Chapter Text
It started, like most terrible ideas, with boredom.
Lando Norris was in a hotel room in Montreal. Rain pelted the windows like the sky was throwing a tantrum. FP2 was cancelled, his engineers were asleep, and he'd scrolled through TikTok so long he started seeing the same videos twice.
He was supposed to sleep early. He wasn’t supposed to be five minutes deep into a Reddit thread titled: “What if F1 drivers were in a polycule?”
He clicked anyway.
It was nonsense. Some chaotic person had written an entire paragraph on why Charles Leclerc would be the emotionally constipated center of affection, why Max Verstappen would secretly be soft for him, and why Pierre was the polyamorous glue of the group.
Lando snorted but he kept reading out of sheer curiosity. By the fourth comment, someone had linked a fic .
“What the hell is an AO3?” Lando muttered to himself.
The link led to a website with a minimalistic white interface, a red banner, and a title that read:
“Pole Positions and Pillow Talk: A Charles x Max x Pierre Slow Burn”
He clicked. Skimmed.
The writing wasn’t bad. Weirdly compelling. Max was grumpy, Charles was confused, Pierre was charming. He laughed at the dialogue, surprised at how… in-character it all felt.
He closed it after ten minutes, shaking his head. There was no way people would spent their time writing about people they have never met.
But he didn’t really stop.
By the end of the week, he had a private tab he didn’t close. He told himself it was just curiosity. Entertainment. He wasn’t reading them because he was into it. Definitely not.
He read one where Lewis was the reigning vampire king of the paddock. Another where George ran a coffee shop and Charles was his grumpy ex from Monaco. Even one where the grid were all at boarding school and Max had an emo phase.
Weird. Wild. But addictive.
Until he found tag called “Carlos Sainz Jr./Lando Norris” .
That… gave him pause.
Carlos.
His
ex
.
The word still felt strange—unanchored—like it didn’t quite belong to them, even now. Even after the time, the space, the silence.
They had never exactly announced it. Never even really defined it. It had always been something unspoken: born in shared hotel rooms and quiet grins across the McLaren garage, nurtured in long walks on off days, finished in a series of phone calls that got shorter and more infrequent until they simply stopped coming.
Lando hadn't been looking for it when he saw the tag.
Carlos Sainz Jr./Lando Norris
.
But there it was. Nestled innocently among dozens of other pairings. The title read:
“Last Lap”
The summary was simple: “Post-race conversations lead to unresolved feelings.”
Unresolved feelings. Yeah. That sounded about right.
He stared at it for a while, thumb hovering.
Then clicked. Just to see.
The first line was a gut-punch.
"Carlos is already waiting when Lando slips through the motorhome door, his fire suit half-unzipped and his eyes full of something Lando can’t name."
He paused. Already it felt... accurate. Specific. Like the author knew things they shouldn't. The Carlos in the fic wasn’t dramatic or romanticized. He was familiar. Quietly grounded. The kind of person who would bring two waters to a debrief just in case. Who would text Lando "don’t let it get to your head, rookie" after a podium—and mean "I’m proud of you."
The dialogue was sparse but intimate. The scene played out in a quiet backroom, somewhere between exhaustion and confession. In the fic, Carlos took Lando’s wrist, softly, and said:
"I watched every lap. You were flying today."
Lando shifted on the hotel bed. His mouth had gone dry but he kept reading.
The fic captured the small things too well. The way Carlos always placed a palm on the small of his back without thinking. The way he tilted his head when he listened, like he was memorizing, not just hearing. The way he had once—only once—kissed Lando behind the hospitality tent in Singapore, heat still clinging to their skin, and whispered, “We shouldn’t,” right before doing it again.
Lando didn’t remember telling anyone about that.
And then the line that stopped him cold:
"You always run when it gets too close," Carlos says, voice low. "But I never stopped being ready to stay."
He blinked. Looked away from the screen. He hadn’t expected to feel… this. Not just seen. Exposed.
Because maybe it was true. Maybe he had run. From the quiet, steady affection Carlos offered. From the way things could have worked, if he’d let them.
He had told himself it ended because of logistics, teams, lives moving apart. But maybe, deep down, he knew he couldn’t stand being looked at like that. Like he was loved . Really loved. Without needing to perform for it.
He’d always felt like he had to be more. Funnier. Faster. Louder. Carlos had made him feel enough, just as he was.
And maybe that’s what scared him most.
His eyes blurred a little. Whether from the screen or the thoughts, he wasn’t sure.
He clicked out of the tab before finishing the scene.
The fic wasn't even sad. But it left something hollow in him, like wind through a broken window.
He didn’t need to be reminded of that.
Didn’t need to remember the gentle strength of Carlos’s hands, or the steadiness of his gaze when Lando had once cried after a DNF in Imola.
Didn’t need to remember the way Carlos had kissed his forehead—forehead, of all places—and murmured, “You don’t always have to prove you’re worth loving.”
He shut the laptop.
Carlos was in the past. They’d both moved on.
But god, some memories had a longer half-life than he’d thought.