Chapter Text
Your heart is not an organ that pumps blood. It's an engine. A complex assembly of pistons, valves, and connecting rods, fueled by the substance you call emotions. And every engine has its redline. The one it's lethally dangerous to cross. Oscar Piastri lived with such an engine inside him. And for the past two months, this damn unit had been constantly screaming at its limit, over-revving the tachometer, threatening to tear itself to pieces.
His entire life, the conscious part of it, Oscar had been striving for Lando Norris. At first, he was a distant star on the karting horizon—older, faster, cooler. Then a rival, whose back he saw on the Formula 2 tracks. Then a colleague, the guy from the neighboring McLaren team, whom he could hang out with in the paddock. And then… then it became an obsession. To be in the same team. To be closer. To be a friend.
And he had achieved it. He had squeezed into the same garage, put on the same orange uniform. Became his teammate. His neighbor in the garage. The person who drinks from your water bottle when his own runs out.
And then, two months ago, a virus had crept into the firmware of his internal engine. One simple, idiotic bug. To the old list of "strive for," a new, flickering red item was added: "want to be something more."
Oscar's brain, a refined logical processor, immediately threw an error. Nonsense. Idiocy. Professional suicide. You can't want your teammate. It's against all the unwritten rules of the paddock, the physics of the universe, and simple common sense. It's like pouring sugar syrup into a power unit instead of high-octane fuel. Everything will explode.
But, to be honest, it was going fucking poorly.
Every touch. Like right now. They're sitting in the drivers' room, waiting for final instructions before qualifying. It's hot. The air is thick with the smell of sweat, hot electronics, and adrenaline. Lando is sprawled on the sofa, his leg in branded socks with a print brushing against Oscar's leg. Just like that. Not on purpose. Just because Lando occupies all available space, including Oscar's personal space.
The point of contact. A small friction of fabric against fabric. And inside Oscar, an explosion. A piston punches through the engine block. The tachometer hits the rev limiter. He feels that touch through the entire carbon-fibre monocoque of his body. It burns like friction against asphalt at 200 miles per hour.
Lando is saying something to him, his lips twisted into a smirk. His voice is a separate soundtrack to this chaos. Not British primness, but a sort of rowdy, slightly nasal melody that crashes into his brain and gets stuck there, like an annoying ringtone.
"You alright, Osc? Look, don't shit yourself on the first sector," Lando pokes him in the side with his elbow. Another touch. Another micro-explosion.
Oscar mentally composes a list.
1. Don't shit yourself.
2. Don't imagine his lips.
3. Don't think about Lando off the track in general.
4. Win qualifying.
Points 2 and 3 constantly conflict with point 4.
"You look after yourself," Oscar mutters, looking away towards the telemetry monitors. Data. Numbers. Everything here is predictable. There's no room for the virus here.
Flirting. Lando flirts with everything that moves. With the marketing girls, with journalists, with Zac, his sweaty engineer, with the elderly cleaner who dusts their helmets. It's his way of being. He scatters smiles and jabs like confetti. And Oscar, like an idiot, catches every speck of that confetti and stuffs it into a piggy bank that's already bursting at the seams.
After qualifying, which Oscar won and Lando came second, Lando finds him in the garage. Slaps him on the shoulder. His hand is heavy, damp with sweat.
"You're a beast, Piastri!" he shouts right into his ear, drowning out the roar of the crowd. "Just wiped everyone out!"
His breath is hot. Smells of energy drink and something else, uniquely Lando. Oscar freezes. His engine stalls for a second, then restarts with a wild screech. He wants to turn around and crash into him. Not with his fist. With his mouth. To extinguish this internal fire the only possible way.
But he doesn't do it. He just nods, pulls away, takes a sip of water. The water tastes bland. Like cardboard.
"Got lucky," he says. His voice sounds alien.
"My lucky guy," Lando winks and runs off to his mechanics, leaving a trail of destruction in Oscar's psyche in his wake.
Evening. The hotel. The team had a small dinner. Oscar sits in a corner, observing. Lando is the center of the universe. He's telling some stupid story about how he and Carlos at his old team almost blew up the hydraulics trying to bolt a fan from a "De'Longhi" onto the race car because it was hot. He gesticulates, pulls faces, imitates the Spaniard. Everyone laughs.
Oscar doesn't laugh. He studies him, like an engineer studies a blueprint for a complex aero package. The line of his jaw. The curve of his brows. How he runs his hand through his hair. Every gesture is another turn of the spring that's been tightening inside Oscar for two months now. It's going to snap soon.
He remembers another moment. A week ago. The simulator. They sat next to each other for six hours. Shoulder to shoulder. Elbow to elbow. It smelled of sweat and an overheated processor. Lando, pleased with his lap, leaned back in his chair, his hand fell on Oscar's knee. Just lay there. Heavy, relaxed.
Oscar sat, not breathing. His whole world narrowed to that five-centimeter square on his thigh. He felt every thread of the denim, every one of Lando's fingers through it. He could describe that hand with his eyes closed. The scar on the knuckle of his index finger. The shape of his nails. It lasted an eternity. A whole three minutes. Until Lando moved his hand to scratch his nose.
Oscar had gotten up and gone to the bathroom. Splashed his face with ice-cold water. Looked at his reflection in the mirror. A pale, twisted face. Idiot, he said to his reflection. You're a fucking idiot. You broke. You let this happen.
But breaking is one thing. Admitting the break is another. He kept working. Eating. Sleeping. Racing. And all this time, his engine screamed in the red zone, warning of an imminent overhaul that would look more like a catastrophe.
And now, at the dinner, Lando catches his eye across the table. And winks. Again. But this time it's not a general, blurred wink for everyone. It's targeted. Just for him. And there's something in it… understanding? Or is it just his imagination? Maybe it's just another piece of confetti, and he's already building a whole house of cards out of it, one that will collapse from a breath of wind.
Oscar looks away. Drinks his water. It's just as tasteless.
Later, when people start to disperse, Lando approaches him. He doesn't have his silly smile on. He looks tired. Real.
"Come on," he says. Doesn't ask. Orders. "Let's go for a walk. My head's buzzing."
Oscar wants to refuse. Say he's tired. Go to his room and bury his face in the pillow, trying to burn this virus out of his operating system. But his legs stand up on their own and follow Lando.
They go out onto the promenade. Night. It's cool. The city hums somewhere in the distance. They walk in silence. Shoulder to shoulder. And Oscar feels that spring inside him tightening to its limit. A little more, and the steel will start to break.
"You're quiet as a fish today," Lando finally says. "Not like you."
"Thinking," Oscar replies.
"About what?"
About everything. About your hands. About your voice. About how I think I'd give up my seat at McLaren for you. About how I want to be something more for you. Not a teammate. Not a friend. And that "something more" has no shape, no name. It's just a black hole that sucks in all my thoughts.
"About the setup for tomorrow," Oscar lies.
Lando stops. Turns to him. His face is illuminated by the neon light of some bar's sign.
"Bullshit," he says simply. "You're even scared to look at me. Did I do something wrong?"
And there it is. A direct question. The most terrifying kind of question. Oscar feels the cracks on his internal engine converging into one huge one.
"No," he says, and his voice cracks. "It's all good."
"Doesn't look like it," Lando takes a step closer. Too close. Oscar feels his warmth. "We're friends, right? You can tell me."
Friends. The word cuts like a knife. It's too small, too tight to describe the chaos inside.
"Lando," Oscar begins, and he himself doesn't know what he's going to say next. A warning? A confession? An accusation?
But Lando looks at him. Stares. And something changes in his eyes. Realization? No. More like… recognition. As if he'd been looking at an encrypted message all this time and only now saw the key.
"Oh," Lando says quietly. Just one word. But it contains a whole universe.
Oscar freezes. Now. Now everything will explode. He expects ridicule. An awkward retreat. Rationalization. "Mate, it's just fatigue. Forget it."
But Lando doesn't laugh. He doesn't retreat. He takes another step forward, reducing the distance to zero. His hand rises and touches Oscar's cheek. Lightly. Almost weightlessly.
A touch. Not through fabric. Not through a glove. Skin to skin.
And Oscar's engine finally explodes. Quietly. Without fire or smoke. Clicked through its last revolution and stalled. White noise in his head. He isn't breathing.
"I think… me too," Lando whispers. His fingers trace the line of Oscar's cheekbone. "Only I'm probably an even bigger idiot, because I only just realized it now."
Oscar doesn't believe it. It's a simulation. A hallucination from overwork. A glitch in the matrix.
"You… what?" is all he can squeeze out.
"Told you, I'm an idiot," Lando grins, but his grin is shaky. "For two months you've been all tense, like a tightrope, and I thought you were mad at me. And you just… wanted this."
"This." What is "this"? Oscar himself doesn't know. But his body knows. His body leans forward, following a gravity stronger than Earth's. His forehead touches Lando's. They stand in the middle of the night promenade, two idiots in team jackets, breathing the same air.
"Yes," Oscar exhales. A confession. The shortest and most terrifying of his life. "Wanted."
Lando says nothing. He just closes his eyes. His breath mixes with Oscar's. And in this silence, in this chaos, Oscar finally hears something other than the wail of his own engine. He hears a ticking. A quiet, measured sound. As if two complex mechanical assemblies have finally synchronized.
---
But your consciousness is not a smooth flow. It's a series of static interferences, interrupted by commercials you call dreams. Sometimes the signal comes in clear, sometimes it doesn't. Oscar Piastri was sinking into one such zone of interference when he was shaken.
A sharp click. Like changing the channel on an old TV.
The picture: a worn-out sofa in the hotel vestibule. Velvet that digs into his cheek with patterns resembling the Marina Bay track. The smell of old perfume and desperation. Time: 4:17 a.m. The numbers on the clock above reception swim like telemetry readings with a broken front wing.
And Lando. Lando Norris, shaking his shoulder.
"Osc? Hey, Sleeping Beauty, wake up."
Here it is, the transition from a color dream to black-and-white reality. In Oscar's chest, everything twisted into one dense, unpleasant lump. If you cut it open, you'd find a layered structure: anger, disappointment, sleepiness, and the remnants of cheap whiskey. The lump had sprouted nerve endings that reached somewhere towards his solar plexus and made him feel nauseous.
The dream. That very dream. It was still fresh, like new asphalt. There was the promenade. The night. The touch. The warmth. Words that in real life would have the weight of a whole race car, but in the dream floated like feathers. His brain, that cunning bastard, had painted him a full-length film with a happy ending. And now he had to return to the sequel, directed by a schizophrenic.
Lando smelled. He smelled of the night. Of cigarette smoke, someone else's perfume, sweat, and some sweet aftertaste of energy drink. He stood over him, blurry, swaying. Not the center of the universe, but its wandering comet with a tail of debris.
"What are you doing asleep here?" Lando asked. His voice was hoarse, clogged with laughter and fatigue.
Oscar slowly sat up. His spine cracked like a chassis after a harsh curb. He felt like a wrecked car after a crash. All the parts are in place, but nothing works right.
"Waiting," Oscar grunted. It wasn't entirely true. He wasn't waiting. He had shut down. His processor had overheated from constantly calculating the probability of "what if" and gone into safe mode.
"Waiting? For me?" Lando smirked. His smile was crooked, off-center. "Cute. Let's go to the room. I'm dead on my feet."
They went. The movement was slow, like underwater swimming. His legs wouldn't obey. Lando walked ahead, his silhouette swaying in the semi-darkness of the corridor. Oscar watched his back and tried to merge the two images: Lando from the dream, the one who said "I think… me too" with a quiet, understanding gaze, and this Lando, who had just crawled back from somewhere he didn't want to think about.
A club? Bars? Someone's room? Oscar forced himself to stop this mental slideshow. None of his business. Not his problems. His problem was to get to the bed and switch off.
"Have fun?" Oscar asked, just to fill the silence that pressed on his ears like pressure changes in the cockpit.
"Yeah," Lando ran a hand over his face. "There was this fucking chick… Anyway, yeah. It was fun."
"Chick." A simple, crude word. It, like a snap of the fingers, dispelled the last remnants of the dream. No promenade. No "I think… me too." There was only reality. The reality where Lando Norris chases skirts, and Oscar Piastri sleeps in the hotel lobby.
The lump in Oscar's chest tightened further, releasing a fresh dose of anger. Anger at himself. For that stupid, cheap fantasy. For allowing himself to buy into that fairy tale, even in a dream.
They entered the room. A twin suite. Another endurance test. Two beds. Two suitcases. Two worlds. Lando threw his jacket on the floor, then his sneakers. They fell with two dull thuds.
"Fucking hell, I'm tired," he groaned and collapsed onto his bed face down. A second later, his voice, muffled by the pillow, reached Oscar: "Why are you so grumpy? Didn't sleep well on your sofa?"
Oscar stood in the middle of the room, like an idiot. He felt like a spectator who'd been kicked out of his seat in the audience and forced to act in a play whose lines he didn't know.
"Nah, I'm fine," he said, procuring that voice, that "everything's awesome" tone from somewhere.
"Doesn't look like it," Lando rolled onto his side, stared at him. His eyes gleamed in the dark. "You've been walking around like you're at a funeral for the last couple of months. Or like you've been robbed. Seriously. What's up with you?"
There it was. A direct shot. Point-blank. And Oscar, with his internal engine that had just experienced total destruction and had been hastily cobbled back together, had to give an answer. Not the one on the tip of his tongue. Not "I'm fucking in love with you, you idiot, that's what's up."
He took a deep breath. The smell of the room: bleach from the linen, leftovers from the room service tray, Lando's expensive cologne.
"Racing," Oscar forced out. "Thinking about racing. Setups. Aerodynamics. All that."
Lando snorted. The sound was wet and disbelieving.
"Bullshit, Piastri. You think about racing when you're driving. When you're not driving, you think about… I don't know. About girls. About money. About a new car. And you're thinking about race setups at four in the morning. In your glamorous hotel room in Monaco. Get outta here."
Oscar felt a chill run down his spine. Too close. Lando, without knowing it, had approached the edge of the abyss and looked into it. And Oscar needed to pull him back before he saw what was at the bottom—his own, pathetic reflection.
"And what were you thinking about while that… chick… was hanging all over you?" Oscar snapped. He hadn't planned to say it. It just escaped. Anger. The one from the lump.
Lando propped himself up on his elbow. In the semi-darkness, you could see him smirking.
"Oh," he drawled. "Are you jealous or something?"
A joke. Another piece of confetti. But it flew right into his eye. Oscar felt his face flush with heat.
"Fuck you, Norris," he grumbled and finally moved. Went to the bathroom. He needed to wash up. Wash off the sticky residue of the dream, the disappointment, and that stupid, untimely jealousy that was just the top layer of all the shit that had accumulated in him.
He looked in the mirror. Face puffy. Dark circles under his eyes. Idiot, his reflection said. You're a fucking idiot. You didn't just break. You're now showing him that you're broken.
When he returned, Lando was already lying on his back, staring at the ceiling.
"Listen, Osc…" he started, unexpectedly quiet.
Oscar froze. His heart, that tireless engine, made another attempt to jump out of his chest. Now. Now he'll say something. Something important. Maybe he remembers everything? Maybe the dream wasn't entirely a dream? Maybe…
"…forget it. Let's sleep."
And another click. The channel changed. From a melodrama to a sitcom. From black-and-white art-house to a stupid reality show.
Oscar silently made it to his bed and collapsed onto it. He was exhausted. His brain, his heart, his everything—was exhausted by this two-month-long civil war raging somewhere in the depths of his skull.
He turned to the wall, his back to Lando, to his even, beginning-to-snore breathing. He was tired. Tired of waiting. Tired of wanting. Tired of analyzing his every look, every word.
Oscar Piastri was tired of thinking about Lando Norris.
And that was perhaps the biggest lie he'd told himself all night. Because even now, closing his eyes, he saw not darkness, but that very dream. The promenade. The touch. And heard the ticking of two mechanisms that seemed so close to synchronization.
But it was just a dream. A simple and stupid fantasy. And reality smelled of someone else's perfume and his teammate's snoring. And the only way out was to bury himself deeper into the pillow and try not to think. Just not to think.
---
Waking up is not a smooth transition from sleep to wakefulness. It's an emergency system reboot after a complete crash. Consciousness loads in chunks, like a pirated firmware that's stuck. First comes the Pain. Then the Sound. And only then the Realization.
The realization that you are Oscar Piastri. That you're in a hotel. That it's the morning before the race. And that two meters away from you, buried behind a wall of blanket, Lando Norris is snoring softly.
Oscar didn't open his eyes. He lay and listened. Listened to his own heart, which was knocking like a warped crankshaft journal after overheating. Listened to Lando's breathing, even, stupid, carefree. This sound was the white noise of his personal hell. The soundtrack to two months of slow insanity.
He acted normally. Like he had for the last two months. "Normally" was the new code for "I'm fucked, and everything is fucked."
He got up. His muscles ached as if he'd driven not a marathon, but the entire Suzuka on his rear wheels. Mild irritation. A constant companion. It hung on him like a sweaty race suit that hadn't been taken off for days. Irritation from constant lack of sleep. From his brain refusing to switch off, continuing to run the same pictures, the same "what ifs" in circles.
He looked at Lando. He was asleep, his face buried in the pillow. Only a tuft of unruly hair stuck out. This tuft drove Oscar crazy. He knew its texture. Knowing the texture of his teammate's hair was a new level of psychosis he had sunk to.
Fatigue. It wasn't just about wanting to sleep, it was an existential fatigue. Fatigue from constant internal censorship. Every second his brain generated thoughts. And 90% of those thoughts were about Lando. And 89.9% of them had to be immediately erased, like faulty telemetry data, so they wouldn't leak out. It was the mental labor of a miner in the coal face of his own skull. All day long - chip, chip, chip away at the vein of the forbidden. And in the evening, block the passage and pretend nothing happened.
He reached for the water bottle on the nightstand. The plastic crunched in his hand. The water was warm, tasteless. Like his life lately.
Thoughts. Too many thoughts about the one who was off-limits. Lando.
There he was, the root of the problem. Lando Norris. Not just a person. It was a phenomenon. A natural disaster in branded socks. A hurricane that had burst into his life and rearranged all the furniture in his head, and was now sleeping peacefully, snoring softly.
Oscar imagined taking his pillow and… No. He didn't imagine that. He erased that picture immediately. Confusion. Anger. Desire. All mixed into one toxic cocktail he was forced to drink for breakfast every morning.
He went to the shower. Jets of water—icy and scalding, like his stupid fantasies. He stood, palms pressed against the tiles, trying to wash off the remnants of that dream. The dream about the promenade. The dream that was so vivid, so real, that now ordinary life seemed like its faded, crooked copy.
"Fuck you, Norris," he whispered in time with the droplets.
Coming out of the shower, he saw that Lando was no longer asleep. He was sitting on the bed, looking at his phone and scratching his stomach. A picture worth a thousand words: "Wake up and sing… or just wake up."
"Good morning, ambassador of beauty," Lando croaked, not looking up from the screen.
Oscar grunted something unintelligible. His version of "normally" included reducing verbal communication to a minimum. The less you talk, the less chance you have of blurting out some bullshit like "I dreamed we were kissing."
"You look like you've been run over by a herd of wild Haases," Lando continued, finally looking up at him. His eyes were puffy, but they still splashed with that damn, indestructible cheerfulness.
"Thanks," Oscar grunted, pulling on his jeans. "You're not so bad yourself. Really fresh."
"I am fresh," Lando stretched, and his t-shirt rode up, exposing a strip of stomach. Oscar sharply turned away, pretending to be incredibly interested in the view of the dumpsters from the window. "I, unlike some, slept like a baby."
"Like a baby." Yeah. The very baby whose crying kept the whole hotel awake. Or rather, Oscar.
Breakfast. Oscar poked at his scrambled eggs with a fork. The yolks spread out like his hopes for peace of mind. Lando, on the contrary, devoured everything, simultaneously scrolling through his Instagram feed and commenting on something.
"Look, what an idiot dressed up, fuck, looks like a car cover. Look."
Oscar didn't look. He focused on his egg. It seemed to him an allegory of his own brain—liquid, shapeless, and slightly burnt around the edges.
Thoughts. They returned, like annoying ads you can't skip.
What if last night, when he was "having fun," he was really with someone?
Well, fuck it.
No, not fuck it. Not fuck it at all.
What if he remembers something? Felt something? Maybe that dream wasn't entirely a dream?
Stop. This is insanity.
His hands. Remember how he put his hand on your knee in the sim?
Stop.
"Are you even listening to me?" Lando tapped his fork on Oscar's plate.
Oscar flinched.
"What? Yeah. Car cover. Funny."
"I've been talking about tires for five minutes, Piastri. Are you okay? You're like a zombie or something."
"I'm not a zombie. I'm a patient in a psychiatric hospital where the head doctor is my own fucking head, and the only other patient is you."
"Didn't sleep well," Oscar said his worn-out refrain. "Tossed and turned."
"I know," Lando nodded. "You were moaning in your sleep. Dreamt something, probably."
Oscar froze. A piece of toast got stuck in his throat. Moaning? What did he dream? He was afraid to ask. Afraid that his own sleeping brain had given away all his secrets in the form of incoherent mutterings.
"Don't remember," he said quickly.
"Pity," Lando took his orange juice and took a swig straight from the bottle. Another ritual. Boundary violation as a form of communication. "I thought maybe you had a dirty dream. You were grunting like…"
"Shut up," Oscar stood up. He needed to leave. Now. Before he did something stupid. Before he grabbed him by the collar and asked, "And what did you dream? Did you dream we were standing on the promenade and...?"
"Hey, where are you going?" Lando was surprised.
"To the track. Early. Check the data."
"You forgot your iPad, you idiot."
Oscar turned around. His tablet was indeed on the chair. Next to Lando's plate. He walked over, picked it up. Their fingers didn't touch. Oscar had calculated the trajectory of his hand movement to avoid it. He'd done this dozens of times. Avoiding touches. It was like avoiding an obstacle on the track. Only the obstacle was alive, breathing, and looking at him with mild bewilderment.
"Thanks," he muttered.
"Don't mention it," Lando was back to staring at his phone. "Meet in the garage in an hour. Don't be late, it's boring without you."
"Boring without you." A simple phrase. Three words. But for Oscar, they had the weight of a whole race car. They stretched like rubber, acquiring dozens of shades of meaning. Was it politeness? Or the truth? He was starting to analyze again. His internal computer was loading the program "Decrypt_Norris.exe" again.
Oscar left the restaurant. The morning was sunny, merciless. He walked down the corridor, and his footsteps echoed in the emptiness of his own skull. He acted normally. Put on the "everything's awesome" mask. Made his face stony. Locked all unnecessary thoughts in the farthest compartment of his memory.
But he knew. This was only a respite. Until the next glance. Until the next joke. Until the next accidental touch. Until the next night, when his brain, that sadist, would play him that very dream about the promenade again.
And he would wake up again with that lump in his chest. With that fatigue. With those thoughts.
Thoughts about Lando Norris.