Chapter Text
The end of the world comes about at 3:06 p.m. on a fucking Wednesday. Oscar sits in his stupid, ergonomically sound swivel chair, making a valiant effort to focus on the very long emergency meeting he and Lando are sitting through, but his mind just can’t seem to let go of that one detail. He’s imagined this exact catastrophe a million times, each nervous spiral complete with a million different horrific little flourishes, but even in his wildest nightmares, these things always happened in the dead of night.
That’s how careers are supposed to fall apart; there was supposed to be some kind of blurry picture posted on Twitter, their faces only half-recognizable, and he was supposed to wake up to a frantic boyfriend and a wall of even more frantic notifications, and then they were supposed to wallow in self-pity for at least 48 hours before accepting a single phone call.
Instead, he was spending his break at Lando’s apartment, magnets digging into his back as Lando kissed him against the refrigerator, when everything went to hell. By the time either of them understood what was going on, they had a legitimate onslaught of texts from Zak Brown summoning them to the McLaren offices a couple of hours outside of Monaco.
—
[New SMS from: Zak Brown]
I will personally pay for your plane/speeding tickets if it gets you here faster. Also legal wants me to tell you that you have my support.
Not that you don’t actually have my support***
Just kind of weird that they told me to tell you that like they think it’s not true.
It’s clearly true.
I have embarrassed myself deeply and would very much appreciate it if we never spoke of this again.
NOT the Twitter thing**** We fundamentally must speak about that.
We could forget about this one conversation though.
—
So Oscar’s hopes for a 48-hour wallowing period were quickly dashed, but he was right about the picture, at least.
Small victories.
That very picture is now open on the screen of the iPad sitting on the table between Oscar and Lando, a snappy headline splashed across it in garish yellow text. Lando’s barely spared it more than a glance since the meeting began, anger clearly simmering under the surface of his skin as he fights the urge to throw the whole fucking iPad out the window. Oscar agrees wholeheartedly with the sentiment, but his eyes seem to be on a constant mission to sneak glances at the screen.
It’s under-exposed and grainy, clearly caught with frantic hands before either of them had the chance to notice the phone camera pointed at them. Just barely discernible in the low light, Oscar is leaning against the wall outside some nondescript building in Monaco with his head thrown back, laughing in that stupid, exaggerated way he always seems to when Lando Norris is involved. Lando’s not fully facing the camera, but his hair and side profile give him away. He’s pressing a kiss to the corner of Oscar’s mouth, one hand tangled in the hair at the back of his neck while the other rests on his waist. It is, unfortunately, the kind of photo a person could stare at forever. Tangible evidence of a life well-lived and well-loved.
Oscar remembers that night. It was weeks ago, and they’d just gotten back from a miraculous 2-3 finish after a horrific qualifying in Melbourne. What was supposed to be a walk to cure some of the jet-lag quickly spun out into insomnia-induced delirium, and then Lando was pushing him against the wall and kissing him, one hand cradling his head to make sure he didn’t hit it too hard on the bricks, and suddenly Oscar couldn’t have cared less about his fucked-up circadian rhythm. Or the fact that they were in public. He was so happy. He was so stupid.
One of Lando’s hands comes to rest on Oscar’s knee under the table. “Alright?” he murmurs, looking at Oscar like they’re the only people in the room. Like Andrea and Zak and half of the McLaren PR team aren’t all sitting on the other side of the conference table, watching the interaction with unreadable expressions.
Oscar exhales forcefully, fighting off the urge to scream. “Yeah,” he responds eventually, but his voice immediately betrays him.
“Yeah,” Lando echoes, an almost unbearable amount of understanding wrapped up into one word. He uses his grip on Oscar’s knee to pull him closer, and the plastic arms of their chairs clack together quietly as he rests his head on Oscar’s shoulder with a hum.
This is, at least, a slight consolation prize for the PR car crash they’ve gotten themselves caught up in. Even if Oscar wasn’t great at concealing his affection to begin with (yeah, he fucking knows), there’s a very real part of him that aches with relief at the prospect of easy, casual moments like this. The quiet luxury of telling a story without first going through it in his head to meticulously redact any mention of Lando’s name. The glittering, shiny-new privilege of looking at him without an excuse. In terms of silver linings, it’s not half bad.
He uses his newfound freedom to take Lando’s hand, absentmindedly brushing a thumb over his knuckles. After a moment of blessed silence, Zak starts speaking again, and for the first time since the meeting started, Oscar makes a real effort to process the words he’s hearing. “Have either of you been paying any attention?”
“No,” they answer in accidental unison, both far too tired to bother with lying.
Zak gives a world-weary sigh. “Alright, look. Here’s the bottom line: your personal lives are nobody’s business but your own. As nice as it would have been to have a contingency plan in place for a situation like this, telling anyone—including the team—should have been your decision, and it’s not right how all of this is happening. But the choice on how we respond is yours to make. The photo is relatively, uh, clear, so denying it would be… a challenge, but it can be done. It can be attempted, at least. You know McLaren will be behind you no matter what, and a number of other teams are prepared to issue messages of support, they’re just waiting on the go-ahead.”
Lando groans, pulling his head off Oscar’s shoulder in favor of pressing his forehead to the cool surface of the table. “Yay, allies,” he drawls into the wood. “And obviously we’re not denying it.”
Oscar’s breath catches in his throat. Despite everything—despite their still-entwined hands, and despite the fact that they’ve always agreed on wanting to come out eventually—some part of him, however small, wasn’t sure. If Lando wanted to, he could have deleted all of their text messages and all the pictures of Oscar he keeps in a locked album on his phone. He could have gone home and taken down all the Polaroids he so loves to decorate with. He could have asked Oscar to do the same, and Oscar would have done it. If Lando asked him to, he would have turned something into nothing, would have figured out a way to destroy energy. Fuck you, Albert Einstein.
But it feels so obvious now that there wasn’t anything to worry about. He has a toothbrush on Lando’s sink. He keeps his own bathroom stocked with all manner of hair products on the off chance that Lando forgets or runs out of his own. When they’re alone, Lando wears Oscar’s clothes more than his own. He admitted once that he saves all of Oscar’s voicemails and listens to them when they’re apart and he can’t sleep. They have a life together, real and tactile and far harder to dissolve than a 14-month trick of the light.
“Obviously,” he parrots stupidly, fighting off a smile. Lando turns his head, still resting on the table, and grins up at him shamelessly.
One of the PR people coos at them, all soft and just a little bit condescending like they’re fucking gay penguins at the zoo. It’s an interesting adjustment to make, knowing that this is just how it’s going to be from now on. Oscar will forevermore be known as one half of “LandoandOscar: Those Gay F1 Drivers—Didn’t You See The Picture?”
He supposes that if he was going to be someone’s other half, it was never going to be anybody but Lando anyway.
—
“Can you drive?” Lando asks, burrowing down into his hoodie as he shuffles after Oscar out of the conference room and down the shiny, somehow always freshly-lacquered hallway of the offices.
Low, blue-toned light filters in through massive windows, an unwelcome reminder that they argued about brand consistency and ‘phraseology’ (what the fuck) for so long that the sun literally set. Oscar alone wasted half an hour convincing a copywriter that the word ‘relationship’ was just fine, thanks. No I’m serious, just say ‘relationship,’ no actually ‘connection’ is significantly worse. For the love of God, if you open that thesaurus again I will throw myself out the window, and how would you like to write that Instagram post?
Shortening his next few paces, Oscar falls into step with Lando. “Yeah, of course. Headache?”
He nods and hums his confirmation. “It’s not so bad yet, but I think driving would make me sick.”
As Oscar makes a little sympathetic noise, Andrea looks over his shoulder at them with a quizzical frown. “You can see that just by looking at him?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess so. He always rubs his eyes like that when his head hurts.”
Lando pauses with the heel of his palm pressed against his left eye. “I do?”
“You do.” Oscar reaches out to brush the curls off his face, smoothing out his eyebrows with a thumb as he goes. He can already feel himself falling in love with touching Lando like this regardless of who could see.
Andrea is looking forward again, deceptively casual, when he says, “Hm. This is good, I think. You make a good match.”
“Oh.”
When it becomes clear that Lando doesn’t know what else to say, Oscar picks up the slack, offering a simple, “We think so too.”
“Please do not have sex in your driver’s rooms.”
Oscar flushes bright red, completely mortified at the fact that Andrea Stella now has a vested interest in his sex life. “Oh my God.”
Lando, on the other hand, just shrugs and fidgets with his sleeves where they’ve ridden up his forearms. “Eh, ‘s not like you ever noticed before.”
“Oh my God, Lando.”
“He asked!”
“He one hundred percent did not ask.”
“Oscar is right, I did not ask. But I suppose it does not matter, as long as it does not interfere with your races.”
“I mean, one time-”
“-Let’s go home!” Oscar announces, still mindful of Lando’s headache. “Let’s leave our place of work, which is where we are, and go home!”
For some reason—which Oscar has no chance of comprehending even after thousands of hours spent observing his boyfriend—this prompts Lando to smile dreamily and announce, “Home is where the heart is.”
He winces at the volume of his own voice, frowning in that stupid way that always makes Oscar want to kiss him. But he refrains, for the moment at least, and softly corrects, “Home is where the painkillers are.”
“…Yeah, okay, let’s go.”
Andrea offers them a warm, slightly amused goodbye, though his voice is tinged with somber awareness of being offered access to a moment he never should have been a part of, and disappears down the hall.
When they make it to the doors out to the parking lot, Zak is there waiting for them. (Even though he totally left the meeting after they did and would have had to run around the long way and take the fire exit stairs in order to beat them without actually passing them in the hallway. But whatever.) “Official statements are set to go out tomorrow morning. Other than that, you two just let me know what you need,” he says. “From McLaren or from me. Understood?”
Instead of diving into the emotional intricacies of that particular sentiment, Oscar just offers a decisive nod. “We’ll see you later.”
A thought seems to cross Zak’s mind then, and he makes several false starts at sentences as if he can’t quite put it into words. “You got here sooner than I was expecting,” he says at length. “Calling Monaco ‘home’ these days?”
After a moment of puzzle-piecing together the elements of that very American sentence, Oscar comes to the conclusion that Zak is accusing him of living with Lando. A strange, innocuous thing to be accused of after being outed on an international scale. It’s a little bit nice, though, to be asked for information. To have the option not to disclose it.
Still, his mind returns to when they left Lando’s apartment that afternoon, in the same car because there was no reason to be separate anymore. He thinks of the dishes they left in the sink in their hurry to get out the door, the bed he insists on making every morning even though Lando says it’s pointless when they’re just going to mess it up again, the pinkish-orange duvet cover (they can never agree on what color it technically is, only that they both like it—Lando has taken to creating increasingly ridiculous and pretentious names for it, and Oscar has taken to openly laughing in his face) they both hate washing because it inevitably takes half an hour and all their sanity to get it back on properly. The toothpaste stains on the sink in the en suite, the shoes in a haphazard row by the front door, the baby-proof corner guards that mysteriously appeared on the coffee table after Oscar banged his knee on it for the fourth time in as many weeks, the special (expensive) brand of hot chocolate mix that Lando quietly stocked up on after he found out it was his favorite.
“Yeah,” he says. “I guess so.”
—
One hand on the wheel, Oscar intertwines the other with one of Lando’s. One of their phones automatically connected to Bluetooth when he started the car, and a Taylor Swift song plays softly now, the bass turned way down so it won’t exacerbate Lando’s headache. Neither of them know the song, nor why Spotify has decided to play it, but it has that sparkly-eyed love song kind of charm, and Oscar finds himself nodding along to the melody without really even processing it. He’s never been particularly enthusiastic about Taylor Swift before, but sudden change is kind of his specialty at the moment. His sisters will be thrilled; he can practically feel the I-told-you-so speech coming.
Fuck.
His sisters must have sent him hours of voice messages by now. His phone, safely on Do Not Disturb mode, seems to mock him from its place in the cupholder. He’s not really worried that they’re going to react badly. The worst he could ever reasonably expect from his little sisters is a sudden influx of incredibly invasive questions, but their flagrant disregard for his privacy is nothing new. Really, he’s just plain unprepared for the amount of support he knows they’ll offer him. He’s been doing pretty well at keeping himself together, but nothing would fuck up his carefully curated sense of calm like his sisters saying, God forbid, something sincere.
“Y’okay?” Lando mumbles, an arm thrown over his eyes where he lies in the passenger seat, reclined back as far as it goes. “You’re all quiet all’f a sudden.”
“I wasn’t saying anything before, either,” Oscar points out.
“You were humming, and then you stopped.”
Oh. Horrifically embarrassing. Cool. These things never stop making him squirm, no matter how many times Lando has seen him at his very worst. No matter how many times Lando has seen, and heard, and known, and loved him anyway.
“Yeah, I’m alright,” he confirms in lieu of acknowledging his alleged sing-along. “Just thinking about how long it’s gonna take to go through all my texts later.”
Lando makes a strangled sound. “Don’t remind me. I think I’m just gonna throw my phone into the ocean and be one of those people who lives in a cabin in the woods and eats, like, oatmeal.”
“Oatmeal?” Oscar echoes, only allowing the slightest amount of amusement to bleed through his voice.
“Yeah, y’know, they have those big jars of- of oats and rice and, like, dried lentils or beans or whatever. And they live in the woods and just… I don’t know, they just think a lot, I guess. Philosophy.”
He’s well on his way to talking himself to sleep, so Oscar just says, “Philosophy, yeah.”
“You’d run away and be a hermit in the woods with me, right, Osc?”
Oscar knows for a fact that they would drive themselves fucking crazy within four days. “Of course,” he says, glancing over at his boyfriend in the passenger seat. “What would we even do all day?”
Lando’s eyes are still covered by his forearm, but his mouth twitches like he’s trying to form a shit-eating grin and just doesn’t quite have the energy. “Well, when two people love each other very much-”
“-Yeah, alright,” Oscar huffs. He untangles their hands, wincing and murmuring an apology at the little mournful noise Lando makes, and reaches blindly into the footwell for the hoodie he knows he left there. “Here, try to sleep,” he says, finally managing to get a grip on the thick blue fabric and offering it up as a makeshift blanket.
Lando accepts it readily, even though he’s already wearing a hoodie of his own, and curls up under it before reaching out to take Oscar’s hand again. The rest of the drive home passes like that, Lando never quite managing to fall asleep despite clearly dedicating all his energy to sitting very still.
In a particularly desperate stretch of mind-wandering silence, Oscar’s train of thought is inexplicably derailed and sent careening toward the idea of how different his life would be if he and Lando weren’t together. Some alternate universe where they never started a horrifically unwise friends-with-benefits arrangement—which inevitably ended with a teary-eyed shouting match and at least twelve stages of grief. Where Oscar never answered his hotel room door only to be bowled down by a slightly manic but stone-cold sober Lando, who had spent the entire night sitting in a booth at some club in Barcelona with a thousand-yard stare before Charles eventually found him and brought him back to the hotel with orders not to drown in his shower. A parallel timeline in which Lando never barged into the room with an impassioned and slightly aggressive love-confession-slash-tirade which culminated in a grandiose, “I didn’t actually suggest this whole thing because I needed to have sex, or something, Oscar, I did it ‘cause I needed to have you. So Jesus fucking Christ, can I kiss you or not?” A version of Lando and Oscar who never ended the world’s most miserable race weekend with slightly perilous shower sex (sorry, Charles) and overindulgent room service and bouts of giggles every time they made eye contact.
Oscar still flushes pink at the memory of being kissed into hotel bedsheets in between whispered apologies and ‘I love you’s. Thinking about parallel universes makes his heart ache. How much less complicated would everything be, how much less vibrant. But it’s all just complete nonsense anyway. No version of Oscar Piastri, in any iteration of existence, would ever not love Lando Norris.
—
“You’re dead to me.”
Oscar blinks, pulling away from his phone for a second to make sure he hasn’t called the wrong person. He hasn’t. “Uh- What?”
“Oh my God, Oscar?”
The bedroom (their bedroom, Lando’s bedroom, it’s pretty much all the same at this point) is quiet, save for the whir of the ceiling fan and Lando’s soft breaths where his head rests on Oscar’s chest. “…Yes?”
Hattie, the eldest of his sisters, makes a strangled noise, somewhere between delighted and devastated. “Fuck, sorry, I didn’t check who was calling.”
“That was your default phone greeting?”
“For people who call me at seven in the morning, yes.”
“Well it’s not seven in the morning here, and I’m catching up on texts, and you said I had to call you or else you’d think I was dead. And then you sent like three rows of exclamation points.”
“I’ll call off the search party,” she deadpans, her voice stretched thin with a yawn. And then, a little bit more genuine, “I’m glad you’re not. Dead.”
Beside (and kind of on top of) him, Lando makes a displeased sound and buries his face further into Oscar’s neck. He winces; he meant to leave the room before calling his sister, but then Lando wrapped himself around him, and Oscar is a very, very weak man. “Sorry, love,” he murmurs, running his free hand over the warm, bare skin of Lando’s back. “I can go.”
“No,” Lando whines, holding onto him a little tighter. “Stay.”
“I don’t want to hurt your head,” Oscar protests softly.
His accent is thick with sleep when he says, “Head’s fine. An’ I like your voice, anyway.”
“Okay,” he concedes, as if he would ever really leave. As if he could. “Tell me if I’m too loud.”
Lando makes a noncommittal noise and brushes a kiss over Oscar’s collarbone. “Say hi for me.”
For the first time since Lando started speaking, Oscar is reminded of the fact that his sister is still on the line, probably hearing at least half of this conversation.
“Lando says hi,” he relays into the phone.
He’s always prided himself on his adaptability—answering ridiculous questions with a smile on his face, making split-second decisions to avoid crashing out, happily allowing his boyfriend to slot a thigh between his legs and kiss him against the door of one of their driver’s rooms (what Andrea doesn’t know won’t hurt him)—but this might be his best work yet. The long-nurtured habit of hiding his relationship falls away so easily that he’s almost surprised that they ever managed to keep it a secret in the first place, let alone for more than a year.
“Oh, I didn’t know you were with him.”
Oscar’s breath catches in his throat as he processes the secondary meaning of the sentence. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he recalls a conversation a couple of years ago when his little sister Edie (the middle child of the three girls, and endlessly bitter about it) painstakingly explained the difference between ‘together’ and ‘together.’
Like, physical distance versus philosophical distance, she said. What the fuck, Oscar responded. He thinks that maybe he understands what she meant now.
“Where else would I be?” he asks, hoping his answer suffices for whichever definition of together-ness Hattie is insinuating.
She makes a small sound of acknowledgement. “How is he?” The ‘ how are you?’ she so clearly wants to ask goes unsaid, as so many things do between him and his sisters. They’re closer now than they ever were as children, but some gaps are best left unbridged.
After a long moment spent trying to find the right words to say, Oscar settles for, “It sucks.”
“Yeah,” Hattie agrees, all the air leaving her lungs in a semi-amused whoosh. “Yeah, it really sucks. If there’s- I don’t know, if I can do anything to help…”
He feigns a dramatic gasp before his heart has a chance to feel the full depth of that. “Are you offering to help me?”
“Desperate times, Oscar.”
“A picture of me kissing my boyfriend is hardly the most important thing happening in the world today. I’m fine.”
He is arguably not fine, but Hattie doesn’t need to know that. His plans for emotional vulnerability include telling Lando everything, telling Logan approximately two thirds of everything, and telling everyone else nothing, and that is just fine with him. Although, now that his relationship and sexuality are pretty much public information, he can probably upgrade to a solid 75% vulnerability with Logan. 80%, if he’s feeling really crazy.
“…Okay,” she says, clearly not believing him. Still, she lets it go, a real testament to how concerned she must be. “It’s late there, I’ll let you go. Make sure you call Mum, okay? And I’ll tell Edie and Mae you’re okay, but you should text them when you get a chance, too.”
“Why?” he asks dumbly, regretting it as soon as the word leaves his mouth.
Hattie goes quiet for a long, palpable moment. “Because they’re worried about you. We all are. We always are.”
What he really wants is to ask whether or not their dad is included in that ‘we,’ but all that actually comes out of his mouth is another, softer, “…Why?”
“I don’t know,” she says. And then, as if she didn’t just claim not to have an answer, “Because we never see you. And we watch your interviews, and all the stuff you do with McLaren, and you’re always just… smiling, and saying the right things.”
“My extensive media training worries you?”
They both know it’s a lie when she says, “Yeah, I guess so. Well, I should go. Unless you want to talk about anything…?”
“I’ll call Mum back tomorrow,” he promises, not giving himself the chance to go and do something really stupid like be honest with his little sister. “Um, thank you. For worrying.”
“…Don’t mention it. Oh, tell Lando I say hi back!”
Oscar glances down, trying to gauge his boyfriend’s level of consciousness. His eyes are closed, but he’s awake, if only on a technicality. “I will.”
“Hey, he’s- I mean, he’s, like… nice to you, right?”
He rolls his eyes and laughs out loud without enough time to even try not to. Lando pulls back a little bit and squints up at him, one eyebrow raised in a silent question. Oscar smiles, looking at him pointedly as he tells Hattie, “Yes, he’s nice to me.”
“And his intentions?” she teases. He laughs, allowing himself to revel in the normalcy for a moment.
“Oh, very honorable,” he assures her with a clumsy wink down at Lando, who absolutely glows with bravado.
“Good. That’s… I’m glad. Okay, I need to take a shower, and you need to go to bed. Tell me if you need anything.”
He hums his assent, even though he’s pretty sure they both know that will absolutely not be happening any time soon. Maybe not ever. “I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Talk to you soon,” Hattie echoes.
After an awkward second of silence, Oscar takes the responsibility to hang up. He twists toward his nightstand to plug in his phone and when he turns back, Lando is already there, catching him in a kiss.
“Who was that?”
“My sister,” Oscar laughs as Lando kisses a path from the corner of his mouth to the underside of his jaw. For a split second, his mind draws a comparison between this moment and the one in the picture, but he forcefully removes the thought from his head and redirects his focus. He pulls Lando properly on top of him and runs a hand through his curls, untangling them gently.
“Which sister?” Lando asks, voice muffled where he’s busy biting marks into a particularly visible expanse of Oscar’s neck. He doesn’t really know where this falls within the new PR strategy McLaren is piloting, but he doesn’t really care, either. Excuse the fuck out of him if he wants to take advantage of his sudden lack of privacy.
“Hattie. She says hi, by the way,” he says, blushing at how breathy he sounds. Stupid Lando Norris and his stupid mouth. “I guess your head’s feeling better, huh?”
Lando hums against his neck. “Yeah. Caught it before it got too bad. God save over-the-counter drugs.”
“You should drink some water, it’ll help-”
“-Osc,” he interrupts, sitting back with a pout on his face. He glows in the low lamplight from the bedside table, wearing nothing but a pair of too-long sweatpants that certainly once belonged to Oscar, eyes sparkly even in his fatigue.
He leverages himself up onto his elbows with a frown. “What? Are you okay?”
Lando promptly pushes him back onto the mattress. “ I love you, I love listening to your voice, you know that, but I need you to stop talking for a minute so I can kiss you properly.”
Oscar’s heart kicks up against his ribs the same way it always does when Lando tells him he loves him. “Oh. Yeah, okay,” he agrees, looping his arms around Lando’s neck and pulling him back down for another kiss.
Smiling against his mouth, Lando pushes his hands under the hem of the soft, threadbare t-shirt Oscar put on before crawling into bed and settles them on the curve of his waist. “You’re pretty.”
“Thank you,” he giggles, feeling kind of silly in his pajama shirt and boxers. Still, the way Lando says it makes him kind of believe it.
“I’m serious,” Lando says softly, looking down at him like he’s some kind of miracle. Oscar is well aware that the vast majority of ridiculous, adoring gazes exchanged between them are his own doing, but he’s not sure he’ll ever get used to the way Lando looks at him. “You’re pretty. I mean it.”
“I know.”
He tries to kiss him again, but Lando pulls his head away petulantly and asks, “You know you’re pretty, or you know I mean it?”
He’s just opened his mouth to say something, although he hasn’t decided what, when the comfortable quiet of their bedroom is interrupted by a sharp, confident knock at the front door. Lando groans at the sound, rolls out of bed and, kind of astonishingly, manages to plant his feet on the ground before he hits the floor. He wastes no time before hauling Oscar out of bed, using him as a human shield as he pushes him toward the bedroom door.
“This is your house,” Oscar hisses, but he allows himself to be herded across the room anyway. “Why am I answering the door?”
“Our house,” Lando corrects, affronted even as he continues to hide behind Oscar.
“Um. Okay,” he stammers, suddenly unable to remember what they were bickering about. Our house. Fuck. Is he being serious? What does that even mean? Oscar’s name sure as hell isn’t on the lease. Although, his sisters’ birthdays are on the calendar in the kitchen. Maybe it is his, then. Not in writing, but certainly in practice.
Lando must have interpreted his silence as protest, because he continues, “It could be a murderer!”
“Hey, your willingness to throw me to the lions is concerning,” Oscar remarks dryly. Just to fuck with Lando a little bit, he digs his heels into the floor and struggles slightly against the unstoppable force shepherding him to his (unlikely) death.
Another knock comes from the front door, louder and more insistent. Lando makes an adorable, miserable sound and gives Oscar one last shove over the threshold into the hallway. Oscar accepts his fate and shuffles toward the front door. When he throws a final glance over his shoulder, he finds a familiar head of curls and an even more familiar set of bright green eyes peeking around the doorframe of the bedroom. As soon as Lando sees him, he ducks out of view.
Oscar’s chest seizes with emotion. He still can’t believe that he’s even capable of loving Lando more, that he hasn’t run out of space for his emotions despite fourteen months of feeling like they could overflow and kill him at any moment. How completely insurmountable, what a criminal amount of love.
Whoever is at the door knocks a third time, which is honestly a little overkill, but what the fuck ever. All he wanted was to lay down in bed with his boyfriend and sleep for approximately twelve to eighteen hours, but this is clearly not the day of wish fulfillment for Oscar Piastri.
It occurs to him only as he is already swinging the door open that he’s still wearing his plaid boxers and a stretched-out sleep shirt, neckline dipping low over his collarbones and fully exposing the evidence of Lando’s mouth on his skin. And he’s answering the door of Lando’s apartment. And he smells like Lando—his favorite cologne, his laundry detergent, his skin. But the door is already open by the time he realizes what a scene he makes, so he merely braces for the worst.
Instead, he finds Max Verstappen. One arm is raised in a fist, presumably getting ready to bang on the door again, while the other is being tugged on by a mortified Charles Leclerc.
“-cannot just show up at his house! Come on, before you wake- Oh. Hello, Oscar.” Upon realizing the door is open, Charles flushes bright red and awkwardly drops Max’s arm.
“Uh, hi,” Oscar greets, desperately wishing he hadn’t let himself be roped into answering the door. His center of gravity shifts back and forth on bare feet. He really should’ve put on some real clothes. “Fancy… seeing you here.”
“You too,” Max says, eyes narrowed as he processes the fact that he’s looking at Oscar, not Lando.
“I am so sorry,” Charles starts. “I tried to stop him from coming here, but he is very stubborn and he has a private plane, so I tried to convince him to at least wait until morning, but he was convinced that Lando was dead or dying or something-”
“-He’s not,” Oscar says. They both look at him like they’re expecting more, but he doesn’t know what else to say. “…I promise.”
Charles nods indulgently. “That is good. I texted you both, but I’m sure everyone else in the world did, too. I am of course very selfish, though, so I’m glad to see you… I don’t know if you’ve looked at the group chat, but we’ve all been wanting to see you both, it’s just that Max is clinically insane, and I had the best chance of convincing him to give you space. But I am a failure, and you answered the door, so here we are. Oh, also, you should tell Logan that you’re not in Australia, because I think he already bought a plane ticket, and that is a very long flight to make for no reason. He’d like to know that you’re alright- or conscious, at least. I don’t want to assume… Are you alright?”
Fucking Charles Leclerc. Of course he knows exactly what to say to completely shatter a carefully-constructed illusion of calm. Oscar’s chest aches with the sudden urge to cry, but he tightens his grip on the doorknob until his fingers go white and waits for the moment to pass before he speaks. “…Well, I’m trending on Twitter,” he says. “So that’s fun.”
Fuck. Small talk in times of crisis is not his area of expertise. He needs Lando.
Max and Charles just stare at him for a few seconds, eyes flitting over him as they properly take in his appearance. Out of the corner of his eye, Oscar catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror hanging over a side table stacked high with unopened mail, and it isn’t lost on him that this is by far the least put-together they’ve ever seen him. From his pillow-matted hair, unbrushed and staticky, to his deeply unsophisticated pajamas and the hickeys steadily darkening on his neck, he undoubtedly looks like sex.
“Yes,” Max agrees eventually, looking fundamentally mystified. “Very fun. So- I’m sorry, is Lando… here?”
“Um, he’s hiding,” Oscar says, pointing a thumb over his shoulder. “So I’m gonna… go get him.”
Charles nods emphatically, looking very much like he would have agreed with anything Oscar said in that moment. “Okay, sure. Take your time.”
After a moment of internal debate on whether or not to close the door in their faces, he leaves it ajar and turns to go find Lando, turning over the absolute horror of that entire interaction in his head as he goes. Literally, genuinely, actually what the fuck is wrong with him? ‘He’s hiding’? Who fucking says that?
“Lan?” he calls softly as he steps into the bedroom, finding it empty. He frowns for a moment, casting his eyes around the room, before he notices that the door to the en suite is cracked open, a sliver of bright light spilling onto the floor. He pushes the door open and finds Lando sitting on the sink, phone in hand. “What are you doing in here?”
Lando shrugs, eyes still on his phone as he scrolls through something. “I don’t remember. But look: the FIA sent us, like, an instruction manual for being gay,” he says, waving the screen in Oscar’s direction. “Well, they sent it to Andrea, and he sent it to us. It’s a million pages long, and there’s a table of contents. And a whole section about how it would really be more convenient for them if we would just deny the whole thing, ‘cause otherwise, Qatar would be a hassle, in terms of legality. It literally says that. They put the word ‘hassle’ in this official FIA document.”
“Oh.”
Oscar feels the familiar tightness of his throat that always comes with the moment he can no longer hold himself together. Lando broke down in tears the moment they found out what happened, and Oscar held him close, desperately soothing him but never actually crying himself. Now, after nearly eight hours (well, somewhere between eight hours and a lifetime) of strict composure, tears well in his eyes and he pitches forward to bury his face in Lando’s neck as the surface tension breaks.
Lando makes a shocked, squeaky sound and sets down his phone, pulling him close instead. “Oh my God, okay, you’re okay,” he murmurs, pressing kisses into his hair.
“I’m- fuck, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Oscar sobs into his chest. “This is so- I don’t even know why I’m crying.”
One of Lando’s hands is settled on the small of Oscar’s back, steadying him, and the other comes up to rest on the back of his head. “Because this is, like, probably a top ten worst day of your life? It hurts, and it’s way too much for one person to handle, and you’ve been trying to deal with all of it so I don’t have to.” Oscar pulls back and opens his mouth to protest, still fully crying, but Lando just smoothes a hand up and down his back and continues, “Osc, c’mon. All you’ve done today is take care of me. I know you want to be strong for me, but you have to let me take care of you, too, okay? If you want to carry my shit, you have to give me some of yours. It’s the rules.”
Oscar laughs wetly as he scrubs tears and snot off his face with the back of his hand. “What rules?”
“The rules! The rules. Of, like, everything.”
“The rules of everything,” he parrots.
“Yes,” Lando insists. He reaches up to brush a stray tear off Oscar’s cheek. “Tell me what I can do.”
Oscar hiccups pathetically. “Max and Charles are at the front door,” he says, mouth twitching with a smile at the look of abject horror on Lando’s face. “They- they flew here, which is, like- they both live here, so I don’t even- Um, can you…?”
Lando recovers from his shock after a few moments. “Yeah, yes, of course. I’ll be right back, stay here. Or don’t. Um, do what feels right.”
As Lando’s footsteps echo away toward the front door, Oscar ghosts his hands over everything sitting on the sink in search of something to occupy himself with. Going to get his phone from where it’s charging on the bedside table suddenly seems like a gargantuan task, so he grabs Lando’s off the counter where he left it and types in his own birthday to unlock it. (Lando’s so sappy. Oscar, who is not sappy, has his password set to his first day at McLaren. For reasons that do not include Lando.)
—
[New SMS to: Logan Sargeant]
Hey it’s Oscar
I stole Lando’s phone
[New SMS from: Logan Sargeant]
holy shit hi are you okay
no that’s a stupid question sorry
how are you doing?
I know that’s pretty much the same but idk what else to say
[New SMS to: Logan Sargeant]
Everything just feels kinda fake right now I guess
Or like theoretical or something
Like someone else is just trying out different options for my life
And I’m just kind of waiting until I can go back to the last checkpoint and start over
[New SMS from: Logan Sargeant]
so like a video game?
[New SMS to: Logan Sargeant]
Oh yeah that makes sense
I was thinking like parallel universes but video games is probably better
[New SMS from: Logan Sargeant]
ok so ur feeling philosphical
philosophical
or idk
how DO you feel?
[New SMS to: Logan Sargeant]
I don’t know
A lot
[New SMS from: Logan Sargeant]
oh
[New SMS to: Logan Sargeant]
So anyway I just wanted to tell you I’m with Lando in Monaco
And Max and Charles are here now too I guess
And Charles therapized me before he even walked through the door
And Max is like
Also here
Honestly I don’t know what the fuck is going on
But I’m fine
So you don’t have to worry or fly to Australia or anything
[New SMS from: Logan Sargeant]
no i’m like very worried
but i’m also happy for you
mostly very not happy but happy that ur happy with lando
not that ur happy rn but like on a bigger scale
I mean i’m really sorry this is happening and i really love you and i’m really happy for you and lando
happy in a past tense way
happy for the love part and sorry for the internet part
sorry
love you man
[New SMS to: Logan Sargeant]
Love you too Logan
I promise I’ll text you when I’m below 80% vulnerable again
[New SMS from: Logan Sargeant]
what
[New SMS to: Logan Sargeant]
I’m adapting
[New SMS from: Logan Sargeant]
okay sure man
hell yeah
—
“Hey,” Lando says, coming back into the bathroom and closing the door behind him. “They’re in the guest bedroom. It was easier than convincing Max to go back home.”
Oscar exhales a laugh. “He really cares about you,” he says, handing Lando his phone. “Sorry, just had to text Logan.”
Lando shrugs. “It’s cool. You ready to go to bed?”
“I want to take a shower but I think I’d fall asleep,” he grumbles. “I’m so tired, but I need to wash my hair.”
“I can wash your hair, Osc.”
This comes as a revelation to Oscar. “Oh my God, I love you so much.”
With a quiet giggle, Lando leans toward the shower, balancing on one foot just so he can keep a hand on Oscar’s waist as he fiddles with the temperature of the water. Once he’s satisfied with it, he quickly kicks off his sweatpants before turning to help Oscar undress.
“Arms,” he whispers, helping him out of his t-shirt with as much grace as can possibly be expected. Lando’s hands are warm against Oscar’s skin as he slides his boxers off, then holds out his hand to help him balance as he steps out of them, legs heavy and fawnlike as all of his exhaustion abruptly catches up with him.
“Thank you.” Oscar allows himself to be guided into the shower and under the stream of water, Lando supporting most of his weight as he goes. The hot water only makes him less stable on his feet, suddenly reminding him of how much he wishes he was asleep right now.
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“I know. Thank you anyway.”
Lando shakes his head with a smile and grabs his shampoo. Comfortable silence falls over them as he focuses on the task at hand, scrubbing shampoo into Oscar’s scalp with just enough pressure to make his eyes roll back in his head. He takes his time, apparently content to hold Oscar close and help him stay upright for as long as it takes to ensure he does a good job. It fucks with Oscar’s heart a little.
“Okay, close your eyes and tip your head back,” Lando instructs. He does as he’s told, and feels Lando work carefully to wash the shampoo out of his hair without getting any in his eyes.
The process is repeated with conditioner, and Oscar is pretty sure he actually nods off once or twice with his nose buried comfortably in his boyfriend’s shoulder. “Mmph,” he says sagely as Lando rinses his hair again.
“I know, just one more minute.” What exactly Lando knows is not clear to him, but he decides not to worry about it. Some distant part of his brain registers the distinct smell of Lando’s body wash and the feeling of a soft towel working it into his skin before rinsing it back off.
With the bare minimum taken care of, Oscar hears the slight creak of metal as the water is turned off and he reluctantly opens his eyes, blinking blearily up at Lando. “Can we go to sleep now?”
“Yes we can,” Lando confirms, guiding him onto the bath mat and swaddling him in a towel.
“Love that.”
Lando snorts and wraps himself in a towel of his own before gently herding Oscar back into their bedroom.
Clean pajamas are laid out neatly on the bed, and Oscar bursts into tears. He doesn’t even know why, really. He doesn’t feel very sad, or anything, just exposed, all soft edges and vulnerability.
When his youngest sister was little, she begged and begged to take ballet lessons, only to leave the first class with tears in her eyes and refuse to ever go back. On the way home, when their mum asked her what happened, Mae’s only response was a sniffled, “The windows were mirrors.”
Their mum was completely lost, but Oscar (who’d been forced to tag along and do his schoolwork at the dance studio for some reason he couldn’t remember now) was on his third little sister by then, and he was fluent in three-year-old speak. He didn’t even look up from the book he was reading as he translated, “She means one-way mirrors. We could see in, but she couldn’t see out.”
At the time, he chalked it up to irrational toddler anxieties, unsure how the mirrors of a ballet studio could elicit such a reaction. Now, as he buries his face in his hands, it makes perfect sense. He feels horrifically visible, as if he’s being observed from all sides with no way of knowing how much of his heart is showing.
If he could, he would run away to the safety of his mum’s arms, too.
But Lando is just as safe. “Hey, what happened?” he asks, gently wiping the tears off Oscar’s cheeks.
Oscar gestures helplessly to the bed. “You put out my favorite shirt,” he mumbles.
“I… did,” Lando confirms tentatively. “I figured you might want to take a shower, and clean clothes always, uh, help with that… Is that okay?”
“No, it’s good,” he promises. “It’s really- thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me,” Lando repeats. Oscar doesn’t have the energy to insist, so he just shrugs and kisses him.
As they get dressed and crawl into bed, he realizes that Lando changed the bedsheets, too. The sheets he was sitting on when he called his sister are visible over the edge of the laundry basket in the corner of the room, having been replaced with a satiny gray set.
“When did you do all of this?” he asks, awestruck and a little bit teary-eyed as he settles under the duvet.
“After I got Max and Charles settled in the guest room. You were texting Logan, I think.” Lando wraps himself around Oscar, leaning up and over him a little bit to kiss him goodnight.
Oscar hums into the kiss before resting his head against his pillow, eyes immediately falling closed as he absentmindedly mumbles, “This one’s good.”
“What?”
Oscar lifts one of his arms in a vaguely all-encompassing gesture. “I was…” He cuts himself off with a yawn. “Earlier, I was talking to Logan about other universes. But I think this one’s good.”
After a long moment of quiet, Oscar feels Lando’s nose press into the nape of his neck, and the last thing he hears before he falls asleep is, “Yeah, it’s not so bad.”
—
In a rare occurrence, Oscar wakes up before Lando. He lays with his eyes closed for an indeterminate amount of time, trying to trick himself into falling back asleep, before hunger overrides the urge to stretch this moment out into an eternity. Once he starts paying attention to his body, he notices the way his eyes sting after his meltdown last night, too. Meltdowns, really.
Lando grumbles petulantly and reaches out for him but doesn’t wake up as Oscar carefully extricates himself from his arms. “Sorry, love you,” he whispers, on the off chance that Lando’s subconscious might pick it up.
When he makes his way out to the kitchen—wrapped in the garish McLaren hoodie he plucked off the ottoman at the end of the bed—he finds Max holding a glass of water and peering curiously at the refrigerator doors. Max startles and turns, face flushing red.
“Uh, sorry,” he stammers. “I was just- I have never seen these before.”
He gestures with the hand holding his water glass at everything plastered across the surface of the fridge. On the grocery list, Oscar’s naively hopeful addition of salmon is crossed out and marked with a frowny face. The Post-It note he stuck to the mirror in Lando’s driver’s room after his first win as Oscar’s official boyfriend has now lost its adhesive, held up instead by clear tape (a choice Oscar cannot comprehend, given the sheer number of available magnets scattered around). He wrote and crumpled up countless drafts, second guessing every word before eventually talking himself out of a panic attack and returning to what he wanted to say in the first place.
Have fun tonight and wake me up when you get back to the hotel so I can congratulate you properly, the faded ink reads. Then, in smaller, less sure handwriting: I love you, I mean it.
As if written evidence isn’t incriminating enough, gaudy souvenir magnets hold up a handful of glossy photo prints. Lando rediscovered a long-forgotten digital camera about five months ago, and subsequently went through a phase of obsessively taking pictures of Oscar when he wasn’t looking. Oscar forcefully vetoed the vast majority of them from the fridge, but he begrudgingly relented on a few candid shots of himself, as well as a handful of clumsy, off-center selfies Lando had taken of the two of them.
Max Verstappen has now seen the picture of Oscar—armed with a piping bag and covered in frosting—staring utterly bewildered at Lando’s birthday cake as he failed to decorate it. Cool.
He thinks about making coffee, just to have something to do with his hands, but he decides against it, knowing that he’ll have to open Twitter in a couple of hours once McLaren posts their official statement, and the caffeine would only make his anxiety worse. “Yeah, Lando usually takes all of that down when someone’s here, but… No use in that now, I guess.”
He opens the freezer and hesitates for a moment before fishing out one of the pints of ice cream Lando always keeps on hand for ‘emergencies’. Making a mental note to apologize to his boyfriend for ever doubting his doomsday preparation choices, he digs a spoon out of the silverware drawer and wrenches the lid off the ice cream. He hasn’t even read the label, so he’s glad to find that it’s just cookie dough—not his favorite, but better than some of the veritable everything-but-the-kitchen-sink monstrosities he knows are dwelling in the depths of the freezer.
“Is that on your meal plan?” Max teases lightly.
Oscar laughs around his spoon. “Well, no,” he cedes. “But being outed on Twitter wasn’t on my PR plan, either.”
The air in the room goes still with tension at his directness. Max nods, leaning back against the sliding glass door that leads out to the terrace. “Can I ask you something?”
He considers it for a moment, then shrugs. “Sure.”
“Did anyone else know?”
Oscar stares down at his ice cream and shakes his head. “No one. It’s kind of funny, I guess, ‘cause we were planning to start telling people soon, anyway. We were going to tell you and Fewtrell and Logan in the next month or two and see how that went, and then… I don’t know, we never really got any further than that.”
“You were going to tell me?”
“Lando trusts you.”
“And you do too?”
Oscar tilts his head. “I trust you enough,” he confirms eventually. “And I trust Lando. He’s a good judge of character. Better than me, probably.”
Max considers him for a long moment. “Christ, you really are as calm as you seem. I thought it was just for the cameras.”
“It is, I think. Just in the same way that everything kind of is. But it’s also… It’s real enough.”
“Oh,” Max says, and the conversation lapses into silence.
“…The guest room was alright?” Oscar asks eventually, eyes cast down at his ice cream. “Enough blankets and everything?”
“It was good,” Max assures him. “Although Charles is like a furnace, so I could not have gotten cold even if there were no blankets.”
“Oh, did you two share the bed?” he asks, looking up.
Max flushes bright red. “I- I of course tried to sleep on the couch, but Charles would not let me, and he said that he should take the couch, but if I was not allowed to then I thought he should not be either, so-”
“That’s fine,” Oscar assures him amusedly. “I just didn’t know you two were, like…”
“We’re not!”
“Oh. Uh, okay, sorry-”
“-I mean, we are, kind of, it’s just not- I mean, we haven’t really… Nothing’s actually happened, but- It’s complicated,” Max says with a sigh.
It occurs to him then that Max and Charles had a decade-long head start, and he and Lando still got together first. Then again, maybe that’s because they didn’t have a whole lifetime of history together to take into account. He can’t even imagine having known Lando when they were kids. It would have killed him, loving someone like that for his whole life; close enough to touch but too far away to hold.
“Well, I reckon it’ll un-complicate itself eventually. Most things do.”
“Yeah, Max says. “Maybe.”
“Definitely,” Oscar corrects. “You two are too weird about each other not to figure things out.”
“…I am trying to decide if I’m offended or not.”
Lando wanders around the corner and into the kitchen then, wearing the hoodie Oscar gave him in the car the night before and looking entirely too content to be awake at this hour. He’s one of those people who always seems to glow, shimmering around the edges in shades of warmth; even now, he radiates sunlight.
“Good morning,” he murmurs, settling himself against Oscar’s side and leaning up to kiss him, before he turns his attention to Max. “Good morning. I can’t believe you flew to my house.”
“Well, I flew to the airport, and then I drove here. The jet isn’t, like, on your roof, or anything.”
“Oh, good,” Oscar deadpans, offering the rest of the pint of ice cream to Lando, who accepts it gleefully. “As long as you didn’t land on the roof.”
Lando giggles, digging through the ice cream in search of chunks of cookie dough. “It’s nice, though. That you came.”
“I didn’t want you to be alone,” Max says with a shrug.
Lando frowns a little. “Oh. I wasn’t.” He says it so casually it almost hurts.
Max’s eyes flicker over to Oscar for a moment. Oscar blushes, and Lando grins at him unabashedly, tugging on the side of his shirt to get him to come closer. Oscar, predictably, resists for all of four seconds before he relents and allows Lando to pull him in.
“…Right,” Max says eventually. “Well, I didn’t know that at the time.”
“I thought the whole world knew that at the time,” Oscar says, trying to maintain some kind of dignity while being willingly wrangled into his boyfriend’s arms.
“I knew you kissed one time,” he protests. “I did not know you were dating. Or living together. I honestly thought you were probably doing some kind of very stupid no-strings thing, and then I thought that you were probably not talking to each other about it, and then I thought that Lando was probably sitting in bed and staring into the distance like a sad little Victorian child, so I thought I should come and water him and turn him toward the sun.”
Oscar snorts. “Pretty accurate, actually, just a year or so too late.”
“What?” Max asks, head tilted a little bit.
“We don’t need to talk about that,” Lando says quickly. “And that’s not even what happened!”
“That is exactly what happened in Spain, Lando.”
“No,” he mutters petulantly. “…I was sitting in a club staring off into the distance, okay?”
Oscar suppresses a smile to the best of his ability. “Oh, sure. Very different.”
“What are you talking about,” Max interjects, squinting at them like they’re speaking a different language.
“We- uh…” Oscar waves a hand vaguely as he searches for the words. “We had a rough couple of weeks before we officially got together, and Lando did not handle it well.”
“Neither of us handled it well,” Lando says. “I just happened to handle it… less well.”
“Spain,” Max repeats softly, the frown on his face betraying him as he struggles to detangle the haze of indistinguishable race weekends in his head. “Oh yeah, you were all weird when we went out. I thought you were just moping because your race was shit.”
“Well, that didn’t help. But yeah, I mostly just missed Osc.”
“Osc,” he echoes softly, a stupid habit he’s been trying to kick for years. Lando beams and pinches his hip, nowhere near hard enough to hurt but plenty to make him blush.
“I love you,” Lando tells him, so sure and soft and serious that it almost knocks the wind out of him.
“Okay, you have my full support and everything,” Max says. “But this is gross.”
Lando huffs but doesn’t say anything, just brushes his thumb along the skin of Oscar’s hip bone the way he knows he likes and smacks a disgusting kiss against his temple the way he knows he hates. The quiet pedantry of being known. Oscar does his best to pay close attention to this feeling, tries to commit the edges of himself to memory. He’s been homesick for this all his life, so he doesn’t want to do it wrong. He doesn’t want to miss it.
—
[50+ Unread Messages in ‘GRID GC’]
[New SMS in ‘GRID GC’ from: Ollie Bearman]
Guys I dropped my phone in the ocean and I just got it replaced, what's going on??
The lack of responses is concerning I’m just gonna check Twitter
[New SMS in ‘GRID GC’ from: Alex Albon]
No wait
[New SMS in ‘GRID GC’ from: Ollie Bearman]
Oh my God
Um peace and love you guys
—
Charles Leclerc ✅
@Charles_Leclerc
Welcome to the family, @LandoNorris
[Image attachment ID: A photo print of Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris held against a metal surface with a magnet shaped like a koala. Lando lies on a couch with Oscar laying partially on top of him. One of his hands is extended to hold the camera and the other cards through Oscar’s hair. He beams down at Oscar, whose face is partially buried in his chest, face scrunched up in response to the flash. One of Oscar’s hands blurs in the corner of the image like he’s reaching to keep the light out of his eyes.]
Oscar Piastri ✅
@OscarPiastri replying to @Charles_Leclerc
You could have at least chosen a better picture.
Lando Norris ✅
@LandoNorris replying to @Charles_Leclerc
Coudlnt have chosen a better picture mate!