Archive of Our Own

I.

By his fourth year at McLaren, Oscar is used to the MTC.

Nobody needs to explain the building to him anymore. The people there just assume he knows where he is going, what he is allowed to interrupt, and which closed doors mean something is up with their legal team.

Lucky for him, most of the time, they are right.

Oscar knows which coffee machines are the ones worth using, meaning they also serve hot chocolate, where Zak likes to appear when he has decided he needs to show everyone how much he works, which meeting rooms are always freezing, which engineers will accidentally keep him for forty minutes if he asks the wrong question, and how to move through the building without slowing anybody down.

He feels like he belongs there.

A few days ago Andrea had mentioned that the engineering groups were still buried in 2026 regulation work before Bahrain testing. Something about the new ERS architecture, new deployment model, new everything.

"Do not distract them," Andrea had said, which Oscar found a little insulting, honestly.

As if Oscar spends his free time wandering around bothering aerodynamicists for fun. As if he even knows what half of them are working on.

Nobody tells you the rules part. There are about five hundred of them and they are all invisible and you learn them all the same way, which is walking into a room you were not supposed to enter and understanding it completely from the way everyone goes quiet.

When to ask questions. When to not. How being the face of something and understanding how it actually runs are completely separate skills, taught by completely separate embarrassments.

Daniel Ricciardo, his old teammate, could change the temperature of a garage just by walking into it, not in a showy way, or not only in a showy way. He remembered names, asked mechanics about their kids, knew which tyre tech had got engaged over the winter and which marketing assistant had moved flats, and Oscar had watched people who barely spoke during race week loosen around him because Daniel made it feel easy to be spoken to.

They were both Australian, technically. That was what every interviewer had wanted to talk about when Oscar joined McLaren in 2023, as if Oscar had somehow borrowed Daniel's childhood and grown up in it. Daniel had been warm about it. Generous, even. He called Oscar mate on camera and meant it enough that Oscar never quite knew what to do with the part of himself that resented him.

Because Daniel was easy to love.

Oscar was not.

Oscar has never had that gift.

People sometimes mistake quiet for confidence. Oscar lets them, mostly because correcting them would require a conversation he does not want to have.

They call him calm. Ice-cold. Like he gets in the car and turns into something mechanical.

That has never felt true.

Inside the car, Oscar feels everything. The chassis vibrates through his ribs like a second heartbeat. The violence of it is held together by habit, and the whole thing only works because of that, because the body knows what to do before the mind finishes forming the question. The moment before an overtake: the gap not a gap yet, just a possibility cracking open at two hundred kilometres an hour, and he reaches for it before the thinking part of his brain gets a vote.

He loves that part. Where he stops being a person trying to find the right thing to say and becomes something simpler, sharper, almost inseparable from the car beneath him.

Dealing with people is harder. People make him aware of himself.

This already year feels different anyway.

New regulations. New structures. New teammate: Rafa, apparently a genius straight from winning Formula 3, young enough that half the media already sounded protective of him and fast enough that the other half sounded afraid of being wrong about him.

New vacancy where Daniel used to be.

Oscar is heading toward a simulator briefing when he passes one of the strategy offices and catches movement inside.

He slows down.

The office looks overrun.

Not messy in the careless sense. More like every surface has been pulled into the same problem.

There are sticky notes on every wall, sticky notes on the desk, sticky notes on top of sticky notes layered over printed run plans and tyre tables. Four monitors display traces, lap deltas, and simulation windows Oscar can't read. The whiteboard appears to contain either a flowchart or evidence of a conspiracy.

And standing in the middle of it all is Lando Norris.

Oscar had already seen his face. The new strategy systems engineer. Former software engineer, former designer, from some tech company. One of the senior strategists had met him at a motorsport analytics seminar in London and become oddly determined to recruit him. The hiring report called him “exceptionally proactive”, which, translated out of corporate, usually meant someone who didn't know when to go home.

Tom had also talked about Lando’s interview exercise at length, and still sounded faintly aggrieved by the outcome. From what Oscar could gather, Lando had found several ways to break one of their old strategy simulators and then calmly walked the interview panel through every flaw he’d uncovered.

Oscar had not understood most of that.

He had understood that Andrea looked impressed.

Not politely impressed. The real kind, where everyone else in the room sat up half an inch without noticing.

Right now Lando is staring at one of the screens with total concentration.

"No," he says.

A few seconds pass.

"No, that is the wrong assumption."

He types something and then deletes it and then types the same thing again with more aggression.

"Why would you even do that?"

Oscar has no idea whether he is talking to the software or himself, but either way he sounds like he expects an answer.

Lando grabs another sticky note, writes something down, stares at it, immediately crumples it up, and throws it away. When he bends over the desk to write directly on a printout, his posture becomes so terrible that Oscar feels a distant, practical concern about long-term spinal health.

His hair is a mess too, soft-looking and unfair and genuinely not something Oscar should be cataloguing with this much attention.

This is useful, Oscar tells himself. He is supposed to be the team leader now that Daniel is gone. He should know the people building the season around him.

That is a completely normal thing for a driver to do. Or not specifically that, but something close.

Three minutes later, Lando finally notices him.

His entire face goes blank. Not annoyed, not surprised. More like he has been pulled out of a thought so completely that it takes him a second to remember there is a room around him.

"Oh."

He blinks slowly, and Oscar’s attention catches on the sweep of his eyelashes before he can stop it.

"Hi."

Another blink.

Then, very quickly, "Please do not read any of that."

Oscar looks at him.

Lando points vaguely at everything. "The screens. The board. Any of it, really."

His ears are going pink.

"It is all unfinished and half of it is probably wrong."

Oscar looks at the whiteboard. There are arrows pointing toward other arrows. One section has been crossed out so aggressively the marker nearly went through the surface. Lando has written SOC WINDOW? in block capitals beside a graph labelled MGU-K DERATE / EXIT SPEED LOSS.

"Okay."

"Good."

Lando stares at him.

"I do not think I would understand anything you wrote," Oscar says. "Engineering-wise, I mean. Not because of your exceptional penmanship."

Lando's face does something complicated.

"Thank you for clarifying."

"You're welcome."

Silence settles again.

Oscar should leave. The briefing starts soon.

Instead, he steps into the office.

"What are you working on?"

Lando tips his head toward the monitor. "ERS deploy."

Oscar waits.

Lando keeps looking at the monitor.

Apparently that is the entire answer.

Oscar knows ERS is the battery stuff, more or less, energy in and energy out and something about how much he gets to use on the straights, and he should probably have read more about the new regulations before wandering in here but he had not.

"What about it?"

"I am trying to figure out if you are going to suck on the straights."

"Isn't that the point of the simulation?"

"Yes."

Lando points at one screen. "So the factory model thinks this." He points at another. "The lap sim thinks something different." He taps the third without looking at it. "And that one is basically lying to itself about a thermal limit."

Oscar follows the gesture. The graphs all look identical to him.

"I'll take your word for it."

"They are not identical," Lando says, without looking away.

"I did not say they were."

"You thought it very loudly."

He does not ask how he knows that.

Lando taps the screen. "So this one thinks the energy store is still fine after three laps of aggressive harvest, which, fine, maybe. This one thinks the MGU-K keeps giving you full deploy past the point where it obviously does not, which is just wrong. And this one," he pauses, "is using last year's thermal limit. Like nothing changed. Which, brave."

Half of that Oscar understands. Less, if he is being honest about it.

"And that means?"

"It means if we believe the nice graph, we send you out with a map that looks quick in sector one, then starts derating halfway down the main straight."

Oscar glances at the graph, then back at him.

Lando says, helpfully, "Technical translation: it feels shit."

Despite himself, Oscar's mouth twitches.

"That one I understand."

Lando types something else. Oscar watches another string of numbers appear.

"So you are testing the model."

Lando's expression changes slightly, fast enough that Oscar almost misses it. Interest, maybe. Or approval.

"I stress-test it," he says. "If it survives when it is being stupid about it, then I trust it."

That sounds more like science than engineering, or maybe Oscar only thinks that because Lando is frowning at the screen and daring it to lie.

"Better than finding out on track."

Lando laughs. A proper laugh, surprised out of him. Warm and bright and gone too quickly.

"Yes," he smiles. "That’s my goal."

Oscar likes that answer more than he should.

He learned something like it years ago. Back at Prema, after Yas Marina, when he had gone from tenth to third and sealed the F2 title, what stayed with him later was not only the podium or the trophy. It was the mechanic who had checked his front-left blanket twice because the numbers looked a fraction off. The engineer who had said, calm and certain, that the pace would come back to him if he stopped trying to force it.

"Do you always work like this?" Oscar asks, scanning the office again.

"Like what?"

Oscar gestures broadly. "This."

Lando glances around, then back at him, genuinely confused. "This is not that bad."

Oscar points at a coffee cup. There are three pens inside it.

"Why are there pens in your coffee?"

Lando follows his gaze.

"Oh."

A beat.

"I thought I had lost those."

Oscar stares at him.

Lando doesn't look away.

Then both of them look at the cup again.

"Right," Oscar says carefully.

Lando rubs the back of his neck. "I get focused."

"I can see that."

The corner of Lando's mouth twitches.

Oscar resists the urge to ask what he is doing after work, which seems wise, sensible even.

Also too much, because the thought of Lando looking at him over the top of his glasses with that polite, mildly confused expression made Oscar stare at the simulator brief for thirty seconds without reading a word of it.

Instead, he forces himself to leave.

There is a simulator session. A briefing. Three separate meetings. A formal introduction to his new rookie teammate. Actual work.

By lunchtime, Oscar has succeeded in pretending he forgot the conversation.

By mid-afternoon, he has failed.

During the simulator run someone asks whether the setup changes feel consistent between low and high battery states. Oscar answers automatically, he can feel that part before he can describe it, a tug in the pedal like talking to someone who is only half listening, and the whole time he is talking he is also thinking about the way Lando had been bent over that desk. With remarkable persistence. Zero professional justification.

The desk was too low. His shoulders had looked like they hurt.

By the time the session ends, Oscar has made an important decision.

He messages, his assistant, Maddie.

oscar
Can we get one of those standing desks delivered to strategy?

A few minutes later she replies.

maddie
For who?

Oscar reads the message twice.

He types:

oscar
Lando

He deletes it. It feels strange to acknowledge the name.

oscar
The new guy.

The response comes back almost immediately.

maddie
Helpful.

Oscar ignores the odd feeling that follows him for the rest of the afternoon.

Because it is definitely normal, and not weird at all, that he cannot even think Lando's name without losing his place in the conversation.

II.

Melbourne is miserable.

The crash itself lasts maybe three seconds, and Oscar has had worse, will probably have another one before his career is over.

The crash he can handle. It is everything after that is the problem.

The medical checks. The sympathetic looks. The way people start speaking to him like he is made of glass.

The worst part is walking back into the garage.

Nobody blames him. They say it was probably a battery issue under harvest on the formation lap, nobody got hurt, and that seems to matter most.

Oscar would almost prefer blame.

Every engineer who passes him asks if he is okay before asking anything about the car. Andrea tells him not to worry about it. Zak appears out of nowhere, squeezes his shoulder, and tells him they will get them next weekend.

Oscar only believes Tom.

Tom tells him things straight, sometimes so straight Oscar needs five minutes alone to recover, but at least it is real. When Tom says the data shows a brake-by-wire harvest fault, Oscar can believe he means the data and not please stop looking so disappointed in front of the mechanics.

With everyone else, belief is harder. Or not harder exactly, but less automatic. Or maybe that is the same thing.

If they were unkind, that would be easier, but they are careful and professional, and some of them were Daniel's people before they were Oscar's people, which Oscar knows is a childish way to think about a Formula 1 team, except last year had a way of making childish thoughts feel like evidence.

There had been celebrations without him. Not intentionally, maybe. Daniel had won, Daniel had delivered, Daniel had been Daniel. People wanted to be near that. Papaya family, someone had joked once, and Oscar had smiled like it did not feel strange to be related to a room that kept forgetting to wait for him.

Oscar had learned to leave early.

Oscar smiles through all of it.

That is another thing people mistake for calm. Oscar is good at making his face do the useful thing while the rest of him runs through every possible version of what he should have done differently. Brake three metres earlier. Ask about the harvest map before the run. Push back when the car felt strange. Say the right thing to the mechanics. Say anything at all.

He then spends the next two hours wishing somebody would just punch him instead.

At least then he would know what to do with himself.

The whole point of rebuilding the team over winter had been to avoid weekends like this. Last year had ended with Daniel lifting the trophy while Oscar stood under fireworks pretending third place felt like an achievement.

It had been close enough to hurt. Close enough that every mistake still had a shape in his memory.

Daniel had been brilliant and smooth and vicious when the door opened and patient in exactly the races Oscar wanted to force, which was the worst part, because it made all of Oscar's uglier feelings look unreasonable even to himself.

And then, when he finally had the championship, Daniel retired.

He was not old and he could have kept going, but he had got what he came back for, and somewhere along the way he had stopped loving the rest of it enough to pay the cost.

Everyone seemed to cry, or close enough to it.

Not literally everyone. Oscar had not done a survey. He was not in the mood for a survey. But it felt that way. Mechanics hugging Daniel in the garage. Zak with wet eyes and a champagne bottle. Andrea looking quietly devastated and proud. Media people filming everything because Daniel's goodbye was a story the whole sport wanted to consume.

Oscar had cried a little too, later, in the bathroom of his hotel room with the shower running, but not because Daniel was leaving.

He cried because he had not been good enough to make the ending more complicated.

Then he stood in team kit the next morning, smiling correctly, trying not to feel like an afterthought at his own failure.

A strategy call that came too late.

A race where points slipped away.

An instruction to let Daniel through because "we need to cover the championship."

Another instruction three races later.

A debrief where Oscar said the words team orders and Daniel flinched like Oscar had aimed them at him personally.

Arguments with Daniel that somehow managed to make both cars slower, even though Daniel never once treated Oscar like the villain Oscar suspected everyone else wanted him to be.

Daniel felt bad, apologised, sat beside him after one particularly horrible meeting in Qatar and said "I hate this too, mate" with enough sincerity that Oscar had nowhere to put his anger.

He could not hate Daniel.

He could not stop feeling replaced by him either.

All winter McLaren had talked about improving the weak spots: better processes, better communication, better preparation.

Oscar had bought into all of it completely.

And then he put the car in the wall during the first race weekend of the year.

Fucking mega start.

Rafa, his new teammate, is still going strong.

Doing very well, unfortunately.

Oscar tells himself he is happy about that. And he is.

Mostly.

It leaves him standing around the garage with nothing to do except watch everybody else work.

Which is how he ends up watching Lando.

Lando is in every conversation at once, one minute talking to performance engineers, the next on Rafa's side of the garage asking about brake migration settings, then back at the pit wall with his laptop tucked under one arm, still talking to the factory strategy room through his headset like the people in Woking are sitting two metres away instead of on another continent.

Oscar has no idea how one person can physically move that much.

What gets Oscar is that nobody seems annoyed by it. Normally someone new spends months figuring out who knows what before they start inserting themselves into things. Lando seems to have just not done that part.

People make room for him because something actually useful tends to happen when they do.

"What did it feel like into Turn Three?" Lando asks Rafa after he comes back from his first Formula 1 podium, still damp with champagne from the team celebrations.

Oscar is standing close enough to hear without looking like he is listening.

Rafa thinks for a second. "A little inconsistent on rotation."

"When?"

"Mid-corner."

"Every lap?"

"No."

Lando points at him immediately. "Okay, see, that is interesting."

Rafa looks extremely confused. "What?"

"If it were every lap, I would blame setup. If it is inconsistent, something else is happening. Could be crosswind. Could be brake-by-wire correlation. Could be rear tyre temp dropping out of the window by the time you arrive there."

Rafa looks down at the telemetry. "What else?"

Lando starts talking.

Three engineers join before he finishes his first theory.

He takes his glasses off, pinches the bridge of his nose, then keeps them hooked in one hand while he leans over the telemetry.

"Look," he says, dragging the trace closer. "Here you are braking at the same point, but the brake migration map is moving the balance around more than it should. The rear contribution changes as you come off the pedal, so the car shifts on entry. Suddenly the rotation feels like setup, but it is actually the brake system giving you a slightly different car every other lap."

Rafa goes still.

Lando looks up. "That made sense, right?"

One of the performance engineers says, "Annoyingly, yes."

Oscar watches the whole thing from across the garage. Watches Lando lean forward when Rafa talks. Watches him light up when someone gives him useful information, the way a screen does when it finally gets a connection. Watches Rafa start laughing halfway through an explanation because Lando keeps interrupting himself with new ideas.

At one point Lando steals a marker from somebody's desk, sketches something on a setup sheet, and explains with his hands before he has finished drawing.

The annoying thing is that Oscar would probably enjoy that conversation. The more annoying thing is that he is not the one having it.

He turns away and checks his phone.

Forty-five messages. Teammates, drivers, sponsors, distant relatives. All variations of the same three things.

jack
mate that was brutal. glad you're okay

caio
unlucky. car looked weird before you even turned in

logan
you'll get them next time. call me if you want to talk shit about formation laps

mclaren comms
Checking in. No pressure to reply tonight.

Oscar scrolls for about thirty seconds before deciding he would rather stare at telemetry.

Which is how he accidentally ends up watching Rafa's side of the garage again.

Lando and Rafa are still talking.

Of course they are.

A few minutes later Oscar hears Rafa change languages.

Rafa says something in Portuguese.

Lando answers in Portuguese.

Oscar raises his eyebrows. He had not known Lando spoke Portuguese. He also had not known Rafa knew that Lando spoke Portuguese, which was the more irritating part.

Rafa immediately starts laughing. "Your accent is terrible."

"I know."

"You sound like a tourist asking where the bathroom is."

"That is basically the extent of my vocabulary."

Rafa laughs harder. "Tell Pietra she needs to work harder."

Oscar's eyes narrow.

Pietra.

Is she Lando's girlfriend? Someone he is seeing? Someone who teaches him Portuguese badly enough for Rafa to be smug about it?

Oscar sits with the knowledge that Lando and Rafa apparently have mutual friends.

For some reason, it lands badly.

Not dramatically. Not reasonably either.

Just badly.

Oscar learned Lando's middle name three days ago because someone mentioned it in a meeting. Rafa apparently knows enough about his social circle to make inside jokes.

That should not bother him.

It bothers him a lot.

Which is ridiculous. Lando is gathering information from the only McLaren driver who actually raced today. That is literally his job. If anything, Oscar should be grateful.

He also should probably walk over there and ask a question, contribute something useful about the way the brake pedal had gone long before the rear snapped, and he even gets as far as shifting his weight toward them.

Then Rafa laughs again, easy and open, and Oscar's courage folds itself neatly into nothing.

Instead, he becomes painfully aware of how few conversations they have actually had.

A couple of meetings. Some passing comments. A standing desk that Oscar had not admitted was for him specifically, even after Lando sent a thank-you note through Maddie on a piece of folded McLaren stationery like it was 1987 and email had not been invented yet.

tell oscar his commitment to workplace ergonomics has been noted
- Lando

Meanwhile Rafa already seems completely comfortable around him.

Oscar hates how childish that thought feels.

Later, when everyone is packing up, their eyes meet across the garage.

Just for a second.

Lando gives him a small smile.

Nothing dramatic. Just recognition.

A simple: hey, you're still here.

Oscar turns away immediately.

Then spends the next five minutes wondering why he did that.

By the end of the night, he decides he is being a little stupid.

By the end of the ride home, he decides he is being really, really stupid.

By the time he settles into his childhood bedroom for a few days off with his family, he has followed Lando on Instagram.

His sister takes one look at him during dinner and asks why he keeps smiling at his phone.

Oscar nearly chokes on his drink.

The worst part is that he does not have a good answer.

Later, when Nicole has gone to bed and his sisters have stopped pretending not to notice him being strange, Oscar does something deeply unwise.

He looks properly.

Not just Lando's recent posts, which are mostly work things and running routes and blurry photos of food taken by someone who apparently believes focus is optional, but older ones too, design work, old race weekends attended as a fan, comments under McLaren posts from before he worked there.

Then, because the internet is built to punish curiosity, Oscar finds Lando in his own comments.

Not many. Not enough to look obsessive. Just enough to make Oscar sit very still in the dark guest room with his phone in his hand.

Under a 2023 post, after Oscar's first points with McLaren:

landonorris
you were mega today. deserved more.

Under a photo from a race where the strategy had buried him behind Daniel:

landonorris
that was not on you.

Under one from late last season, the caption carefully neutral, Daniel already pulling away in the championship:

landonorris
keep driving like that. people are noticing even if they pretend not to.

Oscar reads that one three times.

Then a fourth.

It is ridiculous to feel anything about it. Lando had been some guy on the internet then, a software designer with too many opinions and no access to the pit wall, and it should not matter that he had watched those races and seen something other than the version Oscar had been afraid everyone else saw.

It matters anyway.

When Nicole asks him the next morning whether he slept badly, Oscar says, "A bit."

She studies him over her coffee, measuring how much truth she is owed.

"Work?" she asks.

Oscar thinks about Daniel. About McLaren. About Lando's comment sitting under an old photo like a small, impossible act of loyalty from before they knew each other.

"Sort of," he says.

III.

Barcelona, first night in the city, after midnight. Oscar notices Lando is still online.

The engineering channels are active, which is not unusual by itself, but the volume feels different, files uploading in bursts, simulation runs being restarted before the previous ones finish, messages stacking up without replies.

It feels less like work ending late and more like work refusing to stop.

Oscar hesitates with his phone in his hand, sitting on the edge of the bed. He could have just checked the engineering channels himself. He has the access. He knows how to read the file activity, or at least enough of it to know something was happening.

He almost puts the phone down twice. Or maybe three times. He stops counting.

Messaging Lando should be easy. The words are easy. The risk is everything around them: sounding too interested, too casual, too entitled to an answer. Oscar is used to pressure, but this is a stupid pressure, all pulse and no event.

Then he types anyway.

oscar
you should be asleep

The reply comes almost immediately.

lando norris (strategy)
is that a threat

Oscar lets out a quiet breath through his nose and leans back against the headboard.

oscar
that is not what i meant

A pause.

lando norris (strategy)
yeah i know

He holds on the screen longer than necessary, thumb hovering, unsure why he is still engaged in this instead of letting it end.

oscar
what are you doing

This time there is a delay, long enough that Oscar assumes Lando has gone back to ignoring him, or to whatever problem is currently eating up all his attention.

Then:

lando norris (strategy)
checking something that is probably wrong

Oscar frowns. It does not sound like confidence, even phrased casually enough to pretend otherwise.

oscar
that is not reassuring

lando norris (strategy)
it is not supposed to be reassuring

That, at least, feels consistent with what Oscar knows of him.

He should leave it there. He has an early briefing, simulation work in the morning, the usual rhythm of a race weekend that does not pause for late-night engineering anxiety.

Instead, he sits up properly.

oscar
do you need help

There is a longer pause after that one.

Long enough for Oscar to wonder if he has stepped into something he was not invited into. Or worse, if it sounds like he is checking up on Lando, like one more person at McLaren hovering over his shoulder and asking whether he is done yet.

Then:

lando norris (strategy)
no

And a second later:

lando norris (strategy)
i think i just need a second set of eyes

Oscar looks at the message, then at the quiet hotel room around him. The silence always feels artificial on race weekends, like the building itself is waiting for the next thing to happen.

oscar
where are you

Five minutes later, there is a knock at the door.

Lando looks exhausted in the particular way of someone who has not noticed they are exhausted yet, his hair worse than earlier and his glasses slightly crooked and his hoodie the kind of wrinkled that means it has been on since breakfast or possibly yesterday.

He has three chargers in the side pocket of his laptop bag and one shoelace untied. Oscar looks at the shoelace and then looks away and then looks at it again.

"I brought the problem," he says, as if that is a normal explanation for standing in a hotel corridor at midnight.

Oscar steps aside without thinking too much about it.

Up close, the details are harder to ignore: the glasses have left a mark on the bridge of his nose, his hair sticks up at the back from too many hands dragged through it, and his eyes look considerably more tired than his messages sounded.

Lando comes in and starts colonising surfaces. Bag on the chair. Laptop open. Hotel TV switched on and repurposed as a second screen.

Lando types for a few seconds, frowns, types again, then holds his hands up over the keyboard like he's about to perform surgery on it.

"This thing is so small."

"It's a laptop."

"I know what it is. I'm saying it's small." He goes back to typing, hunched, fingers cramped over the keys. "I have a mechanical one at home. Black and green. Actual room for my hands."

Oscar looks at his hands.

He has looked at Lando's hands before, obviously. People have hands. It is not a noteworthy category of thing to look at.

Except that Lando's hands are large, and right now they are spread out over a keyboard clearly built too small for him, knuckles flexing as he reaches for keys that are not quite where he wants them, and Oscar's brain helpfully points out that this is the kind of thing he is not supposed to be noticing about a colleague at midnight in a hotel room.

He turns away. Then, a second later, back again, because apparently he has no self-control left at all.

"You okay?" Lando asks, not looking up.

"Yep," Oscar says, and his voice comes out wrong, a little rough, and he has to clear his throat and pretend it was nothing. "Tired."

"You can sleep, if you want. I'll just be over here. Failing."

"I'm not tired tired."

"Cool. Helpful. Great use of the word."

Lando talks while he sets things up, not waiting to see if Oscar follows every step. He seems to assume Oscar will catch what he can and ask about the rest. Efficient, not cold, and too focused to sand the edges off his explanations.

"I have three hypotheses," Lando says, opening a spreadsheet, a lap trace, and a comparison table dense enough that Oscar immediately stops trying to understand it. "One, our pit-loss model is too optimistic. Two, the out-lap warm-up curve assumes clean air we are absolutely not going to have. Three, I am wrong because I have been awake too long."

"Which one is winning?"

"Sadly, not the third."

"Why did you ask me?" Oscar asks, eyes on the traces.

Lando pauses. "What?"

"For a second set of eyes. There are engineers for that."

"I did ask engineers. They gave me engineer answers."

"And I give you what?"

Lando looks at him then, like the answer is obvious enough to be mildly irritating.

"You tell the truth about what the car is doing."

Oscar does not know what to say to that.

Last year, useful had mostly meant useful to Daniel, to the championship, as long as he did not need too much from anyone.

Lando says it like Oscar is useful by being himself.

"I crashed in Melbourne," Oscar says.

Lando stills.

It is not what Oscar meant to say. Or maybe it is exactly what he meant to say, which is worse.

"I know."

"Rafa put it on the podium."

"I know that too."

Oscar looks at the trace on the television because it is easier than looking at Lando. "Sometimes I think everyone is waiting for me to prove last year was a fluke. That leading the championship for half a season was timing, and a good car, and everyone else getting it wrong."

Lando is quiet long enough that Oscar regrets every word.

Then he says, "Leading a championship for half a season is not a fluke."

Oscar laughs once, without humour. "You do not have to do that."

"Do what?"

"Make me feel better."

"I am not."

That makes Oscar look at him.

Lando is tired, serious, almost irritated that the room has failed to arrive at the obvious answer without him.

"If I thought you were not good enough, I would not be in this room."

Something in Oscar's chest shifts.

"You are in this room because you needed a driver's opinion."

"I needed you," Lando says, and then looks back at the screen like he has not said that.

Oscar goes very still. He opens his mouth. Nothing useful comes out. He closes it again.

Lando looks back at the screen. "Also, I do not hang out with you because you are convenient. I have met convenient people. They are boring."

"You hang out with me?"

"Oscar."

"Right."

"You were quick in Suzuka," Lando says. "Before the second stop. Everyone talked about Daniel's undercut because it mattered for the championship, but you were holding the gap on older tyres with dirty air in front of you."

Oscar has to swallow before he answers.

"You do not know that."

"I watched every race."

There is no easy answer to that.

Lando taps the trace with the end of his pen, gentler now. “The team deciding too late that you were a title threat does not mean you were not one.” He looks up at Oscar. “Besides, you’ve been improving a lot recently. The gap looks a lot less impossible than it did a month ago.”

Something in Oscar's chest does something difficult to name.

Lando's pen taps once against the edge of the laptop. "So. Are you going to help me win you this one, or are we doing self-loathing until sunrise?"

Oscar looks down.

For the first time all night, Oscar can look at the trace without wanting to delete himself from the room.

"Winning seems more useful."

"Finally. A sensible contribution."

Lando looks back at the screen. "You are annoying about it, actually. Very precise. Very calm. You say 'entry instability' when other drivers say 'the rear is trying to kill me.' It is useful."

It does something to him.

Heat climbs up Oscar's neck, which is unfortunate, because he has no idea what his face is doing and even less interest in finding out. The sensible thing would be to move past it. Instead, his brain won't stop replaying Lando's voice saying useful.

Oscar finds himself watching more than he expects to.

The way Lando pushes his glasses up with the back of his hand instead of stopping to use his fingers properly. The way he bites the inside of his cheek when a calculation does not immediately behave. The way his sleeves slip down over his wrists and he keeps tugging them back without noticing.

At some point Lando sits on the floor near the bed, laptop balanced on his knees, drawing on a notepad while talking through corner entry behaviour like it is the most obvious thing in the world and also the most important.

He explains with his whole body. Hands, pen, shoulders, the quick tilt of his head when he corrects himself halfway through a sentence.

"No, wait. That assumption is stupid. Ignore me."

Oscar looks down at the notepad. "Can I ignore you selectively, or is this a general instruction?"

Lando's mouth twitches. "Selectively. I am still right about most things."

"That sounds convenient."

"It is. You should try it."

Oscar smiles before he can stop himself.

Lando knows more than him. Oscar is used to that, has been used to it since his first week at McLaren, is in theory fine with it. There are entire rooms at McLaren full of people who know more than him. That is the whole point of a team. That is not what is happening here.

What gets under his skin is that Lando makes not knowing something feel like the beginning of a conversation instead of evidence of a problem.

At some point, Oscar stopped trying to decode the explanation and started listening to the rhythm of it instead. He has no idea when that happened.

"You are not actually watching any of this," Lando says without looking up.

"I am," Oscar replies automatically.

Lando turns to look at him.

"That was not convincing."

Oscar shifts, then corrects himself with more honesty than he usually gives situations like this.

"I am watching you explain it. You're great."

That makes Lando pause for half a beat. He blinks, glasses sliding down a fraction before he pushes them back up.

Then he gives a short laugh under his breath and looks back at the screen.

"That is not useful feedback," he says.

"It was not meant to be feedback."

Lando's pen stills.

He has said too much. He knows it the second it lands.

Then Lando says, very quietly, "Okay."

And explains again.

After that, the conversation slips its original shape. Ideas stack on ideas until the original question almost stops mattering.

Then Oscar says, "The out-lap will not feel like that."

Lando looks up.

"If the model says the front takes longer to come in, I will drive around that," Oscar says. "But Barcelona does not give you much time to correct it. First push, the front will be there earlier than the trace thinks. If I go in expecting it to wash wide, I am too conservative on entry and give up the corner before I know I had it."

Lando stares at him for a second.

Then he turns back to the laptop and starts typing so fast Oscar can hear the keys catch under his fingers.

"That," Lando says, "is why I asked you."

Oscar has to look away. He has stood on podiums with cameras in his face and felt less exposed than he does in this hotel room at two in the morning with Lando's pen making a small sound against the notepad, which is honestly a bit much.

At some point Oscar leans back against the bed, still listening, and realises the room has gone quiet in that gradual way it does when exhaustion starts winning.

Lando's voice is still there, softer now and slightly slower at the edges, his glasses smudged from how long he has been wearing them, and when he pushes them up again it is slower this time, like even that is becoming optional.

Oscar does not remember deciding to close his eyes.

He just does.

The next thing he registers is morning light shifting across the curtains.

Lando is asleep on the floor beside the bed, one arm folded under his head, glasses still on, hoodie bunched at the shoulder like he fell asleep mid-adjustment. His pen is still loosely held between his fingers, refusing to be let go even in sleep.

Oscar reaches down and carefully removes the glasses, hesitates long enough to notice the mark they have left on the bridge of his nose, and sets them on the bedside table. He closes the laptop and puts that there too. Then he gets the spare blanket from the chair, slowly and careful not to knock the cable or step on the notepad or do any of the ridiculous things his body apparently feels capable of right now, and lays it over Lando as gently as he can.

Lando shifts, face turning slightly into the fabric.

Oscar keeps his hand on the edge of the blanket after he lets go, and does not move for a while after that.

On Sunday, Oscar wins by twenty seconds from Rafa in second.

It moves him past Russell in the standings, close enough to Kimi that the championship stops sounding hypothetical.

IV.

Oscar tells himself he is being completely normal about it.

He is not.

After Barcelona, it starts in ways that feel too small to count.

Not the obvious things, although Oscar notices those too. Lando already in the debrief room before him, always earlier than expected, always in something plain that still somehow looks deliberate on him. A faded McLaren shirt. A black hoodie sitting slightly loose at the shoulders, which Oscar is fairly sure is actually his.

Those are easy to dismiss, attraction can be filed away as a private inconvenience, and Oscar has managed worse.

The less obvious things are harder to file away. The fact that Oscar has access to Lando's calendar, for example, because strategy keeps a shared schedule for most of the engineering group, and Oscar checks it with a frequency that is probably not professionally defensible.

He knows when Lando has model validation meetings, which ones are likely to overrun, when he is supposed to be at the MTC gym, none of which is useful to Oscar in any meaningful capacity, which unfortunately does not stop him from knowing it.

The harder part is that Lando is kind.

Lando's kindness is quiet and almost private, he notices small failures in the world and corrects them without asking to be thanked.

He learns that Oscar does not like being crowded after a bad session, and gives him information sideways: a message instead of a hallway conversation, a quiet "Tom has the trace if you want it" instead of three people standing around his chair asking how he feels.

He notices that Oscar drinks the same terrible black coffee with protein powder in it before simulator work and leaves one on the corner of the strategy desk when their schedules overlap. The first time it happens, Oscar assumes it is an accident.

The second time, there is a sticky note on it.

this tastes like brake fluid. enjoy.
- Lando

Oscar folds the note once and slips it into the back of his phone case, where it stays.

Lando does not make him talk when talking feels impossible. That might be the worst part. Oscar is used to people trying to pull him out of himself, like quiet is a locked room and the polite thing is to knock until he opens. Lando just sits down nearby and works. Sometimes he talks through whatever problem is in front of him. Sometimes he says nothing at all.

It should feel awkward.

It does not.

Oscar leaves space for Lando in his silence.

In Austria, after a practice debrief where Andrea is careful and Zak is loud and everyone says the wrong things, Oscar leaves the room with that old feeling under his skin. The Daniel feeling. The sense that the team is moving around him and he is somehow both central to the problem and absent from the solution.

Oscar is fine. He had already decided he was fine by the time the debrief ended, made the decision cleanly, filed it away.

Lando catches up to him near the stairwell.

"For what it is worth," he says, slightly out of breath, "that call was not on you."

Oscar looks at him.

Lando has a laptop under one arm, a pen tucked behind his ear, and a sad look in his eyes.

"I know what everyone said in there," Lando continues. "But they said it like they were trying to make you feel better, which is annoying, because it is also true. The timing was wrong before you had anything to do with it."

Oscar has to look away first.

"Okay," he says.

Lando studies him for half a second. "You do not believe me."

"I heard you."

"That is not the same thing."

Oscar does not answer, because it is not.

Lando shifts the laptop higher against his ribs. "Fine. Then believe the data when you see it."

He sends the trace ten minutes later, annotated in three colours and accompanied by a message that says:

lando norris (strategy)
not pity. evidence.

Oscar sits with it for a long time.

Then the message for a long time after that.

After that, the yearning becomes harder to lie about.

He notices Lando in the garage the way you notice a change in temperature, quietly, before you can explain why. His presence has started mapping itself onto the space. One moment he is at the pit wall talking to an engineer with a hand half-raised mid-explanation; the next he is behind Rafa's side of the garage, studying brake trace data like it has insulted his family.

And then he is suddenly beside Oscar, asking a question as if it is the natural continuation of whatever thought Oscar was having before he arrived.

"Did it feel lazy?" Lando asks later that weekend, leaning close enough to be heard over the garage noise.

"What?"

"The front-left. First sector."

Oscar thinks back to the feel of it, the reluctance in the tyre, the way the car had wanted a fraction longer than he had before it agreed to turn.

"Yes," he says. "Like it needed convincing."

Lando's face changes.

Not dramatically. Just enough that Oscar sees the moment the information lands.

"That is what I thought," Lando says, softer.

Then, because apparently he is determined to ruin Oscar's life in increments, he adds, "Thank you."

Oscar is always slightly aware of him before he fully sees him, the sound of his voice, the quick scrape of his chair at a workstation, and then the glasses, when he is wearing them, sliding gradually down his nose because he never remembers to push them back up.

Thin-framed, almost too simple for how much he uses them. Under garage lighting the screens catch in the lenses, as if he carries pieces of data with him wherever he goes.

He does not keep them on for long. Lando will read something, frown, take the glasses off, hook one arm between his fingers while he explains, and if the explanation gets complicated, the glasses end up pushed into his hair, and if it gets really complicated, he takes them down again and holds them against his mouth for half a second before saying something that makes three engineers go quiet.

It is just a habit. A prop. But Oscar learns the grammar of it anyway: glasses on means reading, glasses in hand means thinking, glasses pushed up into his hair means someone is about to be told, very politely, that their model is wrong.

He does this more than he should.

What gets him, eventually, is the moment after. Lando pushing the glasses up into his hair, turning into the room, and looking for Oscar first.

It is the fact that when Oscar says, "I do not know how to explain it," Lando never makes him feel stupid. He just says, "Try anyway," and then listens like Oscar might hand him the missing piece of the universe if he waits long enough.

On the tired days, Lando wears his hoodie more often. Hands tucked inside the sleeves when he is not actively using them. Hair messier than usual, like he stopped caring about it halfway through the day and never restarted.

Oscar brings him water when he looks like that.

The first time, Lando looks at the bottle in Oscar's hand and then up at him.

"Are you hydrating me?"

"Apparently."

"That is very kind of you. Mr Number one driver."

"Drink it."

Lando's smile catches for half a second, small and warm and not quite hidden in time.

"Yes, sir," he says.

Colour rises high on his cheeks as he lifts the bottle.

Oscar watches his mouth close around it for approximately one disastrous second, and then has to turn away before his face does something revealing.

Observant. That is his job.

But it does not feel like that.

Lando has already made space for him before Oscar works out how to ask for it.

Fact: Oscar is not afraid of wanting things. He is afraid of wanting them where other people can see it. There is a difference. The visible version gives someone else the first shot at deciding what it means, and that has never gone well for him.

After the race, Sophie sends him a link while Oscar is still pretending to look at his post-race notes.

He opens it without thinking.

It is a fan thread.

Of course it is.

osclandtoday
oscar's love language is physical touch and he loves lando, here's the proof: a thread

papayapologist
opening this like it is evidence in court

Oscar stays on it longer than he should.

There are clips. Screenshots. Moments he does not remember choosing. His hand on Lando's shoulder in the garage. A brief touch at his elbow in a corridor. Oscar standing too close behind him at the pit wall, close enough that Lando turns before Oscar says anything.

It is all framed as evidence of something everyone else has apparently found easier to name.

Oscar closes the tab immediately.

Then reopens it.

Then he closes it again and deletes it from his history this time, as if that makes a difference.

He spends the rest of the afternoon more aware of his own hands than he has ever been in a car.

The thread feels invasive, a little. Mostly, though, it feels like recognition.

Oscar had thought the touching was just him being careless, not paying attention, the garage was loud and the corridor was narrow and Lando had a habit of walking while talking while not looking where he was going and Oscar had a habit of correcting for it without thinking about it much.

On video, it looks gentle. Like Oscar reaching for him is just where his hands go.

The next race weekend is Britain. Lando's home race. McLaren’s home race. Oscar tells himself that makes it worse because everyone is watching them closely, which is true, and because Oscar wants to get it right for Lando, which is also true and much harder to look at directly.

He lasts four hours.

By then, he has tapped Lando on the shoulder twice without thinking. Once to point something out on a screen. Once just to get his attention when he is mid-conversation with an engineer.

He also stands too close again. He realises this only when someone else steps between them and suddenly the space just feels wrong.

After that he overcorrects. Hands in pockets. Half a step back. Eyes on the screen even when Lando is the person speaking.

It makes him worse at listening.

It also makes Lando go quieter around him across three separate meetings, which Oscar can feel even from the corner of the room where he is very deliberately looking at something else.

By Thursday afternoon, after a meeting about free-practice plans has somehow produced three action items and no actual answers, Lando stops beside him on the way out.

"Did I do something?"

"No." The word comes out too fast.

Lando's face closes by half a degree. It is barely anything. Oscar hates that he notices.

"Okay," Lando says.

He leaves before Oscar can work out how to fix it.

That night, Oscar lies awake in his hotel room feeling worse than he did after the fan thread, because this is exactly what he was trying to avoid, wanting badly enough that it can hurt someone else, even when he is trying not to touch them.

Silverstone qualifying breaks the internet, and it is mostly Oscar's fault.

There's this new video.

He gets pole. The camera catches him climbing out of the car, then cuts to parc ferme, where he pulls Lando into a hug that lasts slightly longer than it probably should. His hand drags along Lando's back.

Then, he leans in and says something close to Lando's ear, too low for the broadcast to catch.

There is some sappy music over it that he does not recognise.

sectoronewife
HE WENT STRAIGHT TO LANDO I AM UNWELL

mclarendata
oscar piastri did not hold that man for 6.7 seconds for you people to call this workplace friendship

sectoronewife
did you say 67 omg

lestappieesz
there is a full compilation of oscar avoiding zak hugs like a tax audit and then doing THIS. be serious.

papayapologist
also what did he SAY in lando's ear because i have watched it 14 times and i am about to become a lip reader

What he said, for the record, was, "Pole at your home race. Not bad."

It is nothing, barely a sentence, just the first thing that comes out because Lando is smiling at him like Silverstone has cracked open around them.

Oscar watches it once.

Then again.

Then again without the sound, because the song is embarrassing and he already knows the words now, which is somehow worse than the video itself.

He is not sure what he is supposed to take from it, only that he cannot quite stop watching the moment Lando's hand comes up against his back like he knew Oscar was coming. The big yellow lyrics on top are making it worse.

He adds the song to a new playlist, closes the app.

That night, he checks Lando's calendar before he lets himself think better of it.

Gym. Forty-five minutes. Recovery block.

Oscar reads it for longer than he needs to, then changes into training kit.

When Oscar arrives at the gym, Lando is sitting on the floor by the bench press between sets, back against the side of the bench, hoodie off now, hair damp from sweat. His glasses are folded beside his water bottle, and there is still a faint mark on the bridge of his nose from where they have been sitting all day. There is a towel over one shoulder. He looks tired enough that Oscar stops half a step inside the door.

The room smells of rubber mats and citrus cleaner, air-conditioning working too hard against the heat the day left behind.

Oscar stops for half a second longer than he needs to.

Lando looks up before Oscar realises he has been staring.

"Are you just going to stand there?" Lando asks.

Oscar blinks.

"No."

Lando raises an eyebrow.

Oscar walks in.

He sits on the bench itself, above Lando and too far to the left, as if distance is a thing he can arrange neatly if he tries hard enough.

Too careful. He knows it immediately.

Lando notices too, because of course he does. His gaze flicks from the empty stretch of bench to Oscar's face.

Oscar pretends he is here for the same reason as everyone else in this building. Training. Discipline. Routine.

He had checked Lando's calendar once. Twice, technically. Three times if refreshing the same page every four minutes counted, which it probably did.

Silverstone is Lando's home race, and Oscar has spent the entire evening wanting to say something that does not sound ridiculous.

Lando's sleeves are still pushed up. There is a faint red mark on his hand from where the weight must have pressed during the set before.

Oscar does not look away.

Lando's expression shifts first.

Not a smile, exactly. Something smaller and more careful. Like he is trying not to startle Oscar out of whatever fragile decision he has just made.

"You can sit normally," Lando says.

Oscar looks down at the bench.

"I am."

"You are sitting like I am contagious."

Oscar's face warms. "You are not."

"Good to know."

The words are light but Lando's voice is not, there is something under it Oscar has not heard before, or maybe has heard and refused to understand: irritation, yes, but hurt folded neatly inside it.

Oscar reaches for the towel beside him, then stops before his hand lands anywhere useful. He does not know what to do with his body when his body is the problem.

Lando watches the aborted movement.

"Right," he says quietly.

"You were weird this week," Lando says.

Oscar looks down at his hands.

"Yes."

"That is not an explanation."

"I know."

Lando waits.

Oscar could make something up. He has several options, all terrible: tired, busy, race week, the sort of thing that would let Lando nod and let him go without either of them having to finish the sentence.

Instead he says, "I did not want to make you uncomfortable."

Lando goes very still.

For a second Oscar thinks he has made it worse.

Then Lando says, "You did."

Oscar's hand goes slack against his knee.

"When you stopped talking to me," Lando adds.

Oscar finds him then.

Lando is still sitting on the floor, hair damp, looking more serious than Oscar has ever seen him outside of work.

The gym hums around them, a machine clicking somewhere on the other side of the room, water moving through the pipes, and outside the glass wall someone walks past in team kit and does not look in.

There is no garage noise to hide behind. No trace on a screen. No timing page. No useful question Oscar can answer instead of the one sitting between them.

"Oh," Oscar says.

"Yeah."

Oscar takes his first full breath since Lando asked the question.

"I just watched a video," Oscar says.

Lando blinks. "A video."

"Of us."

"That really narrows it down."

Oscar almost smiles. It fails halfway. "From today. After I got pole."

Understanding moves across Lando's face. Not surprise. Something closer to recognition.

"Ah," he says.

"And Austria. A thread. Sophie sent it to me. I think as a joke." "It made me think maybe I was being... too much."

Lando is quiet.

He keeps going. "I did not want you to feel like I was micromanaging you. Or hovering. Or making you weird about something that was already weird."

"Oscar."

The way Lando says his name makes him stop.

It is too soft to argue with.

"I know when people are micromanaging me," Lando says. "Zak micromanages me. Badly. You mostly stand near me and look stressed."

Oscar lets out a breath that is almost a laugh.

"That is not better."

"It is to me."

Oscar looks at him.

Lando's fingers tighten once around the edge of the towel. Then he lets go, as if he has caught himself doing it.

"I do not need you to become less yourself," Lando says. "I like knowing where you are."

Oscar's pulse goes strange.

"You do?"

"Yes."

It is such a simple answer that Oscar has no defence against it.

Lando drops his gaze, then brings it back. "I like when you touch my shoulder before you ask me things. I like when you stand too close to read over my laptop even though you pretend you are looking at the same graph as me. I like that you bring me water and then look offended if I do not drink it fast enough."

Oscar's ears go hot.

"I do not look offended."

"You look personally betrayed."

"Hydration is important."

"Sure."

There is a silence after that, but not an empty one. Oscar can feel every inch of it. The space between his knee and Lando's shoulder. The towel on the floor. The fact that if he moved his hand, he could touch Lando's hair where it curls damply near his temple.

He does not.

But he does move closer.

Only a little. Enough that his knee nearly brushes Lando's arm. Enough that Lando looks at the distance between them again, and this time his mouth does something small that is definitely not a smile.

"Okay," he says.

Lando's mouth curves. "That is all you have?"

"For now."

"Terrible."

"I am working on it."

Lando looks down, smiling to himself, and Oscar feels the world tilt by the smallest possible degree.

Then, before he can think better of it, Oscar reaches out and touches two fingers to Lando's shoulder.

No balance issue. No loud room. No narrow corridor. No practical excuse available.

Just because he wants to.

Lando goes still under his hand.

Oscar almost pulls away.

Then Lando leans into it. Barely. A shift so small Oscar might have missed it if he had not spent months learning every version of Lando's stillness.

Oscar leaves his hand there.

For three seconds. Maybe four.

Long enough to count.

Long enough not to be an accident.

He lets himself be caught.

V.

Before summer break, Oscar buys an apartment in Woking.

Officially, it is for convenience. Less travel, easier sim access, fewer days with everything packed into a suitcase that never fully empties.

Unofficially, it means he is at the MTC more. Which means he sees Lando more.

He does not say that part out loud. Even Oscar has limits.

Lando is training for a half marathon in Italy and runs four times a week. Oscar joins him most of the time. Afterward, they get brunch.

It is not weird at all, except for the part where Oscar measures weeks by whether Lando is in them. And buying shorter running shorts.

The week he gets the keys, McLaren has him do a sponsor interview in one of the glass meeting rooms at the MTC. Nothing difficult. New apartment, fresh start, some joke about whether he has finally learned how to cook anything that is not pasta.

Then the interviewer smiles and asks, "Is anyone helping you move in? Girlfriend, family, anyone like that?"

Oscar's first instinct is to look at Sophie, which is useless because she is just staring at her phone.

Lando is there too. He is leaning against the back wall with a tablet in his hand, next to Tom, waiting for the next strategy meeting, and his eyes flick up immediately.

"No girlfriend," Oscar says.

It comes out flatter than he means it to.

The interviewer laughs lightly. "Keeping it private?"

Oscar feels the familiar small closing-in of the room. He has been on dates with girls, technically. Nice girls. Funny girls. Girls he liked enough to feel guilty about the fact that liking them never turned into wanting them, no matter how long he waited for the missing part to arrive.

For years he had filed it away as timing, or racing, or travel, or just not being that kind of person, all of which were easier than the obvious one, which is that wanting has always pointed somewhere else, and lately that somewhere else is Lando Norris leaning against the back wall with a tablet in his hand looking like he belongs there.

He has never kissed a guy either. Even inside his own head, he has to look at the sentence twice.

So when people ask girlfriend, what Oscar hears is not privacy. It is a door he has spent most of his life politely not opening.

"No," he says. "Just no girlfriend."

There is a tiny pause.

Lando drops his eyes to his tablet again, but not before Oscar sees the corner of his mouth move.

Interested. Almost smiling to himself.

The apartment itself is modern in the way new buildings near the McLaren base tend to be modern: clean, minimal, slightly too careful. Like nobody has decided what it is supposed to feel like once someone actually lives in it.

Lando arrives one afternoon with a furniture catalogue tucked under his arm, already frowning.

"Oh my god, thank fuck you are here," he says immediately, kicking his shoes off at the door.

"It is my flat," Oscar says.

"Yes, and you are here, which is what I said."

Oscar glances up from the counter.

Lando walks in furious before the door has fully shut. "Zak pissed me off so much today."

"Hello to you too."

"He keeps pushing us to use Gemini on the strategy tools."

Oscar pauses. "The AI thing?"

"Yes, the AI thing. As if saying Gemini in a meeting makes it automatically useful. What is it supposed to do, Oscar? Write code? Rewrite the pit-loss model because Zak saw a conference demo and decided Python was basically old news?"

Oscar leans back against the counter. "Right."

"And then he repeats my idea in the follow-up as if it came from him, which would be fine, actually, if he were not meddling with the implementation. I do not care who presents it. I care when Zak explains my own work back to me after missing the point of it. I mean, I know we are both men, but shit, he really commits to the bit sometimes."

"I can talk to him."

Lando stops.

Oscar hears what he said only after he says it.

"If you want," he adds. "Not to interfere. Just... if it helps."

Lando is quiet for a second, some of the sharpness draining out of his face.

Everyone at McLaren feels tense these days, the standings having become something Lando tries not to look at too directly, Antonelli still leads by 18 points, and George is still close enough that nobody can afford a bad weekend.

"Maybe," he says.

Since the Silverstone, Oscar has been better at noticing when Lando lets him close on purpose.

Before, Oscar could pretend the garage was loud or the corridor was narrow or his hand had simply ended up on Lando's shoulder because bodies in busy places sometimes did that. This is different. Lando comes into his flat and takes up space like he expects to be allowed. He holds the catalogue against his chest, leans against Oscar's counter, and complains about Zak without checking whether Oscar wants to hear it, which is good, because Oscar always wants to hear it.

Oscar leaves his water glass beside Lando's elbow and forgets to take it back.

Then Lando looks around the apartment and frowns.

"Also, I knew you would get this wrong."

Oscar tilts his head. "I have not chosen anything yet."

"That is already the wrong approach."

Lando walks further in like he already owns the sightlines and stops in the middle of the room and frowns at it like it has done something to him personally.

"This is not even minimalism. This is just empty."

"It is a new apartment."

"It is a waiting room."

Lando drops the catalogue onto the kitchen counter and flips it open between them without asking.

"You need mid-century," he says.

Oscar pauses. "I need what?"

Lando looks at him like this is not complicated. "Mid-century modern. Wood, low profiles, clean lines. Functional without looking like it is apologising for existing."

Oscar watches him. "I do not think furniture apologises."

"It does when it looks like that sofa you almost bought."

"I did not almost buy anything."

"You sent me a photo."

"That was for opinion."

"That is how decisions happen."

Oscar reaches for his water glass and slides it across the counter until it stops beside Lando's elbow. It is practical. Lando has been ranting for ten minutes and Oscar is, technically, helping.

His other hand settles at the small of Lando's back as he does it.

He means to move it immediately.

His hand stays where it is.

Lando's fingers pause on the catalogue, barely enough to count. Oscar feels it anyway.

Oscar leaves it there while Lando flips another page, his palm light against the fabric of Lando's shirt.

"You are very confident about this," Oscar says.

Lando flips a page. "I have done this before."

"For who?"

"I freelanced, mostly. Also, my ex-boyfriend. He had a flat in Brighton that looked burgled and then abandoned halfway through. I fixed everything."

Oscar's hand drops from Lando's back.

Oscar goes very still.

Not visibly, he hopes.

Lando keeps flipping pages, mentally rearranging the entire room without moving any furniture.

Ex-boyfriend.

Oscar hears the word too clearly.

His face feels hot. His ears ring a little, like he has just climbed out of the car after a qualifying lap and forgotten how to stand normally.

He also hears the sponsor interviewer asking girlfriend, and Lando looking up from the back of the room.

Lando liked men, not theoretically, not as a joke Oscar could pretend he had misunderstood, but actually, with an actual ex-boyfriend and an actual flat in Brighton and furniture Lando had apparently been trusted to touch.

Oscar's brain, which is usually capable of processing tyre degradation, media questions, and three people shouting different strategy calls at once, gives up immediately.

"Oh," Oscar says.

Lando glances at him. "What?"

"Nothing."

Lando's eyes narrow.

Oscar looks down at the catalogue because eye contact suddenly feels dangerous.

"So, furniture," he says, because apparently that is the only safe noun left in the room.

Lando is amused now, which is not helpful. "Yes. Furniture."

"Since when do you have an architecture degree?"

"I do not."

"Then how-"

Lando half-closes the catalogue. "I told you. I used to do design work."

Oscar pauses. "You did not."

"I did."

"You were a software engineer."

"I was also doing design."

"Of what?"

"Things."

Oscar stares at him.

"That is not an answer."

"It is. Just not a detailed one."

Oscar sits on the edge of the ugly gray sofa that came with his apartment, still processing. "I feel like you are telling me you had a second life."

Lando sighs. "I told you I was a designer before."

Oscar is almost sure that is true. Unfortunately, most of his available mental space is still occupied by the fact that Lando has had boyfriends. That Lando likes men. Lando likes men.

"I thought you meant clothes."

Lando goes quiet for a moment.

"Clothes?"

"Or liveries," Oscar says. "Maybe."

"Liveries."

"I don’t know. When people say designer, I think clothes or car paint."

"Why are you always ignoring everything I say?"

Oscar shakes his head. "I do not ignore things."

Lando points at him immediately. "You absolutely do."

"I remember everything you say."

"That is worse."

Oscar frowns. "How is that worse?"

"Because you remember it incorrectly."

Silence.

Then Oscar slowly sits forward.

"Wait," he says. "What does design mean, then?"

Lando turns to face him fully.

"Are you asking me what design is?"

"Not in a rude way."

"There is no non-rude way to ask that."

"I am asking in a curious way."

"You have lived your entire life around cars."

"Yes."

"And you think anything that is not a car just appears?"

Oscar opens his mouth, then closes it again. Lando likes men. Which means he and Lando could be boyfriends.

Lando points at him. "Do not say yes."

Oscar closes his mouth again. What was the question, again?

Lando drops his hand and looks at him. "I designed user interfaces for software products. I freelanced on interiors for actual spaces. Apps, dashboards, rooms, workflows. How people move through something. How they use it. How they stop hating it."

Oscar nods slowly. "So screens and rooms."

"Yes."

"And now you do cars."

"Now I do systems."

Oscar considers that. "On cars."

"Around cars."

"So cars."

"Oscar."

"What?"

Lando exhales through his nose, but he is smiling despite himself.

Oscar smiles back, then ruins it because his mouth keeps going while his brain is still in Brighton with Lando's ex-boyfriend's sofa. "I mean, how were you even qualified for this job?"

Lando's face changes.

Half a second too late, Oscar registers that Lando's hand has gone still.

Lando goes quiet in a way that takes up more space than sound would have.

There is a long pause where neither of them moves.

Then Lando speaks very carefully, one hand closing into a fist against his knee. His face is red now.

"It is a similar workflow."

Oscar clocks Lando's fist, then reaches out before he can talk himself out of it. He touches Lando's wrist, light enough that Lando can pull away.

Lando does not.

"I feel like you are overreacting," Oscar says, quieter than he means to.

"I feel like you are underreacting."

"You never told me."

"I did tell you."

"You did not."

"I absolutely did."

"You said software."

"That includes design."

"Not furniture."

"It includes understanding how people use things."

Oscar considers that.

Then, slowly, "I thought you meant cars."

Lando goes very still.

"This entire time," he says, "you thought I meant I designed cars."

"Yes."

There is another silence.

Then Lando lets out a short laugh that sounds more like disbelief than humour.

"You have been sitting there for four months thinking I was some kind of secret interior car designer."

Oscar pauses.

"When you say it like that, it sounds worse."

"It is worse."

Oscar's fingers move once over the back of Lando's hand before he can stop them. "I did not have enough information."

"You had all the information."

"No, I did not."

"You did."

Oscar watches him. "You are very aggressive for someone who picks sofa fabrics based on emotional impact."

The joke lands.

Lando holds his gaze for a second and smiles.

Then his free hand lifts, like he is about to make a point and has to physically contain it.

"Do not bring the sofa into this."

"I am not bringing it into anything. You brought it into my life."

"That is literally what you asked me to do."

"I asked for furniture advice."

"And I gave it."

Oscar shakes his head slightly, like this is spiralling in a direction he did not anticipate. "You are very defensive about this."

"I am not defensive."

"You are."

"I am correcting you."

"That is also defensive."

Lando opens his mouth, then closes it again like he is recalibrating.

"You know what," he says finally. "Forget it."

Oscar nods once. "Okay."

A pause.

Then Lando adds, still irritated, "I cannot believe you thought I worked with car interiors."

Oscar shrugs. "It sounded plausible."

"It is not plausible."

"It is a little plausible."

"It is not."

Oscar looks at him for a second.

"You are very passionate about telling me I am wrong."

"I am passionate about reality."

"That is new information."

Lando exhales, looks away, then back at the catalogue like he is trying to recover the original purpose of the visit.

Oscar finally lets go of his wrist, slow enough that it feels like a decision.

"Can we go back to the new sofa before I regret knowing you?"

Oscar nods. "Yes."

A beat.

Then, almost to himself, "You still did not explain what mid-century means."

Lando closes his eyes.

"Where is your laptop?"

Oscar buys everything Lando suggests, including paint, which is how he ends up repainting the entire apartment.

He had planned to think about it first. Or not think about it, exactly. Just not do it the same afternoon Lando pointed at a sample card and said "that one" and then moved on like the conversation was over, which it apparently was.

It is also not weird that Oscar comes back early from Australia before the break ends, because he has sim work. Actual sim work. Real meetings on the calendar. The fact that it also means he can fly to Rome with Lando, Max Fewtrell, and Pietra for Lando's first half marathon is not the official reason.

It is, however, the reason he spends one evening in his newly painted kitchen making a sign that says GO LANDO in block letters, then immediately wondering whether signs are something normal adults make.

Lando sends him a photo of his race bib ten minutes later.

lando
if u laugh at my predicted finish time i am deleting your sofa order

Oscar reads the message, then glances at the half-finished sign on the counter.

oscar
between the two of us, you are literally the professional athlete. i would never laugh at your numbers

He has to put his phone face down after that, because Lando replies with a middle finger selfie from his flat and Oscar spends an embarrassing amount of time smiling at it.

VI.

By the time Lando ends up at Max Verstappen's birthday in Monaco, he has run out of ways to pretend Oscar Piastri is only a work problem.

This is not how Lando usually handles problems. Usually problems have structure. Something is slow, you find the bottleneck. Something keeps failing, you find the dependency nobody bothered to write down. People keep making the same mistake, you stop blaming the people and start looking at what you built around them.

When he was eight his parents split up, and the world stopped feeling like something adults had under control. He started gravitating toward things with visible rules. Astronomy, for a while, until the maths stopped behaving, and dyslexia made numbers slippery, which was its own particular misery, understanding the shape of a thing and still losing the line of it on paper. Design made more sense. People moved through rooms in patterns, ignored buttons in the wrong place, stopped using software that didn't account for how they actually thought. Coding let him make that structure real: inputs, outputs, failure states, constraints. Build something that understands the person before the person has to explain themselves.

Motorsport is the most honest thing Lando has ever found and probably the most merciless.

The car does not care what you say about it in the press. It has grip or it does not, the energy arrives when asked or it does not, the strategy survives tyre deg and traffic and weather and human panic or it falls apart on live television where everyone can see it. There is something almost fair about that. It is ruthless and technical and it makes people pay for bad assumptions and Lando finds this beautiful in a way he has never quite been able to explain without sounding a bit strange.

Oscar loves the complete opposite.

Lando does not understand that immediately. At first he only knows that Oscar talks about the car with the feeling arriving before the vocabulary. A hesitation where there should be bite. A pause. A reluctance. The car needing coddling. Oscar is reaching for the moment the engineering disappears and leaves only speed, pressure, instinct, trust.

Then Lando builds systems and watches Oscar drive through them.

Before McLaren hired him, Lando watched the team like a fan with a spreadsheet problem.

Everyone watched Daniel, obviously. You could not really avoid watching Daniel. The championship run became the kind of story people wanted to believe in: the comeback, the grin, the Australian veteran getting everything right at the end. Lando liked Daniel. It was impossible not to.

But he kept watching Oscar.

Oscar in clean air. Oscar in traffic. Oscar being asked to run a sacrificial race because the other orange car had a better shot at the title. Oscar matching Daniel's pace on weekends when the broadcast talked about Daniel's experience instead. Oscar saying fine on the radio in a voice so flat that Lando could hear the effort under it.

People kept calling him mature.

Lando thought what they actually meant was convenient, which is not the same thing at all.

So, yes, he left comments sometimes. Stupid comments, probably. The kind of thing you write when you are sure the person will never read them, because why would Oscar Piastri scroll far enough to find some stranger telling him the team should have trusted him more?

Then Lando got hired.

Then Lando spent twenty minutes lying on his bed staring at the ceiling, thinking about every single public comment he had ever left and whether it was too late to fake his own death.

When he finally meets Oscar in person, Lando expects him to be quiet. Everyone knows Oscar is quiet.

What Lando does not expect is how many opinions Oscar has, or how carefully he keeps them behind his teeth until someone gives him permission to say them.

He does not pretend to understand more than he does, which Lando likes immediately. He sits through explanations with a thoughtful frown, then says something like, "I do not think the car will do that," in the same mild voice someone else might use to ask for tea. Half the time, he is right.

Oscar is careful with a quality that feels learned, he checks a room before he enters it, listens before he speaks, waits to be asked before giving away too much of himself.

Lando is the opposite of all of this. He has opinions about it before he is even in the room.

Lando recognises it partly because he is the opposite. He has always been too loud by accident: too many thoughts, too many tabs open, too many opinions escaping before he can decide whether the room wants them.

Ten, maybe eleven, old enough to understand that the drivers he kept cutting out of magazines and taping above his desk were not just there because he admired their braking technique...

His family noticed before he said anything properly. They made it ordinary. A boyfriend at dinner was a boyfriend at dinner. Boys were who Lando brought home, who his family asked about, who got folded into the normal noise of the house. He has been lucky. He knows that.

Lando has dated enough to know he is not very sentimental about dating. He likes men, he likes sex, he likes clear expectations and leaving before anyone starts pretending a good night has to become a life plan. Relationships are fine. He has had them. They are also full of variables people insist on calling feelings.

That has always been enough.

Until Oscar brings him water when he forgets to drink, buys him a standing desk he never asked for, sits beside him at midnight just to listen to him think, and then, one day, just stops, and Lando realises he had been counting on it. Until the gym, when Lando finally says something, and immediately wishes he had not, because, idiotically, he had wanted to stay the only one who knew. He gives Oscar as much of the truth as the room can hold: that he likes knowing where Oscar is, that he had not realised how much until it stopped. He does not expect anything to change. Then Oscar touches his shoulder for no reason at all, just because, and Lando spends the rest of the night thinking about it anyway.

After that, the private moments keep accumulating, small and exact and impossible to explain away. Oscar waiting outside the MTC after a late testing block because Lando said, three hours earlier, that he hated walking out alone when the building was empty.

Oscar asking which pasta sauce Lando is buying, then appearing in the M&S Foodhall at Victoria Place ten minutes later while Lando is still standing there with two jars in his hands, like this is a normal place for two McLaren employees to have a fifteen-minute argument about basil. Oscar texting him from a hotel lift to ask if he wants anything from the vending machine and arriving seven minutes later with water, crisps, and the exact chocolate Lando had once described as structurally superior.

Lando tells himself those things are Oscar's pattern, Oscar being observant, having a strange memory for small needs, finding practical reasons to stand close.

This is where Lando loses the plot. Or maybe he never had it.

Not Oscar's pace. Not his attention. Not even his face, although the face is a serious contributing factor.

It’s Oscar in a team polo with the sleeves tight around his arms, forearms bare, watch sitting low on his wrist while he leans over a table to look at a trace. It is Oscar climbing out of the car, race suit tied around his waist, fireproofs clinging to his shoulders, still carrying the heat of the car with him.

There are photos. Of course there are photos. Fans take them constantly: Oscar walking through the paddock with his jaw set, Oscar laughing at something Rafa says, Oscar leaning against a barrier with his arms crossed, all that contained strength made temporarily available to a camera that does not know what it is doing to Lando's self-control.

Lando saves them. Not all of them. He is not unwell. Then he checks the folder one night and finds one hundred and forty-five photos, which suggests he may, in fact, be unwell. About forty of them are Oscar in a hat that is slightly too big for him, which is not helping.

The worst ones are the ordinary ones. No podium, no dramatic lighting, just Oscar standing with his hands in his pockets looking slightly lost until he sees someone he knows, and sometimes that someone is Lando, and Oscar's face does something before he laughs, like missing a step and then catching it, the whole crowded world briefly irrelevant.

And then there is the kissing problem, which is less of a problem and more of a constant, unhelpful proposition his brain won't stop making.

Oscar looking down at him over the top of a tablet: kiss him.

Oscar saying "felt shit" in a debrief voice, completely serious: kiss him, Lando, what are you doing.

Oscar handing him water in the garage and pretending it is nothing: do not say thank you out loud, do not do it, do not.

The wanting would be easier if Oscar looked like he knew what to do with his own.

He does not, and it is not subtle: Oscar says no girlfriend too flatly in sponsor interviews, goes still at the word ex-boyfriend, and his eyes catch on Lando's mouth and then dart away again like touching a hot surface.

Lando knows better than to push at that. Nobody ever made him treat his own wanting as an emergency.

After Silverstone, the touching comes back changed. Oscar still goes pink around the ears. He still looks away first, most of the time. But when his shoulder brushes Lando's in a meeting room, he lets it stay. When his hand lands at the small of Lando's back in a crowded hospitality corridor, he leaves it there for one extra second before he remembers they are in public.

Now there is intent under it, small but unmistakable, and intent is much harder to survive.

After Oscar moves to Woking, it gets harder to ignore: Oscar barefoot in his own kitchen, watching Lando choose paint like the colour of a wall might matter because Lando says it does. Oscar's fingers at Lando's wrist after he says the wrong thing, careful and immediate and gone too soon.

Then summer break should make it easier. Oscar goes home to Australia, and Lando tells himself distance will reset the system, because distance usually does. Instead, Oscar texts him from twelve hours ahead about nothing: Nicole making too much food, his sisters stealing his hoodies, whether Lando thinks the new dining chairs will look strange with the table Lando picked.

They FaceTime almost every day. Sometimes for five minutes. Sometimes for eight hours while Lando pretends to read and Oscar pretends to play video games properly instead of driving into walls because he can't stop looking at Lando's face in the little square at the corner of the screen.

By the end of the break, Lando knows the sound of Oscar's house in Australia: birds in the morning, someone laughing in another room, Oscar going quiet when he is tired and still not hanging up.

In Rome, Oscar stands near the finish with the GO LANDO sign held too high, looking genuinely embarrassed and completely serious at the same time, which should be impossible but is not. Fans post photos before Lando has even made it back to the hotel. He saves the first one without thinking, then three more because apparently there are angles, and every single one makes him want to do something stupid.

After Rome, the calendar starts again, and the private moments get harder to file away. In Zandvoort, rain traps them under the same narrow strip of awning behind hospitality. In Monza, Oscar appears outside Lando's hotel room with room-service chips and stays until Lando's laptop dies.

By then, the title fight has everyone losing sleep.

Baku gets under his skin. He remembers the 2025 weekend too well: Oscar in the wall in qualifying, Oscar starting ninth, Oscar gone on lap one before the race had even settled into itself. By Friday evening his eyes ache from watching timing screens, but that seems like a fair trade.

He checks everything twice. Brake migration, deployment maps, out-lap targets, the margins in every call that might ask Oscar to trust the car before the car has earned it. Lando cannot drive the lap for him. He knows that. But he can make sure the car arrives underneath Oscar exactly when Oscar reaches for it.

Then Oscar trusts it.

Then Oscar wins.

And still finds Lando first in front of the garage, hair damp, eyes too bright, fingers catching at Lando's sleeve for half a second before he remembers cameras exist. A few days later, after McLaren does the proper factory celebration, Oscar brings the replica trophy to Lando's flat and leaves it on his kitchen counter while they order dinner.

That is how Lando Norris ends up with a Formula 1 trophy next to his toaster.

And that is how Oscar ends up leading the championship.

By the time Oscar asks if Lando could come to Monaco for Max's birthday, Lando has already spent half the week pretending he is not waiting for an excuse to see him outside work again.

So, of course, he says yes.

The thing is, Lando really, really does not like Monaco.

Monaco is loud in a way that never turns off. Too many rich people trying to sound casual, too many conversations stacked on top of one another until none of them mean anything, too many cars that exist more as statements than transport. The whole place feels like it is performing itself, and Lando has never worked out where to put his hands in the middle of it.

Lando is mid-conversation with Rafa when he registers Oscar across the room.

Oscar is staring at him. Not scanning the room, not drifting, focused, the way he gets during a qualifying lap when the whole world narrows to the next corner. The rest of the party keeps moving around him; Oscar does not.

Lando stops talking mid-sentence.

Rafa keeps going for a second before noticing.

"What?"

"Nothing," Lando says.

But his attention has already shifted, quietly, without permission.

Because attention like that is not casual. It is not social. It is attention with a decision waiting at the edge of it.

Lando looks back every time.

He takes a sip of a drink he does not taste anymore, sets it down earlier than intended, and adjusts his stance like that changes anything.

He feels awkward suddenly and stiff and too aware of his hands and his face and the fact that Oscar is still looking. He should move. He will move in a second. He is moving.

"Obrigado," he says to Rafa. "I need to go somewhere."

Rafa laughs at his accent and turns back into their friends.

Oscar is still there when Lando reaches him.

Lando stops close enough that Oscar has to look down at him, which is a bad idea for both of them.

"You are doing it again," he says.

"I am not doing anything," Oscar says.

"Right."

"I was just looking," Oscar says.

"Yes," Lando replies. "At me."

Oscar's expression shifts, something almost careful underneath it.

"I know," Oscar says.

That almost makes Lando laugh.

The admission gets under his ribs, quiet and direct and not an apology.

Not this time.

Since Silverstone, Oscar has been trying. Lando can see it in how he lets his hand stay where it lands, how he stops himself from retreating every time he wants something too openly. But this is different again. This is Oscar looking at him from across a crowded room and deciding not to hide it.

There's a glass in Oscar's hand, nearly empty, and Lando files that away too. An explanation, maybe, for why tonight Oscar is doing the looking instead of getting caught at it.

"You know you do this a lot."

"Do what?" Oscar asks.

"Find me."

"Well, we work together."

"Outside the MTC at midnight?" Lando asks, stepping a little closer. "At Victoria Place because I sent you one photo of pasta sauce?"

Oscar's ears go pink.

"You looked undecided."

"It was sauce."

"You still looked undecided."

Lando smiles. "You came all the way to M&S because I looked undecided about basil."

Oscar looks down, but he is smiling now.

After a second, he says, "What's your point?"

"My point is," Lando says, softer now, "I am not exactly complaining."

Oscar studies him for a second, like he is trying to solve that sentence properly.

Then, quieter, "No?"

Lando exhales through his nose and shakes his head once.

"No."

Oscar's shoulders drop a fraction.

It is painfully obvious, suddenly, that Oscar wanted the answer anyway.

He knows Lando likes it. Lando told him. Oscar has a disturbing memory for anything Lando says when he is not paying attention, which is most of the time, and an even more dangerous one for when he is.

But Oscar still has to make himself say it.

"Okay," Oscar says.

And then, after a beat:

"Good."

Lando takes him in for a second, all of it, like he is confirming something he already knew.

"Come on," he says, nodding toward the balcony.

Oscar follows without hesitation.

Of course he does. Ever since they met, Oscar has been following him around.

Outside, the noise drops in layers. First the voices, then the music, then the sense that anything urgent is happening at all. The air is cooler, sharper. Monaco looks different from up here, less like a party and more like a city that has finally stopped asking Lando to perform for it.

Lando closes the door behind them.

Oscar watches the movement.

A pause settles between them, but it is not uncomfortable. It just exists.

At close range, everything is harder to ignore: the way Oscar stands still without being rigid, the way he watches without trying to hide it anymore, the way his nervousness sits right under the surface of all that control.

His thumb rubs once against the side of his index finger.

Lando notices.

Of course Lando notices.

"I think you are doing that thing again," Lando says.

Oscar tilts his head slightly. "What thing?"

"Looking at me like you are planning a murder."

Oscar thinks about that.

"I am not."

Lando huffs a small laugh. "What a relief."

"It could be worse than murder, though."

That lands between them quietly.

Lando steps closer before he fully decides to.

Oscar does not move away.

He does, however, look terrified for approximately one second.

Lando likes him so much it stops being funny.

There is no useful way to make the sentence smaller, no joke to hide inside, and Lando has run out of evidence that it gets less terrifying. There is only Oscar standing in front of him, brave and frightened at the same time, every careful part of him carried out onto this balcony and still half-convinced Lando might decide it is too much.

For months, Lando has told himself this is Oscar’s pattern. Oscar appearing in doorways, drifting toward him in garages and hotel corridors and crowded rooms, coming back over and over like he cannot quite help it. But Lando has not exactly been standing still. He has been doing it too, starting conversations he does not need to start, asking questions he already knows how to answer, turning at the sound of his voice, saving terrible photos because Oscar is laughing in them somewhere past the flash.

He wants to tell him: you do not have to become easier. You do not have to be out before you are ready. You do not have to turn yourself into someone cleaner and braver and simpler just because I got lucky.

Lando did get lucky. His family loved him without making it a whole thing. He thinks Oscar will be loved that way too, thinks of Nicole’s voice on FaceTime, the easy noise of Oscar’s family in the background, but thinking is not knowing, and Lando does not want to be another person asking him to be brave faster than he is.

He wants to tell him that wanting quietly is still wanting. That careful does not mean cowardly. That he knows exactly what Oscar is offering, and he wants it like this, nervous and real.

But Oscar is watching his mouth, and Lando is not sure words are the right tool for this particular job.

He reaches up and catches two fingers in the front of Oscar's shirt, gentle enough that Oscar could step away if he wanted to.

Oscar does not step away.

He pulls him in.

The kiss is warm and immediate and a little clumsy at first, mostly because Oscar exhales hard against his mouth. Then his hand comes up to Lando's jaw, careful even now, thumb brushing once under his ear, and Lando forgets every clever thing he has ever thought about taking things slowly.

When they separate, the party is still loud behind the glass. Monaco is still Monaco. Oscar's hand is still at his waist, not moving, like he has decided not to give the moment back yet.

Oscar is still there.

"So," Oscar says.

A pause.

"I have been meaning to ask you out."

Lando lets out a slow breath, almost a laugh.

"Yeah," he says quietly. "I figured."

Oscar's mouth twitches, small and nervous. "Evidence?"

"Loads."

The pattern is not something Lando has to solve.

He can just step into it and see where it goes.