Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The wedding binder had taken over the coffee table sometime around Tuesday and hadn't moved since. It sat there now, thick and overstuffed and colour-coded within an inch of its life, Oscar's doing, obviously, because Lando's contribution to the organisational system had been a sticky note that said "Flowers? yes. Cake? also yes." which Oscar had peeled off with two fingers like it had personally offended him and replaced with a laminated divider tab labelled Floral Arrangements-Confirmed/Pending.

Lando loved him so much it was genuinely embarrassing. The afternoon had settled into something quiet and golden around them, the kind of friday that felt almost too good to be real, the sort you didn't notice until it was gone. Lando was sprawled across the length of the sofa one arm draped over the back cushions, one leg hanging off the edge, sock-footed and comfortable.

He had a vendor confirmation email open on his phone that he'd been meaning to reply to for forty minutes and hadn't, because Oscar was beside him and the afternoon was golden and some things could wait. Oscar could not wait, as it turned out.

He'd been fine twenty minutes ago. He'd been fine ten minutes ago. Lando had checked. And then something had shifted in the way it only did with Oscar quietly, internally, like a tide going out before anyone noticed the water level dropping and now he was sitting with the binder open across his knees, shoulders drawn up somewhere around his ears, staring at a single page with the kind of focus that wasn't really focus at all but was actually controlled panic wearing focus as a costume.

Lando watched him for a moment without saying anything. He knew this look. He'd catalogued every version of Oscar's anxiety over four years of loving him and this one the still one, the quiet one, the one that looked the most like composure was always the one that needed the most tending.

"Osc." Nothing. Oscar turned the page and turned it back. "Oscar."

"The centrepieces," Oscar said and his voice came out very measured and very careful in the specific way that meant he was one moderate inconvenience away from completely unravelling. "The florist confirmed the centrepieces for the reception tables but she hasn't confirmed the ceremony arch and I sent the follow-up three days ago and she still hasn't-“

"Hey."

"-responded and I know it's probably fine but the arch is the thing I actually care about the most visually and if she's overbooked or she's changed her mind about the design without telling us I need to know now because we have four weeks and four weeks sounds like enough time but it isn't, Lando, it genuinely isn't, there are seventeen things still on the pending list and Papa is doing everything he can-“

"Oscar, hey. Look at me."

Oscar looked at him. His eyes were doing that thing, the thing where they were slightly too wide and slightly too bright and he was breathing just a little too deliberately. He was so beautiful it knocked the air out of Lando quietly and without warning the way it always did, even now, even four years in, even when the man was spiralling over flower arrangements on a Friday afternoon in their living room.
Lando reached over and closed the binder. Oscar made a small wounded noise. "I'll text the florist," Lando said.

"But you don't have her number."

"I'll get her number."

"You won't remember to-“

"Oscar." Lando moved the binder to the table and shifted across the cushions until there was no space left between them, until Oscar had no choice but to lean into him or sit very awkwardly upright and because Oscar had never in his life chosen the awkward option when Lando was offering an alternative he leaned in and Lando wrapped both arms around him and pulled him close and pressed his lips to the top of his head.

"Breathe, please.” Oscar breathed. "Bunny, the arch is going to be there," Lando murmured into his hair. "The florist is going to respond. The centrepieces are confirmed, the venue is confirmed, the catering is confirmed, your suit is frankly criminally gorgeous and should be illegal-confirmed. Everything that matters is already done."

"The arch matters too."

"The arch will be done. I'm telling you it will be done."

"You don't- you can’t know that!”

"I know that I will personally drive to that florist's house if I have to and I will stand in her garden and I will not leave until she confirms the arch, how does that sound?”

“Like an actual crime, Lan.” Oscar huffed a small laugh into his shoulder despite himself. Lando felt it more than heard it, the slight easing of tension in Oscar's frame, the way he settled a little heavier against him. He pressed another kiss to his temple and held him tighter.

"Everything is going to be perfect," he said quietly. Steadily. With all the conviction he could push into his voice. "I promise you. I'm going to make sure of it, to the very last thing. You have my word."

Oscar was quiet for a moment. Then- "You're very calm about this."

"Someone has to be."

Oscar tilted his head up to look at him. "Aren't you nervous at all?"

And Lando looked down at him, at the face he'd been memorising for four years, at the light curls and the worried eyes and the slight crease between his brows that only smoothed out completely when he was asleep and smiled. "Not even a little.” he lied.

Because the truth… the truth that lived somewhere behind his sternum in a place he hadn't shown anyone, not Oscar, not Max or Charles when they'd sat around the dinner table last weekend talking about rehearsal dinners and seating charts, the truth was that Lando Norris was absolutely, comprehensively, silently terrified.

Not of the wedding. God, not of the wedding... Not of Oscar, not of the commitment, not of the life they were building together in this house that already felt more like home than anywhere he'd ever lived. That part was the only part that felt completely solid, completely certain, like the one fixed point in the universe he could orient everything else around.

He was terrified because he wanted it.
He wanted it with the kind of wanting that had no floor to it, no bottom, that just kept going down and down into something that felt almost too big for one person to hold.

He wanted to marry Oscar Verstappen-Leclerc in four weeks in front of everyone they loved and he wanted it so badly that his brain, his stupid, catastrophising, overclocked brain had taken that want and turned it into a source of anxiety all by itself, because what if something went wrong, what if something fell through, what if the arch wasn't confirmed and it spiralled from there and he'd spent four years loving this man and- He breathed out slowly through his nose.

Calm. He needed to be calm. Oscar needed him calm, and in a month he was going to stand across from the love of his life and say words he'd already written three drafts of and deleted twice and he needed to hold it together until then.

He was fine. Everything was fine. He was completely fine.

His phone rang destroying that calmness. It was loud, louder than it needed to be, probably because Kimi had gotten hold of his volume settings last Tuesday and adjusted them to what he'd solemnly described as "a more reasonable level" and then grinned at his own joke for about thirty seconds while Lando had looked on with the helpless adoration of a man entirely at the mercy of a seventeen year old's sense of humour.

The sound shattered the quiet of the afternoon like something thrown through glass. Lando reached for it automatically, already half-composing the text he'd send to whoever it was -busy, call you later, sorry- and then he saw the contact name on the screen and every single thought in his head stopped.

Kimi's School.

It wasn't a contact he'd ever wanted to use. He'd put it in his phone months ago when he took over as Kimi’s guardian he had filed it away under the hopeful assumption that it would just sit there, dormant, a precaution and nothing more. Because Kimi was… Kimi was Kimi. The boy who came home and sat at the kitchen counter and talked about his day in that careful, slightly-too-eager way he had, like he was always just a little bit afraid that nobody actually wanted to hear it, not realising that Lando would genuinely listen to him talk for hours.

Kimi who packed his own bag the night before, who never missed deadlines, who once spent forty minutes re-doing a piece of homework because he wasn't satisfied with his own handwriting and had looked so deeply embarrassed when Lando had caught him doing it that Lando had had to leave the room to compose himself before he said something that would have made them both cry. Why was his school calling?

The question hit him like cold water. A hundred answers rushed in immediately behind it, none of them good something happened, an accident, he was hurt, someone hurt him, he was sick, he'd been sick all day and hadn't wanted to worry them, he was- He was already moving. He'd launched himself half-across Oscar before the second ring had finished, grabbing the phone off the cushion where he'd left it and Oscar made a startled sound beneath him and then saw the screen and went very still.

"Put it on speaker," Oscar said immediately, his voice dropping low. "Love, put it on speaker, I want to hear."

Lando's thumb was already moving.
He answered and sat upright. Felt Oscar shift close beside him, warm and solid, their shoulders pressed together.
"Allo? Monsieur Norris?"

The French was… unexpected. Lando blinked. "I’m sorry, I'm not-I don't speak french, my partner is the one who speaks french, I can give him-“

A brief pause. Then, in accented but clear english: "Of course. My apologies, Mr. Norris. I was not aware, am I speaking with Andrea's parents?"

And something happened then, something small and enormous at the same time. Lando looked at Oscar. Oscar looked at Lando. And both of them answered, together, in the same breath, overlapping and unhesitating:
"Yes. You're speaking to Andrea's parents."

The words came out warm. Came out proud in a way that had nothing self-conscious, just completely and entirely true. Lando felt it in his chest like something settling into the right place. Oscar's hand found his knee under the binder and pressed down gently, and Lando covered it with his own without looking.

"Wonderful. My name is Madame Roussel, I am Andrea's French teacher. I am calling because I have become quite concerned about him over the last few weeks and I feel it would be wrong not to bring it to your attention."

"Of course," Lando said carefully. "What kind of concern?"

A pause. Then: "Andrea has not attended my class in three weeks."
The words landed quietly.

"I'm sorry," Lando said. "Can you-can you say that again?"

"He has not come to my class in three weeks, Monsieur Norris. My class falls in the middle of the school day, so it is not a matter of leaving early. He is in the building. He just chooses not to come. And I would perhaps be less concerned if his grades reflected this, but they do not, he continues to perform adequately on the assessments, which leads me to believe he may be receiving assistance with them that isn't entirely-“

"You think he's cheating." The words came out of Lando's mouth flat and stunned, not angry. Just…stunned. Because nothing she was saying was attaching to anything in his brain. It kept sliding off, refused to stick, because what she was describing wasn't-it wasn't-

"I have raised the concern with Andrea directly," Madame Roussel continued carefully, "and he was very pleasant about it. He smiled and told me he would attend the next class. He did not attend the next class. Or the one after. That is why I am calling, I really don’t want to fail him.”

Lando stared at the phone. Beside him Oscar had gone very still. "Madame," Lando said, and he heard his own voice come out strange measured in a way he had to consciously construct, "are you sure you're talking about my Andrea? I hate to sound like a clueless parent, I genuinely do, but what you're describing doesn't sound like my kid. It doesn't sound like him at all."

There was a brief silence on the other end and when Madame Roussel spoke again her voice had shifted, softened just slightly at the edges: "You are right, Monsieur Norris. It does not sound like Andrea at all. In the years I have known him he has been exemplary. That is precisely why this concerns me. Whether this is a response to something changing in his life or simply a phase of teenage rebellion I cannot say, but I thought you should know. And if you would like to verify this for yourself I have a class with them within the hour. There is every chance he will not come. You are welcome to see for yourself and speak with him directly after, I told you I really don’t want to fail him.”

Lando was already standing. He didn't register standing. He was simply no longer sitting.

"Madame Roussel," he said and his voice had changed entirely now it had gone to a place Oscar recognised, a place that had nothing to do with wedding planning or lazy friday afternoons, a place that lived in team meetings and in the particular tone Lando used when he'd already made a decision and was simply informing the world of it, "I appreciate you calling and I appreciate your concern. But I am going to ask you to hold off on any formal action until I have had a chance to speak with him myself. I will always hear my kid before I let anyone draw conclusions about him. And I am telling you now, as his parent, that his behaviour in your class is going to change. That is a promise I don't make lightly."

A pause. Then: "I will wait to hear from you."

"Thank you." He ended the call and the living room was very quiet.

Lando didn't look at Oscar at once. He stood with the phone in his hand and looked at the middle distance for a moment, at nothing in particular, at the textbook Kimi had left on the end of the coffee table Thursday evening, the corner of it sticking out from under the wedding binder, a red pen tucked into the pages as a bookmark. His eyes stayed on it…then he looked at Oscar.

Oscar wasn't spiralling out loud. That was somehow worse. He was sitting with his hands pressed together between his knees, eyes on the floor and Lando had known him long enough and loved him thoroughly enough to be able to read every single thought moving behind his face without a single one of them being spoken.

We haven't been paying enough attention. We've been so caught up in the wedding. He needed us and we were looking at florists and seating charts and maybe we reminded him of everyone who chose something else over him, maybe we made him feel like he wasn't enough, maybe he's acting out because we failed him, maybe we aren't doing this right, maybe we never were-

"Hey," Lando said quietly.
Oscar didn't look up. "Oscar, love. Hey, whatever you're thinking-don't."

"I'm not-“

"You are. I can see you doing it." He crossed the room and sat back down beside him, close, turned toward him. "Look at me, please?”

Oscar looked at him. His eyes were doing the too-wide thing again, but it was different this time, less wedding-panic and more something that sat heavier.

"We're going to get to the bottom of this," Lando said trying to sound steady. "And I need you to hear me when I say that what she described is not our kid. That's not Andrea. You know that, you know him."

"What if we missed something? What if he's been involved in something bad and we just missed it because we’ve been to focused on the wedding? What if-“

"Then we find out and we fix it. That's what we do." He held Oscar's gaze. "He is not being failed. I won't allow it. Not by us, not by that school, not by anyone. Okay? He’s just a teenager, our teenager. It’s probably just a misunderstanding, love.”

Oscar was quiet. Then, slowly, the tightness in his shoulders came down by degrees and he leaned forward and let his forehead drop against Lando's shoulder and Lando brought a hand up to the back of his neck and held him there. "I know my kid," Lando murmured, almost to himself. "I know who he is. And I'm telling you it's a misunderstanding. You'll see."

He felt Oscar nod against his shoulder. Felt him exhale long and slow and deliberate, the exhale of someone choosing, consciously, to lay something down. "Okay," Oscar said quietly. "Okay, you’re right? Of course you’re right.”

Lando kissed his temple. Then his cheek. Then he pulled back and looked at him with a brightness in his eyes that was only partly manufactured.
"C'mon, let's go."

Oscar blinked. "Go where?"

"The school, of course.”

"Lando, I don’t think that’s a good idea-“

"If he's skipping I want to know what he's doing with all that free time." He was already reaching for his jacket from the hook by the door. "And for his sake I am sincerely hoping I don't open a bathroom door and find him and Ollie in there sucking faces because if that's the case he's grounded until he's fifty. Fifty, Oscar. And I'm ringing Max."

Oscar made a sound that started as something despairing and ended, against all odds, as a laugh a real one, surprised out of him and the sound of it did something to the tight thing in Lando's chest that had been sitting there since the phone rang.

"You sound exactly like him," Oscar said, standing, running a hand through his curls.

"Your dad is an excellent parent and I take that as a compliment."

"He once grounded me for a week for coming home thirty minutes late and worrying him.”

"See? Visionary, I expected nothing less from Max Verstappen-Leclerc.”

Oscar was still laughing, shaking his head, reaching for his keys and Lando caught his wrist and spun him back in and kissed him, properly, one hand cupping his jaw. Oscar made a soft surprised sound into it and then kissed him back and when they pulled apart his eyes were a little brighter and the crease between his brows was gone.

"I would, for the record," Lando said against his mouth, "go down on you before we leave if you wanted? Just to take the edge off?”

Oscar pressed his forehead against his and laughed again. "Down, boy. We have somewhere to be."

"He says, not disagreeing with the offer."

"Lando!”

"Going. I'm going. Look, moving."

~~~~

The classroom had not been officially assigned to them. They'd been here three weeks now. It showed…

Gabi's hoodie was draped over the back of the chair he'd claimed on day one and hadn't moved from since, not even on the days Gabi himself wasn't wearing it, because it had simply become part of the furniture.

There was a stack of printed reference photos in the corner, stills from videos, screenshots of candid moments that Kimi had been using to cross-reference footage and the stack had developed its own style by now, a specific lean to it that nobody touched because Kimi knew exactly where everything was and God help the person who reorganised it.

Isack had left a charger plugged into the wall socket by the window on the second day and neither he nor the charger had separated themselves from it since. There was an empty coffee cup on the windowsill that had been there since Tuesday of last week and had achieved a sort of landmark status. Nobody moved it. It was part of the room now. It belonged.

The afternoon light came in low and amber through the east-facing windows, the kind of light that made everything look slightly more artistic than it actually was, which was either appropriate or deeply ironic given what they were doing in here. Kimi was at the centre of it.

He always was, in this room. Not because he demanded it, the idea of Kimi demanding anything was almost comedic, he was constitutionally incapable of taking up space on purpose, but because everything in the room oriented toward him the way a room orients toward its light source.

Gabi had pulled his chair up to Kimi's left at a diagonal, close enough to see the screen without being asked to be included. Isack was sprawled in the chair on the other side of the table with his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle, his chin dropped into his palm, looking for all the world like someone deeply unbothered and fooling absolutely nobody. And Ollie…Ollie was beside him. He was always beside him. It wasn't a decision Ollie appeared to make consciously, more a gravitational reality wherever Kimi was, there was an Ollie-shaped space that appeared adjacent to him and Ollie filled it.

His chair was pulled close enough that their arms touched along the length of them, Ollie's elbow warm and present against Kimi's. His own laptop was open in front of him, nominally because he'd said he was going to look something up, actually untouched for the last twenty minutes because the screen Kimi was working on was more interesting than anything Ollie had planned to do. They'd been at it for nearly an hour already.

On Kimi's screen, the timeline was open. It was… something. Even Kimi, who had been building it piece by piece and knew every clip in it like a map he'd memorised, still felt something shift in his chest when he looked at the whole thing assembled. Two tracks, running parallel, woven together.

The first was the messages. Short videos, thirty seconds to two minutes, from people across Lando and Oscar's lives. Some formal, some a little crazy, some clearly recorded on a phone balanced against a coffee mug at a slightly horrifying angle. Max's had been impeccably framed because of course it had. Charles's had been filmed in what appeared to be a walk-in wardrobe and had still managed to be the most beautiful thing Kimi had ever seen a human being record on a smartphone.

There were old teammates and current ones, Lando's friends, Oscar's ex-teammates, a former engineer who had apparently wept twice during filming and made Isack, who had been the one to coordinate the call, deeply uncomfortable and also quietly moved.

The second track was slightly different. Longer, slower, more carefully constructed. Interview clips. Questions Kimi had written and rewritten until they were exactly right, not intrusive, not sentimental in the heavy-handed way that made people perform feeling instead of actually feeling, just questions that opened doors. Tell me about the first time you knew. Tell me what changed. Tell me what it looked like from where you were standing.

He'd interviewed Charles on a Tuesday evening while Oscar was at a training session and Lando had been on a call.

He'd sat in their kitchen with a borrowed microphone and a list of questions on his phone and Charles had looked at him for a long moment before answering the first one and when he finally spoke he'd said things about Oscar, about the specific quality of Oscar's happiness when he was in love, the way you could map it on him like weather that Kimi had had to listen back to three times in the edit suite because he kept getting distracted in the middle of it feeling something he couldn't name.

He was in that footage now, scrubbing through it, headphones around his neck so the room could hear.

"-you always know, with Oscar," Charles was saying on screen, warm and precise and entirely like himself, "because he stops pretending with his happiness and starts just having it. There's a difference. As his father you learn to see it. And when Lando-“ a small pause, something private moving across his face before he let it through "-when Oscar came home and talked about Lando for the first time, I knew within thirty seconds that this was the one. Because he wasn't trying to make me think he was happy. He was just happy."

The room was very quiet. Gabi was watching the screen. He'd been about to say something three minutes ago and then Charles had started talking and the something had simply not happened, which was notable because Gabriel Bortoletto not saying something was roughly as common as a solar eclipse. He had his chin propped on his crossed arms on the table and his expression was doing something complicated that he would deny if anyone pointed it out.

Isack had uncrossed his ankles and was now sitting with both feet on the floor, which for Isack was the physical equivalent of sitting up straight and paying attention. His chin was still in his palm but his eyes were on the screen and they were doing something that was not quite blankness and not quite feeling but somewhere in the precarious territory between them.

Kimi was watching with the focused stillness he only had when something mattered. He'd seen this clip perhaps fifteen times now in the edit and it still did this to him, this small thing in his chest that had no name, just a quality, like something warm pressing from the inside. He reached up without looking at it and adjusted one earphone cup where it sat against his neck.

Ollie's hand moved. Just his hand coming up to rest at the back of Kimi's neck, below the headphones, warm and still. His thumb moved once, a slow deliberate stroke along the top of his spine and then settled. Kimi didn't react, he didn't need to. He just stayed exactly where he was and kept watching the screen and breathed.

The clip ended. Kimi let the timeline sit for a moment. Then he pulled off the headphones entirely and set them on the desk and leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. Nobody said anything immediately. They'd learned, the three of them, that Kimi sometimes needed a minute after he watched something that moved him, not because he fell apart but because he processed privately first and you got better Kimi if you let him do that.

Then Gabi said, without inflection: "Charles Leclerc is going to make me cry at this wedding and I'm going to be so embarrassed."

"Same," said Isack immediately.

"You've never cried at anything in your life,"said Ollie.

"I cried at that video of the dog who found his owner at the airport."

"That was me crying. You were eating a sandwich."

"I was emotionally eating. It counts."

Kimi laughed a short, genuine thing, surprised out of him and dropped his gaze from the ceiling back to the screen. Gabi was watching him with a look that was approximately sixty percent sarcasm and forty percent something gentler that he kept very well buried.

"It's good, Kim," Gabi said. No preamble, no cushioning. Gabi didn't do cushioning. "Like actually good. Not just 'nice effort from the kid' good. It's really good."

Kimi looked at him. "You haven't seen most of it."

"I've seen enough, you are amazing for doing it.”

"I've got three more interview clips to cut in and the whole second half of the messages section still needs-“

"Kimi." Gabi fixed him with a look. "Receive the compliment."

A pause. Kimi looked back at the screen. "Thank you," he said quietly.
Ollie pressed a kiss to the side of his head. Brief and warm. Then went back to pretending to look at his own laptop.

"Play the Max one," said Isack.

"Which part?"

"The bit at the end. Where he-you know. The bit."

Kimi knew which bit. He scrubbed to it. Max Verstappen on screen, in what appeared to be his home office. He'd been answering a question about Lando, specifically about the first time he'd understood that Lando wasn't just Oscar's partner but was going to be family, really family, the permanent kind. Max had been quiet for a moment and then he'd said, with no particular drama, in the flat certain way Max said everything that mattered:

"He looks at my son like Oscar is the most obvious answer to a question he spent years not knowing he was asking. That's not something you perform. You either see someone that way or you don't. Lando sees him that way every day and he doesn't ask for anything in return for it. That's how I knew."

And then a beat of silence, and then Max had looked directly at the camera, at Kimi, behind the camera and said:

"He's a good man, your… Lando. He's a very good man."

The slight pause before Lando. The word he'd started to say and swallowed. Kimi had not asked him to re-record it. He'd left it exactly as it was. That pause was the truest thing in the entire clip.

The room was quiet again. Then Isack said, very carefully, studying the middle distance: "He was going to say ‘your dad’.”

"I know," said Kimi.

Nobody pushed it. Nobody made it a thing. That was the thing about these three, they knew when to leave something alone, knew how to love Kimi in the way that meant not making him account for his own feelings before he was ready to.

Ollie's thumb moved again at the back of his neck. Kimi reached up, a brief motion, automatic and covered Ollie's hand with his for exactly three seconds then let go. Then kept working, Ollie’s hand moved inside his thigh just caressing letting the warmth engulf him and Kimi made a content sound leaning into his presence.

He'd been scrubbing through a transition for six minutes when Gabi made the sound. It was a small sound at first. A kind of contemplative hum, the sort that meant Gabi was thinking something that was probably going to be better for everyone if it stayed internal. Kimi knew this sound. He chose to ignore it on the grounds that engaging with it was always a mistake.
He kept scrubbing.

"You know," said Gabi, in the tone of voice of someone who had already committed to whatever came next and felt no remorse about it, "for people who are supposedly innocent teenagers who happen to share a chair…”

"We're not sharing a-“

"-you two are very…” Gabi made an expansive gesture that communicated nothing and everything "-you know. Very."

"Very what?" said Ollie.

"Just… very."

"Gabi I will end you."

"You're basically in his lap seconds away from giving him a handy, you brat.”

"I am not in his-“ Kimi looked down. He was, perhaps, marginally in his lap. "That's not-this chair doesn't-“

"The chairs," said Isack gravely, "are a perfectly normal size, Ollie’s more precisely."

Kimi put his face in his hands. "I hate you both," he said, very clearly, into his palms. "I want to be very clear about this. I hate you both specifically and I hate the day I asked for your help with this."

"You love us," said Gabi.

"I barely tolerate you."

"He loves us," Isack confirmed to Gabi.

"Deeply," Gabi agreed.

Ollie leaned in and said directly into Kimi's ear, quiet and warm and deliberately smug: "I think you're in my lap actually." A pause. "Not that I mind."

Kimi's ears went pink. "Ollie, don’t start.”

"What? Can’t I do a little bit of flirting with my boyfriend?”

"Don't."

"Don't what? I'm just clarifying the spatial situation-“

"I will close the laptop."

"You would never close the laptop."
Which was true. Kimi would never close the laptop. Kimi looked back at the screen with enormous dignity and kept working. Gabi watched this exchange with the expression of a man who has been given a gift.

It escalated, as things with these four always did, in a way that felt inevitable in retrospect and completely surprising in the moment. They'd settled again or something approaching settled, the version of settled that existed with these four people in this specific room which was more accurately described as a temporary ceasefire.

Isack had actually looked at something on his own laptop for nearly eight minutes. Gabi had eaten half of something from his bag and made commentary about the video clips that was approximately twenty percent useful and eighty percent gibberish, but averaged out to something Kimi found genuinely helpful because Gabi's instincts, under all the noise, were actually very good.

Kimi had found a good rhythm. The kind where his hands knew what to do and his brain was a step ahead of them and the edit was starting to feel like itself, like the thing it was always supposed to be.

And then he pulled up a clip of Lando.
Not an interview clip. A candid, something Oscar had filmed on his phone months ago and sent to Kimi when Kimi had asked people for footage. Lando in the kitchen on a Sunday morning, not knowing he was being filmed, making coffee with the inefficiency he brought to all domestic tasks that weren't racing-related. Talking about nothing and laughing at something Oscar said off camera. Them he was turning around and looking directly not at the camera, at Oscar with an expression that had no performance in it whatsoever, no awareness of being seen, just pure undisguised love sitting openly on his face like it was the most natural thing his face had ever done.

Kimi stared at it. He'd watched this clip before. He'd watched it several times. Every time he thought he'd absorbed it and then he looked at it again and something happened in his chest that he couldn't predict and couldn't stop and couldn't quite explain even to himself. He paused it. Right there. On that expression.

"That's your shot," said Gabi suddenly, leaning forward. All the noise was gone from his voice. "Right there. That's how you end it."

"I know, I-I just taught it’s a bit too raw maybe? Like that should stay between them?” said Kimi quietly.

"The whole thing builds to that. Everything you've collected, all the interviews, all the messages it all lands there. On that face. It would be a crime not to use it Kims!”

"I know…”

A beat. "Why are you doing this?" Gabi asked, not unkindly. Just directly, the way Gabi always was, the way Kimi had learned to appreciate because at least with Gabi you always knew exactly where you stood. "Like. You've been here for three weeks. You've sent approximately one thousand messages to people you don't even know. You're going to be in actual trouble with Roussel if this goes on much longer." He nodded at the screen."Why?"

Kimi looked at the paused image of Lando's face. He was quiet for long enough that it didn't feel like he was avoiding the question. Just finding the right words. He did this turned things over carefully before he let them out. The others had learned to wait.

"He took me in," Kimi said finally. Simply. "When he didn't have to. When nobody was asking him to. When-“ a pause, shorter this time, "-when the people who were supposed to didn't and chose themselves before they even tought about me. He wasn’t obligated to it, he could just said ‘Tough luck, kid, I’ll see you when I’m in Miami on a race.’ And that would have been it. He made the biggest choice someone ever made involving me.”

Nobody moved.

"I want him to know-" he stopped. Tried again. "I want them both to know that I see it. That I see what they've done and sacrificed for me and what they are to each other and-“ his jaw tightened slightly, barely, "-and what they are to me. Even if I haven't-“

He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. They all knew what lived at the end of it, the word he hadn't said yet, the one that sat in his throat every time Lando ruffled his hair or Oscar tucked a blanket around him on the couch, the one that was too big and too scary and too much like something that could be taken away.

Dad. Because that’s what’s been going on in Kimi’s head, in between them finally giving him a life that felt normal, adults who listened to him and were there not physically, but emotionally there too, they made him learn what that word really meant. That he can rely on both of them as parents.

Ollie's arm came around his shoulders. Not a big motion. Just there. Solid and warm and without any requirement attached to it. Kimi sat very still inside it for a moment then he cleared his throat quietly and reached for the mouse and kept working.

"Okay," said Isack, from across the table, his voice coming out slightly rougher than usual. He cleared his own throat. "Okay. This is-yeah. Good. This is a good thing you're doing."

"Obviously," said Gabi. He leaned back in his chair and kicked his feet up on the desk and crossed his arms and if his voice was very slightly thicker than normal that was nobody's business. "We wouldn't be here if it wasn't. I'm skipping French for you, Norris. Do you know how boring I am without my French suffering? I need that class for my personality."

Kimi laughed despite himself. "Your personality is just fine."

"My personality is exceptional. But that's not the point-“

"Gabi."

"What?”

"Thank you, all of you." He didn't look up from the screen. "I mean it, you don’t understand how much this means to me.”

"Obviously," said Gabi again. This time it came out completely soft.

They'd been at it for another twenty minutes productive, easy, the room back in its rhythm when it happened.

In retrospect there had been warning signs. There were always warning signs with Isack and Gabi operating in proximity to each other for extended periods of time. A certain quality of quiet that wasn't peace but was actually Isack thinking. A certain quality of attention from Gabi that wasn't focus on the screen but was focus on Ollie, who had at some point drifted close enough to Kimi that their cheeks were nearly touching as they both looked at the laptop, Ollie saying something quiet in his ear about a transition, Kimi tilting his head slightly toward the warmth of him without appearing to notice he was doing it and blushing hard when Ollie whispered how much he wanted to worship him right then and there and the quiet, but not so quiet whisper of “ Oh, Ollie…” They were, objectively, very couple-y and very disgustingly showing their affection.

Gabi looked at Isack.
Isack looked at Gabi.

Something passed between them that had no words and needed none. "You know what I love," said Gabi, to nobody in particular, in the measured tone of a man building toward something, "about this project?"

"Don't start!” said Ollie immediately, because he knew this tone.

"It's just so romantic."

"Gabi, I swear to God-“

"The love in this room. The tenderness." He gestured broadly at Kimi and Ollie. "Very inspiring stuff. Very-“

"I'm going to close your airway," said Ollie pleasantly.

"-gives me all sorts of feelings, you know? Makes me think about love. About connection. About the sounds people make when they feel very horny like you two-“

"GABI."

Gabi stood up. And then with absolutely no hesitation and shame, no warm-up, no mercy he bent himself at the waist over the table, grabbed the edge of it with both hands and let out a moan that was frankly theatrical in its commitment, his voice pitched high and breathy and completely devastating: "Oh-Ollie-“

The room exploded. Kimi made a sound that was not a word, a kind of strangled, full-body noise of protest, his face going from its natural colour to a shade of red that started at his ears and moved inward with startling speed. Ollie was already on his feet with a very indignant look on his face.

Isack, who had been waiting for exactly this moment with the patience of a man who understood timing, leapt to his own feet, grabbed the back of his chair, bent slightly at the knee and produced from somewhere within himself a sound that was lower and considerably more enthusiastic:

"Kimi, yes, Kimi-“

"OH MY GOD-“ Kimi's hands flew to his face. "STOP- ISACK I WILL ACTUALLY DIE-“

"We don't-“ Ollie was already reaching for the nearest projectile which turned out to be a highlighter "-we don't fucking sound like that, stop it!” The highlighter sailed across the room.

Isack, still in character, dodged it without breaking the performance. Gabi straightened up long enough to contribute a supportive "yes you do"and was immediately pelted with a rolled-up piece of reference paper.

"NEVER SAY MY BOYFRIEND'S NAME LIKE THAT-“ Ollie had found a second highlighter and was deploying it "-you absolute asshole, I will TELL YOUR MOTHER-“

"Tell her what? Tell her what, Ollie, she'll just agree with me after that time when I invited you to our pool and you decided to make exactly that kind of sounds! IN MY POOL!”

"We do NOT sound like that!" Kimi emerged from behind his hands long enough to point at both of them with what would have been authority if his face were not the colour of a fire exit sign. "That was-you were-that's not even what happened!”

"Very convincing denial," said Gabi, catching the second highlighter out of the air.

"We are going to be murdered by Lando if he hears about this," said Isack cheerfully, "and I think it'll be worth it."

"Lando is going to GROUND Ollie," said Kimi, "and I'm going to let him-“

"I am your BOYFRIEND, whose side are you on?!”

"You were ENJOYING IT JUST NOW!”

"I was NOT-“

"You were SMILING-“

"I was HORRIFIED on your behalf!”

Gabi sat back down. He had the expression of a man who had accomplished something and was at peace with himself and the universe. He reached into his bag, retrieved a cereal bar, opened it and took a bite with great tranquility while Ollie and Kimi's argument dissolved into something that was no longer about Isack's performance and had become purely about whether Ollie had been smiling, which he had been, which he would not admit, not today not ever, regardless of the evidence.

"I love this project," Gabi said quietly, to no one, to everyone.

"Shut up, Gabi," said Isack and Ollie and Kimi simultaneously. He just took another bite enjoying the circus he created.

The chaos settled the way it always did not abruptly but in stages, like weather passing through. Isack dropped back into his chair with an expression of deep satisfaction and zero remorse. Ollie sat back down beside Kimi with the residual energy of someone who has been deeply wronged and is choosing dignity. Kimi, whose face had returned to approximately its normal colour except for the very tips of his ears, pulled his laptop back toward him and stared at the screen with enormous focus and said nothing, which was fine, which was normal, which was Kimi's way of pretending the last five minutes had not occurred.

Gabi finished his cereal bar. Folded the wrapper. Put it in his pocket because he was, under everything, a person who picked up litter.

"For the record," Ollie said finally, to the room, with great measured dignity, "we don't sound like that."

"Known," said Gabi.

"I just want it noted."

"Noted."

"Good."

Silence then: "You were definitely smiling," said Isack.

"ISACK, don’t start!”

"OKAY," said Kimi, loudly, placing both hands flat on the table, "we're moving on, we're done, nobody is speaking for the next ten minutes-“

"Bit harsh-“

"Nine minutes and fifty seconds of silence for Gabi specifically-“

"I think you'll find I'm the wronged party here!”

"Nine minutes forty-“

"Fine, fine, I'm quiet.”

And then they were quiet. Or quiet enough. The room settling again into its particular warmth, Gabi doing something on his phone, Isack back to his chin-in-palm posture but with his eyes actually on the screen now, Ollie's shoulder warm against Kimi's, their arms touching the whole length of them.

Kimi pulled up the timeline. He looked at it for a moment. All of it. The clips assembled in order, the interviews woven through the messages, the careful structure of something he'd been building quietly for weeks in a borrowed classroom during a class he was good enough at to risk. The paused frame of Lando's face in the kitchen on a Sunday morning, caught mid-laugh, mid-love, not knowing anyone was looking.

He exhaled slowly. Ollie turned his head and pressed a kiss to the edge of his jaw. Barely there. Just the warmth of his mouth for a second and then gone. "It's going to be perfect," Ollie said quietly. Just for him.

Kimi kept his eyes on the screen reached up and scratched the back of his neck where Ollie's mouth had been, an unconscious motion and kept his face very neutral, which Ollie saw through completely and had the grace not to comment on. "Two more sessions," Kimi said.

Isack looked up. "You said that last week."

"Yeah," said Kimi. The corner of his mouth moved. "I know, they deserve perfection and nothing less.”

The afternoon light stretched long and golden across the floor and the four of them sat inside it, in a room that wasn't theirs, doing something for people who were and the time passed easily and the work went on and nobody skipped French because they had nothing better to do.

They skipped it because they had something that mattered. And that was the only reason they'd ever needed.

~~~~

The school smelled exactly like every school Lando had ever been in. He couldn't have described it if someone had asked, something institutional, something that lived in the walls and the carpet and the particular quality of the fluorescent light overhead, something that was universal and specific all at once.

It hit him the moment the front doors swung closed behind them and transported him somewhere entirely against his will, some composite memory of being fifteen and loud and entirely certain he knew better than everyone around him. He wondered, briefly and with a feeling he couldn't name, whether Kimi walked these corridors with that same certainty.

He suspected not. He suspected Kimi walked them carefully, the way Kimi did most things attentively, a little quietly, making sure he knew where the edges were before he committed to any particular direction. He was that kind of kid. Had been from the first week, from the first day, standing in the kitchen doorway with his school bag on both shoulders like he wasn't sure he was allowed to put it down.

The thought tightened something in Lando's chest that he'd been trying to keep loose since the phone call.
The woman from the front office young, efficient, a lanyard with a photo ID that she kept touching reflexively was talking as she walked. Lando caught approximately sixty percent of it. Something about the layout of the building, something about where the French department was relative to the science block, something about Madame Roussel being very dedicated.

Oscar was beside him doing the social heavy lifting, answering in the right places, smiling at the right moments, because Oscar had always been better at performing functional when he was anything but. He took over Charles more in that department.

Lando was looking at the walls.
Student work pinned in rows. Timetables behind plastic covers. A noticeboard with football tryout information and a reminder about the winter concert and a hand-lettered sign about the library being closed Tuesday for restocking. Ordinary school things. Kimi's ordinary school things. The world his kid moved through every day without them, a whole geography of it that Lando only ever got in fragments stories at the kitchen counter, names that had become familiar through repetition, Gabi said this and Isack did that and the way Kimi's voice always went slightly warmer when he mentioned Ollie without appearing to notice that it did.

He walked through all of it now and felt like a visitor in a country he cared about very much. Oscar's hand found the small of his back for exactly three seconds. No pressure, no message attached, just I'm here, I'm beside you, we're doing this together. Then it was gone.

"Just down here," the woman said, turning a corner, "the French rooms are at the end of this corridor. Class starts in a few minutes so the students should be making their way in now."

"Thank you," Oscar said warmly. "We'll take it from here, we don't want to disrupt anything."

She nodded, touched her lanyard and left them to it.

They positioned themselves to the side of the door not directly in front of the small rectangular window, not so obviously that any passing student would clock two grown men loitering in a school corridor and think anything of it, just adjacent. Watching.

Students came in ones and twos and small clustered groups, the social formations of a Friday afternoon class, the ones who sat together and the ones who sat alone and the ones who arrived at the last possible second looking slightly windswept.

Lando watched every face. Not Kimi. Not Kimi. Not Kimi. He was aware of Oscar beside him doing the same thing-that still, contained quality Oscar had when he was paying close attention to something he didn't want to show he was paying close attention to. His arms were loosely crossed. His shoulder was against the wall. He was watching the door with an expression that gave nothing away and said everything.

The stream of students slowed.
Lando checked his phone. The app, the one they'd set up six months ago, the one Kimi had accepted with such earnest seriousness, "of course, whatever you need, I don't mind at all" showed a little blue dot sitting somewhere in this building, somewhere that was decidedly not this corridor.

The last student filed in and the door closed. Muffled through the wood and the small wire-threaded window, Madame Roussel's voice warm, accented, beginning her class.

Lando stared at the closed door. The corridor was very quiet. He became aware that his jaw was tight. That he'd been rubbing at it with the back of his hand without deciding to. He looked at the phone again, at the small blue dot that was Kimi being somewhere in this building that wasn't a French classroom, doing something with an hour of his school day that Lando couldn't account for and felt something rise in him that was frustrated and baffled and underneath both of those things, quietly and persistently, worried. Kimi was lying to them.

"He's here," Lando said. His voice came out lower than he intended. "I can see him on the app, he's in the building, so he's still at school, he didn't leave, he's just-“ he made a gesture with the phone that communicated the incoherence of it “-what the hell is he doing for an hour alone? What does he do? Why would he skip?”

"Lando…”

"He's not like this, Osc, I know him. I know my kid and this isn't-“ he stopped. Rubbed at his jaw again. "I don't even know what to say."

Oscar looked at him steadily. Then he reached out and touched his arm, a brief grip just above the elbow. "Come on, love. We can't stay here."A beat, the corner of his mouth moving slightly. "We'll look like creepy men watching teenagers."

Despite everything, despite the tight jaw and the baffled worry and the small blue dot that wasn't where it was supposed to be Lando felt something loosen fractionally. "We're not watching teenagers, we're watching for our specific teenager-“

"Same optics."

"Oscar, I can’t just leave-“

"Office, come on." Another touch, this one at his back, guiding gently. "We'll pick him up early. It's Friday, his afternoon is light. We take him home and we talk to him." He held Lando's gaze. "Okay?"

Lando looked at the closed classroom door one more time. "Okay," he said. "Yeah. Okay."

The office was slightly too warm, slightly too fluorescent, a woman behind a desk who was professionally unsurprised by anything that walked through her door. Lando gave Kimi's full name, confirmed he was the guardian. Confirmed the other guardian was present. Signed the form she slid across the desk with a pen on a little chain.

His name next to Kimi's. Guardian signature. He'd signed things for Kimi before school forms, medical releases, the permission slip for the overnight trip in October that Kimi had handed him with such careful casualness, like he hadn't been thinking about asking for a week. He'd signed all of them without ceremony because that was the point, that was the job, you signed the things and you showed up and you made it ordinary so the kid understood it was ordinary, that it would keep being ordinary, that Lando's signature next to his name was not a favour or a gift or something that could be revoked.

He handed the pen back. "He'll be collected at the bell," he said. "Please don't mention anything to him before then."

The woman nodded with the practiced neutrality of someone who had seen every variation of parental concern this building had to offer and filed them all appropriately. They walked back out into the afternoon.

The car was warm from sitting in the sun. Oscar started the engine to get the air moving and then left it running without pulling out, Lando sat in the passenger seat and looked at the school building through the windscreen saying nothing for a moment.

Then: "We have to be hard about this."

"I know."

"Not hard like-“ he turned the word over "-not cold, but firm. Real consequences, real conversation. No laughing it off."

Oscar nodded slowly. "Good cop, bad cop?”

"I don't want to be the bad cop!”

"Nobody wants to be the bad cop, Lan.”

"Can't you just be the bad cop?”

"Lando, I can’t believe you just asked me that!”

"You're very authoritative when you want to be, I've seen it, you've got a voice you do-“

"No-uh. You're going to be the bad cop," said Oscar serenely, "because you made the promise to the teacher and because Kimi responds to you the best…and because you care more about him doing this than you're letting on and that's going to come through whether you want it to or not. So yeah, you can’t be good cop, sorry”

Lando was quiet. Then: "That's annoyingly accurate."

"I know, I’m always right.”

"I hate it."

"Also known." Oscar reached across and squeezed his knee once. "I'll be there, I'm not going anywhere. I'll be softer so he's got somewhere to land after, but I won't undermine you. We go in together."

Lando looked at him. "Yeah?"

"Yeah, of course. It’s our first time parenting him like this, I’ll be with you every step of the way.”

He turned back to the windscreen. Exhaled through his nose. "The cheating thing I don't believe, not for a second."

"Neither do I."

"He rewrites his homework if the handwriting isn't up to his standard, Oscar. He rewrote an essay by hand at eleven at night because he'd rushed the first draft and it bothered him. That kid doesn't cheat."

"No," Oscar agreed quietly. "He doesn't, we’ll get to the bottom of this, I’m sure he has an explanation for the skipping. It’s just not… Kimi.”

They sat with that for a moment. Lando knew what Oscar was doing in the quiet because he was doing it too cycling through Kimi as they knew him. The way he came home and found them in whatever room they were in before he went anywhere else, like he needed to locate them first before he could properly arrive. The way he sat at the kitchen counter and talked about his day with that slightly nervous velocity, words coming fast and earnest as if he was always mildly surprised anyone wanted to hear them. The way his eyes… those big, caramel, enormously expressive eyes never quite managed to hide anything he was feeling, not really, even when he was trying.

The way he latched on. Gently, quietly, with both hands, like someone who had learned to hold carefully because things had been taken before.

"We'll get past this," Oscar said. "Wedding nerves and all," Oscar continued, the corner of his mouth lifting. "Frayed edges and all. We'll get past it. He needs us.”

"Yeah," Lando said. Something in him settled, fractionally, the way it always did when Oscar said something true. "We will."

The bell rang distantly from inside the building.

The doors opened and the Friday afternoon released itself onto the car park in a wave, noise and movement and that collective energy of a school week ending, bags swinging, phones appearing from pockets, voices jumping registers. Lando stood beside the car and watched the crowd and waited.

He found Kimi before Kimi found him.
He always found Kimi in a crowd, Lando didn't know when that had started, when he'd developed that particular calibration, but it was there now, reliable and automatic.

And he found him now: not where he might have expected, not walking out carefully with his bag neat on his shoulders, but draped across Gabriel Bortoletto's back with both arms slung around his neck and his head thrown back laughing at something, while Gabi spun him slightly, deliberately, making the laughing louder and less dignified, and Isack walked beside them laughing at both of them and Ollie… Ollie was a half-step behind the whole group, not participating but watching, quiet and precise, tracking Kimi's balance with the focused attention of someone who has made a private decision to make sure nothing bad happens and is not going to announce that decision to anyone.

Lando stood very still. The tight thing in his jaw went somewhere else for a moment went soft, just briefly, just long enough to feel the full weight of what he was looking at.

This. This was what he'd wanted for Kimi from the first moment he'd understood what the kid's life had been before this exact configuration, this quality of ease. The freedom of laughing that openly in a car park on a Friday. The safety of someone at your back making sure you don't fall. The gift, the absolute gift, of being carried by people who want to carry you.

He let himself have it for exactly one full second. Then he breathed out and it went back to where it needed to be and he was a parent with a job to do.
Oscar appeared at his elbow had been watching him, Lando knew, had been watching his face make whatever it had just made. He pressed a kiss to Lando's cheek, his mouth warm and brief and certain.

"Go easy on him, love, yes?” he murmured.

"Easy-ish," Lando said.

Oscar's eyes were soft. "I'll be right here."

Lando put his sunglasses on and walked towards his boy.

~~~~

Across the car park, the configuration shifted in the way it always did when something interrupted from outside Gabi stopping first, mid-spin, with the sudden stillness of someone who has processed an incoming variable. Kimi lurched slightly on his back from the abrupt halt.

"Hey, what did you stop for-“

"Oh God," said Gabi, in a reverent and deeply solemn tone, staring into the middle distance. "Kimi, your dad is so hot."

The silence that followed lasted approximately one second. Kimi turned his head. Lando was crossing the car park toward them with the energy of a man who had somewhere to be and a clear idea of how to get there, sunglasses on, jaw set and even from this distance he knew he was in trouble. Kimi knew him extremely well.

He slid off Gabi's back with a speed that was not entirely dignified. "He's not my dad, he's my-" the word snagged, caught on something, "-he's Lando. Don't say that in front of him, ever."

Gabi turned to look at him with an expression of great interest and absolutely no remorse. "Your Lando is so hot then."

"I will end you-“

"Hello, Mr. Norris!" Gabi turned with the smooth social pivot of someone who had been performing charm since birth, executing a bow that was half-sincere and half-theatre and somehow entirely effective. "We are so happy to breathe the same air as you, sir. What can we help you with today?"

Lando, to his credit, laughed. One short genuine sound before it went back behind his teeth. "At ease, Bortoletto."

"Hey?” Kimi had crossed the remaining distance in the way he always did, both arms wrapping around him, face turning into his shoulder. "Hey, D-“ He stopped immediately and stepped back slightly. His ears had gone pink.
"Lando." A correction. Smooth enough. Not smooth enough. "Did something happen? What are you doing here, you never come to-“

"Lan?" Ollie materialised from the back of the group in that quiet way he had and his voice had already changed, the easy Friday afternoon had drained out of it and something more alert had taken its place. He was at Kimi's shoulder, a half-step behind, which was simply where Ollie tended to be. "Is something wrong? Is Oscar okay?”

"Hey." Lando's voice came down. Not soft, but level, deliberate. "Both of you, breathe. Oscar is fine, everyone is fine, nothing is burning."

As if on cue because Oscar had always had extraordinarily good timing a hand appeared from the direction of the car in a wave, followed by Oscar himself leaning against the bonnet with the ease of someone who had been there all afternoon, blowing a kiss across the car park with complete and total sincerity.

Kimi's hand shot up and caught it. Ollie caught his a half-second later. Oscar's laugh carried across the noise. Lando watched this and felt something in his chest do something complicated.

"Bag," he said, turning back to Kimi. His voice was measured. "Get your bag. We're heading home, consider it an early start to the weekend."

The smile he put with it was wrong and Kimi knew it immediately. Lando watched the knowledge move through his face that flicker, the careful recalibration, the way Kimi's attention sharpened when something felt off in the air around the people he loved.

"Are you sure? You never let me leave early, you're really specific about school and this feels-“

"Oh, does it feel weird?" said Lando, in a tone of mild interest that carried a specific weight. "Interesting. Very interesting. Go get your bag, Andrea.”

Kimi went for his bag. Scurried was the precise word as Ollie stepped sideways. Directly into Lando's line of sight. It wasn't accidental. Nothing Ollie did with his body was accidental. He was slighter than Lando, younger by enough that it should have felt unequal and he stood there with his jaw set and his eyes doing something careful and asked quietly not a whisper, just low, just for them:

"What's this about? You sound-“ a brief pause "-angry. What do you think he did? And why are you acting like that?” He didn't move from between Lando and the direction Kimi had gone.

Lando looked at him. At the set of those shoulders. At the deliberateness of his position. And he felt complicated things. Because this boy-this boy who looked at Kimi like he was something worth guarding, who had positioned himself in front of a fully grown adult man without a second's hesitation because his instinct said protect, this boy was not the problem and Lando knew it and respected it more than he was going to say right now, he loved what Ollie was trying to do.

"Ollie," he said, quietly. "I'm not going to answer that because if I explain myself we'll end up in a debate and neither of us has time for that and one of us will say something they'll regret so I’m not going to dignify your question with an answer.” He held his gaze. "I'm taking my kid home. We're going to talk. You'll know what this is about eventually, I promise you that. But right now I need you to step aside and let me take him home." A beat. "Do you have objections?"

Ollie held the look for exactly long enough to make clear that he was choosing to stand down rather than being made to. He realised that he crossed a line before and the tension went out of his shoulders and he stepped aside and the charm came back, smooth and genuine all at once and he opened his arms. "No, of course not. I'm sorry, Lando." The hug was brief and real and smelled like whatever expensive thing he'd borrowed from Charles's bathroom. "Dinner on Sunday still?"

"Dinner on Sunday," Lando confirmed, his hand briefly on the back of Ollie's neck before letting go.

He turned. Kimi was coming back with his bag, both straps on, walking with his eyes already finding Lando's face and trying to read it. He passed Ollie and there was a small, private transaction between them Ollie's hand catching his briefly, Kimi turning toward him, a shy press of mouths that lasted only a second and then broke into something murmured that Lando didn't hear and wasn't meant to.

Whatever it was made Kimi's shoulders drop slightly. He turned back then he was beside Lando and both his hands found Lando's arm and they were walking.

"Gabi. Isack." Lando lifted a hand without looking back. "Have a good weekend."

"Godspeed, Mr. Norris!" Gabi called after them with complete sincerity.

"We'll pray for you, Kimi!" added Isack.

"I hate them," Kimi muttered under his breath, which was an absolute lie, and they both knew it.

They walked across the car park in the afternoon sun, Kimi's hands wrapped around Lando's arm, his footsteps matching Lando's automatically the way they always did something he'd started doing early on and never stopped, like his body had simply decided this was how walking next to Lando worked and Lando had noticed, of course he did and said nothing because he would sooner have walked directly into traffic than comment on it and risk it stopping.

He could feel Kimi scanning him. Could feel the quality of that attention careful, thorough, doing the thing he always did where he read the people around him for information because for a long time information had been how you stayed safe. Lando kept his face even and his stride unhurried and gave him nothing to catastrophise about.

Oscar pushed off the car when they were close enough. He didn't do the bright voice or the big gesture. He just opened his arms. And Kimi, because whatever antennae he had for warmth and safety were extraordinarily well-calibrated walked straight into them.

Oscar wrapped around him properly, both arms, real and unhurried, the kind of hug that wasn't going anywhere on a schedule. His hand came up to the back of of his head and Kimi’s face went into his shoulder while Oscar pressed his lips to his forehead, warm and deliberate and murmured against his hair: "Hey, baby."

Two words. That was all. Kimi made a sound that was very small and very quiet and very much the sound of someone whose nervous system had just been given permission to stop bracing. His hands gathered a fistful of Oscar's jacket at the back and held on.

Lando stood beside them and watched and felt something move through him that was too large to look at directly.
Oscar caught his eye over Kimi's head. Something passed between them brief, certain, the language of two people who had been in each other's orbit long enough to have developed their own grammar.

We've got him. We've got this.

Oscar released Kimi gradually, hands moving to his shoulders, pulling back just enough to look at his face. Whatever he saw there he held for a moment, then nodded once, small and private and opened the car door.

Oscar's hand rested briefly on the top of his head as he ducked inside the lightest thing, barely there and then he straightened and met Lando's eyes, the tenderness in his face had a resolve underneath it.

The school got smaller in the rear window. Kimi sat in the back and both his hands were in his lap and he was looking at them, turning them over once and his voice when it came was very quiet and very careful and very much the voice of someone who wore their heart so openly that even trying to sound neutral never quite worked:
"Am I in trouble, Lan?"

Lando looked at him in the mirror. At those eyes. At the caramel brown of them and the open, unguarded worry sitting in them that he could never in his life look at without feeling something crack open gently somewhere in his chest.

"Oh, so much trouble, baby," he said. And then, because he could not help himself, because this was Kimi and this was them and love was not a thing you suspended for the duration of a hard conversation: "But it's nothing we can't get through. Okay?" He leaned back through the gap between the seats and kissed his forehead.

Kimi closed his eyes for exactly one second. "Okay," he said quietly.

~~~~

The house was exactly as they'd left it that morning. The house was entirely itself and entirely ordinary and Kimi stood in the entrance with his school bag on both shoulders and felt like a visitor in his own life.

Oscar came in behind him and didn't say anything. His hands just came up both of them, calm and deliberate and helped lifting the bag off Kimi's shoulders. Unclipped one strap and then the other, smooth and quiet, like it was just a thing that needed doing. He set it down by the foot of the stairs and his hand passed briefly over Kimi's shoulder as it came away just a touch, just a second and then he was moving toward the kitchen.

Kimi just stood there. What the fuck is happening? They acted like he committed a crime, Kimi tried to scrape his brain for the last things he did in case he did commit one, but nothing came up…. Oh fuck. The school called. That’s when Kimi knew what this was about, so maybe skipping three weeks of French wasn’t the best thing he could have done, but certainly it wasn’t that big, right? Both Lando and Oscar are pretty chill when it came to things about school… they can’t be that mad for this… right?

From the kitchen came the sound of Oscar moving, the soft clunk of the kettle, the sound of cupboard doors that Kimi had learned well enough now to map without seeing. Something warm being made. For him, he knew Oscar hadn't asked, hadn't announced it, it was simply happening.

Lando came in behind him, a hand landing briefly at the back of his neck as he passed warm, guiding, steering him gently toward the kitchen without pressure and Kimi followed.

“ Can someone please say something? You’re acting like the police is going to come for me!”

"Sit down, Andrea." Lando, already at the table, pulling out a chair. Not a command, more like an observation, like he'd looked at Kimi hovering in the doorway and understood exactly what was happening and decided to give it a name. His voice was easy. “You're not in the headmaster's office, you can relax kiddo.”

Something about that landed cleanly. Kimi crossed to the table and sat.

Oscar appeared at his shoulder a moment later and set something down in front of him a mug, both hands wrapped around it to carry it carefully. Hot chocolate, the mug was warm against his palms when he picked it up.

He stared into it.

Oscar's hand came to the back of his head a slow, gentle movement, fingers moving through his hair once, just once, before settling briefly at the nape of his neck and then withdrawing. He moved around the table to sit across from him and his expression was entirely open and entirely calm and had none of the things in it that Kimi had been bracing for on the drive over.

Lando sat beside him rather than across close, angled slightly toward him, his forearm on the table. Not crowding. Just near. He waited until Kimi had taken one sip of the hot chocolate and then he leaned forward slightly and caught his eye and held it.

"Okay," he said. Quietly. "We're going to talk about this." A beat and then his mouth moved into something that was almost a smile small, real, the one that lived at the corner and meant I see you and you're okay. “And it's going to be fine. Yeah?"

Kimi looked at him. At the familiar lines of his face, at the way his eyes were doing the thing they always did when he meant something direct, without deflection, the thing Kimi had learned early was just how Lando looked when he was being honest.

“Yeah," Kimi said quietly. His hands were still around the mug.

Lando started the way he'd planned to.

Measured. Clear. He laid it out without embellishment, without the frustration that had been sitting in his chest since the phone call that morning just the facts, placed on the table between them the way you'd place evidence, careful and deliberate. Madame Roussel had called. She'd said three weeks. She'd said Kimi had promised her twice and hadn't followed through either time.

He watched Kimi's face as he said it.

There was no surprise there. That was the first thing no genuine surprise, no ‘what, really, are you sure?’ just a very controlled kind of listening that told Lando his kid had known this moment was coming and had been preparing for it since then. He filed that away.

"I know," Kimi said, when Lando finished. His voice was even. His hands were around the mug. "I know I should have gone. I'm sorry I promised her and didn't, I'm sorry about that part specifically. I'll go and speak to her myself, I'll apologise, I'll go to every class from now, I mean that."

It was a good answer. Lando almost said so.

"Okay," he said instead. "I believe you about that. And I'm glad you understand it." He paused. “But I need to understand something first. Where were you? Three weeks, fourth period on Fridays where were you going?"*

And there it was.

Kimi's hands shifted slightly around the mug. A small movement. Almost nothing.

"I was with the boys," he said. “Ollie and Gabi and Isack. We were… working on something. In one of the empty classrooms."

"Working on what?"

A beat. The smallest hesitation.

“ A school project?”

“ Are you asking me or telling me, Andrea?” Lando’s frown deepened, he was onto him, faster than a hawk over a rat. He always knew when he was lying and it rubbed Kimi off everytime.“ Want to try that again, kid? And stop lying to me, please. You’re not on trial here, we just want to know the truth.”

There it was. He really can’t fucking do anything in secret in this house…

"I can't tell you that right now." Kimi settled on, Lando just looked at him and across the table Oscar was very still, watching Kimi with an expression that was careful and open and giving nothing away.

"You can't tell me…” Lando repeated.

"Not yet. I will! I promise I will explain everything, just not right now. It’s not the right time.”

“Kimi, you know it dosent work like that, I need to know the truth from you, we’re way past ‘I’ll tell you after’, usually I’m all for respecting your privacy, but not on this matter. I need you to tell me why you skipped for three weeks and why are you lying to me.” Lando was slowly losing his patience, Kimi could sense it.

"I know how it sounds-“

"It sounds like you're not telling me the truth and you’re involved in drugs.”

"I'm not involved in drugs! How can you think that? And I’m not lying!” And there was something genuine in that something that flickered across his face that Lando almost caught. "I'm just not-I can't tell you the specific reason yet. But it's not bad, it's nothing bad, I need you to trust me on this."

Lando sat back slightly. He kept his voice level. "I want to trust you. That's the problem-I want to and you're sitting there telling me there's something you can't tell me and I'm supposed to what? Say ‘ Yes, okay, Kimi. Keep going on with the secret you’re keeping from me, of course I dont’t mind?’” he stopped. "Help me understand, Kims. Give me something."

"I can't." he whispered defeated, he will not tell Lando about the surprise, consequences be damned. Kimi could be as stubborn as he was when he wanted it.

"Why?"

"Because it would-it would ruin it!” He caught himself. "Please. Just…a little longer. I swear I'll explain, just trust me.”

“ That’s the problem, Andrea. I don’t think I do in this exact moment.”

Silence.

Lando looked at Oscar. Oscar's expression said ‘I don't know either’ and underneath that said ‘go carefully’ and underneath that said something else Lando didn't have time to translate.

“ Baby, whatever it is it’s not worth it enough to make us question our trust in you, believe me. You can talks to us, Kimi.” Said Oscar changing tactics, but Lando wasn’t having it, he really felt betrayed by Kimi this time.

"Alright," Lando said finally and something in Kimi's shoulders started to drop. "Here's what's going to happen. You'll speak to Madame Roussel on Monday yourself, not me, not Oscar, you. You'll attend every class. And until I understand what's been going on, until you can give me an actual explanation you're grounded."

Kimi nodded. "Okay." Careful and accepting.

"No going out beyond school."

Another nod. Tighter this time. "Okay."

“Until the wedding."

The nod stopped and Kimi looked up at him. “That's-that's almost a month, Lando! You can’t be serious!”

"I know how time works in general and I mean it, Andrea. One month.”

"That's-“ he recalculated visibly, something moving behind his eyes, “-that's the Italy trip… That's before the Italy trip!”

"Yes."

The word landed in the room and stayed there.

Kimi stared at him. Not with anger yet, with something that was still in the disbelief stage, still in the part where your brain keeps running the numbers hoping the answer will change. “But you said yes. You already said yes to Italy! You gave me your word-“

“I know I did, I’m taking it back baby. You can’t expect me to reward bad behaviour, can you?”

“ But you said yes! Oscar said yes! Both of you-you said it was fine, you said-“

“Kimi." Lando kept his voice even. “Consequences affect things that were already agreed. That's how they work, they have to, otherwise they don't mean anything. You know both of us asked you for only two things, not to lie to us wich you just disrespected and to prioritise school. I think it’s a fair punishment for both transgressions, you won’t even know when the weeks went by and there are more trips you can take this year for sure.”

“That's not-“ Kimi stopped. His jaw tightened. He set the mug down on the table. “That's not fair, in what world is that fair?!”

"I understand it feels that way, but my decision is final piccolino.”

“No, it-it actually isn't fair." He wasn't shouting. His voice was controlled in the effortful way of someone who was raised to keep things controlled and was finding it very hard right now. "You gave me your word. You told me I could go. Charles knows, Max knows, Ollie has been planning-“ He stopped again. Something moved through his face. “You can't just take that back, we’ve been all waiting for this!”

“I actually can," Lando said quietly. "I'm sorry, but I can."

"But why?" Not rhetorical. Genuinely asking, genuinely wanting the logic of it. “Because I skipped one class-“

“Three weeks of classes, baby.” corrected Oscar quietly.

“One class, three times, while I was still in the building, still at school-“

“While you were lying to your teacher, Andrea. We know you’re a smart boy, I think you understand why we’re so mad about this.”

“I wasn't lying I just-“

“You promised her you'd come back." Lando's voice had gained an edge. Not sharp yet, but present. "Twice. You looked her in the face and you said you'd be there and you weren't. That's-Kimi, that matters. That's not a small thing, she was thinking of failing you, I managed to talk her out of it just yet, do you understand how that made us feel?”

"I know, Lando and I’m really sorry.”

"Do you? Because you don’t seem to care that much.”

“Yes!" The word came out louder than he'd intended and he pulled it back immediately, visibly, pressing his mouth shut for a second. Then, quieter: “Yes. I know it matters. And I'm sorry about that part. But the trip-“ he turned, almost involuntarily, toward Oscar. “Oscar, tell him. Tell him it's too much!”

Oscar looked at him steadily. His face was soft and completely immovable. “Baby-“

“You were excited too. You both said yes, it was a family decision, you can't just change your minds! Please it’s important to me-“

“Kimi, we're on the same page here, me and Lando. I’m sorry baby, but he’s right, your actions have consequences. It’s not the end of the world, there will be others trips-“

“You can't be." And the hurt in that was real and raw and very young, the bewilderment of realising the person you'd counted as an ally is standing on the other side of the line. “He's being too harsh, you can see that, why won't you just-“

“Because he's right," Oscar said gently but firmly. “I know it doesn't feel like it. But he's right."

“ I thought you would be always on my side, clearly you were lying too. Just…stop trying to act like my Dad.” Kimi whispered looking at him for a long moment then he looked back at the table when he saw the pain his words caused in his eyes. Something had changed in the silence, Oscar wasn’t on his side, he didn’t believe him. That hurt Kimi deeper than anything said until now.

“Don’t talk to Oscar like that just because things aren’t going your way, don’t forget about respect." Lando said, his voice had come back down. “Andrea, if you just tell us why you were there if there's a reason, a real reason we can work with that. We're not trying to punish you for something that makes sense. But right now all I have is three weeks of skipping and a reason you won't give me and that’s just not enough.”

“I told you I can't explain yet!”

“Why not? What's so important that you can't tell us? Make me understand because I’m feeling like we just go in circles here.”

“I just can't."

“That's not an actual answer."

“It's the only one I have right now!"

Lando's jaw set. “Kimi-“

“You said yes to Italy." Back to this. Back to the thing he couldn't let go of, the promise that had been made and unmade, the ground that had shifted. “You promised me. You specifically-you looked at me and you said yes and you meant it and now you're taking it back because you're angry and that's…that's not what you do!You said you don't do that!”

"I'm not taking it back because I'm angry at you-“

“You are, you are! You never acted like this with me!”

“I am not-“

“Then why?" His voice cracked slightly at the edge. Not with tears with something heated and frustrated and barely contained. “Give me a reason that actually makes sense. Give me something that isn't just-you're in charge and I have to accept it-“

“Because you're lying to me, kid and you know how much I hate lying."

The room went very quiet. Lando heard himself say it and knew it was true and knew also that the way it came out was harder than he'd meant, sharper than the conversation had been until this point and he watched Kimi's face change.

“I'm not, how can you say that?”

“You're not telling me the truth. Whatever's in that classroom, whatever you've been doing for three weeks in there you won't tell me and you won't give me a reason and every time I ask you there's another wall and I'm sitting here trying to-“ He stopped. Breathed. “I asked one thing of you. One thing when this started, when you came to us and it was honesty. That's all I asked. And right now you're sitting at this table lying to my face and Oscar's face and I can't-“

“I'm NOT lying!"

“Then TELL ME THE TRUTH. I’m sick and tired of this, that’s enough Kimi!”

The words landed much harsher than he intended, Lando never raised his voice at him, never got exasperated with him. Finally, Lando had enough of him.

The room flinched and Kimi just stared at him.

Lando stared back and saw, in the space of about two seconds, exactly what he'd done, watched it land on his kid's face, watched the specific way it hit, watched something that had been heated and frustrated go very suddenly quiet and very suddenly somewhere else entirely, somewhere older and colder and much more frightening, and felt his stomach drop.

But the silence was already there and Kimi was already somewhere inside it that Lando didn't know how to reach.

"Kims, I’m-I didn’t mean-“

“If you're so sick and tired of me-“ His voice was very quiet, almost flat. “ -maybe you shouldn't have adopted me. If you want to ground me for life, do it. I don’t care anymore, it’s clear that you don’t fucking trust me. I don’t know why you even bothered, every adult in my life is the same.” His chair scrapped along the floor with a decisive sound.

The sound Oscar made was involuntary, small and terrible.

Lando felt the words go through him like something physical not a blow, something quieter and more total than a blow, something that simply rearranged everything and left the furniture in the wrong places.

"Andrea-“ His voice came out stripped of everything, just the name.

“Baby, wait-“ Oscar was already on his feet, already moving, “-just wait, please, he didn’t mean that.”

But Kimi was already gone. Not running, moving with his jaw set and his hands in fists and his eyes somewhere that wasn't this room anymore, through the kitchen door and into the hall and then the stairs, each step quick and deliberate, and then-

The door. The slam of it went through the whole house. Rattled something on the wall. Settled into silence like a stone into water.

~~~~

The kitchen was very quiet.

The hot chocolate was still on the table. Still warm, probably. Kimi's chair still pulled out from where he'd left it. The afternoon light still lying across the floor as if nothing in particular had happened.

Oscar stood in the middle of the room and didn't move for a moment. His hand was still slightly extended from when he'd reached for Kimi and come up short. He let it drop.

Lando was sitting.

He didn't remember sitting back down. But he was sitting, both elbows on the table and his hands were not quite steady when he pressed them flat against the surface. He was looking at the space where Kimi had been a minute ago with the expression of a man who has just watched himself break something he loves and is only now understanding the full shape of what he's done.

The words were still in the room. “Maybe you shouldn't have adopted me.” He could still hear them in Kimi's voice that flat, quiet voice, the one that wasn't anger anymore but something colder and more frightened that Lando recognised now, now that it was too late, as something that had nothing to do with Italy or French class or any of the things this conversation had been about. “ All the adults in my life are the same.” It hurt Lando’s soul to hear that. He knew Kimi was angry, but he also knew he didn’t say things he didn’t mean.

“He didn't mean it," Oscar said quietly. He hadn't moved from where he was standing. His voice was careful, even, doing the work of staying steady because one of them had to and he'd elected himself. “You know he didn't mean it, he’s hurt and he is still our kid.”

“ I-I’m not sure he still wants to-“

“He's scared. That's-you know that's what that was. He did the exact same thing you did when you were his age, it’s not crazy for a teenager to act this way.”

“I know what it was." Lando's voice was hollow. “That's the problem. I know exactly what it was and I know what I did that made him say it and Oscar I watched it happen, I watched that tone hit him, I knew the second it came out what it would do to him, I’m an awful parent. God I suck at this!”

“Hey, hey, hey. No we’re not doing that.” Oscar crossed to him. Both hands came up to his face the way they did when he needed Lando somewhere specific, present, here. Lando let himself be held like that, looked at. "You were trying to parent him and it went a little wrong. That's normal, it happens. It happens to everyone."

“Not with him." Something raw in Lando's voice. "I promised myself not with him. Not that tone, not that-he's heard that tone his whole life, Oscar, from people who actually were done with him and I-“

He stopped, but Oscar's thumbs moved against his jaw. Steady keeping him present.

“He's upstairs," Oscar said quietly. “He's not gone. He slammed a door, Lan. Teenagers slam doors. He's upstairs in his room in our house and he's upset and he needs about twenty minutes and then he needs you to go up there."

“What if he doesn't want me to-“

“He does." Certain. No hesitation. “He absolutely does. He's terrified right now, which means the only thing that's going to help is you walking through that door and showing him the fear is wrong." His hands dropped to Lando's shoulders. “You know your kid. Go be what he needs."

Lando looked at him. “ I can’t… I can’t right now, Osc. I’m not in the best state of mind and I’ll say something then he’ll say something and end up in a much bigger mess. God, I’m so awful, I can’t even talk to my kid-“

“ Hey, okay. It’s okay, you don’t have to do it now if you can’t. Rember you’re still human, Lan. You have feelings too, we’ll figure this out, yes? We always figure it out.” said Oscar caressing his face and kissing his temple repeatedly.

Lando just melted into the hug and held him tight. “ Okay, we’ll figure it out.” he whispered into his neck.

They will talk to Kimi, but right now they will give him space. Space to process everything that happened and space for them to find the right words for their kid.