Work Text:
Something was up with Oscar. Besides the obvious, obviously. It couldn’t be much fun going from championship frontrunner to having commentators pick apart his driving like they’d never missed an apex in their lives, all in the space of a few races. Brutal, really. But no. This was something else.
Oscar kept his emotions locked up tight, probably filed alphabetically somewhere behind all that dry humour and quiet observation. Even with his season beginning to take a fairly spectacular wrong turn, he’d mostly just gone quieter over the last few races. Very Oscar. Very healthy, no doubt. But now something had shifted. Lando clocked it the second they sat down for the latest round of mandatory social media nonsense.
After Mexico City, Oscar had looked withdrawn, almost resigned. In São Paulo, he turned up calm. Not normal calm, either; Oscar calm, somehow calmer, which was frankly suspicious. It sat wrong with Lando.
He really shouldn’t care this much about Oscar’s mood. Oscar was his friend, yes, and his teammate, and Lando did care about him, annoyingly. But he was also a competitor and, until a few races ago, the main obstacle between Lando and the championship. Concern was all very noble. It was also terrible race strategy.
He should absolutely drop it. Max was breathing down his neck, which was very on-brand for Max, and Oscar’s recent run of disasters hadn’t put him safely out of contention. Not even close. So yes, Lando needed to focus on himself. He was only one point ahead of Oscar in the championship, which was basically loads if you didn’t understand numbers.
And he would. Right after he worked out what was going on with Oscar. Priorities.
Had Oscar always checked his phone like that? Half turned away from the room, one shoulder angled in, screen tucked out of sight? His thumb moved once across the glass before his fingers tightened around it. No. Oscar was private, certainly, but not secretive. There was a difference.
“Everything okay, Osc?” Lando asked, shifting forward before he could stop himself. His voice came out far too pointed. Brilliant. Subtle as a front-wing failure. He made himself lean back, drumming two fingers against his knee like this was casual and Oscar wasn’t being interrogated.
Oscar looked slightly startled, his shoulders drawing in before he caught himself. “Yeah,” he said, shoving his phone into his shorts and refocusing on the room with all the natural ease of someone who definitely wasn’t hiding anything. He rubbed his palm once against his thigh. “Everything’s good.”
Lando was just about to pry a little more, surreptitiously, obviously—when admin interrupted.
“We’re ready to start filming, guys!”
Lando spent the next thirty minutes, or however long it was; time moved differently during social content. Half engaged and half watching Oscar, who had once again arranged his face into something completely normal. Suspiciously normal.
Filming wrapped, and before Lando could do anything useful, like continue his completely reasonable surveillance of Oscar, some engineers commandeered him to go over data. It wasn’t even Friday yet. Bit keen. Still, duty called. So did the championship, rather more loudly. He let himself be hauled into an office and deposited in front of a screen.
By the time he resurfaced, Oscar had vanished.
At first, Lando resolved to let it go. He needed to let it go. He rolled his shoulders, flexed his fingers, and pointed himself firmly towards literally anything else. Oscar was clearly fine, suspicious Zen routine notwithstanding. There was no reason for Lando to be this preoccupied with his teammate’s mysterious behaviour. None. His foot tapped against the floor. Very convincing.
Fine. He would focus on himself and what he needed to do to finally win the whole thing. He could be extremely mature about this. Admirable, even.
And he would… right after he found Oscar.
Lando checked the usual places with what he considered excellent discretion, and anyone else might have called suspicious lurking. He shoved his hands into his pockets whenever anyone looked his way, then took them out again when standing still became impossible. Nothing. Asking around was out; people talked, and Lando and Oscar generally knew where to find each other. Admitting he didn’t would only feed the murmurs about trouble between them, and that particular fire had enough fuel already. His jaw tightened. Luckily, a staff member chatting with one of Oscar’s engineers saved him from choosing between subtlety and answers.
“…Yeah, he headed out a little while ago,” the man said. “Didn’t say where. He’s already done most of his media duties for the day.” He paused. “Looked like he was heading towards the loo, maybe.”
Lando moved before he could think better of it, which was probably just as well. The loo wasn’t far, only past a couple of the other teams’ hospitality suites.
Only Oscar wasn’t there either. Lando checked twice, as if Oscar might somehow have appeared beside a sink in the three seconds since he’d last looked. Nothing. Of course. That would have been far too easy.
Maybe he’d stopped to see another driver on the way back. Entirely possible. Probably harmless. Between McLaren and the loo were Red Bull and Ferrari, which should have narrowed things down. Instead, it left Lando staring at two closed hospitality doors and the unpleasant sense that he was already a step behind.
Oscar wouldn’t have gone to Red Bull. Terrible optics, for one thing, and surely even Oscar had limits. But Lando had never known him to be particularly close with Charles or Lewis, either. Well, Charles had adopted him, so maybe they were close. Perhaps Yuki. Definitely not Max. Lando refused to entertain that level of betrayal, mostly because the thought arrived with an irritating little twist in his gut.
He’d just resolved to head back to McLaren and wait for Oscar there, sensible at last, when Oscar’s voice cut through the corridor behind him. Lando’s heel stopped halfway through a turn. Close enough to lock his shoulders in place. He couldn’t make out the words, only the unmistakable cadence and the fact that it was getting nearer. The back of his neck prickled.
Behind him. Getting closer. Shit. In seconds, Oscar would round the corner and find Lando lurking outside rival hospitality like a man with no dignity and an even worse explanation. Footsteps carried along the corridor. Lando grabbed the nearest handle and slipped through the door, easing it shut behind him. A driver’s room, and judging by the frankly aggressive amount of red, one of Ferrari’s.
He closed his eyes for one useless second. Brilliant. Now he only had to avoid Oscar outside and Charles, or worse, Lewis, inside. Because standing uninvited in one of the few places a driver could reasonably expect privacy was famously easy to explain.
He waited. One second. Two. The voice outside faded, then the footsteps with it. Oscar had surely passed by now. Lando could slip out, return to McLaren, and let the entire humiliating episode die quietly. His hand was already reaching for the door. God, he really should have let this go.
The handle moved beneath his fingers. Lando jerked back. A shadow cut across the gap under the door as it began to open. He had half a second, less, to choose between being caught and making this significantly worse. Instinct chose for him. He bolted for the bathroom.
He slipped inside just before the outer door swung open. The bathroom latch clicked—far too loud in the sudden quiet. Lando held still, one hand clamped over his mouth, and forced his breathing down as footsteps crossed the room beyond. They stopped. For one dreadful second, there was nothing. Then Lewis spoke, his familiar dulcet tones carrying clearly through the door.
Lando caught only the tail end of a question. Lewis’s voice dropped too low for him to make out the words, and the silence that followed stretched just long enough for Lando to notice every stupidly loud beat of his own pulse. Then someone answered, close enough that the voice carried cleanly through the bathroom door.
“No. Not really.”
Oscar.
Lando went very still. Confusion hit first, chased by the ugly certainty that he’d missed something important. Oscar and Lewis weren’t close. At least, Lando didn’t think they were, but very few people on the grid could honestly claim they were close to Lewis. George included, no matter what his spreadsheets said. Lando pressed his lips together, listening for the next word through the door.
No, Oscar visiting Lewis wasn’t strange. It was Thursday, media day. They had gaps in their schedules, and drivers occasionally spoke without press officers, cameras, or a contractual obligation to look delighted about it. Rare, perhaps. Not unheard of. Lando leaned closer before he caught himself and froze. The bathroom was silent. If either of them stopped talking, they might hear him breathe.
Oh.
Now he understood. Or thought he did. Lewis’s first year at Ferrari hadn’t gone the way he, or most of the planet, had expected. Oscar had found someone to talk to. Someone who understood what it was like when a season went sideways in public, and everyone suddenly developed expert opinions about your life. The explanation settled into place neatly. Too neatly, maybe. All that suspicion, all that lurking, and the answer was apparently an older driver offering advice and a bit of time. Horribly reasonable. Lando waited for the relief to follow.
His shoulders eased by a fraction. His pulse didn’t. A shoe scraped against the floor outside, close enough to make him pull back from the door. He was still hiding in Lewis Hamilton’s bathroom, listening to a conversation he had no business hearing, one careless movement away from an explanation that would ruin several people’s day. But at least Oscar wasn’t in trouble. Probably.
Then a small, sharp bolt of jealousy went through him, quick enough to feel like a warning. Irritating. Lewis had always been kind to Lando, always supportive, but Lando couldn’t say they’d ever had proper one-on-one time. Not like this. Beyond the door, the voices dipped again, leaving him with the sudden, unwelcome sense that whatever came next might prove his tidy little explanation completely wrong.
The couch gave a soft creak. A beat later came the muffled thump of someone dropping onto it, close enough that Lando felt the vibration through the soles of his shoes. He pictured Oscar folding himself into the cushions, all long limbs and lowered guard, which was profoundly unhelpful. Then Lewis laughed—that warm, unmistakable laugh, softened by the wall between them. The sound cut off too quickly.
“Tired?” Lewis teased.
A sigh, drawn out and close. “Very much so. Media day is a lot.” Lewis didn’t answer. Maybe he’d nodded. Maybe he’d done something else entirely. The not knowing scraped at Lando’s nerves. He shifted his weight; blunt fingernails bit into his palm beneath his tightening grip. He needed to see them. Not because he was suspicious, obviously. Sight would simply settle the suspicions he absolutely did not have before his imagination made things worse.
Suspicions? He pulled back so quickly his shoulder brushed the wall. The sound was tiny. In the silence, it might as well have been a crash. Lando froze, jaw locked, waiting for the conversation outside to stop. It didn’t. There was literally nothing happening except two drivers talking. He made himself unclench his hand and breathe through his nose, slow enough not to be heard.
Still.
He lasted perhaps two seconds before the quiet pulled him back. He leaned in until his ear touched the door, careful this time, every muscle held rigid. Excellent restraint. He’d missed part of the conversation, and the missing words had already begun arranging themselves into possibilities he didn’t like.
“…another time, then,” Oscar was saying. His voice lifted at the end, but only slightly, question, suggestion, challenge. Lando couldn’t tell, and the distinction suddenly felt important.
“No,” Lewis replied, too quickly. “I have a family thing next weekend, and Vegas is…” The sentence thinned into nothing.
Silence pressed against the door. Lando held his breath without meaning to. A pulse beat hard in his throat. Somewhere beyond the wall, fabric whispered, then stopped.
Impatience crawled under Lando’s skin and settled somewhere less comfortable. Again, none of what he’d heard was out of the ordinary, per se. Plans. Schedules. Two people failing to finish sentences. Perfectly normal. He pressed his tongue to the back of his teeth. So why did the quiet on the other side of the door feel less like a pause and more like a decision?
“Come here,” Oscar said.
Lando forgot to breathe. He’d never heard Oscar sound like that—low and quiet, not quite a demand but close enough that the difference hardly mattered. Something in Lando’s chest pulled taut. Heat climbed the back of his neck while the rest of him went cold. He frowned at the door as if it had personally arranged this.
Lewis huffed surprise, amusement, or protest, impossible to tell. The couch creaked again. Fabric dragged softly against fabric, followed by two measured footsteps and then nothing. Lando leaned into the door until the edge pressed painfully into his cheek. A second passed. Lewis laughed, quieter this time, the sound breaking off on an exhale. Lando’s stomach tightened. What the hell was going on? And, more importantly, who designed a bathroom door this offensively solid?
Maybe he could open it. Just a crack. Barely a crime, really.
No. Opening the door was a bad idea. A terrible idea. Easily top ten, and Lando had a competitive field.
Slowly, painfully slowly, Lando turned the handle. When had he put his hand there? Irrelevant. His palm was damp, his fingers too tight around the metal, and the door had begun to move before common sense could file a formal objection.
“How much time do we have?” Oscar asked, still in that low register, Lando had apparently gone his entire life without hearing. His fingers stopped. The door held against the latch. Lando listened.
Lewis hummed. More fabric shifted. Lando pictured him checking his watch, because that was the sensible explanation and he was suddenly very invested in sensible explanations. “Not much,” Lewis said. “Maybe fifteen minutes. Less, probably.”
Oscar made a quiet sound in reply, then said something too low for Lando to catch. Lewis laughed again. There it was, that sharp bolt of jealousy, immediate and absurd. Worse, Lando wasn’t entirely sure which of them he envied. Or why. Excellent. Very normal problem to develop while hiding in a bathroom.
Silence. Then a soft sigh and another whisper of fabric. Lando pushed. The latch gave with a tiny click that cracked through the room like a gunshot. His heart lurched hard enough to hurt. He froze, hand locked around the handle, waiting for footsteps—for the door to be ripped open, for Oscar to say his name. Nothing came. No movement. No voices. Somehow, that was worse.
He pushed again, millimetre by millimetre, until a thin blade of light opened between the door and the frame. At first, all he could see was the far end of the cramped driver’s room. Empty carpet. The corner of a table. Nothing useful.
Any farther and the door would announce him to the room, so this pathetic sliver of visibility would have to do. Lando shifted by a fraction, careful not to let the hinge breathe. The angle changed.
Lewis and Oscar came into view, seated on the couch as if this were a perfectly ordinary Thursday and not the final stage of Lando’s self-inflicted psychological collapse.
Well, no, Oscar was seated in the middle of the small loveseat, relaxed at ease. And Lewis. Lewis was straddling him.
Lando blinked, shifted forward, and the door slid open just a touch more. He wasn’t sure what was happening here. Why was Lewis sitting on Oscar, and why was Oscar letting him?
From the couch came more movement, and Lando refocused, thoughts still tangled. Confusion swirled within him. Oscar had tilted forward and was pressing lingering kisses into Lewis’s neck. Lewis' face was tipped up towards the ceiling, eyes closed. Oscar’s hands were underneath Lewis’s shirt, circling his slim waist. Lewis’s hands clasped into Oscar’s hair.
His brain still could not make sense of what he was seeing. Oscar and Lewis were kissing? Making out, he corrected himself, absently. And clearly, they had done this before. Maybe, it certainly seemed to be the case
No, that couldn’t be right.
He stepped back, blinked once, twice, three times, and then leaned in again.
Oh god, his teammate was moving steadily to third base with Lewis Hamilton, and he was trapped in a bathroom while they did, entirely unaware that a third driver had appointed himself the world’s least dignified surveillance operation. Panic went through him, immediate and wildly unhelpful. Every muscle tightened around the same clear instruction: leave. Now.
Reality, tedious as ever, intervened. He couldn’t leave while they were on the couch unless he fancied strolling out with a cheerful explanation for why he’d been hiding beside Lewis’s toiletries. He would have to wait. Lando closed his eyes as if in prayer and pressed his tongue to the back of his teeth. More shuffling came from the room. Of course, there did.
He could not help but look again. Lewis had removed his shirt. Smooth, toned, tattooed skin was all Lando could see. And as usual, it was something to see. Oscar, who had leaned back to watch Lewis take off his shirt, leaned forward and bit into his collarbone. Hard. Lando winced as Lewis merely inhaled sharply before moaning quietly.
Oscar shushed him before soothing over the bite with his warm, clever tongue.
“No marks,” Lewis chastised, his hands had returned to Oscar’s hair. In response, Oscar laughed into bruised skin before moving to add an identical mark on the opposite side. Lewis opened his eyes, rolled them, and pulled Oscar away from his chest to look him in the eye.
“No. Marks.” He repeated. Oscar grinned at him and caught Lewis’s mouth in another bruising kiss. Lando had never seen him look at anyone that way. He was learning a lot about Oscar today. Too much.
On the couch, Oscar’s mouth had returned to Lewis’s neck. His hands traced their way around the tops of Lewis’s trousers. When he went to open them, Lewis’s hand caught his.
“We don’t have time.” He murmured. “Not today,” Pressing kisses to the backs of Oscar’s hands, to his fingertips, as if in apology. From where he was pressed against the small opening in the door, Lando closed his eyes once more. That confirmed it; this was not the first time the two had met, this was not a one-off, and Lando had no idea what to do with that knowledge.
Oscar scoffed. “We can be quick.” Lando went still. Apparently, Oscar contained multitudes, several of which Lando had neither known about nor requested access to. Shouldn’t know about, a small, increasingly ignored part of him supplied.
In response, Lewis leaned forward and pressed his lips to Oscar’s before opening his mouth to trace closed lips. Oscar opened his own to allow entry, and the protestation was forgotten.
A phone buzzed from the corner, small and sudden in the quiet. Lando flinched hard enough to resent the device personally. Lewis glanced towards it, then at his watch, and something in his expression shifted.
“I have to go,” he said quietly. He made no move to retrieve his phone or his shirt. Of course, he didn’t. Apparently, even leaving required a dramatic pause now.
Oscar watched him for a beat, face unreadable. Then he nodded once, slow and calm. Too calm, Lando thought, pressing closer to the door before catching himself. There it was again—that unnerving stillness Oscar had been wearing all day, only now Lando knew the cause.
Lewis stood, leaned down to grab his shirt, and slipped it on. Oscar followed a beat later, smoothing a hand over the front of his shirt with slow, deliberate care. Lando tracked them through the narrow gap. His calf had begun to cramp, but shifting even an inch risked the hinge answering for him. He stayed perfectly still.
“Vegas won’t work, but what about Qatar or Abu Dhabi?” Oscar asked. Casual words. Careful voice. As if he weren’t quietly rearranging the final weeks of a championship campaign around Lewis’s calendar. As if Lando weren’t holding himself rigid on the other side of a door, waiting for the answer.
Lewis studied him. One second passed. Then another. Not awkward silence, either. Thoughtful silence, the sort where an answer was being chosen rather than found. Somehow worse. Lando’s shoulders crept higher, every nerve tuned to the space between them.
“You’ll be busy trying to win it all, Oscar,” Lewis said softly. A reminder, technically. It landed more like a warning.
Oscar frowned, as if this were a scheduling conflict rather than the championship. “Maybe, but I won’t be too busy for you.” No hesitation. No joke to soften it. Lando’s jaw tightened before he could stop it, and the ache in his calf vanished beneath something sharper. Fantastic. Oscar had discovered scheduling priorities and conviction.
Lewis said nothing. His expression softened by a fraction, then settled into something Lando couldn’t read through the sliver of open door. The silence stretched. Lando pressed his tongue to the back of his teeth and waited for Lewis to answer, reject it, laugh—anything. More importantly, he wondered why the absence of an answer felt worse than any of those options. When Lewis finally spoke, his voice dropped too low for Lando to catch, and the conversation dissolved into murmurs he couldn’t decipher.
They left a few minutes later, voices lowered as they moved into the corridor. Making plans to meet again, probably, Lando thought, with a viciousness that felt both unfair and entirely deserved. Their footsteps receded. The outer door clicked shut. He stayed frozen in the bathroom, staring at the narrow strip of carpet beyond the door while the silence thickened around him. One second. Two. He waited for one of them to come back. Nothing. Then reality shoved its way back in. He needed to move. He needed to get to McLaren before someone noticed both of its drivers had vanished and formed a search party.
He remained exactly where he was. Brilliant plan. Very proactive. The tiled room seemed to contract around him, each quiet second insisting this was real. This was big, catastrophically, life-rearrangingly big, and he couldn’t tell anyone. He couldn’t even ask Oscar a careless question without risking the whole truth spilling out. Worse, he could never confront him about what he’d seen without explaining how he’d seen it, which meant confessing to several crimes against privacy and common sense. His stomach turned.
A laugh escaped him before he could stop it, half hysterical and half bitter. It struck the tiled walls and came back wrong. Lando clamped his mouth shut, suddenly certain someone in the corridor had heard. He listened. Nothing. Well. At least the mystery was solved. He knew why Oscar had seemed so calm lately, why he sometimes angled his phone away with all the subtlety of someone definitely not hiding anything. Fantastic. Answers, it turned out, were overrated. This one felt less like information and more like a live grenade he’d somehow swallowed.
He needed to leave. Now. Lando eased the bathroom door open and stopped at the first murmur from the corridor. A voice passed. Footsteps followed, slowed outside the room, then moved on. Only then did he slip out, every movement wound too tight. He pointedly refused to look at the couch and crossed Lewis’s room at something just short of a sprint. At the outer door, his hand slipped once on the handle. Excellent. His body had chosen now to forget basic machinery. The corridor beyond was empty. He went. Ferrari blurred into McLaren in flashes of red, white, and startled faces he didn’t stop to identify, his jaw clenched and his hands curling into fists whenever anyone came too close.
Somehow, he managed not to make it to his own driver’s room and not slam his door. Barely. The latch caught behind him, and Lando stood with his back pressed to it, listening for footsteps that had no reason to follow. His hands were shaking. Annoying. He made straight for the bathroom, braced both palms on the sink, and dragged in one slow breath after another. The room kept tilting anyway. Eventually, he turned on the tap and splashed cold water over his face. It did absolutely nothing. Heat still burned under his skin—anger, jealousy, something else he had no intention of naming—while his heart refused to understand that he was no longer about to be caught.
Lando stared at himself in the small mirror. Wet face. Wet hair, several strands plastered to his forehead like they’d given up before he had. His skin was flushed, his eyes too wide. He looked as though he’d just finished a race, overheated, exhausted, and faintly shell-shocked, except there was no trophy waiting outside. Just Oscar. Brilliant. Just Oscar and Lewis. Just Oscar and Lewis and the secret rendezvous they had apparently been having for God knows how long.
He needed to forget it. What he’d seen. The closeness of it. The quiet intimacy. Most of all, the sharp, confused envy still lodged beneath his ribs. He lowered his head until the cool edge of the mirror touched his forehead. He could take the whole thing, lock it somewhere deep, and never touch it again. Easy. People did that all the time and turned out brilliantly.
He watched determination arrange his face into something usable: jaw set, mouth flattened, eyes narrowed until they looked focused rather than mildly haunted. There. Better. He had a championship to win. Whatever he’d just witnessed changed absolutely nothing about that reality, apart from apparently changing several things he was refusing to examine.
He drew in another breath, rolled his shoulders back, and peeled his hands from the sink. His palms left damp prints behind. He wiped them on his trousers, squared himself in the mirror, and gave one firm nod. Convincing enough from a distance. Then he left the bathroom.
They had one final meeting before the day mercifully ended. Lando contributed when required, nodded in roughly the correct places, and retained none of it. His knee bounced under the table until he pinned it still with one hand. Afterward, he and Oscar headed out together. Lando kept his gaze fixed ahead and his arms loose at his sides with deliberate care. Oscar said nothing, but Lando could feel his attention like a hand between his shoulder blades.
“Everything okay?” Oscar asked. Lando’s stride hitched. The question landed between them, an echo of Lando’s from that morning, now returned with interest.
Lando stopped. Oscar stopped with him. For one dangerous second, Lewis’s bathroom flashed behind Lando’s eyes: the narrow gap in the door, the couch, what he now knew about his teammate. The corridor seemed to narrow around them. Then came the knot of emotions waiting just outside naming distance. Finally, mercifully, the championship cut through the noise. Lando swallowed and fitted a smile into place, feeling it pull too tightly at the corners of his mouth.
“Everything’s great.”