Chapter Text
Chapter 1: The Fine Print
The London rain made ghosts of the city. It blurred the sharp edges of the financial district buildings into grey watercolour smudges beyond the immaculate, silent window of Turnbull Hartley LLP. Inside, the air was refrigerated, smelling of lemon polish, expensive paper, and quiet dread.
Oscar Piastri sat perfectly still in a butter-soft leather chair, his fingers resting lightly on the edge of a vast mahogany table. Before him lay the document. It was, he supposed, his future. Or at least, the legally binding skeleton of it.
Pre-Nuptial Agreement.
The words were in a severe, serif font. He’d already read it twelve times. His family’s lawyers had drafted it; the Norris family’s had picked it over. It was a masterpiece of cold pragmatism. Clauses detailing the separation of racing earnings, sponsorship portfolios, and inheritance. A multi-page treatise on the discreet dissolution of assets, should dissolution ever be required. There was even a confidentiality clause with punitive financial penalties for public disclosure.
A merger. That’s what his father had called it over a stark breakfast. “The Piastri engineering legacy and the Norris commercial empire, Oscar. This creates an alliance that can’t be broken by a rivalry on track. It stabilises everything. For both of you.”
Oscar had nodded, swallowing his toast. It made sense. Strategically, it was a flawless move.
A soft click echoed in the room as the lead solicitor, a woman with a steely bun and eyes that missed nothing, placed a pen precisely next to his right hand. The sound was a starting pistol aimed at his own heart.
His mind, traitorously, replayed the memory. Not of his father’s reasoned arguments, but of Lando’s proposition. A week ago, in the paddock, after the third awkward dinner with both sets of parents. Lando had pulled him behind a hospitality unit, his usual grin strained at the edges.
“Look, mate,” Lando had said, voice a conspiratorial rush, his eyes darting like a cornered animal’s. “This is mad, right? But they’re not gonna let it go. What if… what if we just… did it? Got it over with? It’ll be a laugh! And it gets them all off our backs! We just… keep it quiet. Between us. No big deal.”
No big deal. Oscar’s thumb traced the gilded edge of the document. The door to the office burst open.
Chaos entered, wearing Moncler and a damp sheen of panic.
“—absolute nightmare on the A40, you would not believe it! Yeah, cheers, mate, later!” Lando Norris’s voice was a firecracker in the tomb-like silence. He shoved his phone into his pocket, his smile a wide, brilliant, and utterly fragile thing as it swept the room. It landed on his own stern-faced father, flinched, and finally found Oscar. For a second, something raw flickered in his gaze a question, a plea before it was drowned in a wave of forced levity.
“Alright! Sorry, sorry. Traffic was mental. Are we doing this or what?” He shrugged out of his jacket, flinging it over a chair, and dropped into the seat opposite Oscar with a thud that seemed to shake the very foundations of the quiet room.
Oscar just looked at him. Lando’s hair was mussed from the rain, his cheeks flushed. He looked vibrantly, painfully alive amidst the dead wood and legal paper. He looked like a mistake about to happen.
“Whenever you’re ready, Mr. Norris,” the solicitor said, her voice drier than the document.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Lando chirped, reaching for a pen. He clicked it three times, fast. Click-click-click. The sound was a rapid heartbeat.
The signing itself was an anticlimax. Oscar went first. He picked up his pen a weightless, precise instrument and signed his name in his clean, engineering-perfect script: Oscar Piastri. No flourish. No hesitation. It was a signature that belonged on a chassis design or a contract for wind tunnel time. He set the pen down without a sound.
Lando watched him, the forced grin slipping for a millisecond into something like awe, or maybe fear. Then it was his turn. He grabbed his pen like it was a tool he didn’t quite know how to use, scrawling Lando Norris in a large, looping, frantic script that spilled outside the designated line. A performance of nonchalance that fooled no one, especially not Oscar.
“Done!” Lando announced, the word too loud. He leaned back, the chair creaking. “See? Painless.”
Oscar’s father gave a slow, approving nod. “This is a significant day for both families.”
“A partnership,” Oscar’s own father added, his keen eyes settling on his son. “In all things.”
Oscar held that gaze, searching for the pride his father spoke of. All he saw was the satisfied gleam of a deal well-negotiated.
“Right!” Lando blurted, clapping his hands together once, the crack of sound making everyone jump. “Partners. Teammates. All that. Brilliant. And now we get a free lunch, yeah?”
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The lunch was at a club so exclusive it was practically invisible. Panelled walls drank the light and the low murmur of their parents’ conversation. Oscar stood slightly apart, by a vast fireplace that held no fire, a crystal tumbler of sparkling water untouched in his hand.
He could feel Lando’s approach before he heard him, a shift in the air’s energy.
“So.” Lando appeared at his shoulder, his voice dropping into a register meant only for him. He smelled like rain, expensive cologne, and nervous sweat. “We need, like, ground rules, yeah?”
Oscar didn’t turn from the window, watching a solitary black cab glide through the grey street below. “I assumed.”
“Right. Well.” Lando took a half-step closer, his shoulder almost brushing Oscar’s. Oscar could feel the heat of him. “Obviously, this stays between us. And the families. And the lawyers. So, like, no one else.”
“No one else.” Oscar repeated the words, tasting their flat finality.
“We keep living like normal,” Lando ploughed on, the words tumbling out in a rushed whisper. “Your place, my place. It’s just… on paper. For them.” He made a tiny, jerky gesture towards the table where their fathers were now sharing a single-malt and a quiet laugh. “Doesn’t have to change anything between us.”
Between us.
What wasbetween them? A driver’s briefing room rivalry. A shared glance of understanding when a strategy went to shit. The occasional text about sim data. The hollow space where something else, something Oscar refused to name even in the quietest part of his mind, might have grown if the world were different.
Finally, Oscar turned his head. He looked directly at Lando, whose eyes were wide, pupils dilated in the dim light. He looked terrified, a boy who’d lit a fuse and was waiting for the bang. Oscar felt a sudden, vicious urge to say something that would shatter that fragile, performative calm. Instead, he let his own face become a mask of perfect, placid comprehension.
“Yeah,” Oscar said, his voice devoid of any emotion he actually felt. “Doesn’t change anything.”
He saw the exact moment the tension drained from Lando’s shoulders. The relief was a physical wave. Lando’s grin returned, realer now, edged with giddy survival. “Brilliant. See? Sorted. It’s just… paperwork.”
Paperwork. Oscar gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. Lando, mission accomplished, clapped him lightly on the back a teammate’s gesture and bounced back towards the group, already launching into a story about his journey that morning.
Oscar turned back to the window. He slid his hand into the pocket of his tailored trousers. His fingers closed around the cool, smooth metal of the wedding band his mother had pressed into his hand that morning. “For later,” she’d said, her expression unreadable.
He didn’t take it out. He just held it, a secret weight against his thigh.
Later, they left separately another unspoken rule already in effect. Oscar’s car, a discreet Audi, glided to the curb. As he opened the door, he heard Lando’s laughter again, bright and careless, as he sprinted through the relentless rain towards his own luridly coloured McLaren.
Oscar slid into the backseat. The door shut with a soft, solid thud, sealing him in silence. The engine purred to life.
“Home, sir?” the driver asked.
“Yes, please.”
As the car pulled away from the curb, Oscar leaned his head against the cool, tinted glass. The world outside was a watercolour blur of grey and neon. The solid, singular weight of the ring in his pocket felt like a contradiction, an anchor in a formless sea.
He had known it would be a transaction. He was a practical person. He had prepared for financial clauses, for logistical challenges, for the burden of a secret.
He had not prepared for the specific, quiet desolation of hearing the person you’ve just married insist, with palpable, desperate relief, that the whole thing meant absolutely nothing.
He closed his eyes. The only sounds were the whisper of tyres on wet tarmac and the low hum of the heater.
Just paperwork.