Chapter Text
It starts in an airport convenience store, where time already doesn’t feel real, and Lando may or may not have hallucinated the sullen-faced cashier who rang him up for Midol, Monsters, and Reese’s, in that order. Lando has been jet-lagged for the better part of seven years, and he still has yet to find out what abominable apothecary concoction will somehow undo said seven years.
His hoodie pockets bulging with his purchases, he cranes his neck into the aisles, until he finds Oscar lurking mysteriously in the beauty section. He’s crouching down, peering at something on the lower shelves.
Lando wheels his suitcase over, and points at the wall of concealers. “They tell you to cover up those moles, or what?” God forbid.
Oscar looks up at him with a drowsy smirk that shouldn’t be this frustrating. “Ha, ha. No, just looking at lip balm. If I get on a twenty-hour flight without a single emotional support Chapstick, I’m jumping out the emergency exit.”
And the scary part is, Lando knows he’s dead serious. Oscar usually had multiple tubes of red or blue Chapstick on him, and now that he’s without? His world might be crumbling around him.
“What happened to your stash?”
“Left the whole damn Ziploc at the hotel.” Ah, yes -- because Oscar is psychotic enough to carry said multiple tubes of Chapstick in a single plastic baggie.
Oscar turns back to the meager selection on offer. There’s one or two brightly colored tubes of something called Baby Lips, and next to that are those pastel egg things that every girl at Lando’s school swore by.
And then next to that --
Lando grins. “Mate, come on.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Look, it’s value for money--!”
“Lando --”
“Since you seem to lose them anyway, you’d have loads for backup--!”
Oscar starts to say something that sounds threateningly like No, Lando, and reaches for the traitorous egg lip balm. But Lando’s quicker, and his arm shoots out to grab the eight-pack of Hershey-branded candy-flavored lip balm. Kissable! bubbly text engulfed by hearts on the packaging proclaims.
“I’m buying it. No take-backsies.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I am, unfortunately, very serious.”
Oscar reaches for the pack, but Lando jerks it away.
“Lando,” Oscar says again, and not for the first time Lando thinks he might have a begging kink.
“There you boys are.” If sighs of relief could be a physical, bodily reaction, this harried-looking McLaren staff member at the top of the aisle takes the cake. “Go on, the jet’s waiting on you.”
Lando turns back to Oscar, and waggles his eyebrows.
Later, at checkout, Lando murmurs, “If these were Tim-Tams branded, you’d want them,” and he doesn’t miss Oscar’s chuckle at the tail end of his sigh.
Lando wakes up, somewhere above the Mediterranean, to the sound of crinkling plastic.
When he peers over his seat partition, he’s greeted with Oscar wincing up at him, the candy-flavored lip balms spilling out over his lap from their plastic prison. “Sorry. But you did pick the ones with the most obnoxious packaging.”
“Don’t be sorry.” Lando blinks the sleep from his eyes. It’s a pleasure to see Oscar like this, rumpled in a sweater, his hair sticking up at the back. It’s an even greater pleasure that, on occasion, this is the first thing Lando sees upon waking up from a nap.
“An unboxing, and you weren’t even going to wake me? Oscar, you wound me.”
“Yeah, you got me. Exclusive OP81 content, right here.”
“Which one’s up first?”
“Dunno. Agony of choice, and all that.” Oscar hums as he looks over the haul in his lap. “Here. Try this one.”
Lando uncaps the proffered red tube. An overly sweet fruity scent wafts up at him. He glances at the label: Twizzlers.
“Not great?” Oscar asks, taking in his grimace.
“It’s sort of like if someone who had once had a Twizzler aeons ago described it to AI, and then an alien asked the AI what Twizzlers were like, and then the alien made this.”
“Very specific.”
“I ought to know, I’m the sweets expert. Even if I’m not huge on Twizzlers personally.” Lando holds his palm out with a gimme motion. “The chocolate one, please.”
Oscar obliges -- “Since you said please--” and Lando inhales, only to give another disappointed frown. It’s the same: a cheap imitation of the real thing.
“Kissable,” he scoffs, tossing it back into the pile in Oscar's lap. “Who’d wanna kiss anyone with those?”
“I mean, it’s probably different, right? When someone kisses you.”
Lando nods, maybe too eagerly. “Right.” Oscar could say we are figments of Bruce McLaren’s imagination, and he’d still agree.
“Like, you’re probably supposed to kiss someone with it, and it’s for the benefit of the kissee, not the kisser.”
“Huh.” Lando’s mouth quirks thoughtfully. “Yeah, I guess I’ve never really liked kissing the normal Chapstick flavors.”
“You don’t?”
“Yeah, I mean, in the whole wide world of kissing, I’ve never thought, hmm, you know what this needs? Cherry Chapstick.” He blows a raspberry with a thumbs-down. “These are probably way more fun.”
Oscar grins up at him like a wolf. “Guess I’ll have to kiss someone and find out for myself,” he says. “For science.”
Lando scrubs at his jaw, and then promptly tries to bat the image of Oscar kissing someone out of his head. “For science.”
“Of course.”
They lapse into a small silence then. Lando pretends to look out the window (dark), while Oscar shuffles the tubes in his lap. Across the aisle, Zak gives a loud snore.
Finally, Oscar clears his throat. “Think I’m gonna go with ….” he holds up the tube for York Peppermint Patties.
Lando snorts. “Bet it’ll just taste like mint.”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.” Oscar’s nose scrunches playfully as he peels the safety seal off the lid, and for both their sakes, Lando decides to drop back down behind his seat. There’s 6 hours of this flight left, and he really doesn’t want to spend it with a raging boner.
Oscar has always been cute.
It’s why Lando had stuttered when he’d first met him in F2, dorky haircut and all. It’s why, five years later, he couldn’t for the life of him stop giggling like a schoolgirl when Oscar had walked into the McLaren HQ for the first time. Andrea and Zak seemed to brush it off as nerves, that anxious energy of a new student in the classroom.
Lando tries not to think too hard about it. Oscar is cute just seemed like another fact of the universe, as irrefutable as the FIA is shit and mac and cheese makes my stomach hurt. Hence the casual flirting, hence the indulgence despite knowing it’s going to bite him in the ass later on.
But something seismic had shifted after the Japan GP last spring. Lando had just finished a hasty post-race shower, quick enough to scrub the champagne out of his hair so he could hurry back out to the afterparty, when his phone had lit up.
osc 🐨: meeting someone for the party, don’t wait up.
And Lando had sunk to the corner of his bed, towel still on his waist, wrestling with the gnawing feeling inside his chest. It felt an awful lot like disappointment, and for the life of him he couldn’t figure out why. Boohoo, Oscar was going to hang out with someone else tonight. So what?
As indubitable as that logic was, Lando could also acknowledge that he was being utterly ridiculous. Oscar wasn’t an object that he owned, and anyway, Lando had definitely done his share of leaving Oscar high and dry at afterparties before.
hahahah sure thing
have funnnn
And yet, Lando found his head on a swivel all night long as he kept looking around for -- for what? Some neon sign with an arrow pointing down to Oscar and his not-date? Get heart broken here! it would flash. But only if you’re a pathetic sod named Lando Norris!
He didn’t need one, anyway. After about forty-five minutes of anxiously darting around, weaving through people and lights and the pulsing bass of the music, he spotted them. Oscar and some bloke. Lando hadn’t recognized him, so definitely not someone from McLaren. And judging from the way Oscar’s head tipped back in laughter, he was also, apparently, hilarious. When Oscar’s head came back up, he’d been watching the guy talk with a sweet, almost fond look in his eyes.
Something like jealousy had crackled underneath Lando’s skin, thrumming like a live wire. The look on Oscar’s face was a special one. Lando doesn’t recall if he’s ever been on the receiving end of it. He thinks he would remember that.
And that’s when the pieces had slotted into place.
Oscar is cute.
The FIA is shit.
Mac and cheese makes my stomach hurt.
Oscar makes my chest and my everywhere else hurt, in a different way, in a good way.
Lando is contemplating all this as he leans up on the railing of the roof of McLaren HQ, tilting his head up at the Surrey night sky. The stars twinkle in a pitiful sort of way at him: look at you, you fuck, living your dream job, every day a permanent vacation, rich as all hell, and you’re still finding a way to mope about your work crush.
(Is that what it is? A crush? God, he hopes not.)
Beneath him, a sponsorship event carries on, one of the dozens of celebrations held in his honor as the reigning World Driver’s Champion. In theory, anyway. Really, it’s a networking event, a sort of who’s-who in McLaren’s sponsor circle. In practice, he and Oscar are like living marionettes, having their strings pulled taut to say a few words before the kickoff toast.
Lando will probably never get used to the fame or notoriety of Formula 1, but it always seems easier when Oscar is there, answering questions for the both of them with the glib of a media-dazzling socialite while all Lando can manage is his most profound Uh.
Oscar is good like that.
“A-ha!”
Oscar’s voice rings out across the rooftop, and Lando nearly drops his Heineken onto the pavement below.
“I knew I’d find you up here.” He joins him at the railing, leans easily on one elbow. He’s ditched his suit jacket, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up his forearms. There’s a pretty flush across the bridge of his nose that tells Lando he’s a little buzzed. “You never did like parties.”
Lando scoffs. “I like them well enough! Just not when my face is blown up on a banner at the entrance and everyone is staring at me like they think I’ll do donuts in the show cars.”
“It’ll never not be weird,” Oscar acquiesces with a small smile. “I didn’t know your badge still worked to get up here.”
In his first week at McLaren, Lando had been tapping his badge everywhere, trying to see what rooms he had access to. The surprising majority was, well, a lot, including Zak’s office and the rooftop stairwell. Zak was quick to get his clearance changed so Lando couldn’t hypothetically, say, leave a dozen thumbtacks on his desk chair, but no one did anything about the rooftop part.
“Yeah,” Lando agrees. “It’s nice to be able to get away. Sometimes I bring dates up here. The McLaren rooftop, now that’s what really gets them jazzed.”
“You’re disgusting, you know?”
“Oh, heaven forbid I do a little kissing on the rooftop every now and then. You could probably do with some kissing, too, you know.” He makes a noise in the back of his throat. “I mean, like.” Lando keeps his eyes trained on a lamppost in the car park, and imagines flinging himself from it. “You could’ve brought up that girl from engineering I saw you chatting up.”
Oscar laugh-huffs. “I wasn’t chatting her up, I was asking her about the front wing specs for Miami.”
“Oh, is that what we’re calling it now?” Lando picks at the label on his beer bottle. “She was cute.”
“Was she? I didn’t notice.”
“Blonde hair, green eyes. Your type, I imagine.”
“You don’t know my type, Lando.”
Oscar says it so off-handedly, so casually, like he’s thought about it before. The moment lingers between them like perfume, frustratingly significant in a way Lando can’t fathom.
Oscar leans forward, clasping his hands over the railing. “D’you remember what we said on the plane?”
“About Timothee Chalamet being overrated?”
Oscar grins. “No. About the Chapsticks.”
“Oh.”
Lando expects Oscar to bring up the engineering girl again. Mention that her name was Marissa or Sophia or Victoria or something else just as pretty, that she was as smart as she was beautiful. Wonder aloud if she had a boyfriend, if it would be okay to go back down and kiss her for their stupid little theory.
“Do … you wanna try it?”
Lando’s skin runs very hot, and then suddenly very cold.
“Try what?” he asks, dumbly.
“The -- you know.” Oscar gestures between them. “The Chapstick thing.”
That’s so Oscar, the bluntness, the nonchalance.
“Uh.”
And that’s so Lando, the cluelessness, the eloquence.
He must be taking too long to answer, because Oscar says, “You told me you were the sweets expert. And, well, you just said I could do with some kissing. Whatever that means.”
Lando’s head feels like it’s been stuffed full of cotton. To buy some time, tilts his head side to side, like he's sloshing around his liquefied brain matter. “So I did."
“So…?” Oscar looks up at him from underneath his eyelashes, his tongue already wetting his bottom lip, and he has to know what he’s doing, he has to. “For science,” he adds quickly, like Lando’s forgotten.
And Lando has forgotten lots of things -- his ID. His keys. His own racing number, if he’s drunk enough. But he’ll never forget anything if Oscar is the one to tell it to him.
He nods. “For science.”
The anatomy of a kiss: two people lean in, mouths touch, eyes close. When Lando’s lips touch Oscar’s, all those things happen, like always.
It’s a bit awkward at first, because they both tilt their head the same way and bonk foreheads and giggle a bit -- you go this way, I’ll go that way -- yeah, cheers -- and when Lando thinks about kissing Oscar (which he hasn’t), he supposes it’s what he expected. Overall professional, if a little mechanical.
But other things happen, too. That feeling in Lando’s chest is back, except instead of some feral creature chewing through his ribcage, it’s something sweet fluttering just beneath his sternum, like that feeling he gets right before he laughs.
He tastes something, too. As Oscar’s mouth moves against his, there’s the familiar, sour bite of alcohol, and, and…
Mint, just barely tinged with an artificial sweetness.
Just as he’s thinking of what he should do with his hands (Run through his hair? Cup his jaw? Kill self?) Oscar pulls away first. “Well?”
Well.
Lando takes a breath. Hopes he doesn’t look as dizzy as he feels.
“I told you that York Patty one would just taste like mint,” he finally says, and Oscar drops his head and laughs.
“Fair enough.” In true Iceman fashion, he seems completely unfazed by the fact he’s just kissed his teammate on the rooftop of the work function. “I mean. There’s seven more of those lip balm things, right? One of them’s gotta be good.”
Seven more. Right. Rightrightright.
Lando offers a weak smile, and two even weaker finger guns in return. “You know where to find me.”
Fuck. This isn’t good.
In general, it's bad strategy to start lusting after your teammate halfway through the season. Come to think of it, Lando can’t think of a time it’d be a good strategy.
Sure, he could (begrudgingly) acknowledge he’d always had a bit of a crush on Oscar. In fact, it almost seemed inevitable: they were close in age, spent most of their waking moments together, and shared their day jobs with only 18 other people, only some of whom they got along with regularly.
But then he’d bought him that stupid pack of Chapsticks, and he’d tasted one on him.
So one could say things had changed.
Like for example, when they’d run into each other at a bakery in Monaco a whole week later, and Lando could hardly look him in the face because he couldn’t ignore the phantom mint chocolate taste in his mouth. Or like, when he does look at him, he starts salivating, actually salivating, because his idiot brain doesn’t know the difference between imitation Chapstick sweets and the real thing.
Or this morning, when they’d gotten on the plane to Miami, and Lando sits as far away from Oscar as the jet will allow him.
It’s not uncommon for them to sit so far apart -- bad race results or sim sessions will do that -- but since neither has happened, it’s enough for more than a few McLaren staff to raise their eyebrows. When Andrea tilts his head curiously at him, Lando just gives a wordless shrug. Keep it moving. Only the sound of several mental crises going on at once over here.
They’re hovering over the coast of Spain, Lando twisted into a comfortable pretzel in his seat, when his phone vibrates with a WhatsApp notif.
osc 🐨: check ur email
Lando turns around in his seat and frowns at him, but Oscar just gives him a pointed stare from the other end of the jet. His laptop is open on the table in front of him.
Lando flips to his email. His newest email isn’t from Oscar’s McLaren address, but rather [email protected].
really?
osc 🐨: shut up it’s my email from primary school llol
Lando throws his eyes to heaven and switches back to his email. There’s no subject, just an attachment, with a file type that Lando hasn’t seen since school.
chapstick_thing.xlsx
What on earth …
Lando opens the file.
A Google Sheets spreadsheet pops up.
Flavour, one column heading reads. Tested, reads another. Rating. Notes.
Underneath Flavour, York Peppermint Patty has already been added. Under Tested, there’s a box with a checkmark in it.
Rating is still blank. So is Notes.
Lando flips back to WhatsApp.
idgi hahaha
osc 🐨: documenting our findings
osc 🐨: for science, duh
u want me to rate it?
osc 🐨: out of 10, preferably. can be to as many decimal places as you like.
Lando rolls his eyes again. That is so Oscar. In the right-hand corner, he can see Oscar’s Google icon hovering over it all, indicating that he still had the file open on his laptop.
ok well get out the doc wtf
i can see yuo
lurking
i get preformance anxiety
osc 🐨: lol
The icon disappears. And even though there’s no way Oscar can see him from all the way back there, Lando still slouches in his seat, tucking his phone in his hands.
Rating: 6.5
Notes: as expected. minty. a little underwhelming. points off cuz i got knocked in the head by kisser
That over with, Lando pulls his hood lower over his eyes and re-settles in his seat.
His phone buzzes again.
osc 🐨: /i/ knocked YOUR head???
yes lol
that was 100% u
osc 🐨: whatever
osc 🐨: see you in miami, clown
honk honk
(tht was me honking my clown nose)
(and also when i overtake u this wknd)
The drive to the track on the morning of race day is mostly silent, broken only by idle comments on the weather and F1 headlines and whatever random song Lando’s Spotify algorithm puts through Oscar’s speakers. There are a few cars that Lando doesn’t mind playing passenger princess in, and any car Oscar happens to be driving is one of them.
Things don’t get interesting until after they park, during which Lando very conspicuously tried not to lose his mind watching Oscar reverse park with one arm around his seat, and Oscar takes the keys out the ignition and says --
“Can I kiss you?”
It’s actually criminal, how blasé Oscar is about the whole thing. Meanwhile, Lando feels all the moisture in his mouth actively evaporating. “Now?”
Oscar nods, in a why-not sort of way, and Lando can think of a million reasons why-not: It’s race day. People will see. We have to meet up with Andrea in 10 minutes. I kind of need to pee and -- did I mention it’s race day, and I might crash my car if all I’m thinking about is your lips on Lap 49?
And maybe Oscar registers all this too, because the kiss once Lando nods is quick, almost perfunctory: all business, no pleasure. Or maybe this is just how Oscar kisses when he’s sober, which is only a little depressing.
Oscar is the first to pull away again. Lando swipes a thumb across his lips, like he’s trying to harvest whatever flavour might still be lingering there.
“Bubblegum?” he guesses after a moment, and Oscar grins at him.
“You’re good at this.”
“Well, you’re not the first one to use flavored lip balms with me, Piastri.”
During the race, he almost swerves into the wall on Turn 11, but recovers nicely into 12. Afterwards, when he reviews the race data with Andrea, he’ll realize it wasn’t the gearbox spluttering that caused him to lose his grip. No, he’ll remember that in that moment, he’d been thinking of Oscar’s face right before they’d gotten out of the car, flushed, a little bemused, but with the bright look in his eyes that Lando knew a little too well that spelled game on.
Flavour: Bubblegum
Tested: Yes
Rating: 5.2
Notes: mint, gum, BORING, bring out the real sweets. also kiss itself was too short booo tomatoes aren’t hard enough so i’m throwing coconuts 🥥🥥🥥🥥