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Lando's reflection in the mirror is just how he expects it to be this time. The skin under his eyes isn't distorted and blue eyes blink back at him idly. A steady hand runs through disheveled curls and his face is still smooth from yesterday's shave. He unzips his brand new toothbrush from the travel case he had picked up at the airport and brushes his teeth.
It's race day today. The forecast for Silverstone is perfectly cloudless when he checks his phone, and just before he makes it to the garage to meet with the engineers he chances a look up at the vastness of it; a toothless, empty maw painted with floaties and tingly static from bright light dangling mercurially over him. A reminder.
He sets his bag down at the table at the far corner of the room like he always does, the same table that nobody else uses because he had accidentally exploded at someone whose name he didn't remember when he had returned after a race to find it moved to the other end to make space for a cooler of drinks. He had apologized ad nauseum and others had apologized for him too, saying things like it had been a hard race and it's normal to be worried about personal belongings, but his reaction wasn't justifiable.
Still, to this day he can't help but glance over at it whenever he remembers the incident, which is often, because his default emotion has been shame for as long as he can remember. Beside him Oscar chimes in about the car's aerodynamics in the wind and whether or not they chose the right rear wing for the weekend. Lando would have jumped in first if he hadn't had his mouth full of tasteless protein shake. He feels his tongue cramp as he curls it into a tight, fleshy bowl for the hundredth time, the thread of conversation slipping from his attention as he tries not to let the smoothie touch his teeth.
The inner admonishment when he feels the sugar skate across his gums is so familiar to him he doesn't even acknowledge it; it comes to him as a second voice shouting muffled from another room. He can't dig his tongue around his teeth like he wants to when people are around because it makes him look like he's scowling. So he sits and smiles with his lips pulled firmly over them.
Once he's in the car and he can feel the warmth of the engine radiating through to his spine and over his shoulders, he doesn't think about it. He can sit through fifty-two laps because he's long since learned that if you hold yourself tight enough it's almost like you're not sitting in your own disgust. Noone can see his mouth through the helmet, anyway. It's all pretend, and Lando is very good at pretending.
When ominous white chevrons start mounting over the horizon on the last lap, he tries not to picture the heatwave emanating at his backside, hundreds of tiny explosions driving the furious gnashing of metal teeth that propel him to first place.
*
On their breaks, Lando limits himself to brushing no more than three times a day, lest his gums start bleeding.
It's not that he minds the bleeding really, but the taste of blood in his mouth only makes him lick and prod at his teeth more, and the more blood that finds its way onto his tongue, the more compelled he is to brush. It's housekeeping. Can't be showing up on camera with pink teeth, after all.
Melbourne is a long way from Silverstone in either direction. Oscar's head is turned towards him in his sleep, his bulky headset hiding his ears from the world. Lando holds out his hand in front of him and snaps once, twice. There's no reaction.
He's already brushed once this morning and again before he'd gotten on the plane. They have seven more hours to go and he's bored out of his mind.
Lando only packs toothbrushes in his carryon on longer flights like these. They're cheaper ones usually, or used ones that he doesn't quite like the feel of in his mouth. They don't get special care. He glances back at Oscar to make sure he's still asleep before unearthing the plastic Ziplock bag he keeps them in; three of them that have seen varying degrees of use.
He picks the one with the pink semi-transparent handle and meticulously squeezes the air from the bag before resealing and returning it to his backpack. Extending his arm over his armrest and turning his palm upwards, Lando sets the head of the brush parallel with the inside of his elbow and drags it slowly down the length of his arm in just the way he knows gives him goosebumps. He shivers when he makes it to his wrist, reversing course back to where he started once the feeling peters out into nothingness.
He used to do similar things with his own nails as a kid, somewhere before he had learned to reign in his temper tantrums and after he had learned that his parents had very specific expectations for him as a person. He remembers the first time his mother had helped cut his nails claiming that it was uncouth to chew them like he tended to, and then smashing everything he could get his hands on within the hour following when he found out he could no longer pick at the skin along the lining of his palms like he had been accustomed to. He had overheard a conversation from his older brother about palm reading a year prior, and in his half-understanding had interpreted it as a secret method of ensuring his go-kart would always be the fastest. It didn't matter the stained blood all along the inside of his racing gloves and on his eating utensils. His father was happy when he won, and that was the only motivation he needed.
Unable to properly grip things on account of the self-imposed injuries on the insides of his hands, Lando developed an awkward grip on his toothbrush and, thus, found the practice quite bothersome. He spent a long time trying to figure out the proper way to hold it from watching his family in the mornings before school, and the fascination never left him. Lando knows it would be easier to explain away if it was a sexual thing, but he's long since grown out of that idle wish. It's as simple as just liking how it feels, the scratch of nylon against his skin when he's bored or needs something to center him. When his hands grew big enough to hold the toothbrush properly, that too grew into a meditative practice.
Lando flips his hand back around, raising it to his face so he can prod at the tiny slip of skin where his fingernails tuck themselves into flesh, stretching the thin fold backwards until he can feel pain. He remembers bleeding from the fingers a lot in school, too, small red beads that would well up from cuticles along his nails and overwhelm graphite scribbles over pink keratin.
He's about to switch to his other hand when he glances to his left again and is met with sharp eyes boring into his own. They're so dark and empty that for several long moments Lando wonders if Oscar has opened his eyes in his sleep.
He hasn't. Oscar blinks at him blearily but intentionally, squinting like he can't adjust to the light properly, before he twists his body around so that he's facing out the window instead. Sunlight from thirty thousand feet above ground has the edges of his ears glowing red and adding a white-hot gold to the outline of his gentle curls. He reaches out a hand to close the window shutter and the cabin goes dark.
*
"How many do you have?"
Lando purses his lips and cracks his knuckles behind his back. Oscar's expression betrays nothing, to his eternal frustration, but the fact that he's asking in the first place touches some lonely part of him.
He fishes out one of his toothbrush cases from his travel bag and unrolls it out on the bed for Oscar to see. A neat array of toothbrushes held in place just below their centers with elastic straps greets them, each with its bristles protected with tiny plastic casing aimed neatly up at the ceiling. Lando counts them to himself, one through six, six through one, and then once more just for good measure, and looks up at Oscar.
He's watching Lando blankly, legs folded in criss-cross with hands hanging from his knees dead at the wrists. Lando suddenly becomes keenly aware of himself then, his own body draped loosely over the soft hotel bedding, ankles crossed where they stretch over the edge of the bed. It's his room, though, not Oscar's. He's allowed to be unalike.
"I had the case custom made," he tells Oscar. He pulls the first toothbrush from its cylindrical slot in the black foam and holds it out to Oscar neatly between his thumb and index finger. It's ocean-blue, this one, with ridges on its midsection and white streaks down its sides. The base of it tapers out towards the head, forming a smooth, gentle curve along its length. "This is the softest in the case. I organize them softest to hardest usually, but sometimes by color or by how much I like them." With his other hand he squeezes the top and bottom of the plastic bristle case gently until he feels it pop, and he's meticulous with unclamping it so that it doesn't bend the bristles.
"I like the ones with the rubber bits in between the normal bristles," he says, unable to fight the shy smile that comes to his face. They give a fuller feeling that he likes against his teeth and the food residue is easier to see on their flat surfaces.
Oscar glances between him and the toothbrush with a question, taking it from him just as carefully as he had pulled it from the case when Lando holds it out closer to him.
Dark eyes run across the plastic and rubber, twisting it around so he can hold the bristle closer to his face. He blinks at Lando.
"Can I touch it?"
"Have you washed your hands?"
Oscar shakes his head, so Lando takes the toothbrush from him and gives him the last in the row instead.
"I'm probably not gonna use this one."
Oscar feels the stiff white bristles with his thumb, the soft pad of skin morphing under the pressure. Despite neither of them having moved an inch, Lando gets this inexplicable impression that Oscar's face is much, much closer than it was moments before when he looks up at him again.
"You're weirder than I thought."
At that all he can do is laugh, because it's true. Oscar smiles along with him, lips peeling backwards to expose the clean planes of his own bunny teeth.
*
Their race in Monza isn't great. He's fumbled enough pole positions not to let it get to him in the moment, but what he struggles to stomach is when it's fumbled because of something out of his control. It's a cascade of kissing wheels that catches up to him just as he's exiting the first turn, something he wouldn't have been able to escape regardless. He spins out trying to protect his own car from the ones careening behind him, and he just doesn't have the pace to make up for all the places he loses.
Lando knows he'll be okay. Daniel had told him once that it was worse to feel nothing about a bad race than it was to feel frustrated or disappointed. Feelings aren't a crime, he had said.
He gets it. He's a human, not a robot—but he's also apparently not Max Verstappen, who can get away with anything under the sun no matter who else he greedily shunts off the track and still take those lovely twenty-five points for himself.
It's easy to blame Max, though, so Lando knows it's not right, nor is it right to be angry at himself or the team. He's left just feeling angry, and aimless anger isn't productive. He thinks he's rubbed away the last year's worth of skin cells from the pad of his thumb as he scrapes it against the stiff bristles of the tiny travel-size toothbrush in his sweater pocket at their debrief. P3 isn't bad, everyone is saying, but it's bad when it should have been P1.
He'll be over it by tomorrow morning, he knows. He knows he knows he knows. It doesn't make the feelings any easier to handle.
That night he and Oscar and some of the McLaren media people have a promotional dinner to attend, so he doesn't even have any time to himself to wind down. He wants to escape into the bathroom but that'd be inappropriate; so would throwing a tantrum, and so would bursting into tears. He keeps himself quiet and sullen despite his best efforts to make McLaren look cheerful, and he hates himself for being such a Debbie downer.
Beside him while he pokes idly at his food, Oscar leans into his side.
"Do you have a preferred toothpaste, too?"
It's so out of left field that for a moment he thinks he's misheard the question completely. He laughs nervously.
"Not really, no. I only care about the toothbrushes."
"Oh." Oscar glances around conspiratorially before continuing with a grin somewhere between cheeky and shy. "I used to eat it when I was a kid. I liked the candy flavored ones, but now I think baking soda is the best."
"I hated the candy flavored ones," Lando says, simultaneously aghast and intrigued.
Where the first hour of their dinner party felt like an eternity, the following one seems to fly by as he and Oscar exchange anecdotes about their childhood peculiarities. It's oddly relaxing to smile so easily with him; normally all of their exchanges feel like an arrow that just barely misses the mark on a blurred target. The confession has Oscar's normally stiff and upright form evolving into something more childlike and amenable, easy smiles sunning Lando's face for the rest of the night.
They chat all the way back to their hotel, and Lando exhales a huge breath once he's finally alone in his suite. He takes a few moments to do some simple breathing exercises, in through the nose and out through the mouth, before flipping on the bathroom light and greeting himself in the mirror.
His hair is still neatly gelled back and he's clearly tired around the eyes, but there's not even a hint of a frown to be seen. He gives himself the biggest smile he can muster, grinning wide and exposing as many of his teeth as possible. They glisten beneath the bright light bulbs overhead, a white smear across the tan skin of his face if he blurs his vision. When he focuses it, he can't bring himself to drag his eyes any lower than his brow. He knows he won't recognize the person there.
It's a half hour to midnight now. He lets his mind go completely blank as he twists the cap off the tiny toothpaste tube and squeezes a dollop of the cold white paste onto his tongue; the sting is familiar and comforting as he presses it to the roof of his mouth and swallows.
It's been a really, really fucking long day. He deserves this.
He picks up his toothbrush.
*
Oscar is waiting patiently for him at the edge of the bed when he returns with a small hand towel and a moist toothbrush. He had wanted the one third to last in Lando's kit, a middle-of-the-road firmness with blue and pink bristles. The white text on the straight handle is in a language he doesn't speak.
"I got this in Qatar last year," he tells Oscar, who makes a face like he's impressed.
"And you've just been holding onto it all this time?"
"Pretty much," Lando lays the hand cloth neatly over Oscar's knee and tilts his chin up. "Open wide."
Oscar does not open wide. He opens just enough for him to slide the toothbrush to the back corner of his mouth, starting with small, self-contained circular motions against the surface. He has to hold Oscar's head in place to keep him from moving around too much but otherwise lets Lando do as he needs to.
The angle is awkward and he's worried about Oscar swallowing his own spit, but he does his best. His gums are a vivid pink under the hotel lights, flesh turning near-white when he presses the toothbrush into them just where the roots of his teeth sink into them. Lando makes his way painlessly across the top row before flipping the toothbrush backwards and starting at the back of his teeth from the opposite end.
Oscar isn't watching Lando. Dark eyes are instead gazing at something in the middle distance somewhere around Lando's earlobe. He doesn't flinch when his finger brushes his upper lip either, but for Lando it's hard not to focus on the sting of it against the cool air.
The bottom row is easier. He can see the tops of his molars like this, rugged and foreign.
"You have a filling?" Lando asks, breaking the silence and feeling good for it. He almost didn't even notice it as the filling is enamel-colored, but the shadow of it sat just strangely enough against the tooth for it to stand out.
"Two," he says, short, which confuses Lando until he remembers he has his fingers in his mouth.
"Tongue," Lando instructs, twisting the head around to its ridged backside. Oscar stretches his tongue out for him and Lando resolutely refuses to feel shy about the picture he's painting here.
He has it in his head to be cheeky and see how far back he can stick the toothbrush before Oscar gags, but he thinks he's had enough experience overcorrecting his feelings of awkwardness with ghastly displays of boldness for a lifetime. He focuses on his work.
Oscar's tongue is pale just like his skin and Lando is taken in by how curiously it moves and flexes in his mouth, like a weird, fleshy animal that lives in a cage of enamel and saliva. It's so alien seeing it on another person.
"Okay, all good," Lando says once he's finished. He follows Oscar into the bathroom to rinse his mouth, sticking the head of the toothbrush beneath the tap while he swishes water between his cheeks. He sets it aside on the ceramic sink edge and leans himself back against the towels, meeting Oscar's eye.
It is severely awkward for several long moments.
It was your idea, he wants to defend himself, but he's worked hard to keep Oscar from clueing in on his insecurities. Defending is an admission of shame.
What happens though isn't Oscar folding in on himself and politely acknowledging his desire to leave; rather he laughs, an airy thing that creases the skin around his eyes and makes him look friendly and approachable.
Lando is slow to laugh along with him, puzzled by the reaction, but when he finds it in him to reciprocate he wonders why Oscar can't always feel like this for him: easy-going and forgiving in the wake of Lando's faults.
*
In the completely expected Brazilian downpour, their race is delayed for an indeterminate amount of time. After an hour passes and the murky sky shows no sign of clearing up, Lando returns to the motorhome to lay down until they inevitably cancel the race.
They do, of course. Lando gets the message through some loud, distant chatter downstairs, and it's only then that he lets himself relax enough to unearth one of his travel-sized toothbrushes from his bag.
He sets it face up and gathers spit in his mouth to soak the unused head—it's not as soft as he'd prefer but he can't be fucked unzipping his brush case for this—and laying back on the bed.
The bristles crunch and slide against each other like gravel underfoot as he pinches them between his back molars. Without toothpaste all he can taste is his own spit and the factory-fresh disinfectants coating the bushels of nylon. They're soft enough that it's only a minute or two of grinding them together that their sound loses its kick and the crunch sinks away into something muted that reminds him of rods of sugarcane. He moves to the plastic instead, the hardness giving his muscles something fun to work with.
He chews rhythmically, letting the sensation of it clear his head until it's enough to put him to sleep entirely.
A knock on his door has him jolting upwards. He's expecting it to be one of the engineers or staffers needing him for something, but instead he's greeted with an Oscar standing fiddling with his hands, fireproofs still hanging around his waist like a skirt. There are locks of wet hair stuck together around his forehead and his cheeks are smeared pink like he had run here.
"Hey," Lando greets around his toothbrush, which nearly falls out of his mouth because he had forgotten about it completely. He pulls it from where it's lodged between his molars and his cheek, grimacing at the bruise the plastic's made on the inside of his mouth and the tiny bits of plastic that fell loose under his tongue. His teeth are uncomfortably sticky with sleep. He should really brush soon.
"Hey," he returns. "Just came to check in. Hope I didn't interrupt anything."
He smiles at his own non-joke, pointedly looking at the bite-mark covered toothbrush in his hand. Pain is bleeding into the left side of Lando's head moment to moment, so he opts to recline on the bed again while Oscar enters and shuts the door behind himself. It's a really small space here, but Lando doesn't mind.
"I'm okay. Was just getting dry. Is it still raining?"
"Yeah. Pouring."
He turns to his side, head perched on his hand as Oscar comes to sit on the edge of the twin-size mattress. There is nothing about Oscar Piastri that Lando would describe as anything other than stiff and metered, but there's some recognizable looseness in his expression and the flatness of his hand splayed by Lando's chest that has him feeling fuzzy.
Oscar doesn't twist his head away or make any sound at all when Lando's fingers reach towards his face, fingertips slipping past his lips and settling over his teeth. He's even nice enough to lean down slightly so Lando's arm isn't stuck fully extended. He keeps his lips fully relaxed too so that he can feel across the shallow divots between each tooth all the way to the end of the enamel ridge.
It's so brief that he thinks he imagines it, but he swears that he feels Oscar's tongue poke out at his fingers at some point. When Lando retracts his hand Oscar reaches out to grab it, balks, then commits to his wrist instead as he dips his head low.
Lando doesn't mind kissing Oscar. Up close in Lando's face he smells like rainwater and sweat, strangely and predictably sterile. It's chaste. He keeps his face close when he pulls away, licking his lips afterwards. Lando smiles.
"Like what you taste?"
Oscar dips his head in again to brush his nose against Lando's, eyes glittering.
"Yeah," he breathes. "Mint."