Work Text:
Times are scary
My boys are getting married
Turning twenty-one
I'm not, but I was once certain, always
Now all I know is the ending
___
The ballroom at the end-of-season gala was the sort of room that seemed to have been designed by people who had never experienced an unpleasant thought. Everything was immaculate, polished to the point of unreality: chandeliers spilling warm light over white tablecloths, crystal glasses arranged in precise rows, enormous bouquets of pale flowers rising from marble tables and releasing a perfume so sweet that Lando could almost feel it coating the back of his throat.
Beyond the tall windows, Monaco was disappearing into night, the harbor black beneath the last traces of sunset, yachts illuminated against the water like expensive little constellations. Inside, however, there was no darkness anywhere. Every surface reflected something. Every corner had been lit. Every person seemed to have been carefully positioned inside the frame of somebody else's photograph. It was beautiful in the way certain things became beautiful when there was enough money involved, but Lando had been standing there for nearly twenty minutes and could not shake the feeling that the whole place was suffocating him.
He had loosened his collar twice already. The shirt was perfectly fitted, of course; his stylist had assured him it was supposed to feel that way, and there were probably twelve different people who could explain exactly why the cut suited him, why the jacket sat correctly on his shoulders, why the watch on his wrist was worth more than the first car he'd driven as a kid. None of that changed the fact that he felt like he was being strangled by a piece of fabric.
He slipped a finger beneath the collar and pulled at it again, looking around the room as though somebody might catch him doing it. They wouldn't. Nobody was watching closely enough.
That was almost funny, considering how much of his life had been spent being watched. Cameras followed him through airports. Fans recognized him in restaurants. Journalists dissected his expressions after races. Millions of strangers had opinions about his driving, his clothes, his friendships, his voice over the radio.
He had spent years wishing for five minutes in which nobody cared where he was, and now that he'd finally found himself in a room where people were too busy performing their own lives to notice him, the freedom felt remarkably similar to abandonment.
"You're looking very serious, mate."
Lando turned and found George beside him, a champagne flute balanced between his fingers and an expression that suggested he'd already made his way through several conversations he would have to pretend to remember tomorrow.
Lando gave him a small smile. "Am I?" he asked, and George laughed, looking him over. "Very."
Lando glanced down at his suit. "That's unfortunate." George's smile widened, and for a moment something almost familiar settled between them, the old rhythm of paddock conversations where nobody had to think too hard about what they were saying.
George nodded toward a group gathered near the center of the room. "Come on. They're over there." Lando followed his gaze and saw a loose circle of drivers talking beneath the chandelier, drinks in their hands, shoulders angled toward one another in the unconscious intimacy of people who had spent too many years sharing the same strange little world.
He knew almost all of them.
That was the strange part.
There was a time when that would have been enough to make him walk over. He would have inserted himself into the conversation without thinking, made some ridiculous comment, stolen somebody's drink, asked what everyone was doing afterward. Instead, he found himself watching from a distance, noticing details he didn't want to notice.
One of the younger drivers looked over and caught his eye. The reaction was immediate: a polite smile, a slight nod, the kind of acknowledgment reserved for someone you respected but weren't sure you were allowed to bother. Lando returned it automatically. Then the driver turned back to the group, and something about the exchange stayed with him.
There had been no awkwardness, no hostility, nothing he could reasonably object to. If anything, the kid had been perfectly respectful. But Lando remembered when respect hadn't been the first thing people offered him. He remembered when younger drivers had looked at him and wondered whether he was someone they could know, whether he would come out after dinner, whether he had heard some stupid paddock rumor, whether he wanted to play FIFA in somebody's hotel room until two in the morning.
Now there was distance where there used to be familiarity.
He wondered when it had appeared.
Maybe it had happened gradually enough that nobody could point to the moment. That was how most things happened in Formula One. A lap time changed by a hundredth and nobody noticed until the sector sheet appeared on a screen.
A team gained three tenths over the winter and suddenly the entire competitive order looked different.
A driver who had once seemed impossibly young became experienced almost overnight, and everyone adjusted their language accordingly.
Lando wasn't old, not remotely, but the sport had its own definition of aging, and it was ruthless. There was the prodigy stage, when everyone talked about your potential as though your future mattered more than your present. Then came the established stage, when people began asking what you'd achieved with all that potential.
Eventually came the veteran stage, when every compliment about your experience carried the faintest implication that your time was running out. Lando wasn't there yet.
He knew that. Still, the word had begun to hover at the edges of conversations, invisible but inevitable, and he hated how much power it had over him.
"You coming?" George asked.
"In a minute."
George looked at him, and Lando knew he had noticed something. George was good at noticing things. Most people in the paddock were. They spent too much time studying one another not to become experts at reading faces.
"You all right?"
"Yeah."
It came too quickly.
George's expression said he knew it.
Lando smiled anyway.
"I'll come over."
George gave him a look that said he wasn't convinced, then let him go. Lando watched him disappear into the crowd and felt the familiar little guilt of having lied to someone who hadn't actually asked for much. He turned back toward the room, and almost immediately another conversation drifted within earshot.
"I've been looking at a place in Switzerland."
"Nice."
"Good investment, apparently."
"Tax benefits aren't bad either."
Lando took a sip of champagne.
A few feet away, somebody was talking about a baby who had finally started sleeping through the night. The conversation was conducted with the same seriousness Lando was accustomed to hearing in the garage when engineers discussed tyre degradation.
"Eight months?"
"Yeah."
"And sleeping?"
"Finally."
"God, you're lucky."
They laughed.
Lando looked down at his glass.
It was ridiculous how much it bothered him.
These were people he knew. People he'd raced beside for years. People he'd watched celebrate wins, suffer defeats, complain about hotels, miss flights, lose luggage, recover from injuries.
He knew their competitive histories better than he knew some of his own. Yet here they were talking about mortgages and nurseries and property investments, building lives that would continue to exist after the engines stopped turning over on Sunday afternoons.
There was something almost surreal about it, as though the paddock had quietly grown up while he was still looking the other way.
His phone vibrated.
He pulled it from his pocket.
He knew better.
Still, he unlocked it.
The first photograph was harmless. Someone he knew standing outside a house with their partner, both of them barefoot on a wooden terrace. There was a dog in the grass and two coffee cups on a table and sunlight falling across the picture in that effortless way sunlight always seemed to fall in photographs taken by people who were happy. The caption was about being home. Lando's thumb hovered over the screen.
Home.
He scrolled.
An engagement.
A wedding.
A baby.
Someone celebrating an anniversary.
A photograph of a driver he had known for years holding a tiny child against his chest, the expression on his face so unguarded that Lando almost didn't recognize him. Another post showed two people standing in a kitchen, laughing over something outside the frame. Someone had bought a house. Someone had gotten a dog. Someone was spending a quiet weekend with their family.
Nothing extraordinary.
That was what made it worse.
If the photographs had been glamorous, he could have dismissed them as social media nonsense. If they had been extravagant, he could have told himself they were curated, polished versions of lives that were probably messier underneath. But they weren't. They were ordinary.
That was the thing that caught somewhere inside him. These people were building small, unremarkable pieces of permanence. They had somewhere to return to. Someone waiting when they got there. A kitchen table. A spare key. A birthday they would celebrate in the same place every year.
Lando locked his phone.
His reflection stared back from the dark screen.
He looked tired.
There was nothing unusual about that. Everyone in Formula One looked tired eventually. Years of travel did strange things to a person's face. But tonight there was something else in his expression, something he couldn't quite place without making it sound pathetic.
He looked older.
The thought was so absurd that he almost laughed.
He wasn't old. He knew that. There were drivers who had been on the grid before he was old enough to understand what Formula One was. He still had years ahead of him. Probably many of them. He could win more races. He could fight for championships. He could sign contracts and move teams and change his life a dozen times before anyone had the right to suggest he was approaching the end of anything.
But there was a particular kind of aging that happened in this sport, and it wasn't measured in birthdays. It was measured in how many younger faces appeared in the paddock after you. It happened when a rookie stopped looking at you like a contemporary and started looking at you like somebody whose advice might be useful. It happened when people who had once called you by a nickname began using your full name in interviews. It happened when you realized that the youngest drivers had stories from the paddock that you weren't part of.
Lando looked toward the group again.
They were laughing.
One of the younger drivers said something he couldn't hear, and the others immediately broke into the kind of laughter that required no explanation. There was history in it. Some shared memory from a night out, a flight, a stupid mistake, something that belonged entirely to them.
Lando found himself smiling.
Then he realized none of them were looking at him.
He let the expression fade.
The feeling that followed was surprisingly quiet. He had expected loneliness to be dramatic if it ever came for him, something obvious and cinematic, but it wasn't. It was smaller than that. It was the sensation of standing in a room where everybody knew where they belonged while you had somehow misplaced the instructions. Nobody had excluded him. Nobody had told him to leave. He could walk over there whenever he wanted. He could make a joke, put an arm around someone's shoulder, ask what they were talking about, and they would probably make room for him.
So why didn't he?
Because somewhere along the way, Lando had become afraid of discovering that he no longer fit.
He thought about the phrase *moving forward*, which had been appearing in his mind all evening without permission. Everyone seemed to be moving forward. Not necessarily toward anything better, not necessarily according to some universal plan, but simply onward. Careers changed. Families grew. Houses were bought. People got married. People retired. People left the sport and discovered there were other versions of themselves waiting outside it.
And Lando?
He kept waiting for his life to begin.
He knew how ridiculous that sounded. He had a life. A spectacular one, objectively. He traveled the world. He drove Formula One cars. He had friends in places he never could have imagined as a child. He had achieved things that the younger version of himself would have considered impossible. There were millions of people who would have traded everything to stand where he was standing.
But gratitude didn't cancel loneliness.
Success didn't automatically become meaning.
He had spent years thinking the next milestone would make everything click into place. The first podium. The first win. The next contract. The next season. The championship fight. Surely one of them would eventually provide the feeling everyone seemed to expect him to have.
Instead, the finish line kept moving.
In racing, time was something you could fight. You could brake later, find a better line, gain a tenth through a corner. Engineers could put your lap beside somebody else's and show you precisely where the difference lived. There was comfort in that. If you were slower, there was a reason. If you lost time, you could go searching for it.
Life offered no telemetry.
There was no graph that could tell him where the years had gone.
No replay.
No engineer leaning over his shoulder to explain the mistake.
Just one season becoming another until, eventually, you looked up and realized the people you had expected to stay beside you had begun building lives in completely different directions.
Lando put his phone away.
He looked toward the bar.
And there, finally, was someone who wasn't laughing.
Oscar stood at the far edge of the room with a gin and tonic in one hand, separated from the crowd by perhaps three feet of empty space and seemingly an entire different philosophy of existence.
___
Oscar had always possessed an irritating ability to look as though he had nowhere else he needed to be. Even here, in a ballroom filled with people whose entire evening seemed to depend on being noticed, he wasn't performing.
He wasn't scanning the room for the next conversation or checking whether somebody important had seen him talking to somebody else. He leaned against the bar with one elbow resting on the polished wood, his drink loose in his hand, his expression composed as he watched the room unfold around him.
There was no obvious reason for him to look so detached. He was dressed just as well as everyone else, surrounded by the same noise and the same expectations, but Oscar had always seemed capable of stepping half a pace outside whatever was happening and observing it without allowing it to swallow him.
Lando had spent years pretending he didn't admire that about him.
Maybe he didn't admire it.
Maybe he was simply jealous.
Their eyes met across the room.
It was an ordinary glance, the sort that should have meant nothing, but Lando felt the recognition immediately. Oscar knew him too well. He could read the difference between Lando being quiet because he was tired and Lando being quiet because something was wrong. He knew when a joke was genuine and when it was being used as an escape route. He knew when Lando wanted company and when he wanted somebody to sit nearby without speaking.
Oscar's eyebrows lifted slightly.
*You okay?*
Lando gave a tiny shrug.
*Fine.*
Oscar's expression remained unchanged.
He didn't believe him.
The relief that came with that realization was almost embarrassing.
Someone called Lando's name, and he turned to find a sponsor smiling at him. "Great season." Lando smiled back. "Thanks." The man asked if he was looking forward to next year, and the answer came automatically, as it always did. "Always."
They exchanged another smile, the sponsor moved away, and Lando was left with the word echoing strangely in his head.
*Always.*
He had said it without thinking.
Of course he was looking forward to next year.
What else was there?
Next year was the easiest answer in the world because it meant he didn't have to talk about the years after that.
He looked at Oscar again.
Oscar was still watching him.
There was something about that gaze that made Lando feel both safer and more exposed. Everyone else looked at him and saw Lando Norris, Formula One driver, someone with a contract and a reputation and a number beside his name.
Oscar had spent too much time beside him in garages and airports and hotel rooms. He had seen the person underneath all of that, including the parts Lando usually tried to keep hidden.
Lando remembered the garage late at night, when the crowds had gone and the screens were still glowing. He remembered sitting beside Oscar after difficult sessions, both of them staring at telemetry until the numbers blurred, neither willing to admit they were exhausted.
There had been a particular kind of silence between them then, not awkward and not empty, but intimate in a way Lando had never known how to describe. Two people who didn't need to explain why they were still awake.
Oscar understood quiet.
Lando understood noise.
Somehow, over the years, they had learned each other's languages.
Oscar glanced toward the terrace.
It was barely a movement. A tilt of his head. A look toward the glass doors and then back at Lando.
Go outside.
Lando almost smiled.
Of course he knew.
He looked toward the doors and suddenly became aware of the heat in the room again, the close press of bodies, the perfume, the music, the weight of conversations happening too close to him. His collar felt tighter than it had a minute ago. His chest had begun to tighten too, not enough to frighten him, but enough to tell him that if he stayed much longer, he might have to pretend harder than he was capable of pretending.
He set his champagne on a passing tray.
Nobody stopped him as he made his way through the room. That should have felt like a relief. Instead, it left him with the strange impression that he was already halfway gone.
He passed beneath the chandeliers, through the shifting pockets of conversation, toward the glass doors at the far end of the ballroom. Behind him, the party continued with its endless low murmur. Somebody laughed. Somebody raised a glass. Somebody was still talking about property. Somewhere nearby, another person was discussing their child's bedtime routine.
All of it blended together until the room sounded less like a collection of individual lives and more like the static of a television left on in another room.
Lando pushed open the terrace door.
Cold air rushed over him.
He stepped outside, letting the door fall shut behind him, and the entire world seemed to change temperature.
The music became distant.
The laughter softened.
The light behind the glass turned golden and unreal.
Ahead of him, Monaco stretched toward the horizon, all dark water and scattered points of illumination, the harbor barely moving beneath the night. Lando walked to the stone balustrade and rested both hands against it, breathing deeply as the cold seeped through his palms.
For several seconds he did nothing but listen to the sea.
Then he looked back through the glass.
The ballroom was still full.
Oscar was still inside.
And for the first time all evening, Lando found himself hoping that when he looked again, he wouldn't be alone.
___
The door closed behind him with a soft, heavy click, and for several seconds Lando simply stood there, letting the cold settle over him. It wasn't particularly warm inside, not really, but the difference was immediate enough to make him realize how tightly he'd been holding himself together.
The air outside carried the salt of the Mediterranean, sharp and clean against his face, and somewhere below the terrace the water moved quietly against the harbor walls. He drew a slow breath through his nose and felt it travel all the way down into his lungs, cold enough that it almost hurt. Behind him, the ballroom continued to glow through the glass, all gold light and moving silhouettes, but the sound had been reduced to something distant and indistinct.
The music was still there, the laughter was still there, the conversations about contracts and houses and children and futures were still happening, but they no longer belonged to him. Out here, the night had stripped everything down to its simplest components: dark water, cold stone, wind, light.
He walked toward the balustrade and rested his hands against it, immediately feeling the chill of the stone through his palms. From this height, the harbor looked almost unreal. The yachts sat in their berths like dark shapes decorated with tiny lights, and every reflection trembled whenever the water moved. Somewhere farther out, a boat crossed the harbor slowly enough that Lando could follow it with his eyes, its wake spreading behind it in a pale line before disappearing into the darkness. He watched until it was gone. Then he kept watching the place where it had been, as though expecting something to return.
He had always liked the sea at night. There was something honest about it. Nobody could make it look happier than it was. Nobody could put a filter over the darkness or convince it to sparkle in the right places. It simply existed, moving at its own pace, indifferent to the people on shore and the money in the buildings above it.
Lando envied that.
His phone vibrated in his pocket.
He felt the movement and immediately knew what it would be before he looked. Another message. Another notification. Another reminder that the rest of the world had not stopped simply because he had stepped outside.
He pulled it out anyway.
Nothing important.
He stared at the screen for a moment, then locked it again without replying.
There had been a time when he would have been grateful for the distraction. He used to be good at disappearing into his phone when he didn't want to think, filling every quiet moment with something bright and stupid until the uncomfortable feeling passed. Tonight, though, he didn't want to be distracted. Maybe because he was finally too tired to keep outrunning whatever had been following him.
He put the phone face-down on the stone.
The harbor lights blurred.
He blinked and realized his eyes were watering.
"Brilliant," he muttered.
He laughed once under his breath, but there was no humor in it.
The problem was that he didn't even know exactly what he was upset about. If somebody had asked him inside, he wouldn't have been able to give them a proper answer. He wasn't unhappy with his career. He wasn't unhappy with his friends. He wasn't angry at the people getting married or having children or buying houses. He didn't secretly want someone else's life.
So why did seeing everyone else move forward make him feel as though he were standing still?
Maybe it was because he had spent so long believing his own life would eventually catch up with him.
When he was younger, the future had always felt enormous. There was room for everything in it. There would be time to travel somewhere for no reason, time to fall in love, time to build a house, time to figure out what kind of person he wanted to be when nobody was asking him to drive a car. He had assumed the difficult decisions could wait because there would always be another year in which to make them.
But years had a way of disappearing when you weren't looking.
One season became another, then another, and another. He could remember individual races with painful clarity, the smell of fuel in the garage, the vibration of an engine through the seat, the exact feeling of a steering wheel beneath his gloves, but whole stretches of his life had begun to blur together. Hotel rooms. Airports. Briefings. Flights. Press conferences. Track walks. Sim sessions. Recovery sessions. More airports. More hotel rooms.
Time in Formula One was measured obsessively because that was the only way anyone knew how to make sense of it.
Milliseconds.
Sector splits.
Lap deltas.
Reaction times.
Pit-stop averages.
Everything could be reduced to a number.
Lando had always found comfort in that.
If you lost a tenth, you could find the corner where it happened. If you were slower, there was a reason. If the car wasn't working, engineers could put data in front of you and explain exactly what had gone wrong. You could study it. You could change something. You could go again.
Real life wasn't like that.
There was no telemetry for a year.
No graph showing you where you'd wasted your twenties.
No replay of the moment when your friends had started getting married while you were still telling yourself you'd get around to everything later.
He leaned farther over the railing.
"My boys are getting married," he said quietly.
The words sounded ridiculous outside his head.
He almost laughed again.
But they were true.
People he loved were getting married. People he knew were having children. People he had once thought of as boys, in the same way he thought of himself as one, were becoming husbands and fathers and homeowners. Their lives had somehow developed roots while his still seemed to exist entirely in transit.
And maybe that was what frightened him.
Not getting older.
Not losing his place in the sport.
Not even becoming irrelevant.
It was the possibility that he could spend the next ten years chasing the next thing and wake up one day to discover that he had been waiting for his life to begin the entire time.
He closed his eyes.
The wind moved around him.
*Why am I still waiting?*
He didn't know.
Maybe he was waiting for permission.
Maybe he was waiting to finish racing.
Maybe he was waiting to become someone worth loving.
The last thought made him open his eyes.
He stared down at the water.
That was too dark.
Too honest.
He didn't want to go there.
So he tried to think about racing instead.
It worked for approximately three seconds.
Then he remembered the garage.
Oscar.
The two of them sitting in silence after a race, shoulders almost touching, neither speaking because they were both too exhausted to pretend they weren't.
Lando exhaled slowly.
He hadn't meant to think about him.
That was the problem.
He was thinking about him anyway.
He wondered whether Oscar had noticed him leaving.
Then, immediately, he wondered whether Oscar would follow.
The second thought made his heart beat harder.
"Don't," Lando whispered to himself.
He wasn't sure whether he meant don't hope or don't think.
Probably both.
Behind him, the terrace door opened.
Lando went still.
He didn't turn immediately.
The sound of footsteps crossed the stone, unhurried and familiar. There was no hesitation in them, no uncertainty about where they were going. Lando closed his eyes briefly.
Of course.
Of course it was him.
___
Oscar stopped beside him without saying anything.
For a while, they simply looked out over the harbor.
Lando didn't know whether he was relieved or terrified.
Probably both.
Oscar leaned against the balustrade, leaving just enough space between them that they weren't touching. He had left his drink inside. His hands were bare, and the wind moved his hair slightly across his forehead. Without the noise of the ballroom around him, he seemed different somehow, less like the driver Lando knew from television and more like the person who existed in all those quiet moments nobody else ever saw.
Lando glanced sideways.
Oscar was looking at the water.
"You escaped," he said eventually.
Lando gave a quiet laugh. "Apparently."
"I noticed."
"Thought you might."
Oscar nodded.
Neither of them spoke for a few seconds.
Lando looked down at his hands. "You didn't have to come out."
"I know."
"Then why did you?"
Oscar shrugged.
"You looked like you needed air."
"I was getting air."
"I noticed."
Lando smiled despite himself.
"You're incredibly annoying."
"I've been told."
"By me."
"Mostly."
The smile stayed for another second before fading.
The silence returned.
Lando found that he didn't mind.
That was the thing about Oscar. He didn't come outside and immediately demand an explanation. He didn't ask what had happened or who had said something or whether Lando was angry. He simply stood there as though being beside him was reason enough to be there.
Lando breathed in.
The cold air smelled faintly of salt and rain and Oscar's cologne.
He hated that he noticed that too.
"You okay?" Oscar asked.
Lando stared ahead.
"Yeah."
Oscar waited.
Lando sighed.
"No."
Oscar nodded as though that answer made more sense.
"I thought so."
"Was it that obvious?"
"To me."
Lando looked at him.
There was something unsettling about how simply Oscar said it.
Not *everyone*.
Not *people*.
*Me.*
Lando looked away.
"That's worse."
"Why?"
"Because you know me."
"I would hope so."
"You know what I mean."
Oscar did.
He always did.
For a while, neither spoke. The city below them seemed impossibly far away, even though they could see the lights along the streets and hear the occasional distant sound of traffic. The ballroom behind them had become almost completely silent from this distance, or perhaps Lando had simply stopped paying attention to it.
"Do you ever think about time?" Lando asked.
Oscar turned his head.
"Sometimes."
"No, I mean..." Lando rubbed his thumb against the edge of the stone. "Really think about it."
Oscar considered that.
"Probably."
"Racing makes it weird."
"How?"
"Everything is measured."
Oscar looked back at the harbor.
"Yeah."
"You can lose half a tenth and someone can tell you exactly where you lost it. They can show you the corner. The braking point. The throttle trace. You can watch the lap again and again until you understand exactly where the time disappeared."
Oscar nodded.
"But then you look up," Lando continued, "and somehow you've been doing it for years."
Oscar was quiet.
"That's the strange part," he said eventually. "You don't notice it happening."
Lando looked at him.
Oscar continued, "You notice races. You remember seasons because something happened. A win. A bad weekend. A crash. A championship fight. But the time between those things..." He paused. "It disappears."
"Exactly."
Lando felt something in his chest tighten.
"I feel like everyone else noticed it before I did."
Oscar frowned.
"What?"
"That time was passing."
Oscar turned toward him fully.
Lando kept his eyes on the water.
"I keep looking at people and thinking, *When did that happen?* Someone gets married. Someone has a kid. Someone buys a house. Someone retires. And I'm still..." He stopped.
"Still what?"
Lando laughed quietly.
"Here."
Oscar's expression softened.
"There's nothing wrong with being here."
"I know."
"But?"
Lando swallowed.
"But sometimes it feels like everyone else is moving forward and I missed the part where I was supposed to start."
Oscar didn't answer immediately.
Lando almost wished he would say something stupid. Something reassuring and easy. *You're young. You've got time. Don't worry about it.*
Instead, Oscar looked at him for a long moment and said, "Maybe you're not supposed to start at the same time as everyone else."
Lando looked at him.
"That's annoyingly reasonable."
"I try."
"No, you don't."
Oscar's mouth twitched.
Lando looked back at the harbor.
"I don't even know what I want."
"That's okay."
"Is it?"
"Probably."
"You don't sound convinced."
"I'm not."
Lando laughed, and this time the sound was warmer.
Oscar smiled too.
For a brief moment, the heaviness lifted.
Then Lando looked toward the ballroom and saw the silhouettes moving behind the glass.
"They all look so happy."
Oscar followed his gaze.
"Who?"
"Everyone."
"That's not true."
"I know."
"Then why say it?"
Lando thought about that.
"Because I want it to be."
Oscar was quiet.
Lando stared at the reflection of the ballroom lights on the glass.
"I don't mean their lives. I don't want to steal somebody else's life or anything. I just..." He paused, searching for words that wouldn't make him sound pathetic. "I want to feel like I have somewhere I'm going."
Oscar's voice was soft.
"You do."
"Where?"
Oscar looked at him.
"You're here."
Lando smiled faintly.
"That's not what I mean."
"I know."
The wind moved between them.
Lando shivered.
Oscar noticed immediately.
"You're freezing."
"I'm fine."
"You're shaking."
"That's because I'm very emotionally stable."
Oscar looked at him.
"Clearly."
Lando laughed.
Then Oscar's expression became serious again.
"You don't have to pretend with me."
The words were simple.
They shouldn't have mattered as much as they did.
Lando looked down.
"I know."
"Do you?"
He didn't answer.
Oscar stepped a little closer, not enough to touch him, but enough that Lando became acutely aware of the space between them.
"I know you think you're falling behind," Oscar said. "But you're not."
Lando stared at the water.
"I feel like I am."
"I know."
"And what if I am?"
Oscar took a breath.
"Then you'll figure it out."
"That's your advice?"
"Yes."
"Brilliant."
"You wanted honest."
"I wanted comforting."
"I can lie if you want."
Lando laughed again.
It hurt a little.
That was the strange thing.
The laughter made something behind his ribs ache, because it reminded him that this was what he'd been missing inside. Not a house. Not a wedding. Not necessarily even a relationship.
This.
Someone who knew when to joke.
Someone who knew when not to.
Someone who could stand beside him in the cold without asking him to become less complicated.
Lando turned his head.
Oscar was closer now.
Not much.
Just enough.
The faint warmth of his body seemed almost noticeable against the cold.
Lando looked at his face.
Really looked.
Oscar's expression was calm, but there was something underneath it that Lando couldn't quite read.
Or maybe he could.
Maybe he was simply afraid to.
"Why do you always know?" Lando asked.
Oscar's eyebrows pulled together slightly.
"Know what?"
"When something's wrong."
Oscar considered the question.
"Because I pay attention."
The answer landed harder than Lando expected.
He looked away.
The harbor lights trembled below them.
Somewhere behind the glass, somebody laughed.
Lando breathed in slowly.
For years, he had thought being seen was the frightening part.
He was beginning to understand that maybe it wasn't.
Maybe the frightening part was finding someone who could see him clearly and stay anyway.
___
For a while, Lando couldn't think of anything to say. Oscar's last words had left him strangely defenseless, not because they were particularly profound but because they were so simple, and there was something almost unbearable about being reminded that someone had been paying attention to him all this time.
Lando had spent years assuming that if he became difficult enough to read, loud enough to distract from himself, unpredictable enough that nobody could quite tell when he was serious, then nobody would ever have the opportunity to look too closely. He could turn sadness into a joke before it became sadness, turn fear into irritation, turn uncertainty into another stupid comment for the cameras. It was a system that had worked remarkably well. Until Oscar. Oscar had never seemed particularly impressed by any of it. He had simply watched, remembered, and waited.
Lando rubbed his hands together against the cold and stared at the water. "I don't know what I'm doing," he admitted eventually. The confession was so quiet that he wasn't sure Oscar had heard it, but Oscar didn't ask him to repeat himself. He only shifted slightly closer, enough that the warmth coming from his body became something Lando could feel without having to look.
"With racing?" Oscar asked. Lando shook his head. "Everything." He laughed under his breath, but there was no amusement in it. "That's the stupid part. I know I'm supposed to be happy. I know how lucky I am. I know what people would say if I told them I was standing in Monaco complaining about my life." Oscar looked at him. "You're allowed to be unhappy sometimes." "I know." "You're also allowed to not know what you want." Lando swallowed. "I know." Oscar's mouth tightened. "You keep saying you know." "Because I do." "Then why don't you believe it?"
Lando had no answer. He looked back through the glass doors at the ballroom, where everything was still bright and moving and impossibly far away.
"Because it feels like I'm wasting something," he said. "Time, I guess. My life. Whatever." He paused, searching for the words. "Everyone keeps telling you when you're young that you have time, and you believe them because you don't know any better. Then suddenly you realize they were never promising you anything. They were just saying it because you were young." His voice became quieter. "And now I look around and everyone has done all these things I thought there'd be time for, and I can't even tell whether I want them or whether I just want proof that I'm not falling behind."
Oscar was silent for several seconds. "Behind who?"
"Everyone."
"That's not a person."
"I know."
"Then you can't be behind them."
Lando laughed softly. "You make everything sound so easy."
"I don't think it's easy."
"No?"
"No." Oscar's eyes remained on him. "I just don't think you can win against time."
Something about that made Lando smile, although it hurt.
"That's a terrible thing for a racing driver to say."
"Probably."
"We spend our entire lives trying."
"I know."
The wind lifted the edge of Lando's jacket. He pulled it closer around himself, and Oscar watched him do it. There was a gentleness in his expression that Lando didn't know how to survive.
"I think I'm scared," Lando said.
Oscar didn't move.
"Of what?"
Lando looked down at the harbor.
"Becoming irrelevant."
The word sounded worse aloud.
Oscar's face changed.
"You won't."
"You don't know that."
"I know."
"How?"
"Because you're not only relevant when you're winning."
Lando shook his head. "That's not how it feels."
"I know."
"People forget."
"People forget everyone."
The answer was so matter-of-fact that Lando almost laughed again.
Oscar continued, "That's not the same as not mattering."
Lando went very still.
The harbor lights trembled beneath them.
"Sometimes I think," he said slowly, "that if I stopped racing tomorrow, everything would just keep going."
Oscar looked at him.
"It would."
Lando laughed once, bitterly. "Thanks."
"But you'd keep going too."
The words settled between them.
Lando looked at Oscar properly then.
Oscar wasn't smiling.
There was no joke coming.
No easy reassurance.
Only certainty.
"You think I wouldn't?"
"I think you'd be terrible at it for a while."
Lando laughed despite himself.
"Cheers."
"But you'd figure it out."
"What if I don't?"
Oscar's gaze didn't leave his face.
"Then I'd help you."
Lando's breath caught.
It was such a small sentence.
It shouldn't have done anything to him.
But suddenly every wall he'd spent years building seemed less substantial than he'd thought.
He looked away.
"Don't say things like that."
"Why?"
"Because."
"Because what?"
Lando swallowed.
"Because I'll believe you."
Oscar didn't answer.
Lando closed his eyes.
There it was.
The thing he'd been avoiding all evening, perhaps for much longer than that.
It wasn't the houses.
It wasn't the weddings.
It wasn't even the fear of getting older.
It was this.
Oscar.
The one constant he hadn't known he was depending on.
The one person who had somehow become woven through the years without Lando noticing it happening. He was there in memories Lando hadn't thought about in months, in airport corridors and hotel rooms, in early-morning briefings and late-night conversations, in the quiet after races when everyone else had gone. He was there in the parts of Lando's life that didn't make sense to anyone watching from outside.
Lando had spent the evening looking at everyone else's lives and wondering what was missing from his.
Now, standing beside Oscar in the cold, he was beginning to understand.
Maybe he wasn't missing a house.
Maybe he wasn't missing a wedding.
Maybe he had been standing beside the thing he wanted for years and was only now frightened enough to recognize it.
He looked at Oscar.
Oscar was already looking at him.
Neither of them spoke.
___
The distance between them had become almost impossible to ignore. It was only a few inches, perhaps less, but Lando was suddenly aware of every part of it: the cold air passing through the space, the faint sound of the ballroom behind the glass, the warmth radiating from Oscar's shoulder.
It felt absurd that something so small could hold so much meaning. Lando had spent years sitting beside Oscar in cars, on planes, in garages, in waiting rooms, their knees sometimes touching beneath tables, shoulders brushing in crowded corridors, bodies occupying the same space without either of them thinking twice about it. Yet now that Oscar had moved closer deliberately, the slightest shift in distance felt enormous.
"You should go back inside," Lando said.
Oscar didn't move.
"Do you want me to?"
"No."
The answer came too quickly.
Oscar waited.
Lando looked at him.
"I don't know."
"I know."
"That's not helpful."
"I wasn't trying to be."
Lando smiled faintly, then looked down.
His hands were still cold.
He could feel them trembling.
Oscar noticed.
Of course he did.
Slowly, deliberately, he reached toward him.
Lando went still.
Oscar's fingers touched the side of his neck.
The warmth was immediate.
It shouldn't have been.
It was only a hand.
A palm against cold skin.
But Lando felt the contact everywhere.
His breath caught, his entire body suddenly becoming painfully aware of itself. Oscar's hand rested lightly against his neck, thumb near his jaw, not pulling him anywhere, not demanding anything. Just there.
Present.
Real.
Lando stared at him.
Oscar's expression had changed.
There was uncertainty now.
Not fear, exactly.
Something more vulnerable.
A question.
Lando could have stepped away.
He didn't.
Instead, almost without realizing it, he leaned into the warmth.
The movement was tiny.
But Oscar felt it.
His thumb shifted gently along Lando's jaw.
Lando closed his eyes.
And suddenly all the noise disappeared.
There was no ballroom.
No Monaco.
No next season.
No championship.
No younger drivers waiting to replace them.
No clocks.
No telemetry.
No years disappearing behind them.
There was only Oscar's hand against his skin and the cold air around them and the terrifying realization that Lando had spent so much time trying not to need anyone that he had somehow failed to notice he already did.
He opened his eyes.
Oscar was closer.
Their faces were only inches apart.
"Lando," Oscar said quietly.
The sound of his name nearly broke something open.
Lando swallowed.
"Yeah?"
Oscar didn't answer immediately.
His gaze moved over Lando's face, searching for something.
Permission, perhaps.
Lando didn't know how to give it without saying the words.
So he stayed.
That was enough.
Oscar leaned in slowly.
There was still time to stop.
Lando knew that.
That was what made it unbearable.
He had spent his whole life making decisions in fractions of seconds. Brake now. Go now. Don't lift. Commit. Trust the car. Trust yourself.
This felt nothing like that.
This felt like stepping off the edge of something with no data to tell him what would happen when he landed.
His eyes closed.
Oscar's forehead almost touched his.
Lando's breath shook.
And the thought came with such sudden clarity that he almost laughed at himself.
*Wait.*
*This is gonna kill me.*
Not because it would hurt.
Because it wouldn't.
Because letting this happen would mean letting somebody matter.
It would mean there was finally something outside racing that could reach him. Something he couldn't measure, couldn't optimize, couldn't control by studying the data afterward. If Oscar kissed him, there would be no returning to the comfortable ambiguity they'd lived in for years. Every glance would mean something. Every touch would become a memory. Every ordinary moment they'd shared would rearrange itself in retrospect, revealing a meaning Lando wasn't sure he was prepared to confront.
Oscar's hand remained against his neck.
Warm.
Steady.
Waiting.
Lando opened his eyes.
"You know," he whispered, "this is probably a terrible idea."
Oscar's mouth curved slightly.
"Probably."
"You're supposed to talk me out of it."
"I don't think you want me to."
Lando stared at him.
He hated how well Oscar knew him.
He loved it too.
That was the problem.
He leaned forward.
Their lips met.
The kiss was soft enough that for one impossible second Lando thought he might have imagined it. There was no urgency at first, no desperation, just the strange tenderness of something finally happening after years of almosts and maybes and moments neither of them had allowed themselves to examine too closely. Oscar's hand remained against his neck, thumb resting beneath his jaw, and Lando felt himself exhale into the kiss as though he'd been holding that breath for years.
Then the reality of it reached him.
Oscar.
Kissing him.
Here.
Now.
The future suddenly felt enormous.
Lando pulled back only slightly, their foreheads touching, his breath unsteady.
Oscar didn't move away.
Neither did he.
For once, Lando didn't need to know what came next.
The sea moved below them.
The lights trembled across the harbor.
Behind the glass, the party continued, unaware that the entire shape of Lando's world had shifted by something smaller than a second.
There was no telemetry for this.
No number.
No measurement that could tell him whether he'd made the right decision.
Only Oscar's hand against his skin and the warmth of his breath and the quiet certainty that, whatever happened next, he would never again be able to pretend that this didn't matter.
Lando closed his eyes.
For the first time all night, he stopped trying to outrun time.
He let it pass.
He let the moment exist.
And when Oscar's fingers tightened gently against the back of his neck, Lando leaned closer.
___
For a while after the kiss, neither of them moved.
It was almost strange how little the world seemed to care. Somewhere inside the ballroom, somebody laughed loudly enough that the sound carried through the glass, followed by the muted clink of glasses and the soft rise and fall of conversation.
A waiter crossed the room carrying another tray of champagne. Someone posed for a photograph beneath the chandelier.
The music continued as though nothing had happened, as though the universe had not just tilted slightly on its axis and left Lando standing on a cold terrace in Monaco with Oscar's hand still resting against the side of his neck.
Lando couldn't look at him.
He stared instead at the harbor, at the yachts and their scattered lights, at the black water stretching beyond them. His breathing had finally slowed, but his heart hadn't received the message.
It was beating hard enough that he could feel it beneath his ribs, each pulse carrying the same impossible thought through him again and again: *You kissed him. You kissed Oscar.*
There was no way to put the moment back where it had been. No amount of pretending, no joke clever enough, no casual shrug could turn it into something else. The years behind them had changed shape. Every memory seemed suddenly illuminated from a different angle, as if somebody had switched on a light in a room Lando had spent years walking through in the dark.
Oscar's hand slipped from his neck.
The loss of warmth was immediate.
Lando hated how much he noticed.
"You okay?" Oscar asked.
Lando gave a breathless laugh.
"No."
Oscar was quiet.
Lando finally looked at him.
Oscar seemed just as affected as he was, though in the restrained way Lando had come to expect from him. There was color high on his cheeks from the cold, or perhaps from something else. His eyes remained fixed on Lando with an openness that made Lando's chest hurt.
"I'm sorry," Lando said.
Oscar's expression changed.
"For what?"
"I don't know."
"You don't have to be sorry."
"I know."
"You keep saying that."
Lando looked down.
"Because I don't know what else to say."
Oscar stepped closer again, but this time he didn't touch him.
"You don't have to say anything."
That almost made Lando cry.
It was ridiculous. He had survived crashes. He had stood on podiums with millions of people watching. He had sat in press conferences after losing races he thought he should have won and answered the same questions over and over while cameras flashed in his face.
He had learned how to keep his expression neutral when he was furious, how to laugh when he was exhausted, how to walk away from disappointment without letting anyone see how deeply it had cut.
But Oscar telling him he didn't have to say anything nearly broke him.
Lando looked away quickly.
"I spent so long thinking something was wrong with me."
Oscar didn't interrupt.
"I thought I was behind."
His voice had become quieter.
"I'd see everyone doing all these things and I'd think, *What's wrong with me? Why don't I want the same things? Why haven't I figured it out?* And then I'd feel guilty because I have everything I'm supposed to want. I have the career. I have the money. I have people who care about me. I get to wake up and drive a Formula One car for a living, and somehow I can still come back to a hotel room and feel completely..." He stopped.
"Empty?" Oscar supplied gently.
Lando nodded.
"Yeah."
The word seemed to hang in the cold air.
"I thought maybe I was just broken."
Oscar's brow furrowed.
"You're not broken."
"I know that now."
Oscar looked at him.
"Do you?"
Lando's eyes filled before he could stop them.
He laughed softly, embarrassed by the tears. "Fuck."
Oscar moved closer.
Lando shook his head.
"Don't."
Oscar stopped.
Lando wiped beneath one eye with the heel of his hand.
"Don't be nice to me right now."
"Why?"
"Because I'll cry."
"You already are."
"Exactly."
Oscar's mouth twitched, but he didn't laugh.
Lando took a shaky breath.
"I hate this."
"What?"
"Being seen."
Oscar's expression softened.
"I know."
"No, you don't." Lando looked at him. "I mean really seen. I don't know how to do this."
"Do what?"
"Need someone."
The admission left him almost breathless.
There it was.
The thing beneath everything else.
The thing he had been circling all night without having the courage to name.
"I don't know how to need someone without being terrified that I'm going to lose them."
Oscar didn't answer immediately.
Then he said, "You can't guarantee you won't lose someone."
Lando's face crumpled slightly.
"That's not what I wanted you to say."
"I know."
"I wanted you to tell me you won't leave."
Oscar looked at him for a long moment.
"I can't promise that."
Lando nodded, staring at the ground.
"I know."
"But I can promise that I'm here now."
Lando closed his eyes.
That was somehow worse.
Because it was honest.
There were no grand declarations in it. No promise that they would somehow outrun everything that scared him. No guarantee that racing wouldn't pull them apart, that careers wouldn't change, that time wouldn't eventually take something from them.
Just *I'm here now.*
Lando breathed in.
For years, he had wanted certainty.
He had wanted contracts that lasted long enough, cars that were fast enough, people who stayed, futures that could be planned. He had wanted proof that the things he loved would remain exactly where he'd left them.
But nothing worked that way.
Not racing.
Not people.
Not life.
Maybe the only thing you could do was be there while something was happening and let it matter.
Lando opened his eyes.
Oscar was still there.
He looked at him and suddenly felt the full weight of everything they had been to each other without either of them ever saying it aloud.
The late nights.
The bad races.
The flights.
The stupid jokes.
The silence.
The victories that felt better because the other person understood exactly what they had cost.
The losses that were somehow easier because there was someone beside you who didn't need an explanation.
All those years.
All that time.
And Lando had been so afraid of time passing that he hadn't realized how much of his life had been filled with Oscar.
"You know what's fucked up?" he whispered.
Oscar waited.
"I think you're the only part of my life that never felt temporary."
Oscar's face changed.
Lando swallowed hard.
"I don't mean that in a weird way."
"You can."
"No, I..." He laughed shakily. "I don't know how to say this."
"Try."
Lando looked at him.
"I spent all night thinking about everyone moving forward. About people getting married and having kids and buying houses and becoming different versions of themselves. I kept thinking I was standing still because I didn't have any of that."
He paused.
"But I do."
Oscar said nothing.
Lando's eyes filled again.
"I have you."
The silence afterward was enormous.
Oscar looked down for a second, then back at him.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "You do."
That was it.
Two words.
And Lando couldn't hold himself together anymore.
He covered his face with both hands, laughing once through the tears because the whole thing was so painfully embarrassing. Oscar stepped closer, and this time Lando didn't tell him not to. He felt Oscar's arms come around him, tentative at first, giving him every opportunity to pull away.
He didn't.
Instead, Lando folded into him.
The warmth was immediate.
Oscar's jacket was cold from the night air, but underneath it he was warm, solid, real. Lando pressed his face against his shoulder and breathed him in, and for the first time in hours he didn't feel like he had to keep himself upright.
His hands curled into the back of Oscar's jacket.
"I'm scared," he whispered.
"I know."
"What if this ruins everything?"
Oscar's arms tightened around him.
"Then we'll figure it out."
"What if it changes everything?"
"It already has."
Lando laughed weakly against his shoulder.
"You're really bad at making me feel better."
"I'm trying."
"I know."
They stayed like that for a while.
The ballroom continued behind them, but neither seemed to hear it anymore.
Lando thought about all the times he'd been afraid of change. How he'd spent years treating it like something that happened *to* him rather than something he could choose. A new teammate. A new car. A new season. A new expectation. He'd learned to adapt because he had to, but emotionally he had remained somewhere much younger, convinced that if he kept everything moving quickly enough, nothing could catch him.
Tonight, something had caught him.
And it wasn't time.
It was Oscar.
Lando pulled back enough to look at him.
"I don't want this to be another thing that disappears."
Oscar's gaze softened.
"It won't disappear tonight."
Lando smiled through the tears.
"That's very specific."
"I'm trying not to make promises I can't keep."
That hurt.
But it was the good kind of hurt.
The honest kind.
Lando nodded.
"Okay."
Oscar lifted a hand and gently wiped the remaining tear from beneath Lando's eye.
The gesture was so tender that Lando nearly broke again.
Instead, he leaned into it.
His eyes closed.
For once, he wasn't thinking about tomorrow.
He wasn't thinking about next season or the next race or the younger drivers waiting somewhere behind them, or how many years they had left, or what would happen when the engines finally stopped.
He wasn't trying to calculate anything.
He wasn't measuring the moment.
He was simply there.
With Oscar.
And maybe that was the thing he'd been missing all along, not a destination, not a perfect future, not some carefully constructed life that proved he hadn't wasted his time.
Just a person who made the present feel worth staying inside.
Oscar's forehead rested against his.
"Lando?"
"Yeah?"
"Come back inside with me."
Lando glanced through the glass at the ballroom.
For the first time, it didn't look quite so frightening.
He looked back at Oscar.
"Do I have to?"
"No."
"Can we stay out here?"
Oscar smiled.
"For a bit."
Lando nodded.
They turned toward the harbor again, standing close enough now that their shoulders touched.
Below them, the water moved without hurry.
The lights reflected across its surface, breaking apart and coming together again with every small movement of the tide.
Lando watched them for a long time.
He had spent his entire life being taught that every second mattered, that there was always another fraction to find, another gap to close, another tenth waiting somewhere just beyond his reach.
But standing there, with Oscar beside him and the cold night wrapped around them, he finally understood something the stopwatch had never been able to teach him.
Not every moment was something to win.
Some were simply meant to be lived.
And for tonight, that was enough.