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It’s a tale as old as time, Lando can’t help but think to himself. Teammates who start as best friends, before the competition amps up, before team dynamics start changing everything. It’s such a cliché, but unfortunately it sums up his and Carlos’ relationship, or lack thereof nicely.
Carlos is in a new team now and it seems as though while Lando was joking whenever he claimed he wouldn’t miss the Spaniard, Carlos was not.
Now that he’s moved to Ferrari, Carlos seems to be really close to Charles. Which is fine, honestly it is. Lando likes Charles, and it’s not as though he and Daniel don’t get along. It’s fine in the sense that Carlos is his friend or Lando at least hopes the Spaniard thinks of them as friends still. It should be fine, except that Lando wishes that Carlos was more than just an ex teammate, wishes that he was more than a friend, and can’t help but look at the way that Charles and Carlos interact and start wondering whether there’s anything more to it.
So honestly, all things considered Lando doesn’t feel as though he’s handling things too badly. If he had a point of complaint it would be that his chest aches whenever he sees the two Ferrari drivers together, but it’s not actually all that different to the way his chest has always gotten tight when interacting with Carlos.
Things aren’t all that different until they are. He doesn’t get to talk to Carlos as much now that they are in different teams but as much as that sucks at least their dynamic is better than it was towards the end of Carlos’ time at McLaren. As much as he enjoyed having more time with Carlos he is more than willing to sacrifice a great chunk of that time for Carlos to actually be smiling and happy to see him. So things are maybe a little bit better, but not really all that different to the way they used to be. That is, until he sees Carlos and Charles together.
He doesn’t know why this particular moment gets to him. He sees them interacting all the time, and while it always hurts, it's never been quite like this. At this moment, there’s something about the way that Charles' hand goes through Carlos’ hair, something almost closer to a caress than to the ruffle he was likely aiming for. There’s something else, the way that Carlos is smiling at Charles maybe, just a little bit softer, eyes shining more brightly than normal.
This time it’s not just Lando’s chest that tightens but his throat. He lets out a cough, unable to help himself. As soon as he coughs once he realises he can’t do anything to control it. He keeps coughing, now struggling to breathe. He slips between whichever two motorhomes he was in the middle of walking past, allowing him to take off his mask and try and clear whatever it is that’s stuck in his throat.
What is probably only a minute or so feels like hours by the time he has stopped hacking and takes a drink from his water bottle to clear his throat.
Immediately afterwards Lando hears the sound of a voice clearing and it takes him a couple of seconds to realise it isn’t himself making the noise.
“Who is it then?” A voice asks.
Lando startles as he looks up and realises Valtteri is standing right in front of him, joined by Kimi and Sebastian only a few steps behind.
“What?” Lando asks, confused.
Valtteri sighs and mutters “why do I always have to deal with this?” the question directed at Sebastian and Kimi, before he looks back towards him.
“Look,” he says.
This time, Valtteri is speaking to him again. The Finn looks down and Lando copies him. The blood on the ground is pretty gross looking but that’s not what makes him gasp.
“What the fuck is that?” Lando says.
He toes his shoe through the blood as he tries to inspect what’s in it.
“A flower petal,” Kimi says.
The tone in his voice makes it seem as though that’s a perfectly obvious and normal thing for it to be. As much as Lando wants to disagree with him however, now that he knows what he’s looking for, when he glances down once more he sees that the other Finn is definitely right.
“What the fuck?” he says.
He might now know the answer to his previous question, it doesn’t exactly help him understand, well anything to be honest.
“It’s someone else’s turn to explain,” Valtteri mutters, mostly to himself.
Having a feeling that Kimi has given the most useful information he’s going to provide in this conversation, Lando looks towards Sebastian for an explanation.
Rather than telling him anything Sebastian simply tells him where they are staying for the weekend and tells him to meet them there once he is done with his duties for the day. As frustrated as he is, Lando knows that they can’t exactly have a proper conversation between some motorhomes, especially if the others have been there longer than him, their teams are probably looking for them by now. It’s only at that point he realises why they all would have been hiding together, and sure their relationship wouldn’t exactly surprise anyone in the paddock but it’s still not exactly the most subtle hiding place.
Thankfully Lando doesn’t have much more to do before he’s allowed to head back to the hotel. The longest period of time is spent in a team meeting, most of which he spends extremely grateful for the mask covering his mouth, and doing a pretty good job of stifling his coughs. Eventually the meeting wraps up and Lando slips out as quickly as he can, doing his best to avoid getting dragged into any conversations.
By the time Lando is standing outside the hotel room, presumably shared by Sebastian, Kimi and Valtteri, he’s practically thrumming with anticipation. While he was able to put off thoughts of earlier in the day when he was busy working, as soon as he left the track, thoughts of what was going on just wouldn’t leave his head. Just as he’s about to knock on the door, a wheeze in his chest stops him. He coughs loudly, again, and again.
He must be loud enough to be heard from inside the room as, when he rights himself from a hunched coughing position, he finds himself standing in front of two silent Finns. They open the door a little bit wider before standing back and allowing him to walk inside.
“Bin?” Valtteri, finally says, as opposed to a more traditional hello, gesturing towards the small hotel waste bin.
Grimacing, Lando takes off his mask before spitting into the waste bin.
He looks inside, and catches Sebastian surreptitiously doing the same thing. Another petal then.
“So, is someone going to tell me what the hell is happening to me?” He asks, noticing that his voice sounds a lot calmer than he feels.
Valtteri, Kimi and Sebastian all glance at each other before Valtteri begins explaining. All of the men interject at different points, telling him about the flowers, about their own story, and somewhat more hesitantly a little about Nico and Kevin too.
The flow of their explanation is seamless, and if Lando didn’t know better he would have thought they had rehearsed it.
By the end of the conversation it’s pretty clear to Lando that he has to at least try and talk to Carlos. Part of him, the part of him that remembers the ways they interacted during the 2018 season thinks he has a chance, the other part of him however, the part of him that caused him to cough up a freaking flower petal after seeing Carlos and Charles interact, isn’t quite so sure.
After what’s going on has been explained and Lando agrees that he will speak to Carlos after qualifying, the conversation flows much more naturally, or well, as naturally as a conversation that’s only happening because of coughing up flower petals can be anyway.
Lando ends up spending the rest of the night with the trio, their hotel room can be more accurately described as a massive suite, so Lando takes the pull out sofa bed when the others go to bed.
The next morning he essentially has three F1 driving bodyguards. Lando wakes up when Valtteri walks past to head out for his run. Rather than falling back to sleep he decides to head back to his own hotel to get his stuff, figuring the ridiculously early morning will reduce the number of people that he will walk past.
Rather than going on his run straight away, Valtteri decides to join him on the walk back. Lando walking slowly, his hand at his mouth alternating between covering coughs and covering yawns. Valtteri walks beside him, his own walk interspersed with stretches. It’s something Lando wants to find annoying, but instead he can’t help but find the way Valtteri keeps pace beside him quite endearing actually.
By the time that they get to his hotel, pretty much just across the road from where Valtteri, Kimi and Sebastian were staying, Lando realises that there are pros and cons to Valtteri’s presence. The good thing is that no one from his team questions what he’s doing up so early, unused to seeing him out of bed before he absolutely has to be. The bad thing is that he’s pretty sure that while they haven’t been passed by a lot of people, Haas, Williams and McLaren team members are all in this hotel, and by the raised eyebrows he’s seen, he’s pretty sure there will be all sorts of random rumours about him and Valtteri by the time the day is over.
Before long Lando reaches his hotel room and Valtteri leaves him to finally go for a run. The Finn makes sure he has his, Kimi and Sebastian’s numbers and tells him to get in touch with one of them if he needs anything. With a final reminder to speak to Carlos at the end of the day, Valtteri heads off and Lando decides to sleep for another hour before he has to properly face the day.
It turns out that Lando doesn’t have much time to think about confessing to Carlos. His hour nap, becomes him oversleeping and the hotel room phone being called repeatedly to make sure he gets up. Pushed for time, Lando has to quickly throw on some clothes and rush out the door. He checks his watch and is thankful he should at least have time for a quick bite to eat when he arrives at the track. He gets a lift to the track and sits huddled in the passenger seat. The coughing has started up again and he does his best to ignore the concerned looks he gets, simply saying that he’s fine and just has a bit of a dry throat. Lando would check his phone as a distraction but it turns out he didn’t plug his phone in fully and it’s now lying dead in his hand. Hoping the phone isn’t a sign of how the rest of his day is going to go, Lando simply shuts his eyes and tries to feign resting for the remainder of the drive.
As always happens when there is something you don’t want to do looming in the future, Lando’s day seems to fly by really quickly.
He’s happy with his qualifying result and when he asks the team for the full order he’s relieved to hear that Carlos has also qualified near the top. Nothing about talking to Carlos today will be easy but at least it won’t be made more difficult by Carlos already being in a down mood.
Thankfully Lando was able to borrow a charger from a team member so by the time he gets back from qualifying his phone is fully charged. He sends Carlos a quick message asking him to meet, when he’s done with his duties for the day, letting the other man know when he expects to be done and sending him the details of his hotel room number. He decides not to check his phone after that, simply hoping that he has a positive response back. He figures if Carlos has ignored him or said he can’t go then that can be a problem for another day. Until then, Lando tries to make the rest of the day drag out as long as possible, trying his best to subtly cough and spit out petals between interviews and debriefs.
Eventually Lando gets back to his room, juggling a key card and takeaway from the team’s catering in his hands. He’s actually managed to make it back a little bit earlier than normal and figures he still has plenty of time before Carlos shows up, if he shows up. Rather than using the small table and chairs, Lando eats dinner on the bed before discarding the packaging into the small waste bin beside him. The smell of food in there would normally bother him, but today he’s too relieved at the way the Styrofoam hides the tissues, petals and blood glued to the bottom of the bin.
A noise disturbs Lando and it takes him a disoriented minute for him to be fully aware of the noise. Eventually Lando picks it up as a repeated knocking at his door.
Carlos.
Lando jolts at the realisation, quickly shifting from half asleep to fully awake. He gets out the bed, stumbling over his feet in his haste to get to the door and open it.
As the door swings open, Carlos smiles at him, sheepishly putting his hand down from the knocking position. Despite being in casual joggers and a Ferrari hoodie, Carlos looks well put together as always. Seeing Carlos, Lando’s first instinct is to run a hand through his hair and try and de-rumple his clothing. Knowing that it would be a futile effort and more likely make his bed head even worse, Lando resists the urge.
Letting Carlos into the room, Lando ignores his old teammates' attempts at small talk and simply instructs him to sit down. As soon as Carlos takes a seat on the sofa, Lando stands in front of him and just talks. Worried about losing his nerve, Lando explains everything as quickly as humanly possible. Rather than staying directly in front of Carlos, he begins to pace around, not wanting whatever look is on the Spaniard’s face to throw him off from his explanation.
Carlos does his best to take it all in. He catches most of what Lando is trying to say, even if it ends up being a bit convoluted. There’s flower petals, Valtteri, Kimi and Sebastian in a relationship, something about Nico and Kevin too? Which okay, upon reflection he probably should have seen both of those coming. As soon as he realises what Lando is saying about himself, and in relation to him, that’s when Carlos loses his focus on the details of what Lando is saying.
Deciding to put a stop to Lando’s rambling Carlos stands up. Thinking the other man wants to leave, Lando goes to step sideways to let him past but Carlos stops instead, standing right in front of him, hands placed gently on Lando’s shoulders. Despite the multiple layers Lando is wearing, t-shirt and hoodie meaning that the contact is nowhere near direct, it feels as though the point of contact between them burns.
“So you love me?” Carlos asks.
The position they’re standing in prevents Lando from doing anything other than staring straight into the other man’s eyes.
Lando nods.
“And you really thought it was unrequited?”
The incredulous tone makes Lando smile slightly, hope beginning to build.
He nods again, the gesture more careful this time.
“You’re stupid,” Carlos says in response.
Lando is about to object to that statement but before he gets a chance, Carlos has kissed him, soft lips pressing against his. The pressure is light at first before building up, more insistent. It’s at that point Lando pulls back slightly.
“I’m not stupid, Charles is stupid,” he can’t help but saying.
His tone is partially indignant, and partially joking. It causes Carlos to laugh.
“Fine,” the Spaniard says in response. “You’re an idiot then.”
Lando laughs, and before he’s able to object they’re kissing once again, deeper this time. Putting the joke out of his mind, Lando decides to enjoy the moment and worry about getting back at Carlos later.