.

Except, to Oscar, something stuck out like a sore thumb. It was a little itch that wouldn't go away, niggling and squirming in the back of his mind so he couldn't forget it was there, not letting him find internal peace until he looked at it in the eyes. Oscar groaned internally. Until he addressed this, there would be no sleep for him tonight.

"Lando?" Oscar said, daring to lift his face from his pillow. His eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he managed to only be a little bit startled that Lando was already looking at him. He was laying on his side, curls splayed out on his own pillow in a way that looked distractingly ethereal.

"Yeah?" came the response.

Oscar swallowed the thoughts that told him this was a bad idea. He had chickened out once, he couldn't do it again.

"I have kind of a weird question." He paused. "You don't have to answer it if you don't want to."

"What is it?"

Oscar's throat felt dry.

"I just— are you alright?"

Lando's brows pinched together, so tight and confused that it made Oscar's heart hurt to be asking this, but he needed to know.

"Huh? Yeah, why wouldn't I be?" Lando responded, shifting his limbs around in a way that seemed fidgety. Oscar pushed on.

"Don't take this the wrong way, but you're just more... chipper than I thought you'd be, after the whole weekend, I guess."

Lando blinked at him, looking no less confused.

"Well, I'm P3," he said. "Three podiums in a row, second double podium in a row for the team. It's a great points haul. Why wouldn't I be chipper?"

See, that sounded to Oscar like a PR answer. He tried to ask his next question carefully.

"I don't know." Oscar brought an arm up to his pillow, resting his head on his forearm. "You just— you said on Friday that you were having a hard time. You were frustrated. Have been frustrated, lately. Has that all gone away, now?"

Lando visibly tensed under the covers.

"Ah, you can forget I said that." He gave a weird, awkward laugh, and averted his eyes. "Just exaggerating. Happens when I'm in a bad mood."

"Are you sure?" Oscar pressed. "You seemed—"

"Yes, Oscar, I’m sure." Lando interrupted. "You can drop it now."

Lando's tone was the sort that didn't invite questions, firm and hovering just on the edge of cold. Oscar dropped it. He tried not to feel like he had chickened out again.

The room went quiet, only broken by the static hum of the AC, the soft drag of two people breathing, and Oscar's own loud thoughts.

Did you mean it when you said you lacked talent? Oscar desperately wanted to ask. That all you do is make mistakes? Could you look me in the eyes and tell me you actually believe that? A wave of frustration, sleepy yet undeniable, rocked Oscar's mind.

Could you be vulnerable with me? Could I see the pieces of your soul and hold them gently, help you feel them and sort them and puzzle them back together?

Could I be your person, the way that you're mine?

But he didn't ask any of that. Instead, he dug his face back into the pillow, closed his eyes, and tried to sleep.

It almost worked, too, until—

"I'm cold."

Oscar glanced up from his pillow again, taking in Lando bundling himself further up under the covers.

"What? Aren't you wearing joggers? Literally how are you cold, right now?"

"I dunno." The vague shape of Lando's shoulders moved in a shrug. "I just am."

Oscar let his gaze flicker over Lando's face, half-buried in a blanket, searching for... something. He wasn't really sure what.

"I think I'll never understand you, Lando," he said, and it came out a little too quiet, a little too honest. Luckily, Lando seemed to take it as a joke.

"Good. My dark and mysterious aura is working, then."

Oscar couldn't hold back a snort.

"I'm still cold, y'know," Lando said, after a second of silence.

"I'm not turning the AC down, mate. That's literally why I'm in your room."

"I'm not asking you to."

"Then just get another blanket, or something," Oscar grumbled. He really did just want to sleep now.

"That's not what I— oh, just come here, you muppet."

Oscar watched, momentarily confused, as Lando scooted himself toward the edge of the bed, then lifted the blankets with one arm, creating an opening next to him. Then it clicked. Oscar didn't even really think about it before he was getting under the covers and filling that opening.

Lando immediately pressed himself to Oscar's side, throwing an arm over Oscar's back and tugging him in close.

"This okay?" Lando whispered, right into Oscar's shoulder. He fought back a shiver and considered the question.

As an overall, the weekend had been… interesting. There was a lot of worry coming out of it, for sure. He was worried about Logan, who he’d seen had retired from the race out of sheer illness. He was worried about Alex, and Esteban, and Lance, and all of the other drivers Lando had reported seeing passed out in the medical center. He was worried about how the FIA looked like they’d be sweeping their negligence about this race under the rug, as per usual.

And, despite being shut down twice, he was worried about Lando. Really worried. But maybe that was a problem for another time.

Right here, right now—

"Yeah. Yeah, this is good."

Chapter Text

Something had changed fundamentally in Qatar.

It was hard to say exactly what it was, just slipping out of the realm of definition, but it felt like a weight shifting balance, like scales that had tipped one way were tipping the other.

And it was there. A flaw in an artistic masterpiece that you noticed once and couldn't un-see. A bruise that you forgot about until you bumped into something the wrong way. A single uneven thread woven through the world—innocuous at first, but the more you tugged on it, the more it unraveled, and the more the world fell apart around you.

Oscar thought that maybe he could ignore it. After all, it wasn't like he spent every day with Lando. As much as he sometimes wished otherwise, they were only coworkers, and they each had their own separate business.

But it was there. The thread had been pulled, Oscar knew it had. He knew Lando knew it too, even if he never acknowledged it, and it was growing into something that neither of them could ignore.

Oscar could only sit and wonder when things would unravel completely.

-

In Austin, Oscar had a truth laid out bare for him. Not the whole truth, definitely—if only it had been that easy. But certainly a part of it.

On the racing side of things, the weekend could wholly be summed up as ehhhhh. They were nowhere near the back of the field—thank god, Oscar wasn't sure he could take that again—but they had apparently hit American soil and taken a big step in the wrong direction. Quali on Friday had been just good enough, and the team had sort of laughed it off. Then, both sprint quali and the sprint had been downright mediocre, and everyone sobered up very fast.

"Kinda fucked weekend, innit?" Lando said, when they were flopped in his driver's room together after the sprint race. Upon getting there, he had immediately sprawled out on the sofa with one leg on the cushions and the other hanging off, lounging in the way that your drunk uncle might. Oscar had no clue how that was comfortable in any way, but he'd learned not to question it.

From his spot on the floor, leaning against the wall, Oscar scoffed good-naturedly. "Says the guy starting second tomorrow."

"Ah, ah, that hardly counts." Lando waved around a flippant hand. "Fluke performance. Just happened to outperform the car."

Oscar hummed and raised an eyebrow in Lando's direction. "Feeling humble today, are we?"

Lando responded with a cheeky grin. "You know I always am, Oscar." And then, to top it off, he winked.

Oscar laughed and rolled his eyes, shoving aside the fluttering in his stomach that appeared with the wink. "Sure, mate," he said. "Whatever helps you sleep at night."

The moment settled, and an extended silence fell upon them. Oscar found he didn't mind it at all. It had been a rough couple of days, and sitting in Lando's company, talking or not, was a nice recovery exercise. Y'know, comfort person, and all that. So Oscar tipped his head back against the wall and closed his eyes, soaking in the tranquility.

A minute later, Lando spoke again.

"P10's not bad though, y'know?" There was a sudden influx of crinkly noises, and Oscar cracked his eyes open to see Lando shuffling around on the sofa, turning to lie on his stomach with his arms and head hooked over the armrest. It brought his face much closer to Oscar's, so he could give him a meaningful look head-on. "Good to move forward," Lando said. "Good to fight for points."

Oscar sighed, crossing his arms over his chest, and his gaze moved down to the floor. "Yeah," he agreed. "It just sucks a bit to know it won't get better from here."

Because the problem with this race was that their car was just not good here. The problem with the upcoming races was that their car wasn't good at any circuit with a lot of slow or medium speed corners—which, big whoop, most of the remaining tracks had exactly that. In their post-sprint meeting, the team hadn't been solemn, but they'd been realistic. It was too close to the end of the season to bring major upgrades, so they would stay around the level they were at right now. AKA: not great.

"We will get better," Lando said, breaking Oscar out of his thoughts, and the statement was so determined, so certain, that he had to look back up at Lando. What he found was a firm edge to his eyes, just as surefire as his words. "Maybe not now," he admitted. "But next season will be better. Before we know it, weekends like this will be the exception, and we'll be on the podium together every single race."

Oscar snorted. "Wouldn't that be a sight?"

Lando just wiggled his eyebrows conspiratorially at him. "Watch out, Red Bull, is all I'm saying. We'll be running laps around them soon."

Oscar huffed out a laugh, folding forward to rest his cheek on his knee. "That would be nice," he said with a smile, letting his imagination run away with what that would actually be like, having such a great season next year. More upgrades, meant more podiums, meant more celebrations. Topping the timing sheets, blazing at the front of the field, exploring a whole new world of gratification. In his wildest dreams, Oscar thought, he could even hope for a win.

Then, another thought occurred to him, and the excitement he'd built up dimmed down to a kind of melancholy. His gaze flickered up to address Lando directly. "I've been realizing how weird this is for me, actually," he admitted.

Lando, still hooked over the armrest, folded his arms under his chin and gave Oscar a questioning look. "What do you mean?"

"It's just— I haven't been in a racing series for more than one year since..." Oscar wracked his brain, trying to remember. "Shit, 2018? And that was only two years in Formula Renault. I've spent so long thinking about 'next year' as something I'm fighting against. To think about it now and know that I'm spending next year in the same place as this year, and then the years after that, too—" Oscar glanced down and shook his head. "That kind of stability is crazy." He then looked back up at Lando, who seemed to be intently paying attention, nodding his head along with Oscar's words.

"So this whole improve-where-you-are thing is something I'm not used to," Oscar added hesitantly, feeling like he was admitting to a weakness of sorts. "It makes sense, though. Conceptually, I mean, as all part of the process. We suffer through this now, do the best we can with what we have, and it all funnels into improving next year." He sighed. "It kinda sucks, but I suppose I can make peace with that."

Oscar let his gaze fall somewhere across the room, intending to have a moment to reflect on all of his introspection. After all, it was rare that he even thought about some of this stuff, let alone talked about it to someone. However, his dramatic movie-scene moment was immediately interrupted.

"Wow, Oscar!" Lando cheered. Oscar saw the glint in his eye that told him he was about to be made fun of, and it didn't help either that Lando reached over from the sofa to whack him on the arm. "Look at you, Mr. frickin' Emotional Maturity over here. When did you go and get all grown up on me?"

Even while rolling his eyes, Oscar couldn't help but to smile. "Yeah, yeah. Shut up, mate."

Lando grinned back at him, all heart-shaped and cheeky, and Oscar felt himself fall that little bit harder.

"But seriously, Oscar," Lando said, adopting a more earnest tone. He caught Oscar's eye and the look he gave him was quietly kind, struck through with something else Oscar couldn't quite define. "Thanks for telling me that stuff, yeah? I know you'll do great next season, and I'll still be here to help too. Plus, y'know, you're talking about stability—I'm Mr. Hasn't-Kept-a-Teammate-for More-Than-Two-Years." Lando shrugged, an awkward motion with his positioning on the armrest, and glanced away then back with a small grin. "Might be nice to have you around for a while."

Oscar took a second to process the words. In a rare moment of intentional delusion, he let his imagination run free again, and what it came back with were images of himself and Lando. But not just any images. It was them, four, six, ten years down the line, both still in F1, both still in McLaren, standing side-by-side for the rest of their careers. It didn't even have to be at McLaren, Oscar decided. Just—the two of them. Together.

Were these images realistic, at all? Probably, almost certainly not. But did they kind of make Oscar want to giggle and kick his feet like a teenage girl?

No comment.

"Thank you," Oscar said, clearing his throat and forcing himself back into the present. "That means a lot coming from you." He looked back up at Lando, who seemed to be stuck between preening at the thanks or smiling shyly. Oscar grinned back—it was rare that Lando was the flustered one, for once. Why not stoke the fire a little bit? "Always nice to have a vote of confidence from a great driver. I mean, at this point, you basically are McLaren, right? It's like the praise is coming from the team itself."

He meant it as nothing but a compliment. Because, really, it was incredible how Lando had spent all these years building up the team around himself, how he was so deeply ingrained here that his influence could be seen from the merch to the the media style to the way they ran meetings, all in one giant interconnected web. Oscar wasn't sure he could describe exactly how being part of that web now made him feel, but one word did come to mind as an attempt: proud.

And if he wasn't so attuned to Lando, he might have missed it. But Oscar was. He always was, and it meant that he caught immediately how Lando's warm expression wavered, closing off just a little bit.

"Yeah," Lando said, quietly, and then nothing else.

Uh oh.

Oscar's brain threw him automatically into clean-up mode; he'd said something wrong, so how could he backtrack, how could he clarify, and make sure to fix whatever the miscommunication had been? But that was the problem. Oscar didn't know what he'd said wrong.

The silence stretched on long enough that it was starting to get awkward. Before Oscar could think of what to say, however, Lando forced out a weird, kind of dry laugh.

"Yeah, I guess," he said. "Um, we should get going. Early morning, you know how it is." He pulled himself up from the sofa, a surprisingly quick move for how much wiggling around he'd done to get in that position. He took a step in the direction of his bag, and Oscar panicked—wait, I need to fix this. But then, Lando paused, his posture tight like he was thinking about something. After a second, he turned back towards Oscar. His expression was confusing, something Oscar couldn't get a clear read on, but there was something, a hint of something there that made him think—

"One-two tomorrow?" Lando asked.

And, yeah, sure, what the actual fuck?

"What?" Oscar said, eloquently.

"One-two tomorrow?" Lando repeated. He cocked his head, maintaining such a picture-perfect, neutral manner that Oscar kind of wanted to shake him.

"Um." Oscar shrugged, unsure of what the correct response here was. They would not be pulling a one-two out of a two-ten tomorrow, he knew that for sure. But Lando looked so expectant, so waiting, so willing, so... "Sure, why not?"

"Exactly!" Lando shouted, and he whipped up a finger to point at Oscar. For a split second, Oscar worried that he'd said something wrong again, that he was being accused of something—but then he saw that Lando was grinning widely, the teasing gleam back in his eye, and that was the point where he started getting dizzy from sheer emotional whiplash. "That's my boy!"

Ah, jeez, Oscar thought, feeling somewhat drunk, somehow. If only I were his boy.

And as Lando grabbed his bag and left, yelling about getting his beauty sleep, Oscar sat there on the ground and contemplated all of his life choices. His cheeks burned.

Then, it was Sunday afternoon, and the weekend, to no one's surprise, went from bad to worse. They'd lined up on the grid, the lights had gone out, and Oscar had jumped Checo on the start. He'd been on the rear wing of both Alpines next, first behind them, then going side-by-side with them, then edging around the outside of turn 4 to get the move done, and he'd been so close, and then—

Esteban had hit Oscar.

The stewards would declare it a racing incident.

In all fairness, of course, it definitely was, but even Oscar wasn't immune to the ole’ blame game sometimes, so he was a little bit pissed. And of course it had to be an Alpine that hit him. This was what Alpine did best, after all—taking an already bad situation and making it about ten times worse, just to rub salt in the wound.

No, Oscar was not still holding a grudge.

And it didn't even really matter, at the end of the day. Both he and Esteban had limped back to the pits a few laps after the incident, and both of their races were over as fast as that.

Thus: an ehhhhh weekend.

The next hour and a half had been kind of excruciating, as these things tended to be—you got all stretched out and psyched up and adrenaline-high for fifty-six laps of driving an F1 car, and then you were forced to watch everyone else do it while you were confined to a garage, so close yet so far away. There was a specific emotion to it: a combination of the heavy drag of disappointment, the twitchy, unfulfilled hum of energy in your bones, the bitter sting of jealousy. It wouldn’t feel good for anyone, but for a race car driver, it was just about unbearable.

Then, after that, there were the interviews to do, and then there was the team photo to take (great for Lando and his podium, largely irrelevant for Oscar), and then there was their post-race social media debrief to film. Then there was their actual debrief, which could be summed up as Oscar trying not to break character and slam his head against the table every time the engineers brought up another fiddly point on the car that they couldn't fix yet. He had smiled and nodded and politely contributed through all of it, but when it was over, he excused himself quickly, practically ran back to his driver's room, threw all of his stuff into a backpack, and exited the venue faster than their car had been on track.

So Oscar may have been rushing to leave a little bit. Sue him.

And maybe the world had heard his thoughts, and decided that it actually did want to sue him, because he got all the way back to the hotel before he realized that he had left his wallet at the track.

Thus was the whole story, in excruciating detail, of how Oscar had found himself here: back at the track at a time when most everybody but the cleanup crews had left, feeling like a home invader in his own damn hospitality, all to get his wallet back after losing it to a situation that was entirely his fault. A majority of the lights were off. Oscar was navigating with his phone flashlight. As far as he knew, there was no one else in the building. This wasn't literally illegal, but oh boy did it feel like he was committing crimes.

He did manage to locate and acquire his wallet, though, which meant he was halfway there. All he had to do now was get back to the hotel. Presently, on the return walk through the hospitality, he was killing some time by having an internal debate over what had been worse about his day: the DNF, or this bullshit. Results on that thought experiment were coming up inconclusive, but the reminder that this journey was cutting into his sleep time made the choice one little bit clearer.

Lost in thought, Oscar turned a corner, and walked directly into someone else.

"Oh, shit," the person cursed as they both stumbled from the impact. Oscar's immediate thought was I know that voice. He recovered before the other person did, and used that second to brandish his flashlight at them, and, indeed, he did know that voice—

"Jesus, Lando. Why are you creeping around in the dark?"

Lando, who had a hand against the wall to steady himself, looked exactly as Oscar had last seen him before he left the track. That was to say: somehow both jittery and tired, and, despite the dry Texas heat, swamped in a Quadrant hoodie that was about two sizes too big for him. His hair was fluffy from air-drying after a shower, which Oscar had spent a lot of debrief staring at instead of listening to his engineers, but that was neither here nor there.

Lando was also making some sort of weird face at him. It was scrunched, and halfway pained, but completely and utterly confused, like he was shocked beyond his mind to see Oscar here. Oscar thought that was a little bit unfair—he was pretty shocked to see Lando here, too.

A second later, he realized that he was shining his flashlight directly into Lando's eyes.

Whoops.

"Ah, shit, sorry," Oscar said, and quickly turned his phone towards the wall. Lando shook his head, blinking, as if clearing away the light from his eyes, and when he looked back up, the shocked wince had transformed into something overtly judgmental.

"Why are you creeping around in the dark, mate?" Lando retorted.

Oscar sighed—he had walked right into that one. With his non-flashlight hand, he pulled his wallet out of his pocket, holding it up into the light.

"I'm not creeping," he said. "I forgot this here."

"Really?" Now Lando's judgment took on an incredulous eyebrow-raise. He adapted his hand-on-the-wall pose to lean casually into the wall, with his other hand placed on his hip. He also gave Oscar a full up-and-down look, which Oscar pretended didn't make his heart beat faster. "The great Oscar Piastri, defeated by a wallet?"

"Yes, really," Oscar huffed as he put his wallet back. "It’s not that unbelievable." Still, Lando's eyebrows were getting higher by the second, and he looked about half a second from laughing at Oscar, so he deflected the ball back into Lando's court. "And what’s your excuse, then?"

There was a beat of silence. Oscar swore that Lando's expression faltered for a second, the flashlight glow catching the glint of his eyes flickering around nervously, like Oscar had hit a target. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but then just dragged his tongue over the corner of his lips before landing on a mischievous smirk like nothing had happened.

"Why do I need an excuse?" Lando challenged. He crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall, the picture of a 'chillaxed' cool dude. "Can’t I just be here, seeing the evening sights? Beautiful paddock, innit?"

Oscar shrugged. "Suppose so. I mean, technically, track curfew is coming up, so…"

Lando went rigid. In an instant, his expression shattered, eyes blown wide open, and he pushed himself off the wall to stand straight. Oscar trailed off, frowning at the sheer degree of panic his posture exuded.

"Fuck, what?" Lando mumbled, maybe to Oscar, maybe to himself. Whichever it was, he began frantically digging through a pocket in his jeans to pull out his phone.

"Uh, yeah, mate, it’s twenty minutes till." Oscar watched as Lando pressed his phone's power button and the time was displayed on the screen. Oscar continued, wary: "I’m lucky I realized my wallet was here with enough time to come get it."

"Wow. That's, um, that’s great, mate," Lando stammered, shoving his phone back into his pocket. "Glad you got that, really.” He rubbed his hands together, visibly shifting his weight from one foot to the other, then jabbed both thumbs back towards the hallway he had come from. "I gotta go."

Oscar reacted before he could think. All he knew was that his instincts were screaming at him, a tangled chorus of don’t let him leave! and then he was lurching forward to grab Lando's arm, holding him in place by the elbow. "Lando, wait," he said.

And Lando stopped in his tracks.

As per usual, Oscar had his brief depraved moment of feeling like a Victorian man seeing an ankle for the first time. It really was a wonder how every physical contact with Lando, even through the fabric of clothing, even after they'd come so far together, still burned under his fingertips like it was the first time. But that was an Oscar problem, and one that wasn't important right now.

He used the opportunity instead to plaster on a little grin and nod in the direction of an exit sign. "Do you need a ride back to the hotel? I've called an Uber, and I assume you're leaving soon." Aiming for joking, he added, "I hope you're leaving soon."

But Lando just stared at him. He was frozen in place, his wide eyes darting from Oscar's face, to Oscar's hand on his arm, then back, never settling for long. There was a tension in his muscles that Oscar could feel, a tight pressure under his fingers that spoke to something waiting—like Lando was a tightly coiled spring, or a wound up toy, packed full of potential energy. Like he was anticipating something, ready to make a sudden move if needed. Almost like he was waiting to flee.

Suddenly, vividly, Oscar was struck with an impression: a forest, a hunter, and the frightened prey animal it had caught in its trap.

But, that didn't seem right. Really, it didn’t. This was just their hospitality, and Oscar wasn't a hunter, he was just Oscar, and Lando wasn't prey, he was just Lando. So why then did Lando look so... scared? Or maybe, so... caught?

Carefully, Oscar loosened the grip he had on Lando's arm, allowing him space to pull away if he wanted.

Lando immediately took it, extracting himself from Oscar's grasp with a stumbling step back, rubbing his arm through his hoodie like he'd felt a burn there too, but not in a good way. He cleared his throat into his fist and looked anywhere but at Oscar.

"Uh, sure," he said. "A ride. Yeah. That's, um. Good, mate. Thanks. I just gotta grab some stuff first, if you don't mind."

"No, that's fine," Oscar replied dumbly.
And as soon as he said it, Lando turned on his heel and took off in a brisk speed-walk down the hallway. For a moment, Oscar just stood there and watched him go.

This isn't weird at all, he told himself. I'm sure there's a perfectly normal reason for all of this. A flash of a panicked expression, the pinch of furrowed brows, the restlessness of a fidgety posture. A reason that's really freaking him out. A reason he isn't telling me.

Oscar sighed. Then, he set off in a little jog down the hallway to catch up.

When he fell into step beside Lando, Lando jumped and whipped his head towards Oscar, appearing no less bewildered to see him than the first time. He almost looked alarmed. Oscar couldn't fathom what was possibly so alarming about his presence.

"Is there something wrong?" he pressed. Lando flinched, then seemed to school his face back into neutrality, looking away again.

"You don't really... need to come with me, y'know," he mumbled.

"Well, I'm not standing around in the dark waiting for you."

"You scared of the dark, Piastri?" Lando shot back, though it lacked any bite, quiet like an afterthought.

Oscar might have said something in response to that—maybe a sarcastic remark about that one time Lando had shrieked when the lights in their motorhome had cut out—but Lando was suddenly not walking anymore, and Oscar had to focus on not tripping over thin air. Once he was absolutely certain he wasn't going to fall on his face, because that would be really embarrassing as an F1 driver, he looked up, and was greeted by an inconspicuous door that said "STAFF ONLY" on it. Oscar wrinkled his nose and glanced at Lando beside him.

"Your stuff's in here?" he asked.

He watched Lando stare at the door for a moment, yet again waiting for him to make the joke. To brush it off, whether it was the truth or not, so they could laugh about this later. Because that was what Oscar was familiar with. That was what Lando did.

"Just— don't ask," Lando sighed. He pushed forward and turned the door handle, slipping into the room without holding the door open for Oscar at all.

Oscar felt a tug in his gut, another, sour, intrinsic feeling of something isn't right here. This was not how Lando had been acting earlier—in fact, he'd been outwardly friendly the entire weekend, inviting himself into Oscar's space like usual and giving Oscar squeezes on the shoulder or arm as if to say I'm sorry for Oscar's less-than-ideal results. Even after the race, after his podium, he'd sought Oscar out to give him a hug and assure him that he deserved to be up in the points too.

Oscar had noticed that the other man looked tired during their debrief, but that was par for the course in their profession. Beyond that, he had seemed normal.

Clearly, that was turning out to be false.

But, whatever it was, there was really nothing to do about right now. So Oscar took a deep breath, and then followed Lando into the room.

He was greeted by a wall of blackness. If it had been dark in the hallway, at least the hallway had the decency of moonlight streaming in through the windows. Here in this... cleaning closet? Oscar held up his phone flashlight and panned it across the room. No, those were signposts over there, not brooms, plus a bunch of miscellaneous boxes and equipment. Storage room, he landed on. Here in this storage room, there were no windows and no moonlight, so wherever the flashlight didn't reach, there was only a shadowy void.

From one particular corner of the room came the sounds of rustling. The room wasn't big, by any means, but there were enough stacks of things packed closely together that it became kind of jungle- or maze-like—you couldn't really see through it. So all Oscar saw of where Lando had disappeared was the flickering of another light in motion, creating dancing reflections across bits of metal and shiny plastic.

Oscar sighed. And here he'd thought he'd given up his criminal activities for the night.

Alas, he dived into the storage jungle. It required a great deal of ducking and weaving around racks of folding chairs and unidentifiable wheeled carts, which he did, following the sound of Lando rustling until he reached a barrier of plastic bins about waist-height. The flickering light emanated from behind them, so Oscar leaned over the bins, peering down into the space they hid.

Despite himself, despite the situation, he immediately huffed out a laugh.

"Jeez. Should I start safeguarding my computers against you, mate?"

Lando, who had brought out his own phone flashlight, was crouched behind the bins, grabbing items and throwing them into a backpack. He paused to look up at Oscar when he spoke, pulling a face that was confused-yet-glowering.

"What?" Lando said, clearly not seeing why this was so funny.

Oscar stifled another laugh. Tucked into a clearing of sorts in between storage bins, more chairs, and other nonsense (was that a stack of cowboy hats? Well, it was Austin, Oscar supposed), Lando had created something of a hidey-hole. A rumpled blanket covered the floor space, a couple of pillows that looked suspiciously like they were stolen from the hospitality sofas were arranged as an obvious spot to sit, and protein bar wrappers and energy drink cans were littered around intermittently. Most notably, though, were the two separate laptops open on the ground and the dozens of sheets of paper surrounding them.

"I mean, what's with all this, then?" Oscar said, using one hand to gesture generally at everything. "Clearly, you're taking up hacking as a new hobby."

"'M not hacking," Lando mumbled. He went back to the cleanup he was doing, picking up some of his wrappers. "Don't even know how to do that."

And maybe it was a little mean, but Oscar coped with humour, and this whole situation was weird as shit. So, he nodded his head in mock approval.

"Right. Got to keep it secret, of course." Then, an idea sprang up in his mind. "Ah, I see," he teased. "This is why you're here so late. Can't tip Zak off to your nefarious activities, can you?"

"I'm not doing anything bad!" Lando snapped, glaring up at Oscar. He slammed one of the laptops closed for emphasis, shoving it into his bag with more force than the poor laptop deserved.

All traces of teasing were gone from Oscar's voice when he raised his hands in surrender. Instead, he spoke slowly, carefully, thinking frightened animal again:

"Hey. Never said you were."

Lando just scowled at him in response, then turned away and back to his stuff.

Another twinge in Oscar's gut.

He stayed quiet to let Lando work for another minute or so, watching him tap away at the other laptop (saving his files, maybe?). With nothing better to do, he checked his watch, and was immediately confronted with the fact that, yikes, they were running out of time. Oscar contemplated it for about two seconds before deciding that he wasn't willing to get hit with a penalty for breaking track curfew for a reason as stupid as this. What he was willing to do was put his phone down, hop over the storage bins, and start gathering all of the scattered papers together in a pile.

"What are you doing?" Lando hissed from where he was hunched over the laptop.

"What does it look like?" Oscar retorted. "I'm helping you."

"I don't need help."

"Tell that to the clock, mate." Oscar tapped all of the papers he had grabbed on the nearest flat surface—a bin—shuffling them into a neater pile. "Where do you want these..?" Realizing he had no idea what these papers even were, he looked at the one on the top of the pile. He blinked in confusion. Sliding that one off the top, he looked at the next one, and then the next. "These are all—"

Lando leapt up and yanked the papers from his hands before he could finish.

Timing sheets. Race data. Braking points and corner speeds.

Come to think of it, although he hadn't seen much of the laptop screens from afar, those lines on one of them might've been their spreadsheet program displaying data. That other screen might've been the rudimentary sim program their engineers used for broad-strokes strategy. It was mostly a party trick for paddock guests, since they had actual computers for this sort of thing that were eons more complicated, but it was still accurate to a degree. Plus, it had a very distinctive logo that was always visible in the corner of the screen, and oh, shit, that definitely was the sim program.

Oscar stayed frozen, still crouched next to the bins, running through this new information like he himself was a supercomputer. He processed and processed and processed, until everything sort of slotted together, puzzle pieces falling into place.

"Lando," he said, slowly, and from where he was faced away from Oscar, cramming the data sheets into his bag, Lando's shoulders visibly tensed up. "Have you been here since the race ended... crunching race data?"

"No." Lando spat out the word like it tasted bitter.

"I mean. It kinda looks like you have, mate." Oscar waited, but Lando didn't respond, so he asked, "Was that the sim program on your laptop?"

Oscar took the continued silence as confirmation.

"Didn't you run through all of this with Will and the engineers already? I mean, it can't be that— why are you— couldn't you have just—" Oscar paused, sucking in a breath between his teeth. "You didn't need to do this," he settled on. "Especially not today. You finished second."

"I finished third. Lewis getting disqualified doesn't count." Lando sounded almost apathetic now, throat rough and dry, but surefire like he was stating a fact.

"You finished on the podium," Oscar amended. "Same difference."

"And Max won from sixth." Lando shrugged, still turned away. "So what?"

A rare flare of frustration shot through Oscar's body. "So what? I'm trying to say that you did a good job today, Lando. You fought hard. You handled the shitty car. You deserve to at least wait one day before agonizing over this technical stuff. Just—give yourself a break, for a minute."

However, that statement only seemed to make things worse. Lando barked out a sharp, dry laugh, and turned his head just enough for Oscar to see his profile, smiling coldly.

"Yeah, mate. Of course you would say that."

The frustration flared up again. It was something bigger this time, a snarling, angry force, threatening the boundaries of Oscar's mind in a way that he'd never experienced before. It was enough that he had to brace one hand on the edge of a plastic bin to ground himself, breathing slowly through staying calm. When he found his next words, and bit them out, he sounded clipped, strained, on edge. Not like himself.

"The fuck's that supposed to mean?"

A second passed. Then another. Then another. Oscar stared at the sliver of Lando's side profile that he could see, stuck in an unnatural blankness, wishing so suddenly and so strongly that he could simply open up the other man's brain and see what was happening inside of it. Just like in Qatar, something in Oscar was absolutely burning for Lando to talk to him, to let him in, to even acknowledge his efforts. Something, anything.

Because they trusted each other. They were there for each other. Always.

Right?

Then Lando looked down at his backpack, and his shoulders sagged in time with a huffed exhale. His voice rang out against the quiet, against the dark, and he said:

"Nothing. It means nothing."

And he zipped up his backpack, stood up, slung the bag over one shoulder, and brushed past Oscar to hop back over the plastic bins. He stopped at the door, just to call over his shoulder. Oscar had yet to move.

"Let's go, mate," Lando said, tone neutral. The flashlight glow showed his line of sight to be somewhere off to Oscar's left. "Cleanup guys can get the rest."

"Okay," Oscar said. He still didn't move. Lando pulled the door open and left.

Look at me, Oscar thought, belatedly, and it struck him hard and fast like a bolt of lightning.

Before he could stop it, Oscar was slipping into a memory from earlier in the week. He had been relaxing in his hotel room on Wednesday night, scrolling through social media, watching TV in the background, when he had received an email from the PR team. It was one of the standard ones he got every time they were about to post a challenge video or something on YouTube, so Oscar had promptly ignored it. Then, a few minutes later, his mind had wandered back to it, and he contemplated which video it was that was being posted. He'd had to think embarrassingly hard—the PR duties tended to all blend together at a point—before remembering, ah, the Finish the Lyric video.

Maybe it was boredom, or maybe it was curiosity, or maybe it was a secret third thing, but for the first time since joining McLaren, Oscar had gone back to the email and clicked on the file that was attached to it.

Look at me.

The Lando in the video was, in fact, looking at Oscar. Maybe too much. And Oscar was looking back. Definitely too much.

He'd grimaced at how the editors had gone out of their way to focus on Oscar staring at Lando as he sang, licking his lips, a look in his eyes that could only be described as hungry. So much for not being obvious about his massive crush on camera.

But then, Lando was staring at Oscar as he sang, smiling, laying on gentle praises in a breathy voice after Oscar was done. They were looking at each other as Oscar said "ride" in a way that sounded far more suggestive than he had remembered it being. Lando was singing "Love Story," looking to him to fill the gaps, eagerly, expectantly, like it was the most natural thing in the world, and really, what could Oscar have said besides "yes?"

Look at me.

They'd filmed that video five days ago, now. Oscar had seen it four days ago. He'd thought about it for four days straight, and now he was thinking about it again.

For half an hour, they'd sat on that couch, and they'd looked at each other. The camera had caught the stars in Oscar's eyes and their reflection in the eyes of the man who had hung them there. They'd been them, and they'd looked at each other, and Oscar had dared to hope.

Look at me.

Presently, as they walked together out of the hospitality, Lando stayed a firm step ahead of Oscar the whole time. They squeaked out of the circuit with a few minutes to spare before curfew. Oscar's Uber arrived, and they shuffled into the back seat together. Neither man spoke except to clarify directions to their driver.

They arrived at their hotel. Oscar used his room card to access the elevator, and they stood side by side on the way up. There was a mirror in the elevator. Oscar did not look into it.

On their floor, they parted ways.

Oscar paused, fighting to muster the courage. Then he looked at Lando, who was walking away, and said, "Good night."

Look at me, he thought, and the flare of frustration swelled up into something furious, something dangerous and beautiful that burned him from the inside out. It hurt like a line of flames dancing across his flesh, happily consuming all that fell in their way. It hurt like a maple tree being tapped, drained of its sweetness, of its nutrients, of everything it had to offer with nothing given in return. It hurt.

Lando did not respond. He did not look back.

Chapter Text

Oscar was certain he was going to make a breakthrough in Mexico. Really, he almost did, before it was violently ripped out from underneath him, leaving him grasping at the ends of straws for a truth that he knew was there, but which seemed invisible to everyone else.

It began with the fact that Lando was ignoring him.

Well—maybe ignoring was the wrong word. It was more like... strategically avoiding? Intentionally keeping distance? Just so happening to hang out in places that Oscar wasn't, even when it was literally inconvenient to his schedule? It was a weird thing to try to define.

Because Lando was present in all the ways that mattered. He bounced off of Oscar's feedback in engineering meetings, they gossiped in the garage about how the Ferraris were looking fast this weekend, they gave each other get a load of this guy looks when Qas, the team photographer, directed them to pose in some inane way that could not possibly be flattering. It was normal, and it was good, and from an outsider's perspective, it would probably look like nothing had changed at all. This was a small mercy, Oscar supposed; at least the media wouldn't be up their asses about it.

But if one looked deeper? If the proverbial curtain of surface-level small-talk was pulled back, even slightly?

There was nothing.

It wasn't like Oscar was keeping track, of course, but not a single conversation he'd had with Lando since Austin had been in private, or about anything other than racing. It was like they were somehow dancing around each other when they weren't in public. After meetings, when Oscar might have stopped him for a chat, Lando was the first one out the door. In the quiet evenings, when Oscar expected rampant texts from the hotel room down the hall either complaining about something or demanding that Oscar come over to play video games, Lando was silent.

Even mealtimes at the track were different. Over the course of the season, sharing meals had become a sort of routine for them, something small but sweet to look forward to. Not this weekend, apparently—whenever Oscar sat down to eat, Lando was simply nowhere to be found.

He'd tried asking Jon about it on Friday, after another lunch had come and gone by himself.

Jon, however, had just casually shrugged. "He's experimenting with eating at different times. Said he wants to see how it affects his performance."

Oscar had given him a weird look—aren't you his trainer and in charge of when he eats?—but Jon had given him a weird look right back—aren't you his teammate and therefore none of this is your business?—so he'd had to drop the subject.

He hadn't dropped it entirely, though.

See, it had come to his attention at some point that maybe these were all tiny, stupid things to get caught up over. Jon was right, after all. Lando was his teammate. This wasn't his business. This should have, by all conventions, meant very little to him.

But, still, it did. It mattered to Oscar, because Lando was making him feel things, and not just the soft, fluffy feelings, either. These feelings were something new. Something raw. Something that barged into his body, seized control, and then lingered after the moment like ripples in water.

And it was all happening in the little moments.

It turned out that a chicken wrap could be sorrowful when it was eaten by a person who didn’t want to be eating it by himself. A stupid video challenge filmed in Texas could start to tint melancholy, with hope, with loss, with longing. A couple walking down the streets of Mexico City, laughing, holding hands, could carry with them grief, a profound mourning for something he'd never even had.

And when he was sitting in his driver's room, alone, staring into empty air, an ache could appear, nestled somewhere in a little nook in his heart. It was an ache that called out for someone's presence, for someone's touch, for someone's comfort. It was a funny little feeling, that. Oscar might have called it loneliness.

And, above all, it was driving him insane.

Because Oscar didn't experience emotions like that. He was a gradual build-up, at best; a belated, fuzzy melting pot of feelings that waited until after the fact to show themselves. It was literally what had started this whole beautiful mess in the first place. He didn't do hastiness, or instant opinions, or big emotions out of nowhere. He was an introvert. He saw being alone not as something to fear, but as more of a comfort, like an all-encompassing presence of its own right that kept him company. These were things that Oscar knew about himself.

Things were different now. There was one person, one man who had barged into Oscar's life, taken him under his wing, and deconstructed his previous notions of feeling, of being alone. It wasn’t even shocking, really, to realize just how used to Lando he had become. His body anticipated casual touches before they even came. His mind looked forward to easy banter, to a familiar back-and-forth. His heart yearned for the fluttery sensations, for the thoughts, both scary and wonderful, that he might actually be on his way to falling in love again.

At least, he had fallen in love with the way he didn't have to put on an act around Lando. It felt like they just understood each other.

But then Austin had happened. It was there, they couldn't ignore it—the thread had been unraveled further. And so the very man who had ingrained himself so thoroughly into Oscar's life became the very man who was unraveling him.

Quietly, privately, Oscar felt.

Quietly, privately, Oscar ached.

But the world moved on.

On track, at least, Mexico was gearing up to be a repeat of last weekend. This was not a good thing, mind. Their times in practice were decent, some better than others, but just as they had predicted, they still weren't great. Just as Oscar had predicted, it was damn frustrating.

Maybe it was the DNF still fresh in his mind, or maybe it was his volatile emotional state, but he was having a harder time finding his peace with being mediocre here than he was in Austin. It was like every last problem with the car was personally offending him, and it was genuinely affecting the way he was interacting with people. He had to put in effort to not be in a crabby mood. A few times, he even caught himself nearly rolling his eyes at the mechanics before he realized it, and thought, what the fuck am I on right now? What's wrong with me? Why am I acting like this?

God, he wanted to go home and sleep.

Maybe because of that burning desire to get this weekend over with, time was going by rather quickly. Before he knew it, it was Saturday afternoon, and qualifying was officially squared and done.

The car had been (surprise surprise) difficult to drive. They'd had tire issues, and some cooling problems, and Mexico's thin air was hardly helping, and after all of that turmoil, the session had finished, and Oscar was— well, shockingly, he was okay with his result. He wasn't so out of it that he couldn't see a P7 as a good thing. It was better than a P10, better than they were expecting, and there was at least a good chance to fight for points in that.

A podium was probably out of reach, what with both Red Bulls and both Ferraris starting ahead of him, but, hey, crazier things had happened. He wouldn't rule it out.

To add the sum of the parts, it had ended up being an honestly okay qualifying. Maybe even decent. Nothing too tragic had happened, or too absurd, or truly shocking. Tentatively, things were actually starting to look up again.

On Oscar's side of the garage.

On the other side—

Well.

For the record, Oscar would state that he did, in fact, know that Lando had been knocked out in Q1. It was kind of impossible not to know; he'd seen the man getting out of his car when they came in before Q2, and not seen him on track for the rest of the session. Even without a race engineer in his ear, literally telling him, assumptions could be made.

Oscar just didn't know why it had happened. Or how. Or how he felt about it.

But, of course, because his mind loved to torture him, it was what he was thinking about for the entire walk back from the media pen after Q3.

It was a weird mental debate he was having: on the one hand, historically, this was exactly the sort of opportunity that Oscar wanted in order to do something for Lando. He knew Lando well enough to know that he was probably beating himself up over this result, and it put the great urge in him to find the other man, hug the life out of him, and ensure that he was holding up alright. On the other hand, Oscar had literally no clue where they stood right now. Lando was clearly making no attempt to reach out to him—would it be socially unacceptable to reach out to Lando instead? Maybe the man just needed a little bit of space, some time to collect himself, and then things would go back to normal.

And, yeah, okay, that was alright. Oscar could do that, he could respect that, even if it wasn't what he wanted.

He would do that.

Oscar sighed and paused in front of his driver's room door. The ache in his heart flared up, something fluttery and frustrated and bittersweet all at once.

He would do a lot of things for Lando, wouldn’t he?

As he pushed through the door into his room, Oscar tried to settle those thoughts to the back of his mind for now. It was time to make a mental switch into recovery mode. He immediately took off his cap and tossed it onto the closest surface (hey, he never claimed to be a neat person), ruffling a hand through his helmet-flattened hair and grimacing at the sweat that had collected in it. Next, he stepped up to his little closet, picking up a team shirt and shorts to change into. He placed them down on a table by the wall and unzipped the top half of his race suit.

While shrugging off the sleeves, it occurred to him randomly that he hadn't seen his water bottle lately, even though Kim was supposed to give it to him after qualifying. Maybe he had left it in here, then? But Kim was usually so meticulous, so was that even likely? Oscar hummed to himself and turned around, letting his gaze pan over the rest of his stuff.

And he just about went into cardiac arrest.

Holy shit, there was someone else in the room. Someone who was definitely not supposed to be here. Someone who was sitting on the floor, someone whose tan skin and brown, curly hair was—

Wait.

Wait, what the fuck?

He was so well hidden that Oscar's eyes almost skipped right over him. However, yes; tucked in between his little sofa and the wall, curled up with his face shoved into his knees and arms wrapped tightly around his legs, so that his only real identifying characteristic was his hair, was none other than Lando Norris himself.

Oscar felt like his brain was buffering, very slowly processing what he was seeing. As it did, a hundred questions and a whole lot of confusion spilled out the other end.

Had Lando somehow gone to the wrong driver's room after quali? Had Oscar gone to the wrong driver's room after quali? He spared a glance back at his closet. No, that was his number on the papaya race suits. That was his spare helmet on the shelf. Those were his shoes. So then—why the ever-loving hell was Lando here?

And more importantly, what the fuck was Oscar supposed to do?

Lando must have noticed that he'd entered the room, but he hadn't said anything, so... that wasn't helpful. Or maybe he was still ignoring-not-ignoring Oscar? Was Oscar supposed to ignore him right back?

Before he could really acknowledge the wave of nausea that flooded his body, thinking about willfully, maliciously ignoring Lando, a loud sniffle sounded from across the room, and Oscar's head snapped up. Any thoughts of social acceptability, or space, or logic, really, threw themselves directly out the window.

"Lando?" Oscar said, as his brain resumed enough normal functioning to take a few steps forward. He waited, hoping for a response, or anything that would help him figure out what was happening here, but there was no response from the curled-up figure except for another sniffle.

A voice popped up in Oscar's head, a remnant of the weekend thus far that whispered does he want to talk to you at all? He pushed it down—that wasn't what this was about right now.

It was one of the easiest decisions he had ever made to move closer, taking more careful steps until he was just in front of Lando. He tied the arms of his race suit around his waist so they wouldn't drag on the ground, then squatted to be on Lando's level.

"Lando?" he tried again. This close, he could see the tremors wracking the other man's frame. Given that he was once again wearing a hoodie in rather warm weather, they were hardly due to the cold, and Oscar's help-protect-make-him-feel-better instinct flared up even stranger than before. But again, there was no response to his words.

Oscar frowned. He reached out a hand to place it on Lando's shoulder, hoping that maybe it would ground him like touch occasionally grounded Oscar, or at least confirm that Lando knew he was here.

However, as soon as his fingers brushed the fabric of Lando's hoodie, Lando violently flinched, shrinking further into his ball. He let out something that could only be described as a pained whine.

Oscar jerked back immediately, cursing internally at his mistake.

"Sorry, I'm sorry," he rushed to say. He made sure that his hands were held up, far away from Lando's body. "I shouldn't have scared you. I should have asked first."

Unsurprisingly, Lando did not respond.

Oscar stayed silent for several seconds, trying to figure out what to do. This was largely uncharted territory for him, ironic as it seemed—usually, he was on the receiving end of this sort of thing, not the giving end, and it was coming back to bite him in the butt with inexperience. But, he scoured through his memories, searching for anything that might help, and managed to come up with a few useful ones: his younger sisters, sobbing and inconsolable when their family dog had to be put down. Logan, through the lower formulae, cracking under the weight of endless pressure and expectations. Lily, when they'd briefly dated, worked into panic attacks by her engineering exams.

Recalling what had been effective in those memories, Oscar took a deep breath to gather himself, then asked, "Can I touch you?"

A second's pause, and then—Lando shook his head, a jerky, awkward movement with his face shoved into his legs. Oscar let out a breath, glancing up at the ceiling, and a rush of different emotions shot through him. Mostly, it was relief that Lando had acknowledged him at all.

"Okay. That's alright," he assured. He sat back on his heels and tried again. "Can you look at me?"

Oscar crossed his fingers and hoped, but Lando shook his head again. He hiccuped a noise that sounded suspiciously like a sob, and his entire body shuddered with it, curling in even smaller. Oscar's heart clenched at how small Lando was making himself look. He was so big as a person, from personality to presence—this just wasn't right.

"How about breathing, then?" Oscar reasoned. He forced his voice to stay light and soothing despite his own feelings. "Like when you helped me before. Remember that? Can you try breathing in time with me?"

A third head-shake.

Oscar's first instinct was to groan. He caught it before he could, though, and immediately felt a flood of guilt wash over him. He knew logically that Lando wasn't being stubborn on purpose—he'd been in this place himself, stuck in his own anxiety spirals, when it felt like nothing could ever pull you out of the overwhelming panic and fear. Oscar knew that. But at the same time, when you wanted to help someone, and couldn't, it was so helplessly frustrating.

Instead, Oscar sighed and scrubbed his hands over his face. He didn't want to give up on his efforts, and, to be clear, he wasn't going to, but he truly was a bit lost for what to do at this point. Maybe phoning a friend for backup was the best option now.

"Okay, mate." He didn't expect Lando to say anything back, but Oscar felt like he had to say it out loud or else risk losing some of his already fragile sanity. He put his hands on his knees, intending to get up and find his phone. "I'm gonna call Jon."

"No!"

Oscar paused in his half-up, half-down pose, blinking at Lando. The other man had whipped his head up and was looking directly at Oscar, and a not-unfamiliar sense of wrongness settled in his gut. Lando's cheeks were stained with distinct tear tracks; he was flushed with a red hue around his eyes, on his nose, and across his cheekbones; there were flat, sweaty, curls stuck to his forehead, and it all just looked so wrong. There was also a uniquely complex emotion in his eyes, something scared, stormy and overwhelming like the ocean blue-green that they were.

"Lando," Oscar said, in lieu of anything else.

"Don't call Jon, please." Lando's voice was a whispering thing, quiet yet rough, shaky yet determined.

"Okay," Oscar conceded, squatting back down. Now that he had eye contact with Lando, he sure as hell intended to keep it. This focus was how he saw the almost imperceptible switch in Lando's expression: a tiny bit of the uncertainty, a tiny bit of the fear fading away. Oscar sighed. "I won't call him. But could you tell me why you're here, then?" he prompted. "What is this about? What can I do to help you?"

However, Lando immediately reacted to the questions, seeming to shrink into himself once more. The hands that he had wrapped around his legs clenched tighter onto his shins, and his shoulders hunched inwards.

"I— I can't—" Lando stammered out. He broke eye contact to look down at the floor, jerkily shaking his head.

"You can tell me anything, Lando." Oscar tried to reach into his heart, past the ache, and draw from his pool of normal feelings to find every soft, fuzzy emotion he had about Lando and imbue into his voice. "I'm not gonna judge you," he said.

"I—" Lando glanced back up, at Oscar, at the door across the room, at the table with Oscar's clothes on it. Slowly but surely, the tremors from before returned, until Lando was shaking like a leaf, breathing unsteadily with little pained, sob-like noises. He scrunched himself even tighter into his ball. It almost looked like—

Like he was holding himself back from something.

"Lando?" Oscar asked, finally unable to disguise how concerned he was about all of this.

Lando's gaze flickered back to Oscar. It was watery but scorching at the same time, and Oscar got the distinct feeling that he was being seen through, somehow. It was intense; watching, observing, searching for something that Oscar would never know.

Whatever Lando saw—it was something that made him look terrified.

Oscar's breath hitched.

And then Lando tackled him.

All at once, Lando just lunged forward, surging up from the floor to throw his whole weight onto Oscar's body. Oscar could barely blink before he was toppling out of his squat and onto the ground, landing hard on his butt with an ungraceful "oof." In a lightning-fast reflex, his arms moved up to catch Lando, trying to hold him steady. He quickly found, however, that he didn't have to.

Lando had sprawled himself out into Oscar's lap, slotted between his spread legs, resting just his knees and shins on the ground by Oscar's feet. He wrapped his arms like a koala around Oscar's abdomen, holding firmly to his body.

With both of their weights combined, this put Oscar dangerously close to falling completely horizontal. His hands found purchase on the floor behind himself for support.

Meanwhile, there was just about one single legible thought rattling around in his brain. That thought was what the actual fuck.

"Oh my god, mate," he wheezed out, nearly choking at how tightly Lando was squeezing him. "Holy shit. What are—?" Oscar tried to ask. He was unconsciously squirming for some breathing room at the same time, but immediately found himself being squeezed impossibly tighter. And, ow, ow, ow. Reaching up one hand, wincing in pain, Oscar tapped Lando repeatedly on the ribs. "Okay, okay, mate, I get it. You need to let go a bit. I can't breathe."

The pressure around his abdomen released slightly, and the air returned to his lungs with one big breath.

However, in turn, Lando shoved his face further into Oscar's chest. This greatly muffled any sound, but as Oscar soon realized, it didn't matter. It was impossible not to hear the little hiccup-ey, gasping noises Lando was making. It was also impossible not to feel the other man's body shuddering against his own with every shaky breath. There was a cool, wet spot soaking through his fireproofs near his collarbone.

And, oh.

Lando was crying.

It was such a stupid realization to have. No shit Lando was crying—Oscar had seen the tear tracks, he'd seen the red eyes. This was fully to be expected. But, somehow, it felt like something groundbreaking, like a frameshift settling everything just slightly to the right, to be seen in just a slightly different way.

Oscar had never seen Lando cry before.

He was honored to be allowed the privilege.

So as Lando continued to sob, holding onto Oscar like a lifeline, Oscar brought up one hand to wrap around Lando's waist, and he held him right back.

"Hey. You're okay," he said, quietly, carefully. "It's okay. I've got you."

It might have been only a few minutes that they sat there, while Oscar whispered sweet little comforts and assurances. It might have been longer. Time felt non-existent, trapped comfortably in the little bubble they'd created for themselves, where all Oscar could focus on was the pressure of the warm body against his.

At some point, he let himself give in to an impulse that he'd had for a long time, and brought up the hand he still had on the floor to bury it in Lando's hair. It meant that he was supporting their weight with just his core again, but, hey, he wasn't a professional athlete for nothing. And Oscar liked it, in a way—he liked that he could support, that he could give his help in the way he so desperately wanted to. His core would survive.

Besides, Oscar thought, gliding his fingers gently through chestnut curls, untangling some of the rougher spots that had been mussed by balaclava and helmet. He brought his other arm up higher across Lando's back, and used it to draw the man that little bit closer to him, that little bit closer to the ache in his heart.

Nothing could be worth more than this.

An indeterminate amount of time later, Lando had quieted down. He was drawing deep, long breaths that Oscar felt against his chest, and he was more than content to sit there and let him do it. Anything that helped was good.

After another minute or two, he decided it was time to try his hand at talking again.

"Hey, mate. Are you—" Oscar started.

However, he got no further than those two words before Lando stiffened, every single muscle in his body becoming rigid under Oscar's touch.

Oscar opened his mouth to say something to Lando—maybe to reassure him that he hadn't actually minded the tackle-hug, if that was what he was suddenly worried about.

But before he could, Lando tore himself out of their embrace. It was a harsh, ungraceful motion, in which he had to get his feet underneath himself, stand up (Oscar had to quickly let go of his hair so as to not rip any of it out), and nearly stumble and fall backwards in his haste. As he went, Oscar caught a glimpse of Lando's eyes for the first time in a while. They were filled to the brim with a raw, overwhelming panic. Then, as soon as he saw it, the emotion was covered up and gone.

Oscar frowned. Once again, he tried to speak, but once again, Lando interrupted him. This time, it was by clearing his throat, running his hands rapidly through his hair, and motioning towards the door with a weird, uncanny smile.

"Ah, shit, sorry, mate," he said. "Must've gotten confused with the doors, you know how it is. Classic mistake." Lando pulled a face that said clumsy me, right? "I'll be off, then."

"I— what?" Oscar responded. Not for the first time today, he was completely dumbfounded, and maybe a little bit affronted. "Really? You're just gonna leave, right now?"

Lando didn't hesitate for a second before answering, already stepping toward the exit. "Yeah. See ya."

"Wait, Lando." Oscar pushed himself off the ground, standing shakily on legs that had long fallen asleep. He made towards Lando, maybe to physically prevent him from leaving. Was that something he could even do? Luckily, Lando stopped on his own, turning to look at Oscar with another smile plastered on that was too casual, too cheery to be real. Oscar faltered. "Are you... okay?" he asked.

Lando laughed, a weird, tight noise. "Who, me? Yep, I’m fine. Bye-bye." He pivoted back towards the door, trying to leave. Trying to leave, again, trying to shut Oscar out; the way he had in Qatar, the way he had in Austin, the way he was trying to do now. It was all the same, Oscar realized. It was all a fucking cycle, a cycle that would repeat itself and repeat itself and repeat itself, and it would never end so long as he complied with it.

It would never end.

And somewhere deep, deep in the recesses of Oscar's soul, something just snapped.

"But you’re not."

Hand on the doorknob, already turning it, Lando froze. He turned his head to look back at Oscar, expression carefully neutral. "What?" he said.

The one word sent a shiver down Oscar's spine. A voice in his head whispered bad idea bad idea stop now, but it was too little, too late. Oscar couldn't stop. Not now.

"You're not fine," he repeated, standing firmly as the pins and needles in his legs went away. He tried to imagine his fear disappearing with them.

"Uh, yeah, I am," Lando argued. "I literally just said that I am."

"Yeah, but you're not, are you?"

Lando frowned, turning all the way around to face him again. He crossed his arms across his chest and fixed Oscar with a confused stare. "Oscar, what the fuck? Why are you fighting me on this?"

Oscar gritted his teeth. "Because you do this, Lando. Not just right now, but other times, too. You act like everything's perfectly fine, like you're okay, but I know that you’re not."

At this, Lando full-on scoffed. His smile returned, too, but it had taken on an edge that it hadn't before, something manic, something sickly sweet. "Oh, really?" Lando crooned. "You know, huh? What makes you so sure that you know?"

"Wha— mate, you just spent at least the past ten minutes crying hysterically in my driver's room. I think I can tell you're not okay."

"And what if that's just how I like to spend my Saturdays?"

"See, you're doing it again, now!" Oscar nearly shouted. Then he squeezed his eyes shut, took a deep breath, and tried to calm himself down. "Look, Lando. I know that for some reason, you don't want to admit anything is wrong, which—whatever, I guess. Forever hold your peace. But people are noticing it. I am noticing it. At a point, you can't just brush this off anymore." Oscar hesitated, looking at how Lando's face had already turned grim. He recognized that this next part, for some reason, was the especially sensitive bit. "Maybe you need to talk to someone. Go talk to Jon, and he can—"

"I'm not talking to Jon."

Oscar rolled with the punch. "Okay. Go talk to Daniel, then. Talk to Max, or other Max, or talk to Martin. Talk to anyone who you think would help you; I know people would if you asked." Then there were words on the tip of Oscar's tongue, and he couldn't muster up the restraint to hold them back. What fell from his lips was, "Fuck, Lando. Talk to me. Please."

But as soon as the plea left his mouth, Oscar knew he had messed up. It had been too open, too honest; the ache in his subconscious that longed for Lando to start talking to him again, to start actually talking. Instead, Lando's face hardened, building into the cold, aggressive thing that made Oscar's heart sink.

“Y'wanna know what I think?" Lando started, his eyes blazing with an icy fire. "Yeah? I think you should mind your fucking business. You don't know shit about me. Cause y'know what? You know what, Oscar?" Lando spat out his name like it was a curse, and splayed his hands wide, taking steps to close the distance between them. "Maybe you're right. Maybe there is something wrong with me. Maybe I am all fucked in the head, and people are noticing, and it's a problem. But if it was, why the fuck would I talk to you about it, huh?" As Lando got closer and closer, Oscar tried to take a step back. But Lando followed up with another step. "You don't care. Why would you?" Another step. "You're nothing but my teammate." Another step, and Oscar was backed up against the wall. "You are nothing," Lando hissed, "but a rookie second driver who thinks he knows something that he doesn't."

Lando finished his tirade with a finger pressed to Oscar's chest, breath heaving, looking up at him with not an ounce of warmth for someone he supposedly called a friend.

And maybe Oscar should have been sad. He wasn't sure. He thought that, later, he might be.

But right here, right now, while Lando had him pressed up against the wall in his own damn driver's room, spitting insults and abuses at him?

Oscar clenched his jaw, and found that what he wanted was anger.

He wanted a hurricane that tore up nature itself and never stopped. He wanted a righteous fury that burned like an inferno through the air. He wanted—he wanted something, anything, to cover up the jagged, gaping, bleeding wound that was his heart. Because how dare Lando say that Oscar didn't know anything, when he made it clearer than the day that something was wrong? How dare he say that Oscar didn't care, when all Oscar could do, all he had done for the past month, was offer his help?

How dare he?

For the first time, the thread appeared right in front of Oscar's eyes. It was woven through the air, in every heartbeat, in every blink, in every second, and for one, insane moment, all Oscar wanted to do was reach up and yank on it. He would tear it free from its bindings, and he would watch as the world came crashing down around him.

But he knew he never could. He wasn't strong enough to do something like that.

So, instead, he channeled all of his willpower into holding back the insatiable fire that burned underneath his skin, the fury, the pain, the vulnerability. For his own dignity, he needed to have an even tone when he looked into Lando's eyes, unwavering, and said:

"I just want to help you."

And Lando met his gaze, iced over and stormy, an impenetrable blizzard at night. Several seconds passed before he spoke. But when he did, the words were not spoken, they fell—heavy and fast as an executioner's blade.

"I don't want your help."

Chapter Text

In Brazil, Oscar got a text from Max Fewtrell.

He was rotting in bed on Saturday night, lamenting how poorly the weekend had gone for him so far. It had been P10 in qualifying after a literal thunderstorm prevented him from putting a time on the board. It had been P10 in sprint qualifying because they’d used up all of his fresh softs and he was outpaced by tires alone. It had been P10 in the sprint race because, really, why the fuck not? Everyone loves P10. Of course Oscar wanted to be collecting them like trading cards. You know, does anyone want a P10? I have a spare P10! I’ll trade anyone for an actually good finishing position every once in a while.

Needless to say, he wasn’t in a great mood.

But when his phone buzzed, a beacon of light through the darkness of his hotel room, he begrudgingly shoved back the blankets, rolled over to the side of the bed, and picked it up. A shitty mood didn’t absolve him of responsibilities, after all.

However, when he registered just whose name was lighting up the screen, the annoyance dissipated. A wash of confusion, and then curiosity, took its place.

Why in the world was Max Fewtrell contacting him?

Hey Oscar

Hey mate, what's up? We haven't had the chance to chat in a while

Yeah

Listen mate, I'm just gonna cut to the
chase here and say that I'm really sorry
my first time reaching out in a long time is
about something like this and not just you.
But this is important I swear

It's alright Max, you don't need to
justify yourself. What's going on?

I need to ask a favour of you

It's about Lando

Oh?

What about him?

Ah god just first off, please know that
this isn't something I would normally do.
I respect Lando and his privacy so much
and I feel like such a shit friend already
for telling you what I'm about to but I'm
losing my mind a bit over here, kinda at
loose ends right now. Basically just, know that's this isn't something I'm taking lightly
and you shouldn't either, okay?

Yeah of course mate I understand

Ok hang on it'll take me a minute
to type all this out

👍

So basically for around the past month or
two, Lando's been going distant on me,
like he's stopped accepting invites to do
streams and shit. And since you guys
are all over the place rn, I can't nail him
down in person, but he also keeps
inventing excuses not to talk to me over
the phone. It was alright when I could tell myself it was just cause of your schedule
and the triple header and all that, but
now he won't even respond to my texts
with more than a sentence, if at all, and
it's getting me super concerned. Beyond
just that though is he's super behind on
stuff for Quadrant, and no one on the
crew there can really get a hold of him
either, even though we're scrambling to
fill in the shit he's supposed to be doing
and it's like he doesn't care at all. Idk
how much he's talked to you about it but Quadrant is kinda his heart and soul next
to racing, and I know he cares a lot about
it, so the fact that he's letting it fall
away from him like it's nothing

Frankly it scares the shit out of me

I'm sorry Max, I had no clue that was
happening but it sounds awful

Yeah, it fucking sucks

Hang on, can I call you actually?

Yeah of course go ahead

Halfway through the text conversation, Oscar had sat up in bed and turned a lamp on, sensing that this probably wasn't the type of discussion to be had lying down. Or in the dark, really. Either way, he was grateful for that decision now, since all he had to do was lean back against the headboard and wait for Max's name to appear on his phone as a call instead of a text.

If he was being honest with himself—which he was more and more trying to be lately, with all of his weird emotion stuff—did Oscar particularly want to talk to Max right now? No. Almost certainly not. It was nothing against Max, just that Oscar had really been enjoying soaking in his alone time (not moping), and talking to Max, especially if it meant talking to Max about Lando, was sure to bring back up a lot of feelings that he would rather not deal with right now. He already had enough on his plate with this triple header delivered personally to him from hell; he didn't need to be reminded that his teammate was slipping through his fingers weekend after weekend, no matter what he did.

But there was also the part of Oscar that was too damn empathetic for his own good. The part that saw a friend struggling and wanted instantly to reach out in support, to do what he could, even if it might hurt himself in the process. It was that part that had won out in the end, for better or for worse.

So, Oscar took a moment to have a deep breath. When he felt steady enough, he reminded himself what he was doing this for, and accepted the incoming call.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey, Oscar," Max replied from the other end of the line, a sheepish turn to his voice. "Sorry for dumping all that stuff on you. I've been a bit stressed lately, but you probably don't need me to tell you that."

Oscar was quick to wave off Max’s concern. "Nah, no worries, mate. It sounds like you needed to let it out."

"Yeah, probably. The guys at Quadrant are great to talk to, so it's not been all bad, but— it's still a lot to have on one mind, innit?"

Oscar hummed in agreement. He knew a thing or two about that, didn't he?

Max then continued, audibly sighing. "But, yeah, anyways. I mentioned earlier that I was asking for a favour out of all of this. That big rant was basically all the background info, so all that in mind—do you think you'd be willing to help me out?"

"Uh," Oscar paused, suddenly a bit blindsided. "I don't know, mate." What he wanted to say was, not really all the background info, is it? How can I agree to something if you haven't even told me? Could you be any more vague if you tried? But that was more his bad mood creeping in than any actual malice.

What he ended up saying was, "Depends what it is, I reckon. As long as it's not anything deranged, then probably, but I've got to know before I can actually say."

Max sighed again. "Yeah, that's fair. I guess I'm just stalling asking for some reason."

"It's not actually something deranged, is it?" Oscar asked, half-joking and half-serious. "I'm not really looking to ask McLaren to bail me out of jail tonight."

"Hah, no," Max snorted, and the relief that Oscar felt was probably more than was necessary. Of course he wasn't worried that Max would ask him to commit a crime. That would be silly. He was certain that wasn't something Max would do.

...Mostly. He was mostly certain.

"No, no, nothing illegal," Max continued, unaware of Oscar's thoughts. "It's a small thing. But it would be really helpful, I think, if you can do it. And it makes sense for it to be you, because—"

"Just ask, Max," Oscar interrupted, trying to gently goad the other man to his point.

"Right." Still, Max paused, just for a second. "Right," he repeated, and he sounded much more determined the second time. "So what I wanted to ask you, if you're willing, of course, was, could you try and talk to Lando, for me?"

And Oscar kind of short-circuited.

There's no fucking way.

Max was still speaking. "—Since he apparently refuses to acknowledge me or anyone else right now, and it's been worrying us a ton cause, like I said, he's not like this usually—"

Oscar barely processed any of it. His brain had heard 'talk to Lando,' and then heard no more after that. The words were just stuck—stuck in his airways, stuck in a memory, stuck to the underside of his skin, crawling, growing heavy, slamming into his gut like a sucker-punch coming from the inside, not the out.

He tilted his head back to look up at the ceiling, clutching his phone, and suddenly thought that he might cry out of sheer irony. That, or hysterically laugh. He wasn’t sure which. Both sounded viable.

He hadn't even realized that Max had stopped talking at some point. Nor had he realized that Max was waiting for a response, or remembered that he'd been asked a question at all until right now. However, Max must have interpreted the resulting silence from Oscar's side as hesitation, because he quickly started arguing his point.

"I get it if you don't want to," Max said. "Because you're teammates, and it's all a bit awkward and weird. But you two are weird about each other, y'know? In a good way. Maybe it's none of my business, but I'm certain you're both closer than just teammates, and I just really need another person who cares about him in my corner right now." Max paused. "Please, Oscar, I trust you with him."

The borderline desperation in Max’s voice finally snapped Oscar out of his emotional crisis, though it wasn't without some little ache in him appearing. It was sad, and it was tired, and it had been stomped into the mud, crushed into smithereens. Yet it refused to go away. It whispered, me? He trusts his best friend with me? He can tell that I care? That I'm trying? That I'm doing the best I can?

Oscar cleared his throat. The ache stayed lodged there, anyways. "Um, yeah, Max, of course I would love to help you," he said. "But I'm actually not sure that I can."

"What do you mean?" Max asked, and Oscar could sense the frown in his voice without even needing to see the other man. "Like… contractually? Or emotionally? Because like I’ve just said—"

"No, sorry," Oscar hurried to clarify. "I worded that badly. What I mean is that, the whole talking to him thing— I've already tried."

There was a few seconds’ pause. Then Max muttered, "Shit. Really?"

Oscar winced, hearing every single ounce of disappointment seeping out of the two words, quiet and exhausted. "Yeah. I, uh, I wasn't lying when I said I didn't know most of what you told me over text." And Oscar hadn't been lying—but he also wasn't surprised. From what he'd seen from Lando lately, it about added up. "But I've also been noticing him acting strange and being distant here during race weekends. So I've tried, a, uh— a couple of times now, actually, to get him to talk to me. But he won't really let me either." And wasn’t that the understatement of the century.

"Well." Max sighed. "Fuck."

"Yeah. I’m sorry, Max."

Max seemed to sit with that for a second. Then, he pushed on. "And he's not given any indication what's bothering him?"

Oscar considered it. "I mean, sort of?" he said, half a question to himself as well. "I get the idea it's related to his performance on the track, to some extent. When we were in Qatar, he, well— he yelled at me. After quali. Which, we were in a stressful situation, but. Yeah. He just said it was because he'd been really frustrated with everything lately. And I tried to get him to say more, but he basically shut down when I asked." Oscar had to physically force himself not to sound bitter about it. "So I don't know if that was a one-time thing, or part of a bigger problem, or what."

Oscar had meant to leave it at that. Honestly, he had. That was all that was really important, and all that Max really needed to know. But then, out of nowhere, something changed, and the truth was suddenly on Oscar’s tongue, pushing against the barrier of his lips. He tried to stomp it down, to make it go away, but it refused to relent, pushing and shoving until he couldn’t hold it back any longer, and then it burst free.

"But in Austin, I found him at the track a long time after the race, reviewing telemetry and running sims for how he could have done better. I tried to ask him about it again but he just said it was nothing, and he was kind of rude about it all." Like a dam had burst, once the words started flowing, Oscar couldn’t stop them. "And then last week in Mexico he came to my driver’s room after quali and cried in my arms, but then he ran away and said he didn't want my help. And, it’s— it's driving me crazy a little bit, because he keeps pretending that nothing's wrong, and then lashing out when something is wrong, and I just keep trying to help him like an idiot because I do care about him but he won't let me care about him and it's such an uphill battle and now he won’t even talk to me at all and I feel like I'm messing everything up and I don't know what to do."

It took Oscar a second to come back to himself, breathing heavily, clenching a fistful of blanket in his left hand. Then he clocked the silence from his phone. In the blink of an eye, he remembered who he was talking to and why, and Oscar full-on blanched.

"Fuck, I'm so sorry, Max," he blurted out. "This was supposed to be about you, not me. You can just ignore me."

There were a few more seconds of tense, anxiety-filled silence before Max's voice came through the phone again, much, much softer than Oscar had been expecting. "Jesus, Oscar," he said. "No. You have nothing to be sorry about. I’m sorry that you’ve gone through that." Then his voice tightened a little bit to say, "I'm sorry that Lando's been such a stubborn dickhead that he can't see the help that's right in front of him."

Oscar took a deep breath, trying to calm the roaring waves he'd stirred up inside himself. He made an effort to smooth out the giant wrinkles he had created in his blankets, and imagined the anger, the desperation, the fear, disappearing with them. "I guess." He shrugged. "It just feels unfair to pin everything on him when he's clearly going through something."

"Yeah, but it's unfair to you too, innit?" Max reasoned. "It sounds like you're doing the best you can with a fucked situation. If Lando wants to be an arse about it then that's not your fault, I promise."

"I get that. And, thank you." Oscar could feel the warmth of a flush on his cheeks, bashful. "It’s, um— it’s really nice to hear someone say that."

"Yeah, anytime, mate."

That brought a small quirk to Oscar’s lips. However, he couldn’t ignore something that was nagging at the back of his mind. "It's still just so frustrating, you know," he admitted. Absentmindedly, he traced patterns on the smoothed-over bed, taking comfort in the solid grooves of stitching and embroidery under his fingertips. "Like, I feel like I should be doing something that's actually useful for Lando instead of complaining about it."

"But you are doing something useful, Oscar. Just by being there and not giving up on him. I wouldn’t hold it against you if you had, by the way. I know Lando."

I know Lando can be a lot to deal with, went unsaid.

Oscar just laughed, a small, breathy thing. "I don't think I could give up on him even if I wanted to."

Max sighed. "He tends to do that to you, doesn't he?" They both stayed quiet for a moment, letting the statement sink in.

Yes.

Yes, he does.

Another moment later, Max was the one to break the silence. "Listen, Oscar," he said. "You can ignore the favor thing now, obviously. I’m gonna spend some time thinking up some other strategy to try on him. I'm hoping that with both of us and the Quadrant team pressing he'll eventually crack. Some of our other mates will join in, too."

Oscar nodded, then remembered that Max couldn’t see him. "Yeah, okay," he confirmed. He deflated against the headboard until he was lying down again, head cradled on a pillow. It was almost guilt-inducing how nice it suddenly felt to have someone else calling the shots, someone else who was telling him what to do, just to not have that pressure on himself for once in a while.

"But please take care of yourself first, mate," Max added, like he could hear Oscar's thoughts, and Oscar really hadn’t thought he could end up smiling after a Friday and Saturday like this. But here he was, lying in the dark in a hotel room, trying to decide whether he wanted to smile or cry. Or maybe both. "I’ll call you again soon to check in," Max assured. "And if Lando continues being a complete wanker about this, do not hesitate to tell me, and I'll have a word with him, whether he wants to talk or not."

"I will." Oscar sniffled. Oh, god, he wasn’t really going to cry over this, was he? He attempted to reign himself in, wanting to end the conversation in a competent manner. "And thank you for all of this, Max. Both for letting me vent but also for trusting me with the issue in the first place." He hesitated only a little bit before adding, "I know I haven't known Lando for half, or even a third as long as you have, but he's done a lot for me. I really do care about him, and I'm grateful that you trust me to help."

"Of course, mate. I've known you were a good kid since the Renault days." Max then took on a tone that was fond, maybe nostalgic. "I have to say, though; seeing you and Lando together now has been really strange for me. Kinda like worlds colliding, y’know? But it’s been nice. You two are good for each other." Oscar's eyebrows furrowed. He opened his mouth to ask Max what he meant by that, but he was interrupted before he could. "Oh, and you didn't hear this from me, but once he pulls his head out of his arse about this whole situation, I think you should go for it." Some sort of mischievous lilt appeared in Max’s voice, and Oscar could imagine the kind of sly grin he was probably sporting. "You'd be surprised."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Oscar asked, frowning. Only silence met his question. "Max?"

Oscar pulled his phone away from his ear and checked the screen. It showed that the call had been disconnected.

He continued to frown at the phone for a second, then snorted, smiling once more.

"Dick."

-

Besides that, Brazil had been inconsequential. Another Max Verstappen victory, another Lando Norris second place, another race where the stars seemed aligned against Oscar. He'd run almost the entire race two laps down after falling victim to a crash he hadn’t even been part of, then finished P14 (at least it wasn’t P10?)—last of everyone who hadn't DNFed.

And Lando was ignoring him. Actually ignoring; not just behind closed doors, anymore. When they locked eyes from across a room, Lando looked away. He kept a wide berth from Oscar in the garage, like some sort of same-pole magnetism was pushing them to be a certain distance from each other.

Worst of all, though, were the media duties.

He and Lando had been scheduled for an interview together after the race. Oscar had shown up ten minutes beforehand, as requested, and Lando had not. He'd watched the time tick away, minute by minute, until the interview was about to start and they were clipping a mic onto his shirt.

"Where's Lando?" he'd asked his PR manager, who was standing behind the camera. "Thought this was a joint interview?"

She'd given him a weird look. "He didn't tell you?"

Oscar shook his head.

"He asked to rearrange his schedule. He's going to do his part of the interview later, by himself."

Oscar had just hummed an acknowledgment in the moment, but on the inside, he was seething—a big, overwhelming emotion, white-hot with rage.

Unsurprisingly, the interview had not gone well. Oscar spent the whole fifteen minute time slot distracted, destabilized, fumbling his answers. He'd spoken quietly enough at points that the crew asked him to raise his voice.

And at some point after the interview, or maybe during it, the searing tidal wave of rage had retreated, and revealed what it was really covering up: the truth.

Oscar's sad, pathetic, ugly truth.

He was lonely.

He was lonely in the way he floated around the McLaren hub, tethered from flying away only by Kim, who was determined to get him where he needed to be on time. He was lonely in the way that in a group of mechanics, or a group of photographers, or a group of nineteen other drivers, everyone seemed to be having conversations around him, not with him. He was lonely in the way that the hotel hallways grew long and haunted, cobbled with glares and shouts and schedule changes, throwing him off balance every single night and every single morning on his way to or from the track.

And when, on Sunday night, Oscar was returning to his hotel room, and he was trying so hard to hold back the tears that threatened to fall with every step he took, it was loneliness in the form of anger at this goddamn triple header. It was loneliness by way of frustration at the highs and lows of the MCL60. It was—

It was Lando, emerging from the hotel room a few doors down from Oscar's. He'd left the track earlier, Oscar knew. When you finished on the podium, there tended to be less crap to deal with with the team, and the FIA, and the media, and you were awarded with a leniency to leave early.

He supposed that was how Lando was leaving again already. The man was dressed to the nines in a black button-up and slacks, silver necklaces adorning his collarbone, exposed by a scandalous amount of undone buttons. Somehow, he'd recovered his hair from both the race and a fast shower, and it looked perfect, too.

Oscar found himself frozen partway down the hall, unable to make his feet move any further. He didn't want to feel the sad, tired ache, where it was still lodged in his throat, whispering about how pretty Lando was, even now. He felt it anyways. It was beautiful, and it was terrible.

And when they came to cross paths in that hallway, he had half a mind to think that they would simply brush right past each other, heads down. Lando to his party, wherever it was, and Oscar to his hotel room, to mope in bed all evening. Again.

But Lando stopped. He stopped maybe two metres from Oscar, far enough to be close and close enough to be far. He stopped, and he looked Oscar in the eye, face-to-face for maybe the first time this weekend.

What was Lando seeing, Oscar wondered? He must have been seeing the tears in his eyes, because his usually impressive poker face wasn't strong enough right now to hide them. He must have been seeing Oscar's hair, messier than even it normally was, since he'd been pulling at it as a nervous habit all day. He must have been seeing what Lando always could see from Oscar, no matter how well he thought he was suppressing it: he must have been seeing that right now, Oscar was not okay.

For one, delicate, split-second, Oscar thought, maybe. He waited, and he looked at Lando, and Lando looked at him back. A drop of recognition in his face. A slight hunch of his shoulders. Just a tick more emotion; anything to show that maybe they still had something, that there was something there that they could save.

You alright?

Then Lando stepped forward. He stepped again, and again, until he reached Oscar, and he—

The split-second fell. It shattered, fractured instantly into a million microscopic glass shards, and spread itself through the entire length of the hallway. Oscar went with it.

And Lando went around him. Towards the elevator, towards his party, without saying a word.

Oscar made it back to his room, eventually. It didn't matter that he didn't know what time it was anymore. He just opened the door, entered, closed the door behind him, and then sat down on the floor, right there in the entryway.

No sooner had he sat down than the tears had started falling.

So Oscar Piastri sat on the floor, sobbing into his hands, and he let himself feel. He cried for all the things that he'd had, and all of the things that he'd lost, and all of the things that he knew he'd never have.

He cried because, above all, in that moment, he was really, truly, alone.

-

There were two weeks between Brazil and Las Vegas.

Functionally, there was a week and a half for Oscar to pull his shit together. He needed to do something before Vegas to lift himself out of his emotional spiral, or else the bad end to the season was about to be getting a lot worse.

So what, one could ask, did Oscar land on? What did he find himself doing, more than anything else, to cope with this situation? What worked?

Well.

He was talking to people.

Go figure, really.

But Oscar just talked to people, and it was working.

His mum, his sisters, Mark, Kim, Logan, Zhou, Arthur Leclerc, Fred Vesti—even some of his old mates from Australia and boarding school—were suddenly flooded with phone calls, texts, chats when they could grab a minute, and anything else he could think of. Sometimes the conversations were lighthearted: breathless laughter with Logan and Fred about their Prema days together, piled up in someone's London flat with FIFA or Mario Kart; Oscar ribbing Mark for some of the silly shit he had done during his F1 career, while Mark mumbled and grumbled when I was your age, I respected my manager, you know; a video call with his sisters where Hattie tried desperately to explain how a K-Pop group releasing a song called "Grand Prix" was clearly a targeted attack by Kep1er because they knew I was trying to resist buying concert tickets. How can I not go now when they're so relevant to my life personally? Oscar had just nodded along and made a mental note to google what the hell a "Kep1er" was.

Privately, though, these were the moments that he was thriving on right now, collecting them and drawing them close to his heart so that he had something to keep himself running straight.

He'd even been talking to Max F. more. True to his word, he'd reached out to Oscar independently, and they were keeping up a steady mix of banter and gossip about all things racing or otherwise. They also continued to discuss the Lando dilemma, by which Oscar discovered something that was probably common knowledge: having someone to connect with as a friend who also understood the struggles you were going through was shockingly cathartic. Max continued to let Oscar vent his emotions, and he wasn't judgmental, and he offered helpful advice, and it felt so good to speak honestly to someone that it made his heart swell in gratitude.

At some point, Oscar had even let slip the full extent of what had happened in Mexico. It was accidental, but Max had pounced on it before Oscar could cover it up.

"He said what to you?" Max had demanded over the phone. Oscar had cringed, then sighed, then quietly repeated the scathing words that had been thrown at him two weeks prior. Max had gone silent for a second, and Oscar had worried that he'd finally gone a step too far, that Max would accuse him of making things up or being dramatic. He was Lando's friend first, after all. Then Max had taken a deep breath, held it, and let it out slowly, controlled, somewhere between a sigh and an expression of restraint. "Fucking hell," he'd said. "I love the man, but his stupidity does me in sometimes. He's lucky we're in different continents right now or I'd go kick his arse."

Oscar had still felt bad about it, but couldn't deny the sense of vindication—or maybe just plain relief—he'd felt at Max coming to his defense. It made him feel supported, something that he'd been severely lacking in lately. It was a nice thing to feel.

Sometimes, though, the conversations he had got really serious, and that was still sort of new for Oscar.

Around the fifth time he called her in the week after Brazil, his mum picked up on it.

"Oscar, honey, I love that you're calling me more," she'd said, interrupting his long-winded ramble about how the supermarket by his London apartment hadn't been stocking their usual selection of Australian snacks. "Don't stop doing that, please. But it is... worrying me a little bit. Are you sure everything's alright over there?"

"Yeah, of course, mum," Oscar assured, though his heart skipped a beat. He shuffled further back into the wall in his bedroom he was sitting against, feeling the cool drywall pressed against his shoulder blades as an anchoring sensation. "Why would you think something's wrong?"

There was a pause, staticky in its silence, and Oscar could only imagine the wry, disapproving look his mum was sending his way. That made him more nervous than he would ever admit to. "Are you really asking me that right now?"

Oscar winced.

"Yeah, no." He would've otherwise been ashamed of how easily his resolve had crumbled, but he'd been too tired lately to really care. "Not my best defense ever."

"No, definitely not."

"Was it that easy to tell?" Oscar asked, thinking of who else might've noticed his struggles as of late. Mark, or maybe Kim, who both knew him very well. No one had mentioned it, at least.

"I'm your mother, honey. I can always tell."

And he couldn't argue with that. The part of Oscar that had gotten much more emotionally developed as of late nudged at him to say more—a bud of emotion, waiting and wanting to unfurl, telling him that this was his mum, that she was safe. She would understand and she would help him and he would feel better afterwards. But still, old habits died hard, and he couldn't help but push back a little bit.

"Listen, mum, you shouldn't worry about it. It's not—" he tried to say, before he suddenly had to stop, choking on the words not that important. Oscar coughed into his elbow and tried again to get the words out, but found that he was completely unable to. Because it actually was kind of important, wasn't it?

His mum graciously let him struggle for a minute before interrupting his attempts to speak with a heavy, drawn-out sigh.

"You know you don't have to talk to me about it if you don't want to," she said. "I know that's not really your style, and even if I'll never understand it, I'll respect it because I love you. But I hope you know that if you do want to talk about it, I'm here to listen, and I always will be. Just promise me you're taking care of yourself, alright?"

And that was so close to the exact thoughts that had been spiraling through Oscar's head for the past several race weekends, mounting and mounting into a crushing, nauseating weight on his chest, that he broke, right then and there, and told his mum everything.

He told her about his panic attack in Singapore. He told her about the clubbing incident in Japan. He told her all of the details that he hadn't told her before, when he hadn't wanted to worry her unnecessarily. He told her about the hot chocolate, about the banter, about the anxiety check-ins. He told her what Lando meant to him. He told her about Qatar, when he had started to get worried, and then about Austin, and Mexico, and how things had gotten ugly, and then Brazil, when Max had reached out. He told her that he had been feeling lonely, and that was why he was calling her. He told her that he didn't know what to do.

After it all poured out of him, Oscar realized that he was crying, again. He couldn't bring himself to care.

"Mum?" Oscar said, sniffling, when the silence on her end dragged on. Finally, it was broken by another sigh.

"You and that big heart of yours."

Despite everything, Oscar snorted out a wet laugh.

"Don't laugh at me, I'm serious," his mum chastised. "You like to pretend you're 'Mr. Stone-Cold,' or whatever, but I know you care a lot about things." She paused, then added, "Sometimes I even worry that you care too much."

Oscar processed the statement. "I don't think I would have agreed with that in the past," he said quietly. "But I think I understand what you mean now. I care a lot, and it hurts." He tilted his head back against the wall, blinking against a new wave of tears that threatened to fall. "It hurts, mum."

"Oh, honey." If Oscar didn't know better, he'd say his mum sounded teary too. "I'm so sorry you've been going through this all alone. I wish I could be there with you right now."

An older ache—something that had been inside of him since he was 14 years old, a child living by himself in a continent halfway across the world from home—sent out a sharp pang.

"I wish you were here too."

Oscar heard shuffling noises through the phone, and then his mum said, "I've got my arms out right now. I'm giving you a virtual hug, okay? Put your arms around yourself and feel my virtual hug."

Oscar sniffled, but smiled. He did what his mother instructed and imagined that he was back in Australia, standing in his childhood house, wrapped in his mum's warm embrace. In his imagination, the notes of her perfume and the smell of her cooking surrounded him, laying warmth and familiarity on his shoulders like a blanket. Through an open window, he could pick out the faint roaring of engines from cars on track at the Melbourne circuit. It was November, which meant late springtime, and the wind was getting hotter and drier in preparation for summer.

It felt like comfort. It felt like family. It felt like home.

"Thank you," Oscar said, still smiling, and he meant it. "I felt the hug."

"And I'll be giving you a ginormous, real hug when you come visit after Abu Dhabi, I hope you know," his mum threatened. "Maybe I'll even get your sisters to dog-pile you."

"Yeah, I'd rather not have that happen, actually."

His mum hummed a non-committal noise, and Oscar resigned himself to that definitely happening.

"Now I assume you'd also like some advice? Or was that all of the talking you're up for for today? Because that's fine too, we can talk later."

Settling himself back into serious-mode, Oscar sighed, using his free hand to fiddle with the hem of his shorts. This was what he was here for, but that didn't make it any easier to talk about. "No, I would like some advice, if you have it," he said.

A second passed, probably for his mum to gather her thoughts, and then she began.

"Listen, Oscar. I wasn't joking when I said I worry about you caring too much. I understand that you're very close with Lando, and you care about him very much, and I don't disapprove of that. Really, I think it's very sweet that you two have bonded like that." She paused to let that sink in. "But it sounds to me like he's causing you a lot of stress right now, stress that you don't deserve. At a certain point, his problems are his problems. He has no right to take it out on you."

She paused, and Oscar realized that she was waiting for a response. "Max basically told me the same thing," he said.

"Then Max is a smart young man." There was staticky silence again, but Oscar couldn't think of anything else to say. So his mum carried on, her voice dropping to a gentler tone. "You might not like me saying this, Oscar, but I don't think your relationship with Lando is a healthy one, at least not right now. It's not good to devote so much time and energy to a person who is giving you no effort in return." Oscar found a loose thread in his shorts and began pulling at it, undoing the careful stitching. "I'm not saying you have to start ignoring him, or being mean to him, but— you know the phrase, 'if you love something, set it free?'"

Oscar swallowed around a lump in his throat.

"Yeah."

"Maybe you should try it," she said, and the suggestion hit like shivering after jumping into a freezing pool, like a rubber band snapping once stretched too far. Like it was shocking, like it hurt; but also like it was inevitable. Almost, in a way, relieving. "As long as he's not an immediate threat to himself or others," his mum continued, "stop going out of your way for him, and see if he notices, see if he cares. If he does, and seeks you out about it, then you've solved your problem. If he doesn't... you start working towards acceptance. You learn that maybe you're better off without him."

Oscar closed his eyes, running the unraveled thread from his shorts through his fingertips. "I think you're probably right," he whispered. "But I don't want to accept it."

"I know, honey. But you can't just let someone make you feel bad about yourself like this, okay? You are a wonderful person with a big, kind heart, and you need to protect that, no matter what."

"Okay." Oscar took a shuddering breath in, and then out. "Okay. I think I can try that."

"Good," his mum said. "And please, keep me updated on this, alright? Don't put me in the dark about how you're feeling." She paused, then joked, "not even Pilates will help my blood pressure if I'm worrying about you any more than I already do."

"I won't. And thank you. For all of this, mum. For being here, and for listening. I love you."

"I love you too, Oscar."

Oscar took another deep breath, and though the weight wasn't off his chest, it felt lighter. Like maybe he was sharing the burden with people who cared, and through them, he wasn't so powerless, and he certainly wasn't alone.

For the first time since all of this had started, it felt like he actually knew what to do.

Oscar decided that he liked that feeling very much.

Chapter Text

They were in Las Vegas when Oscar found Lando's dinner in the bin.

It was completely accidental. He hadn’t meant to—really, he hadn’t. Nor had he expected to. It was just a series-of-unfortunate-events style masterclass; random, haphazard, and odd.

It was also probably the moment Oscar should have realized that Las Vegas was going to go to shit.

Hindsight was a bitch, wasn't it?

The weekend had managed to come out swinging, even before the dinner incident, with the whole track thing. The thing where Liberty Media's sparkly new pride-and-joy street circuit turned out to have loose drain covers, like, everywhere. The thing where Carlos had run over one of them at full speed and had broken his car in half, and then nearly broken himself in half too. The thing where now, after five whole minutes of running on a Thursday evening, all the drivers had to sit around waiting for fuck knows how long while the FIA tried to fix a problem they probably should have noticed months ago.

So yeah, maybe Las Vegas had been doomed from the start.

The thing was, though, that it had been going strangely in other ways, too. Namely, Lando-ways. Combining being at the MTC after Brazil and being in Vegas so far, Oscar could count on one hand the number of times he and Lando had talked to each other. They'd been... not cordial interactions, certainly. But not directly rude, either, which Oscar was unsure how he was supposed to feel about.

It was like Lando was maybe-sort-of-kind-of acknowledging his existence again. Five interactions, meaningful or not, was more than zero, which was what they'd been at for some time now. No, they still weren't talking outside of official means, or hanging out, or eating together, but did that really matter, in the grand scheme of things? Could he see this as a sign that things were getting better? Could he say to his mum, to Max: look, he's coming around again; can I go back to helping him now? Could he look his friends, his family, or even himself in the eye, wading through a sea of endless "hey"s and neutral glances, and tell them all that everything was okay?

No.

And that was what had changed. Oscar had realized what he'd maybe known the whole time. It was freeing, in a way.

He deserved more than a man who would barely talk to him.

So, he found every excuse to cling to his mum's advice instead. Whenever he felt tempted, which was often, he suppressed the urge to go out of his way, to confront Lando, to talk to him, to grab him by the shoulders and shake some sense into him or maybe tackle him into a hug. He sucked it up, and put on his best poker face whenever they were in a room together, and resolutely did not care.

If it was neutral Lando wanted, it was neutral he was damn well going to get.

Although maybe, because Oscar was nothing if not a little bit weak, he had still given Lando a birthday gift. It was a small bag of Kinder chocolates that he knew Lando liked, plus a stuffed animal goose—the kind that was weighted and scented, that you could put in the microwave to be like a heating pack. The goose was a pretty silly-looking guy, in Oscar's opinion, and he'd felt equally silly for buying it, but he'd chanced upon it online and made the purchase before he could really think it through. After a week straight of the goose staring holes into him every time he remembered it was in his apartment, he'd decided to sign the gift anonymously from a member of the team, and left it in Lando's driver's room on Wednesday. A few minutes later, he'd doubled back and let Jon know about it, because oh, god, that was going to look so creepy, wasn't it? Jon hadn't needed much convincing, luckily. The gift had been given and it hadn't come up with either Jon or Lando since.

So, no, Lando and Oscar weren't really talking to each other at the moment. That wasn't news.

But. At this point, it was going on hours since FP1 had been red-flagged. It was past midnight, there were still no updates, and everyone was getting either cranky or delirious or just plain weird.

Exhibit A: The mechanics were all yelling at each other over a game of hacky sack. It had been pretty funny to watch until they started trying to kick each other in a different kind of sack, and then Oscar, alongside all of the women in the vicinity, had promptly left.

Exhibit B: Andrea was drinking coffee to stay awake. Despite being Italian, he seemed to have a terrible tolerance for caffeine, so he was pacing the halls of the hospitality at rapid speeds, glaring at anyone who so much as looked at him the wrong way. Oscar would've been worried, but he'd heard that some of the PR managers were keeping tabs on him and waiting for the energy crash to hit so they could corner him and make him take a nap. Oscar could leave the worrying to them.

Exhibit C: The engineers were playing a massive game of UNO. He was pretty sure there were people from Ferrari, Mercedes, Aston Martin, and even the Vegas GP's event staff piled into a McLaren conference room with at least four decks of cards. Last time he'd looked, it had also appeared more like a street fight than a card game. He had not gone back to look again.

All in all: Oscar was tired. He was annoyed at the FIA, and he was groggy, and he was overwhelmingly desensitized to the extreme levels of nonsense happening around him.

He couldn't even muster the energy to be shocked when Lando texted him out of the blue.

scar

jon just gave me sanwich

bread chi eeee meet and May o

What do you want me to do
with this information mate

so bland

😟

you could ask for something else?

jon says no

"th kit cu end staff r tyred
and cant prpar anythin ggels rn"

Wow I can practically hear Jon's
voice like he's next to me

sad 😞

Too bleary to think critically about any of what had just been said (was that the first semi-positive interaction he'd had with Lando since Mexico?), Oscar had indeed gone directly back to sleep. Forty-five minutes later, though, he woke up again, hungry.

Begrudgingly, he asked Kim for his kitchen-assigned sandwich, and went down to the dining area to eat, which was deserted except for Andrea coming through to get more coffee. Before the man could even pick up his cup, one of the PR managers came sprinting in to redirect him.

"We managed to get him down for half an hour, but he's stubborn," she said to Oscar, exasperated, while basically pushing Andrea across the room. Andrea was crossing his arms and grumbling presumably unflattering things in Italian, but was too half-asleep to actually fight back. Internally, Oscar was trying really hard not to giggle at his boss being guided to nap time like a toddler. Externally, he just smiled and nodded.

They left, and Oscar ate his sandwich—unfortunately just as bland as advertised—and when he was done, he balled up the paper wrapping it came in and threw it away.

However, while he was leaning over the bin, there came the sensation of a slide of metal against his wrist. Oscar could only stand there, blinking sluggishly, as the clasp on his watch came undone, and the very expensive, sponsorship-mandated accessory he was wearing fell into the bin, disappearing into the pile of rubbish.

Bing-bang-boom, Bob's your uncle, that was the annoyingly long and tiring story of how Oscar had ended up here: elbows-deep into one of the hospitality's rubbish bins, staring at a whole uneaten sandwich with the letters "LN" scribbled onto its wrapping. If the ripped sticker barely holding it together was any indication, it had been opened, investigated, and then wrapped back up without a single bite taken.

But— that didn't make sense to Oscar.

There had been Lando, immediately swearing he was going to eat the sandwich after the smallest suggestion otherwise. Then Lando, warding Oscar firmly away from the dining area so he could be alone for his meal. And then Lando, apparently just tossing the sandwich without having eaten it at all, even though there was nothing else for him to eat. He'd claimed he was hungry, though, which really meant that all signs pointed to one conclusion, and that was that—

Oh, hell, no.

The thought burst suddenly through the fog that was weighing down Oscar's brain, stark in its determination and clarity.

I am not dealing with this right now. I simply can't.

And deal with it he did not. In fact, he stared at Lando's sandwich for a minute, gears turning in his brain. Then, silently, he put it back into the bin, and reached for the glint of silver he saw peeking out from under a yoghurt container. He rubbed the watch against his shirt, put it back on, stood up, and left.

Much later that night, when they all made it back to the hotel, the sun was rising, the birds were chirping, and Oscar was ninety-five percent certain he was having an out-of-body experience. Beyond his control, his fingers were twitching like they were still shifting gears. Multiple times, he reached up to his face, expecting to feel his helmet, and was shocked to touch his own skin instead.

In a way, it kind of felt like one of those clickbait YouTube videos targeted toward children: "DO NOT DRIVE IN FREE PRACTICE 2 AT 3 AM CHALLENGE (GONE WRONG) (FIA CALLED??)"

Oscar was feeling about as brain-dead as one of those videos, anyway.

And despite it all, despite his mother's advice, despite what he knew was good for himself, and despite "not dealing with this right now," he was still thinking about Lando.

Oscar wasn't oblivious. He could connect the dots. He knew what a thrown-away meal, refusal to be seen eating, and defensiveness about food implied. He knew personally what the mindset felt like, when you started losing yourself so deep into your performance that you thought about your body as fractions of kilogrammes instead. He even knew that there was a history among Formula One drivers. It was just... maybe it was a terrible thing to say, but it was harder to believe, now that it was someone close to him. Having to look it in the eyes, and confront that it was real, and tangible, and not just something you heard about from stories years later—Oscar just deeply, truly, didn't want to believe that it was happening. Not to his teammate. Not to Lando.

As long as he's not an immediate danger to himself, his mum had said.

Well, here they were. Maybe the danger wasn't immediate, but it was there. And, yeah, maybe this was a lot to be concluding from one interaction about a sandwich, but this was the kind of thing where it was so, so much better to be safe than it was to be sorry. Oscar couldn't live with himself if he ignored this.

I'll talk to Jon tomorrow, he decided abruptly. Just about sinking into the sofa in his hotel room, drunk in a delirious haze, it felt like a compromise of sorts. Either he already knows, and I can rest assured there's someone else with an eye on Lando, or he doesn't, and I'm giving a heads up to the person most qualified to help him. Either way, I'm helping from afar.

Yes, Oscar assured himself. This is a good plan.

I'll do it after the race.

-

Unfortunately for Oscar, the stars were determined not to align.

It was now, funnily enough, after the race, where Oscar had just pulled up his car into his favorite finishing position: P10. He was finding himself stuck between debriefing the race mentally, considering how he'd gone from running in P3 at one point to barely scoring one point, and cursing out the McLaren pit wall in his head—activities that were not unrelated.

On the inside, though, Oscar knew that he wasn't actually that frustrated about the race. The car was still iffy, Red Bull were still strong, and nothing except for some poor strategy calls had really been that shocking about it.

But there was still a strong sense of turmoil in his gut. It was tossing and turning like it had been since, oh, Lap 3; a rotten sort of feeling that made him nauseous, or almost guilty, like he'd done something wrong, even though he was pretty sure he hadn't. Maybe he was just getting food poisoning again, like he had in Baku, and it was affecting both his body and his mood. Somehow, it didn't seem likely.

When he stepped off the scale after being weighed, he couldn't help but heave out a tired sigh. Was it ungrateful of him to be wishing this hard that the season could just be over? That he could be free from all the chaos and drama for once? That he could simply go back to Australia, fall into his mum's embrace, and relax for a little while?

Oscar genuinely didn't know the answer.

Lost in thought, he tugged at the straps of his helmet until he could pull it off his head, and automatically directed himself toward the media pen. He had barely taken a few steps when a loud voice called out to him.

"Oscar!"

As vaguely snooty as it sounded to admit, someone yelling his name wouldn't always catch his attention these days. When you were around a horde of fans all screaming your name and vying for you to notice them more often than not, you kind of learned to tune some of it out.

However, something about this particular voice gave him pause. It was accented in a way that he didn't normally hear, but it was also definitely familiar—he just couldn't place it off the top of his head.

Curious, he turned in the direction the voice was coming from, unsure of what to expect.

"Oscar, wait," none other than Carlos Sainz panted out, and okay, yeah, that was a bit of a surprise. The man was jogging to meet Oscar's position, actively taking his helmet off, and his breath was heaving like he had only just gotten out of his car.

Oscar's gaze flickered to behind Carlos, where there was an FIA representative with a clipboard who looked about two seconds from joining their little gathering.

Shit, maybe he had just gotten out of the car.

"Hey, mate," Oscar said, a little bit awkward, when Carlos reached him. It wasn't like he disliked the man, even after their various on-track incidents. He just didn't strictly like him either. "Good race, yeah?"

Oscar had not a single clue where Carlos had finished. Luckily, it seemed to be the right thing to say.

"Thanks, you too." Carlos ruffled a hand through his hair, taking a deep breath. Oscar eyed him warily. Despite being red in the face and sweaty, he managed to put together a serious, worried look, all to ask Oscar, "Is Lando okay?"

And, ah.

The nauseous feeling in Oscar's gut rolled and twisted. Not food poisoning, then.

"How bad was the crash?" Carlos was asking. "Is he still in the hospital?"

But Oscar couldn't respond. He was back on the track, hands gripped tight on the wheel, feet pressed against the pedals. Like deja vu, except worse, because he had never actually left, really. He was seeing sparks in his side mirror. He heard a horrible metal screech, louder than even their engines, and had the sickening realization that he knew exactly which car was behind him. Tom's voice was in his ear, saying, "Safety car, Oscar, safety car. Lando has crashed." There was a medical car, and then a medical helicopter, and Oscar's blood froze to solid ice. He was terrified.

"Oscar?"

Oscar blinked, and noticed suddenly that his vision had gone a bit blurry. He blinked again, and again, until he was no longer on the track, in his car, but standing in the pit lane. Carlos was still standing in front of him, but now there was a concerned pinch in his brows. Oscar blinked a few more times until he found enough air in his lungs to speak.

"Sorry. I don't know."

He shrugged, turned back around, and resumed his walk to the media pen.

Out of his peripheral vision, he saw Carlos dart forward to start walking with him.

"Ay, but you must know something, no?" Carlos all but pleaded. "The team have not said? He has not contacted you?"

It was all Oscar wanted to do to ignore him and keep walking. That, or retort (how the fuck would he know if Lando had contacted him or not? Did he look like he had his phone on him?). Seriously, screw Carlos, screw Lando, and screw the tumultuous nausea in his gut.

But at the same time, he recognized the emotion that was saturating Carlos' voice. It was the fear, the anxiety, the desperation of a man who didn't know whether his teammate—no, one of his best friends—was alright. Oscar could pick it out in an instant, because what was it, really, if not his very own nausea reflected back at him? He and Carlos were more alike than either of them probably wanted to admit.

So, begrudgingly, he stopped walking, and he sighed.

"Look, Carlos," he said, glancing up at the other man, who stopped next to him, wide-eyed. "All the team said was that he got out of the car by himself, but he went to the hospital as a precaution because they were worried about his ribs. Besides that, I haven't heard anything, and I obviously haven't checked my phone yet, either." Unable to resist dipping into the pool of bitter frustration that seemed so easy to reach these days, he muttered under his breath: "Not like I'd be the first person he'd contact, anyway." Then, addressing Carlos directly again, he added, "So, no. Sorry."

Oscar really hoped he'd leave it at that, but Carlos opened his mouth, looking determined to probably argue with him, and he groaned internally.

Can't a guy just get to the media pen in peace?

Before Carlos could say anything, however, the FIA official Oscar had clocked earlier indeed came to approach them, tapping on Carlos' shoulder.

"Mr. Sainz? You have to get weighed," she said, pointing at her clipboard.

Carlos took on a constipated look, gaze shifting from the woman, to Oscar, and back.

"In one second," he told her. Then he took a step toward Oscar, and Oscar seriously considered the pros and cons of just running away.

The FIA official, his lord and savior at this point, prevented him from having to follow through.

"Mr. Sainz, this cannot wait. You have to get weighed."

"Yes, I know, and I will go in one minute—"

"You need to be there now—"

In the background of their arguing, Oscar began backing away slowly. If he could just make a stealthy, unseen exit, then he could get to the damn media pen and move on with his night.

"In one minute," Carlos was halfway to shouting. "Dios mío, there is one thing I have to say to this man, and then—" Carlos gestured towards Oscar, who was noticeably further away than he was before, and frowned. Well, shit. "Oscar, stop trying to leave," Carlos scolded. Then he turned back to the woman, and said, "Please. You can stand right here. This will take one minute, no more, and after this I will go with you. Okay?"

"Fine," the woman gritted out. Oscar got the idea that she was only agreeing because she didn't want to keep arguing with one of the twenty most notoriously stubborn people around.

"Oscar." Carlos turned to face him, a wild look in his eyes, and Oscar was immediately reminded of why he was considering running away. For a few seconds, he stood braced for an incoming argument. However, none came. Instead, Carlos' expression turned inexplicably softer, almost concerned, and he took a step to close the distance between them, placing a hand on Oscar's shoulder. When he spoke, his voice was softer, too, and now Oscar was just plain confused. "Are you okay?" Carlos asked. "You have seemed— different, these past few races. And not in a good way."

Oscar's heart skipped a beat.

What?

"Gee, thanks," he tried to retort, hoping the dry humour would cover up the panic bubbling up inside him. "I'll let my barber know he messed up."

However, Carlos looked unconvinced.

With the hand he had on Oscar's shoulder, he squeezed lightly. "That is not what I mean and you know it."

"Uh." Oscar was so caught off guard, frozen and exposed, that he actually almost told the truth.

I don't know if I'm okay right now. I don't know if Lando is okay right now, and that scares me. And, oh, yeah, I've been stuck in a month-long fight with one of your best mates, and he won't talk to me, and I think it might be almost entirely his fault so I stopped talking to him back, but now he might be horribly injured and we’ve left things on such a bad note that suddenly I feel guilty for cutting him off even though I know I carry absolutely no blame in him crashing? Cheers, mate, have fun talking to the media now.

Luckily, he was able to reign in control of himself before he said any of it. There was a time and place to let this stuff out, and by god, it was not in the F1 pit lane, in front of Carlos Sainz, or with an FIA official glaring daggers at them.

So, he pointedly stepped away from Carlos' hand and cleared his throat.

"It's nothing," he said, putting on his best polite smile. He also realized instantly how bad of a lie that was, so he averted his eyes, and added, "I mean, it's something. But I won't be having to deal with it soon, if everything works out. So don't worry about it."

When he looked back up, Carlos was pulling another constipated I want to argue with you face, so Oscar just tilted his head toward the FIA official.

"Think she might murder you if this goes any longer, mate." He spoke louder than before, hoping to signal to her that the conversation was over. "See you next weekend."

And like the pissed, grouchy savior she was, the woman took the hint and came over, physically herding Carlos toward a scale.

Oscar seized the opportunity with open arms.

Thank fuck that conversation is over, he thought, turning on his heel to start power-walking to the media pen. As he went, though, he caught one last glimpse of Carlos' face: troubled, frowning, and with some sort of open worry on it that reminded him of Max, of his mum, and of Lando as the way things used to be between them.

He again felt the tug of nausea in his gut, for one reason, and then for another, and he resolutely ignored both of them.

Oscar just kept on walking.

-

Lando had been at the post-race debrief.

It was a fact that was impossible to ignore. They'd been halfway or so through the meeting, discussing the brake balance of the car, when the door behind Oscar had opened and a collective cheer had erupted across the room. He hadn't even needed to turn around to know who it was. He had turned anyway, maybe because he needed the confirmation that he was actually, physically there.

Lando had, in truth, looked only semi-there—drowning in Jon's ginormous coat and smiling dopily at the team members who patted him on the back on his way to a chair. Upon sitting down, he'd spent about five minutes poorly pretending to be listening, then had fallen asleep slumped forward in his chair. Oscar got the feeling that prescription drugs were involved.

Still, high or not, it was a relieving scene. Oscar didn't exactly have the courage to approach Lando right now, much less ask the man himself how he was feeling, but the sight of him alone tided over his concern enough that he got back to the hotel feeling okay-ish.

Yes, the weekend had drained the shit out of him. Yes, his brain was full of fog and cotton. Yes, he wanted nothing more than to sleep for 14 hours straight and forget about Las Vegas entirely. But there was also this sort of quiet confidence in him that when he could do just that—have a few hours of peace and sleep—he would be able to forget about Vegas. It was a weird thing, having trust that his anxiety would leave him alone in that regard. But a good thing, too. Definitely a good thing.

He was getting ready to enact this plan when it immediately hit a roadblock. Just as he finished brushing his teeth, a series of sharp knocks sounded at the door to his hotel room.

Sighing, Oscar made his way across the room. He hoped that whatever this was, the interaction would be short. He turned the door handle, pulled it open, looked up, and—

"Jon?"

"Oscar," Jon replied. There was an upturned tick to the word, like he was surprised that Oscar had answered the door. Oscar was a little astonished himself, considering it was past 2 in the morning.

A few seconds came and went. Oscar waited for Jon to say something else, maybe explain his presence, but only silence filled the gap between them. Jon was just sort of looking at Oscar with an expression that he couldn't parse—exhaustion? Apprehension? Dread? Whatever it was, it was weird enough to bring back the concern he thought he'd done away with.

"Uh. Can I help you, mate?" Oscar asked when the silence became physically painful. He pointed a thumb back over his shoulder and glanced to the side. "I was just about to head to bed, so…"

Luckily, that seemed to kick Jon back into gear.

"Yeah," he said, clearing his throat. He shifted his posture to be less rigid, crossing his arms across his chest. "Yes, sorry. I know it's late. And I hate to ask you this, really, I do, but I need you to come with me."

A wave of confusion broke through Oscar's brain fog.

"What? Why?" he asked.

Jon sighed, a long, dragging thing. Some of that same exhaustion-apprehension-dread that Oscar couldn't read flashed across his face, and Oscar had about half a second to be really concerned before Jon opened his mouth and said, "I'm not going to bullshit you, mate. Can you come talk to Lando for me?"

If Oscar knew something about himself, it was that he didn't snap at people. He had learned the depths of how he could get mad, how he could get frustrated, how he could get scared, but he knew that he didn't lash out about it, even if he wanted to. That last little bit of energy that pushed you over the edge just wasn't in his personality. But some way, somehow, those words from Jon were like a lit match. Tiny, sparking, they were thrown into his body, catching on the tiredness and the lingering guilt and the oxygen already burning in his lungs. Barely a moment could pass before some kind of stowed rage flared up out of him, so bright and hot he swore he could see orange flickers on the edge of his vision.

"No," Oscar spat. Jon visibly recoiled at the poison in his voice, eyes wide. "Why is everyone and their mother— no. You fucking talk to him."

"Wait, Oscar, just listen—" Jon tried to reason, holding out a hand. Oscar felt no remorse interrupting him.

"I am not talking to him right now."

"He wants to see you—"

"Really?" Any other time, Oscar would have applauded himself for how much emotion his usually dry tone was able to pack into one word. It was hurt, and sarcastic, and mean, and all the other feelings the media loved to say he didn’t have. "Now he wants to see me, and he can't even tell me himself? He has to send you?"

Jon paused, caught out. "Oscar, that's not— yes, he wants to see you, but—"

"Too bad. I'm going to sleep." Fuming, Oscar began to shut his door, but Jon sprang forward, grabbing onto the edge of the wood.

"Wait, listen! Just hang on for a second, mate, and listen, that's all I ask. Please."

They locked eyes. The tension hung in the air. It was a standoff.

A beat passed in silence.

Oscar considered it. If he really wanted to, he could slam this door shut. Jon was too smart to play that game of chicken—he would pull his hand out of the way if he thought Oscar was determined enough. At the same time—

Oh, god.

The thought pushed through the fire in Oscar's body, steady like a stream of water, dousing some of the sparks and heat. With it came a stark moment of clarity. He wasn't actually mad at Jon, was he? It was just the same damn anger as with Carlos earlier, and with Max in Brazil, where he hadn’t actually been mad at them, either. No, what he was really mad at… he was mad at the responsibility. He was mad that he'd spent so long trying, and then as soon as he made the choice to turn away, everyone suddenly turned to him. Why was this Oscar's responsibility? Why was this his burden to carry? Was everyone truly so lazy, or incapable of their own agency, that they saw Lando and could think of nothing more than to ask Oscar to help, to take over, to fix their broken man for them?

No. That was unfair. Jon was better than that, and Max even more so. Loath to admit it, Carlos was better than that as well. None of these people were acting maliciously; they were struggling too, in their own ways, looking for solutions where they were difficult to find.

Oscar sighed.

He was mad at many, many things right now. And maybe he was mad at Jon as a symbol—at what he represented. But Jon the person didn't deserve Oscar's rage.

"Okay," Oscar conceded. The fire hissed and spit, slowly burning out. He held the door not wide open, but just open enough to extend an olive branch. "I'm listening."

Jon took his hand back from the door. With it, his shoulders slumped, and he shot Oscar a tired, grateful look.

"Thanks."

Oscar shrugged. Jon seemed to take it as invitation enough.

"Can I come in?" he asked. Probably immediately realising that Oscar wouldn't be receptive to that request, he moved to justify himself. "This isn't a conversation for the hallway. By team rules, it's technically confidential information."

Recognizing that Jon was being serious, Oscar tried to stomp out the rest of the fires' coals. In his mind's eye, he watched the stray embers dancing away on the wind, and imagined his anger flying with them, delicate and fleeting. He stepped back from the door and let Jon come in.

"Sure."

After an awkward moment where Oscar remembered how disastrously messy his room was, then decided to pretend that it simply wasn't, they ended up sitting with Oscar on the sofa and Jon in an adjacent armchair—close enough to talk, but not too close.

Much appreciated by Oscar, Jon didn't beat around the bush. He just launched straight into his explanation.

"Right. So, Lando is... on some really, really strong painkillers right now. Like we told the team, the hospital verified that there's no underlying injuries, which is well and good, but the bruising is bad. He was in a lot of pain the whole way there, so they hopped him up for comfort's sake." Oscar nodded along. So, yes, Lando had very much been high. Oscar also chose this moment to feed information to the part of his heart where the remaining guilt had been coming from. Hearing from another direct source that Lando was fine, if a bit banged up, was a considerable relief. "Now, on paper," Jon continued, "he's on fairly standard injury meds. But, as far as my records go, he's never had this specific kind before, and something about them is really messing with his head. He's like— an overenthusiastic adult-sized toddler who won't stop telling me things he shouldn't be telling me." Jon's expression faltered into something half-embarrassed, half-exasperated, and he lowered his voice. "I don't think he's aware of half the world around him right now, much less what he's saying, but I really don't need to be hearing about his teenage hookups."

"Okay," Oscar said, forcing himself to remain neutral. "What does any of that have to do with me?"

Jon dragged a hand down his face, leaning heavily on one arm of his chair.

"That's the other thing. No matter what I do, he won't stop asking for you." He pitched his voice up. "'Jon, where's Oscar? Can you go get Oscar for me? I want Oscar to be keeping me company!'" Oscar grimaced at the impression, to which Jon said, pointedly: "I'm not exaggerating at all. But, problem is, what I really need him to be doing, instead of any of this, is resting. He needs to go to sleep. If I could have you talking to him, even just for a couple of minutes, I think it might actually calm down the hyperactivity long enough that he'll fall asleep on his own merit."

Oscar stepped back to think for a second. This was going to end up being another compromise, wasn't it? Pros versus cons, heart versus mind, what he wanted versus what he needed. Just like the birthday gift.

Of course he wanted to talk to Lando. He'd spent three damn race weekends wanting to talk to Lando. That didn't mean it was what he needed. What if seeing him—really, seeing him, again—made things worse? What if he broke down? What if he had a panic attack? Worse, what if— what if Oscar apologized? What if he let himself be walked over, or let himself be the aggressor?

He didn't think he could ever look his mum in the eye again if that happened.

Plus, beyond that, Jon had said Lando wasn't even lucid right now. Maybe that should have been comforting, somehow, but it wasn't. It was terrifying. If he did this, if he worked up the courage, if he talked to Lando, and it wasn't even really talking to him, just some hopped-up, crazy version of him, then what was the point? Doing this would achieve nothing.

But oh, if there wasn't this little voice in Oscar's heart.

Oscar knew in his mind that being in Lando's sphere right now wasn't what he needed. But he hadn't removed himself from it entirely in the first place, had he? There was some part of him that was stuck there, no matter what he did, no matter what he tried. With time, he could probably cut the ties, learn to live with that part gone. But the absence would remain, stark and unmistakable. Maybe that was just what loving someone meant. It meant that they stuck with you, in a way, even when you were letting them go.

Even when it was what you needed.

Oscar met Jon's eye.

"I don't know... if I can," he forced out. It wasn't a refusal, or a deflection, or a statement in anger like before—it was a confession. I'm scared. I don't know if I'm strong enough. I'm stuck in a compromise and I don't know how to find a way out. He hoped that Jon would hear the words that he didn't want to say.

"I know, mate." Jon's tone dropped, softer, and he leaned forward to place a careful hand on Oscar's shoulder, and Oscar knew the message had been received. "I'll admit, I still don't understand everything that's going on between you two, but I get enough to know what I'm asking of you is unfair. I know, and I appreciate that. Just—" Jon took a second to glance up, then to the side, considering his words. "Think about it this way, for a minute. Being on painkillers this strong is kind of like being blackout drunk, right?" He waited for Oscar to nod, then continued. "There's about a 95% chance he's not going to remember any of this when he's sober again. He won't know that he was asking for you, he won't know that you went to talk to him. It'll be like nothing ever happened at all."

Oh.

Huh.

Wasn't that a funny point?

"What about the other 5% chance?" Oscar made himself say, maybe because he was actually concerned, maybe because he didn't want to admit so easily that Jon was right. It felt almost anticlimactic to have his argument torn through so fast.

"I'll convince him you were a dream," Jon countered, not missing a beat. "It will not be hard. Trust me."

There wasn't really a case he could make against this, was there? It was as close to a win-win as they were going to get. The best of both worlds. This was the compromise, and maybe— maybe it wasn't so bad. Maybe it could all turn out alright, for once. Maybe this was something he could live with.

"Yeah." Oscar said, voice quiet. "Okay. I'll do it."

Jon smiled. "Thank you, Oscar. Really, I mean that." Oscar just nodded, unsure what to do with the gratitude. "We're just down the other side of the elevators, to the right. Room 821. Take a few minutes, yeah? Be there at, say—" Jon removed his hand from Oscar's shoulder and glanced down at his watch. "2:45? Is fifteen enough?"

On the surface, Jon could have been talking about the fact that Oscar was clearly dressed to go to bed, not at all presentable to leave the room at the moment. But there was a significant look in his eye, and a careful emphasis on the question. The pyjamas weren't why he was asking.

"Yeah," Oscar said, staring at a blank spot on the wall above Jon's head. One hand moved down to lightly squeeze the sofa cushion underneath him, and he grounded himself in the soft give of the fabric. "Fifteen's alright."

Jon nodded. "Good." Oscar kind of expected that to be that, but Jon made no movement to get up yet. In fact, as Oscar glanced back at him, he sort of deflated into a slouch, dragging his hands over his face once more. "God," he sighed. Suddenly and awkwardly, Oscar was struck by the thought that however long and arduous this all had been for him, it had been a long day, a long weekend, a long season for Jon, too. If he hadn't felt bad about snapping before, the guilt was certainly piling up now. He’d have to find time to apologize, at some point.

"It's a blessing, in a way," Jon was saying, in the meantime. "And I don't mean the crash itself, obviously," he hurried to justify when Oscar raised a brow. "I mean the fact that this is forcing him to rest. He's never had the greatest sleep schedule, even as long as I've known him." Yes, Oscar had seen enough of Lando sleeping on his sofa, in the MTC, or face down on a table next to a plate of food to have gathered that. "Just something about him. But it's been even worse, lately, and there's not much I can do about it that he'll listen to." Jon's voice dropped off at the end, muttering like he was talking to himself. "It's like he doesn't even want to sleep, sometimes." Looking back at Oscar, he added, "Don't keep him up for too long if you can help it? God knows he needs this rest after the race he's had."

“Yeah,” Oscar agreed. "Of course." In the back of his mind, though, he was poring over the information he'd just been told. Why was something about it nagging at his brain?

Even worse lately…

Doesn't even want to sleep…

After the race…

Like a flashbang, Oscar remembered.

"Jon," he said, cutting off what was probably going to end up being the other man saying goodnight. Luckily, Jon seemed to take no offense.

"Yeah?"

Oscar’s eyes flickered to the side, and he picked at the thread of his shorts, considering how best to phrase what he wanted to say.

"This is going to sound like a weird question," he started. Jon hummed inquisitively. "Has Lando been... eating, lately? You don't have to tell me any details, of course, it's not my business—but I do have a reason I'm asking."

Jon looked visibly taken aback. He seemed to take a minute to process the question, and as he did, his face gradually scrunched up into a pained sort of grimace. Oscar also saw the exact moment he realized what he was doing, and schooled the expression into something more impartial, but Oscar had already gotten the answer he needed. Probably realizing this, Jon gave in.

"Lando is eating… not as much as he thinks I think he is," he said, carefully choosing his words. "What's your reason?"

Oscar did his best to recount the story with the sandwich.

"Ah, god. Yeah, that sounds about right," Jon mused when he was done. He was just sitting there, nodding like he wasn't surprised by the story at all, and bile rose in Oscar's throat. For the second time since the race, an overwhelming nausea threatened him, not at all helped when Jon let out a short, sharp little laugh. "I'm doing a right shit job these days, aren't I?"

And suddenly Oscar had two reasons to be concerned. The nausea continued to roll and twist. Did he need to tell someone about that? Who did he even go to to report his teammate's physio making self-deprecating comments? Would that be some sort of breach of professionalism within the team? Would anyone even care? Most of all, how the hell did Oscar keep finding himself in all of these hyper-specific, ridiculous situations?

It was a good thing, then, that Jon seemed to notice that Oscar was spiraling. He waved a hand in the air in front of Oscar's face until he had his attention, and then leaned deliberately forward.

"Hey. I'm alright, mate," he assured. "Just a bit of humour to cope. Probably not the time or place. Sorry about that. Really, if there's one thing I can promise you here, it's that this isn't your problem; and I mean both me and the food thing." Jon slowed down his speech, maintaining direct eye contact as he emphasized, "This is my job. It's an ongoing process with its ups and its downs, and it always will be. Nothing to do about it except push through." Then, the ghost of an ironic little grin appeared on Jon's face. "Forever forward, right?"

Despite himself, Oscar couldn't hold back a little chuckle at the reference to the McLaren motto.

"Forever forward," Oscar agreed, grateful for the feeling of at least one weight lifting off of his shoulders.

"Thanks for telling me anyway," Jon continued. "I've got my eye on it, but it's nice to know I'm not the only one paying attention."

He shot Oscar a small smile, one that was amicable and reassuring. Oscar shrugged, and gave a small smile back.

"Yeah. No problem."

With that, Jon finally bid his farewell and left the room, leaving Oscar to his thoughts. As soon as the door closed behind him, Oscar heaved out a huge breath, burying his face in his hands. What had happened to "peace and sleep?" Everything felt so complicated right now. Relief, fear, gratitude, nausea, a tentative hope. Exhaustion. Apprehension. Dread. Maybe he had gotten a better read on Jon than he realized.

The thought of sorting through all of those feelings tonight sounded miserable. So, instead, he switched gears and created a mental checklist. Change clothes. Put on shoes. Grab phone. Broken down into little steps like that, the task ahead of him seemed that tiny bit more surmountable.

He had no belief that this would be easy. In fact, he very much believed the opposite. But, hey, when he thought about it, and thought about himself, and thought about everything he'd ever done in his life—Oscar was a Formula One driver, wasn't he?

When had he ever done easy?

-

Pretend he's someone else, pretend he's someone else, pretend he's someone else.

That was what Oscar had settled on. He was chanting the mantra to himself the entire way down the hallway. He was chanting it when he met up with Jon outside Lando's door, and while Jon gave him a spare room card and said he'd be two rooms down if Oscar needed him. He didn't want to be present himself, claiming that he was worried it would just distract Lando more. Oscar didn't know if that was sound logic at all, but whatever.

He was especially chanting the mantra now—frozen in the hall, feet feeling glued to the carpet. He was completely unable to make himself move.

It was stupid, really. How something as simple as opening a door could be so daunting.

If he could only pretend there was someone else behind that door.

The mantra, no matter how much he repeated it, was still landing on shaky foundations, seizing his nerves, his bones, his brain with ice. Oscar had to force his thoughts to unfreeze, and then force them a bit more to try to logic his way out of this. Eventually, he hit something he could work with. He just had to remember: the worst-case-scenario here was not that bad. If Lando said some embarrassing shit, he wouldn't remember that he said it. If Oscar had an absolute nervous breakdown, Lando wouldn't remember that either. There was no path here that ended on a net-negative for either of them. This could only go neutral at worst.

Using the momentum sparked by that reassurance, Oscar crushed the ice in his bones. He moved before he had the chance to talk himself out of it, scanned the keycard he'd been given and pushed the door open, almost jumping into the little entryway area.

This can only go neutral at worst, he told himself.

Pretend he's someone else.

"Jooooonnn," came a drawn-out, pitchy whine from further into the room. "I told you I want Osssscar. If that's not him then I'll cry."

Okay, nope. Nope, nope, nope. Immediately this wasn't going to work. There was no mistaking it, no pretending—that was Lando, through and through. As that realization set in, panic came with it. He couldn't do this. The worst case scenario was actually that bad. He was going to turn right back around, march out that door, and then… what?

Silently go back to his room, leaving Jon hanging even though he'd verbally agreed to help? Lie when confronted about it? Or tell the truth, saying that he simply wimped out?

No, he couldn't avoid this now. It wouldn't be right. But how the fuck was he going to make it through with his sanity intact? He still felt halfway on the edge of an anxiety attack, and that feeling wouldn't just go away if he ignored it.

Pretend he's a child, his brain supplied. Yeah, okay, that was easier, that was plausible. Jon had said Lando was like an adult-sized toddler right now, anyway.

Sparing just a moment to internalize that new mantra, Oscar took a deep breath, plastered on a grin, and stepped past the entryway into view of the rest of the room.

"Hey, Lando."

"Oscar!" When Oscar entered, Lando had been sprawled out on top of his bed, cushioned by a mountain of pillows. However, as soon as he saw Oscar, he shot up, seemingly uncaring of how much he was struggling to achieve the simple movement. "You're here!" he exclaimed, a beaming smile on his face. The smile forced his eyes into a squint, crinkling happily at the corners, and his ruffled hair and giant hoodie completed the look.

Oscar's heart panged. When was the last time he'd seen Lando look so soft? When was the last time Lando had looked happy to see him?

He willed his grin not to falter, thought child, and shoved his hands into the pocket of his own hoodie. He stepped up closer to the bed.

"Indeed I am," he confirmed. "How are you feeling, then? Not too shaken up?"

"Mmmm, my bones hurt." Lando had managed to settle himself into a cross-legged pose. Every few seconds, he would sag forwards, then apparently remember that that made his bruises hurt, and then straighten back up. Against his will, Oscar found it rather cute. "Was fine, though, 'n then Jon came and brought the magic beans. Now I feel all spinny."

"Magic beans, huh?" Oscar asked, deciding to humour him.

"Uh huh." Lando narrowed his eyes and glanced around, then whispered conspiratorially, "They came in an orange bottle."

"Wow. Sounds pretty magical to me."

"Y'wanna know something, Osc?" Lando said, loudly, without prompting. Briefly, Oscar remembered what Jon had said about Lando's hookup stories, and hoped very fiercely that he wasn't about to be subjected to that. He didn't need to be kicked while he was down, thank you very much. Lando didn't wait for any acknowledgement before rambling on, "I don't even like orange that much. S'what I've been wearing for..." Lando scrunched his face up, clearly trying to think and not quite connecting the circuit. "A whole buncha years. And it's not that nice. Doesn't look great on me."

"Really?" Oscar inquired, mostly just relieved. "And what color would you rather wear?"

"Blue." Oscar's only response was raising an eyebrow, but Lando's eyes shot wide open and he reached up a hand to slap it over Oscar's mouth. Except, Lando's motor skills were clearly not the greatest right now, so he kind of just smacked Oscar in the jaw and left the hand there. "Shhhhh," he said. "Don't tell Max."

"I won't," Oscar assured. Then, he cringed, as Lando's hand started limply falling and scratching down the side of his neck. He reached up to seize the hand and put it back to rest on Lando's lap, giving it a little pat for good measure. "You can have that back, mate, thank you."

"Looks good on you, though," Lando drawled, apparently deciding he wanted to lie down again. He settled back onto his mountain of pillows.

And for one earth-shattering, split second, Oscar was certain that Lando meant that his hand looked good on Oscar.

"What?" he choked out, forgetting his act.

"Orange. It suits you. Makes you look goooood."

"Ah. I see." Oscar's impending mental breakdown, while still happening (what did goooood mean?), lessened slightly. "Thanks, I guess?" he questioned.

Lando, meanwhile, just closed his eyes, oblivious to Oscar's turmoil.

Oscar stood by the bed for a few seconds, questioning his life decisions. Lando had obviously just pivoted from hyper-high to sleepy-high, which was hopefully a good thing. If the world was working in Oscar's favor, Jon was right, Lando would stay sleepy, Oscar just had to babysit him for a little while, and he could get out of here sooner rather than later.

With nothing else to do, Oscar decided to perch on the corner of Lando's bed. He took the silence as an opportunity to gaze around the room. As usual, Lando had kept his space a weird mixture of messy and not messy (not that Oscar would ever admit it, but Lando was a lot neater than him sometimes). His clothes were all in his suitcase, but the suitcase was upside-down on a chair. There was no food lying around, but there were at least five empty water bottles that Oscar could see. His backpack was randomly in the middle of the floor, but nothing was spilling out of it or anything, except for—

Oscar squinted. There was a suspicious shape in the exterior pocket of Lando's backpack. He obviously wasn't going to look through the other man's bag without permission, but he did suddenly have a burning question on his mind. The gears turned in his head, weighing the different factors against each other. With Mr. Oversharing in the room with him, it was the perfect opportunity…

Maybe it wasn't the best ethics to be asking someone questions when you knew they were high as shit and unlikely to lie. But it wasn't like Oscar was going to ask anything actually serious. It was just a bit of silly fun, to keep himself sane.

"Hey, Lando," he called out to the man next to him. Lando hummed, the only sign that he wasn't asleep. "Do you really not bring headphones to race weekends?" Oscar was pretty sure he knew the answer to this already, of course. The shape of headphones was distinctive, even through the fabric of a bag.

"No, I do," came the immediate response, nonchalant.

Oscar couldn't hold back a scoff, a little amused, a little offended. "Then why do you play music loud enough for the whole team to hear?"

"To annoy you."

Oscar would swear up and down that, in that moment, there was a small turn to Lando's lips, a goddamned knowing smirk.

He sighed. "Of course you do."

On the plus side, though, that had confirmed his theory. Lando was just answering things right now. Hm. What else would be fun to ask?

"Where do you go in between practice sessions when no one can find you?" he settled on. After Austin, Oscar had a sneaking suspicion that he knew the answer to this question, too, but he figured it was worth an ask.

"Staff-only rooms," Lando replied, just as easily. "There's always 'least one that's not locked. But no one ever looks there cause they 'read signs' and take them serious. Signs are stupid."

"I see." Oscar suddenly had an idea. He shuffled over on the bed and leaned in close over Lando, dropping his voice to a whisper. "Lando... do you like fish?"

Lando had an immediate reaction.

"Ewwww, no, fish is groooooss," he whined, curling up on his pillows like the thought was causing him physical pain. "People who eat fish are stupid."

Well. So much for that theory.

"Wha' happened in the race?" Lando asked, blinking up at Oscar, uncurling like nothing had happened at all. It was genuinely impressive how quickly his brain moved from one topic to another. "They told me, but... I forget."

"Ah, well." Oscar found himself actually having to think about that. The details had all been a little lost on him throughout the night. "Max won, no surprise there. Charles passed Checo on the last lap for second, so that was the podium. The rest of the order I'm not so sure on, but a couple people DNFed."

"Like me!" Lando cheered, a stupidly endearing grin on his face. Despite himself, Oscar couldn't hold back a little grin in response. A genuine one, this time.

"Yes, like you. Although not quite so dramatically, I think."

"And you..." Lando trailed off. Oscar grimaced just a tiny bit at the reminder.

"I finished tenth."

"No," Lando protested, smile gone, his expression scrunching up into what was probably supposed to be extreme concentration. Oscar cocked his head, unsure of what Lando was trying to get at here. He had, indeed, finished tenth. "You... you were 'n front of me when I crashed," he slowly sounded out. "I went all slide-y. I nearly hit you."

Oh. Believe it or not, Oscar had kind of forgotten about that. Yeah, he'd seen the replay of it, and it had actually looked rather dramatic. If Lando had been tailing any closer behind him when he slid out, there was a good chance he would have taken Oscar with him to a double DNF. But it had just seemed like such a minute, unimportant detail in the grand scheme of the weekend. Not something worth dwelling on at all. Apparently, Lando had dwelled.

"Yeah, good thing you didn't, I guess," Oscar said, aiming for joking reassurance.

If anything, though, that only seemed to agitate Lando even further. He started struggling to sit up again, reaching forward and grabbing onto Oscar's hoodie with a surprising strength. Oscar couldn't tell whether he was trying to use him as leverage to get up or drag him closer to examine him for injuries. It seemed to be the latter as his hands scrambled down to the hem of Oscar's hoodie, attempting to lift it up from an awkward angle. Briefly, Oscar was too stunned to do anything.

"I could've hurt you." Lando's voice sounded genuinely panicked, his eyes wide and vulnerable. He fought with the hem even more. "You're not hurt, right? You're okay?"

Oscar frowned, coming back to himself. He placed a firm hand on top of Lando's to stop his movement.

"Yes, Lando, I'm okay," Oscar emphasized. He gently nudged Lando's hands to get them out of the way, then pulled up his hoodie himself, just enough to show his unbruised stomach. Any other time, he would've been having a heart attack about exposing himself in front of Lando like this. Right now, it just seemed like a necessary measure. "Look, see? I'm fine. You didn't hit me."

Oscar watched as Lando's eyes raked over his stomach. He didn't look entirely satisfied, still, but it was apparently enough for him to drop the subject. In place of the panic, he deflated into a new demeanor. Oscar could only think to describe this emotional state as "droopy." He was sitting there cross-legged again, slouched over like an under-watered plant—his bruises must not have hurt as much anymore, or else he was just ignoring the pain. He looked wilted, and sad, and his eyes were grey and misty like he was maybe about to cry.

Oscar was just sort of dumbfounded.

What had changed? How had they gone from sleepy-high to panicked-high to emotional-high in about two seconds, and how in the world did they get back? He wouldn't feel content at all if he left Lando here like this.

Oscar was brainstorming ideas when Lando's voice cut into his awareness.

"Osc?" Lando asked. He was looking down at his lap, his tone quiet and wavering, and uh oh, was Lando about to cry? There was a long moment's pause where Oscar tried to get a read on the situation. He couldn't come to any conclusions before Lando spoke again, just as quiet. "I've been a shit friend, haven't I?"

And Oscar just froze.

"Um," he managed to half-stammer out.

"S'true." Lando sniffled. "I've been awful to you, and you haven't done anything back."

"Lando—"

"I'm sorry."

"I think I should leave," Oscar said, jarring in its loudness. Both of them stopped moving; Lando, hunched over but looking up at him with open confusion, and Oscar, rigid in something that he vaguely recognized as terror. His nerves were seized by panic. His heartbeat was pounding in his ears.

"What?" Lando asked, the word so quiet, so airy that Oscar could barely hear his voice crack on it. "Why? I'm trying to... 'pologize."

"You—" Oscar tried to say. He realized that he had no words to come after it. His logic, his emotions, everything that he had thought about tonight prior to now, escaped him. Never, in all of his considerations, had he thought about the possibility of this.

Searching desperately for something to say, he grasped at Jon's words from earlier.

"You don't know what you're saying right now, Lando. You are... really high. You probably won't even remember us talking about this by tomorrow morning." Halfway through saying it, some of Oscar's wits came back about him, and he realized that he was on the right track. The whole being-high-thing was actually why he was so uncomfortable. This wasn't just silly questions anymore—this was serious, personal shit that Lando didn't understand the implications of. Oscar had no business hearing it. "I'm not gonna take advantage of you like that," he added.

Unsurprisingly, Lando looked like the nuances of this had flown right over his head. "But I wanna apologize," he repeated, eyes still glossy and wide. Oscar swallowed heavily. Maybe this stance was a selfish one, too. He didn't think he could live with hearing an apology that Lando might not 100% mean.

"And if that's really how you feel, I'm glad," Oscar assured, lifting a hand. He was too chicken to actually touch Lando, but the gesture still stood. "And I want to have that conversation with you. But I want to have it when you're sober."

"I'm not gonna remember this tomorrow," Lando suddenly said, a total non sequitur. If it was possible, his eyes flew open even wider, and a rigid tension entered his posture.

"Yes," Oscar responded, wary. "Like I said—"

"I'm not gonna remember this tomorrow," Lando repeated, on the verge of yelling. The panic from before was back two-fold, and he grabbed onto Oscar's hoodie again, twisting his fingers into the fabric. "Oscar, you have to remember it for me, please. Come and find me, and, frickin,' punch me if you need me to shut up and listen, or, do something, just do something! Tell me to have this conversation with you, please, Oscar, please." There was no denying it now. Lando was begging him. "I can't do this anymore," Lando almost sobbed. He yanked Oscar toward him enough that he could fall forward and press his face into Oscar's stomach. "I don't want to forget," he whispered. "Please, don't let me forget."

The whisper echoed throughout the room, gone but heavy in the air. Silence reigned again.

Oscar couldn't think. He couldn't breathe.

His insides were tearing themselves in half. He could feel the moment, physical, and real, and raw, when his heart cracked. It was a gaping wound, bleeding pain, and love, and desire. It was a chained animal, crying against its bindings for Oscar to move, to do anything to make this feeling stop. It was a shattered mirror, in which every shard contained a vision of the future. In one, he placed his arms around Lando. In another, he said I forgive you. In another, or maybe multiple, he woke up in Lando's bed tomorrow morning. In one more, he said I'm sorry. The shards whipped around him like a tornado, slicing cuts into his arms, his legs, his soul, flashing in front of him in blood-tinted glimpses and teases. They were woven together by a single, uneven thread.

It would be so easy to reach into it. To let the thread tangle around his fingers, the tornado take his body, the shards guide him to a crystalline, bloody, future.

So easy.

Oscar took one breath in. He released one breath out. He felt the blanket underneath his hands, and the faint breeze from an air vent on his face, and the lingering taste of minty toothpaste on his tongue.

"I can't do that, Lando," he said. The words came out in a detached, almost scary calmness. "That's not fair to me. You know it's not."

And like a puppet with its strings cut, Lando slumped back down onto the bed. His head landed among the pillows, turned away from Oscar, poorly disguising the tear tracks on his cheeks. At least he had the conscience to look guilty, Oscar noticed, distantly. Or maybe it was just the general vibe high-Lando exuded. Right now, he looked for all the world like a kicked puppy, wet and miserable and sniffling a little bit. Oscar sighed, looking away at the wall.

"You need to show me that you mean it, mate," he said softly. "Come and find me. Tell me that you want to talk, that you want to have this conversation, and I'll have it, I promise." He glanced back. "But it has to be you. I can't help you with this."

Lando's eyes flickered up, just barely enough to meet Oscar's gaze.

"But I'll forget," he whispered.

"Then it's up to you to remember."

"Okay."

Stillness fell around them. Lando looked away, curling into his pillows. Oscar looked away, watching the rainbow of Vegas lights flicker behind the curtain in Lando's window. There was a pattern to one of the lights—red that pulsed into purple, then blue, then white, before starting over again, unwavering and unending. When Oscar saw it—really, saw it—the only emotion that emerged was a strange, profound sense of empathy. This light understood him, somehow.

It cycled through its colours at least five times before Oscar broke the hypnosis and let his gaze drop. Chin to his chest, he stared down at his legs, at the joggers he'd thrown on to replace his pyjama shorts. He sighed. Walking away after a conversation like this was never going to be easy. But he had to do it.

Feeling the creak of his stiff muscles, Oscar stood up from the bed.

"I still think it's best that I go," he said into the empty air. The steps he took toward the door were slow and quiet, glancing over his shoulder for a confirmation that Lando had heard him. It would be unnecessarily cruel to just vanish without a trace.

He got his confirmation when the panic reignited in Lando's eyes.

"Wait, no, don't leave!" Lando cried. He had tired himself out, now—instead of trying to sit up, he got one arm underneath himself and used the other to reach out, like he could bring Oscar back from across the room.

"Lando..." Oscar trailed off, half a warning in his tone.

"I won't talk, I promise," Lando said. His voice sounded scarily sober for someone who was so high. "Just stay, please, until I fall asleep. I don't want to be alone."

Oscar weighed the pros and cons. On the one hand, it was past 3 in the morning now. He had to be hitting some kind of new low for emotional and physical exhaustion, and all he wanted to do was go to bed.

On the other hand, there was Lando. Lando, whose eyes were wide and watery and vulnerable. Lando, who had just had one of the worst crashes of his career and only wanted a friend with him until he fell asleep. Lando, who wanted desperately to apologize but wouldn't remember that in the morning.

Lando, quiet, bruised, and scared.

Yeah.

He could afford Lando this one small thing.

"Okay," Oscar exhaled. "Until you fall asleep."

After that, he went around the room turning off lights until only one small desk lamp illuminated the space. Lando had somehow figured out how to get his mountain of pillows under the blankets, and he settled in wordlessly. Oscar picked an armchair near the bed as his resting spot. It was close enough that Lando could see him easily, if he wanted to.

"G'night," Lando said as Oscar was getting comfortable in his chair, so faint and muffled that he barely heard it.

"Yeah," Oscar responded around a lump in his throat. "Good night, mate."

For what was probably only a few minutes, Oscar just sat in the near-darkness. Time seemed to move both faster and slower than normal. The rustle of sheets as Lando shuffled a bit. The wail of a distant police siren. The ever-present pulse of lights outside the window.

At some point, he realized that Jon probably wanted an update. He was most likely waiting to go to sleep until he was certain he'd fulfilled his job, and there was no reason to keep him waiting any longer. Oscar pulled out his phone and navigated to the rarely-used WhatsApp contact.

He'd just fired off the text to Jon and was putting his phone back in his pocket when an unusual amount of rustling from the bed caught his attention. Lando was rummaging around underneath his blankets and pillows, maybe looking for something, maybe… well, Oscar didn't really know. He was about to question Lando on it—anything that was keeping him from sleeping at this point was a bad thing—when the other man seemed to find what he was looking for. He let out a little ah hah before retracting his arm and pulling out—

Oh.

It was the goose. It was the stupid, silly goose that Oscar had bought on a whim, and wrapped up, and given as an anonymous gift. God, Wednesday seemed ages ago at this point. But Lando actually had the goose. He had kept the goose. More than that, he was wrapping the goose in his arms and curling up around it, hugging it tight to his chest even though that had to hurt his bruises.

In the back of Oscar's mind, a little bell went off. This meant something. It was something about compromises, something about joy, and a little something about love. The thought didn't go any further than that, though. That was okay. He'd find the right time to think about it, at some point.

Another minute or so passed.

"Osc?" Lando slurred from the bed. He sounded right on the verge of sleep, now. "Can you talk about something?"

Caught off guard, Oscar took a long moment's pause before he could actually process the question.

"Talk? About what, mate?"

"'Dunno. Something. Anything." Lando's gaze, with eyes half-lidded, had been fixed on the floor. Now, it flicked up to meet Oscar head-on. Lando wetted his lips, then whispered into the darkness, into the lights, into the Las Vegas night, "I miss hearing your voice."

And Oscar could do nothing but open his mouth and comply.

Chapter Text

It happened in Abu Dhabi.

Because of course it did—the world of Formula 1 seemed to be nothing without its flair for the dramatics.

Oscar thought it was a retribution of sorts, maybe, for how uninteresting the season had been from a competitive point of view. No fight for the driver's championship, a constructor's championship won with only one driver's points, and statistically the most dominant season in F1 history.

Statistically, also one of the most boring seasons in F1 history.

So the universe, in its eternal craving for drama, had decided that the responsibility for the season finale instead fell on the drivers themselves. There were Logan and Daniel, both under immense pressure, driving like their seat depended on it, because it did. There were the Mercedes and Ferrari drivers, still duking it out for the honor of being best-of-the-rest. And then there was Oscar. Abu Dhabi was never going to be an on-track battle for him—his 9th place was pretty much set in stone, and although it was technically close with Aston in the constructors', the other team was only going backwards. He was coming to Abu Dhabi engaged in a quiet battle, off the track, a battle that the public wouldn't hear about. Only he knew it was there, hanging above his head, heavy and haunting, dragging the weekend down.

It was a little unfair, Oscar thought. The race this Sunday would be settled with the crossing of a line, with numbers on a page, with points on a board. Logan and Daniel's problem would be settled with a phone call and the stroke of a pen, for better or for worse. Oscar's problem wasn't that easy. It was him who had to settle it, him who had to wrangle it until the axe chose a direction to fall. Him who had to judge when it was settled at all.

But it would be settled. One way or another, no matter what came next, by the end of this weekend, it would be settled. Oscar knew, somehow, that it had to be.

It started, as many a stressful situation might, with Zak calling him in for an unscheduled meeting. It was Friday night, and they'd just passed yet another debrief with Lando being difficult.

In general, since getting to Abu Dhabi, the same bare-minimum had been carried over from Vegas. Lando acknowledged that Oscar was there, and he wasn't outwardly rude to him, and that was it. On a good day, they would exchange a bit of small talk about the car. It was simple and polite. Oscar could deal with that.

Friday, however, was not a good day.

Lando had shown up to debrief looking what Oscar would call scruffy, with shadows under his eyes, stubble on his jaw beyond his little goatee, and a general grouchy demeanor. His comments were clipped, his temper was short, and Oscar swore that Lando kept glaring at him when he thought he wasn't looking. Even when the team directly asked him what he thought about Oscar's feedback from FP1, since Pato had been doing a mandatory practice session in Lando's car, he had shrugged, deflected, and offered up his own feedback—a lot of which overlapped with what Oscar had said in the first place.

And yes, it was infuriating. Go figure, Oscar was used to it by now.

However, for the first time since this had all started, it seemed like the team had actually noticed that something was wrong. Maybe it was how blatantly grumpy Lando was, or maybe it was Pato squished in between them, unafraid to throw raised eyebrows and side-eyes at their weird tension. Maybe it was some third thing that the team saw but he couldn't. Whatever it was that did it, there were more awkward pauses, questioning glances, and "Okay, let's move on"s than Oscar had ever seen from a meeting before.

He wasn't exactly surprised when Zak came up to him after they were done, clapped a hand on Oscar's back, and said:

"Oscar! Can you stick around for fifteen minutes? There's something I want to talk to you about."

Immediately, Oscar's gut said no. Zak was smiling like he usually did, a big American grin that could clock him from a mile away, but it didn't really reach his eyes. There was something behind his expression that screamed this is serious. This is important. I'm smiling because I have to but what I want to talk to you about isn't fun at all.

Unfortunately, Oscar couldn't really say no to a meeting with his boss. So he accepted with a nod, and they both waited as everyone else filed out of the room.

When they were the only ones left, Zak motioned for Oscar to sit down. Oscar picked a chair at random. Zak then crossed over to the other side of the table, and he grabbed the chair directly opposite Oscar and spun it around, sitting down on it backwards. Behind the unease, something in Oscar's brain clicked at the sight—there was a joke Logan had made once about American youth pastors—and another time, he probably would've been holding back a snicker. Right now, though, he couldn't find the humour.

"So," Zak said, crossing his arms on the back of his chair. He leveled Oscar with a look that wasn't unkind, but was definitely resolute. "I'm not going to beat around the bush here. I hope I'm not breaking any news when I say that there's something going on between you and Lando."

Oscar winced. Any lingering hope that this meeting could be about literally anything else disappeared.

"Yeah," he said, trying to sound more casual than he felt, like he hadn't been thinking about this almost non-stop for a month.

"Do you want to tell me what that's about?" Zak asked.

Oscar shrugged, looking at the far wall of the room. "If I'm being honest, not really. We're just having some disagreements. It's not a big deal."

"Disagreements since Austin?"

Oscar's gaze snapped back to Zak. He tried and failed to hide the surprise on his face. Zak had noticed as far back as Austin? Or else someone else had noticed and told him. So why was this conversation only happening now? Was it a test of some kind the whole time? Was he judging Oscar for how long this had been going on?

"Um, yeah," Oscar defended. "We haven't had the chance to talk about it much, so—"

Zak interrupted him with a hand held up. "Relax, Oscar, I'm not making an accusation." He brought his other hand up and splayed them both palm-up on the table, leaning forward. "I just want to understand," he said, speaking firmly, "how my drivers went from being attached at the hip to this. I want to know how we can fix it."

Still uncomfortable, Oscar shrugged again and fidgeted with a note-taking pen that was left on the table. "I mean, attached at the hip, that's a bit of a stretch..."

"My mom watched the race in Japan and asked me if you two were dating," Zak said, completely deadpan. The pen stilled in Oscar's hands.

"Oh."

And, well, in Suzuka—maybe Lando tapping him on the butt after qualifying, and maybe Lando singing his praises to the media, and maybe Lando drowning him in champagne on the podium...

Hm.

"But back to my point," Zak continued, breaking Oscar out of his thoughts. "What's going on here? What happened to you guys?"

Oscar sucked in a breath through his teeth. "I mean, like I said, it's not something I really want to talk about. Yes, there are... personal issues that we're trying to work out. But we are trying. And tensions are all high right now, and everyone is tired, so it's probably not the most conducive environment for it right now. Once we're in the off-season I think things will cool off."

Against everything his body was telling him, Oscar forced himself to hold eye contact with Zak. The other man was tapping his fingers on the table, a contemplative look on his face. Maybe ten seconds passed. It felt like an eternity before Zak hummed and leaned back a bit.

"Okay," he said. "Alright. That's fair. That's fine reasoning, and I'm glad you think so." He paused before adding, "But you understand that if it weren't the end of the season, I would be pushing this further, right?"

"What do you mean?"

"Think of it like this," Zak amended. He made a gesture, pointing with two fingers at Oscar and another hypothetical person. "What happens between you two, in your personal lives, is your business." With the same hand, he motioned in a circle at the room around them. "It becomes my business when it starts affecting us on the track. Now, we all know we're not at the top of our game right now, so I've been being lenient about it. But if we were—if we had both cars fighting for podiums or wins every weekend, we could not afford having drivers who won't talk to each other. The team cannot work like that." Zak gave him a significant look. "I don't think I need to explain why, right?"

Oscar knew that they were both thinking about Mercedes in 2016.

"No," he conceded.

"Good." Zak smiled. "We're all very hopeful about 2024, if you catch my drift." Oscar nodded. He knew that the preliminary testing they'd been doing on next year's car was showing promising results. Zak's expression then dropped again, back to serious. "So you understand that, whatever this is, you guys need to sort it out before the start of the season, or Andrea and I will start intervening." Placing emphasis on every single word, he said, "That is non-negotiable."

Oscar swallowed. The weight of the statement settled on his shoulders like an elephant, enormous and crushing. Despite being wholly reasonable, and in fact quite logical, it was hard not to see the situation as what it was: an ultimatum. Fix your shit or I'll fix it for you, whether you like it or not.

Still, he put on his best facade of neutrality, and nodded again. "Yeah. I understand."

For a few seconds, Zak's eyes roamed his face, and Oscar got the distinct sense that he was searching for something. Maybe it was confirmation that Oscar really did understand, or maybe he was looking for the things under the surface that Oscar wouldn't share. He didn't know. He hoped his poker face held up anyway.

"Okay," Zak eventually said. He pressed his lips together into what was perhaps a grin, perhaps a grimace, and tapped his fingers on the table again. "That's all, then. Thank you for discussing this with me."

Oscar took that as his sign to finally get the hell out. He managed to shoot off a little "Yep, no problem," before he got up and made for the door. At the last second, he realized he should probably try not to look like he was running away, so he forced himself to take slow, casual steps, pretending that nothing was wrong.

Right before he made it to the door, though, Zak called out to him.

"Oscar?" Reluctantly, Oscar turned back around, giving his full attention to his boss. He was still sitting in his chair, but there was something deeply contemplative on his face as he looked up at Oscar. There was a moment in which neither of them spoke, only looking at each other, before Zak sighed. "Obviously you're both adults," he began. "And you're both very smart young men. I trust you to resolve this. But, speaking for a second as not-your-boss: I know what a one-sided conflict looks like, and I know how hard they can be to deal with." Oscar's heart skipped a beat. Zak was right on the money once again. God, he was proving so much more observant than Oscar gave him credit for. "I also know Lando," Zak added, "and smart as he is, I know how hard he can be to deal with. If you need one of us on the team to step in, or talk to him, we can."

As he finished talking, and Oscar processed what he was saying, an unexpected swell of warmth rolled through his chest. It was a weird feeling, not super familiar. It felt a little like comfort, a little like support, and a little bit like a sense of belonging. Like community. Like a home.

Oscar swallowed again, a sudden lump in his throat.

"Okay," he said.

"And," Zak continued, thankfully unaware of Oscar's emotions. "I hope this goes without saying, but even though it's your first year at the team, you have our full support. If this is an issue that needs to go to the HR department—"

Oscar might have laughed if the implications of the words HR department hadn't hit him a second later. He blanched.

"No, no, no, it's nothing like that—" he rushed to clarify, waving his hands in a dismissive motion.

"If this is an issue that needs to go to HR," Zak emphasized, standing up, "we will conduct a fair, unbiased investigation and we will support you through it."

"Right." Oscar felt stuck somewhere between laughing still, abject horror, and a deep sense of gratitude.

If you had asked him at any point during this month whether he would stay in his current situation if he had a choice, the answer would've been absolutely the fuck not. Frankly, the answer was still absolutely the fuck not. But when he thought about it, if there was maybe one silver lining he could pull from the whole ordeal, it was this. It was finding out the depth of people's support, the way that people could care, the way that a team, a conglomerate of madmen and geniuses who had no idea who he was two years ago, could care. About him. People cared about him. And people cared about Lando. And maybe it was Oscar's fucked-up perspective from the Alpine hellhole messing him up on this—in fact, it almost certainly was—but Oscar wasn't used to knowing that. Now, he did. And his world felt that little bit better for it.

"Yeah, that, uh— that won't be necessary," he managed to stammer out to Zak. Unable to express the full scope of his emotions, he added, quietly, "But thank you anyway."

Fifteen minutes ago, Oscar might have assumed that Zak couldn't read anything behind his words. Now, with the look in Zak's eyes, the way they softened slightly, the way he came over to clap Oscar on the shoulder before escorting him out of the meeting room, he realized that Zak probably knew more than he was letting on. Oscar was okay with that, actually.

It was nice having another person he could count on.

-

Saturday, unfortunately, showed no improvement in Lando's mood. In fact, if it was possible, it seemed to get even worse.

At least the driving part of the weekend was going alright. Compared to the mediocre first two practices, the car improved enough during FP3 that Oscar actually felt confident going into qualifying. Of course, Q1 and Q2 had then been a mess of slips and slides and barely hanging on into the next round, but that was more Oscar's fault than any car issues. And at the end of it all, he'd surprised even himself by scrounging up a P3. It hadn't been a bad Saturday, not by any means.

Still, when he was doing his final push lap, Oscar had known that he was doing it in an eight-second window behind Lando's lap. The gap was big enough that he could only see the car in front of him on the straights, or if the corners happened to line up with clear visibility. It was good formation from the team, obviously—avoiding dirty air and all that—but it also meant that halfway through his lap, when Oscar realized that the eight-second gap had become more of a seven-and-a-half, he had no clue what had happened. Then, when he pulled up to the P3 board and a Red Bull and Ferrari were beside him, his confusion only increased. Lando had been overwhelmingly faster than him the whole weekend, but if he hadn't qualified on the front row, then… where?

As he hopped down from his halo and his feet hit the track, Oscar glanced behind him to the other seventeen cars parked in the pitlane. Those cars were organized by pit entry order, not position, so it didn't even tell him anything useful, but sure enough, the bright orange of Lando's McLaren stuck out amongst the rest. Oscar frowned underneath his helmet. How in the world had that happened?

On his way to get weighed, he looked for a screen displaying the running order. When he spotted one, his gaze fell down the numbers, scanning each name until he found his target.

5 - NOR +0.371

Oscar's split-second response was, fuck. He's gonna be mad about that.

If Oscar had been confident coming into qualifying, Lando had been nothing less than assured (in the weird, grumpy kind of way he had going on right now). They hadn't really talked about it, but Lando had to have known that he could fight for the front row, if not pole. Plus—

Well. They also hadn't talked about Vegas, since it happened. Any part of Vegas. If there was even the slightest chance that Lando remembered that night, he hadn't said anything about it, and Oscar's feelings on that were… complicated, to say the least. And also not important at the moment. The point about Vegas was that even if they weren't talking, Oscar knew Lando was upset about having crashed. He could read it in the way he spoke to the team about this final race, determined, but almost desperate. Like a podium here was inevitable, and if it didn't happen, the world would cease to exist. Lando needed to make up for his mistake. So to not only lose the opportunity for pole, but to not even qualify on the second row, when he was already in a questionable mental state these days— yeah. Lando was going to be seething.

Frankly, Oscar was a little bit afraid for the debrief they were about to have. Whether he was afraid for the team or afraid for himself? Well. That was anyone's guess.

The period of time before the debrief did not exactly calm Oscar's apprehension. In fact, it did the exact opposite. Everything he saw was an omen, all pointing big red arrows at the fact that something was going to come to a head later, and he just had no way to prepare for it.

At some point before his interview, he caught a glimpse of Lando from across the pitlane, making his way to the media pen. His steps were quick, joints stiff, shoulders set. Their PR manager was walking next to him, talking with her hands in a way that looked a lot like placating. They were both facing away from Oscar, but body language alone told him all he needed to know.

As he was heading to the media pen himself, Oscar passed by some F1TV pundits discussing the results for their broadcast. He didn't catch much of their conversation, a brief encounter as it was, but he did pick up a few key terms: "Lando Norris," "mistake," and "fuming." There was no time to think about it at that second; less than a minute later, he'd be in front of cameras, interrogated about the results of his own qualifying. But it stayed in the back of his head the entire time.

It was only after all of this, when he finally had a moment to breathe, that he saw the clip. Oscar had just been walking back to the garage when he caught a glimpse of an orange car on a TV showing replays, and his feet stopped him before his brain did. He could only stand there and watch with a morbid, voyeuristic fascination as Lando swung his car through turn 13, and then literally swung through the exit of the corner. The massive snap turned him nearly sideways, and Oscar knew it was sheer skill that had let him finish quali in one piece. A worse driver would've been in the wall in an instant.

A little voice in Oscar's head wondered whether Lando would see that part of the incident at all. Would he recognize the talent he had displayed?

The more cynical part of him—or maybe not cynical, but realistic—said no. He would not.

Meanwhile, the TV had finished Lando's replay, fading into a shot of an Alpine exceeding track limits. Oscar was no longer watching anyway.

That was all, was the statement repeating in his thoughts as he started walking away. That was all. He was probably set for P2. But he ended up in P5, and he lost all of it in one single corner, with one single snap. That was all.

Maybe if this were a normal season, that would be a somewhat comforting thought. A sort of, yeah, that's frustrating for Lando, but it's so much simpler knowing his time loss came from one place instead of having to hunt for it throughout the lap. Alas, this was not a normal season. Lando was not his normal self. And knowing that he'd been so determined, and that he'd lost the lap on something so small, and that he'd already had a short fuse yesterday—the only emotions flooding Oscar's body were that wayward fear, which was maybe more like dread, and exhaustion.

It was exhaustion for something that hadn't even happened yet, he realized. But it felt so tangible, so inevitable, that feeling it now was almost a precaution. Something was going to happen.

And still, Oscar was thinking.

Fuck. He's going to be so mad.

-

It took a record-breaking five minutes into debrief for the other shoe to drop.

It had been an uncomfortable meeting from the get-go—the rooms in the Abu Dhabi hospitality were noticeably smaller than anywhere else on the calendar. It had been this way since Oscar had raced here in F2, and if the random gossip he overheard was right, it was an unfortunate quirk of the track from its very beginning. Squishing an entire F1 team's worth of mechanics, engineers, strategists, bosses, drivers, and more into one of these rooms made debriefs a little cramped at best and downright claustrophobic at worst.

Throwing in the fact that one of their drivers was sitting rigid as steel, jaw clenched, leveling anyone who looked at him with a murderous glare, the atmosphere skyrocketed straight to suffocating. Oscar hadn't let his gaze linger, not wanting to somehow provoke him even more, but it was impossible to miss the way Lando's eyes were rimmed with red. He was livid.

Lando's head mechanic James, bless him, was pushing through the tension as best he could. Despite multiple levels of discomfort, he was trucking on, going over some bullet points for basic wear and tear, things that just needed to be tuned before the race.

Once he finished, Oscar saw him pause. It was only a tiny hesitation, maybe a second, before he gestured toward his driver.

"Lando, over to you, then. Obviously, the mistake in turn 13 cost you the last lap. What's your side of the cause of that?" James tapped his pen on his notepad. "Suspension issues, tyre grip, just a driver error? What can we do to prevent that from happening tomorrow?"

Lando scoffed. In his peripheral vision, Oscar saw him crossing his arms, slouching forward so that his elbows were settled on the table. Oscar had not a single clue what he was about to say. You couldn't have paid him all the money in the world to make a prediction.

Lando jerked his head in Oscar's direction, opened his mouth, and sneered:

"Are you sure you want to be talking about that in front of the other side of the garage? He's always there grabbing the opportunity when I fuck it up."

The entire room went silent.

Oscar didn't think he had ever actually experienced a "quiet enough to hear a pin drop" moment before, but holy shit, this had to be it. For an uncomfortably long pause, everyone just looked at each other. Half the room was looking at Lando. A quarter of the room was staring at Oscar. The rest were exchanging glances with the people sitting next to them. Oscar wanted to sink into the floor.

Only maybe ten seconds had passed, but Oscar had aged ten years by the time that Zak loudly cleared his throat and the room unfroze, sort of. Everyone still held a general air of what-the-fuck about them, which was completely understandable.

James, clearly trying his best and failing to remain unaffected, said, "Um. So. Suspension issues? Tyre grip? Driver error?" There was the most pained, fake grin Oscar had ever seen pasted on his face.

Luckily, it seemed Lando was not immune to feeling a basic amount of shame. He slumped back in his chair, curling into himself so he almost recluded into his hoodie, and fixed his gaze solely on the table in front of him. The burning snarkiness, although definitely still there behind his eyes, had been momentarily shut down.

"Driver error," Lando mumbled. "Just fucked it up."

"Okay, great," James responded with false cheeriness. He then attempted the world's most difficult segue, moving the attention to another mechanic and asking for his opinion on something-or-another.

On the surface, the team moved on. They made it through the rest of the meeting successfully. They hit all of the required topics.

But Oscar couldn't pay attention to any of it. He felt eyes on him the entire time—Kim, concerned, team members, judging, Lando, piercing. Maybe he was imagining some of it. Maybe his fellow team members weren't actually that interested, and everyone had truly moved on except for him. But Oscar could feel it. It was tension, thick enough to be cut. It was an underlying question that everyone wondered, but no one would ever ask. It was claustrophobia in a too-small room, thoughts and feelings clouding the air until they had nowhere to go but down his throat, choking and twisting and spiraling until Oscar could barely breathe.

When they were finally done, Oscar almost sprinted out of the meeting. Evading anyone who might ask questions, he shut himself in the brief sanctuary of his driver's room, sinking down onto the sofa.

His face fell into his hands. Alone, the choking feeling receded, leaving mostly embarrassment in its stead. It was half second-hand, Oscar's natural empathy putting him in Lando's shoes, imagining having said something like that in front of the team. Oscar quickly concluded that he would simply die. For the most part, though, it was first-hand embarrassment, flowing through his body in heavy, nauseous waves.

Then, anger. How dare Lando say something like that in front of the team? How dare he paint that picture of Oscar, like he was capitalizing, or betting on Lando's mistakes? Even if not one person in the room believed the accusation, what if the seeds had been sown? He found himself thinking of Alpine again. He knew from experience how rumours could spread, how a team's opinion of you could change, how it could all fall apart beneath you. He couldn't deal with something like that happening again. He couldn't.

Trapped in a swirling mix of embarrassment and anger, Oscar barely heard the knock on his door. In fact, picking his head up from his hands, he thought for a moment that he had imagined it. Then, again. A knock.

He sighed. Reluctantly, he ran his hands through his hair so he looked at least half presentable to whichever team member was knocking, then got up, flicked the light on and opened the door to find—

Lando. Standing in his doorway.

Oscar came a hair's breadth from snapping, what the fuck are you doing here? But he couldn't let himself do that right now. It wasn't worth the energy. Instead, he exhaled a long breath through his nose, clenched his jaw, and turned around to go sit back down, leaving the door open for Lando to do whatever he wanted.

When he looked up, though, Lando was still just standing in the doorway, leaning with a hand against the frame. His expression was as stony as it had been in the debrief. Oscar gave him a moment, and then when nothing happened, he raised an eyebrow.

As if coming unglued, Lando's eyes flicked to the side, then back. He shifted his weight so that his shoulder leaned against the doorframe instead of his hand. Finally, he muttered, "I'm here to apologize." And, well, the words were one thing. The tone, like he was saying it with a gun to his head, was another thing.

Both of Oscar's eyebrows were raised now. "Oh?"

"Yeah," Lando continued, sounding for all the world like he was reading directly off of a script. "For the comment in debrief. It was unprofessional and I shouldn't have said it. Just because I'm a shit driver doesn't mean I should take it out on you."

Oscar waited out a pause. "...Okay?"

"Okay." Lando nodded. "Good talk." And he turned and stepped out, reaching to close the door behind him.

"Wait, Lando," Oscar called, standing up from his couch. He grabbed the door handle from the inside, wrenching it open. Lando hadn't gotten far. As soon as Oscar saw him, he froze as if caught in a crime scene, and slowly spun around to face Oscar again. His hands were shoved into his pockets in an almost aggressive show of casualness.

Voice betraying no particular emotion, he said, "Yeah?"

A flood of irritation swept through Oscar's stomach. Suddenly, he was reminded why he'd been so angry in the first place. To think that Lando had the audacity to say the things he did, and then act the way he did, and believe that Oscar would let him off the hook with a shitty, half-assed excuse? And then he went right back to stone-faced neutrality, like Oscar wouldn't care, like he wasn't a living, breathing, human being with complex emotions. Just thinking about it made his blood start to boil, alight with a righteous fury.

In an instant, Oscar decided. Maybe Lando wasn't worth the energy, but he deserved an actual damn apology for once.

"No, come back inside," Oscar demanded. He beckoned Lando in with an arm gesture, trying to tamp down the rage simmering under his skin. Really, there was no reason for Lando to come back in at all, but maybe something in Oscar's voice made him figure it was better than dealing with the alternative. Oscar stepped back, and Lando stepped in. "Close the door," Oscar said. A muscle twitched in Lando's cheek, but he made no comment, following the instruction. Feeling on a hair trigger, it was a conscious effort for Oscar to calmly sit down on his couch, fold his hands under his chin, and try a half-sympathetic approach before he actually exploded. "See, I'm glad you want to apologize," he offered, staring up at Lando. "And I appreciate the, uh, effort, but… it becomes a lot less believable when you won't actually say the words 'I'm sorry.'"

The statement hung in the air. Lando, although fully in the room now, had still put as much distance between them as possible. His gaze raked up and down Oscar's body, analyzing, like he was trying to strategize a chess move.

"Alright, then," Lando said. "I'm sorry I made that comment because I was frustrated about my driving being so shitty. All good?"

Oscar frowned.

"Yeah, uh, no, actually." He analyzed Lando right back, finding him sort of hunched over, leaning back against the door, expression a mix of faux guilt, genuine irritation, and that damn cold neutrality trying to cover it all up. Honestly, he was a pretty pathetic sight. But that was the point, wasn't it? "I don't know what you think you're trying to do, but apologies also get a lot less believable when you're trying to make me feel bad for you."

Lando crossed his arms. "I'm not trying to make you feel bad for me."

"Okay, then the 'I'm such a shit driver' stuff is just what, humility?" Oscar snapped. "Flattery? Teenage angst?" With every passing second, his patience was wearing thinner and thinner. The sympathetic approach was clearly not working.

"No—" Lando tried to say, but Oscar wasn't done talking.

"What does that add to an apology except to put yourself down for no reason?"

"Jesus Christ, Oscar, it's called honesty," Lando snapped back. Finally, the irritation was winning out on his face. He could no longer hide how much this was annoying him, and Oscar found a sick satisfaction in that. "I'm literally trying to say sorry right now." He scowled. "Can you not just fucking accept the apology and move on?"

Oscar gave him a nasty look. "Not with that attitude about it, no."

"Okay, then." Lando pushed himself off the wall, throwing his hands in the air. "I'm sorry I'm shit at apologies too, I guess. Sorry you're not satisfied with this. Sorry I can't do anything right today."

"Holy shit." Before Oscar could stop it, an ugly, disbelieving laugh tore itself from his chest. The force of the realization made him stand up, and he cocked his head at Lando. "You literally can't stop, can you? You just have to drag yourself through the mud at every opportunity and then act all high-and-mighty about it at the same time?" Anger simmered beneath his skin again, lighting up his body, carrying his feet over to Lando, closer and closer until they were almost chest to chest. "That's not normal, Lando," Oscar said to his face. "It's a shitty thing to do to me, and it's a shitty thing to do to yourself."

The strength of Lando's withering glare this close up felt like enough to cut through diamonds. But Oscar withstood it, tension sizzling in the air between them.

"So what, you've never heard of being self-critical?" Lando hissed. In a tone that sounded almost mocking, he added, "This is how I improve, Oscar."

"Yeah, sure, whatever. It's important to be self-critical. It's important to acknowledge your mistakes. This?" Oscar jabbed a finger forward into Lando's chest, the impact almost making him stumble. "This isn't self-critical, Lando, this is just hurting yourself and everyone around you for literally no reason."

Lando slapped his hand away. "And? Why do you care? What was it, fuckin' P3 and all that, mate?" He stepped forward to pass Oscar, shoulder-checking him on the way by. "I'm sorry I came to talk to you. Go enjoy it. You deserve it more than I do, clearly."

Oscar refused to turn around, refused to acknowledge the obvious bait. Instead, he channeled his anger into the most dangerous, scathing words he could muster, words that were dripping with poison.

"Stop doing that, Lando." The walls of these driver's rooms were not thick. The team could definitely hear them by this point. Oscar found that he didn't really care.

"Stop what?" Lando snarled from behind him. "Stop telling the truth? Stop—"

"That's not—"

"Stop being happy for you?"

Oscar's breathing picked up, short and ragged.

"No—"

"Stop reminding you that you have the team's support more than me right now?"

He could hear his heartbeat in his ears.

"Stop making you feel bad for me?"

With every short breath, he saw flashes of the past few months. Being snapped at in Qatar. Being given the cold shoulder in Austin. Being yelled at in Mexico, sobbing on the floor in Brazil, suffering through pain and empty apologies and stress after stress after stress after stress. It was every single moment where he felt doubt, or fear, or used by a man who wasn't giving him anything in return. It was laughter and tears and hot chocolate and ignorance. It was anger, burning brighter and brighter into a powder keg about to explode.

This was the breaking point of Oscar Piastri.

"Stop making you feel guilty about little Lando Norris, your poor, stupid teammate who can't do anything right—"

And enough was enough.

"Stop having a fucking inferiority complex!" Oscar shouted, whirling around. Some shred of self-control, maybe—something beaten down, something tired, something that hurt—something broke, and the words came pouring out before Oscar could even think about stopping them. "Stop acting like we're enemies, like I spend all my time trying to undermine you, or trying to, I don't know, make you look bad, or like I'm trying to take your spot in the team—because I'm not!" In the back of his mind, Oscar thought that he must sound hysterical. Frankly, he thought he deserved to be. "I'm here to race, Lando. I'm here to focus on my career, to do the best that I can, and whether you want to believe it or not, the world doesn't actually revolve around you. If you really think I come to race weekends fucking plotting your downfall, or whatever shit you make up to tell yourself, then you need to pull your head far out of your ass and wake the fuck up. Stop acting like I hate you!"

He could barely register the man he was shouting at. Yes, he saw the person standing in front of him, the defensive posture, the frazzled hair. It took blinking away some of the rage to see Lando's face as well, twisted in what looked like a mix of shock and offense.

After a second passed with nothing but Oscar's heaving breaths filling the silence, Lando took half a step forward. He started to say, "Listen, Oscar, that's—"

And Oscar had thought that maybe he'd said all he needed to. Maybe he'd shouted it all out, and now he'd return to normal, and now he would hear Lando out.

He was wrong.

As soon as Lando started talking, it was like oxygen to the fire inside of him, and words tore back up out of his chest.

"No, actually, you fucking listen to me right now," Oscar snapped, marching up to meet Lando in the middle. As far as Lando's half-step had brought him, he took a full step back upon Oscar's approach. That emotion on his face, the offense, or maybe annoyance, drained away, leaving only shock and a spark of something else, something brand new and growing in size. Oscar might've described it as fear.

Good, he thought.

"You want to know why I care?" he asked. "Why I've spent the past five races trying to get you to talk about your goddamn emotions, even though all I've gotten in return is abuse?" Without even realizing it, he was stepping closer to Lando as Lando retreated, boxing him in further and further into a corner of the room. "It's because you were a good person," Oscar spat, hands flying out to the sides as he spoke. "You helped me more than anyone else has helped me this season. You remember the beginning of the year, when I was about as interesting as a wooden board in front of the cameras? It was you who joked around, you who took the focus off of me until I got more comfortable." He stepped closer. "I've been hanging out with the other drivers more—you know, having a social life beyond three people, and it's because you dragged me around to meet all of them."

With one final step, Lando was pressed up against the wall, and Oscar was inches away from him. All he could see was red.

"This entire season," he shouted, finding himself close to hysterics again. "I've been fighting mental health issues, trying to get over my anxiety, trying to separate racing from my sense of self. And you know what? It worked. I am in a better place than I've been in a long time, and do you want to know who was there picking me up when I was at my lowest points?" His voice broke as he hissed, "It was you, you fucking idiot. So don't ask me why I care. Of course I care, because you won't stop beating yourself up, and it's killing me to watch you push away help and do nothing. I care because you're doing what I was doing, and I would give anything to make you stop, because it doesn't end well; I know. I care because you're important to me, and I don't know what I'd do if I lost you, Lando, and I care about you. Okay? Okay?" he yelled.

There was a moment then, at the apex of the tension, where they just looked at each other. It was a battle, or a game, or an impasse. Hysteria versus fear. Anger versus ignorance. Fire versus ice.

And then Oscar saw it. Or felt it, or heard it, or tasted it—did it really matter which when it filled all of his senses? There, behind Lando's eyes, in the scruffy stubble, in the rumpled hoodies, in the purple-grey eyebags, in the rude comments and the half-assed apologies and the stone-cold neutrality: he was exhausted.

God, Oscar thought.

They were just two exhausted people yelling at each other, weren't they?

As if broken from a spell, all of the fight drained out of him. Underneath it all, he was just tired. So, so tired.

Belatedly, Oscar realized that at some point, he had raised one of his hands. For what reason he wasn't sure—on the other side of the red-hot anger and haze in his brain, he thought he might've been about to shove Lando. Or slap him, or, in some stretch of the imagination, hug him. He didn't do any of that, though. Instead, he pressed the hand up against Lando's shoulder. It was enough pressure to be forceful, enough for it to push him, enough for it to mean something, but not so hard as to hurt.

"I care about you," Oscar repeated, and his voice was much quieter now. "So, just— stop acting like you don't know that. Please."

They were both breathing heavily. Oscar could feel their chests heaving, feel the rush of air as it left Lando's mouth, slightly open in shock. The eye contact continued, Lando blinking up at him, processing, analyzing, sitting here in the gap between words.

Oscar had to look away.

"Oh," Lando said. Oscar's head whipped back, and he found that Lando's gaze hadn't moved at all. But it had changed. All of the analysis and shock and everything else was slowly melting away, and turning into something horrified.

"'Oh?'" Oscar repeated, when Lando said nothing else. "What do you mean, 'Oh?'"

"Oscar." Lando's voice broke. He blinked, and suddenly his eyes were wet. "I didn't— I— you—"

Oscar couldn't even begin to process what was happening. "Lando?" he asked, carefully.

"You're right."

What?

"I'm... right?" Oscar whispered. It felt like if he said it too loud, maybe the illusion would shatter. Maybe he would come crashing back to reality. Maybe those words wouldn't mean what he thought they meant.

"Yeah," Lando said, and Oscar did come crashing into reality. But this was reality, and Lando was saying it like he was realizing it himself, right in that moment, and he meant it. He actually meant it. "You're right. Everything…" Oscar couldn't help but watch as Lando's throat bobbed with the force of his swallow. His lashes fluttered, clinging to the wetness in his eyes, but he still didn't look away. "I'm sorry," he said. And like the first time wasn't enough, he said again, "I am. Sorry. For saying that in the debrief. Outside of anything I did or didn't do, or how good of a driver I am or not, you didn't deserve that from me. It was shitty no matter what. I'm sorry."

This time, it was Oscar's turn to be stunned into only one word. "Oh." And Lando probably didn't deserve it, not for only that, but Oscar's heart was swelling with emotion right now—not happiness, not sadness, just emotion—and it poked at something inside of him. Something that made him want to say, "Thank you." So he did.

He was immediately glad that Lando ignored it.

"And, I think—" Lando continued. For the first time, his gaze did flicker away from Oscar, to the side. It was only for a second, though, and when it returned it was full of real guilt, and real shame. "I think that I've been sorry for longer than this, too," he said, picking each inflection carefully. "For the past month. For everything."

Oscar couldn't think. With more emotion swelling, something in him was breaking, and something in him was healing, and they might've been the same thing but Oscar couldn't think. All he could do was stand there and listen.

"God," Lando was saying. It was a word full of pain, full of more realization, and as he stared up at Oscar, there was a raw, desperate quality to his face. "I've been awful to you, and you didn't do anything to deserve it, and before this, I— Wait." Lando suddenly cut himself off, an abrupt tone switch from desperation to… confusion? His eyebrows scrunched together, and he tilted his head to the side. "Sorry," Lando apologized, glancing at Oscar briefly, then at some mystery spot in space. "I just—" His face scrunched even more, almost looking like whatever he was thinking about hurt. "I feel like I've said this to you before."

And as soon as he said it, Oscar knew. His stomach dropped. But like watching a car crash from afar, there was nothing he could do about it. Just brace for impact as Lando figured it out.

"Have I—? Have we—?" Lando asked, looking back at Oscar like he could find the answers in his face. A second passed. Another second. And then: the impact. "Oh my god." Lando's eyes blew wide, and his mouth fell open. "Oh my god. Holy shit." There was so much energy that had just entered Lando's body, and he used it to push himself off the wall and past Oscar in a mirror image of earlier. This time, though, there was no shoulder-check, no anger. Just recognition. Just memories coming flooding back in. Warily, Oscar turned so he could keep track of Lando, who had started pacing. "Vegas, Oscar, Vegas," he said. "I fucking remember! I fucking—" He spun around and ran back up to Oscar, grabbing him by both shoulders. "I want to have this conversation with you, Oscar. I want to talk, I want to show you, please. I want to apologize. I know I don't deserve it. If you tell me to fuck off right now, I'll do it, I swear." The desperation was back, now, and Oscar fully believed that Lando would go away if he asked. "But I want to tell you—everything. If you'll let me."

Holy shit.

The concept of breathing was escaping Oscar, right now. He had to kick himself into a reboot, focusing on the feeling of air flowing through his lungs, on the rise and fall of his chest. Gently, he pried Lando's hands off of his shoulders, walked over to his couch, and fell down onto it. His body moved on autopilot, leaning back so he was staring at the ceiling, running his hands through his hair, bringing them down to his shorts to pick at the hem.

He tried to help himself reason, help himself think. What had changed in the past fifteen minutes?

The answer hit him like a clap of thunder, not particularly helpful. Everything.

Fuck, everything was overwhelming.

He needed to say something, too. Lando was still there, standing awkwardly near him, openly distraught. But what to say?

Another deep breath brought the solution to him.

"Not... right now, I think," Oscar said. Lando's face fell, but he quickly schooled it back to something like understanding. Still, Oscar felt the need to justify, "It's getting late, and we're both tired, and I'm just not quite— it's a lot to think about. Another time, yeah?"

I am totally fucking overwhelmed, and overstimulated, and god, this is going to take me several hours at least to process, he didn't say.

Lando frantically nodded. "Yeah, of course, Oscar, that makes sense. Whenever you're ready to talk, that's okay with me." The more he said, the more it devolved into nervous rambling, talking with his hands as well. "It doesn't even have to be this weekend, if you need more time, we could do it back in England, at one of our flats, or wherever you want, really—"

"Lando." The man's head snapped up from where he'd almost started talking to himself, and despite everything, Oscar's lips quirked at the deer-in-headlights expression on his face. "How about tomorrow? After the race, so we're not distracted during it. You can come to my hotel room in the evening."

Lando stammered, "Yeah— yeah, okay, we can do that." He nodded some more. It was at this point that he probably realized how horrendously awkward this would become if he stayed any longer, so he squeaked out a "Great, see you tomorrow," and shuffled out of the room.

Finally alone again, Oscar just sat and stared at the wall for a few minutes. Then, his head fell forward into his hands, and he started laughing. Or maybe crying. It was hard to tell. But as he choked out laugh-sobs, all he could think about was that he had been right. By the end of the weekend this would be settled. For better or for worse.

What a way to end the season.

Eventually, Oscar needed to get back to the hotel for the night. He wiped his face down with a towel, shot Kim a text that he was ready to go, and gathered up all of his stuff. The whole time, he couldn't shake the feeling that his world had just been shattered. Kim could almost certainly tell. He said nothing about it, but Oscar kept him waiting an extra several minutes as they got halfway to the exit before he realized that he'd left his water bottle behind. On the round trip to get the water bottle, he realized that he'd done a terrible job packing his bag and in fact had left several things behind. Even once they made it out, Oscar knew he was blankly staring into space.

The car ride back was silent. Not for the first time, he found himself grateful for Kim's uncanny ability to know when he wanted to be left alone.

Oscar sighed.

Getting himself back into the racing mindset tomorrow was going to be difficult. He had only the short few hours before bed tonight to process things, and then he had to push it all to the side in favor of public appearance and driving, no more feelings allowed. But he'd do it. Professionalism was part of the job.

Didn't mean he had to enjoy it, though.

And after a long, emotionally and physically exhausting season—well. He just had to get through one more thing.

It'll be over before you know it, he told himself, eventually, settling into bed for the night with a head no less full of thoughts and feelings.

Just make it through the race. One more day and it will be settled.

One more day. For better or for worse.

Chapter Text

The race was meh.

Lando had apparently regained some of his determination overnight, even if it wasn't nearly as angsty as before, and he had strong-armed past both George and Oscar pretty quickly. In Oscar's brain, the rest of the race was just a mess of fighting George, getting passed, fighting Fernando, not getting passed, fighting Checo, getting passed, and watching Lando and Checo throw hands with each other in front of him. They'd wound up P5 and P6 in the end—Lando ahead, Oscar behind—and that definitely wasn't the worst result in the world.

But, just as he'd suspected coming into the weekend, the race felt kind of insignificant. Oscar finished 9th in the drivers' championship. McLaren finished 4th in the constructors'. Neither of these facts were particularly surprising, so he'd felt most of his feelings about them already the week prior, and said as much to the media. Yes, he was happy with his results for being a rookie. Yes, it was astonishing how McLaren had turned themselves around in the middle of the season. Yes, he was going to fight for more podiums and a race win next season. He'd said it all already.

Although, there were moments; in the privacy of his car, or while crossing the start-finish line, or in the brief minutes to breathe while getting weighed or walking to the media pen or sitting down in his driver's room. In those moments, there bubbled up one more feeling inside of him, something solely new upon completion of this race: Oscar was proud of himself. He was. It wasn't something he'd had the free time to ruminate on, yet, what with everything else going on, but it had surprised him a little bit when he realized. Something about the pride was so visceral, so steadfast, so certain. It was like a fuck you to everything that had come before it.

This season had put him through hell and back. He'd been anxious, he'd been exhausted, he'd questioned whether throwing away his childhood, his teens, his early twenties had been worth it for this. He'd questioned whether he was worth it, whether he was good enough, whether he was just taking up space where he shouldn't. But he'd fought for this. And he'd continued to fight, and fight, and fight, until he'd broken through the other side of the questions and the doubts and the hell and back and he'd come out of it proud.

Isn't that something, he caught himself thinking with a small smile.

I did it.

Returning to the point, though, unless something today had gone egregiously wrong, none of those broad things he'd been feeling would've changed at all because of the race.

Thus, with those loose ends tied up, they cleared up plenty of space for the other loose ends to come back with a vengeance. When Oscar had turned off "driving mode" in his head, all of the thoughts had come flooding back in—replays of his and Lando's conversation last night, anticipation for the conversation they'd have tonight, a reminder that coming out of the media pen, it was already 7 pm and they still had to stay at the paddock for several more hours. Consequently, there came an additional slew of oh god, I'm going to be staying up late tonight, aren't I?

The only thing that soothed that particular thought was knowing that he'd be getting closure by the end of the night. Technically, he could ask to push the conversation back another day, or week, or month, or not have it at all. But that was the problem. Oscar knew, in his soul, that they'd either have this conversation tonight or they wouldn't have it at all. It had to happen now.

So, in the short break he had between taking a shower and the debrief starting, he was tracking Lando down to make sure they agreed on a time and a place.

It was quite weird, honestly, seeking Lando out. After a month of either being avoided or ignored by the man, walking through the hallways knowing that when he found him, they would actually talk—it was a little strange.

And stranger it was, when instead of finding him in his driver's room, or eating, or doing stretches with Jon, or in any circumstance that Oscar had imagined, he found him immediately in the hallway. By almost running directly into him.

"Lando," Oscar said, as they both stopped short in front of each other. He let just a hint of surprise into his voice. Funny coincidence to find him so fast, wasn't it?

"Hey, Oscar." Lando said it close to casually, but Oscar could clock the same tone as last night. He had that deferential, awkward, almost nervous demeanor about him again, like he didn't know what to do with his hands, or where to look, or how to interact with Oscar like a normal person. Oscar couldn't blame him, he supposed. He was still feeling pretty awkward right now himself.

He moved to start asking Lando about a meet-up time—well, he wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth—when he noticed the way that Lando was shuffling his feet, shifting his weight from one to the other like there was some energy inside of him that wanted to get out.

Instead, in a quick pivot, Oscar asked, "What's up?"

A few moments passed for Lando to say something. To his credit, it looked like he really wanted to, but was struggling to figure out how to. His nervous shuffling increased in severity.

Deciding to put him out of his misery, Oscar took control of the conversation once more. However, at the exact moment he spoke, Lando apparently found his confidence again, and they ended up talking at the same time, voices almost in unison:

"I was looking for you."

"Oh," Oscar said. They stared at each other.

"Come to my hotel room," Lando blurted out, before Oscar could reorganize his thoughts. "At 11. I have hot chocolate. And we can talk." The burst of confidence audibly fizzled out with every word, and by the last sentence, his voice was quiet. "Only if you still want to, of course."

Oscar found himself stunned into silence. Not for the first time this weekend, Lando had thrown him a curveball. Because (oh god, this made Lando sound like a terrible person), Oscar wasn't expecting him to step up like this at all. He had just sort of assumed he'd be the one organizing the meeting, inviting Lando to his room, initiating all of it for both of them. And it sounded like a small difference. In theory, it really was a small difference—what did it matter who organized the time, whose room they were in, any of that? All the same, in his heart, it felt like it mattered.

A little flame of hope rose in Oscar's chest, and he had to fight to not let it get too high. This wasn't anything, yet. Not really. It was a first step, and it was meaningful. But they still had a long way left to go.

"Yeah. That sounds good," he said, unsticking himself from his silence.

In the blink of an eye, half of Lando's nervous energy deflated out of him.

Just slightly less awkward than before, he nodded—although it still had this kind of frenetic quality to it that made Oscar worry he was going to throw himself to the floor right here and now and start apologizing. Luckily, he did not.

"Okay, great. Great. I'll, uh. I'll see you then." Before Oscar could respond in like, Lando's eyes went wide, and he stumbled over his words to add, "Or, well, I'll see you before then, for the debrief, but I'll also see you then then, so, um. You know. See you then." And then he turned on his heel and started jogging down the hallway.

Oscar watched him go with a mix of amusement and wariness. Maybe the conversation tonight wouldn't be that bad. On the other hand—one interaction was no guarantee. There was only one way to find out for sure.

11 o'clock in Lando's room it would be.

-

There ended up being a lot of time, in between debriefs and media stuff, for Oscar to think. That was mostly the grace of the last race of the season; everyone was either jovial at their newfound success or exhausted, and some were getting sick from the non-stop travel and work. A few people managed all three. So although all of the technical meetings happened, they were a bit unserious. Oscar figured out quickly that he could just zone out, and no one really cared.

Instead, he used the time to mentally prepare for talking to Lando. It felt a little weird, considering the man was sitting a few seats away from him, but whatever. No one needed to know.

The main topic he was mulling over was how he wanted to approach the conversation personally. The thing he kept getting stuck on? He had no idea what to expect from Lando. The evidence he had from earlier and yesterday suggested a frantic, desperate kind of attitude, where Lando might meet him and immediately jump into apologies. And while that sounded alright on the surface—the apology was literally what he had wanted—imagining the conversation playing out that way made Oscar feel almost nauseous. He didn't want Lando throwing himself at his feet, because it would make him want to forgive him.

Despite knowing that he was objectively in the right, and knowing what was good for him, Oscar had never fully been able to squash the part of him that just wanted them to be friends again, no matter what it took. If he was handed that opportunity on a platter, an instant shortcut to their relationship being fixed… Oscar didn't actually think he would take it. He knew, realistically, that it wouldn't really fix their relationship, if they didn't talk anything out. But he would consider it, and that was bad enough.

Then, there was always the chance that he got to Lando's hotel room tonight, and Lando had totally changed his mind. Oscar didn't let himself consider that possibility much. It wasn't going to happen. It wasn't.

The most likely scenario, Oscar hoped, was that Lando would strap on his emotional maturity boots, sit down with him, and have a reasonable conversation. But even if that was the case—if Lando explained everything, and genuinely apologized for it all, would Oscar forgive him? Should he? He couldn't quite figure out that part.

When he thought about it hard enough, he started hearing his mum's voice in a sort of what-would-she-say? situation. It was almost enough to make him want to call her, but it was going on 3 in the morning in Melbourne; she'd already stayed up late enough to watch the race. So he made do with the hypothetical version of her in his head.

You don't need to forgive him at all, she said. They're your feelings he hurt. It's your choice how much he needs to do to make up for it.

Is him taking responsibility, owning up to it, and explaining it enough? he asked her back.

The picture of her in his head gave him a withering look. After all he put you through? It's a start. But I think he needs to make it up to you, in a way beyond words. Using Oscar's own statement against him, she said, he needs to show you that he means it.

As usual, his mum—even the hypothetical version—was probably right.

As the debrief wrapped up, Oscar gave a quick glance over to Lando, who was chatting with a mechanic. He looked noticeably more upbeat than yesterday; still not great, but better. Was he being plagued by the same thoughts as Oscar? Was he wondering what he was going to do tonight? Was he figuring out an approach?

There was no way to know.

Oscar ended up taking comfort in his original mindset, the one from the earliest breaths of the weekend: for better or for worse. Just let the meeting happen. One way or another, something would get done.

If it went poorly? Then, fuck. He'd probably have to talk to Zak again. And that would not be a pretty conversation.

If it went well?

Well. Oscar didn't know, honestly.

They'd cross that bridge when they got to it.

He hoped.

-

At 11 pm sharp, Oscar showed up to the room number Lando had texted him.

Oscar knocked. The door opened.

"Come in," Lando said, so Oscar did. He took his shoes off, glancing around at the room even though it was the exact same room as his own. When he was done, he turned to where Lando was loitering in the entryway.

For a terrible pause, nothing was said or done. Oscar had nothing to say yet, and he had no clue what was going on in Lando's head. They just stared at each other, and the pause grew on, more and more uncomfortable by the second.

Finally, Lando cleared his throat.

"Ah, I have, a, uh. Hot chocolate," he said, spinning around and beelining for a little kitchen table. "It's just Swiss Miss, cause I didn't have much time after I thought of it, and it's too late to order from room service now." Continuously rambling, he picked up what was actually a whole box of Swiss Miss from the table and presented it to Oscar. "So I hope that's okay, or I can go back to the store tomorrow, or—"

"It's fine, Lando." Oscar took the box, effectively cutting him off. The nod he gave Lando was a little bit stiff, still wary, but he had to admit at least that this was a nice gesture. "Thank you," he said.

An awkward few minutes then ensued, in which neither of them could figure out where to get hot water from to actually make the Swiss Miss, until they both remembered at the same time that there were coffee-making amenities by the elevators. There was wordless agreement that both of them going out for it would be weird, so Oscar put his shoes back on and made the journey by himself. It was eerily quiet. Not that the conversation in the room had been flowing, but in that short walk down the hall, packet of hot chocolate powder in hand and thoughts still racing through his head, the lack of noise was deafening.

After he made his drink, he got back to the room and scanned the key card Lando had given him. The door opened up to an empty room.

For a second, Oscar genuinely thought that Lando had disappeared. Scanning the space, he was nowhere in sight—had he straight-up left? But this was Lando's hotel room, there was nowhere for him to go. Then, Oscar took a step further into the entryway, and most of his confusion alleviated. There were brown curls peeking out from behind the bed. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that Lando had just picked a spot to sit, and that spot happened to be in the space between the bed and the wall, leaning against the wall with his knees up to his chest.

Oscar decided not to question it. He'd seen Lando in weirder places before, and if that was where he wanted to have this conversation, then sure.

Making his way over, he sat down opposite Lando, back pressed against the bed frame. His steaming mug came down with him. He blew across the top of the hot chocolate, tested the temperature with a sip—too hot—and waited for Lando to speak.

And waited. And waited. And waited some more.

Lando just sat there, picking at his fingers, staring at the floor. At first, Oscar was willing to give him some grace. This was one hell of a topic to broach; it was only fair that he had a minute or two to think about it. But then, one minute actually became two, and then two minutes became three, and then three became enough for Oscar's hot chocolate to cool down to a drinkable temperature.

He took a long sip, and the lingering heat did nothing to feed the little flame of hope he'd had. In fact, as he took a few more sips, and Lando still stayed quiet, the hot chocolate started to taste less like Swiss Miss and more like disappointment.

The tone of Oscar's voice was undeniably wry when he finally broke the silence himself. "We just gonna sit here the whole night?"

Lando's head shot up, startled. "Hm?"

Another sip of hot chocolate. Oscar shrugged. "Figured you had something to say, but maybe not."

"No, I do. Sorry." Lando started chewing on his lip, and to his credit, he did look guilty. "It's just— um. Where do I start?"

"You tell me, mate."

Lando's gaze fell back to the floor, staring like he'd find answers in the pattern of the carpet, still chewing on his lip. Now, Oscar was starting to get annoyed. He was here to talk, not watch Lando fidget for an hour.

Before he had to say anything about it, though, Lando's head whipped up again.

"Ask me something," he said, stark in its sudden clarity.

Oscar quirked an eyebrow. "What?"

"Yeah." Lando nodded, almost excited. "How about that? Ask me something. Ask literally anything you want to know, and I'll answer you honestly. Even if I really don't want to."

Oscar considered this for a moment.

What he concluded was that he wasn't impressed.

He let himself go completely deadpan, responding, "Okay. I have a question. What's been wrong with you?"

"Uh." Oscar watched as all of Lando's excitement fell through into confusion. His eyes flicked to the side, then back at Oscar, like he was searching for a punchline. "Loaded question, innit?" he asked. It would've nearly been a joke if not for the strain in his voice.

"I can ask it differently," Oscar offered. "Why have you been an asshole for the past month? Why are you blowing everyone off? Why have you been pretending I don't exist?"

Lando let out an awkward, high-pitched ummmmm. He looked anywhere but at Oscar, tapping a hand on his leg.

Oscar shrugged again. "You said ask anything."

"No, I know. I know." Lando glanced up to the ceiling, then to the side, and he ran a hand through his curls. A little nervous laugh escaped him. "Just, um, wow, didn't think you'd start so broad, so, uh—"

"What do you want from me, Lando?"

Lando froze. He was suspended mid-sentence, eyes wide, fingers caught in his hair. The look he wore was one of shock, and maybe hurt, too.

"What?" he said.

Oscar placed his mug down on the carpet, a mindful distance away from any wayward elbows or hands, and rested his arms on top of his knees.

"Why did you invite me here?" he asked calmly. "Why are you talking to me right now?"

"What— I mean." Lando faltered. "I want to apologize to you. You know that."

Oscar shook his head. "No. If all you wanted was to apologize to me, you'd be doing it. Instead, you're beating around the bush, asking me to do the work for you, avoiding eye contact like it's the plague." To prove his point, he moved his head to the side, attempting to intercept Lando's gaze. Immediately, it flicked to the other side. "Hey. Look at me, Lando," Oscar demanded. Lando winced, but complied, meeting Oscar's eye. "You're stalling. Why? What do you want from me?"

They looked into each other's eyes, the contact searing. As Oscar scrutinized the depths of his irises, searching for the thoughts behind the grey-blue-green, he could pinpoint the exact moment that Lando caved.

"I don't know," he confessed, quietly.

Oscar let that sink in. Then, he sighed. "Okay. Then I don't need to be here."

Trying his hardest to mask the hurt and disappointment curling in his gut, Oscar got his feet under him and started to get up. This was why he hadn't wanted to hope.

"Wait, Oscar," Lando was scrambling to say, but Oscar wasn't here to be convinced to stay. At this point, it was late. Oscar had a flight to catch tomorrow morning. He was going to be seeing his family again soon. If Lando couldn't get his shit together, there was no begging, no pleading, no reasoning that he could do that would make Oscar stay. Unless he actually got serious, figured out what he was doing here, and admitted— "I'm— I'm scared."

Oscar paused. He didn't let himself look down at Lando, but he paused.

"Of?"

"You," Lando said, with no hesitation. "Of your reaction. I do want to apologize. I want to explain everything to you. I'm not lying about that."

There was a stain on Lando's curtain, a slightly off-coloured splotch that looked like a shoe. Oscar stared at it intently.

"Then what?"

"I want you to understand." Once again, there was no uncertainty in Lando's words. Only the soft waver of overturned earth, of things spoken into existence for the first time. "And I'm scared of what will happen if you don't. A lot of the stuff I want to say sounds really stupid in my head."

Oscar glanced down. Lando was looking at him already, so their eyes instantly met. Just like his voice, his eyes were certain—nervous, but certain. He wasn't desperate, or excited, or pleading. He wasn't trying to convince Oscar of anything, or convince him to stay. He was vulnerable. He was scared.

And he was telling the truth.

"Well," Oscar said. One hand braced on the bed, he lowered himself back to the floor. Settling into his spot, he picked up his hot chocolate again, and gave Lando a look, a little head tilt. I'm giving you a second chance. For your own sake, don't mess it up. "It's a good thing you're not the one who has to judge that, isn't it? I deserve the explanation whether you think I'll find it stupid or not."

Lando blinked a few times, but if he was surprised, or grateful, or anything like that, he didn't show it. Oscar found himself glad for it.

Instead, Lando just nodded and said, "Yeah. You do." He took a deep breath, adjusting his position so that one leg was down on the floor and the other was still up by his chest. Then, he spoke. "Okay. I'll find a place to start. Um. You know all that stuff you said yesterday? About how I act like you're trying to replace me in the team?" Lando waited for Oscar to nod, then continued, "You were right. I mean, obviously not literally," he cut in over himself, eyes wide with brief panic. "I don't actually believe you're doing any of that. Of course I don't. But at the same time, it was kind of right." He shrugged. "Ever since you've joined McLaren, Oscar, I don't know where I fit in anymore. I don't know where I fit in the team."

When Lando looked up at him, Oscar just cocked his head. That was interesting to hear, to say the least. But maybe not surprising, based on all that he had known or guessed; it had been clear for a while that Lando's issues were related to the team and his performance. That couldn't have been all they were, though, so Lando bringing up this specific line of thinking, about fitting in? Oscar wanted to hear more. He wanted to see how deep the problem went.

Luckily, Lando took the nonverbal cue and kept talking.

Gazing down at the floor between them, he sighed. "The best way I can explain it is that when I was racing with Carlos, I knew where I belonged. I was the rookie second driver in a shitty, broken car, and that was it. No one expected anything of me other than not putting it in the wall every Sunday." The way Lando spat the word expected, bitter and full of disgust, only intensified Oscar's curiosity. Lando continued, "When I was with Daniel, everyone thought it was gonna stay the same. No one expected me to beat him until I did, but I did, and then the view pretty much flipped. Everyone knew I was ahead. It was concrete. It was easy."

Lando glanced up. "When you came along I wanted it to stay easy again. I was the older driver, the number one driver from the start, and everyone expected me to be ahead. Finally I had a teammate I didn't need to think twice about beating."

Oh.

That… made sense. Of course Lando had thought Oscar was no match for him—all twenty drivers in F1 thought that they were the best driver on the grid, because they had to. And Oscar was a rookie, so what was Lando supposed to have expected?

Still, it was one thing to know it, and another thing to hear it said to your face. Although he didn't let the emotion show, Oscar had to look away.

"Sorry that sounds mean," Lando said, quietly, like he genuinely meant it. "I didn't know you were… you, yet. And that's the thing." Suddenly, as he spoke, his volume started to increase. "You are you, and you're competing with me, and you're beating me, and I know I've said this before, but you are a really good driver, Oscar." At that, Oscar glanced back. Lando had said that before. Previously, he'd greatly valued the sentiment, holding it close to him at times he wasn't as confident. Now, with Lando's face a mix of longing, frustration, and straight jealousy, he couldn't decide whether to take it as a compliment or not.

"Everyone can see it," Lando continued, and Oscar didn't get the time to think about it. "So, I guess I was kinda thinking, where does that leave me? I'm older, but I'm not the number one driver. Even if I was this season, I won't be next season." Hand in hand with the volume increase, the vitriol in Lando's voice twisted more and more bitter with every word. "I'm five years into my career. Five fucking years. What does that say about me, huh? How can I possibly be as good a driver as I thought if I'm being beaten this quickly, five years into my career?" Lando brought his other leg up again and wrapped his arms around them, becoming as small as he could. "I don't know."

He was silent for a moment. Then, he laughed, a sharp, self-deprecating thing. Looking up at Oscar, he said, "And there you have it, mate. There's your answer. Your teammate was being an asshole because he's a fucking jealous prick. He can't handle the thought of being beaten like this, so he made it everyone else's stupid, stupid problem." Abruptly, the bitterness, humour, and everything else drained from Lando's voice, leaving nothing but sincerity. "And I'm sorry about that," he said. Oscar could see the regret playing in his eyes. "I really am."

Hm.

So that was how deep it went. Oscar was conflicted. On the one hand, of course he knew what jealousy felt like. This was a competition, a sport full of jealousy, where you couldn't help but envy anyone doing better than you. And at a certain point, things like that took a mental toll. There was only so much you could take of other people being better before it started to become a self-confidence issue. On the other hand—Lando had taken those self-confidence issues and ran with them. He had gone far.

It was so frustrating because Oscar had been there before. He hadn't publicly scorned his teammate for performing well, though, and as much as he wasn't inclined to talk to people about his problems, he hadn't ostracized them, either.

Lando had.

"You said you wanted me to understand," Oscar raised, eventually.

Lando tilted his head back against the wall, rolling his neck so he was looking to the side. "Yeah. Like I said, though. It's stupid."

"So then help me understand here," he pressed. "The entire season—or, you know, up until just recently—we've gotten along fine. Our results have been pretty similar the whole time, so… what changed for you? Was there a specific thing that happened?" Thinking of all of the times Lando had complimented him, comforted him, helped him, he desperately avoided asking, were you feeling like this the entire time? The whole time we were friends? Were you just pretending? "I want to know your thought process," he made himself say, instead. "What made you decide it was okay to treat me the way you did?"

Shaking his head, Lando said, "Nothing happened. Or at least, nothing that should have changed anything."

"What do you mean?"

Lando shifted, sitting up straighter. He put his hands out in front of him in frustration. "This is what makes it so stupid, mate. There was no thought process. Nothing I was thinking made any sense. But when I get anxious, like I have been, I also get really fucking paranoid. Let me tell you: jealousy and paranoia, all mixed together with nowhere to go?" He gave Oscar a sardonic grin, then shook his head. "Not a good combination. I don't think anything through when I'm like this, I just spiral. And do stupid shit. It's fucking pathetic."

Oscar frowned, considering. To an extent, the anxiety part was relatable to him. But jealousy, or paranoia like that? Not so much. "I see," he said.

Then, Lando deflated some. "But, uh, yeah. I do actually think there might've been a turning point of sorts. In Qatar. When you got that sprint win before me, and seeing you above me on the podium and shit—I tried so hard to suppress it, but I was mad. And jealous as fuck." Oscar nodded. If he saw past his feelings, the ones that kind of hurt all over right now, what Lando was saying made sense. Qatar was the first time Lando had ever snapped at him, so. Yeah.

"I think after Qatar, some part of my brain broke off and started seeing you less as Oscar-my-teammate and more as Oscar-my-competition," Lando admitted, looking like it pained him to say it. "And it kind of spiraled from there. I'm sorry. It just got bigger and bigger, and it made me touchy all the time, and angry, and self-critical, which just made me even more anxious, and it was all one big fucked-up circle. It doesn't make any of what I did okay, but it's the truth. I'm sorry."

"Is that why you never wanted to talk to me about it, then?" Oscar asked, before he could let himself feel anything more. "Because you saw me as competition?"

Lando made a hand gesture like so-so. "That was part of it, yeah. Like I said, I get paranoid. I overthink. That same part of my brain convinced me that if I told you about it, you'd try to use it against me. Somehow. God, that sounds stupid."

"But that was only part of it?"

"Yeah. I also didn't want to talk to you because, well—" Lando looked down, and then back up, and said, "You know that other stuff you said yesterday? About how you care about me, and I shouldn't act like I don't know that?"

Even though his hot chocolate was long gone, Oscar still held the mug. It had become something of a moral support along the way here, and he clutched it tighter now. He had a feeling that whatever Lando was about to say, he wasn't going to like it.

"Yes?"

"Oh, god." Lando rubbed his hands up and down his shins, face scrunching with another pained expression. "This is gonna make it sound like I'm trying to get you to feel bad for me again," he warned. "I promise you I'm not. But, I don't think I really did know that. That you cared about me. Like, I did, but I didn't," he said, speaking quickly, "or I convinced myself that you didn't, somehow, because I care about you. I knew that I cared about you. A lot. But I had no… evidence? That you cared about me." He shook his head, looking at the floor. "That sounds wrong. Of course I don't need evidence, but I just— I didn't—"

Suddenly, he stilled. Like he had just pressed a manual reset button, Lando stopped, took a deep breath, and when he started talking again, it was much slower and calmer.

"I think it was easier. It was easier, maybe, to pretend that you didn't care. Because then I could let the anxiety take over, let myself be mean to you, let myself push you away. It was easier for you, too, in my brain. If you didn't have a reason to care about me, you didn't have to get involved in my shit. And of course I know that easier isn't always right." Dripping with the irony of hindsight, he said, "Sure as hell wasn't right for this. But it was easy. And I needed anything easy." Lando looked up, and probably saw Oscar failing to hide his surprise, or confusion, or whatever feeling it was that he couldn't really untangle. His lips quirked. "Makes perfect sense, huh?"

Maybe, Oscar supposed. He didn't really know what to think.

It wasn't what he was expecting Lando to say, for sure. He had thought that Oscar didn't care about him? Or he had pretended, or whatever, and that just— well, maybe it didn't make Oscar feel bad, but it did make him feel weird. And again, he was struck by that stark sense of not being able to relate to Lando.

"You didn't talk to anyone else, either," Oscar said, not an accusation. Just a statement.

"Eh, yeah." Lando shrugged, falsely casual, and leaned back against the wall again. "When I found an excuse for one person, I found an excuse for everyone. No one would understand. They would all turn it against me. Jon would tell Zak to fire me, and Carlos would air me out to the media, and Max would stop being friends with me, and Daniel would laugh at me behind my back, and Alex would think I was a spoiled brat for complaining, and George would call me a pussy. Yeah," Lando snorted a dry laugh when Oscar failed to hide his expression once more. "Welcome to my brain." Then, more seriously: "'M not kidding about the paranoia. It was easier to pretend they didn't care either."

Oscar hummed.

There were still so many thoughts firing around in his head—considering the things he'd learned, a million more things he wanted to ask, the knot of his own emotions that was only getting more complicated by the second. But he knew he couldn't address all of it. Sooner or later, he had to respond to Lando, and responding was going to be the most difficult part.

Quickly sorting through the laundry list of questions in his mind, he settled on one that would help him the most.

"Before I say anything else," Oscar said, "I do have one more question. It'll help me understand."

"Yeah?"

Oscar paused, then let the axe fall. "About last week."

Immediately, Lando groaned. His head fell between his knees. "Oh, god," he said, voice muffled by his body. Then, he picked his head up, running both hands through his hair instead. "I am really, actually sorry about last Sunday. Fucking mess, that. Remembering what happened, all what I said, all what you had to hear." Lando shook his head, looking haunted enough for both Oscar and him. "You shouldn't have had to hear any of that."

"Well. I did," Oscar responded, struggling to feel any sympathy. Sunday was still too fresh of a wound. "Gotta deal with it. And my question is, when you were high, you told me you wanted to apologize. You said you knew you had been treating me badly. You knew what you were doing was wrong. So why didn't you? Why did it take this long?"

For the first time in a while, Lando actually took a pause to think, instead of the answer coming to him immediately. Unlike the first few times, earlier, this felt justified. Oscar waited.

After some time, Lando opened his mouth, and came out with, "I couldn't. And I know that also sounds pathetic," he clarified, "but I had gone so far. I'd already said what I said, no take-backs. I'd yelled at you, and I'd ignored Max, and I'd skipped one meal, so why not skip two? I'd burned one bridge, so why not burn all of them? I wanted to apologize so badly, but I was too late. I was frozen. Everyone else was moving past me, but I couldn't reach out or do anything, only let them pass. I just couldn't."

There was a pause. They both let the words hang in the air, waiting, thinking, appraising.

"Sounds lonely," Oscar said.

And finally, Lando's face crumpled. He'd been nervous, and scared, and regretful, but for the first time tonight, he just looked sad. Defeated.

He slouched into his legs, curling up again, eyes locked onto nothing.

"I don't know what to do, Oscar," Lando whispered, and it came out broken and small. "My brain is so fucked. I've pushed everyone I love so far away and I think all I want to do is run to them for comfort. My mum, I've ruined things with her. I think she hates me. And I've ruined things with Max. We've been best mates for so many years, and I threw it all away for nothing. I ruined things with you. Your friendship means so much to me already. But now it’s all gone, and I don't know what to do." His voice hitched, desperation creeping in. "I don't know what to do."

Well. Now it was responding time, whether Oscar liked it or not. He took a moment to organize his thoughts, deciding how he wanted to approach this, and then spoke.

"Do you want me to tell you what I think?" he asked.

"Yes," Lando choked out. "Please. I need help."

As if that wasn't the most earth-shattering thing Oscar had heard in the past month, he moved on.

"For one thing," he started, choosing his words carefully. "I understand what it's like to feel lonely. I understand what it's like to feel like people don't, or won't understand you. I do. But you can't pretend they don't care about you. I think you need to recognize that." Oscar leaned forward, so that even if Lando wouldn't look at him, he was certain he could hear him. "The people who surround you, the people who stay, they don't care about Lando Norris, F1 driver. They don't care about podiums, or trophies, or championships. They don't care about your place in the team. They care about you."

He pulled back, and shook his head. "I can't speak for your mum, obviously, but I can say with confidence that she could never hate you. She's your mother, and you're her son, and she'll always love you, even when you're arguing. I— well." A little sheepishly, Oscar said, "I can speak for Max, actually. When we were in Brazil, he reached out to me and asked if I could talk to you because he was worried about you. I had to tell him no, that I had already tried, and I think it really hurt him. But it hurt him because he cares, and he wants to know that you're okay. Every single one of your friends, if they are truly good friends, would feel the same way." The only acknowledgement that Lando gave him was a shaky breath out. But Oscar knew that he was listening.

So, cautiously, he moved on to the third prong of what Lando had said. "And… you haven't ruined things with me."

At that, Lando looked up, pure skepticism written all over his face. "But—" he tried to interrupt.

"You haven't," Oscar repeated. "I'm not gonna underplay it, obviously. You said some really nasty shit, and hurt me a lot, and I can't pretend that you didn't. That's not something you can just apologize away." As he said it, Oscar was almost grateful to find that among his complicated knot of emotions, what he was saying was true. Even with the explanation, with the apologies, he hadn't forgiven Lando yet. And he didn't want to. "But our relationship is not irreparable. If you put in the work, and really show me that you're sorry, that you're willing to make changes to your behavior, then we can get there, eventually." Oscar found that it was equally true when he said, "We can be okay again."

Lando blinked at him, and suddenly his eyes were wet.

"Fuck." He scrubbed his hands over his eyes. When he squeezed them shut and dug the heels of his palms in roughly, some buried instinct in Oscar wanted to tell him to stop. But they weren't back to that point yet. "It just feels so massive," Lando said. "And overwhelming. I still don't know where to start."

Oscar tilted his head and lifted his shoulders, a sort of what-can-you-do? "Always the first step that's the hardest, isn't it?"

"I guess." Lando made a strangled noise, finishing wiping his face. "Fuck," he repeated. He looked up at Oscar. "What do I do?"

Finally putting his mug down on the carpet, Oscar crossed his arms. "I can't tell you that. Not really. I can give you advice, but it's up to you to make the choice, no matter how hard it is."

Lando looked away. There was acceptance written in his expression. Still: "Can I ask for the advice?"

Oscar considered the Lando in front of him, less teary now, but still so defeated. He considered all that Lando had said about feeling paralyzed, about burning bridges, about feeling like he was too late. From the depths of his memories, up came a phrase that he had learned about in school one time. As he mulled it over, it only seemed more and more appropriate for Lando's situation.

"Do you know the saying about planting a tree twenty years ago?" Oscar asked.

Lando shook his head. "Don't think so."

"Well, it goes something like, 'The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is today.' It's about how even though you know you should've done something in the past, you can't let that stop you from doing it right now. It's basically the idea of 'better late than never.'" Lando got a look in his eyes like he was really thinking about that, and slowly nodded. "My advice, in that vein," Oscar continued, "is to do this. Exactly what you and I are doing right now, you need to do with everyone you want to apologize to. And you can't wait until they blow up like I did. You can't let the paranoia take over, and you can't let yourself be frozen just because you should've apologized a while ago. Like I said, the people who care care about you. They will not call you stupid. They will not use your anxiety against you. And when you let them in, you let yourself be seen." Recalling what Lando had said he wanted, Oscar added, "You let them understand you."

Lando kept thinking, and kept nodding as he took in the advice. Then, he grinned, a little shaky thing. "You know you're really good at this, Oscar?" he said, almost wistful. "I don't know how. The way you put words together just makes things make sense."

Oscar shrugged. A small part of him preened at the compliment, but he didn't want to let himself get distracted. "Eh, you might not be saying that in a minute. I have another piece of advice that you probably won't like."

"That's alright." Lando's little grin turned ironic. "I think I deserve not liking all the advice you give me."

Still, Oscar took a deep breath before saying, gently, "I think you might need to get professional help, Lando. As much as your friends and family want to help you, there are some things we just can't do, or can't know—and yes, a lot of your friends are racing drivers, so we do know what you're going through to an extent, but a lot of us don’t have great solutions either. The people who can actually help you with anxiety this severe are therapists." Aiming to lighten the blow slightly, he joked, "Reckon the entire field of sports psychology exists for a reason, yeah?"

Luckily, Lando neither got offended nor got mad, which were the two possibilities he'd been most worried about. Instead, in a concerning twist, he snorted.

"You're right," Lando said, perplexingly smiling again. "I don't like that advice. But you wanna know why I don't like it?" Not waiting for Oscar to answer, he moved on. "Because I know. I know, I know, I know I should probably go to therapy. Because you know what's extra funny?" A laugh, almost crazed, was underlining all of Lando's words now. Oscar frowned. "I've seen a sports psychologist before, around the 2020, 2021 times. Think it was a mix of the pandemic, and, like, rookie stress I hadn't fully processed yet, but I was so fucked for a while." Counting off on his fingers like he wasn't admitting something nearly so serious, he said, "I wasn't eating, I wasn't sleeping, I wasn't hardly functioning at all. It only ended when Jon broke into my flat with a list of phone numbers and refused to leave until I scheduled an appointment with one of them. And I'm not kidding about him breaking in, by the way. I wasn't answering the door, so Jon lock-picked me and let himself in."

And instead of processing anything that had just been said, Oscar dumbly asked, "Jon can pick locks?"

Lando gave him a cartoonishly shocked look. "I know, right?" Then, he shrugged. "But yeah, it worked, I guess. I ended up talking to this lady for almost a year, and I thought she really helped me. We worked through a lot of anxiety and self-doubt stuff, and at a certain point, I remember thinking, like, 'is this what it feels like to be normal?' Because I stopped having all these crazy voices and shit in my head, and— fuck, it was just mental." At this point, the humour faded away. Lando's tone turned bittersweet in its place. "By 2022, I was so proud of myself for getting better. I felt better, I looked better, I was performing better, and then—" He looked up at the ceiling, running his hands over the carpet..

"Earlier this year, I just— think I saw signs that something was slipping again, and I didn't, or honestly don't, know why. But I saw the signs, saw myself going back to before, and it fucking terrified me. Because, fuck," Lando admitted, voice shaking, "I'm not eating. I'm not sleeping. I don't really feel like a real person sometimes, now. Just a foggy sack of flesh that I'm dragging around for some reason. But I didn't want to see it like that. It felt like... giving up, or something, if I admitted that it was happening again. Because, then, what was it all for? Why did I go through an entire fucking year of therapy, if now, only a few years later, it's all coming crashing down again? Worse, if I did admit it, and go back to therapy, what if it didn't help? What if I go through all of that again, and come out the other side exactly the same? Or if I get better, and then just relapse again, just like I am right now?" During the rambling confession, Lando's hands had found their way back into his hair, and were now tangled in the curls, pulling in a way that looked painful.

"I was scared," he said. "Fuck, Oscar, I'm so scared. And it's so, so pathetic, because I am letting it paralyze me. I can't do anything, I don't feel anything other than bad, and I can't even fucking keep it to myself. I have to lash out, be a dickhead, make everyone feel as bad as I do, and I don't know how to stop."

Lando's voice broke on the last word, sharp and desperate.

Then, there was silence. Lando had talked himself dry. Oscar was at a loss for what to say in response. The only noises were the hum of the AC, the muffled ambiance of the city outside, and Lando's heaving breaths.

Oscar didn't know what to do.

So, where words failed, he fell back onto actions. Ignoring the protests of his race-sore muscles, Oscar put his hands on the floor and scooted around so that he was facing the same direction as Lando. He sidled himself up next to the other man, not quite touching, and settled down. In his peripheral vision, he felt the force of Lando's eyes on him. Still, he looked straight ahead. And then, when the sharp breaths didn't stop, and he could see Lando's hands still pulling at his hair, Oscar leaned ever so slightly to the left.

Their arms made contact. Oscar's bare skin pressed up against the fabric of Lando's hoodie. Not enough pressure to overwhelm—just enough to say I'm here.

Oscar still didn't look. But there was no missing the choked, broken, noise that came from beside him. Lando's hands fell from his hair, and Oscar heard the shift in weight, the rustle of clothes before he felt it. The pressure against his arm increased.

There really was no need to check. Still, he glanced to the side, just long enough to verify. Some unnamed emotion unfurled in his chest.

Lando was leaning against him back.

A few minutes passed, then; Oscar was happy to let them. Lando's breathing softly evened out, becoming slower, deeper. Oscar listened to the muted wail of a police siren from the street.

Then, quietly, Lando said, "I think you're a better person than I'll ever be, Oscar. You're so good. How are you so incredible?"

"Hah," Oscar laughed, more instinctually than not. Then Lando's tone of voice, dripping and shaky with the weight of emotion, caught up to him, and— oh, he's not joking. "I mean, what?" Oscar did actually look at Lando now, grappling with what to say. "Uh, don't sell yourself short, mate. I'm not, like, an angel or anything."

But Lando gave no acknowledgement that he heard Oscar at all. Instead, he stared intently at the floor, wrapping his arms back around his legs.

"I think I might be a bad person."

Oh.

Well, shit.

In hindsight, the amount of time that Oscar spent thinking about that probably wasn't great. Anyone more present of mind might've been offended, but Lando seemed pretty lost in his thoughts, so Oscar took the time to make sure he didn't say anything stupid.

Eventually: "Do you want me to be honest about my response to that?"

Lando jolted, surprised out of his blank staring. His eyes flicked over to Oscar, then quickly away. "Yes," he whispered, curling into himself like he was bracing for the bad news.

But Oscar shook his head. "You're not a bad person. You… talk before you think, and you're not good at putting words together into what you really mean, and you have made a shit ton of mistakes. But that doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you a person who has done some bad things. And there's a difference there." Oscar struggled momentarily to figure out what he wanted to say, then landed on, "I can tell that you're trying, Lando. You've helped me understand. You're not rude just to be rude, you're not enjoying your mistakes—you have a good heart. And that doesn't make the things you did okay, but it shows me that you can come back from them."

Lando looked back at him, eyes wide and disbelieving.

"I believe that you want to do better," Oscar emphasized. "I believe that you have the desire, and the strength, and the will to do better, and that's more than so many other people can say." Maybe a statement like this wasn't always true. Not with everyone. But in Lando's case, Oscar fully believed it when he said, "You are not a bad person unless you choose to be."

Lando made another choked noise. Oscar both saw and felt his shoulders shake with a shuddering force, but the emotion on his face was indecipherable. It just looked something like pain. Oscar waited to see if he would say anything, but he didn't. What else was there for Oscar to say, then, or do? He opened his mouth, figuring he'd come up with something, but before he even could, there was a sudden jolt of weight along his side.

Oscar blinked. He titled his head down.

Lando had collapsed against him. Like he just couldn't support his own weight anymore, so he had given it to Oscar to hold. They were pressed together from hip to shoulder.

This was more than Oscar had been planning to give. If this were an alternate world, if he were meaner, more petty, or really trying to prove a point, he would move away. He wouldn't let Lando have this, after everything.

But that wasn't the kind of person Oscar wanted to be. Lando had confessed to everything. More than Oscar was even expecting him to say, he had confessed to. Maybe they weren't to the point of forgiveness, yet, but he had acknowledged it himself: Lando was trying. This was okay, for now.

So he let Lando lean against him, felt his uneven breaths, felt the shiver through his core. He looked up, absently surveying the room. The Swiss Miss box on the table. The clothes spilling out of Lando's suitcase. The tangle of sheets, falling off the bed, while placed on top of a pillow there was…

No way.

Oscar startled, craning his neck up to be certain of what he was seeing. Lando made a noise, unsettled, so Oscar returned to his original position, but he had seen all he needed to. The stuffed goose. The gift he had given Lando in Vegas, which meant that not only had he kept it in Vegas, he had gone out of his way to bring it all the way to Abu Dhabi. Which, yeah—he'd been all cuddly with it last weekend, but he was high, and for all Lando knew it was a silly, anonymous gift, so for for him to have not just tossed it or given it to someone else, but intentionally packed it and had it on his bed—

Oscar needed to calm down. Never mind his stupid feelings.

But when Lando pressed himself against Oscar even further, and his head came down to rest on his shoulder, Oscar lifted an arm and put it around his back.

They sat like that for a few minutes. Oscar expected that Lando just needed some physical comfort, a little bit of time to calm down. Certainly, the way he leaned into Oscar like he was trying to absorb into his body spoke to that. Soon, the wrinkles in his brow would smooth out, and his hands would unclench from where they were gripping onto his shins, and his breathing would slow, and they'd figure out the next step from there.

Oscar waited.

However, little progress was being made. Even as Oscar felt the tickle of Lando's curls on his jawbone, as he squeezed Lando closer to him by the shoulder, there was no sign of Lando finding any kind of peace. Oscar could still hear the ragged movement of his breaths, feel the way he moved with each, unable to catch up with himself. Maybe he just needed more time, but he was getting time already.

After another minute, there came a point where Oscar started to genuinely get concerned. Lando's breathing only got quicker and quicker, more gasping—he wasn't calming down at all. At what point did it stop being anxiety and start becoming hyperventilating?

Oscar tried to pull away, just slightly, so that he could twist around and see Lando's face. It was not an easy feat, and Lando just shoved his face into Oscar's neck anyway. His breaths came hot and fast on the sensitive skin, and Oscar had to force himself not to shudder.

"Lando?" he asked, figuring that a verbal check-in was better than nothing.

And that was when he felt the tears.

The wetness on his neck, the way that sharp breaths were actually sobs, the soft whine coming from Lando's throat.

Oscar's base instinct was concern. Then, it quickly upgraded to alarm.

He brought his other arm up just in time for Lando to collapse forward. Instead of folding in on himself, he landed in Oscar's arms, and Oscar shuffled around so that Lando could lean on him comfortably. As soon as Lando realized that he was being held, his hands came up and found Oscar's back, grasping tightly onto his t-shirt.

It was probably a lost cause, but Oscar tried one more time, just in case Lando wanted to talk it out. "Lando?” he said, softly.

And the dam definitely broke. Maybe not in the way Oscar wanted it to, but Lando started talking.

"I'm sorry." The words came out barely recognizable, choked by gasps and sobs. Lando's death grip on Oscar's shirt squeezed impossibly tighter, and he buried his face into the joint of Oscar's shoulder. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry." He repeated himself over and over again, more and more insistent and broken every time. His chest was heaving, and his tears were soaking into Oscar's neck, and from the fingertips curled into his back to the curls tickling his chin to the body pressed up firmly against his, all Oscar could feel was Lando shaking. Trembling, straining, painful; the kind of shake that came from over-exerting a muscle.

Oscar's heart cracked. He'd reached his own breaking point yesterday—this was Lando's. This was the veil come off. This was the Lando who had been underneath it all, anxious, and alone, and spiralling, and paranoid, and so, so afraid. And yes, it was the Lando who had been an asshole. And yes, he was going to have to make up for it. But that was a problem for later. Right now, the priority was this. Just this.

Oscar held Lando as tight as he could, and for every I'm sorry that fell from his lips, Oscar murmured back, "I know."

It was a long while before Lando began to quiet.

A few minutes ago, as discreetly as possible, Oscar had checked the time on his watch. He'd caught it right as the clock turned midnight. They still had that 9 am flight tomorrow—today, now—and by all means, Oscar's bed was calling to him.

Still, despite his legs falling asleep, his butt going numb from the floor, and everything telling him I want to go to bed, Oscar did not let go. He wanted to wait for Lando.

And eventually, Lando took one more long, slow breath into Oscar's neckline, and started to pull away. Oscar dropped his arms to let him.

As Lando sat up straight, wiping down his face with his hoodie sleeve, Oscar couldn't help but think that he looked wrecked. His eyes were red, and so was the flush across his nose and cheeks. The eyebags didn't help, either. But if Oscar had to make a guess, he would say that Lando almost looked more content. Or relieved, like he had found some peace in his breakdown. Oscar hoped that he had.

"You alright, mate?" he asked. His voice felt weird breaking the silence.

Lando glanced at him, then resumed scrubbing at his eyelashes. "Yeah. Uh huh," he croaked.

"Are you sure?"

Strangely, Lando actually giggled. It sounded disgusting—congested, snotty, wet. But the little smile that accompanied it, maybe the first genuine smile of the night, was enough to make anything else irrelevant. "No. No, not in the slightest," he said. Then, done cleaning himself, he scooted over so he could lean back against the wall again. His head tipped to the side, and he found Oscar's gaze. "But. I think I could be, soon."

And Oscar responded honestly. "Good."

After that, things became mostly a matter of wrapping up. Lucky for Oscar, Lando checked the time himself after only a minute or two of contemplative silence, and said, "Holy fuck, mate. Didn't realize it had gotten so late. Sorry about that." This eliminated any need to navigate leaving on his own, which he was guiltily glad about.

Lando peeled himself off the floor, Oscar following suit to the continued protest of his body. He guided Oscar to the door, and as he did, there was only a little bit of awkwardness lingering in the air. No obligation to figure everything out, no need for hostility any longer, no pressure to talk any more than they already had. Even if nothing was technically resolved, something about knowing that felt particularly freeing. Oscar counted it as a win.

While he was putting on his shoes, Lando darted away for a moment and then came back, pressing the box of Swiss Miss into Oscar's hands.

"Don't let it go to waste," he threatened, tone somewhere between joking and not.

Unconsciously, Oscar's lips quirked. "I wouldn't dare."

They bid each other goodnight after that with no extra fanfare. It didn't feel necessary, honestly. Oscar finally made to leave.

"Hey, Oscar." The words made him stop right as he was reaching for the doorknob. He turned around, and found that Lando had paused by the table, leaning against it with one hand. His other hand was on his own shoulder, fidgeting with the fabric there. As he looked at Oscar, it was with an open, nervous gaze, and it took him a few moments to speak. "Not ireppable, right?" he asked, timidly.

Despite everything, Oscar couldn't help the little snort and stupid, fond grin that appeared on his face.

"Irreparable, Lando."

Suddenly, Lando was fighting a grin as well. His expression was caught somewhere between staying serious and laughing, and if this were a month ago, Oscar knew there would have been an immediate clapback comment. A wow, correcting the dyslexic person much? Or a damn, didn't realize I called the grammar police, or a not all of us finished school, Oscar.

Maybe they'd lost the privilege of that banter for the moment. But the sparks of it were still there, tiny and buried but not gone. Maybe a month down the line, they'd be making jokes again, and maybe come next season, they'd be closer than ever before, and maybe a few years from now they'd be standing side by side with each other still, side by side with the team, and they would look back on this moment and they would laugh.

It was going to be a hell of a fight to get from here to there. Nothing in Formula 1 was a guarantee.

But the time would pass, one way or another.

And nothing was irreparable if you fought for it.

-

The first time that Lando and Oscar met up during the off-season, it was early December. They were both in England, tying up a few loose ends with the team, and one day at the MTC, Lando had approached him. Clearly nervous, he had asked if Oscar wanted to come back to his flat and play some games together.

Oscar, although caught slightly off-guard, had accepted without much consideration.

The plan was set from there. Lando gave him his address, because they needed to drive separately, and at the end of the day, they each took their respective car and made it to Lando's flat.

The atmosphere, once they were inside and alone, was a little bit awkward. It made sense, though. For them, it had been a while since casual hang-outs, since mindless chats and jokes, since existing in each other's space. It would take some getting used to again.

So, to break the ice—and because he'd never actually been to Lando's flat before—Oscar suggested that they do a little tour around. Lando was receptive to the idea, and started taking him through the kitchen, through the lounge, through the bathroom. A few jokes were made here and there, mostly about the absolute nightmare that was Lando's kitchen and fridge. Oscar didn't want to know the expiry date of anything in this flat.

Luckily, the quiet ribbing seemed to work wonders for alleviating tension, and as they made their way through rooms, the chatter between them increased. Oscar started to feel a bit more hope coming alight.

Eventually, they made it to Lando's bedroom, where Lando pushed himself inside in front of Oscar and frantically started picking up clothes off the floor.

"Forgot to clean," Lando was saying, along with a whole bunch of other mumbling that was unintelligible. Being not the neatest person in the world himself, Oscar truly didn't care, but he left Lando to his fussing. Instead, he gazed around the room. The decorations were simple, clean, just what you'd expect from a temporary residence. There were a few trophies here and there, but most of them were probably at his main place in Monaco. Because it was Lando, there was definitely evidence of the room being lived in—drinks cans on the nightstand, a takeout container on the desk, a whole bunch of socks everywhere. His bedsheets were rumpled and half thrown off the bed.

But while Oscar was looking at the bed, his eyes caught on something that stood out. He managed to be less shocked this time, as it was the third occurrence, but his breath still caught a little bit when he saw the stuffed goose. It was sitting pretty on one of Lando's pillows, so innocuous, but so significant.

Looking at it from the doorway still, Oscar couldn't help the feeling of awe, or maybe gratitude, or maybe just happiness. "You really kept it around," he murmured, mostly to himself.

Apparently it wasn't as quiet as he thought, though, because Lando turned around, holding an inside-out shirt. "Hm?"

Oops. Well, Oscar decided, fuck it. Casually, he gestured to the bed. "The goose," he said. "I thought it would get left in Vegas, honestly."

Lando briefly furrowed his brows. "The goo—" he started to say. Then, in a split second, his head snapped to the side. The offending goose was still there, sitting on his pillow, and Lando flushed bright red. Oscar had to hold back a laugh.

In one motion, Lando leapt over to his bed, threw himself down on it, and picked up the goose. He held it awkwardly to the side like he couldn't figure out whether he was showing it off or hiding it.

"Quack is just— I mean— it was a gift," he stuttered.

This time, Oscar had to laugh, just a little bit. Lando had named it Quack? Crossing his arms, he leaned against the doorframe and grinned. "Yes, I know."

That gave Lando pause. Embarrassment put on hold, his face scrunched up in confusion instead. "Wait. What do you mean, you know? And, hang on, you thought it would get left in Vegas? How the fuck do you know about that?" Lando kept looking at him, gears turning, trying to figure out the mystery. Oscar watched, in real time, as he connected the dots. "It was you!" he exclaimed. He jumped up from the bed and pointed a finger at Oscar.

Oscar raised his hands in surrender. "It was me."

"And the chocolates?" Lando demanded.

"And the chocolates."

Lando put his hands on his head and started pacing, like this was the most life-altering news he'd ever received. He was still holding the goose as well, so the positioning made it look like it was sitting on top of his hair. "What the fuck, mate? Jon told me they were from the team, how—" Oscar waited for him to realize, and yep, there it was. "Oh my god, Jon." Lando stopped pacing, giving him a glare that was comically betrayed. "No way you two were ganging up on me. How the fuck did that happen?"

Oscar shrugged, very amused. "Happy birthday?"

Lando threw the goose at him.

Though they moved on, Lando spent a while longer grumbling about Jon and Oscar working together behind his back. Oscar couldn't even imagine what his reaction would be if he told him that that wasn't the first or last time they had co-conspired. If this amount of complaining was the baseline, Oscar was never going to say a word.

And of course, he did know that the grumbling wasn't all that serious. Back when they bantered like this all the time, Lando had loved this type of humour, playing up offense to the peak of its drama. This wasn't that weird for him. But maybe it was too soon, or the wound was too fresh, because Oscar couldn't help but find it a little bit grating, after a while. It almost felt invalidating, like Lando was making fun of what he had done, or even criticizing. Never mind the risk Oscar had taken for him.

Eventually, it wore on him enough.

To one random complaint, Oscar simply responded, "What do you think would've happened if you'd known that gift was from me?"

There'd been a pause. Then, Lando had gotten this uncomfortable look on his face. The grumbling instantly ceased.

Later in the evening, they were sitting on the couch, having just finished their most recent round of Mario Kart. Lando, who had come in varying degrees of tenth for the past three races, tossed his controller to the side and stretched. Oscar took that as a sign that they were done, so he followed suit, taking a sip from his glass of water.

"I don't think I could have done it, you know."

Oscar stopped drinking. He glanced over at Lando, who was still looking straight ahead at the TV, expression unreadable. "Done what?" he asked.

"Given you a birthday gift." Leaning forward, Lando put his elbows on his knees. "If our roles were reversed, I mean. I think I would've been too scared, or too mad, or I wouldn't have thought of it at all."

Oscar paused. He placed his glass down. "Why are you telling me this?"

Lando turned his head, looking Oscar in the eye. "I guess I want to say thank you. For being you. For thinking about it, when I wouldn't have. And for doing it, when I didn't deserve it." There was an attempt at an ironic smile. It came out more like a grimace. "It was a pretty shit birthday. Even just thinking the stuff was from the team— it meant a lot to me. And knowing it was from you? It means even more. I want you to know that."

The intensity of his gaze made Oscar look away. There was quiet for a minute.

"I take him to all of my therapy sessions with me," Lando suddenly said.

Almost startled, Oscar turned back. "Quack?" he asked, fighting off a situationally inappropriate laugh at the name.

"Yeah. His name is actually Quacques Villeneuve, you know." Luckily, Lando started snickering at his own statement, so Oscar didn't have to fight the laugh anymore. "Uh huh," Lando said, among their quiet giggling and emerging, gentle smiles. "Real Villeneuve hates me, so, uh. Felt right. Felt petty. He'll never know."

Grinning, Oscar did a quick search of Lando's eyes. They yielded nothing but humour, gratitude, and the truth.

From Oscar's complicated tangle of emotions, finally there emerged something concrete. Pink and yellow tendrils of surprise, happiness, hope, all twisting, braiding together until they were one and the same and reached a new form: pride.

"Good," Oscar said, the feeling swelling in his chest, overtaking him. He placed a hand on Lando's shoulder and gave him a firm nod. "I'm glad I gave you him, too."

-

A week or so after that, Lando sent him a text asking if Oscar wanted to have dinner together. When Oscar accepted, and asked what he had in mind, Lando had texted back, verbatim, "haha dont worry bout it," and said he'd meet him at Oscar's place at 6. Naturally, Oscar had worried about it.

At 6, Lando showed up at his door with two full bags of stuff, and declared that they were going to cook. What culinary feat, one might ask, were they striving for? Spaghetti and meatballs. The rest of the stuff in his bags were snacks and desserts—taking full advantage of the off-season.

They'd decided to divide and conquer, so while Oscar got started frying meatballs in a pan, Lando stood back and waited for a pot of water to boil. They were chatting idly on and off, but overall, it was quiet. Not a bad quiet, thankfully, with Lando's playlist on in the background and the sizzling coming from the stove, but a genuinely nice atmosphere.

"Is this weird?" Lando asked, out of nowhere.

Oscar, keeping half an eye on the meatballs, turned partially. Lando was leaning back against the kitchen island, not an easy spot to look at. "Weird how?" he responded.

"Asking you to do this with me?"

"I don't think so," Oscar said, and he didn't.

Lando made a strained noise, like Oscar had missed the point. "I just— what if I said that I was using you? As, like, a way to get me to eat more, again? I've been talking about it with Jon, and some other people, too. Cooking the food helps. So does being with other people."

The spatula stilled in Oscar's hand. An emotion, sad and indescribable, sent a pang through his heart. Absently, he adjusted the burner so that it was on low heat, then turned around to face Lando fully. The other man was looking at the floor.

"You're not using me, Lando," Oscar said, keeping his voice level. "You're getting help to do something hard, something that's really important to you. That's not a bad thing."

Lando made another noise, clearly disagreeing. "Yeah, but like, this is supposed to be about us reconnecting. Not my food issues."

"Why can't it be both?" Oscar gestured between the two of them. "End of the day, we can't reconnect if you're not helping yourself get better."

"Maybe," Lando conceded, although he didn't sound convinced.

Turning back to the meatballs, Oscar resumed his task. By the looks of it, the water was ready for the spaghetti, too. But he didn't tell Lando that yet. Instead, he let them stand, listening to the hiss of oil and boiling water and a random country song.

"If you had told me your reason before you invited me, I still would've said yes," Oscar said, eventually. He didn't look behind, and Lando didn't respond, but Oscar knew that he had heard. "You know? It's not using me if I want to."

Lando said nothing again. But he slid in next to Oscar, shuffled up close, and pressed their arms together.

Oscar handed him the box of pasta. Wordless, they leaned on each other. And they stayed that way, swaying slightly to the rhythm of the music, until their dinner was made.

-

In late December, both of them went home for the holidays. It was exactly what Oscar needed.

His sisters all dog-piled him, just like his mum said they would. For the weeks spanning Christmas and New Year's, he just soaked in the family time, the refreshing sunlight, and the chance to finally have a break from F1. When he got back to England, he felt better than he had in a long time.

He and Lando had planned a meet-up on the first weekend of January—Oscar hadn't heard why, but Lando was apparently staying in England for most of the break instead of going back to Monaco. That was fine with him, frankly. Maybe more than fine. Oscar tried not to think about it.

They ended up agreeing to go to some café in London that Lando had heard about from George, a supposedly rather high-end hidden gem. Upon getting there, he discovered that it was actually very nice, with all-out winter decor and a cozy interior. Even the dreary English weather could be cheered up with this sort of atmosphere.

Sitting down at a table together, Oscar joked, "You should take more recommendations from George, mate. Maybe he actually knows what he's talking about with the whole posh act."

Bashful, Lando looked down, then back up. "Funny you mention that. Only reason I got the recommendation is because I talked to him." At Oscar's questioning gaze, Lando clarified, "Like, talked to him. The way you told me to."

Oscar blinked, surprised and not surprised at the same time. "Ah," he said.

"And some other people, too." Lando fidgeted with the cuffs of his sweater, pulling them over his hands.

"How'd it go?"

When Lando looked up at him, his eyes were thick with emotion. Perhaps gratitude, perhaps something more complicated. "You were right," he said.

Over their orders of croissants, tea for Lando, and hot chocolate for Oscar, Lando told him all the details. He'd talked to his parents, and especially his mum, who was just as understanding as Oscar had guessed. Apparently, Max, when Lando had showed up to his flat unannounced, had almost decked him. Then, he'd spent ten minutes calling him an idiot in every single way possible, and then pulled him into a fierce hug. Lando didn't say it outright, but there'd been tears from both of them.

As for the people like Carlos, George, Alex, other-Max, the Quadrant gang—well, they'd all been supportive. The way Lando said it made Oscar a little sad, honestly. It was with a tentative, shaky sort of wonder, the kind that made him sound like he truly couldn't believe that people supported him. But that was a problem that Lando needed to solve with himself. For now, Oscar just stayed happy that he had confronted his paranoia at all, and made sure to tell him as much.

"Oh," Lando suddenly said, when they were long done eating, in a tone like he'd remembered something. He cleared his throat and started picking at the flakes that had fallen off his croissant. "I keep forgetting to mention, by the way. I have a, uh. Gift. For you."

Oscar cocked his head, intrigued.

Clearing his throat again, Lando wiped his hands with a napkin and reached into his backpack, which was set on the floor. Oscar had wondered why he'd brought such a big bag.

From the depths, Lando pulled out none other than Quacques, and set him on the table. Then, he reached back in and extracted another stuffed animal: a mallard duck with funny bent legs and, somehow, an expression of authority in its beady black eyes. Lando extended the duck toward Oscar.

"I got you your own friend," he said, and he looked a little embarrassed, but he was still smiling.

As Oscar reached out and accepted it, snickering, he couldn't stop his own stupid grin from forming. He turned the duck over in his hands. "Does it have a name, too?"

All of a sudden, Lando's smile turned entirely too self-satisfied, which should have been the first warning. As it was, there was only half a second for Oscar to get suspicious before Lando said, "Yep. It's Mark."

"Mark?" Oscar failed to see why that elicited the pleased smirk Lando was giving him. "Like, Mark Webber?"

Overly casual, Lando leaned back in his chair and gestured at the duck. "Nah, mate. That's Mark Webbed-Feet. Completely different bloke."

A moment passed.

Then, Oscar folded at the waist, snorting out breathless laughter. With his face planted in his hands, he couldn't see Lando, but he could hear him also cracking up. Between gasps and giggles, Oscar managed to ask, "How do you come up with these things?"

"'Dunno, mate. Got a brain like no other."

That brought a particularly big snort out of Oscar. "Yes. Yes, you do." Running his hands down his face, he tried to pull himself together, remembering that they were in public. Aside from the occasional hiccupping breath, he managed well enough to give Lando a proper, genuine look. There was still that smug little grin on his lips. Underneath it, though, Oscar could tell that there was contentment, and maybe a bit of relief. He looked happy. "Thank you," Oscar said, and he put the duck—Mark, apparently—on his lap. In a tone that came out more soft than he intended, he added, "I like him a lot. Really."

"Well, uh," Lando stammered. Maybe it was just the café's candle-light decorations, but he seemed to take on a rosy colour in his cheeks. "Um. Merry Christmas, you know."

And Oscar, knowing full well that this was more than just a Christmas gift, smiled.

-

The next several weeks passed in a blur of random invitations from Lando, from playing padel together, to trying out restaurants, to just hanging out and playing more games. Oscar hadn't really had many plans for the off-season, so— it was nice. It was nice on a deeper level than that, too, of course.

It was on one such occasion, when they were at Lando's place playing FIFA, that Oscar knew he was noticeably subdued.

He'd said yes to Lando because he hoped hanging out with someone might distract him, take his mind off of things, help him cope. Evidently, it wasn't working. Despite his best efforts, the conversation kept trailing off with him, and he found himself unable to muster the right kind of humour to play it off. He already sucked at FIFA, but this gameplay was a new kind of terrible. Oscar just couldn't pretend to be normal right now.

It shouldn't have been surprising that Lando noticed. After Oscar's third brutal loss in a row, Lando reached over and gently plucked the controller from Oscar's grip. Together with his own controller, he placed them on the coffee table.

"Mate," Oscar protested. It was half-hearted even to his own ears.

"Oscar," Lando said back, lightly scolding. Then, his gaze turned uncertain, and he hesitated before he spoke. "You can tell me if I'm, like, overstepping or anything, but. Are you okay?"

"Um. Yeah." Very quickly, Oscar realized how stupid that sounded. "Well, no," he admitted. "Not really." There was a brief battle in his head, weighing whether or not he wanted to tell Lando. Then, he leaned forward, elbows on his knees and face in his hands, and sighed. "One of our family dogs is sick. Something to do with her kidney, or— I don't really understand what, honestly. My mum told me earlier today, but I wasn't listening super well. It's serious."

As he said it, the waves of pain and sorrow that he thought he'd managed to contain came bursting back out.

In his peripheral vision, Lando shifted closer to him. "Oh my god, mate," he said, voice soft and serious. "That's so fucked. I'm sorry."

"Well." Oscar shrugged, trying to shrug the emotions away with it. "She's on medication now, which they think might solve the problem, but it also might not. Her future is sort of up in the air."

Silently, Lando put a hand on his shoulder. And funnily enough, it was that that brought the feelings back. That that made his eyes start burning. That that brought the words to the tip of his tongue. "I just keep on thinking," Oscar said, "about the fact that I'm hardly ever there, and I haven't gotten to spend much time with her this year, and I might not even get to see her again before she dies, and I can't—"

With every word, his vision was blurring, and he hardly realized it before the tears started falling. He cut himself off with a sob.

His attention was barely there enough to notice, but between the space of one wet blink and another, Lando disappeared from beside him and reappeared in front of him. Crouching down to Oscar's level, he put both hands on his shoulders. The firm grip grounded Oscar enough that he heard it when Lando asked, "Can I give you a hug?"

Reduced to a state beyond speaking, Oscar just nodded.

Lando leaned forward, wrapped his arms around Oscar's back, and held him through the sobs. His embrace was tight, not stifling, squeezing in all the right places to say I'm here. It was only when the last tears dried on his cheek that Lando finally let go.

Wiping down his face, Oscar managed to make his voice work again. "Thank you," he said, thick with emotion.

Lando sat back on his haunches, expression a mix of concern and something else, something tender. His lips quirked in the smallest, gentlest of smiles.

"Of course," Lando responded. "Always."

-

A few days later, Lando invited him to go shopping together.

When Oscar came out of the fitting rooms, carrying a few shirts that Lando had been right about—he could admit they were a nice addition to his boring wardrobe—he found the other man standing in front of a mirror. He wasn't wearing anything different, or even looking at his clothes at all. He was looking at himself.

Silently, Oscar stepped up next to him, and his reflection joined Lando's. They made eye contact through the mirror. In that moment, Oscar could see that Lando's gaze was one of thinking. Not scorn, nor judgement, nor anything strong. Just quiet thinking.

Casual as anything, Lando said, "I think I'm starting to like the person I see in the mirror again."

And Oscar wanted nothing more than to hug him.

So he did.

-

In late January, Oscar went to visit his family a second time.

He had been calling his mum regularly, and, at her insistent prodding, telling her about his time spent with Lando. Every call, she'd stop him at the end of the story and ask something like, "And how is he making you feel?" At the beginning, the answers had ranged a lot, from okay, to awkward, to hopeful. Lately, though, they'd been consistent.

"Good," he'd say. And his mum would hum in assent, or if they were on FaceTime, she'd nod, and he could see the approval on her face.

Honestly, when Oscar touched down in Melbourne, he forgot about it for a while. The heat and activity of peak Australian summer, his sisters swarming him and dragging him around to this and that, meeting up with some old friends and classmates—he'd only been gone for a month, but he was kept busy enough you'd think he'd been gone for years. And then there was the stress of the dog, of course, who was tentatively doing better. Oscar was glad more than anything to be seeing her.

Still, despite all of the chaos, the trip felt like what it was supposed to be: a vacation. This was the good kind of busy.

Now, it was his last day in Australia, the night before he was due to fly back to England. For the sake of the jet lag, he was forcing himself to stay awake much later than he wanted to. His mum was staying up in solidarity.

Oscar was lying sprawled out the couch, scrolling on his phone, while his mum was sitting on an armchair, reading a book. The lights had been dimmed, the room silent except for the clock, second hand ticking away on the wall.

Oscar sighed. He put his phone down on his chest. In the silence, the thoughts in his head were running rampant. In the silence, they also sounded a lot scarier to say out loud.

"Hey, mum?" he said, softly for the others in the house who were asleep.

She looked up at him over her reading glasses. "Yeah?"

Oscar gave himself a second, contemplating. "What do I do if I'm ready to forgive him?"

Knowingly, his mum slipped a bookmark between the pages she had open. She shut the book and placed it on a side table.

"How is he making you feel?" she asked.

And the answer came to him instantly. "Happy."

"Then you forgive," his mum said, simply. "You don't forget—but you forgive. That's all there is to it."

She let him sit in that for a minute. Then, she got up, and sat down next to him on the couch. Her hand came up, running through his hair like she used to when he was younger.

Screw the jet lag, Oscar thought. He slowly drifted off, lulled to sleep by the ticking clock and the gentle rhythm through his hair. As consciousness slipped away from him, so did the feeling of holding on.

And right before he fell asleep, he thought he heard his mum say something.

It sounded a lot like "I'm proud of you."

-

By early February, he and Lando no longer needed excuses to hang out at each other's flats. One of them would just send a message, and then they'd spend an evening catching up about vacations and family, or playing video games, or watching dumb reality TV shows. They'd even expanded their culinary pursuits, and sometimes cooked dinner together. Tonight was one of those nights.

Lando had gotten a recipe for risotto from some online-famous chef or something, so they'd made a trip to the store together to get all of the ingredients. Oscar had read over the recipe at some point with a dubious eye—wasn't risotto supposed to be hard to make? But the box of specialized rice said fifteen minutes, and the recipe, although longer, only said twenty. Really, how bad could it be?

The answer, as it turned out, was very bad. For one hour and twenty fucking minutes, Oscar had stood at the stove, continuously stirring a bitchass pot of rice that simply would not cook. Lando had been a fountain of unhelpful suggestions, like "Just turn up the heat, bro," and "what if you stir it more?" It was late, late in the evening when they finally sat down at the table, plates in front of them, and tried a bite of their hard work.

For a minute, they sat there, chewing, contemplating.

"Mate, this kind of sucks," Lando said. And then the hysterical laughter began.

"Oh my god, it does," Oscar wheezed out, between planting his face firmly in his hands and keeling over onto the table. Lando was full-on cackling, slapping the tabletop with his palm. They just kept on laughing, and laughing, and laughing, until that finally died down into giggles. Oscar picked himself up from the table eventually, and then looked at Lando, and immediately started laughing again.

He was laughing so hard that he was crying, so he didn't notice it at first. The only thing that cued him in was realizing that Lando had gone quiet—in the absence of his commotion, the room felt suddenly empty. Something had changed. Oscar blinked the wetness out of his eyes, and his laughter slowly trailed off with it, confused.

He dared a glance up, and instantly, he saw it.

Lando wasn't laughing anymore. He was looking at Oscar. But not just looking, either—watching. With a small, soft smile and eyes that glittered with something so intensely fond it hurt, Lando had been watching him laugh.

Oscar's breath caught in his chest.

His laughter trailed off completely, and he found himself, unconsciously, watching Lando back. The way his skin had taken on a healthier tone these past few months, the way his bruised eyebags were gone. How his curls sat on his head, finely tousled with a new product Lando had told him about. The way he sat here in Oscar's kitchen, natural as anything, as if he belonged there. His clothes, his hands, his lips, his eyes—good god, his eyes, the way he looked at Oscar. Like maybe this meant something to him too.

A feeling, wracked with deja vu and the knowledge that it had never actually left, tore its way out of the place Oscar had been keeping it tucked away. Surging, billowing, it burned so brightly for a moment that it blinded him. All he could see or hear was two repeated statements in his head: I'm so gone for him. After all this time, I'm still gone.

And the realization, if it was even a realization at all, was enough to break Oscar from his trance.

He startled back, just now noticing how he was leaning forward across the table, closer to Lando. The sudden movement made Lando jump too, and he blinked rapidly. Within the second, they both flushed red. What was happening right now?

Before the awkwardness could set in, before he had to acknowledge anything, before either of them started asking questions, Oscar rushed out a declaration. "Lets order takeaway," he said. "Give up on the risotto. It's not good." He gave Lando his best I promise everything is normal dont ask me what just happened please let's just move on grin.

Mercifully, he hadn't needed to worry at all. Lando looked just as flustered as Oscar felt, and he immediately grabbed onto the out, agreeing, "Yep. Sounds mint."

And they moved on. Not smoothly at all, but it worked.

When Lando wasn't looking, Oscar sighed. It looked like he was back to reigning in his feelings again. It was crazy how much had changed since the last time he'd had to do this—just about everything.

But he'd do it, for as long as he had to, if it meant he got to keep Lando like this.

-

Later that same night, Oscar was moving about his kitchen, putting away some of the random stuff that hadn't been cleaned up earlier. He had said goodbye to Lando a few minutes ago—unfortunately, Lando had spent the whole time leaving complaining about the weather. Which, yeah, it was chilly, but Oscar was convinced that there could be a heatwave and Lando would still be cold. It was just one of his many quirks.

Finally, Oscar finished the menial chores. Flicking the kitchen light off, he headed for the couch, ready to settle in for the night with a random movie or show. He had just sat down, sinking into the cushions, when his attention was caught by several knocks at the door.

His immediate reaction was irritation, because, really? Now? But as he thought about it, the feeling transformed into confusion, because he wasn't expecting anyone—especially not at this time of night. Making dinner with Lando had been his only plan for the day.

Whoever was outside knocked again, and begrudgingly, Oscar got up. Upon getting to the door, he looked through the peephole. If this wasn't someone he knew…

But, no. He actually did know the person on the other side. And, he realized, as his confusion increased ten-fold, it was Lando. Again.

As soon as Oscar registered him, standing there bundled in his hat and scarf, he opened the door.

"Lando?" he had to ask, right out of the gate.

"Hey," Lando said, and then he didn't elaborate at all.

Oscar was left to fill the gap. "You're back. Did you forget something?" The thought only occurred to him as he said it, so he craned his neck around, looking for a phone, or keys, or a jacket, or anything else Lando could've left behind.

"No," Lando responded. He sounded certain in the statement, but at the same time, as Oscar looked a little closer at him… there was something off about his expression. Almost spacey, or a little lost. Like his mind was on a completely different subject.

"Okay, then. Is there something—"

Before Oscar could finish his question, Lando cut him off, blurting out, "Can I come in? Like, just for a minute, probably?"

Oscar didn't let the interruption offend him. "Yeah?" he said, stepping back to let Lando come through the door. "Of course. What's up, mate? Be honest, did someone steal your car?"

As Lando came to a stop in the entryway, he snorted. "Nah, nah. Not that. I'd be in a scrap right now if someone tried that." The image conjured up of Lando in a fistfight made Oscar laugh. The joke also seemed to bring Lando back to the present, and Oscar internally patted himself on the back.

"I, uh— there's something I want to tell you, actually," Lando said. He shifted, taking his hat off and putting it on the console table, and with that change his voice also changed. It was more firm now, kind of quiet but not unsure. "Something I didn't have the confidence to tell you before."

Oh. Oscar nodded, understanding now. This was a serious topic, probably something weighing in Lando's mind, probably something he just wanted to talk through.

"Okay. Should we sit down, maybe?" Oscar pointed with his thumbs back toward the couch.

"No, uh, it's alright. This will be quick." The way that Lando said it, with more quiet confidence, surprised Oscar a little bit, but he didn't argue. Instead, he let Lando have the floor.

Playing with the fringed end of his scarf, twisting it around his fingers, Lando paused for a moment. Then, he spoke. "Like I said, this is something I didn't have the guts to tell you before now. Or, it's more like I didn't know I wanted to tell you, because I didn't know what it was for a long time, and now I do. At least I think I do." The drop of uncertainty, of hesitation, lasted for no more than a second before Lando seemed to steel himself. He came back with, "No, I do. I do know."

There was another moment's pause. Oscar knew Lando well enough at this point to recognize that this wasn't him thinking about his intention—he knew what he wanted to say. This was him thinking about his words, so that he actually said what he meant. He'd been doing this a lot with Oscar lately.

Finally, he said, "So, you know I've been going to therapy and shit for the past few months. That's given me a lot of time to think, right? About myself, and about other people, too, and my relationships with them. How I feel about the people in my life." He looked to Oscar, who nodded, acknowledging that he understood. "And, the whole time, there was something sorta… underneath it all? Like, this super big, familiar feeling that I was supposed to understand, but I couldn't really see what it was. Just that it was important. Really important." Oscar nodded again, curiosity increasing.

"Well," Lando said, glancing briefly down, then back up, "a couple weeks ago, I figured out what it was. What it is, actually. It's still there."

"What is it?"

And with all of the certainty, all of the conviction in the world, Lando said, "It's you."

The air escaped Oscar, like a punch to the chest.

"And it's always been you," Lando continued. "I was just too dumb to realize it."

Unconsciously, Oscar's mouth opened, but he had nothing to say. He couldn't think, he couldn't breathe, he couldn't make anything make sense. If Lando was saying what he thought he was, then— but that meant— he couldn't be—

"What—? What do you mean?" Oscar asked, fighting to get every single word out because nothing made sense but he had to know. He had to ask.

"It's you," Lando repeated, as if Oscar wasn't actively having a breakdown. "It's everything about you, Oscar. It's your face, and your bunny teeth, and that stupid swoop in your hair. It's your neck, and your moles, and your waist, and your legs, and the way that you walk in your race suit. It's how you laugh, and how you treat kids, and how you're so calm until you're not and then you're so, so passionate. It's your kindness, and your patience, and your heart." Each statement was listed with a scarily calm tone, like Lando was repeating known truths, like there was no questioning it. He tilted his head, shaking it slightly. "How could it not be you?"

What?

Oscar's brain was breaking, falling apart at the seams. He had half a mind to wish that they had gone to the couch, actually, because his legs felt unsteady, and he wanted to sit down. Before he could say or do anything, though, Lando took the chance from him.

"You got mad at me for beating around the bush, last time," Lando said. His eyes were alight, fierce with a determination he usually saved for the track. "I'm not gonna make the same mistake again."

Suddenly, in one quick move, he stepped forward and cupped Oscar's face with both hands. With a grip both gentle and firm, he pulled Oscar in to make direct, searing eye contact.

"Can I kiss you?"

Oscar jolted. His heartbeat stuttered once, then twice, then began to hammer heavily.

"What?" he asked, carefully.

"Oscar Piastri. Can I kiss you?" Lando repeated, the force of his hands and his eyes a beautiful, burning inferno.

And Oscar wanted nothing more than to say yes.

But because his brain hated him, he couldn't stop the words that were crawling up his throat. "Are you sure?" he asked, and he regretted it as soon as he said it.

All Lando did in response was pull him closer. Their faces mere centimetres apart, it was impossible to miss the genuine, fond, sincerity projecting from Lando's expression. He whispered, "I've never been more sure of anything in my life."

Oscar waited one second for confidence. Another to make sure this was real. And on the third second—

"Yes."

Lando smiled. Then, gently, he tilted Oscar's head for him, leaning in, bridging the gap.

Oscar's eyes fluttered shut, and for a moment, all he knew was the grip on his face, the soft breaths on his lips, the beating of his own heart. Every nerve ending was alight with electricity.

Then, their lips met. Oscar melted into the kiss, and it felt like coming home.

It was a slow, sweet thing, like honey, like summer days, like everything that was good. Too late, he realized that he was smiling, and their teeth lightly clacked together. "Sorry," he whispered. Lando kissed the apology away from him.

From that point on, time was lost in the gentle rhythm of push and pull, of give and take. Oscar didn't care. Lando's hands were in his hair, or maybe his hands were in Lando's hair, or maybe both were true, but Oscar knew it for certain when Lando's hands slid down to his waist. Digging his broad fingers into the softer flesh, Lando pulled their bodies closer together. The tug of warmth in Oscar's gut was unmistakable.

He would've been happy to do this for much, much longer. But eventually, time caught up to them. Lando pressed one final, lingering kiss to Oscar's lips, slow and savoring as if to remember the sensation forever.

And at last, they parted. However, they stayed with their eyes closed, foreheads pressed together, breathing in unison in the silence.

Oscar only opened his eyes when Lando inhaled deeply.

"Holy fuck, Oscar," he said, voice low and shaky. The smile was both visible on his face and audible in his words. "I can't believe I did that. I was shitting myself the entire time. No joke."

The laugh was in Oscar's chest before he could tone it down. Of course. Of course that was what Lando would say after kissing someone. "Really?" he asked, also smiling like an idiot. "It didn't look like it."

"Feel my heartbeat. No, actually, feel it," Lando insisted, taking one of Oscar's hands and bringing it up to his neck. Automatically, Oscar shifted two fingers to find Lando's pulse point. He was right—his heart was pounding like crazy.

It was almost a little concerning. "Oh my god," Oscar said, half-joking, half-serious, as their hands returned to their original places. "Are you okay?"

Lando's eyes twinkled. "I am now. I'm more than okay."

He accentuated his words with an extra tight squeeze of Oscar's waist. That was the only warning he got before Lando adjusted his grip, set his stance, and lifted Oscar off the ground. Oscar made a noise halfway between a squeal and a laugh, grabbing onto Lando's shoulders for support as Lando spun them around. The only way that he could think to describe this feeling was giddy. He wasn't sure he'd ever felt like this before.

After a few spins, Lando carefully set him down, although he didn't release his grip.

"We have to talk about this, you know," Oscar managed to say, between giggles and the wide, toothy smile he knew hadn't left his face at all in the past few minutes.

"I know. But just let me have this for a second, okay?" Wiggling his eyebrows suggestively, Lando said, "I've got a hot new boyfriend and I have to kiss him some more."

The snort-laugh was punched out of Oscar reflexively. "Ugh," he groaned, feeling so disgusted and endeared and gone for this man. "Good to know you're still you under all the fluff."

All of a sudden, Lando faltered. For the first time, there was a glimpse of true hesitation in his eyes, a little, raw piece coming to the surface. One of the hands on Oscar's waist started moving in a way that was less caressing, more thumbing his shirt—a rhythmic, grounding motion. "That's, like— okay, right?" Lando asked, quietly, looking up at Oscar with a candid, vulnerable expression. "That I'm… me, in this? You're okay with what that means?"

"Lando."

There were so many things that Oscar wanted to say to him. He wanted to tell him about every little part of him that Oscar loved, about how their relationship and their banter was one of Oscar's favorite things about being at McLaren. He wanted to tell Lando that he knew he had flaws, that he'd just watched three months of him fighting and struggling and clawing his way out of a bad place and it only made Oscar like him even more. He wanted to tell Lando that being himself was what made him perfect. And he would. All of these things, he would tell Lando, at some point.

For now, he just kept it simple.

It was Oscar's turn to cup Lando's face, lightly cradling his jaw. "I have wanted you for so long," he said, honestly. "I have wanted you."

"I kinda feel like I don't deserve it," Lando responded, although it was a half-hearted protest at best. There was already something warm and tender on his face once more.

Seeing this, Oscar tipped their foreheads together again, bonking Lando slightly. "You're an idiot, Lando."

A small, slanted grin appeared on Lando's lips. "Yeah. Probably. But I managed to do something right with you."

"Oh, shut up," Oscar said, full of a fondness he couldn't disguise. Lando looked so proud of himself, and not even in a cocky way. He was just… happy. Happy with what he'd done, happy with Oscar, happy with standing here holding each other. Oscar couldn't fault him because he felt the exact same way.

Still, though, that little smirk remained. Oscar brought their lips together and kissed it off of Lando's face.

And when he smiled into the kiss this time, he didn't feel bad about it.

This was what he'd been fighting for.

Oscar had finally won.