Chapter Text
Lando Norris had won the World Championship and still felt like he was losing.
It should have been impossible. Obscene, almost. There were drivers who spent their entire careers bleeding themselves dry for a trophy Lando now had his name attached to forever. There were boys in karting who dreamed themselves sick over standing where he stood. There were years of doubt, jokes, almosts, heartbreaks, bad cars, failed strategies, and people wondering whether he had the ruthlessness to finish the job.
He had finished it.
He had done the thing.
2025 World Champion.
The words still made something inside him go silent with disbelief when he let himself think them too directly.
And yet, beneath the golden, impossible weight of it, there was Oscar.
Always Oscar.
Oscar in the background of every photograph. Oscar in every interview answer Lando gave too honestly. Oscar in the title fight, in the debrief rooms, in the late-night messages, in the locked doors. Oscar in the memory of pressure and want and hands that never stayed long enough to mean what Lando wanted them to mean.
Oscar, who had helped make Lando champion.
Oscar, who had almost taken it from him.
Oscar, who still went home to Lily.
Lando could not outrun that part, no matter how heavy the trophy in his hands became.
He had tried to make peace with what they were.
Fuckbuddies was the crude word for it. Easy, ugly, accurate enough if someone did not care about all the blood under it. Teammates who took the pressure off each other in private. Friends who weren’t really friends in those rooms. Rivals who had discovered, accidentally and then deliberately, that fighting was not the only way to get each other out of their systems.
Except Lando had never gotten Oscar out of his system. Not even once.
The first time had happened after the 2025 United States Grand Prix Sprint.
The crash had done something to both of them.
The sprint had been over too quickly for what it meant. A few seconds of disaster, then the long, suffocating aftermath. Cameras caught enough. Commentators said enough. Social media did what social media did. McLaren went into damage control with smiles that were all teeth and no softness.
Inside the team, everyone used the right words.
Misjudgement. Review. Racing incident. Difficult day. Learn and move on.
Lando heard all of it and wanted to tear his own skin off.
He remembered standing in the MTC the next day, after the meetings, after the official conversations, after the private ones that felt worse because everyone was trying so hard to be professional. He remembered Oscar across the room, arms crossed, face empty in that awful way he used when he felt too much and refused to give anyone the satisfaction of knowing it.
Oscar had looked untouched.
That had made Lando furious.
He knew Oscar better than most people, worse than he wanted to admit. He knew the difference between Oscar calm and Oscar contained. The difference between silence as personality and silence as pressure.
That night, after everyone else had drifted away, they ended up in one of the smaller rooms at the MTC.
Lando never knew afterward which of them had followed the other.
Maybe both.
Maybe neither.
Maybe the building itself had grown tired of watching them circle each other and shoved them into the same space.
Oscar stood near the wall, still in McLaren kit, sleeves pushed up, jaw tight. Lando sat on the edge of the table because standing felt too aggressive and sitting properly felt too weak.
For a while, neither spoke.
Then Lando said, “You can stop pretending now.”
Oscar’s eyes flicked to him.
“Pretending what?”
“That you’re fine.”
Oscar’s expression did not change.
“I am fine.”
“Bullshit.”
“That your professional analysis?”
“Yes.”
“Very useful.”
Lando laughed once, sharp and humorless.
“You crashed into me.”
Oscar’s face finally moved.
Something dark behind the eyes.
“You turned in.”
“There he is.”
Oscar stepped closer.
“What?”
“You're actually pissed off.”
“I’m not pissed off.”
“Liar.”
Oscar’s mouth tightened.
Lando should have stopped there. He knew that now. He had known it then too, probably, but Lando had never been good at stopping when the thing under his skin started burning. Especially not with Oscar. Especially not when Oscar stood there looking controlled enough to make Lando feel like the only one losing his mind.
“You do this thing,” Lando said. “Where you act like if your face stays blank, nothing happened.”
Oscar’s voice dropped.
“Something happened.”
“Yeah. We fucked it.”
Oscar’s eyes flashed.
“We?”
“Oh, don’t act like you don’t know how much this matters.”
Oscar stared at him.
The air changed.
“You think I don’t know?” Oscar asked quietly.
Lando’s breath caught because there it was. Not the words. The voice. The first crack in the flatness.
Oscar took another step.
“You think I need you to explain pressure to me?”
“No.”
“You think I don’t understand what we lost?”
“No.”
“Then what do you want?”
Lando did not have an answer.
Or he had too many.
He wanted Oscar to yell. To show something. To stop looking like a locked door. He wanted to shake him. He wanted to touch him. He wanted to make Oscar feel even half as ruined as Lando felt standing there with their championship battle turning into something sharp and ugly between them.
What he said was, “I want you to stop acting like I’m the only one who gives a shit.”
Oscar went still.
For one second, Lando thought he had gone too far.
Then Oscar laughed.
It was a small, cold sound, and it made Lando’s stomach turn.
“You really think that’s what this is?” Oscar asked.
“I don’t know what this is.”
Oscar looked at him then.
Really looked.
And Lando felt, absurdly, like he had been caught doing something worse than arguing.
Because Oscar’s eyes dropped once.
Only once.
To Lando’s crotch.
Long enough to ruin them.
"Then why are you getting hard?"
Afterward, Lando would tell himself neither of them had decided. It had not been romantic. It had not been planned. It had barely even been seduction. It was anger finding the nearest possible exit. It was adrenaline with nowhere left to go. It was two men who had spent all season measuring themselves against each other suddenly discovering that closeness could feel like another kind of fight.
They did not kiss.
That became important later, though at the time Lando barely understood why.
They crossed every other line with the sort of desperation that made thinking impossible. Hands first, then breath, then the kind of closeness that should have shocked them more than it did. It was messy and half-angry, all stress and heat and the dangerous relief of not having to be media-trained for once.
Oscar came first.
That was what Lando remembered most.
His control cracked under Lando’s hands, and the sound he made was so raw that Lando felt something inside himself change shape.
It was not love yet.
Or maybe it was, and Lando had simply been too stupid to recognize the first symptom.
Afterward, Oscar stood on the other side of the room, already putting himself back together.
That was the first lesson.
Oscar could come undone and then reassemble faster than anyone Lando had ever known.
His shirt was still half undone. His hair was a mess. And still, his face had closed.
“That never happens again,” Oscar said.
Lando leaned back against the table, still trying to steady his breathing.
“Yeah.”
“I mean it.”
“Sure.”
Oscar looked at him sharply.
“I’m not gay.”
There it was.
Flat. Defensive. Too fast.
Lando’s chest tightened.
He could have made a joke. He almost did. It would have been easy to say something like, could’ve fooled me, and maybe that would have been the beginning of a different ending. Maybe Oscar would have left sooner. Maybe Lando would have saved himself months of being wanted only in secret.
Instead, he said, “Okay.”
Oscar looked away.
“And I love Lily.”
Lando felt the name land in the room like a third person.
He nodded once.
“Okay.”
Oscar waited for something. An argument, maybe. A challenge. Some sign that Lando would make it difficult enough for him to justify running.
Lando gave him nothing.
So Oscar left.
Lando stayed in the room for ten minutes after, staring at the closed door and trying very hard not to think about the fact that his whole body already wanted it to happen again.
It did.
Of course it did.
Not immediately.
Oscar was stubborn enough to last three weeks.
Lando gave him credit for that later, on mean days.
Three whole weeks of acting normal. Three weeks of Oscar walking past him in the garage with that careful, untouched face. Three weeks of debriefs, travel, media, questions about the title fight, questions about team tension, questions about whether McLaren could keep two drivers fighting without tearing itself apart.
Three weeks of Oscar pretending.
Then, after another race weekend that went badly enough to leave both of them raw, Oscar knocked on Lando’s hotel room door.
He did not say much.
He did not have to.
Lando let him in.
That was the beginning of the routine.
Not a relationship, never that.
Oscar would have hated the word.
Arrangement sounded too formal. Affair too dramatic. Mistake too dishonest after the third, fourth, fifth time. Habit became the word Lando used privately, because habits were things people knew were bad for them and kept doing anyway.
It became easy in the way terrible things became easy when repeated often enough.
A locked door.
A text that looked like nothing to anyone else.
A look across a room.
A meeting that ended late.
A hotel corridor where one of them walked first and the other followed five minutes later.
They learned each other in fragments and limits.
Oscar did not like too much talking afterward.
Oscar hated being asked what he wanted, but he responded badly if Lando guessed wrong.
Oscar got sharp when he felt vulnerable.
Oscar became almost tender when he was too exhausted to remember not to be.
Oscar never stayed the whole night unless travel or logistics made leaving too obvious.
Oscar never kissed him.
That rule mattered more to Lando than he wanted it to.
At first, he told himself it was ridiculous to care. Kissing was just one thing. They did plenty else. More than plenty. The physical lines kept moving because Oscar kept moving them and then pretending they had not shifted. What started as frantic release became slower, riskier, more intimate in every way Oscar refused to name. Hands, mouths, beds, breath in the dark, Oscar’s body learning Lando’s with a greed he never allowed into daylight.
And still, no kissing.
Oscar could put his hands anywhere else.
He could say Lando’s name like it had been dragged out of him.
He could look at him afterward with something unguarded and almost afraid before closing it down again.
But if Lando leaned toward his mouth, Oscar turned his face away.
The first time, Lando thought it was guilt.
The second, fear.
The third, he understood.
Kissing would make it real.
Oscar could cheat if he could categorize it as pressure, release, impulse, whatever lie he needed that week. But a kiss was harder to file away. A kiss belonged to romance, to tenderness, to couples who held hands in public and went home together and did not check the hallway before opening a door.
A kiss belonged to Lily.
Not Lando.
And Lando wanted it with a kind of desperate humiliation that made him hate himself. He wanted Oscar’s mouth softly, honestly, without the anger, without the excuse of adrenaline or title pressure. He wanted Oscar to choose the most intimate thing and not turn away from it.
He wanted a future.
It sounded pathetic even inside his own head.
Oscar had never promised him one.
Oscar had promised the opposite, actually, again and again. He loved Lily. He was not gay. He did not want anything complicated. He liked what they had. He liked that it could exist in the dark and vanish in the morning. He liked Lando best when Lando did not ask for more.
Lando learned to stop asking.
Not because he stopped wanting.
Because he wanted too much to risk losing the little he was given.
By Abu Dhabi, by the end of the season, by the time Lando won the title and Oscar stood as the runner-up, their arrangement had become another secret thread running through McLaren’s championship year.
The world saw rivalry.
The team saw two drivers who had pushed each other too hard and somehow survived.
Then came the FIA Awards.
Tashkent was polished, formal, strange in the way FIA events always were: too many suits, too many cameras, too much ceremony around a sport that spent most of the year pretending chaos could be turned into data. Lando arrived with Magui on his arm and the knowledge that everyone would be looking at him as the champion.
He should have been untouchable.
Instead, the first person he looked for was Oscar.
Oscar was across the room with Lily.
He looked unfairly good in a dark suit, composed and reserved, the kind of beautiful that seemed almost accidental because Oscar never looked like he was trying to be anything. Lily stood beside him, elegant and familiar, her hand resting lightly at his arm while they listened to someone speak.
They looked real.
Not performative. Not showy for cameras.
Real.
Lily fit into Oscar’s life like she had always belonged there, because she had. She was history and safety and public acceptability. She was the girlfriend people expected Oscar to have. Pretty, quiet, appropriate. The kind of person who made sense beside him in photos.
Lando looked away.
Magui noticed.
“Stop staring,” she murmured through her smile.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m allowed. I am the World Champion.”
“World champion, but not subtle.”
He glanced at her.
Magui’s face remained camera-perfect, but her voice had softened. She had been useful to him for months, and he hated that word even in his head. Useful. Like she was a prop. Like he had not agreed to the arrangement because it helped both of them, because she got attention and he got cover and everyone got a story that was easier than the truth.
She knew enough now.
But not everything.
“This is the last one,” Magui said quietly.
Lando nodded.
“I know.”
“After tonight, I’m free.”
He smiled faintly.
“That sounds dramatic.”
“It is dramatic. You are emotionally exhausting.”
“Rude.”
“True.”
Her hand squeezed his arm once, almost affectionately.
The ceremony moved around him like a dream.
He clapped when he was supposed to clap. Smiled when cameras found him. Stood when his name was called. Accepted the formal weight of the trophy with hands that almost trembled.
He had imagined this moment so many times in his life that reality felt slightly wrong.
The World Drivers’ Championship trophy was his.
The room applauded him.
For one clean second, Lando let himself feel it.
The pride.
The relief.
The impossible truth of it.
Then he spoke.
His speech had been written in pieces beforehand, but Lando had never been good at sticking exactly to what people expected him to say. He thanked his family first because he would not survive looking at them if he didn’t. He thanked McLaren. The mechanics. The engineers. Andrea. Zak. Everyone who had given years of work to make this possible.
Then he looked at Oscar.
He should have stopped himself.
He didn’t.
“And Mr. Piastri, the incredible teammate that I've had,” Lando said.
The room shifted slightly. Not visibly, maybe. But Lando felt it.
Oscar looked at him.
Lily looked at Oscar.
Lando kept going because now that he had started, cowardice would be worse.
“I wouldn’t be standing here as the driver I am without him pushing me every weekend,” Lando continued. “He made me better. He made the title harder, obviously, which was annoying.”
Oscar’s mouth moved slightly.
Lando saw.
“But he also made it mean more,” Lando said, quieter now. “So, thank you.”
The applause came before Oscar had to react.
Lando looked away before he could search Oscar’s face too desperately.
He finished the speech. Smiled. Took photos. Held the trophy. Became, for everyone watching, exactly what he was supposed to be.
Champion.
Winner.
The man on top of the world.
Inside, something hurt.
After the awards, the night broke into smaller rooms and smaller conversations.
People congratulated him until the word lost shape. Sponsors wanted photographs. FIA officials shook his hand. Drivers clapped him on the back. Magui stayed beside him for most of it, graceful and easy, until eventually she leaned close and said, “I’m getting a drink and then I’m retiring.”
Lando choked on a laugh.
Then she left him alone near a side corridor.
Lando knew Oscar would find him.
He knew because Oscar was never as indifferent as he pretended to be. He could ignore Lando across a room for an hour, two hours, an entire event if he had to. But eventually, when the conditions were right, when no one could see too much, Oscar came.
He appeared at the end of the corridor in that infuriatingly quiet way he had.
Lando turned before Oscar spoke.
“World champion,” Oscar said.
His voice was too neutral.
Lando leaned one shoulder against the wall.
“Runner-up.”
Oscar’s eyes narrowed faintly.
“Careful. People might think you’re gracious.”
“They’d be wrong.”
The noise of the celebration became distant behind closed doors. Oscar stood there in his suit, clean and composed and impossible. Lando wanted to touch him so badly his hands hurt.
“You still thanked me, though,” Oscar said.
“I did.”
“Why?”
Lando stared at him.
“Because it was true.”
Oscar’s jaw shifted.
“You didn’t have to.”
“Yes, I did.”
“No, you didn’t.”
Lando stepped closer.
Enough to make Oscar’s eyes flick down and back up again.
“I wanted to.”
Oscar looked away first.
“Lily heard it,” Oscar said.
There was the knife.
Softly placed, cleanly twisted.
Lando’s smile arrived because pain had trained it well.
“Good for Lily.”
Oscar’s eyes sharpened.
“Don’t be like that.”
Lando laughed quietly.
“Be like what? Like the man you come to when she’s not around?”
Oscar moved closer so quickly Lando’s pulse jumped.
“Careful.”
It should have made Lando stop, but it didn’t.
He was tired. Happy. Hurt. High off the trophy and low from watching Oscar stand beside the woman he claimed to love. He had spent the whole night being celebrated by everyone and still feeling like the one person who could truly ruin him had not chosen him.
“Magui’s done. This was her last public appearance with me,” Lando said. “She won’t have to hang out with me anymore. Her contract is over. The whole thing is over.”
Oscar stared at him.
Lando felt suddenly too exposed.
He had imagined saying this differently. Better. With more control. Less obvious hope.
But Oscar was in front of him, and Lily’s name was still between them, and Lando had never been good at wanting quietly.
“Now you can break up with Lily too,” Lando continued, voice lower, “and we could… you know...”
He stopped.
The rest of the sentence was unbearable.
Be real.
Try.
Date.
Oscar’s face closed immediately;
“I’m not breaking up with Lily,” he said.
Lando’s chest went hollow.
Oscar held his gaze.
“I love her.”
There it was again.
The line Oscar drew whenever Lando stepped too close to truth.
Lando nodded once.
“Oh,” he said. “Okay.”
He hated how small he sounded.
“I was just thinking…” He corrected too quickly.
“What?” Oscar asked.
His voice had gone cold now. Defensive. Cruel before Lando could make him feel anything else.
Lando said nothing.
Oscar’s mouth twisted.
“What, you had the insane idea of us being like...?”
He looked so disgusted to even finish the sentence.
Still the words landed like a slap.
Lando’s face did not move.
That was one of his better tricks.
Oscar stepped closer.
“Why? If we can just stay like this.”
Lando looked at him.
World champion, he reminded himself.
He had survived Max Verstappen, Oscar himself, strategy nightmares, public scrutiny, and his own head. He could survive one sentence apparently.
“Right,” Lando said.
Oscar watched him carefully.
The corridor seemed to shrink.
Lando should have left.
He knew that with absolute clarity. This was the moment where a person with any self-respect would step back. He could go find Magui, thank her properly, go to his room, sit with his trophy, call his family, cry or laugh or do whatever world champions did when they were not busy letting the runner-up break their heart in a corridor.
But he did not leave.
Because Oscar was looking at him now in that way.
Not loving.
Wanting.
And Lando was weak enough that wanting still worked.
Oscar saw the moment he had him.
His expression shifted, almost lazy now, confidence returning because this was territory he understood. Lando hurt was complicated. Lando wanting was easy.
“Of course...” Oscar said.
His voice dropped lower and dangerous.
“Mr World Champion can’t get enough of his hot runner-up.”
His hand moved, subtle and deliberate, lowering just enough to make Lando’s breath catch and his entire body betray him.
Lando caught his wrist.
Oscar looked at him, surprised.
For one suspended second, they stood there like that: Oscar’s hand trapped in Lando’s, the party noise distant, the trophy somewhere in another room, Lily waiting somewhere Oscar would return to if Lando let him.
“Don’t make it a joke.” Lando said.
“It’s not a joke.”
“It is when you say it like that.”
Oscar’s face hardened.
“You used to like it.”
Lando laughed broken.
“I still like it. That’s the problem.”
Something flashed through Oscar’s expression.
Not pity.
Not love.
Maybe discomfort.
Maybe the first dull recognition that Lando had become less easy to handle.
Then Oscar leaned closer.
“Then, what do you want from me?”
The question almost made Lando smile.
Because Oscar knew.
He knew exactly what Lando wanted. He just wanted Lando to be the pathetic one and say it out loud.
Lando released his wrist.
“Nothing.”
“Liar.”
“Probably.”
Oscar went quiet.
Lando looked at him, really looked, and felt the night split open around the truth he was not brave enough to keep saying.
He wanted Oscar in daylight.
He wanted Oscar’s mouth without refusal.
He wanted Oscar’s name beside his without shame.
He wanted Oscar to stop treating him like a room he could enter whenever pressure got too high and leave before anyone noticed the lights were on.
He wanted a life together that Oscar had just called insane.
Lando should have hated him for it.
But the hatred was never enough.
Oscar stepped back first, glancing once toward the end of the corridor.
Always checking.
Always measuring.
Always making sure no one could see what he did with Lando when he thought no one was watching.
Then he looked back.
“Come upstairs,” Oscar said.
Lando closed his eyes briefly.
The answer should have been no.
It was written everywhere.
In the hollow under his ribs. In the humiliation still fresh in his throat. In the fact that he had just been called world champion by an entire room and still stood here waiting for scraps from a man who said he loved someone else.
He opened his eyes.
Oscar was watching him.
Waiting.
Not worried.
Oscar still believed Lando would come.
And the cruelest thing was that he was right.
Lando nodded.
It hurt less than he expected.
Or maybe he had already gone numb.
Oscar turned toward the lifts.
Lando did not follow him immediately.
He gave himself that much dignity.
He waited three seconds.
Maybe four.
Then he followed because he was in love, because he was weak, because he was world champion and still not the man Oscar chose when the doors were open.
Having Oscar like this is better than not having him at all.
At least, that was what Lando told himself as the lift doors closed.
For now, he still believed it.