Work Text:
The leak started as a tick, then a tap. Then a steady, insolent drip into the middle of Oscar’s carpet.
“Mate, I’m so sorry,” the night manager had said, palms up, remorseful. “Maintenance can’t get it sorted till morning, and we’re fully booked with the race this weekend. We can comp another hotel-”
“It’s midnight, and quali tomorrow,” Oscar said, soft. “I’ll figure it out.”
Lando
Fuck sake.
Got a water leak.
Might have to get a taxi to another hotel.
Sent 00:08
jus cmere mate
got a queen bed
u ain’t going out at this hour
Delivered 00:09
Oh, hello.
What are you doing awake?
Sent 00:09
Meh
just can’t sleep
And y do u still txt like a grandad
Delivered 00:10
I don’t?
Sent 00:10
whatever u say osc
anyways u comin then?
Delivered 00:10
Are you sure?
Sent 00:11
Yess
bring ur toothbrush and ur tragic pj shorts
Delivered 00:11
Five minutes later, Lando opened his door in a washed, too-soft T-shirt that Oscar absolutely did not notice in detail. “Room’s yours,” he said, stepping aside. “Well, half of it.”
It was a simple, lived-in space: a huge bed, a nightstand either side with a single lamp, his team kit draped over the chair, and two identical bottles of hotel water sweating on the desk.
They moved around each other easily - phones on charge, lanyards unhooked, a brief tug-of-war over the single good outlet that ended with Lando producing a multi-adapter like a magician.
“Of course you travel with this,” Oscar said, plugging in.
“Preparedness is sexy,” Lando deadpanned.
“It’s… something,” Oscar said, aiming for light and landing somewhere closer to fond.
They brushed teeth shoulder to shoulder, trading the mirror with small wordless gestures, the kind of domestic choreography that pretends it’s nothing so it doesn’t have to be a conversation.
“Thanks,” Oscar said at the sink, washing his face. His reflection looked more nervous than he felt. “For the rescue.”
“Anytime,” Lando replied, hip leaned to the doorframe, smile easy. “Consider it my civic duty.”
Back in the room, Lando flicked the lamp to low. The rain outside found the window, soft and steady, like someone drumming fingers on the glass.
“Alarm for seven?” He asked, already sliding under the duvet.
“Ten past,” Oscar bargained, crawling onto his side of the bed. “We’re not saving the world before coffee.”
“Neither of us even drink coffee, mate,” he replied.
“Okay, then we’ll still save the world but slower,” Oscar said, and Lando’s laugh - quiet, unguarded - shivered over the dark like a spark.
They lay there a while, talking about nothing - the new corner kerb that was eating tyres, the old physio who swore by eucalyptus oil, the hotel gym’s doomed rowing machine.
The unspoken thing between them hummed like a low current, but for once it didn’t scare Oscar. It just… warmed.
He could feel Lando’s presence the way you can feel the sun behind your eyelids: not a picture, just a certainty.
They did the careful dance of two people pretending this wasn’t intimate: fighting for the covers, comparing tragic pyjama shorts (Lando’s were worse - tiny lobsters), arguing quietly about the aircon setting.
Banter smoothed the edges.
Eventually, they killed the big light and the room fell into a settled hush: rain whispering the window, the aircon a steady hush.
One bed, a shared duvet. A neat strip of bedding between them. No problem at all.
Oscar lay still and watched the ceiling go soft and blue.
Night, Osc,” Lando murmured.
“Night, Lan.”
Oscar turned onto his side and let the rain count him down. Sleep came in slow swells.
And then-
The room had gone that soft hotel blue where edges blur and time slides. Rain continued to tick against the window, and the AC hummed a steady line.
Across the small gulf between their beds, Lando’s breathing had settled into the even, unselfconscious cadence of deep sleep.
Oscar changed position onto his back and told himself to sleep too.
He didn’t.
The night had that stretched-silk quiet where every thought shows its face.
He tried counting backwards from a hundred, tried timing his breath to the air vent. He tried not to remember the way Lando’s laugh had cracked open an hour earlier and lit the room in a way no lamp could.
He drifted, surfaced, drifted - until a sound threaded the dark and caught him.
Not a word. A breath, caught and let go. Then another.
He turned his head before he could talk himself out of it.
Lando was facing him.
One hand loose on the sheet, lashes dark on his cheek. The line of his mouth was soft, unguarded - so rarely visible in daylight that it felt like something Oscar shouldn’t be allowed to see.
Lando’s hips were moving in the smallest tide against the mattress, as if a dream had tugged a rhythm out of him and left him at its mercy.
Oscar’s first reaction was instinct and training.
Look away
Give privacy
Pretend you were never here.
He stared up at the ceiling, jaw tight, and tried to be a good man in the abstract.
But the next breath Lando let go shivered and found Oscar where he was, as if it knew him. Heat flickered low and honest in his groin.
Oscar swallowed, throat dry.
Don’t move, he told himself. You can be a saint for thirty seconds.
Lando shifted, slow and thoughtless, and the bedframe creaked in a way that pulled at something old in Oscar - the part of him that had spent months noticing the shape of Lando’s hands on a steering wheel, the tired smiles, the quiet competence, the stupidly tender way he folded his laundry like it might be watching.
Longing didn’t arrive as a crash; it rose like tidewater.
He rolled onto his side to face away - give the man a break - only to end up presenting the back of his thigh to a warmth that followed him like a tether.
The touch was nearly nothing: the press of Lando’s knee, accidental, sleep-loose. Oscar went very still.
Heat gathered where they met, then spread. His body knew the language before his mind did.
Lando let out a small, desperate noise as he pushed his hips into the mattress, and Oscar felt ashamed as his cock swelled in his shorts.
He could move an inch, he thought. Just one.
An inch wasn’t a betrayal; it was… an acknowledgement.
He turned on his back, let his legs push toward’s Lando’s side of the room.
The contact aligned.
Lando’s breath caught, a small grunt escaping his throat. The tide in his hips changed, steadied, answered as the outline of his cock pressed against the side of Oscar’s leg.
Then, the sound that followed was small and ruinously sincere.
Heat shot to Oscar’s dick, and his hand instantly reached down to palm himself.
His heart slammed into his ribs with a physical joy that startled him - something equal parts relief and oh.
You can stop, he told himself, even as his muscles were already tightening and his cock throbbing. You can still stop.
He didn’t.
He eased his thigh up again, careful, offering rather than asking, and felt Lando follow with a slow, helpless gratitude that poured into him like heat through a window.
It wasn’t about friction, not really. It was about proximity, the old ache of being wanted back, even accidentally. The room telescoped to two breaths, two heartbeats, and the hush of cotton.
Oscar’s hand - traitor, friend, both - edged across the mattress toward the border between their beds, then stopped.
His fingers curled against the sheet. If he reached, it would be too much. If he did nothing, he might shatter from the effort of holding still.
Lando made another sound, faint and broken-open, and that was what undid him.
Oscar shifted to the other side of the bed to give Lando a better angle, then set his thigh deliberately - offering a surface, a way through.
No going back now. No playing it off.
But it felt too good.
The rhythm found them, slow and clumsy in the way that means it’s real. Oscar’s pulse moved from his throat to his hips; he swallowed around it and let himself feel instead of argue.
Lando makes another small noise, keening, and a hand shoots out to grip Oscar’s shirt.
Oscar feels himself leak into his boxers, and he grips the head of his cock tight as his stomach coils.
The want was clean. It didn’t ask him to pretend. It only asked him to be here.
There was a moment - a bright, shocking instant - when the thought rose, just say something. But talk would have made it daytime.
Oscar’s breath took on a shape that matched Lando’s. Heat gathered, brightening, a curve toward something inevitable.
His whole body felt like it had confessed. He could smell Lando; soap, clean cotton, the warm neutral scent of him that Oscar could have found in a dark room with his eyes closed.
Then, through the rain and the hum and the pulse, his name.
“Mmph- Osc…”
It landed like contact.
He turned his head just as Lando body tensed against him - taut like a cable - then trembled, sound breaking into the space between them, small and unspeakably tender.
He went still.
The quiet after wasn’t empty; it was crowded with breath and awareness, with the fact of what had happened and how much of it had been choice.
Oscar’s hand squeezed his cock once more before pulling it away, waiting for the panic.
Lando’s eyes opened, dark and wide in the blue.
There was a moment of quiet, but then he must’ve felt the stickiness in his pants; his hips flushed against Oscar’s thigh.
Realisation lit across his face like lightning through cloud - followed immediately by the kind of apology that runs bone-deep.
“Oh- God.” His hand lifted and hovered, then retreated as if he didn’t trust it. “Oscar, I… I’m sorry. I was asleep, I didn’t- I wouldn’t-”
Lando pushed away from him, scurrying to sit against the headboard.
“Hey,” Oscar said, following suit and turning towards Lando.
His voice was low and steady. “I know. You were asleep.”
“I didn’t mean to put you-” Lando stopped, shook his head, breathing too fast. “I’m mortified.”
Oscar could have let him drown in that. He didn’t.
He turned his palm up on the sheet between them, a small invitation. “Look at me.”
Lando did. The shame in his eyes made something protective and fierce flare in Oscar.
“It wasn’t just you,” Oscar said, honest to the point of trembling.
He shifted his hips the smallest fraction - enough that the truth of his own arousal was not theoretical. “I’m okay. More than okay.”
Lando looked down at where the covers pooled, noticing Oscar’s dick straining against the fabric still.
He froze, as if the night needed new instructions. “Are you-? I mean- Are you sure?”
This was the hinge.
Oscar met him there.
He slid his own hand across the border at last, found Lando’s wrist where it hovered, and eased it down - slow, plain, stoppable at any second - until warm fingers cupped him through thin cotton.
The relief that shuddered out of him made him lightheaded.
“I’m sure,” he said, breath catching on the word. “Only if you want.”
Lando’s breath hitched - want written clear - and his hand shaped to Oscar with a care that felt like reverence.
The first gentle pressure knocked a sound out of Oscar chest he didn’t know he’d been carrying. He arched a little into it, not chasing so much as answering.
“There?” Lando murmured, voice ruined-soft.
“Yeah,” Oscar breathed, the syllable a thread that held.
What happened next didn’t need choreography.
Lando kept it unhurried, tuned to every tiny shift in Oscar’s breath, the way his hips asked for a fraction more, then less.
His hand squeezed Oscar through his boxers, causing a gasp to slip from his mouth. Then, his fingers just barely brushed the soft skin of his navel, before it snaked beneath his waistband.
Oscar let his eyes close, lip between his teeth and rode the narrow wave between wanting and being wanted, the kind where you notice the ridiculous details - the quiet rasp of fabric, the rain ticking time, the way Lando’s thumb rubbed over his slit and adjusted without being told.
Heat built like sunrise instead of lightning.
Lando’s hand found its rhythm - gathering wetness at the tip and spreading it along the length, his fist twisting at the right moment.
The world narrowed to the slide of skin through fabric, the careful pressure, the way Lando’s forehead tipped against his temple as if to lend him steadiness.
Oscar’s focus tunneled: the quiet drag of air through his lungs, the faint creak of the mattress, Lando murmuring “you’re alright, mate. I’ve got you”.
The familiar feeling gathered low and slow, coiling tight.
He tried to keep still and failed, hips stuttering, a helpless sound catching in his throat. Lando kissed the corner of his jaw, then the line beneath his ear, and the room tilted warmer.
Oscar’s fingers clutched at Lando’s shirt, breath fraying into short, broken pieces as the rhythm built - patient, then certain.
“Lando,” he gasped, the name wrecked and honest.
“I know,” Lando said, barely more than a breath. “Let go.”
The pressure crested; Oscar went weightless for a second, then came apart with a quiet, shuddering exhale, head tipping back into the pillow as his release covered his lower stomach and his teammate’s hand.
Aftershocks ran through him in small, stunned waves.
Lando stayed with him, touch easing, palm flattening over Oscar’s sternum to anchor him back into his own skin.
When Oscar blinked up, Lando was already there, eyes soft in the dim. “Hi,” he said, a crooked, disbelieving smile in his voice.
“Hi,” Oscar echoed, dizzy and a little dazed.
Lando leaned in.
The hand moved from Oscar’s chest to cup his jaw and then their lips met.
The kiss was slow, deep and grateful, nothing to prove - just the sweetness of finally being allowed to mean it.
Oscar made a small noise and chased it, hand finding Lando’s shoulder, the other curling at his waist to pull him closer.
Time stretched.
The city beyond the curtains could have been a rumour.
They broke for air with foreheads touching, their breaths tangling.
Lando brushed a thumb along Oscar’s cheekbone, affection bright and unhidden.
“Okay?” he asked, still checking.
“Yeah,” Oscar said, voice rough with happiness. “God- yeah.”
Lando smiled into the dark, “Good.” Then, “I should apologise again,” he continued, habit tugging at him.
“Don’t,” Oscar said, and the steadiness in his own voice surprised him. “We both just got each other off.”
That undid Lando more than any argument could have.
They moved through the small practicalities with a gentleness that felt like holy ground: tissues, a damp towel, the lamp still low.
No hurry or fumbling to erase what happened.
Their hands were careful, eyes soft. They changed for fresh shirts and had a shared, breathless laugh when Oscar tossed Lando a packet of hotel biscuits as if to reset the universe’s balance sheet.
They settled back in bed together, facing each other.
Lando let his fingers rest in the gap between them. Oscar turned his palm up again until their fingertips met and matched; the lightest contact, enough.
“We’ll talk in the morning,” Oscar murmured, sleep finally folding itself around the edges of him.
“Yeah.” Lando agreed. “Well, technically-”
“Shut. Up.”
Lando sniggered.
Outside, the rain kept stitching the night together. Inside, the hum of the vent, the ghost-warmth of Lando’s hand, the steadying thump of Oscar’s pulse - all of it arranged itself into a shape that could hold him.
He breathed, letting the moment be both simple and enormous. He let himself want without bracing for regret.
Sleep came like tide, at last, and when it took him, it took him easy.
~~~
Morning arrived in soft stripes through the curtains, the rain traded for a washed, quiet light.
Oscar drifted up slow.
For a moment he didn’t move, cataloguing: the smell of hotel soap, the press of the mattress, the echo of last night in his chest like a secret that had decided to live there.
Lando’s alarm buzzed once, then died. A rustle, then a half-muttered curse at the snooze button.
Oscar smiled into his pillow before he could stop himself.
The room was all gentle gold and hotel hush.
He realised now that there was an additional warmth pressing against him.
He cracked an eye open.
Lando’s front was pressed against his side, soft breath against his shoulder with an arm slung across Oscar’s stomach.
The compromising position sent both a nervous jolt to his stomach, and his cock to kick at the thought of last night. He let himself calm for a moment.
It lasted thirty seconds.
Calm wasn’t in Lando’s hardware. His leg started twitching and his fingers started tapping against Oscar’s navel.
Oscar made a low, sleep-rough sound, face still buried in the pillow. “You’re thinking way too fucking loud, Lan,” he mumbled, voice like gravel and sunrise.
Lando stilled. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to-”
“Mm.” Oscar closed his eyes again. “You’re like a bee. Just buzzing all the time.”
“No ’m not.” Lando whispered.
“Y’are. Your brain is leaking onto me.” Oscar attempted to roll over, but failed because Lando was like a rock and refused to move.
He let out a smal noise of frustration.
“You’re so grumpy,” Lando said, not even pretending he wasn’t smiling.
“It’s the morning,” came the reply. “And I can’t move currently.”
Lando scoffed and rolled away from him.
Oscar turned to his side, observing Lando who was staring up at the ceiling, hands resting on his abdomen.
Lando’s hair was a mess in his eyes, his jaw was firm, and his nipples were hard through his shirt from the breeze of the aircon.
It made certain thoughts flood into Oscar’s head, and he pushed them away as far as he could mentally throw them.
“Should we get up?” Lando asked.
A small noise, then, “ten minutes.”
“Deal.”
They lay like that for a while. Listening to the city wake up outside, the light getting brighter outside. The quiet got bigger.
When fifteen minutes passed, Oscar blinked awake properly.
They did the slow morning things; checking their socials, catching up on messages.
The kind of quiet that felt like belonging.
Lando clears his throat. “We’ve got third practice at two and some media before that; I was thinking breakfast downstairs - unless you want room service?”
“Yeah. Room service, mate. The quiet option sounds good.” Oscar meet his gaze on purpose. “Thanks.”
They talked nonsense for a while - traffic, the weather, a meme Lando saw, followed by a video.
It’s easy, familiar.
It buys them the space to breathe.
And then the conversation thins, like the tide going out; the moment drifted.
Lando’s shoulders tense. “About… you know. Last night.”
Oscar’s eyes steadied on him. No flinch, no bail-out. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s… talk.”
The words bottlenecked in Lando’s chest for a second. He almost made a joke. He didn’t.
Silence, but not a bad one. He looks at his hands, and flexes them once like he’s weighing something invisible.
“I owe you a proper apology,” Lando says finally.
He’s careful with the words, precise. “I’ve… I’ve been white-knuckling it a bit. Cut the drinking. Cut the… you know.” A quick grimace, honest and embarrassed.
“Trying to keep the championship clean in my head. And I thought I was fine, and I am but- but the the body says otherwise, apparently.”
He glances up to see if Oscar’s laughing at him. He’s not. If anything, the honesty lands in his chest and sits there, warm.
“I didn’t mean to make things weird,” he adds quietly. “Didn’t mean to make you responsible for any of it.”
“You didn’t,” Oscar say, immediate. “You didn’t put anything on me.” Lando looks away, a tiny, crooked smile adorning his features. “And for what it’s worth… I liked that you said my name.”
Lando’s face dropped.
“Wait- you what? Are you taking the piss?”
A beat.
“Nope. You uh… called my name when you were um… dreaming.” Oscar replied.
The noise Lando let out was that of great embarrassment, hands reaching to cover his face.
“Fuuuck. I’m sorry, mate. I didn’t mean it.” Is all he can come out with.
He sobers again, thumb worrying a loose thread on the duvet. “It’s just… I’ve been saying “no” to everything. Parties, distractions, chaos. Head down. And I like the focus. I do. But it just gets a bit difficult y’know?”
Oscar know the feeling more than he wanted to admit. “Yeah, but you don’t need to pretend it’s fine all the time.”
“I know,” he says, and his voice dips, sincere. “Especially not with you.”
For a second, neither of them breathe. The room tilts into that edge where the next thing could change everything.
“Can we talk about… the rest of it then?” Oscar ask, soft. “Not the championship. Us.”
He nods. It’s tiny, but it’s relief. “We can.”
Oscar shifts closer, not touching, just near enough to count freckles.
“I want to be careful with you,” Oscar says. “And I want you to be careful with me.”
He takes a breath. “Last night… I wasn’t scared, Lan. I just didn’t want to make it a joke and move on like it was nothing. ‘Cause you kissed me. And that wasn’t nothing to me.”
Another beat.
“Me neither.” Lando swallows, and Oscar raises his eyebrow in confusion. “Okay, I lied, before. I did mean it. Even if I was asleep I- fuck. I really like you, Osc.”
The heat in my chest slides lower. “Okay,” Oscar says. “Then let’s not pretend it was nothing.”
Lando’s mouth twitches - the start of a smile, the start of bravery.
He leans in a fraction, stops. “If we’re doing this,” he murmurs, “I need to say it out loud so I don’t make it a sprint. I’m… wound tight, yeah. But I want slow. I want-” he laughs at himself, helpless, “-to actually feel the end of the season and not bulldoze it. Including you.”
“You’re allowed to want me and still want to win,” Oscar says. “Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“Tell that to Twitter,” Lando deadpans, and Oscar snorts in response.
“Tell me” Oscar counters.
He does. Not with a speech, but with honesty that stings in the best way.
“I want you,” Lando says, simple. “Have for a while. And I’m… unbelievably pent up and trying not to be an idiot about it.”
It shouldn’t make Oscar’s pulse jump the way it does, but it does.
He lets his hand drift, just enough to rest on Lando’s chest through his shirt, right over his heartbeat. It stutters, then steadies under his palm.
Lando looks at him like he just finished a race in one lap.
“Okay,” Oscar whispers. “Then start with this.”
He rubs slow circles with his thumb, feeling him shiver. His breath leaves him in a sound Oscar wants to replay.
“Can I kiss you?” Oscar asks suddenly, the question catching on a smile.
“Please.”
He kisses Lando hard. Lando kisses back like he meant every word about ‘slow’.
Warm, careful pressure; the kind of kiss that makes the world get wider instead of smaller. When they part, he’s close enough that Oscar could count the flecks in his eyes.
“Better?” he murmurs.
“A bit,” Lando says, and then, because honesty is a door once you open it, “A lot.”
They don’t rush. No fireworks, no sprint.
“I’m not asking you to be my therapist,” Lando rushes, half-teasing to soften the truth, “but I am asking if we can do this on purpose. Not as an accident. Not because a season or even one night made everything weird.”
“On purpose,” Oscar echoes. “Fuck, you have no idea how long I’ve wanted this.”
Lando exhales - one of those long, unclenching breaths - and leans back into the headboard, eyes bright in the morning light. “Let’s order then?” he asks. “Then the paddock, then quali.”
“And then?”
“And then whatever we want,” he says, mouth curving. “Carefully.”
They get up because they had to, brushing teeth shoulder-to-shoulder, bumping hips by accident and then on purpose.
At the door, after breakfast, when they’re dressed and ready and before they leave for the circuit, Lando hesitates and looks at him properly.
“One more?” he asks, and he doesn’t mean a slice of toast.
Oscar steps into him. Lando kisses him again, and this time his hands are sliding up Oscar’s chest, making him shudder.
They break before it runs away with them. They’re both flushed, grinning, a little dazed.
“Later,” Oscar says, and he nods like a promise. “Besides, I recall it being a certain someone’s birthday last week which I need to make up for.”
”Oh yeah? The cake and video at MTC not enough for you?” Lando says, a knowing smile on his face.
“Yeah,” Oscar breathes, pecking his lips once more. “I need to give you a proper celebration that involves a lot less clothing.”
“Hmm, okay. Later then,” Lando repeats, his small smile turning to a large grin.
They step into the corridor like normal people.
They absolutely were not normal people, but they could pretend until they were away from the cameras.
The elevator dings; Lando’s bumps Oscar’s shoulder with his.
Oscar checks for cameras before stealing another kiss, leaving him breathless by the ground floor.
Lando was already counting the hours until the day was over.