Chapter Text
The first time Oscar Piastri walked into the McLaren Technology Centre as their reserve driver, Lando Norris was arguing with a vending machine.
"Come on, you absolute—" Lando kicked the base gently, then harder. "It took my money. It literally just ate two quid."
Oscar stood in the doorway of the break room, kit bag still slung over his shoulder, watching this unfold with something between amusement and secondhand embarrassment. The Lando Norris—McLaren's golden boy, their future, their investment—was currently engaged in what appeared to be a losing battle with automated snack distribution.
"Have you tried—" Oscar started.
Lando spun around, eyes wide. For a moment, they just looked at each other. Oscar had seen Lando plenty of times before, of course—on screens, in press conferences, from the paddock during his Alpine junior days. But this was different. This was close. This was real in a way pixels had never been.
"Tried what?" Lando asked, recovering first. He was shorter than Oscar expected, more compact, but there was an energy to him that seemed to fill the space beyond his physical presence.
"Shaking it," Oscar said, stepping forward. "Not kicking. Shaking."
He set his bag down and approached the vending machine with the kind of calm deliberation that would, over the coming months, become intimately familiar to Lando. Oscar gripped the sides of the machine and gave it a firm, controlled shake. The motion was precise, economical. Nothing happened for a second, then two—and then a packet of crisps tumbled into the collection slot.
"Huh," Lando said, crouching down to retrieve them. He held them up like a trophy. "Salt and vinegar. Wasn't even what I paid for, but I'll take it." He straightened and extended the packet toward Oscar. "Want to split them? Seems only fair, since you did the actual work."
Oscar hesitated. There was something in Lando's expression—open, genuinely friendly, with an undercurrent of loneliness that Oscar recognized because he'd felt it himself more times than he could count. The life of a racing driver was full of people and empty of connection. Everyone wanted something from you. Everyone was watching, measuring, calculating your value.
"Sure," Oscar said.
They sat at one of the small tables, the packet between them, and talked. Or rather, Lando talked and Oscar listened, occasionally offering a comment that made Lando laugh or lean forward with interest. They talked about racing, obviously—about how Oscar's season was going in F2, about Lando's hopes for the upcoming year, about the pressure of being young in a sport that demanded you be perfect immediately.
"It's weird, isn't it?" Lando said at one point, his fingers fidgeting with the edge of the crisp packet. "Everyone acts like we should just know how to handle all of this. The media, the fans, the politics. Like driving fast is only half of it, and the other half is this performance you have to give all the time."
"Yeah," Oscar said quietly. "It's exhausting."
Lando looked at him then, really looked at him, and something passed between them. A recognition. A understanding that went beyond words.
"I think we're going to be friends," Lando said.
Oscar felt something warm unfurl in his chest. "Yeah," he agreed. "I think so too."
-
The friendship developed quickly, with the intensity that comes from proximity and shared purpose. Oscar was at the MTC constantly—simulator work, meetings, training sessions. He was being groomed for a seat, everyone knew it, and Lando seemed genuinely happy to have him around rather than threatened.
They fell into routines. Late-night simulator sessions when the facility was mostly empty, just the two of them and the hum of machines. Coffee runs before dawn training sessions. Quiet dinners after long days when they were both too tired to socialize with anyone else but not tired enough to want to be alone.
"You're good at this," Lando told him one night. They were three hours into a sim session, running setup variations for a track Lando would race in a few weeks. "The calm thing. The steady thing. I'm always all over the place, and you're just... there."
Oscar glanced over from his position behind Lando's rig. "Is that a compliment?"
"Yeah." Lando's eyes didn't leave the screen as he took a virtual corner. "Yeah, it is. You're like..." He paused, clearly searching for words. "You're like the eye of the storm or something. Everything's chaos, and then there's you, just solid."
Oscar didn't know what to say to that. The warmth in his chest was back, spreading through his limbs. "You're not all over the place," he offered. "You're focused. Passionate. There's a difference."
"Carlos used to say that," Lando said, and there was something in his voice—a note of loss, of missing. "That the fire was good, as long as I didn't let it burn me."
"Smart guy."
"Yeah." Lando completed his lap and pulled into the virtual pits. He turned in his seat to face Oscar fully. "But he's gone now. Moved on. That's how it works, right? Everyone moves on eventually."
There was a question in there somewhere, one Oscar didn't quite know how to answer. So instead, he said, "I'm not planning on going anywhere."
Lando smiled, but it was smaller than his usual grins, more private. "Good."
-
The first time Oscar saw Lando after a truly bad race—a DNF caused by a mechanical failure that wasn't his fault but felt like one anyway—was also the first time he saw behind the performance Lando had mentioned. They were in Barcelona, and Oscar had been at the track as reserve, watching from the garage as Lando's race had ended in a cloud of smoke and radio silence.
Afterward, in the paddock, Lando had smiled for the cameras, made jokes in the media pen, patted his mechanics on the back and told them it wasn't their fault, these things happen. Oscar had watched it all, seeing the cracks in the facade that no one else seemed to notice.
Later, much later, when the paddock had mostly cleared and Oscar was back at the hotel, staring at the ceiling of his room and trying to decide if texting Lando would be intrusive or kind, there was a knock at his door.
Lando stood in the hallway, still in team gear, hair damp from a shower. He looked exhausted.
"Hey," Lando said.
"Hey," Oscar replied.
"Can I—" Lando gestured vaguely. "Can I come in? I just... I don't want to be alone right now, and everyone else either wants to solve the problem or tell me it's fine, and I can't handle either of those things at the moment."
Oscar stepped aside. Lando entered the room and immediately sat on the edge of Oscar's bed, elbows on his knees, head in his hands.
"It's so stupid," Lando said, voice muffled. "It wasn't even my fault. I know that. But it feels like—like I should have been able to do something, you know? Like if I were better, faster, smarter, I could have felt something was wrong earlier or pushed less hard or pushed harder or—" He broke off, frustrated.
Oscar sat down next to him, close but not touching. "You did everything right."
"Did I?"
"Yes."
Lando lifted his head to look at Oscar. In the dim light of the hotel room, his eyes were darker than usual, stormy. "How do you know?"
"Because I watched every lap," Oscar said simply. "You were perfect. Sometimes perfect isn't enough. That's not your fault."
Something in Lando's expression crumbled. Not dramatically—he didn't cry or break down. But his shoulders sagged, and he leaned slightly toward Oscar, like a plant bending toward light.
"Thanks," Lando said quietly.
They sat there for a long time, not saying much. Oscar put on some mindless Netflix show, and they watched it without really watching it. Lando eventually stretched out on top of the covers, and Oscar grabbed the spare blanket from the closet to drape over him. At some point, Oscar dozed off in the chair by the desk.
When he woke up in the early morning, Lando was gone. There was a text on his phone: Thanks for last night. You're a good friend.
Oscar stared at the message for a long time, trying to identify the odd feeling in his stomach. It felt like disappointment, but he didn't understand why. Friend was good. Friend was what they were.
He told himself that firmly.
He almost believed it.
-
The end of the 2022 season brought changes. Daniel Ricciardo's departure was announced, and while no one said it officially, everyone knew: Oscar was getting the seat for 2023. He would be Lando's teammate.
The announcement, when it came, was surreal. Oscar had worked toward this his entire life, but now that it was real, he felt oddly detached from the moment. He did the interviews, smiled for the photos, said all the right things about what an honor it was and how much he was looking forward to working with Lando.
Lando, for his part, was enthusiastic in public and something more complicated in private.
"It's going to be weird," Lando said. They were at MTC, in one of the small meeting rooms, ostensibly discussing Oscar's transition into the race seat but mostly just talking. "Good weird. But weird. We're going to be competing against each other now."
"We already were," Oscar pointed out. "Just in different series."
"Yeah, but now it's direct. Now there's team orders and points and all that political bullshit." Lando was fidgeting with a pen, clicking it repeatedly. "I don't want it to change things. Between us."
"It won't," Oscar said, with more confidence than he felt.
Lando looked at him searchingly. "Promise?"
"Promise."
It was a promise neither of them could keep, but in that moment, they both believed it.
-
The 2023 season began with hope and ended with complications.
Oscar's first race as a McLaren driver was everything he'd dreamed of and nothing like he'd expected. The speed, the pressure, the sheer intensity of it all—he'd been prepared for that. What he hadn't been prepared for was how it would feel to be Lando's teammate in a way that mattered, to have their names linked together constantly, to have every performance compared.
But beyond the professional complications, there was something else developing. Something neither of them acknowledged but both of them felt.
It started small. A hand on the shoulder that lingered too long. Eye contact across a crowded garage that felt too intense. The way Lando sought Oscar out after every session, every race, every moment of triumph or disappointment.
"You're my person now," Lando said one night, drunk on champagne after a double podium in Monaco. They were on the balcony of some sponsor party, the Mediterranean spread out before them like a postcard. "Like, Carlos was my person, and now he's not, and you are. Is that okay?"
Oscar, slightly less drunk but still buzzing, felt that warmth again. It had become familiar now, that feeling. He knew it was dangerous but couldn't seem to care. "Yeah," he said. "That's okay."
Lando grinned and slung an arm around Oscar's shoulders, pulling him close. They stood like that for a while, looking out at the water, and Oscar tried not to think about how right it felt.
-
The first time they kissed was in Hungary.
It was after a difficult race—mid-summer heat, high tensions, a strategy call that had worked for Lando but cost Oscar several positions. There had been radio messages that were maybe a bit too sharp, team orders that felt too obvious, and afterward, a distance between them that Oscar hated.
He found Lando in his hotel room that night. Or rather, Lando found him. Oscar still wasn't sure who had knocked on whose door first; they'd been texting, dancing around the issue, both of them too stubborn to apologize for things that weren't really their fault.
When Lando opened his door and saw Oscar standing there, something in his expression shifted from guarded to grateful.
"I hate when we fight," Lando said immediately.
"We didn't fight," Oscar replied, stepping inside. "The team fought us."
"Feels the same." Lando closed the door and leaned against it. "I don't like when you're mad at me."
"I'm not mad at you."
"You looked mad. In the garage. You looked at me like—" Lando broke off, frustrated with himself. "I don't know. Like I'd disappointed you."
Oscar moved closer without really deciding to. "You didn't disappoint me. You drove brilliantly. That's not on you."
"Then why did it feel so shit?" Lando's voice cracked slightly. "Why did seeing you upset make me feel worse than losing the positions in the first place?"
The question hung between them, heavy with implications neither of them were quite ready to voice. Oscar was close enough now to see the flecks of gold in Lando's green eyes, close enough to count the freckles that the sun had brought out across his nose.
"Lando," Oscar said quietly.
"Yeah?"
"I think we have a problem."
"Yeah," Lando agreed. "I think we do."
Oscar didn't remember deciding to close the distance. He just remembered the moment before—the wanting, the certainty that this was a mistake, the complete inability to care—and then Lando's lips on his, soft and warm and tasting faintly of mint toothpaste.
Lando made a small sound, something between surprise and relief, and then he was kissing back, hands coming up to grip the front of Oscar's shirt. It wasn't frantic or wild; it was slow, exploratory, devastating in its gentleness.
When they finally pulled apart, both breathing harder, Lando's eyes were wide.
"Fuck," Lando whispered.
"Yeah," Oscar agreed.
"We can't—" Lando started.
"I know."
"This is such a bad idea."
"I know."
Lando laughed, but it was shaky. "So what do we do?"
Oscar should have said they should forget it happened. Should have said they needed to maintain professionalism, protect their careers, protect themselves. Should have said a lot of things.
Instead, he said, "I don't know."
And then he kissed Lando again.