(Always) Pointing North

by rafalclrc

Summary:

Oscar gives Lando a compass for his fifteenth birthday. The needle always finds North. Oscar spends the next decade pretending he doesn't know what that means.

Notes:

is it legal to write a 27k words piece and call it an oneshot?

September 2013

Tuesdays were, as a general rule, entirely useless.

They lacked the miserable, shocking adjustment of a Monday, but they were miles away from the saving grace of a Friday. For a twelve-year-old Lando Norris, a Tuesday in mid-September was simply a beige block of time to be endured. It was the second week of Year Nine, the new-school-year novelty had already thoroughly worn off, and the damp, grey London weather had settled in with a grim finality, turning the school playing fields into a muddy swamp.

Lando was sitting in morning registration, tilted dangerously far back on the two hind legs of his plastic chair. He was surrounded by the familiar, chaotic noise of his own orbit. Felix was arguing loudly with Max about a FIFA penalty that had allegedly occurred the night before, while a crumpled ball of lined paper flew over Lando’s head, lobbed by someone two rows back. The classroom smelled of cheap aerosol deodorant, damp wool jumpers, and the harsh, chemical scent of whiteboard markers.

Lando was right in the middle of it all, exactly where he always was. He was loud, he was comfortable, and his uniform was already a disaster — tie pulled loose, top button undone, the cuffs of his grey jumper pushed up to his elbows. He was half-listening to Felix, half-trying to balance a ruler on the end of his index finger, entirely at ease in a world he had already conquered.

Then, the classroom door opened.

The heavy oak door swung inward, squeaking loudly on its hinges, and the low roar of thirty kids abruptly died down. Mr. Harrison, their form tutor, stepped in, looking as exhausted as he always did, clutching a battered clipboard.

But it wasn't Mr. Harrison that made Lando stop trying to balance his ruler.

Walking half a step behind the teacher was a boy. He was tall for his age, but he held himself as though he was actively trying to take up as little space as possible. He wore the standard school uniform — charcoal trousers, white shirt, maroon tie — but on him, it looked painfully crisp, as if it had been taken out of the cellophane wrapper that very morning. His dark hair was neat, brushed flat across his forehead, and his expression was entirely blank.

But the thing Lando noticed first, the detail that his brain immediately caught and filed away into some deep, unrecognized corner, was how the boy was holding his bag. It was a standard, dark blue rucksack, but he wasn't slinging it over one shoulder like everyone else in Year Nine. He was holding it by the top loop with both hands, gripping it right in front of his chest. Like a shield. Like he was bracing for an impact.

"Right, settle down, everyone. Shut it, Felix, or you're sitting at the front for the rest of the term," Mr. Harrison barked, waving his clipboard vaguely at the class. The remaining chatter snuffed out. "We have a new addition to the form today. He's transferred over from Australia, so I expect you all to be reasonably helpful and not your usual feral selves." Mr. Harrison turned to the boy. "Go on, introduce yourself."

The boy didn't shift his weight. He didn't look at the floor, either. He looked straight out at the rows of desks, his dark eyes scanning the room with a calm, analytical precision that felt entirely out of place on a kid’s face.

"I'm Oscar Piastri," he said.

His voice was quiet, but it carried perfectly. The accent was thick, distinctly Melbourne, drawing out the vowels, but there was no nervous waver in it. He just stated his name like a hard fact and then stopped speaking. He didn't offer a fun fact. He didn't fidget. He just stood there, holding his bag with both hands, waiting for the next instruction.

Lando decided he was interesting immediately.

He didn't know why, not really. Lando operated purely on instinct and momentum. He liked bright things, loud things, fast things. Oscar was none of those. Oscar was like a patch of deep, still water in the middle of a rushing river. The sheer lack of panic radiating from the new boy — despite the iron-grip on the rucksack — was entirely fascinating.

"Right. Piastri," Mr. Harrison sighed, scanning the room. "Let's find you a seat. There’s an empty desk back there, next to Lando. Norris, put your hand up."

Lando let his chair drop forward so all four legs hit the linoleum with a loud clack. He shot his hand into the air, grinning broadly.

Oscar walked down the aisle between the desks. He moved quietly, his steps deliberate and measured. He didn't bump into any of the chairs. He pulled out the plastic seat next to Lando, set his bag down on the floor with meticulous care, and sat down. He pulled a single, pristine black biro from his pocket and placed it perfectly parallel to the edge of the desk.

Lando watched this entire process with unabashed curiosity. He leaned over, invading Oscar's airspace without a second thought.

"Alright," Lando said cheerfully, pitching his voice just low enough to avoid Mr. Harrison's attention. "I'm Lando."

Oscar turned to look at him. Up close, Lando could see that Oscar's eyes were a very dark, very solid brown. They didn't dart around nervously; they just focused on Lando with a steady, unblinking weight.

"I know," Oscar said. His voice was incredibly dry. "The teacher just said your name."

Lando blinked, surprised, and then a loud, genuine laugh burst out of his mouth before he could stop it. A few heads turned, and Mr. Harrison shot him a lethal glare, but Lando just waved a hand apologetically and leaned closer to Oscar.

"Fair point," Lando whispered, a massive grin spreading across his face. "So, Australia? What are you doing in London? Did you get deported?"

Oscar didn't smile, but a tiny, barely imperceptible shift happened in his expression. The tight, guarded line of his shoulders dropped about a millimetre. "My dad got transferred for work. We moved two weeks ago."

"Brilliant. Well, it's terrible here. It rains constantly and the canteen food tastes like cardboard, but I can show you where the vending machines are that don't steal your money."

"Okay," Oscar said simply. He didn't elaborate. He just accepted the information and turned his attention to the front of the room where Mr. Harrison was writing the morning notices on the board.

Most people would’ve been put off by the brevity. Lando’s usual mates required constant, high-energy engagement — a relentless volley of jokes, insults, and noise. If you weren't talking, you were losing. But Oscar’s silence didn't feel like a rejection. It felt like space. It felt like stepping out of a crowded, noisy room and into a quiet hallway. It was surprisingly comfortable.

By the time the bell rang for morning break, Lando had already decided that Oscar was going to be his project.

"Come on," Lando said, standing up and violently shoving his own scattered mess of pens and crumpled paper into his bag. He slung it over one shoulder. "I'll introduce you to the idiots. Bring your coat, it's freezing."

Oscar looked at Lando’s chaotic bag, then at his own neatly zipped rucksack. He picked it up — slinging it over one shoulder this time, Lando noted with a spark of triumph — and followed him out into the crowded corridor.

The playground was a mass of damp grey asphalt and shouting teenagers. Lando navigated through the sea of maroon jumpers with practiced ease, parting the crowd simply by existing loudly within it. He led Oscar toward a sheltered corner near the maths block where Felix and Max were already kicking a bruised tennis ball against the brick wall.

"Lads," Lando announced, stepping directly into the path of the tennis ball and trapping it under his trainer. "This is Oscar. He's from Australia and he's already pointed out that I state the obvious."

Felix, a tall boy with perpetually messy blonde hair, caught the tennis ball as Lando kicked it up. "Alright, Oscar. Do you play football?"

"A bit," Oscar said, his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his regulation black coat. "Mostly Australian Rules."

"Is that the one where you just punch each other and run around in tiny shorts?" Max asked, leaning against the wall.

"Yes," Oscar said, his face completely deadpan. "Exactly that."

Felix and Max laughed, immediately disarmed. Lando watched the exchange, a strange, warm feeling blooming in his chest. He felt absurdly proud, like he had personally discovered a hidden treasure and brought it back for the group to admire.

For the rest of the break, Lando kept up a steady stream of commentary. He explained the complex, unspoken social hierarchy of the school, pointed out which teachers were mental and which ones let you sleep in the back row, and detailed exactly how to avoid the older boys on the bus.

Oscar mostly listened. He didn't try to interject or compete for airtime. He stood near the edge of the circle, watching them all with that same steady, analytical gaze. But every so often, right when Lando would say something particularly ridiculous, Oscar would chime in with a single, perfectly timed, devastatingly dry comment that would make the entire group crack up.

He didn't demand attention, but when he spoke, you had to listen.

When the bell rang to signal the end of the day, the sky had darkened into a bruised, gloomy purple. Lando was standing by his locker, trying to violently force his geography textbook past a crumpled PE kit, when he noticed Oscar standing a few feet away, quietly waiting.

"You taking the bus?" Lando asked, slamming his locker shut with a metallic bang that echoed down the emptying corridor.

"Walking," Oscar replied. He had his rucksack securely over both shoulders now. "We live near the high street. Just off Queensway."

Lando paused, his hand still resting on the cold metal of his locker. "Wait. Really? I live on Inverness Terrace. That's practically the same direction."

"Is it?" Oscar asked, though he didn't sound surprised. In fact, Lando had the distinct impression that Oscar had already looked at a map, calculated the coordinates, and knew exactly where Inverness Terrace was in relation to his own flat.

"Yeah. Come on, I'll walk you. It's a six-minute walk if you don't get stuck at the crossing."

They pushed through the heavy double doors and out into the biting September wind. The streets of West London were slick with a fine drizzle, the streetlamps flickering on and casting a harsh, orange glow over the damp pavements.

They walked in silence for the first two blocks. It wasn't the kind of silence Lando was used to. He walked with long, even strides, looking at the Victorian terraced houses and the black cabs splashing through puddles, taking it all in.

Lando found himself matching Oscar's pace. He didn't feel the frantic, desperate need to fill the air with noise. He just walked, the rubber soles of his trainers squeaking faintly against the wet concrete.

"It's different here," Oscar said suddenly, his voice cutting through the hum of the London traffic.

Lando looked over at him. "Different how? Worse?"

"No," Oscar said thoughtfully. He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets, his chin tucked down against the cold. "Just... louder. Everything feels like it's right on top of you. The buildings, the people. There's not a lot of sky."

Lando looked up. He had lived in London his entire life; he had never really thought about the sky. It was just a grey ceiling that occasionally leaked on him. But looking at it now, framed tightly between two towering rows of white stucco townhouses, he saw what Oscar meant.

"It gets better in the summer," Lando offered, surprisingly defensive of his miserable, grey city. "And the parks are massive. Hyde Park is just down the road. You can see the sky there."

"Okay," Oscar said. He turned his head and looked at Lando, the orange glow of a streetlamp catching the side of his face. He offered a very small, very brief smile. "You can show me."

Lando’s heart did a strange, sudden stutter-step in his chest. It wasn't a romantic feeling — he was thirteen, entirely oblivious to the shape of his own heart, and years away from having the vocabulary to name what was currently slotting into place. All he knew was that it felt like a promise. It felt like something heavy and important had just been handed to him, and he desperately wanted to prove he could hold it.

"Yeah," Lando said, grinning back, his voice bright and certain in the damp air. "Yeah, course I will."

They reached the corner where the route split. The high street stretched out to the right, a chaotic blur of glowing shop fronts and red buses, while Lando's quieter residential street branched off to the left.

They stopped.

"This is me," Lando pointed to the left. "You just keep going straight down there. Three minutes, you can't miss it."

Oscar nodded. He stood there for a second, looking at Lando. "Thanks. For... introducing me to the idiots."

Lando laughed, the sound loud and clear over the traffic. "Anytime, Osc. See you tomorrow."

"See you," Oscar replied.

 

October 2013

The progression of their friendship did not happen in a single, cinematic montage. It happened gradually, in increments of six minutes, and then, all at once, it was simply a fact of gravity.

By the second week of October, Oscar had seamlessly folded into Lando's orbit. He didn't disrupt the existing ecosystem of Felix, Max, and the rest of the boys; he just anchored it. He was the one who could reliably remember what the geography homework actually was, and he was the one who could execute a perfectly timed, deadpan insult that would leave the entire table at the canteen in stitches.

But it was the six minutes of pavement after the final bell that truly belonged to them.

Every day, the chaotic group would splinter off at the school gates, leaving Lando and Oscar to walk down the high street. The weather grew steadily colder, the London drizzle turning into a sharp, biting wind that whipped the autumn leaves across the tarmac.

During those walks, Lando discovered that Oscar wasn't actually quiet. Not really. He just had a very strict internal filter. Once you bypassed the filter, Oscar had an opinion on absolutely everything, and he delivered those opinions with a ruthless, hilarious precision.

"I don't understand the plumbing in this country," Oscar announced one Tuesday, his chin buried in his maroon scarf as they waited for a pelican crossing. "It’s actively hostile. Why are there two separate taps for hot and cold water? You either freeze your hands off or suffer third-degree burns. It makes no logistical sense."

"It builds character," Lando replied instantly, shivering in his leather jacket, which was entirely inadequate for the weather but which he refused to swap for a proper winter coat on principle. "We are a nation of strong, resilient, moderately burnt people."

"You are a nation of people clinging to Victorian infrastructure because you're too stubborn to buy a mixer tap," Oscar countered, stepping out onto the zebra crossing. He looked over at Lando, his dark eyes bright with amusement. "It’s a structural nightmare."

"You care a lot about structures for a thirteen-year-old," Lando pointed out, matching his stride.

"Structures make sense," Oscar said simply, lifting one shoulder in a half-shrug. "If you do the maths right, a bridge stays up. If you don't, it falls down. There’s no ambiguity. I like things that have rules."

Lando kicked a pebble across the pavement, watching it skitter into the gutter. "I hate rules. Rules are just suggestions made by people who are less creative than me."

Oscar let out a short, sharp laugh. "That’s the most arrogant thing I have ever heard you say, and the bar was already incredibly high."

"Thank you," Lando grinned, entirely unashamed.

A few days later, Lando dragged Oscar back to the house on Inverness Terrace for the first time. The Norris household was exactly like Lando: loud, brightly lit, and operating at a relentless, overlapping speed. There were siblings shouting from the top of the stairs, a television blaring a football match in the lounge, and a spaniel that immediately threw itself at Oscar’s knees.

Lando had expected Oscar to retreat into his shell, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it all. Instead, Oscar waded into the chaos with a profound, unbothered calm. He politely shook Lando’s mum’s hand, correctly identified the breed of the dog, and then sat on a stool at the kitchen island, happily eating a plate of digestives while Lando desperately tried to find his missing physics textbook.

"Your house is a health and safety violation," Oscar observed twenty minutes later, watching Lando’s older brother nearly trip over a stray skateboard in the hallway.

"It's vibrant," Lando corrected, tossing a cushion at him.

"It's a hazard," Oscar corrected back, catching the cushion with one hand. But he was smiling, a small, genuine expression that reached all the way to his eyes. He looked comfortable. He looked like he fit.

That weekend, Lando made good on his promise. He dragged Oscar out of his flat on a freezing Saturday morning, armed with two terrible cups of takeaway tea, and marched him all the way to Hyde Park.

The sky above the Serpentine was a pale, icy blue, entirely cloudless and shockingly vast. The trees lining the water had turned brilliant shades of copper and gold. Lando stood on the edge of the path, gesturing grandly with his tea.

"Behold," Lando announced, his breath pluming in the cold air. "The sky. As requested. Try not to be overwhelmed by the majesty of British nature."

Oscar stood beside him, both hands wrapped tightly around his paper cup for warmth. He looked up. He looked at the expanse of blue, the sharp contrast of the autumn leaves, and the distant skyline of the city poking through the tree line. He was quiet for a long time, the wind ruffling the dark hair across his forehead.

"It's good," Oscar said softly. He didn't look at Lando; he kept his eyes on the water. "Melbourne is flatter. The sky always feels really massive there. You can see weather coming from miles away. Here, everything just sort of drops on your head without warning."

"Do you miss it?" Lando asked. He suddenly felt a weird, protective urge over this boy he had only known for six weeks. He wanted London to be good enough. He wanted to ensure Oscar didn't want to leave.

"Sometimes," Oscar admitted, his voice dipping low. "I miss my sisters. I miss my room. But..." He took a sip of his tea, wrinkling his nose slightly at the bitter taste. "It’s not so bad here. I think I just needed to figure out how the grid works."

Lando bumped his shoulder against Oscar’s. It was a clumsy, adolescent gesture, but it was the best he had. "You’ve got the grid sorted, mate. You’ve got me. I know all the shortcuts."

Oscar turned his head, looking at Lando with that same, steady, piercing gaze he had used on his very first day in registration. "Yeah," he said quietly. "I know."

 

November 13, 2013

November arrived with a heavy frost that coated the windscreens of the cars parked along the street.

November 13th was a Wednesday. For Lando, his thirteenth birthday meant a chaotic morning of torn wrapping paper, his mum making a massive fry-up, and an overwhelming sense of being the absolute centre of the universe. He arrived at school buzzing with a manic, sugary energy, his uniform even messier than usual.

Felix and Max cornered him by the lockers before first period. They gave him a heavy, unidentifiable object wrapped in a plastic Sainsbury's bag.

"Happy birthday, you absolute tosser," Felix said, thumping him hard on the shoulder.

Lando ripped the bag open to find a half-eaten packet of salt and vinegar crisps and a violently bright green laser pointer. "You lads really outdid yourselves. The emotion, the thought, the expense. I am moved to tears."

"Cost me three quid at the market," Max said proudly. "Don't shine it in anyone's eyes, you'll blind them."

"Obviously I'm going to shine it in Mr. Harrison's eyes," Lando replied, shoving it into his pocket.

He looked around the crowded corridor. "Where’s Osc?"

"Library," Felix shrugged. "Said he had to finish printing something."

Lando didn't see Oscar until morning break. The sky outside was threatening sleet, so they were huddled in the warmth of the radiators near the science block. Oscar appeared just as the bell rang, holding a cup of terrible vending machine hot chocolate in one hand.

He walked straight up to Lando, bypassing Felix’s ongoing debate about football boots.

"Happy birthday," Oscar said. He reached into the inner pocket of his blazer and pulled out a standard, white rectangular envelope. He held it out.

Lando looked at it. It wasn't a card. It was just a plain envelope, sealed shut. But what caught Lando’s eye was the top right corner. There was a first-class stamp affixed to it. It was slightly crooked.

"What's this?" Lando asked, taking it. It felt surprisingly light. "You're doing formal correspondence now? You do realise we see each other every single day, right?"

"I know," Oscar said. His ears were a bit pink, though whether that was from the cold or something else, Lando couldn't tell. He shoved his hand back into his blazer pocket. "I was going to post it. I wanted it to arrive with the rest of your post this morning. But I realised last night that I don't actually understand the timeline of the Royal Mail, and I didn't want it to be late."

"So you just wrote it this morning?"

"I wrote it," Oscar corrected gently, shifting his weight. "Just read it later. When you're not..." He gestured vaguely at the loud, echoing corridor and the crowd of boys around them. "Here."

"Alright. Cryptic. I like it," Lando grinned. He didn't open it. He felt, instinctively, that opening it right then, surrounded by the noise and the shoving, would be the wrong move. He carefully slid the envelope into the front pocket of his rucksack, zipping it securely.

He didn't think about it again until much later that evening.

The house had finally quieted down. The remnants of a massive, heavily iced chocolate cake were sitting in the kitchen, and Lando was lying on his bed, still wearing his school trousers, staring up at the ceiling. His room was a disaster zone of discarded clothes, video game controllers, and school books.

He reached down, grabbing his rucksack off the floor, and dug through the front pocket until his fingers brushed against the smooth paper.

He pulled the envelope out. He sat up, crossing his legs on the mattress. The house was completely silent, save for the distant hum of the central heating.

Lando slid his thumb under the flap of the envelope, tearing it open. Inside was a single piece of lined notebook paper, clearly torn from the spiral-bound pad Oscar used for history. The edges were slightly ragged.

Lando unfolded it.

Oscar’s handwriting was exactly like Oscar: neat, precise, and entirely devoid of unnecessary loops or flourishes. It was written in black biro. There was no greeting. There was no “Dear Lando”, and there was no “From Oscar” at the bottom.

There was only a single sentence, perfectly centred on the page.

You are the loudest person I have ever met and also somehow the one who listens the most carefully. I guess you made London look warmer to me. Happy Birthday.

Lando stared at the paper. He read the words once, quickly, and then he read them again, much slower.

His chest felt incredibly tight. It was a sensation entirely alien to his thirteen-year-old self. Lando was used to being told he was loud, or annoying, or funny, or fast. People saw the noise. They saw the bright colours. They saw the kid who couldn't sit still in a plastic chair to save his life.

But nobody, not even his own family, had ever looked at him and noticed the quiet thing underneath it all. Nobody had ever noticed that while Lando was making the noise, he was also cataloguing everything around him — remembering the specific brand of crisps someone liked, noticing when someone dropped their gaze, absorbing the emotional temperature of a room before anyone else had even walked through the door.

Oscar had known him for exactly eight weeks. And Oscar had seen the entire architecture of him.

Lando traced the black ink with his fingertip. The words felt heavy, solid. They felt like an anchor dropped into the rushing, chaotic river of his brain.

He didn't know what to do with a feeling this large. He was thirteen; he lacked the language to articulate it, and he lacked the bravery to try. So, he did the only thing that made sense.

He stood up, walking over to his battered wooden wardrobe. He opened the door, pulling out an empty shoebox from the bottom shelf. He placed the single sheet of paper inside, placing the stamped envelope neatly on top of it. He put the lid back on the box and shoved it into the furthest, darkest corner of the shelf, safely hidden behind a pile of winter jumpers.

He closed the wardrobe door with a soft click.

 

April 6, 2014

Lando Norris was not a planner. His entire existence up to the age of thirteen had been a masterclass in aggressive improvisation. He did his homework on the bus, he packed his football boots five minutes before he was supposed to be on the pitch, and he operated under the firm, untested belief that everything would simply work itself out if he moved fast enough.

But as the miserable, wet London winter bled into a slightly less miserable, damp London spring, Lando found himself attempting to do something highly unnatural: he was trying to execute a calculated operation.

It was April 6th, 2014. A Sunday.

The problem with Oscar’s birthday falling on a Sunday was that Lando couldn't just casually hand him something by the lockers or shove it across a desk in geography. It required a physical relocation. It required intention.

For the last five months, ever since Lando had shoved a white envelope into an empty shoebox at the bottom of his wardrobe, there had been a new, unspoken weight resting between them. They hadn't talked about the letter. They were thirteen-year-old boys; talking about feelings was a terrifying concept, functionally identical to walking into traffic. But the ground beneath them had shifted anyway. Lando found himself paying closer attention. He watched the way Oscar catalogued the world, and without meaning to, Lando started mirroring him.

Which was why, at four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, Lando was standing in the harsh, flickering fluorescent light of a BP garage on the Bayswater Road, his hair plastered to his forehead from a sudden April shower, staring aggressively at a display of highly depressing baked goods.

"Is this the freshest one?" Lando asked the bored cashier behind the reinforced glass, holding up a plastic clamshell containing a Victoria sponge. It looked slightly yellowed, and the jam in the middle had the structural consistency of glue.

The cashier didn't even look up from his phone. "Mate, it’s a petrol station. It's as fresh as it gets."

Lando sighed, dropping the cake onto the counter alongside a pack of matches and a blue plastic bag. "Right. Brilliant. Ring it up."

He paid, shoving his change into his damp jeans, and carefully placed the cake into the bottom of the plastic bag. He already had the main gift tucked securely in the inside pocket of his jacket, but turning up without a cake felt like a violation of basic birthday protocols.

He stepped back out into the drizzle, pulling his hood up. It was a fifteen-minute walk to Oscar’s flat just off Queensway. He set off at a brisk pace, dodging massive puddles on the uneven pavement.

The DVD in his inner pocket bumped rhythmically against his ribs with every step.

It wasn't an expensive gift. It had cost him four pounds from a discount bin in HMV two weeks ago. But it was precise. Back in January, during a brutally boring double history lesson about the Second World War, Mr. Harrison had put on a documentary. Oscar had spent the entire hour quietly dissecting the logistical flaws of prisoner-of-war camps, leaning across the desk to whisper a highly detailed analysis into Lando’s ear.

“It’s a completely ridiculous setup,” Oscar had murmured, entirely serious, while Felix snored softly behind them. “They put the fences right on top of soft dirt. They're basically asking people to dig under them. Have you ever seen The Great Escape? The film? The way they build the tunnels actually makes sense, but the Americans ruin it by turning it into a massive action movie.”

Lando hadn't seen the film. He had barely known what it was. But he had filed the name away. He had filed away the animated, intense light in Oscar’s eyes when he talked about the architecture of a tunnel.

It had taken him three different shops to find the DVD.

Lando was so lost in his own head, mentally rehearsing how he was going to casually present this without making it look like he cared too much, that he didn't notice the massive, broken paving stone jutting out of the pavement on Inverness Terrace.

His trainer caught the edge of the stone. Lando pitched forward, his arms flailing in a desperate attempt to break his fall. He managed to catch himself on his hands, scraping his palms against the wet concrete, but his chest — and the plastic BP bag clutched tightly in his left hand — slammed hard against the ground.

"Fuck," Lando hissed, pushing himself up. His palms stung fiercely, dotted with grit.

He looked down. The plastic bag had taken the brunt of the impact. Lando frantically opened the handles and peered inside. The rigid plastic clamshell had cracked straight down the middle. The Victoria sponge, previously a proud, distinct circle, had been violently compressed into a tragic, jam-smeared crescent moon. The icing was entirely stuck to the plastic lid.

It looked like a crime scene.

Lando groaned, dropping his head back and letting the rain hit his face. He considered turning around. He considered walking home, throwing the mangled cake in the bin, and pretending he had completely forgotten what day it was. It would be easier. It would be entirely in character. Lando Norris, chaotic and forgetful.

But then he remembered the neat, black biro handwriting. The one who listens the most carefully.

"Right," Lando muttered to himself, gripping the damp plastic bag. "Character building."

He practically jogged the rest of the way to Queensway. When he reached the heavy double doors of Oscar’s apartment block, he was out of breath, his shoes were soaked, and the bag was swinging ominously against his leg. He pressed the brass buzzer for flat 4B.

A moment later, a crackle of static echoed from the speaker. "Hello?"

It was Oscar’s dad. Lando instantly stood up straighter, trying to wipe the rainwater off his face with his sleeve. "Hi, Mr. Piastri. It's Lando. Is Osc in?"

"Lando. Yeah, come on up. Get out of the rain."

The buzzer sounded a long, harsh tone, and Lando pushed the heavy door open. He took the lift, entirely focused on damage control. He tried to pull the plastic lid of the cake away from the icing, only succeeding in smearing the jam further across the container.

When the lift doors opened on the fourth floor, Oscar’s flat door was already open. The faint, tinny sound of a sports broadcast murmured from a radio somewhere inside.

Lando stepped inside, toeing off his wet trainers. The Piastri flat was a total contrast to the Norris house. It was tidy, deeply organised, and remarkably quiet. There were no siblings shouting from the stairs, just a few framed photographs of the rest of the family back in Melbourne sitting neatly on the hall table, making the space feel a little lonely.

"He's in his room, Lando," Mr. Piastri called out from the kitchen, stepping into the hallway holding a mug of tea. He was a tall, calm man, and it was immediately obvious where Oscar had inherited his steady demeanour. He offered a sympathetic wince at Lando's damp hair and the slightly panicked look on his face. "You look half-drowned. Stick your coat on the radiator."

"Cheers, Mr. Piastri," Lando called back, adopting his most charming, effortless tone.

He didn't take off his coat. The DVD was in the pocket. He walked down the short hallway and knocked once, loudly, on the closed door at the end before pushing it open without waiting for an answer.

Oscar was sitting at his desk. He wasn't playing video games or watching television. He had a massive, complex piece of graph paper spread out in front of him, and he was meticulously drawing straight lines with a metal ruler and a mechanical pencil. His room was pristine. The bed was made, the books were arranged by height, and the air smelled faintly of clean laundry.

Oscar looked up, setting the pencil down perfectly parallel to the ruler. He didn't look surprised. He just looked at Lando, assessing the damp hair, the scraped palms, and the pathetic, dripping blue plastic bag.

"You're wet," Oscar observed mildly.

"It's raining, you absolute genius. Top-tier Australian observational skills," Lando shot back, stepping into the room and letting the door click shut behind him. The sudden quiet of the bedroom felt heavy.

"Did you swim here?"

"I walked. With purpose," Lando said, stepping further into the room. He felt entirely too large, too loud, and too messy for this meticulously ordered space. He held out the BP bag by the handles. "Happy birthday, mate."

Oscar raised an eyebrow, pivoting his desk chair around to face Lando. He reached out and took the bag. He didn't open it immediately. He looked at the logo on the plastic. "You went to a petrol station."

"I’m a man of refined tastes," Lando said, shoving his hands into his damp pockets, his knuckles brushing against the hard plastic of the DVD case. His heart was beating uncomfortably fast. "Go on, look at it. Prepare to be amazed."

Oscar opened the bag. He reached in and pulled out the cracked, jam-smeared, violently compressed clamshell.

He stared at it. He looked at it from a few different angles, his expression completely blank, reading the structural damage like he was assessing a collapsed bridge. The silence stretched for three agonizing seconds. Lando wanted the floor to open up and swallow him.

Then, the corner of Oscar’s mouth twitched.

"Lando," Oscar said, his voice completely flat, fighting a losing battle against a smile. "What happened to it? Did you sit on it?"

"I tripped!" Lando exploded, the defensive lie slipping out before he could stop it. "The pavement on Inverness is a death trap! I risked my life to bring you baked goods. I threw my body over it to protect it, but the structural integrity of the plastic was compromised."

"The structural integrity was compromised," Oscar repeated, actually laughing now. It was a low, genuine sound that instantly released all the tension in Lando’s shoulders. Oscar set the tragic cake down on the corner of his desk. "It looks like it was run over by a truck. Thank you. I’m deeply moved."

"You should be. It cost me two quid," Lando grinned, shifting his weight. "Anyway. That’s not... that’s just the cake. Obviously."

Oscar looked up, the laughter fading into something quieter, more attentive. "Obviously."

Lando pulled his right hand out of his pocket. He held out the DVD case. It wasn't wrapped. He hadn't bothered with paper or tape. He just held it out, letting the fluorescent bulb of Oscar’s desk lamp catch the plastic cover.

Oscar took it.

He looked down at the cover of The Great Escape. Steve McQueen on a motorcycle. He stared at it for a very long time. Lando watched the dark eyelashes resting against Oscar's cheek, trying to read the microscopic shifts in his expression.

When Oscar finally looked up, his dark eyes were impossibly wide.

"You bought this," Oscar said. It wasn't a question.

"Found it in a bin at HMV," Lando said quickly, waving a hand dismissively. "Cost me like, three quid. I just remembered you complaining about the tunnels in history class that one time. Figured it would keep you quiet for a few hours so I wouldn't have to listen to you drone on about British plumbing."

It had actually taken three shops, two weeks of searching, and a level of attentive listening that Lando had never applied to another human being in his life.

Oscar looked from the DVD in his hands to Lando’s flushed face.

"January," Oscar said softly.

"What?"

"I mentioned this film in January. It was three months ago," Oscar's voice was very quiet, stripped of all its usual dry sarcasm. He placed the DVD gently on the desk, right next to the ruined cake, aligning the edges perfectly with the metal ruler. "You remembered."

"I have an excellent memory," Lando said weakly, scratching the back of his neck. "Photographic, basically."

Oscar didn't laugh. He just stood up from his desk chair. He was slightly taller than Lando. He took a step forward, closing the space between them.

Lando froze, entirely unsure of what was happening.

Oscar wrapped his arms around Lando’s shoulders and pulled him into a hug. It was stiff, awkward, and deeply unpractised — the kind of hug given by a boy who wasn't used to physical affection outside of his own family. Oscar’s chin bumped awkwardly against Lando’s shoulder, and his hands were flat and rigid against Lando’s damp coat.

But it was fierce. It was anchoring.

Lando’s breath hitched in his throat. He brought his own arms up, returning the embrace, squeezing his eyes shut for a second. Oscar smelled like graphite, clean cotton, and the faint, sharp scent of rain.

"Thank you, Lando," Oscar whispered, his voice muffled against Lando’s jacket.

"‘S nothing, mate," Lando mumbled back, his voice thick.

Oscar pulled away after a second, clearing his throat and instantly retreating back into his calm, composed shell. The pink flush was back on the tips of his ears. He turned back to the desk, pointing a finger at the crushed Victoria sponge.

"We are going to need a spoon to eat that," Oscar said pragmatically. "And possibly a shovel."

Lando let out a shaky breath, an explosive, relieved laugh following right behind it.

"I'll go ask your dad for a trowel," Lando grinned, turning toward the bedroom door.

"Get two," Oscar called after him. "And bring tea. You're a terrible guest."

"You're a terrible host!" Lando shouted over his shoulder, already halfway down the hall.

 

September 2015

Oscar Piastri did not have a master plan. He was fifteen years old, his brain mostly occupied by school, impending GCSEs, and trying to navigate the sudden, awkward growth spurt that left his wrists hanging out of his school blazer.

He didn't spend hours dissecting the exact nature of his relationship with Lando Norris. He just knew that a room was generally more interesting if Lando was in it. Lando was loud, constantly moving, and operated on a frequency that should’ve been exhausting. But Oscar found it weirdly catchy.

It wasn't a grand, sweeping revelation. It was just a fact of Oscar’s daily life. He walked Lando home. He let Lando copy his physics homework. He knew Lando liked his tea basically the colour of pale wood.

It took a Year Ten geography trip to the South of France for Oscar to realise that his mild, rolling acceptance actually had edges to it. Sharp ones.

The Occitanie region in late September was suffocatingly hot. The air smelled of baked limestone, dry pine needles, and the cheap aerosol deodorant the boys sprayed in the cramped aisles of the coach. They had spent the morning walking around the base of the Millau Viaduct, a towering, multi-cable-stayed bridge spanning the gorge valley of the River Tarn.

Now, they had been granted a two-hour free period in a nearby village square before getting back on the bus.

Oscar had immediately detached himself from the loud, sweaty pack of his classmates. He found a low stone wall under the shade of an enormous plane tree. The leaves overhead filtered the harsh afternoon sun, casting moving, dappled shadows across the cobblestones. He pulled his sketchbook out of his rucksack — a thick, black-bound book he rarely showed anyone — and clicked his mechanical pencil.

He was trying to draw the viaduct. He wanted to capture the specific angle of the masts, the way they looked impossibly delicate against the massive expanse of the sky, despite bearing thousands of tonnes of concrete and steel.

He was perfectly content. Or, at least, he was until he heard the laugh.

It was Lando’s laugh. Not the polite chuckle he gave teachers, and not the loud, braying noise he made when Felix tripped over a curb. It was a lower, warmer sound.

Oscar paused, the tip of his graphite pencil hovering a millimetre above the paper. He looked up.

Lando was standing by a stone water fountain in the centre of the square. He was wearing a faded grey t-shirt that clung slightly to his shoulders in the heat, his sunglasses pushed up into his messy hair. He looked completely at ease, gesturing with his hands as he spoke.

Standing very, very close to him was Chloe Williams.

She was a girl from their history set. She had bright eyes and dark hair that she kept tucking behind her ear. Right now, she was leaning in, laughing at whatever Lando had just said. As she laughed, she reached out and placed her hand flat against Lando’s forearm. It wasn't a fleeting brush. Her fingers curled slightly around his wrist.

Lando didn't pull away. He looked down at her hand, and then he looked back up at her face, his smile widening. He leaned slightly into her space, his body naturally gravitating toward the warmth and the attention. Lando operated on pure momentum; if someone offered him a spotlight, he stepped into it without a second thought.

Sitting under the shade of the plane tree, Oscar felt a sudden, deeply annoying sensation spark right behind his ribs.

He gripped his mechanical pencil tighter. He watched Chloe’s thumb stroke the inside of Lando’s wrist, and the annoyance quickly spiked into a hot, uncomfortable irritation. It felt like walking into his bedroom and finding someone else sitting on his bed, moving his things around.

Oscar didn't have a label for it. He didn't want to call it jealousy, because that implied ownership, and he didn't own Lando. But as he watched Lando tilt his head back and laugh again at something Chloe said, Oscar felt an intense, irrational urge to walk over there, step directly between them, and drag Lando away by the back of his shirt.

He didn't, obviously. He stayed on the wall. But he pressed the tip of his pencil down onto the paper so hard the graphite snapped with a sharp, audible crack.

Oscar frowned, brushing the broken lead off the page. He clicked the pencil twice to dispense more graphite, forcing his eyes back to his drawing. He spent the next ten minutes shading the base of a concrete pylon with vicious, unnecessary force, his jaw clenched so tight his teeth ached.

Then, a shadow fell over the pages.

"It is genuinely too hot for human habitation," Lando complained loudly, dropping onto the stone wall right next to Oscar.

Oscar didn't flinch, but his shoulders instantly dropped an inch. He could smell the sharp smell of Lando’s sunscreen.

Oscar kept his eyes strictly on his drawing. He blew a stray piece of eraser dust off the page. "Where's your new best mate?" he asked. His voice was perfectly even, dry as the French dirt, completely masking the weird, hot tension that had just been coiled in his chest.

"Chloe?" Lando scoffed, stretching his long legs out in front of him and crossing his ankles. "She wanted to go look at a pottery shop. I told her I’d rather throw myself off the actual bridge than look at ceramic bowls for an hour."

Oscar finally stopped drawing. The tight, uncomfortable feeling evaporated instantly, leaving behind a sudden, quiet rush of relief. She was gone. Lando was here.

Lando leaned over, his shoulder pressing firmly against Oscar’s. It was a casual, thoughtless gesture, but it sent a tiny jolt of static down Oscar’s arm. Lando rested his chin near Oscar's elbow, peering down at the open sketchbook.

"You've been working on that for ages," Lando murmured. The loud, performative energy he had been using by the fountain was completely gone. This was the quiet Lando. The one he only pulled out when it was just the two of them. "It's brilliant, Osc. Looks like a photograph."

"It's the Millau Viaduct," Oscar said, acutely aware of the heat radiating from Lando’s arm.

"I know what it is, we literally spent three hours staring at it this morning,” Lando groaned, though there was a smile in his voice. He reached out, his index finger hovering just above the paper, careful not to smudge the graphite. "It looks fragile, though. All those thin strings holding it up. Like if you snapped one, the whole thing would just crash into the valley."

"They aren't strings, Lando, they're steel cables," Oscar corrected, the familiar rhythm of their banter grounding him. He tapped the centre mast with his pencil. "And it isn't fragile. It’s built on tension. It’s stable because it's constantly pulling against itself."

Lando went quiet. He stared at the drawing for a long moment, the warm breeze ruffling his messy hair.

"It's a massive drop," Lando said quietly.

"Two hundred and seventy metres," Oscar supplied automatically. "At the road deck."

Lando turned his head. His face was only inches away from Oscar's. His bright, observant eyes locked onto Oscar’s dark ones. For a second, the rest of the noisy village square completely muted into background static.

"We should drive over it," Lando said.

Oscar blinked. "What?"

"When we're older," Lando clarified, his voice dropping lower. He wasn't joking. "When we get our licences. We should buy a terrible, cheap car, drive all the way down through France, and drive right over the top of it. Just us. See if it actually holds the weight."

Oscar stared at him. He didn't know why Lando was looking at him like that, like it was a lifeline instead of a hypothetical road trip. But sitting there, shoulder-to-shoulder on a stone wall, Oscar felt the undeniable pull of it. He didn't need to understand the exact mechanics of why he wanted to say yes; he just knew he wanted to.

"Alright," Oscar said softly, the corners of his mouth turning up into a small smile. "Yeah. It's a promise."

Lando’s face broke into a massive, blinding grin. He bumped his shoulder hard against Oscar’s, almost knocking the sketchbook off his lap. "Brilliant. You're paying for the petrol, obviously."

 

November 2015

The weird, possessive annoyance Oscar had felt in France faded into the background once they returned to the damp, grey routine of London. As November crept in, a different kind of pressure took its place.

It was Lando’s fifteenth birthday in a week.

The birthday tradition with Lando had accidentally morphed into something else entirely following the DVD the year before. He couldn't just buy a video game or a graphic t-shirt. The gift had to prove he was paying attention.

Oscar spent a freezing Saturday afternoon navigating the winding, cobbled streets of Greenwich. He bypassed the tourist traps and headed for a cluster of dusty, overcrowded antique shops tucked away down a narrow alley.

He pushed the door of the third shop open, a rusted brass bell chiming weakly above his head. The shop was a claustrophobic maze of grandfather clocks, tarnished silver tea sets, and stacks of yellowing maps.

He didn't know exactly what he was looking for until he saw it in a locked display case near the back of the shop, sitting on a bed of faded red velvet.

It was a pocket compass.

Oscar asked the elderly shop owner to unlock the case. He handed it over, explaining it was an authentic maritime compass from the 1890s.

Oscar took it. It was heavy, solid brass, slightly tarnished around the edges from decades of being held by human hands. The face was protected by thick, bevelled glass, and the cardinal directions were painted in intricate, faded black script.

Oscar held it flat. The delicate, needle-thin piece of magnetised iron inside trembled violently for a second before snapping firmly into place.

It pointed North.

Oscar turned his body ninety degrees toward the window. The needle swept across the dial and locked back onto North. He turned completely around, facing the dark back wall of the shop. The needle found North immediately.

No matter how the casing was twisted, no matter where the person holding it moved, the needle was entirely, hopelessly bound to a single point of gravity.

Oscar looked down at the compass. He thought about Lando. He thought about how, whether they were in a crowded classroom, a noisy pub, or a French village square, Oscar always ended up tracking exactly where Lando was. He didn't mean to do it. It wasn't a conscious decision. It was just a magnetic pull. His attention simply naturally settled wherever Lando happened to be standing.

It was a practical object. It made mechanical sense.

"I'll take it," Oscar said.

It cost him nearly three months' worth of saved allowance. He handed the cash over without a second thought.

The real challenge came later that night.

Oscar sat at his desk in his bedroom, the brass compass sitting heavily on top of his homework diary. The birthday tradition required a letter.

He pulled a fresh sheet of lined paper from his notebook and clicked his black biro. He stared at the blank page. He didn't want to write anything weird or heavy. They were fifteen. Lando would probably mock him relentlessly if he wrote a poem.

He just needed to explain the compass. He needed to explain the mechanical reality of how Lando functioned in his life.

Oscar wrote three different sentences. He crossed them all out. Finally, he just thought about the trembling needle locking into place, and wrote down the most accurate observation he could manage.

You are the North the needle always finds.

He set the pen down. He looked at the sentence. It sounded a bit dramatic, maybe, but it was factually correct. He folded the paper into thirds, slipped it into a plain white envelope, and sealed it shut.

Four days later, on November 13th, the sky over West London unleashed a freezing, torrential downpour.

Oscar waited until the final bell rang. He didn't want to hand it over in the chaotic, damp corridors of the school. He waited until they had braved the rain, running the six minutes from the school gates to the bus shelter on the high street.

They stood under the cracked perspex roof of the shelter, shivering. Lando’s hair was plastered to his forehead, droplets of water running down the bridge of his nose, and his blazer was soaked through. But he was grinning, completely buzzing with the residual energy of his birthday.

"I reckon my mum has bought me that new FIFA," Lando was saying, wiping the rain from his eyes. "If she hasn't, I'm genuinely moving out."

"You haven't finished your geography coursework in three weeks," Oscar pointed out, his teeth chattering slightly. "I think you need to pass Year Eleven before you emancipate yourself."

Lando shoved him playfully, nearly sending Oscar out into the rain. "You are a miserable, cynical bastard, Piastri."

Oscar caught his balance, stepping back under the shelter. The noise of the traffic hissing on the wet tarmac was deafening, but within the small, dry space of the bus stop, they were insulated.

Oscar reached into the deep inside pocket of his regulation winter coat. His fingers brushed the cold brass of the compass and the crisp paper of the envelope.

He pulled them both out.

"Happy birthday," Oscar said. He just held the items out in his palm.

Lando stopped talking about FIFA. He looked down at Oscar's outstretched hand. He took the envelope first, recognizing the plain white paper immediately. He tucked it safely into the dry inner pocket of his blazer to read later.

Then, he picked up the compass.

Lando turned it over in his hands. He felt the heavy, substantial weight of it. He ran his thumb over the tarnished brass casing, and then he looked through the glass. He watched the needle tremble, swinging wildly for a fraction of a second before snapping firmly into place.

Lando went completely still.

When Lando finally looked up, his eyes were incredibly bright. He looked from the compass, to Oscar’s face, and then down to the pocket where he had tucked the envelope. He didn't know what the letter said yet, but watching Lando process the weight of the object, Oscar felt a strange, terrifying lurch in his stomach.

Lando didn't make a joke. He didn't say thanks.

He took half a step forward in the cramped shelter. He reached out with his free hand and gripped the sleeve of Oscar’s heavy winter coat. His fingers dug into the wet wool fabric with a desperate, anchoring strength.

"Osc," Lando whispered, his voice barely audible over the rain.

Oscar looked down at Lando's hand gripping his sleeve, and then back up at Lando's face. He felt that same, undeniable pull he had felt in France. He didn't have a name for it. He just knew he wasn't going to pull away.

"Yeah," Oscar said softly.

He stood perfectly still in the freezing London rain, letting Lando hold onto him, entirely content to just roll with it.

 

April 6, 2016

Turning sixteen came with a very specific, universally understood set of ridiculous expectations.

For Lando, the transition through Year Ten had been a blur of terrible house parties, warm cider smuggled in plastic bottles, and sweaty, chaotic games of spin the bottle in damp living rooms. In the span of six months, Lando had kissed three different girls. Every single time, it had been a hurried, clumsy collision of teeth, lip gloss, and performative noise. He hadn't felt anything profound. He had just assumed that was what kissing was: a messy, hollow milestone you crossed to prove you were growing up.

Oscar had kissed a girl too. Her name was Maya, she was in their chemistry set, and it had happened behind the sports hall in late February. Oscar had reported the event back to Lando the next morning with his usual, devastatingly detachment.

"It was highly uncoordinated," Oscar had said, staring blankly at a textbook. "And her nose was very cold. I don't really see the appeal."

So, kissing wasn't a big deal. It was just a weird, slightly unhygienic social requirement. Or so they thought.

It was April 6th, Oscar’s sixteenth birthday.

They were sitting on the floor of Oscar’s meticulously tidy bedroom, their backs resting against the edge of the bed frame. The physical space between them, which had been steadily eroding ever since Oscar had handed Lando a brass compass in a freezing bus shelter, was completely gone. They were sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, their knees occasionally knocking together as Lando animatedly explained a highly elaborate, completely unworkable plan to bypass the school's firewall.

Lando had given Oscar his present an hour ago — a set of German, high-precision architectural drafting pencils that Lando had spent three weeks tracking down online. He had attempted to carve Oscar’s initials into the wooden presentation box with a pocketknife, realised halfway through the “P” that he had ruined the symmetry, and given up. Oscar had traced the jagged, ruined lettering with his thumb for a long time, looking entirely too overwhelmed for a boy who had just received stationery.

The flat was quiet. The low, steady rhythm of the spring rain tapping against the windowpane filled the negative space between Lando's rambling sentences.

Lando turned his head to ask Oscar a question. At the exact same second, Oscar turned his head to answer.

They stopped.

Their faces were only inches apart. The proximity wasn't unusual — Lando was constantly invading Oscar's personal space — but the sudden, heavy silence that dropped over the room was. Lando’s brain ground to an abrupt, screeching halt.

He looked at Oscar. He looked at the dark, familiar eyes, the sharp line of his jaw, the slight, nervous swallow that made the column of his throat work.

Lando thought about the girls at the house parties. He thought about how loud everything always was. He thought about how hard he constantly had to work to keep people's attention, and then he looked at Oscar, who was already paying attention to him without Lando having to make a single sound.

Lando didn't think about the mechanics of it. Operating entirely on pure, unexamined momentum, he just leaned in.

It was an experiment, and it was a disaster. Lando misjudged the angle completely. Their noses bumped together with a harsh, painful clack of cartilage.

"Shit, sorry," Lando hissed, instantly pulling back. A hot, violent flush of embarrassment crawled rapidly up his neck. It was weird. He shouldn't have done that. He had just ruined the easy, comfortable thing they had built.

But Oscar didn't laugh. He didn't flinch away or make a dry joke about spatial awareness.

Oscar’s eyes were wide, incredibly dark, and entirely focused. He let out a slow, slightly shaky breath. And then, Oscar reached out.

His hand came up, awkward and entirely unpractised, his fingers trembling slightly as he cupped the side of Lando’s jaw. He didn't pull Lando toward him; he just anchored him there, offering a quiet, steady question.

Lando’s heart hammered a frantic, terrifying rhythm against his ribs. He leaned forward again, slower this time.

The kiss was incredibly tentative. It was just closed mouths at first, the soft, warm pressure of skin against skin. It wasn't smooth. It was clumsy and a little weird. They shifted angles nervously, trying to figure out the exact shape of how their faces were supposed to fit together. Lando brought his own hand up, his fingers hovering uncertainly in the air for a second before settling clumsily against Oscar’s collarbone.

It was strange to be this close to his best mate. But underneath the awkwardness, Lando felt a sudden, terrifying drop in his stomach.

It didn't feel like the wet, sloppy cider-kisses at the parties. It didn't feel hollow or performative. It felt like the heavy brass compass locking violently onto North. It felt like walking through a door he hadn't even known was in his own house, and discovering an entire, sprawling universe on the other side.

It felt profound.

Lando parted his lips slightly, letting out a small, shuddering exhale against Oscar’s mouth. Oscar made a quiet, hitched sound in the back of his throat, his thumb stroking a slow, impossibly gentle line across Lando’s cheekbone. The sheer tenderness of the gesture was absolutely devastating.

When they finally pulled apart, they didn't go far. They stayed in each other's airspace, their foreheads resting together, breathing the same air.

Lando didn't know what to say. His usual arsenal of noise and banter was entirely useless here. He didn't know how to react to any of this.

"Okay?" Oscar whispered, his voice barely a rasp, his hand still resting warm and heavy against Lando's jaw.

Lando swallowed hard. He opened his eyes, meeting Oscar’s steady gaze, and offered a small, lopsided, entirely genuine smile.

"Yeah," Lando whispered back. "Okay."

They didn't label it. They didn't try to explain it or build a conversation around it. They just let their shoulders drop back against the edge of the bed frame, returning to the quiet, but the air in the room was permanently altered.

 

August 2016

Since April 6th, Lando had kissed two more girls.

It was the summer after their GCSEs, a sprawling, humid stretch of August filled with sticky house parties and cheap vodka. Lando had leaned against a garden fence in Putney with a girl named Sofia, and he had closed his eyes, desperately trying to map the sensation. He was looking for the terrifying, stomach-dropping gravity he had felt in Oscar’s bedroom. He was looking for the feeling of the compass locking onto North.

He didn't find it. Sofia tasted like strawberry lip balm, and her hands on his shoulders felt entirely weightless.

Lando didn't have an agonising crisis of identity; he had a crisis of vocabulary. He spent the sticky, sleepless nights in his bedroom staring at the ceiling, trying to try on labels in the dark. Gay. Bi. The words felt like ill-fitting clothes. He didn't feel fundamentally different. He still liked girls, he thought, or at least he liked the noise and the ease of them. But none of them anchored him. None of them made the frantic, spinning velocity inside his head completely stop.

He didn't know how to explain to himself that he wasn't necessarily drawn to boys. He was just undeniably drawn to Oscar.

They hadn't talked about the kiss in April. They had both shoved it into a box, locked the lid, and spent the last four months carefully stepping around it.

But by late August, the box was beginning to leak.

They were in Lando’s bedroom on a sweltering Tuesday night. The window was thrown wide open, letting in the faint, distant hum of London traffic, but the air in the room was completely stagnant. They were lying on their backs on Lando’s rug, shoulder-to-shoulder, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark stars Lando had stuck to the ceiling when he was ten.

"I think I failed biology," Lando announced to the ceiling, breaking a ten-minute silence. "I think I genuinely got an unclassified. I drew a picture of a dog on the final page."

"You didn't fail," Oscar said, his voice a low, sleep-rough rumble in the quiet room. "I checked your flashcards. You knew the material. You just have zero impulse control when handed a blank piece of paper."

Lando turned his head. Oscar was lying right next to him, his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm. The heat of the room was oppressive, but the heat radiating off Oscar’s arm, mere millimetres from Lando’s own, felt infinitely heavier.

The tension that had been humming between them since April was suddenly deafening.

Lando rolled onto his side, propping his head up on his hand. He looked at the line of Oscar’s throat, at the dark eyelashes resting against his cheek. He was tired of the box. He was tired of not having the vocabulary.

"Are we ever going to talk about your birthday?" Lando asked. His voice was shockingly quiet, stripped of all its usual performative noise.

Oscar’s eyes snapped open. He didn't look at the ceiling; he looked straight at Lando. The calm face was instantly gone, replaced by a dark, intense vulnerability.

"Do you want to?" Oscar asked softly.

"I don't know how to," Lando admitted, the terrifying honesty slipping out before he could stop it.

Oscar didn't say anything. He just shifted his weight, turning onto his side so they were directly facing each other. He reached out, mirroring the exact movement from four months ago, and cupped the side of Lando’s jaw. His thumb brushed over Lando’s cheekbone.

This time, there was no collision of noses. There was no clumsy, panicked hesitation.

Lando leaned forward, closing the remaining distance, and pressed his mouth to Oscar’s.

It was a revelation. It wasn't an experiment anymore; it was intentional. Oscar made a quiet, sharp noise in the back of his throat, his hand sliding into the messy curls at the nape of Lando’s neck, pulling him closer. The kiss opened up immediately, entirely desperate.

Lando felt a sudden, massive surge of adrenaline. He pushed himself up, throwing his leg over Oscar’s hips so he was straddling him on the rug. Oscar’s breath hitched, but his hands instantly dropped to grip Lando’s waist, anchoring him there.

It was messy, and it was hot, and it was overwhelming. Lando kissed him blindly, his hands dropping to brace against Oscar’s chest. He could feel the frantic, hammering beat of Oscar’s heart beneath his thin t-shirt. Lando shifted his hips, pressing down instinctively, and the sudden, heavy friction sent a violent shockwave straight down his spine.

Oscar let out a muffled groan against Lando’s mouth, his hips jerking upward in an involuntary response. His hands tightened on Lando’s waist, his fingers digging into the cotton of Lando’s shirt.

They were fifteen and sixteen. They were drowning in a sudden, terrifying flood of hormones and uncharted territory. Lando wanted to get closer. He wanted to strip the stifling heat of the room away. He reached down, his fingers catching the hem of Oscar’s t-shirt, pulling it up slightly to expose the warm skin of Oscar’s stomach.

But as his fingertips brushed the bare skin, they hit a wall.

Lando suddenly realised he had absolutely no idea what he was doing. He didn't know the rules of this. He didn't know how to cross the line from a frantic, heavy make-out session on a rug into whatever came next, not with Oscar. The sheer magnitude of getting it wrong terrified him into paralysis.

Oscar felt the hesitation instantly. He always felt everything Lando did.

Oscar broke the kiss. He fell back against the rug, his chest heaving, his eyes wide and blown dark in the dim light. Lando stayed frozen above him, his breathing ragged, his hand still resting tentatively on the edge of Oscar’s shirt.

"Sorry," Lando whispered, a hot flush of embarrassment prickling at his neck. "I don't— Osc, I don't know what I'm doing."

Oscar let out a shaky, breathless laugh. He didn't push Lando off. Instead, he reached up, wrapping both arms around Lando’s back, and gently pulled him all the way down until Lando’s chest was resting flush against his own.

"Neither do I," Oscar murmured, his voice thick, his lips brushing against Lando’s temple. "It's fine. We don't have to know."

Lando let his entire weight drop. He buried his face in the crook of Oscar’s neck, inhaling the sharp, clean scent of him. The panic of not knowing how to cross the line instantly dissolved, replaced by a profound, overwhelming tenderness.

They didn't push it further. They just stayed tangled together on the floor of the bedroom, entirely clothed, sweating in the August heat. Lando closed his eyes, listening to Oscar's breathing slowly even out.

He still didn't have the vocabulary. He didn't know if he was gay, or bi, or what any of it meant for his future. But lying perfectly still on the rug, held entirely safe in Oscar’s arms, Lando finally realised that he didn't actually need the words.

He just needed Oscar.

 

November 13, 2016

Turning sixteen in the Norris household was a chaotic, high-decibel affair.

The entire day had been a relentless barrage of shouting siblings, discarded wrapping paper, a massive family dinner, and an overwhelming amount of sugary cake. By ten o'clock at night, the house had finally begun to settle into a quiet hum. Lando had successfully escaped the lingering remnants of his extended family and school friends, dragging Oscar upstairs to the sanctuary of his bedroom and locking the door behind them.

Outside, it was a classic London November — pitch black and freezing, with rain lashing rhythmically against the windowpane. Inside, Lando’s room was an insulated, warm bubble.

Since the sweltering night on the rug in August, the space between them had permanently fundamentally shifted. They still hadn't bothered to attach a label to it. Lando still didn't have the exact vocabulary to explain his own heart, but he had realised he didn't need it. They had simply folded the quiet, desperate kissing into their routine. Behind locked bedroom doors, in empty school corridors — they found each other, anchored each other, and retreated.

But they hadn't crossed the line they had stalled at in the summer. There was still a fragile, unspoken hesitation hovering just beneath the surface, born entirely out of a mutual terror of getting it wrong.

Oscar was sitting on the edge of Lando’s bed, leaning back on his hands. He was wearing a dark maroon jumper that made his eyes look impossibly dark in the dim light of Lando’s bedside lamp.

"You survived," Oscar noted, watching Lando completely dismantle his carefully constructed, gelled hair with a towel.

"Barely," Lando groaned, throwing the towel onto his desk chair and dropping onto the mattress next to Oscar. "If my aunt asked me what my plans for university were one more time, I was going to throw myself out the window."

"You're sixteen. You don't even know what you're having for lunch tomorrow."

"Exactly!" Lando bumped his shoulder against Oscar’s, a bright, exhausted smile taking over his face. He shifted, pulling his legs up onto the bed and crossing them. He looked at Oscar expectantly. "Right. The family has been dealt with. Hand it over."

Oscar let out a quiet, fond huff of laughter. He reached into the pocket of his dark jeans and pulled out the familiar white envelope, along with a small, flat box.

Lando took the box first. Inside, resting on black foam, was a heavy, brushed-steel keyring. It was simple, completely unbranded, but deeply tactile.

"You can't even get your provisional licence for another year," Oscar said softly, watching Lando’s thumb trace the cool metal. "But I figured you'd lose the keys to whatever terrible car we end up buying if you didn't have something heavy attached to them. We still have a viaduct to drive over."

Lando’s chest seized. He looked at the keyring, the promise of a future road trip from France completely solidified in his palm. He swallowed hard and picked up the white envelope, tearing the flap.

The black biro script was neat and centred.

You are the only person who makes me stop calculating everything that can go wrong in a room and just lets me exist inside it. Happy Birthday.

Lando stared at the paper. The frantic, buzzing energy of his sixteenth birthday instantly drained out of his limbs. He reached over, placing the letter and the heavy steel keyring on his bedside table, right next to the brass compass.

He didn't make a joke. The deflection wasn't necessary anymore.

Lando shifted his weight on the mattress, pushing himself up onto his knees. He moved into Oscar’s space, his hands coming up to rest gently on Oscar’s shoulders. Oscar’s breath hitched, the sudden, sharp sound loud in the quiet room.

Lando leaned down and pressed his mouth to Oscar’s.

It was a hungry, deliberate collision. Oscar’s hands instantly dropped from where they had been bracing his weight on the bed, coming up to grip Lando’s waist with a bruising, anchoring force. Oscar’s mouth opened against his, tasting like the sweet frosting from the birthday cake and something entirely dark and wanting.

Lando let out a soft groan, shifting his knees so he was straddling Oscar’s lap. The friction of their jeans sliding together sent a hot, violent spark straight down Lando’s spine. Oscar’s hands tightened on his waist, pulling him down flush against him, leaving absolutely zero negative space between them.

The stifling heat of the jumper was suddenly unbearable. Lando broke the kiss just enough to catch his breath, his eyes dark and blown wide.

"Osc," Lando whispered, his voice trembling slightly, entirely wrecked. He tugged at the hem of Oscar’s maroon jumper. "Take it off."

Oscar didn't hesitate. He pulled the heavy wool over his head, tossing it blindly onto the floor. Lando followed suit, pulling his own t-shirt off in one fluid motion.

The sudden rush of cool air against their bare skin made them both shiver, but as Lando pressed his chest flush against Oscar’s, the heat that flared between them was electric. Oscar let out a ragged exhale, his hands sliding up Lando’s bare back, mapping the warm line of his spine.

"Are you sure?" Oscar breathed against Lando's collarbone, his voice rough, checking the boundary they had stalled at months ago.

Lando tangled his fingers in Oscar’s dark hair, tilting Oscar’s head up so their eyes met. There was no hesitation left.

"Yeah," Lando whispered, his heart hammering a frantic, perfect rhythm. "I'm sure."

Lando didn't wait for another question. He leaned in again, capturing Oscar's mouth in a kiss that felt deeper than any they'd shared before. The bed creaked softly under their combined weight as Lando shifted forward, pressing Oscar down until his back hit the mattress. Oscar went willingly, pulling Lando with him so their bodies aligned fully — chest to chest, hips slotting together with a friction that made them both inhale sharply.

Lando broke the kiss only to trail his lips along Oscar's jaw, then lower, pressing open-mouthed kisses against the side of his neck. Oscar tilted his head back, giving him more room, a quiet, shaky sound escaping him when Lando's teeth grazed his collarbone.

"God, Osc..." Lando murmured against his skin, voice rough and low. His hands explored the newly exposed plane of Oscar's chest, fingertips tracing the faint definition of muscle that had appeared over the last year of growth spurts and PE lessons. Oscar's skin was warm, slightly damp from the heat of the room and the building tension between them. Every small reaction — the way Oscar's breath hitched, the subtle arch of his back — felt like a discovery.

Oscar's hands weren't idle either. They roamed Lando's back, then dipped lower, slipping just beneath the waistband of Lando's jeans to grip the curve of his hips. The touch was bold but still careful, testing. When Lando rocked his hips forward experimentally, seeking more of that delicious pressure, Oscar let out a muffled groan and tightened his hold.

"Wait— Lando," Oscar breathed, even as he pulled him closer. His voice had that familiar steady quality, but it was frayed at the edges now, cracked open by want. "We don't have to... if you're not—"

"I am," Lando interrupted, lifting his head to look Oscar straight in the eyes. The dim lamplight caught the flush high on Oscar's cheeks and the dark, glassy sheen in his eyes. "I want this. With you.”

Something in Oscar's expression shifted — the last trace of hesitation melting away. He surged up, reversing their positions in one smooth movement so Lando was on his back, Oscar hovering above him. The sudden change made Lando's pulse spike, a thrill running through him at how easily Oscar could take control when he chose to.

Oscar kissed him again, slower this time, like he was memorising every second. His hand slid between them, fingers brushing lightly over the front of Lando's jeans. The touch was tentative at first, then firmer when Lando gasped and pushed into it.

They moved together in a careful, learning rhythm; hands exploring, clothes gradually disappearing piece by piece — jeans pushed down and kicked away, socks lost somewhere on the floor. There were quiet laughs when fingers fumbled with belts or zippers, soft reassurances whispered against skin when one of them hesitated. It wasn't perfect or practiced. It was sixteen-year-old urgency mixed with years of deep, unspoken trust.

When Oscar finally wrapped his hand around both of them, the slick slide of skin on skin drew twin moans from their throats. Lando's head fell back against the pillow, one hand gripping Oscar's shoulder, the other tangled in his dark hair. Oscar's forehead dropped to Lando's, their breaths mingling hot and fast.

It built quickly — too quickly for either of them to feel self-conscious about it. The rain continued its steady drum against the window, but inside the locked room the only sounds were ragged breathing, soft gasps, and the occasional whispered name.

Afterwards, they lay tangled together under Lando's duvet, limbs heavy and skin cooling. Lando’s head rested on Oscar’s chest, one arm draped possessively across his waist. Oscar’s fingers carded slowly through Lando’s hair, the motion soothing and absent-minded.

Neither of them spoke for a long time. The silence wasn't awkward; it felt earned. Safe.

Eventually, Lando broke it, his voice soft and teasing but laced with a sudden, creeping paranoia.

"Do you think anyone heard?" Lando whispered, his eyes flicking toward the heavy wooden door of his bedroom. Everyone was supposed to be downstairs, but the walls on Inverness Terrace were notoriously thin.

Oscar’s hand stopped moving in Lando’s hair.

"I don't know," Oscar said, his voice completely flat, his eyes widening slightly in the dark as he calculated the acoustic properties of a Victorian terrace house. "We were... relatively quiet."

"You hit your elbow against the headboard," Lando pointed out, sitting up slightly.

"Because you shoved me," Oscar hissed back, already scrambling backward on the mattress. He grabbed for his discarded boxers on the rug. "If your dad knocks on that door right now, I’m genuinely climbing out the window."

"You'd break both your legs!"

"It's a risk I am entirely willing to take."

Lando stifled a frantic, breathless laugh, grabbing his own jeans and pulling them on with a distinct lack of coordination. They scrambled around the dark room, hunting for missing socks and tossing t-shirts at each other, the heavy, profound tenderness of the last hour entirely replaced by the manic, terrifying adrenaline of being sixteen and convinced they were about to get caught.

They were fully dressed and sitting rigidly on opposite ends of the bed, breathing slightly too fast, when a floorboard creaked out in the hallway.

They both froze. Oscar looked at Lando, his eyes utterly terrified. Lando grabbed a random biology textbook off his nightstand, shoved it into Oscar’s lap, and desperately tried to smooth down his own hair.

Footsteps padded past the door, heading for the bathroom down the hall. A door clicked shut, followed by the sound of running water.

They let out a simultaneous, massive exhale.

Oscar looked down at the biology textbook in his lap. He flipped it open. "Lando," he whispered, fighting a desperate battle against a grin. "This book is upside down."

"Shut up," Lando breathed back, collapsing backward onto the mattress, a shaky laugh finally escaping him. "Just read about the... the mitochondria."

Oscar closed the book, setting it on the floor. He lay back down next to Lando, bumping their shoulders together. The panic faded, the adrenaline settling back into that warm, heavy exhaustion.

 

July 2018

It was mid-July, deep into the sprawling, directionless summer after their A-levels. They were at a massive, chaotic house party in Richmond, thrown by someone Felix knew from rugby. The music was vibrating through the floorboards, the air in the kitchen was thick with the smell of cheap vodka and sweat, and Oscar had retreated to the relative quiet of the back garden half an hour ago.

He was sitting on a low brick wall, a warm beer resting loosely in his hand, watching Lando through the sliding glass doors.

Lando was in the centre of the living room, practically glowing. He was laughing, his head thrown back, surrounded by a group of girls Oscar vaguely recognised from a neighbouring school. One of them, a blonde in a denim jacket, was leaning in close, her hand resting lightly on Lando’s chest.

Oscar watched the interaction with a strange, numb sort of detachment. He didn't feel the sharp, violent spike of panic he had felt in France years ago. The architecture of his jealousy had fundamentally changed, mostly because the state of their entire relationship made absolutely no logical sense.

Since the night of Lando’s sixteenth birthday, their friendship had developed a parallel, shadow existence.

They had never formally discussed it. They hadn't sat down and drawn up the parameters. They just let the physical reality of it bleed into the gaps between their normal lives. If a room was too quiet, if a party was too boring, if the tension simply grew too heavy to carry — they would find a locked door, drop the heavy, platonic shield, and absolutely devour each other.

It was frantic, exploratory, and deeply, overwhelmingly intimate. Oscar knew the exact sound Lando made when he bit down on his collarbone. He knew how Lando’s hands felt gripping his shoulders in the dark.

But they had never crossed the final boundary. They always stopped just short of a full, whole night. They had never gone all the way — not with each other, and, by a silent, mutual understanding, not with anyone else either. It was as if they were both terrified that crossing that final line would shatter the delicate, glass-blown structure of their friendship.

Because above all the heavy breathing and the desperate hands, they were still just best mates. Oscar was still the person Lando complained to about his father; Lando was still the person who forced Oscar out of his flat on miserable Sundays. The friendship was the foundation. The physical stuff was just an unlabelled room built on top of it.

To maintain the facade of normalcy, they both kept trying to date. Lando flirted endlessly at parties, sometimes disappearing into hallways with girls, always emerging a little while later looking perfectly cheerful and entirely untouched. Oscar had gone on exactly three dates with a girl from his physics set. They had gone to the cinema, they had shared a perfectly pleasant, polite kiss by a bus stop, and Oscar had felt absolutely nothing.

Kissing other people felt like standing on the moon — entirely devoid of gravity, floating in a dead, airless space. Kissing Lando was like standing at the bottom of the ocean. It was crushing. It was the only thing that felt real.

But sitting on the brick wall in the dark, Oscar felt the low, steady hum of a headache building behind his eyes. He was eighteen. They were supposed to be going to university soon. The unlabelled, formless limbo they were existing in was starting to feel structurally unsound.

What are we? Oscar thought, tracing the condensation on his beer bottle. Friends who occasionally lose their minds? A habit? Something else?

He didn't know if Lando was just rolling with the momentum, enjoying the safety of Oscar without the terrifying commitment of a label, or if Lando was just as hopelessly, permanently anchored as Oscar was.

The sliding glass doors scraped open, spilling loud bass out into the garden.

Lando stepped out into the humid night air. He looked around the dark garden, his eyes scanning the shadows until they locked onto Oscar sitting on the wall. The performative, bright energy he had been using with the blonde girl instantly dropped. He let out a long exhale, walking across the damp grass.

"It's a nightmare in there," Lando announced, practically collapsing onto the brick wall next to Oscar. He bumped his shoulder heavily against Oscar’s. "Someone just spilled Red Bull on my trainers. I'm leaving."

"You were having a great time," Oscar noted mildly, taking a sip of his beer. "The girl in the denim jacket seemed very invested in your stories."

Lando waved a dismissive hand, tilting his head back to look at the starless, hazy London sky. "She asked me what my star sign was, Osc. Unironically. I had to fake a coughing fit to get away."

Oscar let out a quiet huff of laughter.

Lando turned his head. His face was flushed from the heat of the house, his curls sticking slightly to his forehead. He looked at Oscar, and the familiar, magnetic pull flared to life between them, entirely effortless.

Lando didn't say anything. He just shifted his weight, sliding closer on the rough brick, and rested his head heavily on Oscar’s shoulder. He let out a quiet, contented sigh, his hand dropping to rest casually over Oscar’s knee.

It wasn't sexual. It was just a profound, absolute claim on Oscar’s space.

Oscar looked down at Lando's hand resting on his jeans. He felt the rapid, anxious calculations in his brain slowly grind to a halt. The confusion over what they were, the terror of the unlabelled future, the frustration of the uncrossed lines — it all muted into background noise.

 

December 2018

Being completely, wonderfully drunk in December made the miserable London cold feel like a joke.

Lando couldn't feel his fingers, his nose was numb, and he was currently leaning most of his body weight against Oscar’s side as they stumbled down the pavement in Battersea. They had just left an aggressively festive Christmas party thrown by one of Lando’s new agency colleagues. It had been hours of cheap mulled wine, terrible holiday jumpers, and screaming over Mariah Carey remixes.

They had taken entirely different paths after the sprawling, melted summer of their A-levels just a few months prior. Lando had flat-out refused the concept of university, charming his way into a junior creative role at a flashy media agency in Soho. It was an environment fuelled by chaos, tight deadlines, and performative networking — exactly the kind of high-velocity noise Lando naturally thrived in. He was somehow already making stupid money, enough to sign the lease on a pristine flat south of the river at eighteen, living a life that felt like it was permanently playing on fast-forward.

Oscar, meanwhile, had done exactly what Oscar was meant to do. He was navigating his first year of a brutal civil engineering degree at Imperial College. His days were built out of rigid schedules, structural mechanics, and endless pages of load distribution calculations. Logically, their lives should have splintered. They were orbiting entirely different planets, operating on completely opposite frequencies. But the foundation they had poured over the last five years was impossibly stubborn. No matter how different their days looked, their nights always seemed to end with them quietly collapsing back into each other's gravity.

"You're walking into the street," Oscar pointed out, his arm wrapping securely around Lando’s waist to physically haul him back onto the pavement. Oscar sounded entirely exasperated, but Lando could feel the familiar, suppressed rumble of laughter vibrating in his chest.

"I’m navigating the urban terrain," Lando corrected, his words slurring slightly. He threw his arm over Oscar’s shoulders, nearly dragging them both down into a frozen puddle. "You just lack my visionary sense of direction."

"You've tried to unlock three different front doors that weren't yours," Oscar replied smoothly, steering them toward Lando’s actual building. "You're a visionary menace."

They barely made it into the lift before Lando dissolved into a fit of giggles, entirely unprompted. The sheer, dizzying momentum of the night had completely taken over. When they finally spilled through the front door of Lando’s flat, the blast of the central heating hit them like a physical wall.

Lando kicked his trainers off, not caring where they landed, and shrugged out of his coat. He didn't make it to the sofa. He took three steps toward the hallway, his sock-clad feet slipping on the hardwood floor, and pitched backward.

Oscar caught him instantly, entirely by muscle memory.

Lando’s back hit Oscar’s chest, and Oscar’s arms locked around him to keep them both upright. Lando tilted his head back, resting it against Oscar’s shoulder, and let out a breathless, booming laugh that echoed in the quiet flat.

"Gotcha," Oscar murmured, his voice low, right next to Lando’s ear.

The laughter died in Lando’s throat.

The transition from chaotic, drunken noise to sudden, suffocating gravity was instantaneous. It was the same shift they had been executing for two and a half years — the quiet click of the deadbolt locking out the rest of the world so they could finally breathe.

Lando turned around in Oscar’s arms. The flat was dark, lit only by the amber streetlamps outside. Oscar’s cheeks were flushed from the cold and the alcohol, his dark hair messy, his eyes locked onto Lando with that absolute, devastating focus.

Lando smiled, reached up, and pulled Oscar down by the collar of his coat.

The kiss was messy, wet, and incredibly warm. Oscar tasted like red wine and the freezing night air. He groaned, a quiet, desperate sound, and backed Lando up until his spine hit the hallway wall. Oscar’s hands were everywhere, frantic and searching, mapping Lando’s waist, his chest, sliding into his hair.

It was the familiar, hungry routine. The desperation to consume each other before the panic set in.

But tonight, Lando didn't feel the panic.

"Too many clothes," Lando gasped against Oscar’s mouth, his fingers clumsily wrestling with the heavy wool of Oscar’s coat, pushing it off his shoulders until it dropped to the floor.

He didn't stop there. He grabbed the hem of Oscar’s jumper, pulling it up. Oscar broke the kiss, his chest heaving, his arms raising automatically to let Lando pull the garment over his head. Lando threw his own t-shirt off a second later, the cool air of the hallway raising goosebumps on his bare skin that were instantly erased when Oscar pressed them chest-to-chest.

Oscar kissed him again, his hands sliding down Lando’s bare back, gripping his hips. Lando rocked forward instinctively, the heavy friction of their jeans sliding together sending a blinding jolt of electricity straight down his legs.

Oscar shuddered, his forehead dropping to rest against Lando’s. He was breathing hard, his eyes squeezed shut. Lando could feel the exact moment Oscar’s brain tried to reboot. He could feel the hesitation creeping into the tension of Oscar’s shoulders — the fear that they were finally at the edge of the map, about to fall off.

"Lando," Oscar whispered, his voice rough, entirely wrecked. It was the warning. The question. The place where they usually stopped.

Lando reached up and cupped Oscar’s face, his thumbs smoothing over the flush on Oscar's cheekbones. He looked at his best friend, the only person in the world who made him feel entirely tethered to the ground, and realised how stupid they had been.

There was no line to cross. There was nothing to ruin. It was just them.

"Don't think," Lando whispered, his voice soft, dropping all the performative noise. He smiled, an easy, fearless, drunken grin. "I don't want to stop tonight, Osc. Let's just... let's just go to bed."

Oscar’s eyes snapped open. He stared at Lando, searching his face for any sign of hesitation, any hint of a joke. He found nothing but absolute, glowing certainty.

The remaining tension bled out of Oscar’s frame, replaced by a sudden, overwhelming surge of intent. He didn't say a word. He just ducked his head, kissing Lando hard enough to make his head spin, and scooped his arm under Lando’s knees, lifting him entirely off the floor.

Lando let out a loud, delighted laugh, wrapping his arms around Oscar’s neck as Oscar carried him down the short hallway.

They fell onto the mattress in a tangle of limbs, the remaining clothes vanishing in a clumsy, eager rush. The fear was completely gone, replaced by a giddy, intoxicating disbelief that they were actually allowed to have this.

The room was dark except for the faint amber glow of the streetlamps filtering through the half-open blinds, but neither of them needed light. They knew each other’s bodies by touch, by sound, by the way breath hitched in the dark.

Lando ended up on his back, Oscar hovering over him, their bare skin sliding together in a rush of heat. Oscar’s mouth found his again, deep and claiming, while his hand trailed down Lando’s side, fingers digging into his hip with just enough pressure to make Lando arch up.

“Fuck, Osc,” Lando breathed, hands roaming over Oscar’s back, nails scraping lightly. “You’re really carrying me to bed now? Romantic.”

Oscar huffed a quiet laugh against his neck, then bit down gently on the junction of shoulder and throat. “Shut up. You liked it.”

Lando’s laugh turned into a moan when Oscar’s hand wrapped around him, stroking slow and firm. The touch was confident in a way it hadn’t been two years ago — they’d learned each other’s bodies in fragments, but tonight felt different. There was no stopping short.

Oscar kissed his way down Lando’s chest, tongue flicking over a nipple before continuing lower. When he took Lando into his mouth, hot and wet and perfect, Lando’s head fell back against the pillow with a broken sound.

“Jesus— Osc—” His fingers threaded into Oscar’s dark hair, not pushing, just holding on. Oscar worked him with steady, deliberate strokes of his tongue, one hand braced on Lando’s thigh to keep him open. Every time Lando’s hips twitched, Oscar hummed around him, the vibration shooting straight up Lando’s spine.

“You’re so good at that,” Lando gasped, voice wrecked.

Oscar pulled off with a wet sound, lips shiny, eyes dark as he looked up. “Want to make you feel good tonight. All the way.” His voice was low, steady, but there was a raw edge to it. “Tell me if it’s too much.”

Lando nodded frantically, tugging Oscar back up for a messy kiss. “Not too much. Want you. Want all of you.”

They shifted together. Oscar reached for the small bottle of lube they’d left in the bedside drawer months ago — never used for this, only for hurried handjobs. His hands were careful as he slicked his fingers, but the look in his eyes was anything but hesitant now.

“Relax for me,” Oscar murmured, pressing a kiss to the inside of Lando’s thigh as he circled one finger gently against him. “I’ve got you.”

Lando exhaled shakily, forcing his body to loosen as Oscar worked him open — one finger, then two, slow and patient, curling just right until Lando was panting, hips rocking back onto Oscar’s hand.

“Fuck, that’s— yeah, there—” Lando groaned, one arm thrown over his eyes. “You’re so careful with me.”

Oscar leaned down, kissing along Lando’s jaw. “Because you’re important,” his voice dropped lower as he added a third finger, scissoring gently. “You feel incredible. So tight and warm around my fingers… can’t wait to feel you around my cock.”

Lando whimpered at the words, a rare sound from him, and Oscar’s control visibly frayed. He pulled his fingers out, rolled a condom on and slicked himself quickly. He lined up, the blunt head pressing against Lando’s entrance.

“Tell me if you need to stop,” Oscar said, voice tight with restraint. One hand stroked Lando’s hip soothingly, the other braced beside his head.

“Don’t stop,” Lando whispered, locking eyes with him. “I want this. Want you inside me.”

Oscar pushed in slowly, inch by inch, breathing hard through his nose. The stretch burned in the best way — a deep, full pressure that made Lando’s mouth fall open on a silent gasp. When Oscar bottomed out, they both stilled, foreheads pressed together, breathing the same air.

“Fuck… Lando,” Oscar groaned, voice trembling. “You feel… so good. So perfect.”

Lando let out a shaky laugh that turned into a moan as Oscar shifted his hips. “Move, Osc. Please.”

Oscar started slow, gentle rolls of his hips that gradually built into something deeper, a little rougher. Each thrust dragged a broken sound from Lando’s throat. Oscar’s hand found Lando’s cock again, stroking in time with his movements, thumb swiping over the head.

“You’re so beautiful like this,” Oscar said, voice low and steady even as his rhythm grew harder.

Lando’s hands clutched at Oscar’s shoulders, nails digging in as pleasure coiled tight and hot in his belly. “Harder— fuck, just like that. Feels so fucking good.”

Oscar obliged, snapping his hips with more force, the bed creaking rhythmically beneath them. The tenderness never left — every rough thrust was balanced by soft kisses to Lando’s neck, quiet murmurs of “You’re so pretty” and “You’re so perfect” breathed against sweat-damp skin.

They didn’t last too long. When Lando came, it hit him hard, back arching, a choked cry tearing from his throat as he spilled over Oscar’s fist. Oscar followed moments later, burying himself deep with a low, guttural groan, hips stuttering as he rode it out.

They collapsed together, Oscar carefully pulling out before gathering Lando against his chest. Their skin was sticky, hearts hammering, but the silence that followed was soft and safe.

Lando pressed his face into Oscar’s neck, breathing him in. “That was… yeah. We should’ve done that sooner.”

Oscar chuckled, the sound rumbling through his chest as he stroked a hand down Lando’s back. “We got there eventually,” he kissed the top of Lando’s head, voice dropping to something quieter, more vulnerable. “You okay? Wasn’t too much?”

Lando shook his head, tightening his arms around Oscar. “Perfect. You were perfect,” he tilted his head up for a lazy, sated kiss.

Lando pulled back from the kiss, resting his chin on Oscar’s chest. The silence in the room stretched out, no longer filled with frantic breathing or the rush of adrenaline. Just the soft click of the radiator kicking on and the distant, muffled sound of London traffic.

Usually, this was the exact moment the script flipped.

For two and a half years, the aftermath of any locked-door collision was identical: a brief, breathless recovery, followed by the frantic rustle of clothes being pulled back on. One of them — almost always Oscar — would construct a flimsy excuse about early alarms, exams, or train schedules, and they would retreat back into their safe, platonic corners before the reality of what they had done could fully set in.

Oscar shifted, the mattress dipping slightly as he propped himself up on his elbow.

Lando’s heart gave a sudden, nervous stutter. The warm, heavy contentment in his stomach instantly tightened. He watched Oscar’s eyes trace the mess of discarded clothes scattered across the rug.

"It's late," Oscar murmured, his voice tentative. He glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand, which read 04:17, then back down at Lando. He didn't make a move to get up, but his entire body was coiled with that familiar, hesitant tension. "I don't know what... the protocol is here."

Lando let out a soft, huffing laugh, reaching up to gently flick Oscar’s bare chest. "Protocol? Osc, we just broke every single rule we've had since we were thirteen. I don't think there's a manual for this part."

Oscar sighed, a small, self-deprecating smile breaking through the uncertainty in his eyes. He rubbed the back of his neck, looking unusually entirely out of his depth. "We've just never actually fallen asleep. Together."

It was true. They had kissed, they had touched, they had entirely unspooled each other in the dark, but they had never actually slept.

Sleeping next to each other implied a permanence, a quiet domesticity that was entirely different from the desperate, adrenaline-fueled hookups they were used to. It meant giving up consciousness. It meant waking up in the harsh daylight, entirely sober, and having to look at each other without any shields to hide behind. It was, in many ways, much more terrifying than taking their clothes off.

"You can stay, you know,” Lando whispered. He reached up, catching Oscar’s wrist, and gently pulled his arm down so Oscar was forced to lie flat against the pillows again. Lando immediately draped himself over Oscar’s side, throwing an arm across his chest to effectively pin him in place.

Oscar looked at him, the last remnants of his over-calculated panic slowly dissolving in the warm, dim light of the bedroom. He didn't argue. He didn't try to build a boundary. He just let out a long, shuddering exhale, wrapping both arms around Lando and pulling him flush against his side.

"Okay," Oscar murmured into Lando's messy hair, his voice finally settling into that deep, anchoring calm. "I'm staying."

Lando closed his eyes, a profound, heavy exhaustion finally pulling him under.

 

February 2019

Oscar had kept his promise. He had stayed the night. But the morning had been a completely different story.

When Lando had dragged his eyes open the day after that freezing December night, the heavy, contented warmth of the bedroom was gone. The space next to him on the mattress was empty and cold. Oscar had been fully dressed, standing by the bedroom door with his coat already zipped up, looking like a man preparing to flee a crime scene.

"I've got to meet someone from my cohort at the library," Oscar had muttered, his eyes fixed firmly on the doorknob rather than Lando’s face. It was a Sunday morning, three days before Christmas. The library wasn't even open.

Lando had just blinked, his sleep-fogged brain entirely unable to process the sudden, freezing chasm that had opened up in the room. By the time he had managed to sit up, the front door was already clicking shut.

In the two months since, they had repeated the cycle. They had slept together a dozen times, falling into each other with a desperate, magnetic ease whenever the air in Lando’s flat grew too heavy. The sex was incredible — tender and overwhelming, breaking down every physical barrier they had ever built. But the emotional barricades were a different story.

The second the sun came up, Oscar’s brain would reboot. The vulnerability would vanish, replaced instantly by an awkward, suffocating panic. Oscar would construct a flimsy excuse, put his shoes on, and bolt back to Imperial College before Lando could even ask him to stay for breakfast.

Lando was beyond confused. He didn't understand how they could be entirely bare in the dark, stripping away years of unsaid things, only for Oscar to put all the armour back on in the daylight. Lando didn't want a label — he was still terrified of the permanence of the word boyfriend — but he hated the sudden distance. He hated feeling like Oscar was running away from him.

But Lando was a master of avoidance. He didn't push. He just rolled with the whiplash, taking whatever pieces of Oscar he was allowed to have.

It was a miserable, sleeting Tuesday in late February. They were sitting on Lando’s living room rug, eating lukewarm Thai takeaway straight out of the plastic containers. The television was playing a football match on mute, providing a flickering background light.

Oscar had been uncharacteristically quiet all evening. He was picking at his noodles with a fork, his jaw tight.

"If you stare at that prawn any longer, it's going to spontaneously combust," Lando noted, nudging Oscar’s knee with his foot.

Oscar stopped. He set the plastic container down on the coffee table. He didn't look up immediately. He wiped his hands on a paper napkin, folding it into a perfect, meticulous square.

"I got an email today," Oscar said. His voice was completely flat, anchored with that deliberate tone he used when he was delivering bad news. "From the engineering department."

Lando lowered his own fork. The ambient warmth in the flat suddenly felt very thin. "Okay. Did you fail a module? Because I can easily hack the mainframe. I’ve seen enough movies."

Oscar didn't smile. He looked up, meeting Lando’s eyes.

"I applied for an international industrial placement program back in October," Oscar said quietly. "I didn't tell you because it was highly competitive. I didn't think I’d get it."

Lando’s heart gave a strange, hard thud against his ribs. He felt the air pressure in the room shift. "Okay. Did you get it?"

"Yeah," Oscar swallowed hard. He looked at Lando, and for a second, the thick, carefully constructed walls were completely gone. He looked terrified. "It’s in Melbourne. It's a structural firm working on a major rail line."

"Melbourne," Lando repeated. The word tasted like ash. It wasn't a train ride away. It was a twenty-two-hour flight. It was an ocean, a continent, and a completely different timezone. "Right. Wow. That’s… Osc, that’s massive. You’ll be close to your family… When?"

"Yeah. September," Oscar said softly.

Lando blinked. "September. So… seven months."

"And the placement is for six months," Oscar added, the words coming out quickly, almost apologetically. "I’ll be back in March."

Lando stared at him. The timeline slotted into place in his brain, and a cold, sickening vertigo washed over him. Six months. Half a year without Oscar. Half a year of walking into rooms and not having a compass to look for.

Lando didn't know what they were doing right now. He was entirely confused by the sex, the mornings, the retreating, and the silence. But he had assumed they had time to figure it out. He had assumed they would always just be in each other's orbit, circling closer and closer until they finally collided for good.

He hadn't realised there was a time limit.

"Well," Lando forced his mouth to move. He stretched his lips into his brightest, easiest, most performative grin. He threw a heavy layer of noise over the sudden, crushing panic in his chest. "That’s brilliant. Truly. You're a prodigy, Piastri. They're lucky to have you."

Oscar looked at him, his dark eyes searching Lando’s face for the crack in the facade. "You think?"

"Obviously," Lando lied cheerfully, picking his fork back up with hands that felt completely numb. "Just means I don't have to share my takeaway for six months. It's a win for me, really."

Oscar didn't laugh. He just nodded slowly, looking down at his hands. "Yeah. Right."

They spent the rest of the evening talking about logistics, safely retreating to flight routes and family stories. But as Lando sat on the rug, perfectly performing the role of the supportive best friend, he felt an invisible clock begin to tick loudly in the centre of his living room.

 

April 6, 2020

Oscar woke up on the morning of April 6th, 2020, to the quiet, suffocating stillness of his childhood bedroom in Melbourne. He was twenty years old today. The world outside his window had entirely ground to a halt. The streets were empty, the university campus was locked, and the global borders had slammed shut with a terrifying, absolute finality.

He stared up at the familiar ceiling of his room, the steady hum of the air conditioning the only sound in the house, and felt a familiar, crushing weight settle squarely on his chest.

For the last thirteen months, Oscar had been running a desperate, failing experiment in emotional containment.

It had started back in February 2019, the day he had sat on Lando’s rug and announced he was leaving for a six-month placement in Australia. He had watched the light behind Lando’s eyes completely short-circuit, replaced by a frantic, blinding panic that Lando had immediately tried to bury under loud jokes and noise.

Oscar had known, right then, that he possessed the power to entirely dismantle Lando. He knew that if he asked, Lando would have begged him to stay.

But Oscar was terrified. The seven months between the announcement and his actual departure in September had been an agonising, prolonged state of suspended animation. They had spent practically every day together. They had consumed each other in the dark of Lando’s Battersea flat with a greedy, starving desperation, trying to stockpile enough physical memory to last an ocean apart.

But Oscar had never stayed for breakfast. He had never let the frantic, overheated nights bleed into the quiet domesticity of a Sunday morning.

He hadn't run away because he didn't care; he had run away because he cared entirely too much. Lando was a blazing, magnetic sun. He pulled people into his orbit effortlessly, absorbing their attention, thriving in the noise. Oscar was just a quiet, steady thing that had somehow managed to anchor him.

But what happened if Oscar claimed the space officially? What happened if they put a label on it, and six months later, Lando realised he was suffocating? Lando moved at a hundred kilometres an hour. Oscar was terrified that if he forced Lando to stand still and be a boyfriend, Lando would eventually resent him. And if they broke up, Oscar wouldn't just lose a partner. He would lose the foundation of his entire life since he was thirteen.

It was a risk Oscar simply refused to take. So, he had kept the boundary rigid. He had kept them as best friends who occasionally, desperately lost their minds behind locked doors.

Then, September had arrived, and Oscar had boarded a plane to Melbourne, leaving his father, Lando, the university, the friends, everything in London.

The first six months back in Australia had been a jarring, surreal experience. His mother was thrilled to have him home, his sisters were older and fiercely protective of his time, and the grid of the city finally made sense again. The sun was bright, the sky was impossibly vast, and the engineering firm he was placed at was brilliant.

Logically, he should’ve been perfectly happy.

Instead, he felt like he was walking around with a phantom limb. He would see a stupid advertisement on a billboard and instinctively reach for his phone to text a joke, only to remember Lando was asleep twelve time zones away. He would walk into a crowded pub in St Kilda and immediately scan the room, looking for a chaotic head of curls and a loud laugh, and feel a sickening, hollow drop in his stomach when he remembered where he was.

To prove to himself that the boundary he had built was real, Oscar had tried to move on. In November, he had gone home with a guy from his university cohort.

The guy was nice. He was an architecture student, he was quiet, and the mechanical execution of the evening was perfectly fine. But lying in a strange bed in Carlton, staring up at a dark ceiling while the guy slept next to him, Oscar had felt violently, overwhelmingly empty.

Kissing someone else felt like reading a textbook in a language he didn't understand. The entire time, Oscar's brain had been rigidly cataloguing the errors: His hands are too heavy. He doesn't smell right. He doesn't make that small, hitched sound in the back of his throat when I touch his waist. Oscar had dressed in the dark and left before the sun came up, entirely disgusted with himself.

It had been even worse when the roles were reversed. During their weekend FaceTime calls, Lando would occasionally, casually drop the mention of a date into the conversation. A girl he had met at an agency party. A guy who had bought him a drink in Soho. Lando always mentioned them with a breezy, careless tone, as if trying to prove that he was perfectly fine, perfectly unbothered by the ocean between them.

Every single time, Oscar would feel a sharp, white-hot spike of jealousy twist like a knife in his ribs. He would smile at the screen, nod, and offer a dry, sarcastic comment, while his internal self violently collapsed.

He was the one who had built the rules. He was the one who had refused to commit. He had absolutely no right to be angry, so he swallowed the jealousy down like broken glass and let it quietly tear him apart.

Then, March 2020 had happened.

The six-month placement was supposed to end. Oscar was supposed to be packing his bags, preparing to fly back to the damp, grey misery of London.

Instead, the pandemic had swept across the globe, locking everything down. The emails from the university and the airlines had arrived in rapid succession. Flights grounded. Borders sealed indefinitely.

The temporary distance had suddenly, horrifyingly, become a permanent state of being.

Oscar rolled over in his childhood bed, grabbing his phone from the nightstand. The screen lit up, blindingly bright in the dim room.

It was 8:00 AM in Melbourne, which meant it was 11:00 PM the night before in London.

There were three texts from Lando.

[08:03] Lando: happy australian birthday you absolute fossil

[08:03] Lando: you almost pushing thirty

[08:03] Lando: i was going to send you a gift but the royal mail is currently operating out of a shed in a panic so you get nothing

[08:06] Lando: wake up and answer your phone i'm bored

Oscar let out a slow, heavy exhale, a reluctant, fond smile finally breaking through the miserable weight in his chest. He tapped the FaceTime icon.

It rang twice before the screen flashed, connecting the video.

Lando looked terrible.

He was lying flat on his back on his sofa in Battersea. The flat was dark, lit only by the blue glow of the television screen in the background. Lando’s hair was an overgrown, chaotic mess, his eyes were shadowed with exhaustion, and he was wearing a faded, oversized hoodie that looked suspiciously like the one Oscar had accidentally left behind in September.

"Look who decided to join the living," Lando grumbled, his voice rough and incredibly thick, though a genuine, relieved smile instantly split across his face.

"It's eight in the morning, Lando," Oscar said, his voice dropping into its familiar rhythm. "Some of us require a standard REM cycle."

"Sleep is a social construct," Lando countered, shifting his phone so it was propped awkwardly against a cushion. He let out a long, heavy sigh. "Happy birthday, Osc."

"Thanks." Oscar traced the edge of his phone case, his eyes cataloguing the dark circles under Lando’s eyes. The agency had sent everyone home to work remotely. Lando, an extrovert who required a constant stream of human interaction just to function, had been entirely alone in his flat for three weeks. "You look like a hostage."

"I feel like a hostage," Lando groaned, throwing a hand over his eyes. "The walls are genuinely closing in. I tried to do a puzzle yesterday. A jigsaw puzzle, Oscar. I lasted twelve minutes before I threw a piece out the window. I’m losing my grip on reality."

"You never had a particularly firm grip on reality to begin with," Oscar pointed out gently.

"Mean. You're mean to me on your birthday. It's a character flaw," Lando dropped his hand, looking back at the screen. The smile faded, leaving behind an incredibly young, incredibly exhausted vulnerability. "I thought you were coming back a week ago."

The words hung in the air, heavy and loaded. They both knew the timeline. They had both been silently counting down the days since September.

"I know," Oscar said quietly. The knot in his throat tightened. "My flight was cancelled on Thursday. They aren't rebooking anything until... well, they don't know."

Lando swallowed hard. The digital compression of the video call pixelated the image slightly, but Oscar didn't miss the way Lando’s jaw tightened, the way he looked away from the camera for a fraction of a second to compose himself.

"Right," Lando murmured. He forced the smile back onto his face, bright and brittle. "Well. More time to enjoy the majestic Australian wildlife. Try not to get boxed by a kangaroo. I need you back eventually so I can officially beat you at FIFA. You're losing your edge."

"I let you win in September," Oscar lied effortlessly, leaning into the banter because it was the only safe bridge they had left.

"Bold claim from a man trapped on an island," Lando shot back.

They fell into it easily, trading insults and sarcastic observations, trying to fill the terrifying, silent void of the global lockdown with noise. But underneath the familiar rhythm, Oscar could feel the strain. He could feel Lando actively trying to hold his own scaffolding up.

"Go to sleep, Lando," Oscar said eventually, watching Lando stifle a massive yawn. "It's past midnight there."

"I don't want to sleep," Lando mumbled, his eyes slipping shut for a second. "It's too quiet in here. I hate it."

Oscar stared at the screen. He looked at the boy — the man — who had somehow become the entire blueprint of his life. He looked at the distance, the physical and emotional walls he had painstakingly built to protect them both, and realised they weren't protecting anything at all.

His refusal to commit, his desperate need to keep the foundation safe by never labelling it, was just another way of leaving Lando alone in an empty room.

"I miss you," Lando whispered suddenly. His eyes were still closed, his face pressed into the sofa cushion. It wasn't a joke. It wasn't a casual sign-off. It was a raw, devastating admission of defeat.

Oscar’s breath hitched.

"I miss you too," Oscar said softly, his voice thick with a sudden, overwhelming emotion that completely bypassed his usual filters. "I'll leave the call connected. Just put the phone on the coffee table."

Lando’s eyes opened. He looked at the screen, the surprise evident on his face.

"You don't have to do that," Lando murmured. "You have to... be awake. Do birthday things."

"I'm not doing anything, Lando. The world is shut," Oscar offered a small, fierce, entirely unguarded smile. "Just put the phone down. I'll stay."

Lando stared at him for a long moment, reading the absolute, unyielding certainty in Oscar’s face. He didn't argue. He reached out, his hand covering the screen for a second, and then set the phone down on the coffee table, angling the camera so Oscar could still see him lying on the sofa.

Oscar propped his own phone against his bedside lamp. He didn't speak. He just lay there in the bright Australian morning, watching the pixelated, grainy image of his best friend falling asleep in the dark, one billion kilometres away.

 

November 13, 2020

Turning twenty was supposed to be a monumental, deafening event. It was supposed to involve a crowded club in Soho, a ridiculous bar tab, and Felix inevitably having to carry Lando into a black cab at four in the morning.

Instead, London was plunged into its second national lockdown, and Lando was spending his birthday sitting alone on his sofa in Battersea, wearing grey jogging bottoms and staring blankly at the television.

The silence of the flat was absolutely crushing.

He had spent the afternoon enduring a chaotic, lagging Zoom call with his entire extended family, followed by a FaceTime with Max and Felix, who had simultaneously taken a shot of terrible vodka on screen in his honour. It was a nice gesture, but once the calls disconnected, the isolation had rushed back in, heavier than before.

He had spoken to Oscar that morning. Or rather, Oscar's evening. Oscar had texted from his bedroom in Melbourne, saying he was exhausted. He had wished Lando a happy birthday and promised they would celebrate properly whenever the Australian government finally decided to open the borders.

It had been fourteen months. Fourteen months of living exclusively through glowing rectangular screens, fighting time zones, and pretending the phantom ache in his chest wasn't slowly driving him insane.

At eight o'clock, the intercom in the hallway buzzed, a harsh, sudden noise that made Lando jump.

He dragged himself off the sofa, assuming his aggressively large Indian takeaway order had finally arrived. He pressed the button to unlock the main building door without checking the camera, grabbed his wallet off the hall table, and pulled his own front door open, ready to offer a tired, polite smile to the delivery driver.

Lando looked up.

His wallet slipped from his fingers, hitting the hardwood floor with a sharp smack.

Standing in the hallway, illuminated by the harsh fluorescent light of the corridor, was Oscar.

He was wearing a heavy black winter coat, a dark beanie pulled down over his messy hair, and a battered duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He looked pale, incredibly jet-lagged, and entirely, impossibly real.

Lando’s brain completely flatlined. He forgot how to breathe. He stared at the apparition in his hallway, terrified that if he blinked, the hallucination would violently pixelate and vanish back into a screen.

"The Australian border force are a logistical nightmare to negotiate with," Oscar said. His voice was a low, rough rasp that sent a physical shockwave straight down Lando’s spine. "But the university technically sponsored a repatriation flight for my placement, so... I pulled some strings."

"You..." Lando choked on the syllable. His vocal cords refused to work.

"I landed at Heathrow two hours ago," Oscar continued, a small, tentative, incredibly soft smile breaking across his exhausted face. He let the heavy duffel bag slide off his shoulder, hitting the floor with a thud. "Happy birthday, Lando."

Lando didn't say a word. He closed the remaining distance in a fraction of a second, launching himself out of the doorway and colliding with Oscar with a desperate, devastating force.

Oscar caught him instantly. His arms wrapped around Lando’s waist, locking him in tight, absorbing the impact as Lando buried his face completely into the collar of Oscar’s heavy wool coat.

The physical weight of him was staggering. After over a year of empty space, the solid, anchoring reality of Oscar’s chest against his own, the sharp scent of his cologne mixed with aeroplane cabin air, the tight, possessive grip of his hands on Lando’s back — it was too much. It was everything.

A ragged, shuddering breath tore its way out of Lando’s throat. He gripped the fabric of Oscar’s coat so hard his knuckles turned white, his fingers shaking violently.

"I've got you," Oscar murmured fiercely, pressing his face into Lando’s neck. "I'm here. I'm here."

Lando pulled back just enough to look at him, to frantically map his face and prove he was actually standing there. Oscar’s dark eyes were impossibly bright, shining with the exact same starving, desperate thing that Lando felt tearing through his own veins.

Lando crashed his mouth against Oscar’s.

It was an absolute explosion. Oscar groaned, a deep, primal sound, backing Lando bodily through the doorway and straight into the hallway wall. He kicked the front door shut behind them, instantly trapping them inside the warm, insulated bubble of the flat.

Lando kissed him like he was drowning and Oscar was oxygen. Their teeth clashed, their mouths opening wide and greedy, swallowing fourteen months of distance in a single, desperate rush. Oscar’s hands were everywhere, frantic and searching, pushing up under Lando’s hoodie to feel the bare, hot skin of his back, proving to himself that Lando was really there.

"Osc," Lando gasped against his mouth, tears prickling hot and sharp at the corners of his eyes, though he refused to let them fall. "Osc, please. Bedroom."

Oscar didn't need to be told twice. He stripped his heavy coat off, letting it drop onto the hall table, and practically carried Lando down the short corridor.

They fell onto the unmade bed, a chaotic tangle of desperate limbs. The clothes vanished in a frantic, uncoordinated blur, neither of them caring about buttons or torn hems. They just needed the barrier gone. They needed skin.

When they were finally bare, Lando pushed Oscar onto his back, straddling his hips. The dim light from the streetlamp outside washed over them, casting long shadows across the mattress. Lando looked down at him, his chest heaving, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.

Oscar reached up, his large, warm palms cupping Lando’s face. His thumbs brushed gently over Lando’s cheekbones, wiping away a stray, rogue tear that had managed to escape. Oscar looked at him with an expression of such pure, absolute devotion that Lando felt his soul physically crack open.

"God, I missed you," Oscar whispered, his voice cracking on the words. "I missed you so fucking much."

"Don't ever leave me for a year again," Lando breathed back, leaning down to press a trembling, open-mouthed kiss to the pulse point jumping wildly at the base of Oscar’s throat. "I thought I was going to die in this flat."

"I'm not going anywhere," Oscar promised fiercely, his hands sliding down Lando’s back, pulling him flush against his chest.

Oscar rolled them over, pressing Lando deep into the mattress. He took his time, treating Lando’s body like holy ground he had been exiled from for far too long. He kissed his way down Lando’s throat, his chest, his stomach, his mouth soft and lingering on every patch of skin, worshiping the feeling of being allowed to touch him again.

Lando arched his back, a long, keening moan slipping out as Oscar’s mouth found him, hot and wet and incredibly precise. Lando’s fingers tangled desperately in Oscar’s messy hair, his hips bucking upward completely of their own accord. It felt too good. It felt like coming home after a war. Every stroke of Oscar’s tongue, every scrape of his teeth sent a violent, beautiful shockwave through Lando’s system.

"Osc, please," Lando begged, his voice a breathless, broken plea. "I need you. Now."

Oscar pulled up, his lips shiny, his eyes entirely black in the dark room. He reached blindly for the nightstand, finding the drawer by pure muscle memory.

When Oscar finally pushed inside him, the breath was punched completely out of Lando’s lungs. It was a slow, exquisitely deep stretch, filling the hollow, aching void that had been sitting in Lando’s chest since September of last year.

Lando wrapped his arms tightly around Oscar’s neck, his legs locking around Oscar’s hips, refusing to let even a millimetre of space exist between them.

"Okay?" Oscar breathed against his ear, his body trembling violently with the sheer effort of holding himself still.

"Perfect," Lando sobbed quietly, a wet, overwhelmed sound. "You're perfect. Move."

Oscar moved. It was a slow, agonisingly tender rhythm. Every thrust was deep and deliberate, accompanied by a soft, reverent kiss pressed to Lando’s jaw, his temple, his mouth. They moved together with a seamless, profound synchronicity, a rhythm built on years of shared history and a whole year of starving for this exact moment.

Lando lost himself in it entirely. He let the physical weight of Oscar ground him, let the heat of him burn away the isolation of the lockdown. He cried out, loudly and without a single shred of performative noise, completely unspooling beneath Oscar’s hands.

When the pleasure finally peaked, shattering over them both in a blinding, brilliant rush, Oscar buried his face in Lando’s neck with a hoarse, ragged shout. He held Lando impossibly tight, his body shuddering through the aftershocks as Lando’s nails dug into his back, grounding him through the high.

They didn't move for a very long time.

The sweat cooled on their skin, and the distant wail of a London siren echoed outside, but the heavy silence of the flat had been fundamentally cured.

Lando lay with his head resting on Oscar’s chest, listening to the rapid, comforting thud of Oscar’s heartbeat. Oscar’s arm was wrapped securely around Lando’s waist, his fingers idly tracing the curve of Lando’s spine.

"I definitely missed my takeaway," Lando murmured sleepily, his voice thick with a profound, heavy contentment.

Oscar huffed a quiet laugh, his chest rumbling beneath Lando’s ear. "I'll make you eggs in the morning. Happy Birthday, Lando."

Lando closed his eyes, entirely safe, entirely anchored. "Best birthday ever.”

 

January 2022

The entirety of 2021 had existed in a bizarre, beautiful state of unlabelled domestic suspension. Once the world had slowly started to open back up, Oscar had simply never moved out of Lando’s Battersea flat. His heavy engineering textbooks permanently occupied the left side of the coffee table, his coat hung next to Lando’s by the door, and they slept in the same bed every single night.

To Felix, Max, and the rest of their orbit, they were just being roommates so Lando could share the rent with someone. They were just best mates being aggressively co-dependent. Nobody knew about the locked doors. Nobody knew about the way Oscar’s hands mapped Lando’s spine in the dark, or the way Lando felt like he couldn't take a full breath until Oscar walked into the room.

They were essentially living a marriage in secret. But they still hadn't crossed the final, terrifying emotional boundary. They still hadn't said I love you. They still hadn't used the word boyfriends. They were balancing a massive, heavy structure on a foundation of unspoken assumptions.

And in January, the foundation finally cracked.

It was a miserable, grey Sunday. The flat felt entirely too small. Oscar was sitting at the kitchen island, a lukewarm cup of coffee in front of him, staring at his laptop screen. He had been quiet all weekend — that specific, heavy quiet that Lando had long ago learned meant Oscar was calculating a massive shift.

Lando was leaning against the counter, scrolling mindlessly through his phone, when Oscar finally closed his laptop. The sharp click echoed in the quiet kitchen.

"My dad's firm just finalized the contract for the new rail line out near L'Hospitalet," Oscar said. His voice was perfectly even, heavily anchored.

Lando looked up, his thumb freezing on his screen. "In Barcelona?"

"Yeah," Oscar met his eyes. The familiar, dark intensity was there, but it was heavily guarded. "The lead engineer on the project... he offered me a spot. I can transfer the last semester to the university there. And once I graduate, I step straight into a junior director role."

The air in the kitchen vanished.

Lando stared at him. The familiar, sickening vertigo — the exact same feeling he had experienced on the rug in 2019 — crashed violently over him. "Barcelona. You're moving to Spain."

"In February," Oscar confirmed softly. He shifted his weight, his hands resting flat on the counter. He immediately deployed his logic, trying to build a bridge over Lando’s rising panic. "It’s a massive opportunity, Lando. The kind of job you don't say no to. And it's not Melbourne. It's Europe. It's a two-hour flight. It’s barely a commute."

"A two-hour flight," Lando repeated, his voice sounding hollow, completely stripped of its usual noise.

"We can make it work," Oscar said, his tone turning remarkably gentle. He reached across the marble counter, his fingers brushing against Lando’s wrist. "We can do long distance. I can fly back on weekends. You can come out there. It’s entirely viable."

Lando looked down at Oscar’s hand.

It wasn't about the flight time. It had never been about the geography. It was about the fact that Oscar was willingly packing up his life and stepping out of the physical space they had spent the last year building.

Lando’s chest physically ached. He looked at Oscar, and the terrifying, unspoken reality of their situation finally caught up with him.

"Make what work, Osc?" Lando asked. His voice was barely a whisper, but it shattered the quiet kitchen like glass.

Oscar’s hand froze. He slowly pulled it back. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, what exactly are we doing long distance?" Lando’s voice began to rise, a frantic, defensive edge bleeding into it. He crossed his arms tightly over his chest, rebuilding his own scaffolding. "We aren't boyfriends. We haven't told anyone. We're just... we're just mates who share a bed. How the fuck do you maintain a secret, unlabelled thing across international borders?"

Oscar flinched. The words hit him like a physical blow. His jaw tightened, the muscles ticking visibly. "We maintain it the same way we maintained it when I was in Australia."

"I was miserable when you were in Australia!" Lando exploded, the admission tearing out of him before he could stop it. "I hated the FaceTime calls. I hated the empty flat. I hated pretending I was fine when all I wanted was my compass back! I can't do the holding pattern again, Oscar. I can't be waiting around in an empty flat for a weekend visit from a guy who won't even call me his."

The silence that followed was deafening.

Oscar looked at Lando. He saw the panic. He saw the frantic, terrified energy of a boy who was convinced he was about to be abandoned.

If Oscar had pushed back — if he had reached across the counter, grabbed Lando by the shirt, and finally said the words they were both starving for — the entire timeline would have changed.

But Oscar was a man of logic. And logically, Lando was telling him that the structure was failing. Lando was telling him that the pressure was too much. Oscar’s deepest, darkest fear had always been that he would eventually suffocate Lando, that tying him down would ruin the only good thing in his life.

So, Oscar did the only thing he knew how to do when a structure was collapsing. He retreated to a safe distance.

"Right," Oscar said softly. The vulnerability completely vanished from his eyes, replaced by an impenetrable, devastating calm. "I understand."

"Osc—" Lando started, the adrenaline crashing, a sudden, desperate regret spiking in his throat as he realized what he had just done.

"No, you're right," Oscar interrupted smoothly. He stood up from the stool. "It's not fair to ask you to wait. You have your life here. You have your agency. I shouldn't... I shouldn't try to lock you into a long-distance thing when we don't even have a definition for it."

"That's not what I meant," Lando whispered, his vision blurring slightly. Tell me you love me, Lando thought desperately. Tell me I'm yours. Give me the label. But he didn't say it out loud. And Oscar couldn't hear it in the silence.

"I've got some paperwork to finish for the transfer," Oscar murmured, not looking at Lando anymore. He picked up his laptop, holding it to his chest like a shield. "I'll... I'll look into getting my own place in Barcelona sorted."

Oscar walked down the hallway, closing the door to the spare bedroom behind him.

Lando stood alone in the kitchen. There was no screaming match. There was no dramatic slamming of doors or throwing of plates. The heaviest, most profound relationship of Lando’s entire life didn't end with a bang.

It just quietly, devastatingly stopped.

 

November 2022

Barcelona in November lacked the biting, miserable frost of London, but Oscar had never felt colder.

His flat in the Eixample district was pristine, perfectly ordered, and completely dead. For ten months, Oscar had existed in a state of rigid, punishing routine. He went to the firm, he ran load calculations, he came home, and he stared at his phone.

Through the sterile, compressed window of social media, Lando was a blur of brilliant, high-velocity motion. There were photos of him at agency galas in Soho, holding champagne flutes, flashing that blinding, performative grin, surrounded by a rotating cast of beautiful people. He looked untouchable. He looked perfectly fine.

Oscar had tried to check the structural integrity of the situation. He had called Felix in October, ostensibly just to catch up. "Lando? Yeah, he’s absolutely flying, mate. Smashes every pitch. Hasn't stopped moving for months." He had even spoken to Lando’s mum, and she had cheerfully reported the exact same thing. Lando was thriving.

Oscar had done the maths. Lando was better off without the heavy, unlabelled anchor dragging him down. The amputation had been a success. Lando had survived the collapse of whatever it was they had been building.

But Oscar hadn't.

Oscar was suffocating. Every time he walked into a quiet room, the absence of Lando’s chaotic noise felt like a physical pressure against his windpipe.

It was one week before November 13th. The tradition demanded a letter. For nine years, Oscar had carefully distilled his feelings into single, precise sentences, terrified that if he offered any more, the entire foundation would buckle. But sitting at his meticulously clean drafting desk, looking at a blank sheet of lined paper, the filters in his brain finally failed.

He clicked his black biro, and he let the dam break. He folded the thick stack of paper into an envelope, walked down to the local Correos, and sent it to London.

Lando,

I've spent the last ten months trying to convince myself that leaving was the correct thing to do. I watched you on a screen, saw how fast you were running, heard from Max and Felix about how brilliantly you’re doing, and I told myself that I was right. I told myself that my absence was the thing that finally let you fly.

But I am so incredibly tired of pretending.

I'm sorry about January. I am so sorry I didn't stay in the kitchen and fight for you. You were panicking, you were looking at me asking for a reason to stay anchored, and I gave you nothing. I thought I was protecting you. You have always been this massive, bright, uncontrollable force, and my biggest fear since we were kids was that if I put a label on us — if I tied you down to a quiet, rigid person like me — I would eventually extinguish you. I thought the kindest thing I could do was leave the door open so you wouldn't feel trapped.

I didn't realise that leaving the door open just made you feel like I was waiting for you to walk out. You are the loudest person I have ever met, but you have always been the only one who actually hears me. I know you fill your flat with people now. I know you work until you drop so you don't have to sit in the quiet. I know how heavy the performance is, Lando. I know how terrifying it is to stop moving and look at what’s actually left in the room.

I miss the quiet with you. I miss the six-minute walks from school. I miss the terrible petrol station cakes. I miss the way the bed in London smelled like your hair. I miss the way you would put your cold feet on my legs when we watched telly. I miss the fact that for an entire year, I got to wake up next to the only person in the world who makes my brain stop calculating the worst-case scenarios.

I miss you with my life, and I’m still here, Lando.

The needle hasn't moved. It’s still pointing straight at you. Happy Birthday.

 

Oscar.

 

December 2022

Lando had read the letter sitting on the floor of his bedroom until his vision blurred so heavily he could no longer make out the black ink. He had wept until his ribs ached, his face pressed into his knees, completely undone by the sheer, devastating weight of being known so intimately.

Oscar had handed him the absolute truth. He had offered Lando the exact thing he had been starving for his entire life: an unconditional, permanent anchor.

But Lando didn't pick up the phone.

He had stared at Oscar’s contact on his screen for over an hour, his thumb trembling over the call button, before locking the phone and throwing it across the duvet. Oscar’s letter hadn't just been a confession; it had been a mirror. And looking into it, Lando realised with a sickening clarity that if he called Oscar now, he would just be pulling him back into the chaos. He would be using Oscar as a crutch to avoid doing the terrifying work of fixing his own foundation.

He couldn't do that to Oscar again. He needed to figure out how to stand perfectly still without feeling like he was going to fall through the floor. So, he folded the letter, placed it carefully into the shoebox, and forced himself to sit in the quiet.

It was agonising.

 

August 2023

The heat in Barcelona was suffocating, a thick, heavy blanket that settled over the city. Oscar was sitting at an outdoor table in a packed plaza in Gràcia, celebrating the successful sign-off on a massive subterranean rail tunnel his firm had been designing for eight months.

His colleagues were loud, cheerful, and halfway through their third pitcher of sangria. A very handsome, softly spoken architect named Matteo, who had been sitting next to Oscar all evening, leaned in and rested his hand lightly on Oscar’s thigh.

"Do you want to get out of here?" Matteo asked quietly, his dark eyes entirely focused on Oscar.

It was an easy, logical thing. Matteo was kind, intelligent, and offering a perfectly stable bridge out of a lonely evening.

Oscar looked at Matteo’s hand. He felt absolutely nothing. No gravity. No spark.

Oscar smiled, a gentle, terribly sad expression, and gently lifted Matteo’s hand off his leg. "I'm sorry," Oscar murmured. "I'm just... I'm not entirely available."

He wasn't waiting, exactly. He had sent the letter nine months ago, putting the entire weight of his heart into an envelope, and Lando had responded with absolute silence. Oscar had accepted the reality of that silence. He was moving forward, building his career, and living his life. But he refused to try and fill the Lando-shaped negative space in his chest with cheap scaffolding. He would rather just leave the room empty.

 

May 2024

Lando’s flat in Battersea looked fundamentally different.

The expensive, sterile aesthetic had slowly eroded, replaced by signs of actual life. There were proper groceries in the fridge. There was a stack of books on the coffee table that Lando was actually reading, rather than just using as coasters. The massive, booming sound system in the corner of the living room hadn't been switched on in months.

Felix came over on a Friday evening, bringing a six-pack of lager. He walked into the living room, stopping to stare at a thriving, incredibly green Monstera plant sitting by the balcony door.

"Who are you and what have you done with Lando Norris?" Felix asked, bewildered. "That plant has been alive for four months. You used to accidentally kill cacti."

"I set a watering schedule," Lando said simply, taking a bottle of beer from the plastic ring. "Turns out, if you actually pay attention to things, they survive."

Felix dropped onto the sofa, studying Lando closely. Lando was wearing old grey joggers and a faded t-shirt, his hair free of its usual heavy styling product. He looked tired from a long week at the agency, but the frantic, vibrating, desperate energy that used to radiate off his skin was completely gone.

"You seem good, mate," Felix said softly, a genuine note of surprise in his voice. "Really settled."

"Yeah," Lando smiled, taking a slow sip of his beer. He looked around the quiet, softly lit living room. He wasn't running anymore. "I think I am."

 

December 2024

It was Christmas Day in Melbourne. The temperature was thirty-two degrees, the sky was a blinding, cloudless blue, and the Piastri backyard was filled with the chaotic noise of Oscar’s nieces and nephews running through the sprinklers.

Oscar was standing by the barbecue, a pair of tongs in his hand, watching the chaos with a quiet, easy contentment.

His dad walked over, handing Oscar a fresh, ice-cold beer. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder for a moment, listening to the shrill laughter of the kids.

"Heard from Lando at all?" his dad asked casually, keeping his eyes on the grill. He had always been an incredibly observant man. He had noticed the silence. He had noticed the way Oscar had slowly stopped checking his phone over the last two years.

Oscar paused. He thought about the heavy brass compass sitting in a drawer in his bedroom upstairs.

"No," Oscar said. His voice was perfectly steady. The sharp, jagged edges of the heartbreak had finally smoothed out over time, leaving behind a dull, manageable ache. "Not for a while."

"Shame," his dad murmured. "Always liked having him around. The house is a bit too quiet without him knocking things over."

Oscar smiled, turning his beer bottle in his hand. "Yeah. I miss that too.”

 

March 2025

It was a Tuesday evening in London. Lando had just finished a brutal, ten-hour pitch for a new global campaign. In the past, this was the exact kind of adrenaline high that would have propelled him straight into Soho, searching for a crowded bar, loud music, and a stranger's bed to crash into just to avoid coming down from the high.

Instead, Lando took the Tube back to Battersea.

He walked into his flat, locked the heavy deadbolt behind him, and took his shoes off. He didn't turn on the television. He didn't reach for his phone to scroll through Instagram.

Lando walked into the centre of his living room and sat down on the sofa.

The flat was entirely, absolutely silent. The only sound was the faint hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen and his own steady breathing.

Lando sat there for a full hour. He watched the headlights of passing cars sweep across the ceiling. He felt the weight of his own body sinking into the cushions. He felt the emptiness of the flat.

And for the very first time in his entire life, the quiet didn't terrify him. It didn't feel like a failure. It felt like peace.

Lando leaned his head back against the sofa, closing his eyes. A profound, overwhelming clarity washed over him. He had spent two and a half years painstakingly dismantling the elaborate, performative scaffolding he had built around himself. He had stopped running. He was finally standing perfectly still.

He opened his eyes, looking across the room toward the hallway that led to his bedroom, where a battered shoebox sat on the top shelf of his wardrobe for so many years now.

He wondered, if he reached for Oscar, if he would ask for Lando to stay.

 

April 4, 2025

For the last two and a half years, the primary reality had been a sprawling, silent void. Oscar had built his life in Barcelona around it, functioning perfectly well as a senior engineer, navigating the grid of the Eixample district, and completely ignoring the fact that his foundation was permanently hollowed out.

It was a Friday evening, two days before his twenty-fourth birthday. The Barcelona air was finally shedding its winter chill, the sky softening into a bruised, hazy violet. Oscar was walking back to his flat, his mind occupied by a complex stress-testing report he needed to review by Monday.

He turned the corner onto his street.

The first thing he noticed was the car. It was parked haphazardly half on the pavement, completely ruining the neat aesthetic of the block. It was an ancient, violently faded blue Renault hatchback. The rear bumper was dented, and the exhaust pipe looked like it was being held on by pure optimism. It was a structural disaster.

The second thing he noticed was the man leaning against the bonnet.

Oscar stopped dead in his tracks. His brain, usually a flawless, high-speed calculating machine, completely short-circuited. He forgot how to breathe. He forgot the street, the passing mopeds, the report waiting in his bag.

It was Lando.

He was wearing a simple white t-shirt and dark jeans, a battered leather jacket slung over one shoulder. But it wasn't what he was wearing that made Oscar’s heart slam violently against his ribs. It was how he was standing.

Lando wasn't pacing. He wasn't scrolling frantically on his phone. He wasn't vibrating with that desperate, performative energy that usually kept him suspended an inch above the ground. He was just standing perfectly, incredibly still, watching Oscar walk toward him.

Oscar felt the pavement tilt beneath his feet. He closed the remaining distance, stopping three steps away. He was terrified that if he reached out, the hallucination would vanish.

"You're in Spain," Oscar managed, his voice a hoarse, entirely wrecked whisper.

Lando smiled. It wasn't the bright, blinding grin he used for cameras or crowded clubs. It was small, soft, and impossibly open.

"I am," Lando said quietly. He pushed off the bonnet of the terrible car and reached into his pocket. He held his hand out.

Resting in his palm was a single, worn car key, attached to a heavy, brushed-steel keyring. The exact same keyring Oscar had given him in a locked bedroom when they were sixteen.

"It took me a while to find a car terrible enough to test the structural integrity of a French viaduct," Lando murmured, his eyes locking onto Oscar's with an absolute, devastating clarity. "But a promise is a promise."

Oscar stared at the keys. He looked back up at Lando's face. The silence stretched out between them. It didn't feel like a countdown, or a failure, or a void waiting to be filled with noise. It felt like coming home.

Oscar dropped his bag onto the pavement, completely abandoning his strict internal filter, and closed the distance. He grabbed the front of Lando’s t-shirt and pulled him in, crashing their mouths together in the middle of the street.

Lando let out a broken, shuddering gasp, dropping the keys and wrapping his arms fiercely around Oscar’s neck. The kiss wasn't frantic. It wasn't the desperate, starving collision of Battersea. It was deep, anchoring, and entirely certain. Oscar kissed him like he was laying the first stone of a brand new thing.

"Let’s get in," Oscar breathed against Lando’s mouth, his hands gripping Lando’s waist tightly enough to bruise. "Please."

Lando let out a wet laugh, nodding blindly. Oscar scooped up his bag and the dropped keys, grabbing Lando’s hand and dragging him through the heavy wooden doors of the building.

They barely made it inside the flat before Oscar backed Lando against the hallway wall. The heavy deadbolt clicked shut, locking out the noise of the city, locking out the two and a half years of agonizing silence.

Oscar shed his jacket, his hands instantly returning to Lando, mapping the broad lines of his shoulders, the dip of his waist. He needed to prove the physical reality of him. He needed skin. He pulled Lando’s t-shirt over his head, discarding it onto the mosaic tiles, before Lando reached down and returned the favour, yanking Oscar’s shirt off with trembling, eager hands.

"You're really here," Oscar murmured, pressing open-mouthed kisses down the line of Lando’s throat, feeling the rapid, frantic flutter of Lando’s pulse against his lips.

"I'm here. I'm not going anywhere," Lando promised, his fingers tangling deep into Oscar’s hair, holding him close.

They moved into the bedroom, a tangle of bare skin and heavy breathing. When Oscar finally pressed Lando down into the mattress, the last lingering ghosts of their past entirely evaporated.

Oscar hovered over him, supporting his weight on his forearms. He looked down at Lando. The evening light filtering through the blinds caught the faint flush on Lando’s cheeks and the dark, glassy sheen in his eyes. Lando looked entirely completely bare, stripped of all his elaborate scaffolding, offering every single piece of himself up without a shred of fear.

"Osc," Lando whispered, arching his hips up slightly, a desperate, incredibly tender plea.

Oscar leaned down, kissing him slowly, tasting the salt of Lando’s skin. He reached for the drawer, his hands remarkably steady as he prepared them. Every touch, every brush of his slicked fingers was deliberate and worshipful. When Oscar slid his fingers inside, Lando let out a long, high moan, his eyes falling shut as his head tipped back into the pillows.

"Look at me," Oscar murmured gently, his thumb stroking a slow, soothing circle over Lando’s hipbone.

Lando’s eyes fluttered open, locking onto Oscar’s.

Oscar lined himself up, holding Lando’s gaze, and pushed forward, sinking into him with an agonizingly slow, exquisite pressure.

Lando gasped, a sharp, beautiful sound, his nails digging crescent moons into Oscar’s shoulders as he took the full length of him. Oscar froze, gritting his teeth, his entire body trembling with the sheer, overwhelming magnitude of being buried inside the only person he had ever wanted.

"I love you," Lando whispered.

The words shattered the quiet room. They didn't feel heavy, or terrifying, or trapping. They felt like the only logical conclusion to the universe.

A tear slipped hot and fast down Oscar’s cheek, dropping onto Lando’s chest. Oscar’s heart completely dismantled as he felt only pure, unadulterated devotion.

"I love you," Oscar rasped back, his voice breaking entirely. "God, Lando, I love you so much."

Oscar began to move. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever felt. The rhythm was slow, incredibly deep, every thrust a physical manifestation of the words they had just finally said. Lando matched him perfectly, his hips rocking up to meet Oscar’s, his legs locking tightly around Oscar’s waist to draw him even deeper.

They didn't break eye contact. They watched each other fall apart, completely unguarded. Oscar’s hands mapped the sweat-slicked skin of Lando’s chest, his fingers slotting perfectly between Lando’s.

"Oscar— please," Lando sobbed, his voice pitching high and wrecked, his body pulling bow-string tight beneath him.

"I've got you," Oscar promised, quickening the pace, driving into him with a beautiful, desperate force. "I'm right here."

Lando shattered first, crying out Oscar’s name as he spilled over their tangled hands, his internal walls completely dissolving. The intense, contracting heat around Oscar’s cock was too much to bear. Oscar let out a hoarse, ragged shout, burying himself to the hilt and spilling entirely into him, following Lando right over the edge.

He collapsed against Lando’s chest, his breathing tearing through his lungs. Lando’s arms instantly wrapped around him, holding him with an anchoring, immovable strength.

They lay there for a long time in the darkening room, completely silent, utterly completely whole.

 

April 5-6, 2025

Waking up on Saturday morning felt like breathing clear air for the first time in his entire life.

During the year they had kind of lived together in London, Lando had always woken up with a low-level hum of anxiety vibrating in his chest. Even with Oscar sleeping right next to him, there had always been the terrifying, unspoken knowledge that they were balancing on an unlabelled tightrope that could snap at any given moment. And then, for the last three years, he had woken up to a devastatingly empty, silent flat.

But today was fundamentally different.

Lando opened his eyes to the sun-drenched Barcelona flat, pinned to the mattress by the heavy, warm weight of Oscar’s arm draped over his chest. Oscar’s face was buried in the pillow next to Lando’s shoulder, his breathing deep and even.

There was no tightrope. There was just the undeniable echo of the words they had finally said out loud the night before.

Lando lay perfectly still, staring at the ceiling. The frantic, buzzing anxiety that had always propelled him out of bed was completely gone. He didn't need to run. He didn't need to perform. He turned his head, pressing a soft kiss to Oscar’s messy hair, and let out a quiet, shuddering exhale of pure relief.

They finally made it out of bed by noon. An hour later, they were standing on the pavement in the Eixample district, staring at the violently faded blue Renault hatchback.

Oscar had his arms crossed, a look of profound, professional horror on his face.

"Lando," Oscar said, his voice deadly serious. "The exhaust bracket is literally held together by a zip-tie. A single plastic zip-tie."

"It’s load-bearing plastic, Osc," Lando grinned, tossing his canvas weekend bag into the boot, which required slamming it twice to get it to latch. "I bought it off a bloke named Alejandro who swore it has at least another thousand kilometres in it. Have some faith."

"I’m an engineer. I don't have faith, I have mechanical standards," Oscar sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. He looked at Lando, his dark eyes softening instantly. "You actually bought a car."

"I made a promise to a very grumpy fifteen-year-old on a stone wall," Lando stepped into Oscar’s space, wrapping his arms around Oscar’s neck right there on the sunny Spanish pavement. He didn't care who saw. He kissed Oscar softly, tasting the coffee they’d just shared. "Happy birthday eve, by the way. Get in the car."

The drive north was a glorious, clanking disaster.

The Renault didn't like going over ninety kilometres an hour, and the air conditioning was a mere suggestion, so they drove with the windows rolled down, the warm spring air whipping through the cabin. Lando drove first, blasting music from a terrible Bluetooth speaker he’d bought at a petrol station, shouting the lyrics over the rattling engine. Oscar sat in the passenger seat, one hand resting possessively on Lando’s thigh, watching him with an expression of such quiet, absolute adoration that Lando thought his chest might physically burst.

By the time they crossed the border into France, taking the winding, scenic A9 motorway, the car’s temperature gauge began to creep ominously toward the red.

"Pull over," Oscar commanded calmly, tapping the dashboard. "The radiator is going to boil over."

They pulled onto the hard shoulder near Perpignan, the Mediterranean sea sparkling in the distance. Oscar popped the bonnet, immediately diagnosing a coolant leak with the resigned efficiency of a man who knew he was right. They spent forty minutes waiting for the engine to cool, sitting side-by-side on the dusty crash barrier.

"We are going to be stranded in the South of France," Oscar noted, handing Lando a lukewarm bottle of water.

"We have snacks in the back and a full tank of petrol. We are thriving," Lando laughed, bumping his shoulder against Oscar’s. He looked at the vast blue sky. "Are you mad?"

"No," Oscar said softly, turning his head to look at Lando. The sea breeze caught his dark hair. "I don't think I've ever been less mad in my entire life."

They nursed the car through the rest of the afternoon, arriving at a tiny, incredibly quiet bed-and-breakfast in the Occitanie region just after sunset. They ate terrible pizza from a local takeaway, drank cheap French wine sitting cross-legged on the floor of their room, and spent the entire night utterly consumed by each other. The only thing Lando could feel was the solid, grounding weight of Oscar’s hands pinning Lando’s wrists to the mattress, and the breathless, repeated cadence of I love you whispered into the dark.

The next day was April 6th.

They hit the road by early afternoon. Oscar took the wheel, claiming he didn't trust Lando to navigate the elevation changes without destroying the gearbox.

The landscape grew more dramatic, the massive gorge valley of the River Tarn opening up before them as they approached Millau. Lando felt a sudden, heavy spike of adrenaline, entirely different from the nervous energy of his past. It was the thrill of arriving.

"There it is," Lando breathed, leaning forward in the passenger seat.

Rising out of the valley floor, cutting through the low-hanging spring clouds, was the viaduct. The concrete pylons towered impossibly high, the delicate-looking steel cables fanning out like massive, taut spiderwebs. It looked exactly like the sketch Oscar had violently shaded into his book ten years ago.

Oscar slowed the Renault down as they approached the toll booths, the car rattling in protest. He gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles turning slightly white.

"You alright?" Lando asked softly, his hand finding the back of Oscar’s neck, his thumb stroking the warm skin.

Oscar let out a slow, shaky breath. He looked over at Lando, his dark eyes impossibly bright. He was twenty-five today.

"Yeah," Oscar whispered, a genuine, blinding smile breaking across his face. "It's a massive drop."

"Two hundred and seventy metres," Lando quoted perfectly, grinning back. "Built on tension. Think it'll hold us?"

"I know it will," Oscar said, absolutely certain.

Oscar shifted gears, the engine groaning as they pulled onto the massive road deck of the bridge. The world fell away beneath them, leaving nothing but the vast, sprawling French sky and the intricate, impossible architecture holding them up.

Lando rolled his window down, letting the wind rush in, and tangled his hand firmly with Oscar’s over the centre console. He looked at the steel cables, and then he looked at the man driving the terrible blue car, and he knew, with absolute, unshakeable clarity, that they were never going to fall.

 

November 13, 2025

To an outside observer, the sprawling, sunlit flat in the Eixample district of Barcelona looked like the physical manifestation of perfect balance.

The high ceilings and arched windows let in the golden Mediterranean autumn light, illuminating a space that belonged entirely, equally to two people. On the massive oak dining table, complex architectural blueprints and load-bearing calculations sat right next to vibrant, chaotic brand mock-ups.

The geography problem had been completely dismantled. Within weeks of that drive across the South of France, Lando had packed up the sterile Battersea flat, sold it, and moved his entire life to Spain. He had stopped running on other people's treadmills, taking the terrifying, brilliant leap of launching his own boutique creative agency right there in the city. They had signed the lease on this flat together, completely dissolving the need for weekend flights and digital screens.

It was November 13th, Lando’s twenty-fifth birthday, and the flat was exceptionally quiet.

In the master bedroom, Oscar was standing on his toes, reaching for the highest, darkest corner of their shared wardrobe to hide a wrapped gift before Lando got out of the shower. His fingers bypassed the winter coats, brushing against something entirely unexpected. It was cardboard, soft at the corners from years of being handled.

Oscar pulled the battered shoebox down, placing it carefully onto the edge of the mattress.

He didn't recognise it at first. But when he lifted the lid, the breath was knocked completely out of his lungs.

Sitting inside, meticulously preserved, was the entire hidden history of the last twelve years. There was the plain white envelope from 2013, the edges ragged where a thirteen-year-old Lando had hastily torn it open. There was the tarnished brass compass from 2015. There was the heavy, brushed-steel keyring from 2016 (that Lando took off the car key when he sold the Renault only one week after their trip). Every single piece of paper, every single word Oscar had ever given him, hoarded and kept safe.

Oscar stared at the box. For a decade, he had been terrified that his gravity was going to suffocate Lando. He had believed Lando was a chaotic, untethered force that needed the door left open. But looking at the physical archive sitting on the duvet, Oscar finally understood the absolute truth. Lando hadn't been waiting for the door to be left open; he had been quietly, desperately building a home out of every single brick Oscar had ever handed him.

The bathroom door clicked open down the hall. A moment later, Lando appeared in the bedroom doorway, barefoot, a towel slung around his neck, his damp curls sticking in every direction.

He stopped when he saw Oscar sitting on the edge of the bed, looking down at the open shoebox.

A soft, pink flush crept up Lando’s neck, but he didn't deflect. He didn't make a loud joke to shatter the tension. He just walked across the room, stepping into the quiet space, and sat down on the mattress next to Oscar.

"You kept all of it," Oscar whispered, his voice thick, his fingers gently tracing the glass face of the compass.

"Obviously," Lando murmured, his shoulder pressing flush against Oscar’s. "I had to keep the proof. In case I forgot how real this is."

Oscar turned his head, looking at the man he loved, and felt a profound, overwhelming wave of peace.

They didn't have to hide anymore. Back in May, they had finally braced themselves to tell their friends the truth. They had arranged a massive FaceTime call with Felix and Max, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on their new Spanish sofa, stomachs in knots, ready to confess to a decade-long secret.

When Lando had finally blurted out that they were officially together, the reaction had been devastatingly anti-climactic.

Felix had just stared blankly at the screen, entirely unbothered, and taken a sip of his tea. "Mate, we thought you’d been dating since Year Ten. Are you telling me you actually weren't together this whole time? You absolute idiots."

Max had simply demanded they pay for the flights to Barcelona so they could celebrate. Even their families had reacted with a warm, exasperated lack of surprise. The secret, it turned out, had only ever been a secret to the two of them. To the rest of the world, the magnetic pull between Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri had always been a blinding, undeniable fact.

Oscar reached into the box, his fingers brushing against Lando’s as they both rested their hands over the old brass compass.

Sitting on the bed, entirely anchored to the ground, Oscar looked down. The delicate iron needle trembled for a fraction of a second, completely undisturbed by the noise of the outside world, and then snapped firmly, permanently, into place.

Pointing North.

 

Notes:

thank you so much for making it to the end!

i started writing this story a while ago, when i was obsessed with heated rivalry and wanted to write a too-many-years-long situationship with a bunch of timestamps hahahaha

it's the first time i've written a landoscar fic that doesn't involve any kind of sport, so it felt a little strange, but i think i made the most of it by adding things i genuinely and personally love, like barcelona (my favourite city in the entire world), the south of france, road trips, architecture, birthdays, and deep and lasting love.

i hope you enjoyed reading this, and i'm sorry if i went overboard with the angst - that's just the way i am. feel free to leave a comment!

thank you, and see you next time!

love,
rafa.

you can always find me on twitter and tumblr!