Chapter Text
It's almost Friday as the clock strikes 3:30 a.m. Lando Norris is lying on the bed in his hotel room, unable to fall asleep, thinking about the night that started all this.
It was when he broke up with his girlfriend. Or rather when Luisinha broke up with him. After the news spread on social media, Carlos Sainz was the first to text him. It was a Sunday, shortly after they had finished the Grand Prix.
Carlos
Doing ok?
super, Lando wrote back.
Carlos
Want to talk about it?
To that, Lando had frowned. Yeah, suppose they were pals with Carlos, but mulling over feelings and breakups? Wasn’t exactly their thing. Wasn’t exactly a pastime for Lando with anyone for that matter.
with u??? 😅, Lando types back.
Carlos
Or idk, get wasted or something?
And boy, did he.
There weren’t many times Lando Norris said no to getting wasted.
And so, later that night they had gone clubbing.
Lando doesn’t even remember where they’d raced that weekend. Could have been Italy. He remembers the melodious manner everyone had been talking, remembers the shouted cin cin’s after he’d bought rounds of drinks for everyone at the bar. He remembers every other person had looked like a model—or that guy from that band, Måneskin.
“So, talk to me,” Carlos had said after they sat at one of the tables. “What went wrong? You two always seemed so… happy.”
Lando couldn’t detect whether Carlos was being sarcastic or not. He opened his mouth and touched the corner of his lip with his tongue as he thought about just what to say. He couldn’t say what exactly went wrong—could he? So, he just shrugged, closed his mouth, and rolled his eyes.
“Uhh, I don’t know. Just didn’t work out, I guess.”
Carlos stared at him for a while. At first, Lando thought he just hadn’t heard what he’d said over the thumping bass and dance music, but then he made that face he sometimes was in the habit of making; a short nod that was more like tilting his head a little backwards, eyes widening for a flash of a second, almost like an eyeroll, but not quite.
“Sure. Okay.”
“Well, I mean—I was being kind of an arsehole,” Lando shouts since they can barely hear each other through the music. He added it only because Carlos seemed like the explanation hadn’t been sufficient enough.
“How come?” Carlos yelled back.
Lando shook his head. “Oh. Well, you know.” Yeah, good. Best be vague. Always worked with his ex-teammate. (Not really.)
“Texting other people and saying you’re single?”
Carlos was kind enough not to yell this part, but Lando heard it, nonetheless.
“Wh—if you already know what happened, then why even bother asking?” Lando snapped, kind of hurt. He turned to Carlos, spilling his drink doing so. It might have been the truth, but the words still managed to cut through his supposedly thickened skin like a scalpel.
“I wanted to hear it straight from the source, I guess,” Carlos said. “Hear your side of it. To see if you’re actually an asshole.”
“Uh-huh, well, thanks—I guess. Very kind of you.”
Dua Lipa was on, and after a chorus-long silence, Carlos added, “Well, are you?”
“Am I what?”
“An asshole.”
“No! Yes—I don’t know,” Lando exclaimed. “She probably thinks so. I mean, I don’t even know. Everything was going so well!” His voice was more high-pitched than usual. “I don’t know. I just wasn’t… feeling it.”
Carlos raised his eyebrows.
Lando winced. Yeah, he had heard it too.
He was an arsehole.
“You weren’t… feeling it,” Carlos stated slowly, stretching the words.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Lando replied. “Not really. Can we just get wasted? And dance.”
And they had done so; until the morning sun had risen, and all the clubs closed, the cleaner trucks appearing on the streets.
Thinking about it now, Lando feels that it had been the beginning of it all—that walk to the taxi in the early morning sunshine. They tried to evade the cleaning trucks and their brushes swooshing over the damp pavement.
It’s impossible to know for sure, if his memories are even close to correct, since he had kept true to his word: they had gotten extremely wasted.
But Lando remembers the walk to the taxi—at least he thinks he does—and he remembers the hand that had kept his steps steady and his body upright by holding his arm. And he remembers a warm body pressed against his—probably because he was about to fall down—the slurred words he was about to utter just before the taxi had come by.
In that taxi, he remembers a hand on his thigh, at least it feels so real it must have been true and not a dream that followed after passing out. He remembers the hand pressed against his thigh and the shivers it had sent through his spine.
Yeah, it could have been just a consolatory hand of a close friend, but still.
He remembers attempting to scavenge a credit card out of his wallet but being unsuccessful in his attempt. He also remembers Carlos carrying a large amount of cash—because who does that these days, it’s just giving hey, just come and rob me—and finding it hilarious. He recalls stumbling onto the elevator, the laughter, the blurry picture that was taken, and he still has it on his phone to prove to himself that it wasn't all in his imagination—well, not all of it, anyway.
And he remembers the key cards fumbling on the lock, the door opening to the hotel room and then—nothing.
Absolutely nothing after that.
He had blacked-out.
He woke up the next morning, and Carlos wasn’t there anymore. Lando had no idea when he had left. Had it been anybody else but Carlos, he’d be freaking out right about now.
Without the pounding headache, it was as if none of it had happened.
And that was the morning that followed the night when it had all begun.
Lando sighs and turns around on the bed one more time. He checks his phone.
4:13.
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
He must be in practice in about… five hours. Breakfast and a jog in three.
He’s fucking doomed.
Lando gives up and checks his messages. Nothing. Why would there be since everyone’s sleeping? Like normal human beings.
George was last seen two days ago as if he’s 78 years old—like, what is he even doing with a phone? He’s so immersed in his girlfriend and shopping khakis and trying on Mercedes caps, probably, that he doesn’t even have time to open any message apps anymore.
And Lando checks—as it has become a habit—the conversation with Carlos.
He has now developed it into a weird habit. He checks the last seen text on the upper corner, thinking about Carlos holding his phone, checking his messages somewhere out there, and he always gets filled with odd solace thinking about it—a fact that’s probably concerning but he doesn’t want to dig too much into it.
But this time Carlos is not last seen because he is there.
Online.
And then, in a split second, he is not online but typing and—oh fuck, oh no no no no no, why the fuck would he—
Carlos
Can’t sleep either?
—hold the phone in his hand like an idiot and just stare at it when he knows it marks the message immediately as read?
Lando wants to smash his phone into the wall. But he knows it's pointless because Carlos has already seen the blue check marks. He doesn’t want to go into too much detail on how that must have come across, either. Lurking in the convo like a creep.
yeahhh no not really
Carlos
Jet lag?
Lando scoffs. No, not jet lag.
You, he wants to write, but at the same time knows that he would never, ever do that.
Instead, he just writes 'ofc yeah must be it'.
The reply surprises him.
Carlos
Wanna go get breakfast?
Waffles?
Lando blinks at the words. Then he closes his eyes.
Yes.
He wants nothing more. But he can’t do that. He cannot go get waffles at 4 a.m. with Carlos because he is in deep shit as is.
So, he just writes back ‘nah’, and goes back to thinking about the night it had begun.
Because, what’s in good health, eh?
Carlos sends ‘gn’, and Lando watches the online text at the top of the screen, then it disappear and turn back into last seen.
He puts the phone away, sighs, and covers his eyes with his hands.
He goes back to thinking about the taxi ride back to the hotel a couple months ago.
He remembers shutting the shiny black vehicle's door before he lost his balance. He recalls hugging the pavement before Carlos pulled him back up.
He doesn’t remember much about the lobby of the hotel he had stayed at. That’s probably where the shots of tequila had eventually caught up to him. He did google it one night and scrolled through a few photos, but there was no cinematic flashback or rush of returning memories.
Lando remembers the blinding lights of that elevator, the upbeat, unconventional music that made him burst into laughter at 5 a.m. He remembers trying several cards on the pale white hotel room door before one clicks it open. He even remembers asking ‘you know what’s funny?’ and he remembers Carlos ask ‘what’ before they headed in and they’d laughed about it way before Lando even managed to scrape together a sentence—and that’s where Lando’s film goes blank once and for all.
After a tour to the bathroom, it’s 5:15 a.m. Lando gives up. He abandons his bed, puts on joggers and a McLaren t-shirt and heads out the door. And he craves for waffles, not a run, but he succumbs to it anyway, putting on headphones.
And as he runs through the slowly awakening city of Melbourne, he racks his brain for the thousandth time, thinking about just what the fuck could drunken Lando have considered to be so fucking funny that he’d said it to Carlos that night to make all of this come about.
Because something’s wrong, and something has been wrong for over six months now.
And Lando can’t make it right because he doesn’t even know what the hell it was that he said or did.