Work Text:
The mistake became evident in the quiet air of the hotel room. Oscar noticed it first.
He had stepped in ahead of Lando, dragging his suitcase carefully over the threshold so it wouldn’t bang into the doorframe. What hit his nose smelled faintly like detergent and citrus, something neutral that offended no one. Clean and strangely calming, with a sense of familiarity that reminded him of the clothes he packed 24 hours earlier.
And then, there it was. One bed. Not even two pitiful twin beds separated by an awkward nightstand. No, it was just a lone queen-sized bed, neatly made with a pretentious runner folded at the foot like it had somewhere important to be. The only other notable piece of furniture being an armchair on the far side of the room.
Oscar stared blankly, hand still wrapped around the angled suitcase handle. Not far behind him, Lando strutted in whilst shrugging off his jacket. Humming a song Oscar couldn’t name if his life was on the line.
“Not bad,” he voiced brightly, still too loud considering the door hadn’t completely shut behind him yet. “Better than that place we stayed in last-”
Lando stopped next to Oscar, mouth slightly ajar. Awkward silence finished his sentence for him. An unsure beat, followed by a few more.
Oscar turned his head slightly. “You booked one bed.”
Lando blinked, face visibly processing the situation. “No no no, I-” He angled his body around Oscar to view the room in its entirety, as if another bed would appear just around the corner of the entryway. “I booked a room. With beds.”
“Beds… plural?”
“Yeah,” Lando said, scratching the back of his neck. “Well, I thought I did, at least.”
Oscar rolled his luggage further into the room before pulling out his phone. “It’s fine, I’ll go back to the front desk. It’s probably just a mix-up.”
“But it’s late,” Lando spoke quickly.
Oscar paused. It was late. They’d arrived well-past check-in hours due to a delayed train, a nearly missed connecting flight, and Lando insisting on stopping for some food because ‘travel calories don’t count.’ The lobby resembled a ghost town apart from the front desk clerk, polite but clearly tired.
“I can still go check.”
“Or…” Lando dropped onto the edge of the bed like he owned it. “We could just share it. It’s a queen. We’re not exactly enormous.”
“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point, exactly?”
Oscar hesitated, the point he wanted to make being difficult to articulate without sounding weird. Or overly particular. Or like he was making something small into something unnecessarily complicated. “We’ll be here for a week,” he landed on.
“Exactly! A week of saving the poor hotel staff from dealing with Mr. Aussie Bigfoot marching down there past midnight to complain.” Oscar slowly exhaled through his nose. “You know I’m right,” Lando dragged out the last word in an annoyingly sing-songy tone. He leaned back on his elbows and continued, “Come on. We’ve crashed on worse setups. You remember the couch in Barcelona?”
”That was a couch.”
“And this is a bed. Upgrade!”
Oscar glanced at the door, then back at the bed. It would be inconvenient to try and change rooms now, maybe even impossible. And Lando didn’t seem remotely bothered because, of course, he didn’t. “Fine,” Oscar conceded.
Lando’s grin widened. “I knew you’d come around and see reason with my unmatched intellect.”
He didn’t respond. He was already making his way to the other side of the room, unzipping his suitcase to reveal the mess of clothes and toiletries he shoved in there. He yanked out a maroon shirt and black shorts for tomorrow and set them atop the cloth amalgamation one hex away from forming into an eldritch being. Behind him, Lando flopped fully onto the now wrinkled bed, arms spread.
“Dibs on this side,” he claimed, with his arms taking up a majority of the space that Oscar would be sleeping on.
He didn’t bother asking which side it was. It didn’t matter. It was just a bed.
The first night, Oscar had the pleasure of learning that Lando moved in his sleep. Not just a small shift or turn, he moved. As if his body had acquired entirely different priorities once he closed his eyes.
Oscar had gone to bed deliberately, careful to stay on his half of the bed, facing away with a reasonable amount of space between them. The boundary—or lack thereof—lasted approximately forty minutes, when he woke to a weight against his back. Oscar initially thought he was imagining it, like some lingering awareness from a dream he’d already forgotten.
That’s when Lando shifted again, arm now loosely draping over Oscar’s side, and Oscar went still. Lando’s breathing was slow and even, evident with how his face was pressed somewhere near Oscar’s left shoulder blade. It was warm, and he was close.
Too close.
Oscar stared into the darkness, blinking a few times. He could just barely make out the rough forms of the accent chair and lamp in the corner of the room. He could move. He should have moved, but instead, he waited. Maybe Lando would roll away on his own.
He didn’t. If anything, he moved closer, like Earth’s gravitational pull had been dropped into Oscar’s stomach and Lando was his Moon. Oscar exhaled quietly as he gathered the courage to move. As cautiously as humanly possible, he lifted Lando’s arm and moved it somewhere onto the bed behind him. He inched forward, too, reestablishing a smidgen more space between them.
That worked… for about ten whole minutes.
Lando rolled again, this time pressing fully against him. A heat-seeking missile with no concept of personal boundaries. This was ridiculous. Oscar turned slightly, nudging back the halo of brown curls with his shoulder.
Lando made a soft, protesting noise in his sleep, “M-mh.” Lando settled once more, this time gripping Oscar’s sleeve as if he didn’t want to lose it.
Oscar shut his eyes and drifted off to sleep. Lando didn’t move again.
The following night, Oscar was prepared.
He went to bed later than Lando, hoping it would somehow solve all his problems. Naive thinking at its finest.
Within minutes, Lando had not only rolled over, but managed to hook his leg over Oscar’s.
”You’ve got to be kidding me, Lando,” he murmured, mostly to himself.
Lando mumbled something unintelligible in his sleep, his leg flexing as if tightening his hold was part of his response. Oscar turned just enough to see if Lando was actually playing a prank on him, expecting to find a set of waiting eyes with a wide grin. Instead, he finds… softness. Younger, almost. His usual impish expressions now replaced by an unguarded vulnerability. His curls fell across his forehead and his lips were slightly parted.
He looked annoyingly endearing. Oscar turned back towards the curtains. This was just inconvenient, is all. He attempted to disentangle himself without waking the other man.
”Stay,” Lando mumbled, voice barely audible to Oscar’s tired ears.
Oscar stilled. He was sleep-talking. No control over what he said. Lando obviously hadn’t meant that for Oscar.
And, yet, he stayed nonetheless.
By the third night, Oscar began to notice patterns in his best friend's sleeping habits. Lando always drifted towards him, without fail. It didn’t matter how far Oscar was from the center of the bed, Lando found him. And once he did, he never strayed. He didn’t let go.
Lando also talked, most of it being incoherent, but enough words to be distracting.
“No, that’s not fair. That’s cheating,” he trailed off at one point, brow furrowed.
Cheating at what? Is he talking to me? Oscar broke out of his thoughts. “Lando?”
Lando did not respond. He shifted even closer, pressing his face into Oscar’s shoulder. Oscar exhaled. This was seriously becoming an issue. Not because of the lack of sleep—though that wasn’t ideal either—but because of the way his reactions were changing.
The first night, he was irritated. The second, resigned. But now-
Now, he was stuck awake thinking, noticing things he shouldn’t. Like how warm Lando was or how easily he fit against him. How natural it felt to accept it and fall asleep, to stay. Oscar frowned at the ceiling. This was temporary. A consequence of proximity and nothing more. This would all go away once the trip ended.
Oscar woke up alone in the middle of the fourth night. Well, not actually alone. Lando was still in the bed next to him, except he hadn’t moved. For once, the imaginary border between them was respected. Oscar lay there for a moment, too aware of the gap and the silence.
Then, Lando repositioned. Of course he did, like clockwork. Like a secret routine only privy to his subconscious, and Oscar. Lando turned, slow and instinctive, until he was facing him. Oscar tracked his freckled hand as it carefully drifted to rest against his chest, palm light above his heartbeat, as if Lando was checking his friend was still there.
Oscar’s throat tightened but he refused to move away. Unable to articulate why, he opted to squeeze his eyes shut instead of challenging that uncomfortable can of worms.
Oscar stopped trying to fight it by night number five.
He still went to bed on his side, intentionally leaving a sizable distance between the two of them. But when Lando inevitably crossed the aforementioned gap, Oscar didn’t push him away. He didn’t reposition himself or his friend. He stopped pretending it was an inconvenience. He lay there, hyper aware of every point of contact being shared.
Calming. That’s the word he settled on. Lando’s presence at his back was constant and grounding in a way Oscar hadn’t realized he was missing. Sleep came easier and nights felt shorter. Oscar glared into the stale darkness.
He could no longer ignore it.
Oscar lay awake, staring at the ceiling, with Lando pressed against his side as usual. Except now, the feeling transformed from something happening to him into something that he was actively choosing. And that-
That was different.
Beside him, Lando slid his hand lightly around Oscar’s arm. His breath caught and he shivered at the caress. Lando was still asleep, relaxed and unaware. Oscar hesitated and before he could overthink it, he turned to mirror Lando. Maneuvering his arm out of the other’s grasp, he faced him head-on. For just a moment, the world went quiet.
Then, Lando closed the space between them, like his body had been aching for the opportunity. He tucked his head under Oscar’s chin and, at the same time, an arm settled around his waist.
Oh. Alrighty then.
Oscar’s hand hovered for a second. Eventually, he let it rest upon Lando’s back, the man making a soft, contented sound in response. Oscar should have stopped, but he didn’t. He doubled down, shifting closer and tightening his arm slightly, and he pulled Lando further into his chest.
It felt… right. That was the problem.
The final night of their trip arrived far too quickly.
Oscar had been aware of it all day. A subtle, haunting tension underlying every conversation and laugh they shared together. Because this would all end. The bed, the proximity, all of it.
They lay down, the infamous distance between them lasting only seconds. Lando moved a little closer and Oscar let him. This time, though, Oscar was the one to close the gap completely. Wrapping an arm around Lando, pulling him in without hesitation or fear. A movement that came so easily, as if they had been doing whatever this was for years.
Lando stilled, Oscar feeling the slight flex beneath his arm. “Finally,” Lando spoke, quiet but triumphant.
Oscar’s breath caught. “You’re awake.”
“Have been.”
“Since when?”
“Long enough,” Lando replied impatiently. “Long enough to notice you’ve been fighting this all week.”
“That obvious, huh?" Oscar chuckled.
“Only to me.”
Oscar huffed a quiet breath that tasted like something in the middle of exasperation and relief. Neither of them moved for a while. Stalling, maybe, so that this arrangement persisted a little longer. Lando shifted slightly, then, just enough to look up at him.
“What are we doing?” Lando asked wide-eyed.
He contemplated the question. He could deflect, or downplay it. He could feign ignorance. He could pretend this was something else entirely.
Instead, he admitted, “I don’t know.”
“That’s new,” Lando snorted.
“I usually know.”
“I know.”
They just stared at each other for a moment or two. Lando’s expression was soft, but there was a subtle steadiness underneath it all. An assured comfort both of them had dug their toes into with no plan to leave.
Lando eventually broke the silence. “I like this.”
“This?”
“This,” Lando emphasized, nudging closer. “You. Us. Whatever this is between us.”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” he admitted.
“Yeah, well, you don’t exactly seem like the planning-to-fall-for-your-best-friend type.”
That got Oscar to smile. “Neither do you.”
Lando shrugged. “I don’t plan anything.”
“I know,” Oscar repeated.
Quiet fell over them again, a blanket of unanswered questions and tension in their joints.
“I don’t want this—whatever this is—to just be because of the trip.”
“It isn’t,” Lando answered matter-of-factly.
Oscar searched his face. “You’re sure?”
He rolled his eyes with a groan. “Oscar. I’ve been trying not to grab you awake all week. Did you think all of this was just a coincidence?”
“You’ve been awake?”
“Not every time. Not the first couple nights at least.” Lando broke eye contact, opting to look somewhere between Oscar’s collarbones instead. “After the first two nights where I woke up to you in my arms, I kind of hoped I’d get to see that more often.”
Oscar just stared at him. “You-“
“I do move in my sleep,” Lando interjected defensively. “That part’s real.”
He exhaled in fond exasperation. “Of course you do.”
Lando grinned back. Then, softer, “So… what do we do now?”
Oscar looked at him. At the familiarity, the closeness. The way this all felt less like a newly uncovered feeling, and more like something they finally both had the courage to acknowledge. The depth of the unknown felt far less daunting when you took the plunge alongside someone you loved.
Love. That’s a big word. And an even bigger feeling. He wasn’t ready to say that, not yet, but he could certainly show it.
He tightened his arms around Lando. “We don’t stop.”
Lando’s smile widened at that. “Good.”
He settled back against Oscar, like he always did. Only this time, Oscar held him there with purpose, with intention. With all the weight of a load-bearing four-letter word.
The room’s scent had changed without Oscar noticing when it happened. It no longer carried the impersonal traces of citrus and detergent that used to mark the bedposts. Now, it held something fuller and lived in. His head rested close enough that the scent of Lando’s hair clung to him, soft and warm, threaded with the faint sweetness of the papaya shampoo lingering in his curls. Beneath it was a more distinct, intimate aroma. A subtle blend of colognes that settled into the moles dotting his skin, fused to form something so unmistakably Lando.
Breathing him in felt like anchoring himself. Like pressing a memory into place before it could slip through his fingers. This quiet mix of them—of Lando and Oscar, of newness enveloped in something deeply known—was something he wanted to keep close to his chest for as long as he could.
And when Lando drifted off, still wrapped around him, Oscar didn’t stare at the ceiling. He took in the sight of his best friend and the promise of something more. Oscar smiled. He stayed awake just a little longer, because he finally understood what the point was. He slowly let his eyes fall close, knowing the rest of his life was nestled comfortably within his arms.