Summary : In a world where soulmates exist, Lando Norris has never believed in fate, bonds, or the idea that one person could be made for another. He always said that if he ever met his soulmate, he probably wouldn’t care.
But what if he had already met her years ago?
Genre : soulmates AU, angst
Pairing : Lando Norris x oc (female)
Words count : 9,2k
Main Masterlist
Series Masterlist
Lando spent the rest of the week in Monaco pretending distance was a choice and not a form of cowardice.
The hospital discharged him the morning after his accident.
The doctors had been almost irritatingly calm about it, which somehow made everything worse. They spoke to him in measured voices, pointing to clean results and reassuring numbers, explaining again that his heart was structurally alright, that the scans showed no abnormalities, that there was no evidence of damage from the collapse.
Lando asked for another scan.
The doctor looked at him for a moment over the rim of his glasses, then agreed with the kind of politeness that made it clear he thought the test was unnecessary. When the results came back exactly the same, perfectly clean, perfectly healthy, perfectly normal, Lando should have felt relieved.
He didn’t.
A normal heart did not explain what had happened.
A normal heart did not explain the way pain had opened in him at the sight of Paula’s eyes, violent and immediate enough to drag him off a podium. A normal heart did not explain waking with her name already in his mouth. A normal heart did not explain the panic that had taken him apart when he imagined her hurting too, or the sickening relief when Pietra called back and said Paula was fine.
The doctors looked at the scans and saw nothing wrong.
There was no physical damage.
Which meant whatever had happened to him had come from somewhere else.
He went back to his apartment under orders to rest, hydrate and avoid stress, all phrases that belonged to people who had never tried to recover from the knowledge that the person they might be cosmically bound to was someone they had spent years hurting.
His parents stayed in Monaco for a little while. His mother fussed over him, but carefully now, as if she sensed that too much tenderness might make him either break or lash out. His father said less, which was somehow kinder. Max came and went, bringing food Lando barely ate, sitting in the apartment when Lando pretended he did not need someone there. Sometimes they put something on the television. Sometimes neither of them watched it.
No one said Paula’s name unless Lando did first.
He almost did.
A hundred times.
Her name lived at the back of his throat all week.
It appeared in every silence. In every room. In every attempt at sleep. He thought of asking Pietra for her number, then hated himself for wanting to reach Paula through someone else again, like he had any right to demand a direct line to a woman who had asked nothing from him except, perhaps, not to be hurt every time she crossed his path.
He imagined what he would say.
Sometimes the words came out cleanly in his head.
I remember now.
That one always made him feel sick.
I’m sorry for the first night. I’m sorry for the garage. I’m sorry for every time after. I’m sorry I spent years being cruel because I didn’t want to admit you were bound to me in a way that scare me so much.
Sometimes the imagined conversation changed shape and became darker, more impossible.
Did you feel it too?
He would picture saying that to her and immediately want to tear the thought out of his own mind.
Because what if she did?
What if she had known? What if she had felt the bond long before him and had spent years standing on the other end of it while he rolled his eyes at her, dismissed her, mocked soulmates in interviews, and treated her presence like a private inconvenience? What if his sudden awakening was only sudden for him? What if Paula had been living with the knowledge of it while he built walls out of contempt and called them personality?
But the other answer was worse in a different way.
What if she hadn’t felt it?
What if he was simply losing his mind over guilt and adrenaline and some universale fate? What if Paula was not his soulmate at all, and he was turning one more thing about her pain into something centered around himself?
That possibility shamed him almost as much as the first.
So he did nothing.
He stayed away.
From Paula. From the group chat. From the easy invitations that came through Max, from the casual messages asking if he was all right, from the world that kept wanting him to translate collapse into a story simple enough for other people to consume. He replied to what he had to. He thanked people. He told the team he was fine. He let McLaren release some polished statement about precautionary checks and no serious concern and taking time to recover.
He did not tell anyone that recovery felt less like rest and more like withdrawal.
Every day without seeing Paula should have made things easier.
Instead, her absence deepened.
It became something inside him. A hollow place that ached quietly even when nothing was happening. He would make coffee in the morning and think, suddenly, absurdly, that he did not know how she took hers. He would scroll through his phone and find himself lingering near Pietra’s name, tempted by proximity, as if Paula might somehow exist on the other side of any person close enough to her. He would stand on the balcony at night, looking down at Monaco’s glittering dark, and remember her eyes in the crowd.
By Thursday, he had almost convinced himself that not reaching out was noble.
He told himself he was protecting her. Giving her space. Refusing to crash into her life with the full, chaotic weight of a revelation he had not even learned how to carry. He told himself that if he saw her now, he would only hurt her again, because apparently that was what he did when Paula was close enough for him to speak to.
There was truth in that. Enough truth to hide behind.
But beneath it, uglier and simpler, was fear.
He was afraid to face her.
Afraid of her anger. Afraid of her indifference. Afraid she would look at him and know exactly what he knew now. Afraid she wouldn’t. Afraid the bond would pull at him again until he lost all dignity. Afraid she would tell him it was too late and he would have no argument against that because it was probably true.
So he kept his distance and called it restraint.
Eventually, he had to go to the UK.
Partly because he had simulator work at the McLaren Technology Centre, and work was still work. The season had not paused because his body and mind had decided to betray him. There were meetings to attend, data to review, development paths to understand.
Partly, though, because Max had insisted.
“It’s not a party,” Max had said over the phone.
“It sounds like a party.”
“It’s a small thing.”
“That’s what people call parties when they want you to come.”
“It’s a few friends, food, drinks, no stress.”
“That’s literally a party.”
“It’s for your recovery,” Max said. “So if you refuse, you look like an ungrateful prick.”
Lando had stared at his hotel ceiling and sighed. “That’s a very manipulative thing to say.”
“Yes.”
“You admit that?”
“I’m comfortable with my methods.”
“I don’t need a recovery party.”
“You fell off a podium and made everyone think you died for three seconds.”
“I didn’t make them think anything.”
“You are coming.”
Lando had been quiet for too long.
Then Max’s voice softened in a way that always made refusal more difficult.
“Mate,” he said, “people just want to see you.”
Lando closed his eyes.
The first thought, humiliatingly immediate, was: Will she be there?
He did not ask.
Asking would mean admitting something he had spent all week pretending he had under control, and Max already knew too much.
Max would hear it in his voice. Max would put the pieces together. Max would either be too gentle or too blunt, and Lando wasn’t sure which would be worse.
So he said yes without asking, and spent the next two days thinking about the question anyway.
Paula would not come, she had no reason to.
If anything, she had every reason not to. The last time they had spoken, he had made her cry again. The last time she had seen him, he had collapsed after staring at her from a podium like a haunted man in front of half the motorsport world. From her side, his behaviour probably looked like a worsening pattern of cruelty and instability.
He tried to accept that.
He tried so hard that it became almost pathetic.
His rational mind understood her absence before it even happened. It prepared for it. Expected it. Told him it was right, deserved, merciful. She should not be required to stand in a room with him simply because Max had decided Lando needed cheering up.
His body wanted her there.
He wanted to see her from across the room. Wanted to know where she was. Wanted to confirm with his own eyes that she was fine. Wanted to hear her voice, even if it was cold. Wanted to apologise again and again until language failed him, until the words became useless from repetition, until she either believed him or walked away and left him with the certainty that at least this time he had said it properly.
He realised, sometime on the ride back from Woking, that he had become dramatic about Paula.
Truly, embarrassingly dramatic.
The sort of dramatic he would have mocked mercilessly in anyone else.
A week ago, he would have laughed at the idea of someone being physically unable to stop thinking about another person after a few days apart. He would have called it pathetic. He would have made some comment about people in love needing hobbies. He would have said soulmates were nothing more than ordinary obsession.
Now he understood exactly how someone could become unbearable over the bond.
Worse, he did not even mind.
That should have alarmed him more than it did.
The party was at Max and Pietra’s flat.
Lando arrived twenty minutes late because he had spent nineteen of those minutes outside in the car, staring up at the lit windows and convincing himself that walking in was not an act of emotional self-destruction. He had almost left twice. Once when a couple passed on the pavement laughing, too normal and easy for him to bear. Once when he received a message from Max that read: I can see your car. Stop being weird.
So he got out.
London was cool that evening, the kind of cool that slipped under jackets and made the city smell faintly of rain, exhaust, and old stone. The street outside Max and Pietra’s building was quiet enough that the sound of music from upstairs reached him in faint, muffled pulses. Not loud. Not a club. Not a real party, despite what he had accused Max of. Just voices and bass and the warm clatter of people gathered somewhere above him, existing together with the careless intimacy of friends.
He stood at the entrance for one second too long.
The flat opened around him in warmth.
Light, noise, the smell of food, laughter already half-turned toward him as someone near the door recognised him. The atmosphere was the exact kind of thing Max had promised: informal, familiar, not too crowded but crowded enough that Lando immediately felt watched. Someone cheered when he stepped inside. Someone else clapped first, and then the whole living room joined in, exaggerated applause swelling through the space with the kind of affection that should have embarrassed him in a simple way.
“There he is!”
“Podium survivor!”
“Careful, no raised platforms tonight!”
“Too soon,” someone called, laughing.
Max appeared almost immediately, pushing through the group with a grin that was too relieved to be entirely teasing.
“You’re late.”
Lando rolled his eyes, because it was easier than acknowledging the way everyone was looking at him like they had been afraid they might not get this version of him back.
“I was making an entrance.”
“You sat outside for twenty minutes.”
“Building anticipation.”
Max pulled him into a hug before Lando could make another joke.
It was firm and brief, but not as casual as either of them would pretend afterward. Lando let himself hold on for half a second longer than usual, because Max had seen him at his worst more than once that week and had stayed anyway.
“Don’t do that again,” Max muttered near his ear.
“Be late?”
“Fall off podiums.”
“Wasn’t planning on doing that anytime soon.”
“Good.”
They pulled apart.
Pietra was next, appearing with eyes already suspiciously bright and a glass in one hand. She hugged him hard enough to make his bruised side complain, then immediately pulled back in alarm when he winced.
“Shit. Sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“No, it’s not. Are you okay?”
“I’m okay.”
She looked unconvinced. Everyone looked unconvinced lately.
“Doctors said I’m fine,” he added, because that was the official line and the only one he knew how to offer without opening a door he wasn’t ready to walk through.
Pietra searched his face for a second longer, then nodded.
“Good,” she said softly. “You scared us.”
“I know, I'm sorry.”
He meant it.
He hugged a few more people after that. Took a bottle someone pressed into his hand, though he had no intention of drinking more than a few sips. Smiled at jokes. Accepted mockery about the podium fall with as much grace as he could manage because if they were joking, then they were not looking too closely. If they were laughing, then maybe no one would notice how his eyes kept trying to search the room over people’s shoulders.
He barely registered half of it.
The warmth of the room sat against his skin but did not enter him. Friends touched his arm, asked questions, said they were glad he was okay, told him he looked better than expected. He answered. He thanked them. He made a self-deprecating joke when appropriate. He played the part because he had been playing versions of himself in public for years, and a living room full of people who loved him was somehow more difficult than a media pen full of strangers.
Then, finally, he looked across the room, and the world narrowed.
Paula was there.
She stood near the far side of the living room, half-turned toward the window, a glass untouched in one hand. She was not alone, there were people nearby, a conversation happening around her, but she had that same separate quality he had noticed in Monaco. As if she could stand inside a room full of people and still remain just beyond reach. The light from a floor lamp caught the side of her face, softening the tiredness there without erasing it. Her hair was loose, falling over one shoulder. She wore dark jeans and a black top, simple and sharp, nothing dramatic, nothing designed to draw the eye.
But his eyes found her anyway.
Immediately.
As if every person between them had been made of glass.
For one suspended second, Lando forgot how to breathe.
The noise of the flat dimmed around him. He could still hear laughter, the low thrum of music, a glass set down on a table, Max saying something to someone beside him. But all of it moved backward. Paula moved forward without taking a step.
The ache in his chest answered.
Not like the podium. This was deeper. Quieter. Almost worse because it did not feel like an attack; it felt like recognition settling into a body that could no longer pretend it did not know where it belonged. The pull toward her tightened, invisible and undeniable, a thread drawn through bone.
He had imagined seeing her all week, he had prepared for anger. For avoidance. For panic.
He had not prepared for the sheer relief of it.
And because relief had become indistinguishable from pain where Paula was concerned, his eyes burned almost immediately.
She did not smile, of course she didn’t.
Her face changed, though. Only slightly. A flicker of surprise, then tension, then something guarded enough to hurt. Her fingers tightened around the glass in her hand. He noticed because he noticed everything now. Every small movement. Every place where her body prepared itself for him like he was weather coming in dark over water.
He wanted to go to her.
The urge moved through him so quickly that he actually shifted one step before stopping himself.
Instead he stood there, half-surrounded by friends, bottle cold in his hand, heart beating too hard for a room that had only asked him to be alive and present.
Max followed his gaze.
Lando felt the moment Max understood where he was looking.
“Lando,” he said quietly.
Lando did not look away from Paula. “Yeah?.”
“You okay?”
“Just surpise to see her here.”
The honesty slipped out before he could stop it.
Max said nothing.
Across the room, Paula looked away first.
The loss of her eyes was immediate, physical. A small drop inside him that made his fingers tighten around the bottle.
She turned her attention back to whoever had been speaking near her, though Lando could see from here that she was not listening properly. Her shoulders had gone tight. Her glass remained untouched.
The flat moved on around him.
Someone made another joke. Someone refilled a drink. Music changed. A burst of laughter rose near the kitchen. Life resumed with the easy cruelty of not knowing that, for him, everything had just tilted.
Lando tried to smile at the person speaking to him.
He had no idea what they said.
Because Paula was still across the living room. And all the careful distance he had kept for a week, all the noble restraint and fear and avoidance, had been destroyed in one glance.
The bond, if that was what this terrible thing was, did not care that he was not ready.
It did not care that he had hurt her. It did not care that she had every reason to keep away.
It only pulled.
Quietly.
Patiently.
He tried not to watch her and he failed constantly.
She was quiet tonight, quieter than he remembered her being before Monaco. She had always known how to make distance visible. A small tilt of her chin. The angle of her shoulders. The way she held her glass close but did not drink from it, as if she needed something to do with her hands.
People spoke to her. She answered. Sometimes she smiled.
Once, someone beside her said something that made her laugh.
The sound reached Lando across the room with humiliating precision, his whole chest tightened, it create a deep, aching pull, like grief for something he had never been allowed to have and had no right to mourn.
He wanted to be the person who made her laugh like that.
The thought came so simply, so unbearably, that he almost had to set his drink down.
He wanted to say something that made her eyes soften instead of harden. He wanted to know what she found funny when she was not bracing herself against him. He wanted to ask whether she still watched races because she loved them or whether he had ruined that too. He wanted to apologise until his voice gave out. He wanted to tell her that he dreamt of her eyes now, that he woke with her name in his mouth, that his body seemed to have learned her absence like a language.
Every possible sentence sounded wrong. Too dramatic. Too late. Too selfish. Too small compared to what he had done. Sorry had become almost grotesque from how often he had failed to mean it properly. Explanation sounded like excuse. And the most honest thing of all: I think the universe gave you to me and I destroyed you before I even knew, was so obscene he could not imagine surviving the look on her face if he said it.
It felt less like desire than gravity. Less like romance than injury. A constant awareness of where Paula was in the room, even when he was not looking at her. He knew when she moved toward the window. Knew when she disappeared briefly into the hallway. Knew when she returned. His body registered her the way a compass registered north, indifferent to reason, humiliatingly faithful.
He hated it and wanted it at the same time.
It was terrifying.
At some point, Max leaned beside him near the bookshelf, voice low enough that no one else would hear.
“You’re going to burn a hole through the wall.”
Lando took a slow breath. “I’m not doing anything.”
“You keep looking at her, what is happening to you?.”
“Nothing.”
Max glanced across the room, where Paula was speaking with one of Pietra’s friends. “You're a terrible liar”
Lando looked at him.
Max met his gaze with unusual seriousness. “Please don't ruin everything by starting a fight with her, I think we all deserved one peacefull night. ”
Lando looked down at the drink in his hand.
“I need more water,” he muttered.
Max’s expression shifted.
“Do you?”
Lando looked away.
He walked to the kitchen because it was the only empty space left to go.
For once, fate waited less than a minute before proving it had a cruel sense of humour.
Lando had just reached for a glass when someone entered behind him.
He knew before he turned, his body knew. The pull sharpened so suddenly that his hand froze around the glass.
Paula stopped in the doorway.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
It was almost absurd, the size of the silence that opened in such a small room. Behind her, the party continued, muffled by distance and walls. Laughter, music, the low pulse of conversation. In here, there was only the refrigerator hum and the space between them, charged with every word they had ever used badly.
Paula’s expression closed.
“Sorry,” she said automatically. “I didn’t know you were in here.”
Lando put the glass down too quickly.
“No, I’m sorry.”
She blinked.
The apology burst out of him before he could organize it.
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to... I mean, I came in for water. I didn’t know you were coming in. I’m not trying to corner you or anything. I know I should stay away. I just...sorry.”
Paula stared at him.
He heard himself and wanted to die.
“I’m apologising too much,” he added, because apparently the part of his brain responsible for restraint had detached from the rest of him entirely. “That’s probably making it worse.”
Her eyebrows drew together slightly. She looked at him like he might actually be ill.
Maybe he was, maybe soulmates were an illness when discovered too late.
“It’s fine,” she said carefully.
The politeness hurt more than anger.
Lando nodded, too many times. “Right. Good. Okay.”
He should have left.
That was the plan. Leave her alone. Give her space. Keep distance. Let her get whatever she had come for, and retreat before his presence became another thing she had to endure.
He stepped to the side.
She moved toward the counter.
The space between them shifted, not closing fully, but changing shape. She reached for a bottle of water near the sink. Her fingers brushed the plastic. Lando watched the movement with a helpless attention that made him hate himself.
The words left him before he could stop them.
“Are you okay?”
Paula went still.
Her hand remained on the bottle. Her head turned slowly toward him.
The look she gave him was something he could not describe. Not anger. Not surprise. Not softness. Something stranger. Warier. As if the question had touched a place where trust used to be and found only scar tissue.
“I should be the one asking you that,” she said.
Her voice was quiet.
“You fell off a podium.”
Lando looked at her.
He searched her eyes for something. Recognition. Fear. Pain. Any sign that she had seen it as more than a public accident, more than another humiliating headline in a week already full of them. He searched for evidence that she knew what had happened when their eyes met, that something had moved through her too, that the bond had not been his alone on that stage.
She gave him nothing. But then, she had been giving him nothing for years.
And he had been blind long enough.
“Can we talk?” he asked.
Paula’s face tightened at once.
He swallowed.
“Privately.”
The air changed.
She looked at him with open distance now, the kind she had every right to use. “The last time we did that, it turned out pretty badly.”
Lando nodded immediately.
“Yeah.”
The word came without defense.
“That was my fault,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Again, she looked at him like she did not quite understand what she was seeing.
Not because the words were complicated, but because perhaps she had spent too long expecting him to fight every accusation until even an uncomplicated apology sounded suspicious in his mouth.
“I am,” he added, quieter. “I know saying it doesn’t fix anything. I know I’ve said it badly before. I know I made it worse. But I’m sorry.”
Paula did not answer. Her fingers tightened around the water bottle.
Lando took a breath, and his chest ached with it.
“But I need to talk to you about something,” he said. “It’s important. Really important.”
She stared at him.
For a second, he thought she would refuse, he would have deserved that.
Then her eyes flicked down, not to his face, but lower, to the hand he had not realised had drifted toward his chest. His heart had started to accelerate. He could feel it now. Not as pain, but as a warning. A hard, climbing rhythm under bone.
Paula saw it and something in her expression shifted.
Like understanding the fact that he was struggling, and perhaps an instinctive desire to stop watching him struggle in front of her.
“Fine,” she said.
The relief nearly made him dizzy.
She turned and walked out of the kitchen without waiting for him to follow.
He did.
They moved through the edge of the living room carefully, not touching, not speaking. No one seemed to notice at first. But then Pietra looked up as they passed. Her eyes sharpened. Max, near the sofa, saw too, his expression turning wary.
Lando did not stop.
Paula led him toward the small balcony at the back of the flat.
The door opened with a soft scrape, and cold London air spilled inside.
Outside, the balcony was narrow, barely large enough for two people to stand without feeling the other’s presence too intensely. The night was clear in the cruel way London sometimes managed after rain, the sky dark and shining, the street below wet enough to reflect amber lamplight in broken streaks. The city smelled of damp pavement, traffic, smoke from somewhere distant, and the faint green scent of plants in pots along the balcony rail.
Paula stepped out first.
Lando followed and closed the door behind them.
The party became a muted world on the other side of the glass.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Paula crossed her arms against the cold. She shivered.
The movement hit him like a command. His first instinct was immediate and almost painful: offer her his jacket. Put it around her shoulders. Do something small and useful and gentle, something that did not require language.
But then he stopped himself, it was too soon, too intimate.
He had no right to warmth with her yet, maybe not ever.
So he stayed where he was and let the cold bite through his own shirt instead.
Paula looked out over the street rather than at him.
“So,” she said. “What did you want to tell me?”
Lando’s mouth went dry.
Now that the moment was here, every rehearsed sentence vanished. The truth stood in front of him like something impossible to climb.
“This is difficult to explain,” he said.
Paula turned her head slightly.
“And maybe you’ll think I’m crazy.”
“I already think that,” she said. “So go ahead.”
A laugh escaped him, it came out too sudden, almost startled.
Paula looked at him in surprise. He realised, a second too late, that she had not been joking.
His chest twisted.
Great.
Apparently his increasingly deranged heart had reached the stage where every harsh line from Paula sounded like the funniest thing he had ever heard. Fantastic. Perfect. Nothing alarming about that.
He forced himself back to the point.
“No,” he said. “Paula, I…”
Her name changed the air.
He felt it. Saw her feel something too, though she buried it instantly.
“Something happened,” he said. “On the podium.”
Her expression closed again. “Yeah. I saw that.”
“No. I mean...yes, obviously. But not just that.” He dragged a hand through his hair, frustrated with himself, with language, with the fact that there was no sane way to say any of this. “Something happened the night before too. In Monaco. During the night. And then in the car during the race. And then when I saw you on the podium.”
Paula was looking at him properly now.
Interested despite herself, maybe. Or worried. Or simply trying to figure out what kind of disaster he was about to become.
“What?” she asked.
Lando could hear his heartbeat.
He could feel it too, climbing.
He thought of the hospital. His mother’s hand. The doctor’s story. Pietra’s call. Paula asking if he was okay. Every piece leading here, to this tiny balcony with London damp below them and Paula in front of him, guarded and cold and already braced for harm.
He should have started with sorry.
He should have explained the pain first. The panic. The collapse. The fact that he had spent the week trying not to drag her into something she might not want to name.
Instead, fear made him clumsy.
“I think you’re my soulmate.”
The sentence fell between them like glass.
For one second, Paula did not react. Then her face changed, scared first. So quickly he almost missed it.
“What are you talking about?” she asked. Her voice was very quiet.
Lando’s stomach dropped.
He knew instantly that he had done it wrong.
“Paula...”
“Are you here to fucking mess with me?”
“No.” Alarm shot through him, far too intense, almost physical. Her sudden anger hit him harder than it should have, cutting through his panic with panic of its own. “No, I’m not. I swear I’m not.”
“What the hell are you doing, then?”
“Something happened when I saw you at the podium ceremony,” he said quickly, words stumbling now. “The sort of thing people talk about when they talk about soulmates. The link. Feeling pulled toward someone. Like you’re connected, like you...”
“You’re serious?” Her voice sharpened with disbelief.
Lando stopped.
Paula stared at him, and the look on her face was no longer only hurt. It was rage beginning to rise through it, bright and shaking.
“You don’t believe in soulmates,” she said. "You’ve said that. Repeatedly.”
“I know.”
“You made jokes about it.”
“I know.”
“You said if you met yours, you wouldn’t care.”
The words landed like blows because every one of them was true.
“I know,” he whispered.
“So what even are you saying to me right now?”
“I’m saying I was wrong.”
Paula laughed. It was not a laugh he wanted to hear again.
“Oh,” she said. “You were wrong.”
“Paula...”
“No. No, don’t.” She stepped back, though there was barely space to do it. “You don’t get to tell me that now.”
Her eyes were bright.
“You do realise,” she said, voice shaking harder with every word, “that you have spent the last three years being anything but horrible to me?”
Lando said nothing.
“From the very beginning, you made it clear you didn’t give a fuck about this sort of thing. You made it clear you didn’t give a fuck about me.”
His throat tightened.
“That’s not...”
“Don’t,” she snapped. “Do not stand there and try to correct my memory.”
He shut his mouth.
Paula’s arms had tightened around herself, but not from cold anymore.
“I tried,” she said. “I tried to make myself smaller. I tried to stay out of your way. I tried to be normal around everyone else and just avoid whatever the hell you decided I was to you. But you kept attacking me for no reason. Again and again. Every room, every dinner, every race weekend, every stupid little moment where I thought maybe you’d just leave me alone and you didn’t.”
Her voice cracked.
She hated it. He saw that at once. Saw the flicker of fury at her own vulnerability. Saw her try to swallow it down.
“I don’t know what game you’re playing,” she said. “But it’s really not funny.”
“I’m not playing a game.”
He took half a step toward her.
She flinched back so sharply his chest caved.
“Don’t fucking touch me, Lando.”
He stopped at once. His hands lifted slightly, empty, useless.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I won’t. Sorry.”
But Paula had already gone somewhere else. Not away from him, exactly. Deeper into the thing he had opened badly and too late.
“I’ve spent years trying to suppress any feeling I could have for you,” she said, and now the tears were there, gathering despite her obvious attempt to fight them. “Years. I tried to stay away as much as possible. I tried to hate you properly because that seemed easier, and honestly, you helped a lot.”
The words cut, but he deserved every edge.
“You made it very clear what your opinion of me was,” she continued. “So don’t come here now and tell me...” Her breath hitched. “Don’t tell me that now.”
Lando stared at her.
Somewhere beneath the panic, beneath the guilt, beneath the terrible need to fix what could not be fixed in one conversation, a single realization opened.
“You knew?” he asked.
Paula went still. The question sounded almost reverent in the cold air.
He hated himself for the hope in it.
“You knew about the bond?”
She looked at him then, tears in her eyes, mouth trembling with a fury so intimate it might once have been grief.
“From the first time I saw you.”
The world seemed to drop away beneath him.
“The club?” he whispered.
Her face twisted.
“So you remember now.”
“I...” He swallowed. “Some of it.”
“Of course.”
“No, Paula, I....”
“I knew from the very beginning,” she said. “I saw you, and I knew. I don’t even know how to explain it. You were across the room, drunk and loud and surrounded by everyone, and I looked at you and it was just…” She shook her head, angry at the memory now, angry at its tenderness. “It was done. It was already done.”
Lando’s chest hurt.
“And then you looked at me,” she said, voice lower now, darker, “and made it very clear that you wanted nothing from me.”
His vision blurred.
“I didn’t know,” he said.
The words came out as a whisper.
“I swear I didn’t know until Monaco.”
Paula’s expression collapsed into something almost pitying. Almost.
“It changes nothing.”
He looked at her.
“What?”
“It changes nothing,” she repeated.
The panic rose again.
“No. Paula, it changes everything.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“It does. I know now. I feel it now. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“That’s the problem,” she said. “You feel it now.”
He fell silent.
Her tears slipped over despite her control, but her voice hardened around them.
“Now it hurts you, so now it matters. Now you can’t ignore it, so now it’s real. Now you’re the one who can’t sleep, can’t think, can’t breathe without feeling it, and suddenly I’m supposed to stand here and listen.”
“No,” he said. “That’s not...I don’t want you to make me feel better.”
“Then what do you want?”
The question opened in front of him like a blade. He had too many answers, and none of them were fair.
He wanted her to forgive him, he wanted her to believe him.
He wanted to go back in time and take the water from her hand, he wanted to stop being the person who made her cry.
He wanted the bond to mean there was still a chance, because without that chance the ache in him felt endless.
But those were wants, selfish, desperate wants.
So he said the only thing he could say that was not another demand.
“I want you to know I’m sorry.”
Paula looked away.
“No,” she said softly. “You're not, you just wanted your pain to disapear.”
The words landed with terrible accuracy.
She looked back at him.
“It’s a mistake,” she said.
Lando felt the air leave him.
“What?”
“The bond.” Her voice shook, but she did not look away. “It’s a mistake.”
“No.”
“Fate put us together as soulmates, fine. Maybe fate is wrong sometimes.”
“Paula...”
“We clearly are not made for each other,” she said, and every word seemed to cost her. “You despise me. I can’t be near you without feeling like I have to defend myself. You don’t even want to believe in soulmates. It was all exactly like you imagined, wasn’t it?”
He shook his head, tears blurring the streetlights behind her.
“We met and you ignored me. You didn’t recognise me. You didn’t feel anything.”
“I don’t know why.”
His voice broke on it.
“I swear to God, I don’t know why it didn’t work the first time. I don’t know what was wrong with me. I don’t know if I was too drunk, or too arrogant, or too stupid, or if I was just...” He choked on the word. “Lost. I don’t know. I only know that I feel it now, and I cannot keep pretending it didn’t happen.”
Paula’s face crumpled, only for a second. Then she rebuilt it in front of him.
“I can pretend.”
He stared at her.
She wiped at one cheek angrily.
“I did it for years.”
The sentence struck harder than anything else.
Lando could not breathe for a moment as Paula stepped back toward the balcony door.
“It’s best we take our distances,” she said. “For good this time.”
The pain that went through him then was not sharp. It was hollow, as if all the air had been pulled from his body at once.
“How?” he asked.
The word sounded almost childlike. He hated that, but he could not stop.
“How am I supposed to do that?”
Paula laughed bitterly through tears.
“You figure it out.”
“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said. The words came faster now, less controlled. “I can’t stop dreaming about you. Your name keeps repeating in my head like...like it’s calling me. I tried to stay away this week. I tried because I thought it was better for you, but I couldn’t stop. I was looking for you before I even knew I was looking. I...I can't let you go.”
“Well,” Paula cut in, voice cold and shaking at once, “welcome to hell, Lando.”
He went still.
“I lived that for three years,” she said.
The sentence left no room for mercy.
Three years.
Three years of what he had only barely survived for a week.
“It’s time you face the consequences of your own cruelty,” Paula said. “Because I don’t want you.”
The words split him open.
“Paula...”
“I don’t.” Her voice broke, but she pushed through it. “You are selfish and rude and incapable of loving anyone without making it about yourself first.”
He flinched.
“I don’t want you as my soulmate, Lando.”
The tears came then. He did not try to hide them. There was no dignity left to protect.
“I understood it years ago,” she said, quieter now, but somehow more final. “It is all a mistake.”
He reached toward her, not to touch this time, just instinct, pleading made physical.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and the words were useless, ruined, too late. “Paula, please. I’m so sorry. I swear I didn’t know. I swear I would have...”
“What?” she asked.
He stopped.
“What would you have done?” she said. “Loved me? Protected me? Chosen me?”
Her eyes moved over his face, wet and furious and devastated.
“You couldn’t even be kind to me.”
There was nothing after that.
Nothing he could say, nothing that would not be another attempt to pull forgiveness out of her before she was ready to give it.
Paula seemed to realise it at the same time.
She turned away.
“Don’t follow me,” she said.
Then she opened the balcony door and walked back inside.
Warm light spilled out around her for one brief second, turning her into a silhouette against the room full of people who had no idea what had just shattered. Then the door closed behind her, cutting off the heat, the music, the voices.
Lando stayed on the balcony.
He was crying silently now, one hand braced against the railing because he was not entirely sure his legs would hold without it.
Inside, through the glass, Paula crossed the room without looking back. Pietra saw her immediately and went toward her. Max looked toward the balcony, and for a moment Lando saw the exact second his best friend understood that something was wrong.
Lando looked away.
The London night pressed close around him.
Below, cars moved through wet streets. Somewhere far off, someone shouted and laughed, the sound careless and alive. The world continued with obscene ease.
His chest hurt.
But it wasn't like Monaco. It was worse, maybe, because this time the pain had no mystery left in it.
It was simply heartbreak.
And Paula was right, he had earned every second of it.
Lando stayed on the balcony long after Paula went back inside.
Longer than necessary. Longer than was reasonable. Long enough for the cold to settle through his clothes and into his skin, for his fingers to stiffen around the railing, for the warmth and noise of the party behind the glass to start feeling like something that belonged to another life. London stretched beneath him in wet black streets and amber reflections, indifferent as ever, full of people going somewhere, leaving somewhere, returning to homes that did not know his name.
He remained still.
It was the only thing he could do.
If he moved, he thought something in him might break loose entirely.
His breathing had become uneven again. Not quite the terrifying, collapsing absence of air from Monaco, not the full sharp panic that had left him on his knees by a hospital bed or on the ground beneath a podium while people shouted above him. This was quieter, but no less cruel. A slow tightening beneath his ribs. An ache that spread from the centre of his chest outward until even his throat felt bruised with it.
He pressed one hand over his heart.
It was becoming a habit.
He hated that.
He hated the way his body reached for the pain now, as if touching it might make it comprehensible. As if the exact point under his palm could tell him where heartbreak ended and the bond began. But there was no difference anymore. Not one he could feel. The two things had knotted together inside him so tightly that he could not tell whether his chest hurt because Paula had rejected him, because he had deserved it, because the bond was protesting the distance, or because he had finally learned enough truth to make breathing feel like an act of violence.
He tried to inhale.
It caught halfway.
His eyes burned again, apparently his body had decided humiliation was not complete unless he discovered, at twenty-six years old, in the middle of a friend’s party, that he was capable of crying endlessly over a woman who had just told him she did not want him as her soulmate.
Her name moved through him like something living.
Paula, who had known from the first time.
Paula, who had been standing in a club with a bottle of water and the entire terrifying knowledge of a soulmate bond opening in her chest while he looked at her and chose cruelty. Paula, who had spent years trying to suppress the pull he was barely surviving for a week. Paula, who had had to stand near him at dinners, at race weekends, at parties, in Monaco garages, while his voice turned sharp for reasons even he had not understood.
He imagined it now with a clarity that made the cold feel warmer than his own shame.
Years of hearing his name in her head.
Years of feeling drawn toward a person who kept rejecting even the smallest version of her presence.
Years of watching him laugh about soulmates, dismiss them, call them stupid, say publicly that if he met his, he would not notice.
God.
He bent forward slightly, gripping the railing harder with his free hand.
The tears came again.
They simply rose and spilled, hot against cold skin, an endless loop of guilt feeding grief feeding panic feeding guilt. He would think of her pain and cry for it, then hate himself for crying because crying did nothing for her, then think of how long she had carried this without him, then break all over again.
How had she lived with it?
The thought was unbearable.
How had she kept showing up?
How had she stood in rooms with him and not collapsed under the weight of it? How had she laughed with Pietra, rolled her eyes at Max, spoken to other people, built an entire self around the wound without letting it devour her openly? How had she turned the ache into anger, the pull into distance, the rejection into teeth sharp enough to protect herself?
And he had called her annoying, insufferable, too easily offended.
He pressed his hand harder into his chest until the pressure became its own pain.
“Fuck,” he whispered.
The balcony door slid open behind him.
Lando did not turn around.
For a second, he thought maybe, stupidly, impossibly, that it was Paula.
His whole body reacted before reason could stop it. His heart lifted, stumbled, hurt.
Then Max’s voice came quietly from behind him.
“Mate?”
The hope died so quickly it left him dizzy.
Lando wiped his face with the heel of his hand before turning halfway. It was useless. His eyes were still wet. His breath still wrong. His posture still that of a man trying to hold himself together manually.
Max stepped onto the balcony and pulled the door mostly closed behind him, muffling the party again.
The moment he saw Lando properly, his expression changed.
“What happened?”
Lando looked away. “Nothing.”
Max’s gaze dropped to the hand pressed against his chest.
His face drained of colour.
“Lando.”
“It’s okay.”
“Is it your heart again?”
“No.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not...” Lando stopped, because even he could hear how thin it sounded. He forced a breath in, slow and shaking. “It hurts, but it’s not like Monaco.”
“That is not reassuring.”
“I’m okay.”
“You’re standing outside crying with your hand on your chest.”
Lando closed his eyes briefly.
“I said I’m okay.”
Max came closer, his voice low and controlled in a way that told Lando he was far more scared than he wanted to show. “Do you need a doctor?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Because maybe they missed something last time.”
“They didn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they checked everything.”
“And yet here you are.”
Lando opened his eyes and turned to him fully now, exhausted beyond defensiveness but not beyond irritation. “Max.”
“What?”
“Don’t. Please.”
Max stared at him.
For a moment, he looked as if he might ignore the warning entirely and drag him back inside, call an ambulance, call his mother, call anyone who could turn this into something practical. That was Max’s instinct when fear had nowhere to go: when something was wrong, fix it. If Lando was in pain, get someone who knew what they were doing.
But this could not be fixed that way. Not with doctors, not with scans.
“It will pass,” Lando said quietly. “It’s nothing.”
Max did not believe him, that was obvious.
But after a few seconds he nodded once, reluctantly. “All right.”
Lando looked back down at the street.
The silence between them was not comfortable, but it was not hostile either. Max leaned against the balcony wall beside him, close enough to help if Lando’s knees gave out, far enough not to make him feel handled. It was very Max, that. The kind of care that pretended not to be care so the other person could bear it.
After a while, Max asked, “And with Paula?”
The simple mention of her name changed something in him.
He hated that Max probably saw it.
The tiny shift in his shoulders. The catch in his breath. The way his hand flexed once against his chest before he could stop it.
“What about Paula?” Lando asked.
Max looked at him carefully.
“What did you guys talk about?”
Lando’s mouth tightened.
Max continued, softer but not less direct. “She just left the party. Didn’t tell anyone why. Pietra went after her, but…” He trailed off. “You didn’t say anything bad to her again, did you?”
Lando looked at him, the question should have made him angry.
A week ago, it would have. He would have bristled, defended himself, pointed out that Paula was not made of glass and that she was perfectly capable of cutting him to pieces too. He would have hated the assumption that if Paula was hurt, he must have caused it.
Now it only exhausted him.
“No,” he said.
His voice sounded hollow.
“I didn’t.”
Max watched him.
“I went to apologise,” Lando said after a moment. “Properly this time. Or I tried to.”
“And?”
Lando laughed under his breath, it was a broken sound.
“I was too late.”
Max said nothing.
The words kept coming then, not because Lando wanted to explain, but because silence had become too crowded.
“She’s right,” he said. “It doesn’t count. It’s too easy to say sorry after three years of…”
He stopped.
The sentence caught on the wrong word, three years of cruelty, three years of denial.
Three years of leaving her alone with a bond he did not feel because he was too blind or too selfish or too broken in some way he still did not understand.
“Ignorance,” he finished, though the word was not enough.
Max frowned.
“Ignorance about what?”
Lando looked at him.
For a second, he nearly told him, all of it.
That Paula had known from the first time. That she had felt the bond for years. That he had just told her he thought she was his soulmate and she had looked at him as if he had invented a new way to hurt her. That she had said it was a mistake. That she did not want him. That whatever cosmic force that had tied them together was just a terrile mistake.
But the words would not come, not because he did not trust Max but because it did not feel like his secret alone.
Paula had given him her truth in anger, in tears, on a cold balcony where she had probably never meant to confess anything. He did not have the right to take it inside and hand it to someone else just because he was hurting.
“Nothing,” Lando said.
Max’s eyes narrowed.
“Lando.”
“Nothing,” he repeated. “Don’t worry, okay? I’ll figure it out on my own.”
Max looked unconvinced, more than unconvinced.
He looked hurt, maybe, but he hid it quickly. Lando hated that too. Hated that his pain had become something other people now had to manage around, a dangerous object passed carefully from hand to hand.
“You know,” Max said after a moment, “you don’t actually have a brilliant track record of figuring things out on your own.”
A breath that might have been a laugh left Lando.
“No.”
“So maybe don’t make that the whole plan.”
“I won’t.”
“You just said you would.”
“I said I’ll figure it out. Not that I’ll do it badly.”
Max gave him a flat look.
Despite everything, Lando almost smiled.
Almost.
Then the ache in his chest pulsed again, and his face tightened before he could hide it.
Max saw.
“Come back inside,” he said immediately. “Drink some water. Sit down.”
Lando looked toward the glass door.
Inside, the party was still happening, though quieter now. Maybe people had noticed Paula leaving. Maybe they had noticed Max coming outside. Maybe the entire room was trying politely to pretend it was not orbiting the wreckage of whatever existed between him and Paula.
He did not want to go back in.
He did not want to stand under warm lights and pretend his chest did not hurt. He did not want to accept more careful glances, more half-finished questions, more kindness he had not earned. He wanted to stay out in the cold until the pain either left him or became something he could understand.
But Max was right about one thing.
He probably should not remain alone on a balcony, crying into the London night with a week-old history of collapsing and a heart that doctors insisted was fine while his body argued otherwise.
Water would not help, he knew that.
The pain was not thirst. Not dehydration. Not race exhaustion. Not adrenaline.
It had a name, it had blue eyes and a voice that had just told him she did not want him.
Still, he nodded.
“Okay.”
Max opened the balcony door.
Warmth spilled out again, carrying music and voices and the smell of food gone cold on plates.
Lando hesitated before stepping back inside.
For one second he looked out at the wet street below, at the reflection of light broken across the pavement, and thought of Paula walking away from him again.
Then he followed Max into the flat.
The room turned toward them in subtle ways. Conversations shifted. Eyes flicked over, then away. Pietra was nowhere in sight. Neither was Paula.
Of course.
Lando kept his head down as Max guided him toward the kitchen.
Someone asked if he was all right. Max answered before he could.
“He’s fine. Just needs water.”
Lando said nothing.
He took the glass Max handed him and drank because it gave his hands something to do, because swallowing was easier than speaking, because pretending to be physically normal was the only performance he could still manage.
The water was cold, but it did not touch the ache.
Across the flat, the balcony door reflected a dark, distorted version of him in the glass: pale, red-eyed, hand still hovering too close to his chest.
He turned away from it.
But Paula’s words followed him inside.
Welcome to hell, Lando.
And for the first time, he understood that hell was not the bond itself.
Hell was realising he had made her live this first.
I’m back on my thoughts on the last two parts!! I wanted to make them together because I feel like they have similar vibes so I didn’t want to repeat myself too much (I already do)
Starting with your incredible descriptions, I love how you can point out specific elements of the surroundings that just make me feel like I’m in the scene. I know I say this all the time but it’s actually not something too easy to do (at least for me) so I wanted to point it out before everything else!!
Same thing for feelings!! As always, you manage to describe the most abstract thoughts and feelings into real and touchable words and I’m just amazed!! It could never be me really 😔
And now.. THE PLOT!! Connecting wirh the feelings, I LOVED how lando was almost manic in his thoughts about Paula during the race! It was excruciating to read and at the same time I was giggling and twirling my hair.
But him in the hospital reached another level!! I actually cant wait to see pietra connect the dots on the because he can’t be normal for one second 🤭
Cisca being the first person lando tells about Paula is so beautiful and once again you managed to write family relations in such delicate and detailed ways!! The description of his mother hands being his home made me tear up a little, ngl. It really is indescribable the way you can make everything feel so real and touchable through the screen. AAAAAAHHHH I WISH I WAS YOU 😭😭
I think this is my shorter yapping session, but I’m so excited to read and see more of them, especially a first conversation between lando and Paula. Like hom being a pathetic mess and her being the cold one this time?? UUUUHHH thah would hit different!!
As always, amazing job on both the chapters. For once I have no theories or anything, so I guess what I’ll ask is: have you thought how many chapters is this fic going to be? I feel like all your other works were around 10 parts (correct me if I’m wrong), but this one would have lots of room to show stuff and expand the universe!! Also!!! Now that I think about it, is lando world champion in this?? I don’t think you mentioned it, but it just came to mind.
Astonishing work (see?? I’m learning new words) as always, it really brightened up my day today!! (I got rejected from a job this morning)
- 🪸
Hiii anon 🪸!!
First of all, I’m so sorry I’m only responding now 😭 I spent my holidays by the sea and I decided not to bring my computer with me, which was very nice for actually disconnecting for a little while… but it also meant I couldn’t properly respond to messages or post any new chapters while I was away hahaha. But I’m back now and finally catching up on everything!!
And once again, thank you SO SO much for this message 😭 I genuinely don’t think I will ever get used to you complimenting my descriptions this much because every time you do I’m like ??? ME??? hahaha.
And YESSS, Lando during the race was absolutely supposed to feel a little manic about Paula 😭
And the hospital scene with Cisca was one I really wanted to take my time with because I LOVE writing family relationships, especially when a character who normally tries to keep everything under control suddenly becomes a child again around their mother.
Also Pietra connecting the dots… 🤭 I will not say anything. But you already know that Lando is absolutely terrible at behaving normally around Paula, and I don’t think his current state is going to make him any better at hiding things hahaha.
And the first proper Lando/Paula conversations are definitely something I’ve been SO excited for you guys to read because the dynamic is changing now. Until this point, he has always been the one getting irritated, defensive, angry, etc., while Paula was mostly reacting to him. But now he is the one who knows something is terribly wrong, he’s full of guilt, he desperately wants to understand her, and Paula has absolutely no reason to suddenly make things easy for him. So yes… pathetic Lando versus much colder Paula is very much the kind of energy we are moving toward 👀.
About how many chapters the story will have: it is FOR SURE going to be longer than ten chapters!! You’re right that most of my other longer stories tend to stay somewhere around that number, but this one is definitely going to be longer than what I normally write. I don’t have an exact final number yet because I know myself and I will probably add scenes along the way 😭 but right now I’m thinking maybe somewhere around 15–20 chapters? There is just so much more I want to explore with them, especially because I don’t only want to explain the soulmate universe, I also want to actually give Lando and Paula enough time to deal with everything that happened between them instead of suddenly fixing three years of resentment in two conversations hahaha.
And YES, Lando is world champion in this universe!! I don’t think I have made it super obvious so far, so that’s on me hahaha, but yes, he has already won his championship when this story takes place.
AND WAIT 😭 I’m so sorry about the job rejection!! Especially getting that kind of news in the morning, that is such an awful way to start your day. So if these chapters managed to brighten it even just a little bit, then I’m really happy they could do that 🥹. And I hope something much better comes your way soon!!
As always, thank you so much for taking the time to write all of this🫶
oh thanks for explaining. after sending that ask i checked the second chapter and realised cisca never says paula's name and connected the dots. sorry for asking something that was obvious I should've checked before asking. since she asked him to apologize I just assumed she just knew the girl.
thanks again for clearing it for me
Oh no don't worry it's really comprehensible.
So really don't apology I was happy to explain it to you and maybe other readers had the same question and thanks to you they have their response 😊
So really don't hesitate if you have more question in the future 🥰
Heyy I need to ask something because I'm a little confused? how come lando's mum doesn't know about paula? didn't she make him apologize to her in the second chapter? but in the 5th chapter it seems like she doesn't even know Paula exists I really don't understand please enlighten me
Heyy
So the reason it that during the GP Cisca only sees her son being disrespectful to a girl in the garage and she knows nothing about her or her name (she or Lando never say her name if you read it again) Lando only admit after the quali to his mom that he knows her and that she is Pietra's friend but nothing more.
So when Lando talk about Paula in the hospital she don't know who she is yet because Lando had never talked about her, but then she make the link and understand she is the girl in the garage Lando had screamed at.
Summary : In a world where soulmates exist, Lando Norris has never believed in fate, bonds, or the idea that one person could be made for another. He always said that if he ever met his soulmate, he probably wouldn’t care.
But what if he had already met her years ago?
Genre : soulmates AU, angst
Pairing : Lando Norris x oc (female)
Words count : 9,1k
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Lando woke to the taste of metal and panic.
For a moment, there was nothing else.
No ceiling. No room. No shape to the world beyond the sharp instinct that something had gone terribly wrong and he had returned to himself too late to stop it. His body felt heavy and distant, pinned beneath a softness that did not comfort him. His mouth was dry. His throat ached as if he had been calling for someone in his sleep. Somewhere nearby, something beeped with a patient, mechanical rhythm that made no sense until he realised it was marking time.
He did not open his eyes immediately, he was afraid of what he would see.
The last thing he remembered was blue.
Not the sky. Not the sea.
Her eyes.
Paula’s eyes in the crowd, wide and terrified, fixed on him as if the whole of Monaco had disappeared around them and left only the unbearable distance between her body and his. The pain had been there too: violent, crushing, blooming from his chest as if his heart had turned against its cage. He remembered the trophy slipping from reality. Someone saying his name. The podium tilting beneath him. The crowd opening its mouth in one collective sound.
Then nothing.
Now there was only the beep, the dryness, the strange weight of his limbs, and one thought striking through the fog with enough force to hurt.
Paula.
His eyes opened.
The room blurred.
White ceiling. Pale walls. A strip of fluorescent light above him, too harsh even through the haze. The smell hit next, antiseptic, plastic, cold linen, the faint sterile bitterness of hospital air. For a few seconds he could not place himself inside it. His mind resisted the shape of the room, still trying to find the podium, the crowd, the press of bodies rushing toward him.
But that did not matter. None of it mattered.
“Paula,” he murmured.
His voice barely existed.
He tried to move and discovered wires before he understood them. Something tugged at his arm. Something else was attached near his chest. The thin hospital sheet slid against his legs as he shifted, and a dull ache answered through his side, probably from the fall. His body complained everywhere at once, but the only pain he cared about was the one in the center of his chest, not sharp now, not like before, but present. Waiting.
There was a silhouette across from him.
A woman, seated near the bed.
His vision was still blurred enough that for one unbearable second hope took shape before reason could stop it. He lifted a hand toward her, fingers trembling in the cold air between them, reaching without shame, without pride, without even the memory of all the years he had spent using distance like a weapon.
“Paula,” he whispered again.
The woman stood immediately.
But the voice that answered was not hers.
“Lando?”
His hand froze, he knew that voice. He had known it longer than any other voice in the world.
The room came back in fragments: the bed, the monitor, the clear tube taped to his hand, the chair pulled close beside him, his mother standing there with one hand already reaching for his as though she was afraid he might vanish again if she did not touch him quickly enough.
Not Paula, his mother.
The disappointment of it was so violent that shame followed immediately after, dark and choking. He loved his mother. He was relieved to see her. He knew, somewhere beneath the panic, that waking up to her beside him should have felt like safety.
But all he could think was: Where is Paula?
His mother took his hand carefully, as if he were something breakable.
“Lando,” she said softly. “Can you hear me?”
He blinked at her.
The room sharpened further.
Hospital, he was in a hospital.
Not the podium. Not the paddock. Not the garage.
A hospital bed.
His mother’s face was pale in a way he had rarely seen. Her hair was slightly disordered, her eyes red-rimmed with either crying or lack of sleep or both. She looked smaller than usual in the harsh light, and that frightened him more than the monitors did. Mothers were not supposed to look like that. Not his. Not the woman who had always seemed capable of making the world gentler through force of will alone.
“You’re awake,” she said, voice shaking at the edges despite how hard she was trying to make it calm. “You’re okay. You’re in hospital. Do you hear me?”
He stared at her, confused by the question.
Then the pain came back. All at once, his breath hitched.
A violent tug pulled through his chest, less pain than memory of pain, but strong enough that his hand moved there automatically, pressing flat against his sternum as if he could hold something inside himself in place.
His mother leaned closer immediately. “What is it? Are you hurting?”
He tried to breathe slowly.
The doctors had probably told her to watch for pain. For confusion. For any sign that something had gone wrong in his body after the cameras caught him collapsing off a podium in front of the world.
But how could he explain that the pain had a name?
“How long?” he asked, voice hoarse.
His mother brushed her thumb over his knuckles. “A few hours.”
“A few...”
“You fainted after you fell,” she said quickly, maybe to keep him from panicking, though panic was already moving through him in cold sheets. “They brought you here. They’ve been running tests. You’ve been in and out a little, but not really awake.”
He swallowed.
“My race?”
The question came from the shallow part of him, the part trained to account for results, schedules, optics.
His mother looked at him with a sadness that almost resembled pity.
“You finished third,” she said. “You don't remember?”
He did and didn’t at the same time.
It seemed absurdly far away.
P3 in Monaco. A podium. A fall. A collapse. A whole weekend that would now be reduced to clips and headlines and theories from people who had not seen the shape of Paula’s eyes in the crowd.
His mother reached toward the wall and pressed the call button near his bed.
“The doctors will be here soon,” she said. “It’s all right, my love. You’re okay now.”
He looked at her.
Okay.
The word was so wrong it almost frightened him.
He was not okay. He knew that with a clarity more complete than anything else. Whatever the machines were saying, whatever scans had shown, whatever careful medical explanation the doctors had assembled to make the impossible fit into a world that preferred not to believe in invisible bonds, he was not okay.
He had woken up reaching for someone he had spent years pretending he wanted nowhere near him.
He had collapsed on a podium because his body had found her before his mind could survive what it meant.
He was not okay.
“Where is Paula?” he asked.
His mother went very still.
He felt the shift in her hand around his, the tiny pause before she answered.
“You kept saying that name,” she said carefully. “When they were helping you, even in the ambulance.”
He stared at her, waiting.
His mother looked confused now, but not only confused. Concerned in the deeper, more searching way she became when she knew there was something beneath the thing being said.
“Who is Paula?”
For a second, Lando could not understand why she was asking.
Then he remembered, of course she didn’t know.
Why would she?
He had spent years keeping Paula at the edges of every conversation. Years reducing her to Pietra’s friend, Max’s friend, the annoying one, the girl he did not want near the garage, the one he rolled his eyes about when her name appeared in a group chat. His mother had never heard her name coming from his mouth.
He closed his eyes for a second.
“Mum,” he said, but no answer came after it.
The door opened before he could try again.
Two doctors entered with a nurse behind them. One of the doctors was the same older man from the night before, or maybe Lando was only imagining the similarity because exhaustion had blurred everything into repeating patterns of white coats and controlled voices. This one had kind eyes and a clipboard, which made Lando trust him immediately.
“Mr. Norris,” the doctor said. “Good to see you awake.”
Lando tried to sit up further, but the nurse moved toward him at once.
“Slowly,” she said. “Take it easy.”
He hated that. Hated being handled carefully. Hated that the fall had turned him briefly into something fragile in front of everyone. Hated that he had no strength to argue with her.
The doctor checked the monitor, then his pupils, then asked several questions that seemed both obvious and necessary. His full name. Where he was. What day it was. Whether he remembered what had happened.
He answered them all.
His mother stood beside the bed with her arms folded tightly across herself now, watching every movement.
The doctor nodded, apparently satisfied.
“Well,” he said, “the good news is that the scans are clear. No sign of complication in the heart or brain. Your ECG is reassuring, imaging is clean, and there’s no evidence of a neurological event.”
Lando looked at him.
The words should have been comforting. They were not.
“We think,” the doctor continued, “it may have been an intense adrenaline response after the race. Physical exhaustion, emotional pressure, dehydration, lack of sleep perhaps. Your body went through a significant stress reaction, and then after the podium, everything may have come down at once.”
His mother exhaled softly beside him, relief moving through her like something physical.
“Oh, thank God,” she whispered.
The doctor smiled gently. “We’ll keep monitoring him for a little while, of course. But there is nothing at the moment suggesting long-term damage. He should recover with rest.”
Lando stared at him as if he had said something obscene.
Everything is fine?
The thought rose with a violence that almost made him laugh.
Nothing was fine.
Paula was out there somewhere. Paula had seen him fall. Paula might be afraid, or gone completely silent in that terrible way she did when something inside her had been struck too hard. He had not apologised. He had not said the truth. He had not even begun to touch the mess he had made. His body had simply decided to collapse in front of the world and leave everyone else to clean up the aftermath.
And now a doctor was standing there saying there was no visible damage, as if the absence of broken tissue meant nothing had broken at all.
“Mr. Norris?” the doctor asked.
Lando realised he had not responded.
He forced himself to nod.
“Okay,” he said.
His voice sounded empty.
The doctor gave instructions. No immediate alarm, but they wanted observation. He tell him to avoid strain for the next hours. They would discuss discharge when they were confident everything remained stable. The race had been extreme physical exertion, the fall had been impressive, and there would be precautions, but the medical language wrapped it all into something manageable.
His mother thanked them more than once.
Lando did not.
Not because he was ungrateful. Because gratitude required being present in the same reality as everyone else, and he was not sure he was.
When they left, the room seemed quieter than before.
The relief in his mother was almost painful to witness. She sat down again, taking his hand between both of hers this time. Her palms were warm. His were cold.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
Outside the closed door, footsteps passed in the corridor. A trolley rattled faintly. Somewhere, someone laughed in a tired, subdued way that sounded wrong inside a hospital. The monitor kept its rhythm beside him, indifferent and constant.
His mother watched him carefully.
“What is in your mind?” she asked at last.
The question was soft, but Lando heard the tremor beneath it. Fear receding, but not gone. The kind of fear that left marks.
He looked at her.
“You scared me, and your dad” she said. “You scared a lot of people, actually. It was quite impressive, and not in a way I would like repeated.”
A breath that was almost a laugh left him. It died quickly.
“I didn’t mean to.”
“I know.”
“I'm sorry mum.”
“No need to say sorry, the important thing is that you are alright.”
The words landed quietly.
Lando’s eyes lowered.
His mother’s grip tightened once around his hand, not enough to hurt, just enough to remind him she was there.
“There are few things,” she said, “as terrible as watching your child fall and not knowing if he will get up.”
The guilt returned, familiar and sharp.
“I’m sorry.”
“You did nothing wrong, we were just worried,” she said again.
There was no anger in her now. That made it worse. Her disappointment yesterday had been easier to understand than this: fear, tenderness, the raw exhaustion of a parent who had been forced to imagine too much in too little time.
Lando swallowed.
For a moment he said nothing.
Then, slowly, almost unsure of his own question before it had fully formed, he asked, “Do you believe in soulmates, Mum?”
His mother blinked.
Whatever she had expected him to say, it had not been that. She leaned back slightly, studying his face.
“Why are you asking me that suddenly?”
He looked away.
“I don’t know.”
His mother waited.
She had always been good at waiting when it mattered. It had annoyed him as a child, enraged him as a teenager, and unsettled him as an adult. She knew when to push and when silence would do more damage than any lecture.
“You always thought it was nonsense,” she said at last.
The word sounded strange in her voice, gentle and disapproving at the same time.
Lando’s mouth twitched despite himself.
“I do.”
“So why talk about it now?”
He stared at the hospital sheet over his legs.
Maybe because I woke up saying her name, maybe because I felt my heart break open when I saw her.
Maybe because I spent years laughing at something she might have known all along, maybe because I think I found mine and destroyed her before I understood what she was.
He said none of that.
“Maybe I was wrong,” he said.
His mother’s expression changed.
He could feel her attention sharpen, not with suspicion exactly, but concern. She was listening more closely now.
“Maybe people are right,” he continued, voice low. “Maybe Charles or Uncle Robert aren't a fool. Maybe it exists.”
His mother frowned softly.
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Lando.”
He closed his eyes briefly.
There was no point pretending with her. There never had been. She might not know the details, but she knew when he was trying to cover a wound with his hands and call it his skin.
She asked, quieter now, “Did you meet someone?”
He shook his head.
The answer was both true and false in ways he could not begin to explain.
“No,” he said. “It’s just a thought.”
His mother did not look convinced.
“Just a thought that made you ask about soulmates from a hospital bed after collapsing from a podium ?”
Lando winced. When she put it that way, it sounded impossible to escape.
Still, he tried.
“Do you think…” He stopped, then began again, the words difficult and humiliating. “Do you think you can realise someone is your soulmate after years of knowing her?”
His mother’s confusion deepened.
“After years?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I always thought when two soulmates met, they both knew. That was how people told the stories, at least.”
“Right.”
“But stories simplify things,” she added after a moment. “People like neat beginnings. They like saying it was immediate because it makes the world sound kinder than it is.”
Lando looked at her.
She seemed to be thinking now, not only answering him.
“I suppose there could be other versions,” she said. “Some people are not ready to recognise what is in front of them. Some people refuse to look. Some people…” Her eyes softened sadly. “Some people hurt the very thing they are afraid to need.”
The words struck too close. His chest tightened again, though not with the violent pain from before.
His mother noticed anyway.
“Lando?”
He breathed through it.
“I’m fine.”
“Don’t lie to me. A mother can see everything.”
He almost smiled, but it vanished before it formed.
His mother lowered her voice. “Why are you asking this?”
Lando looked down at their joined hands.
Her hands had always looked like home to him. He remembered them tying his shoes when he was small, fixing collars, holding phones during distant race weekends, touching his face in garages after wins and losses as if checking he was still real beneath the helmet marks and sweat. They were hands that had loved him through every version of himself. Even the ugly ones.
He wondered what she would think if she knew all of it.
What he had said to Paula that first night, how many years he had carried on without remembering, how he had shouted at her again in front of the garage, how he had found her to apologise and somehow hurt her worse.
He wondered whether love had limits when faced with the full truth of someone.
Then he remembered the way his mother had looked at him after the garage incident, disappointed, yes, but still there. Refusing to excuse him. Refusing to abandon him to the worst version of himself.
Maybe that was love too.
Not forgiveness without consequence, but presence without illusion.
He took a breath.
“I think…” he said.
The words stuck. His mother waited.
The monitor beside him kept counting his heart.
A heart the doctors insisted was fine, a heart that had dragged him to the floor at the sight of Paula’s eyes.
Lando swallowed hard and looked at his mother properly.
“I think I know who is my soulmate.”
The sentence landed so softly it should not have changed the room.
But it did.
His mother’s face went still.
Not shocked, exactly. Not disbelieving. Something deeper. A recognition of the fact that whatever this was, whatever he was finally saying aloud, it did not belong to the world of jokes and clips and easy declarations.
This was her son lying in a hospital bed admitting the universe might have tied him to someone.
His mother did not speak immediately.
When she did, her voice was very careful.
“Paula?”
Lando’s breath caught.
His mother’s eyes filled with a sorrow so gentle it was almost unbearable.
“She is the girl from the garage, isn't she?” she said.
He nodded once, barely.
“Yes.”
The word felt like confession.
His mother looked at him for a long time.
Then she asked, “Does she know?”
Lando’s throat tightened.
“I don’t know.”
But that was not entirely true.
He thought of Paula watching his soulmate interview and going quiet. How she arrived early the next morning, looking at him with pain that seemed older than the moment. Paula on the podium, her eyes widening not only in fear, but in something like recognition.
Maybe she knew. Maybe she had known first.
Maybe that was why everything had hurt so badly for her long before it hurt for him.
His voice dropped even lower.
“I think maybe she knew before me.”
His mother closed her eyes briefly, as if the idea hurt her too.
“And what did you do?” she asked.
The question was not accusing, that made it more devastating.
Lando turned his face away.
He stared toward the window, where the hospital glass reflected a pale, hollow version of him back into the room.
“I think I ruined it,” he said.
His mother’s hand tightened around his.
He could not look at her.
“I think I ruined it before I even knew what it was.”
The silence that followed was not empty.
It held the whole weight of what he had said. It held Paula’s name. It held the garage, the podium, the club years ago, the apologies he had failed to make and the one he still owed. It held the possibility that some bonds were not soft miracles, not golden threads leading two people gently home, but things that could be neglected, denied, wounded, left to rot in the dark until recognition arrived not as joy, but as pain.
His mother did not tell him he was wrong.
She did not comfort him with easy promises.
For a while, she simply sat beside him, holding his hand in both of hers while the machine counted his heartbeat and the room remained painfully bright around them.
Then, very softly, she said, “Then you need to stop running from it.”
Lando closed his eyes.
Paula’s face appeared immediately.
The realization did not arrive gently, it struck him with the force of something falling from a great height.
One second Lando was lying there in the hospital bed, his mother’s hand warm around his, the monitor keeping time beside him with indifferent little beeps, the word soulmate still sitting between them like something neither of them entirely knew how to touch. The next, fear opened inside him so violently it emptied the room of everything else.
Paula somewhere outside this room, somewhere in Monaco, with no doctor standing beside her, no monitor tracking her heart, no one necessarily understanding what might have happened to her if the bond, if that was what this was, if he had not finally lost his mind under the pressure of a race weekend and too many years of denial, had dragged his pain through her body too.
His own heart gave one hard, awful kick.
What if she had felt it?
The question landed in him and instantly multiplied.
What if the bond worked both ways? What if what had happened to him on the podium had not stopped at him? What if the pain in his chest had echoed in hers, sudden and terrifying, while she stood trapped in the crowd watching him fall? What if she had gone pale not only because she was afraid for him, but because something inside her had broken open at the same time?
He had no idea how any of this worked.
That was the worst of it.
He had spent his whole life refusing to learn the rules of a thing he now might desperately need to understand. He had laughed at soulmates. Dismissed the bond. Mocked people who spoke about it as if it had gravity. He had called it stories, foolishness, a pretty mythology built around ordinary love because ordinary love was apparently not enough for people anymore.
And now, lying under hospital lights with medical tape on his skin and his mother watching him as if he might fracture again, ignorance felt like punishment.
What if one soulmate in pain meant the other felt it too?
What if all this time Paula had been bearing things he never felt because he had refused to recognize her?
What if, when he collapsed, she had collapsed too?
The image came before he could stop it.
Paula in a hospital bed.
Pale against white sheets. Her hair spread across a pillow. Eyes closed. A monitor beside her counting out a rhythm that should not belong to someone who had simply come to Monaco with her friends. Doctors moving too quickly. Someone asking what happened, and no one knowing how to answer because the truth sounded insane: Lando Norris had finally looked at her properly and his heart had rebelled, and maybe hers had followed.
A cold, violent horror seized him.
He pushed himself upright before he decided to move.
The monitor beside him changed immediately, its steady rhythm quickening as if even the machine had noticed fear before his mother did. The sheet tangled around his legs. The IV line tugged at his hand. Pain from the fall flashed through his side, but he barely registered it.
His mother startled. “Lando?”
“I need to know if she’s okay.”
His voice came out raw.
His mother stood at once. “What?”
“I need to know,” he repeated, already trying to swing his legs over the edge of the bed. The room tilted slightly, but panic held him upright better than strength could have. “I need to see her.”
His mother moved faster than he expected, catching his shoulder and pressing him back with the careful firmness of someone who loved him too much to let fear make him stupid.
“Wait. Lando, stop. Where are you going?”
“To her.”
“You are in hospital.”
“I don’t care.”
“You need to rest.”
“No.” The word broke out of him, too loud in the small room. “No, I need to know if she’s fine.”
“Lando!”
“What if she felt what I felt?” he said, and the moment he spoke it aloud the terror became worse, more real, given shape by sound. “God, what if she collapsed? What if it happened to her too and no one...” His breath caught. “I need to make sure. I need to see her.”
His mother stared at him.
For a second she looked as though she did not recognize him at all.
This was something else, something stripped bare and almost violent in its intensity. He could feel it spilling out of him, impossible to make dignified: the panic, the need, the terrifying certainty that he would tear the wires out of his own arm and walk barefoot through Monaco if that was what it took to place his eyes on Paula and know she was breathing.
Tears gathered before he understood they were coming.
He hated that too, he hated all of it.
His mother’s expression softened and frightened at the same time.
“Lando, calm down.”
“I can’t.”
“You need to breathe. Your heart is accelerating.”
He looked toward the monitor because she did, and saw the numbers climbing, heard the beeping quicken into something sharper. The sound fed the panic, each little electronic note confirming that his body was again becoming something beyond his control.
“I’m sure she’s okay,” his mother said, voice steady only because she was forcing it to be. “And if she isn’t, she has people around her. Pietra, Max, her friends. Someone would help her.”
That did nothing. Nothing.
Because other people were not enough.
The thought was immediate and unreasonable and terrifying in its clarity. Other people might help her, yes. Other people might sit beside her, call a doctor, hold her hand, ask if she was all right. But none of them were the reason this was happening. None of them had spent years hurting her while tied to her by something he had denied so completely he had mistaken the bond for hatred.
Other people did not know.
Other people could not feel the pull clawing through his chest.
“No,” he said, and now he was crying properly, breath shaking, throat closing around the words. “No, Mum, you don’t get it. I need to...” He broke off, one hand gripping at the hospital sheet, the other pressed against his sternum as if holding himself together. “What is happening to me?”
His mother’s face crumpled for half a second before she controlled it.
“Oh, sweetheart.”
“What is happening to me?” he asked again, smaller this time, because beneath the panic there was something like pleading. He wanted her to know. He wanted someone to know. He wanted this to have rules, a name, a cure, anything other than the raw fact that he felt as if he had been split open and filled with someone else’s absence.
His mother took his face in both hands.
It was such an old gesture that it nearly undid him.
“Listen to me,” she said. “You need to calm down first. Then we will find out. But you cannot help anyone if you make yourself worse.”
He tried to breathe, but it came ragged. The monitor kept beeping too quickly.
His mother tried to guide his breathing with the steady softness she had used when he was a child waking from nightmares, her thumbs resting lightly against his cheeks, her face close enough that he could see the fear she was trying to hide for him.
But Lando did not feel safe. Nothing about his own body felt safe anymore.
“I don’t understand,” he choked out, his voice breaking around the sobs he could not control. “I don’t know anything about this. I don’t know the rules. I don’t know what it wants from me.”
“Lando...”
“What if it gets worse?” he asked, looking at her with wide, terrified eyes, suddenly not a driver, not an adult, not the person millions of people had watched stand on podiums and smile under pressure, but her son, pale and frightened in a hospital bed. “What if I can’t stop it? What if I hurt her and now it’s doing this because of that? What if this is…” His breath caught so hard he had to press a fist against his mouth for a second before he could force the words out. “What if this is a sort of punishment?”
His mother’s face tightened. “No, it is not a punishment.”
“How do you know?” His voice rose, cracked, fell apart. “How do you know, Mum? I hurt her. I hurt Paula for years and I didn’t even know. Or I knew and I ignored it, I don’t know, I don’t know anymore. Maybe this is what happens when you do that. Maybe this is what happens when fate gives you someone and you destroy her before you even understand what she is.”
“No,” she said again, firmer this time, but her hand trembled slightly when it moved to brush his hair back from his damp forehead. “Listen to me. The doctors said your heart is fine. Your scans are fine. They would not let you sit here like this if they thought you were dying.”
“I don’t want to die,” he said.
The words came out small.
So small that, for a second, the room seemed to break around them.
His mother’s mouth parted, and all the control she had been holding onto slipped for one terrible heartbeat. “Oh, my love.”
“I don’t want to die, Mum.” Tears spilled down his face again, hot and humiliating, but he was too scared to care. “I’m scared. I’m so scared. I keep thinking about what the doctor said, about that man, the one who lost his soulmate after the accident, and he was healthy, wasn’t he? He was fine and then he wasn’t because she was gone, because the bond did something to his heart. What if this is the same? What if I don’t know how bad it is until it’s too late? What if I already ruined it and there’s no solution because Paula hates me and she should hate me and I can’t even ask her not to?”
His mother pulled him forward before he could say anything else, carefully, mindful of the wires and the hospital gown and the exhaustion trembling through his body, but still gathering him against her as if holding him tightly enough might convince him the world had not ended.
Lando folded into her with a broken sound, face pressing against her shoulder, one hand gripping the fabric of her sleeve because he needed something solid, something human, something that was not the invisible thread tearing through him toward a woman who had every reason to run from him.
His mother held him the way only she could, one hand at the back of his head, the other moving slowly over his back.
“You are not going to die,” she whispered, and this time her voice carried the fragile force of someone making a promise because she could not survive doing anything else. “Do you hear me? You are here. You are breathing. Your heart is beating. We will find out what is happening. We will find help. You are not alone in this.”
“But what if there’s no cure?” he asked into her shoulder, the panic quieter now but no less terrible. “What if the only thing that helps is her? What if I need her and she can’t bear to be near me?”
His mother closed her eyes for a moment over his head. When she spoke again, she sounded careful, as if choosing each word with the tenderness required to touch a wound without deepening it. “Then we take it one thing at a time. Not the whole future tonight. Not every fear at once. Just this moment. Just making sure you are safe. ”
Lando’s body tensed again. He pulled back from his mother just enough to look at her, breathing unsteadily, cheeks wet, eyes red and frightened. “But what if she felt it?” he whispered. “What if when I fell, she felt something? What if I hurt her again without even touching her?”
His mother wiped one tear from his cheek with her thumb, though another followed immediately. “We don’t know that.”
“I need to know.”
“I know.”
“No, Mum, I really need to know.” His hand went back to his sternum, pressing there as if the pull had become a physical direction inside him. “I need to know she’s okay. I need to know she’s not alone somewhere feeling this because of me.”
His mother looked at him, helpless for a second in the face of something no doctor had explained and no mother could kiss better. Then her eyes moved toward the bedside table, where his phone lay dark and untouched beside a plastic cup of water.
His mother looked at it, then back at him.
“Maybe you can call her,” she said. “Make sure she is okay.”
The suggestion hit him with a new kind of shame.
“I don’t have her number.”
The words were quiet.
He hated saying them, hated the emptiness they revealed.
After all these years, after all that history, after all those arguments and the strange cruel intimacy of knowing exactly how to hurt each other, he did not even have her number saved in his phone. He knew the shape of her anger better than he knew how to reach her. He had spent years close enough to wound her and still not close enough to call.
The realization made the want sharper.
Suddenly he wanted her number with a desperation so intense it frightened him. Wanted the ability to press a button and hear her voice, even if that voice was angry, even if it told him to leave her alone. Wanted access to her in the smallest, most ordinary ways. To text. To call. To know where she was. To know if she got home safely. To know if she had eaten. To know if she was sleeping. To know if her chest hurt.
He wanted proximity in every form.
Physical. Digital. Emotional.
His mother absorbed the answer, the grief in it, without comment.
“Then call someone close to her,” she said. “Someone who can check.”
Lando nodded immediately.
“Yes.” His fingers were already reaching for his phone, clumsy with urgency. “Yeah, okay. Pietra. I can call Pietra. She’s her best friend.”
His mother handed him the phone from the small table beside the bed.
He nearly dropped it.
His hands were still shaking as he unlocked the screen and found Pietra’s contact. The seconds it took felt grotesque. Too long. Every delay became another possible catastrophe. Every ring another image of Paula alone in a room somewhere, not answering because she couldn’t.
Pietra picked up on the fourth ring.
“Lando?” Her voice was thick with worry and exhaustion. “Oh my God, are you okay? We were so worried. What happened? What did the doctors say?”
He did not say hello, he did not answer any of it.
“Is Paula okay?”
There was a silence on the other end.
“What?”
Lando sat upright, ignoring his mother’s hand hovering near his shoulder in warning.
“Is Paula okay?”
“Why are you asking that?” Pietra sounded confused now, and maybe a little guarded. “Lando, you collapsed. Are you...”
“Did she have any pain?” he interrupted. “Chest pain. Breathing problems. Anything? Did she faint?”
Another pause, longer this time.
“Lando,” Pietra said carefully, “what are you talking about?”
“Just answer me.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “She left after you passed out.”
His blood went cold.
“What do you mean she left?”
“She went back to her hotel.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Not long after. She was overwhelmed, I think. Everything was chaos and she...”
“Did she look sick?”
“She looked scared,” Pietra said, and there was a sharpness in her voice now, something protective. “We all did. You fell from a podium.”
“Pietra.”
“I don’t know if she had pain, Lando. She didn’t tell me.”
He closed his eyes.
The panic surged again, fast and bright.
On the monitor, the beeping sharpened.
His mother murmured his name in warning, but he could not listen.
“Go to her,” he said.
“What?”
“I need you to go to her hotel and check if she’s okay.”
“Lando, it’s the middle of the night. She’s probably sleeping.”
“I don’t care.”
“Lando?”
“Now, Pietra.”
The word cracked out of him too harshly, too desperate, and the room went silent around it. His mother stared at him. On the other end of the line, Pietra said nothing.
He dragged in a breath, trying and failing to soften himself.
“Please,” he said, and that was worse somehow. More naked. “Please, just go. I need to know she’s okay.”
Something in his tone must have convinced her, or frightened her, because when Pietra spoke again, her voice had changed.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. I’m going.”
Lando’s hand tightened around the phone.
“No need to panic like this,” she added, though she sounded less certain than she probably wanted to. “I’ll check.”
“And don’t tell her I called.”
“Why?”
The panic did not leave, but shame moved in beside it.
“It’s better if she doesn’t know.”
“Lando, what is happening?”
“Please, just go to her.”
Pietra sighed softly, confused and worried and clearly on the edge of asking questions he had no idea how to answer.
“All right,” she said. “I won’t say anything.”
“And call me immediately when you see her.”
“Yes.”
“Immediately.”
“I said yes.”
He swallowed.
“Thank you.”
Pietra hesitated.
When she spoke again, her voice was quieter.
“Are you okay?”
The question was the same one everyone kept asking him, but from her it carried something different now. Not only concern for him. Suspicion. As if she was beginning to feel the shape of something underneath all this and did not know yet whether to name it.
Lando looked down at his hand pressed to his chest.
“No,” he said.
Pietra was quiet.
Then she said, “I’ll call you.”
The line ended.
Lando lowered the phone slowly.
For a moment, he could only sit there, breathing hard, staring at the blank screen in his hand as if the call might still somehow produce Paula’s voice if he wanted it badly enough.
His mother was looking at him. Not with disappointment now, not even with fear, exactly.
With astonishment.
As if she were seeing a new person inside her son and had not yet decided whether to be relieved or terrified by the discovery.
Then, impossibly, she laughed a little. It was soft, breathless, almost disbelieving.
Lando turned his head toward her.
“What?”
She shook her head slowly.
“God,” she said. “You are intense.”
He frowned faintly, not because she was wrong, but because the word seemed absurdly insufficient for whatever was happening inside him. Intense sounded like passion. This felt closer to possession. Not in the sweet, romantic way people might have imagined the bond, but in the darker, more frightening sense of being claimed by a truth he had spent years refusing to name.
His mother looked at him with sad, gentle wonder.
“Maybe your uncle Robert wasn’t wrong,” she said.
Lando went still.
“Maybe meeting your soulmate truly does change you,” his mother finished.
Lando looked away.
Through the hospital window, Monaco was dark beyond the glass, full of strangers and lights and rooms where people slept unaware of the invisible things that might be passing through their bodies.
He thought of Paula in a hotel bed somewhere, maybe asleep, maybe awake, maybe angry, maybe hurting.
He thought of the terrifying possibility that his mother was right.
Meeting your soulmate changed you.
The phone lay heavy in his hand.
He stared at it, waiting for it to ring, every second stretching longer than it should have.
And for the first time since the bond had started tearing through him, Lando did not want relief for himself.
He only wanted Paula to be okay.
Even if she never forgave him, even if she never wanted to see him.
Even if the truth of what she was to him arrived too late to matter.
He just needed her to be breathing.
The monitor beside him slowly began to calm.
But the ache in his chest did not disappear, it waited with him.
His mother stayed with him for a while.
She sat in the chair beside his bed, one hand resting close to his on the blanket but not holding it anymore, perhaps because she had understood that he was not truly in the room with her. Not fully. His body was there, wired and bruised and exhausted beneath hospital sheets, but everything else in him had gone after Pietra. Down the corridors. Out into Monaco. To whatever hotel room Paula was in.
He imagined Pietra walking too slowly.
He imagined lifts taking too long, hotel receptionists asking questions, key cards not working, corridors stretching impossibly, every delay another heartbeat in which something could have happened to Paula without him knowing.
He imagined Paula not asleep.
He imagined her curled on the floor with one hand to her chest the way he had been, breath short, too proud or too scared or too used to carrying pain alone to call anyone.
That image was the one he could not survive.
His mother watched him quietly for some time before she finally stood. The movement drew his eyes to her.
“You’re leaving?” he asked.
The question came out younger than he meant it to.
His mother’s face softened at once.
“Only for the night,” she said. “Your father is waiting, and the doctors say you need rest. I’ll come back tomorrow morning.”
Lando nodded, though his fingers tightened around the phone.
His mother leaned over him and pressed a kiss to his forehead.
It was gentle. Familiar. Almost painfully ordinary after everything that had happened.
Then her hand moved into his hair, scrunching it softly the way she had done when he was a child and feverish, when he had fallen asleep on long drives home from karting, when the world had been smaller and kinder and his worst mistakes had not had witnesses or consequences large enough to ruin anyone.
“Try to sleep, okay, love?” she murmured.
He nodded again.
“I will.”
They both knew it was a lie.
His mother knew it especially.
She looked at him for a long moment, and in her gaze there was worry, exhaustion, and something like wonder still, as if she had not quite recovered from seeing the force of his panic for Paula. As if she, too, was beginning to accept the impossible not because it made sense, but because her son had been torn open by it in front of her.
“Call me if you need anything,” she said.
“I will.”
Another lie, probably, she let it pass.
At the door, she stopped and looked back once. “Lando?”
He lifted his eyes.
His mother’s voice was soft, but there was something steady underneath it.
“Whatever this is… don’t let fear make you cruel again.”
The words landed quietly.
He swallowed.
“I know.”
She nodded, not entirely reassured, but willing to leave him with that. Then she was gone, the door closing behind her with a soft click that seemed too final in the dim room.
The silence left behind was immediate.
Lando stared at the door for a few seconds before looking back down at his phone.
Nothing.
No call.
No message.
He exhaled and leaned his head back against the pillow, eyes closing for a moment. He was exhausted beyond anything normal. His body had been through a race, a fall, a collapse, a hospital admission, and a panic so complete it had seemed to hollow him out from the inside. Every part of him wanted sleep except the part that mattered.
That part stayed awake.
Waiting.
He tried to think rationally.
Pietra had said Paula left because she was overwhelmed. That made sense. Anyone would be overwhelmed after watching someone fall from a podium. Especially someone they knew. Especially someone they had spent the last two days fighting with. It did not have to mean anything had happened to her physically.
She was probably in her hotel room, probably annoyed that Pietra had woken her.
Probably.
The word was useless.
Probably was not enough.
Not for this.
He shifted, wincing as the bruise along his side protested. The fall had left him sore in places he had not fully registered before. His shoulder ached. His ribs felt tender. His head was heavy with the dull aftermath of too much adrenaline and too little sleep. But none of that mattered compared to the ache in his chest, the strange lingering awareness that seemed to wait beneath every breath.
It was not pain now.
It was absence. Paula’s absence.
The bond, did not feel beautiful in that moment. It did not feel like fate or home or whatever poetic nonsense people liked to attach to soulmates. It felt like being tethered to someone in the dark and not knowing whether the line between them led to safety or ruin.
He had spent years insisting he would not notice his soulmate.
He had been wrong.
The problem was that noticing had arrived 3 years too late.
Suddenly, his phone rang. Lando’s whole body jerked.
The monitor beside him jumped with his heart.
For half a second he stared at the screen without processing the name, panic making him stupid. Then he saw it.
Pietra.
He answered so quickly he almost dropped the phone.
“Is she okay?”
No hello, no greeting.
There was a faint rustle on the other end, maybe Pietra moving somewhere quieter. When she spoke, her voice was low, tired, and careful.
“She’s fine.”
The words passed through him with such force that for a second he could not answer.
The relief was not soft.
It hit him like something breaking open and flooding all at once, cold and hot and overwhelming enough that he had to press his free hand over his eyes. His breath left him in a shaky rush that sounded almost like a sob, though he tried to swallow it before it became one.
“She’s fine?” he asked, because once was not enough.
“Yes,” Pietra said. “She’s fine.”
He closed his eyes harder. The room blurred behind his lids.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Lando. I saw her.”
He let that sink in.
Paula had been in front of someone. Alive. Breathing. Awake, apparently, if Pietra had spoken to her. Not collapsed. Not alone on a hotel room floor. Not in pain because of him in some way he could not explain to anyone without sounding insane.
His hand dropped slowly from his face.
“What did she say?”
Pietra was quiet for a second.
When she answered, there was something in her voice that made him brace himself despite the relief still shaking through him.
“She seemed a little shaken,” she said. “But honestly, Lando, we all were. You fell from a podium. It was scary.”
He swallowed.
“I know.”
“She looked tired,” Pietra continued. “Not ill. Just… tired. Like she’d been crying maybe, or trying not to. I don’t know. She didn’t want to talk much.”
Lando’s chest tightened.
“But no pain?” he asked. “Nothing with her chest? Breathing? Anything like that?”
“No,” Pietra said. “Nothing like that. I asked if she felt okay. She said she was just exhausted.”
Lando nodded, forgetting Pietra could not see him.
“Okay.”
“She didn’t faint. She wasn’t hurt. She was standing when she opened the door. Annoyed, mostly.”
Despite everything, a broken laugh escaped him.
Annoyed.
That sounded like Paula.
The familiarity of it almost undid him. He could picture her at the hotel door, hair messy, eyes tired, face guarded, looking at Pietra like the interruption itself was suspicious. The image was so painfully alive that it eased something in him and hurt something else at the same time.
“She asked about you, actually,” Pietra said.
Lando went still. The room seemed to quiet around him.
“What?”
“She asked if you were okay.”
His fingers tightened around the phone.
Pietra’s voice softened slightly, though not without confusion. “Which surprised me, to be honest. Because normally she never asks about you.”
Lando looked down at the hospital sheet. The fabric blurred.
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her you were okay,” Pietra said. “That you were awake. That the doctors didn’t find anything too serious.”
A pause.
“She seemed relieved.”
Lando closed his eyes.
Relieved.
The word moved through him with devastating gentleness.
He did not deserve her relief.
That was his first thought.
Not after the garage. Not after the failed apology. Not after years of cruelty, old and new, remembered and forgotten. She should have been angry. She should have been indifferent. She should have heard he was medically fine and said nothing, or nodded, or turned away with the cold satisfaction of someone who had finally seen him brought low.
But she had asked, she had been relieved.
And somehow that hurt worse than anger would have.
“She shouldn’t care,” he whispered.
Pietra was silent for long enough that he realised he had said it out loud.
Then she sighed.
“I don’t think people choose that sort of thing.”
Lando opened his eyes.
His chest ached again, but differently now.
“No,” he said quietly. “I guess not.”
Pietra did not respond immediately. When she did, her voice had changed. Less confused now. More cautious. Like she was standing near the edge of something and trying to decide whether to look down.
“Lando,” she said, “why did you think something was wrong with her?”
He did not answer. The silence stretched.
“Lando.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
It was a lie, a poor one.
Pietra seemed to hear it.
“You called me from a hospital bed in the middle of the night and told me to check if Paula had chest pain,” she said slowly. “That is not nothing.”
“I was worried.”
“You’re never worried about Paula.”
The sentence landed without cruelty, which made it worse.
He looked toward the window. It reflected back a pale version of him, hollow-eyed and wired to machines, holding the phone as if it were the only thing keeping him in the room.
“I know,” he said.
Pietra breathed out softly on the other end.
“Something happened,” she said.
It was not quite a question.
Lando swallowed.
“I can’t talk about it now.”
“Okay.”
Her acceptance came too quickly, and he was grateful for it in a way he could not explain.
“But you’re sure she’s okay?” he asked again.
“Yes.”
“And she didn’t suspect I called?”
Another pause.
“No. I didn’t tell her.”
“Thank you.”
“She did ask why I came.”
“What did you say?”
“I told her I was worried after everything. Which is true.”
Lando closed his eyes again.
“She’s fine,” she repeated, perhaps because she knew that was the only thing he could hear tonight. “Try to sleep.”
He let out a breath.
“Yeah.”
“Goodnight, Lando.”
“Goodnight.”
The call ended.
The silence returned, but it was different now. Not peaceful, never that.
But less sharp around the edges. Less like a room waiting for bad news. The phone screen dimmed in his hand until it went black, and for a while he simply stared at it, letting the words replay.
Each one was a mercy he had no right to.
He placed the phone carefully on the bedside table, though part of him wanted to keep holding it, as if contact with the device maintained some thin connection to the person he had been so afraid for. The monitor beside him had slowed again, settling back into something steady. His body, treacherous and exhausted, began to understand what his mind still resisted.
Paula was okay.
The relief of that made him feel briefly better.
He sank back against the pillow, turning his face toward the ceiling.
He wondered what she would think if she knew.
Probably nothing kind.
Maybe she would think he was dramatic. Maybe she would think guilt had finally found a theatrical way to announce itself. Maybe she would look at him the way she had in the service corridor and tell him this was not about him, not everything was about him, not even the pain he felt over the pain he caused.
She would be right.
She so often was, in ways he had spent years refusing to admit.
Lando turned onto his side slowly, careful of the bruises, and pressed one hand to his chest.
The ache was still there.
Quieter now, but not gone.
He did not think it would go away easily. Maybe it wasn’t meant to. Maybe this was what happened when a bond woke late and found nothing clean to hold onto. Maybe other people felt warmth, recognition, peace. Maybe Charles had looked at Alexandra and known himself loved.
Lando had looked at Paula and felt the full architecture of his own cruelty collapse inside him.
That seemed fair, darkly, terribly fair.
He closed his eyes.
For the first time in two nights, sleep approached him not as escape but as surrender. He still resisted it for a few minutes, afraid that if he drifted away, something would happen and he would not know. But Pietra had seen her. Paula was fine. She had asked about him. She had been relieved.
He held onto that.
Only as proof that somewhere in Monaco, Paula was still alive enough to hate him tomorrow.
And somehow, tonight, that was enough.
Just before sleep finally pulled him under, one thought moved through him, soft and devastating.
He needed her number.
Not because he had any right to call.
But because never again did he want to be in a world where she could be hurting and he had to ask someone else to find out.
Summary : In a world where soulmates exist, Lando Norris has never believed in fate, bonds, or the idea that one person could be made for another. He always said that if he ever met his soulmate, he probably wouldn’t care.
But what if he had already met her years ago?
Genre : soulmates AU, angst
Pairing : Lando Norris x oc (female)
Words count : 7,9k
Main Masterlist
Series Masterlist
Race day arrived without mercy.
The sun came up over Monaco as if nothing had happened.
It slipped gold across the harbour, turned the water bright and careless, climbed over balconies and hotel windows and polished the city until it looked unreal again.
Lando watched the morning unfold from the passenger seat of the car and felt nothing but exhaustion.
He had not slept.
Not really.
There had been moments where his eyes had closed, where his body had gone still enough that anyone watching might have mistaken it for rest, but his mind had remained awake beneath the surface, turning the same things over and over until thought itself became a kind of punishment. Max’s voice. The story of that first night.
No one wants you here.
You’re a burden for everyone.
Even now, sitting in the car on the way to the track, the words made his chest tighten.
Not sharply like the night before. Not with that terrifying, crushing pain that had dropped him to his knees and made him call emergency services with barely enough air in his lungs to speak. This was duller. Lower. A bruise under the bone. A warning, maybe. Or a memory the body had decided to keep because the mind had proven too willing to bury things.
Max kept looking at him.
It was subtle at first, little more than a glance whenever the car slowed or whenever Lando shifted strangely in his seat. Then it became less subtle. His eyes moved toward him at every red light, lingering on the way Lando kept pressing the heel of his palm against the centre of his chest as though he could disguise the gesture as discomfort from the seat belt. By the time they reached the first security checkpoint, Lando’s patience, already frayed into something thin and dangerous, snapped beneath the weight of another concerned glance.
“Stop,” he said.
Max blinked, looking back toward the road. “Stop what?”
“Looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m going to die. I told you I was fine.”
Max’s jaw tightened. For once, he did not laugh or attempt to turn it into something lighter.
“That’s not funny.”
Lando turned his face toward the window. “I wasn’t trying to be.”
The silence that followed was immediate and unpleasant, filling the car with everything neither of them seemed capable of saying properly. Max drove for another few seconds, his hands fixed too firmly around the steering wheel, before he spoke again.
“Are you okay?”
Lando closed his eyes.
“Max.”
“I’m asking.”
“You’ve asked every five minutes since we left the apartment.”
“Because last night you called an ambulance because you couldn’t breathe.”
Lando’s throat worked.
The words sounded worse in daylight. More real. Less like some dark, surreal episode that had happened to another version of him in the middle of the night. In daylight, there was nowhere for it to hide. No shadows to soften the memory of the floor against his knees, of his fingers trembling so violently that he had nearly dropped his phone, of Paula’s face appearing in his mind every time the pain tightened around his heart.
“I’m fine,” he said.
Max huffed out a breath. “You’re not fine.”
“I’m fine enough.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means I have other priorities. I have a race today.”
Max’s hands tightened on the wheel.
Lando noticed the movement but said nothing. Outside, Monaco passed around them in race-day fragments: temporary barriers, marshals in bright uniforms, police officers directing traffic, team members moving quickly through narrow streets, tourists already pressed against fences with phones lifted. Everything looked too bright to belong to a morning after that kind of night.
Eventually, Lando said, “You didn’t tell anyone, right?”
Max glanced at him. “No.”
“Not my parents?”
“No.”
“Max?”
“I said no,” Max repeated, irritation slipping into his voice. “I didn’t tell them.”
Lando nodded once, although the relief came twisted together with guilt. His mother would worry. His father would try not to show that he was worrying, which would somehow make it worse. The last thing either of them needed was to sit through the race wondering whether their son’s heart was going to revolt inside his chest because he had apparently developed a conscience several years too late.
“Good,” Lando murmured.
Max looked at him again. “I don’t like this.”
“You don’t have to like it.”
“That’s not the point.”
“It’s better if no one knows. They’ll be worried for nothing.”
“For nothing?” Max repeated. “It wasn’t nothing, Lando.”
Lando turned toward him. “What do you want me to do? Withdraw from the race because I had a panic attack?”
“I want you to stop treating it as though it never happened. I want you to talk to me.”
“You were there when they checked me. You already know they said I was stable.”
“I know what they said.”
“Then stop worrying.”
“No.”
The answer was so immediate that Lando stared at him.
Max did not look away from the road. His expression had settled into something firm, the familiar softness of his face replaced by a seriousness Lando rarely saw directed at him.
“No?” Lando echoed.
“No, I’m not going to stop worrying just because it’s inconvenient for you.” Max paused as they were waved through the checkpoint, offering the security guard a brief nod before continuing. “I know you, Lan. I’ve seen you under pressure. I’ve seen you before races when everything was going wrong, after mistakes, after awful qualifying sessions, after reading things online that you pretended didn’t bother you. I’ve watched you carry pressure until you were barely speaking to anyone, but I have never seen you like that.”
Lando looked away again. “There’s a first time for everything.”
“That isn’t an explanation.”
“It was a panic attack. Sometimes they happen.”
“Yes, sometimes they happen,” Max said. “But they usually happen for a reason.”
“Not always.”
“Fine. Then tell me what you were thinking about when it started.”
Lando’s fingers curled against his thigh.
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
“I was tired. I hadn’t eaten properly. It was a stressful weekend.”
“And?”
“And nothing.”
Max gave a disbelieving laugh, but there was no humour in it. “You expect me to believe you were sitting quietly in your apartment, thinking about absolutely nothing, and suddenly decided you couldn’t breathe?”
“I didn’t decide anything.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t. You’re acting as though I planned it.”
“I’m acting like there was something happening in your head before it happened, and you’re refusing to tell me what it was.”
“Because there wasn’t anything.”
“Were you thinking about the race?”
Lando did not answer quickly enough, Max noticed.
“Were you thinking about qualifying?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your parents?”
“No.”
“Something the team said?”
“No.”
“Paula?”
Lando’s head turned sharply.
Max’s eyes remained on the road, but something shifted in his expression, a small tension appearing around his mouth as though the reaction had confirmed far more than an answer would have.
“There it is,” he said quietly.
“There’s nothing.”
“You looked at me as though I’d accused you of murder.”
“Because you’re making this about her again.”
“I’m asking a question.”
“You’ve asked it. The answer is no.”
Max nodded slowly, although it was obvious he did not believe him. “Then why did you ask the doctor whether someone could physically being hurt because they had hurt another person?”
Lando went still.
The city continued to move outside the car, but for a moment he heard none of it. The noise of the traffic seemed to recede behind the sudden rushing of blood in his ears.
“I didn’t ask that.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I asked whether guilt could cause physical symptoms. That’s different.”
“Not by much.”
“It’s a perfectly normal question after a panic attack.”
“It isn't actually.”
Lando’s jaw tightened. “I was tired. I probably wasn’t wording things properly.”
“You worded it very clearly.”
“Can we change the subject?”
“No, because I let it go last night. You could barely breathe and you were exhausted, so I didn’t push you. But I’m not letting it go now.” His voice softened slightly, although the determination beneath it remained. “Was it about Paula?”
Lando stared out of the window.
“Did you have that episode because you realised how badly you’d hurt her?”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”
“That isn’t a no.”
“It’s me telling you to stop.”
“And I’m not going to, because something happened to you last night and you clearly don’t understand it either.”
Lando swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry.
He hated that Max could see that much. He hated that even his silence seemed to become evidence in Max’s hands. He had spent years becoming good at evasion, at giving people just enough truth to satisfy them without ever surrendering anything that mattered. Max had known him for too long for those tricks to work properly. He knew where Lando kept the unfinished sentences. He knew which jokes were distractions, which shrugs were lies and which silences meant that Lando was afraid of the answer.
“It was just guilt,” Lando said at last. “You told me what happened at that party. I realised I’d been worse to her than I remembered. It upset me. That’s all.”
Max was quiet for a moment.
“Guilt doesn’t normally make people collapse on the floor...and you don’t find the timing strange?”
“No.”
“Not even a little?”
Lando’s voice hardened. “What exactly are you trying to say?”
Max hesitated, choosing his words with a care that immediately made Lando suspicious.
“I’m saying that what the doctor explained was strange.”
“What part?”
“The story about the man.”
Lando’s chest tightened before Max had even finished speaking.
“The one who started having heart problems after his soulmate died,” Max continued. “They couldn’t find anything physically wrong with him at first, but the symptoms kept getting worse. Then he died not long after her.”
“The doctor said the circumstances were disputed.”
“He said they couldn’t medically prove that the bond caused it.”
“Exactly.”
“But he also said cases like that exist.”
“Stories exist,” Lando corrected sharply. “People say all kinds of things when they’re grieving. It doesn’t make them true.”
Max glanced at him. “Do you believe in this stuff?”
Lando frowned. “What?”
“Soulmates.”
“You’re asking me?”
“Yes.”
“You already know the answer.”
“I thought I did. But you were the one asking the doctor questions about soulmate bonds at three in the morning, so apparently I don’t.”
Lando turned toward him fully. “It's different...and you, you believed in it?”
Max let out a small, incredulous laugh. “Do I believe soulmates exist?”
“Yes.”
“Of course I do.”
Lando stared at him.
Max shrugged one shoulder. “I mean, why wouldn’t I?”
“Because there’s no reason to.”
“Isn’t your uncle married to his soulmate?”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“Because he says she’s his soulmate, that doesn’t prove anything.”
“What would prove it to you?”
“I don’t know. Something real.”
Max’s eyebrows lifted. “Real?”
“Something measurable. Something that can’t be explained by people simply falling in love and deciding it must be fate because that sounds more romantic.” Lando could hear the bitterness entering his voice but could not seem to stop it. “There’s no scientific explanation for it. No consistent physical evidence. No test. No proof. Just people telling you they felt something and expecting everyone else to believe them.”
Pain rose beneath his sternum.
It began as pressure, low and dense, before sharpening quickly enough to interrupt his breath. Lando shifted in his seat and pressed his hand against his chest before he could stop himself.
Max noticed immediately.
“Is it hurting again?”
“No.”
“You’re holding your chest.”
“It’s the seat belt.”
Max looked at him for one second longer before facing forward again. “It started when you said it wasn’t real.”
“That’s a coincidence.”
Max did not argue, and somehow the lack of argument made Lando more defensive.
“It’s ridiculous,” he continued, as though he could talk his way out of the pain. “People build their entire lives around this idea that there is one person chosen for them, and they’re supposed to recognise them through some magical feeling no one can explain. What happens if they’re wrong? What happens if one person feels it and the other doesn’t? What happens if you don’t want the person you’re apparently meant to want?”
The final question escaped before he could catch it.
Max’s gaze moved toward him slowly as Lando turned back to the window.
There was a pause.
Then Max asked, “Do you believe in love?”
Lando frowned. “What kind of question is that?”
“A relevant one.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Max smiled slightly. “You don’t believe in love?”
“That isn’t what I said.”
“Good, because that would be a bit insulting considering how much I love Pietra, my parents and your stupid face.”
Despite himself, Lando looked at him. “It’s understandable that you love your parents.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re your parents.”
“That’s not an explanation.”
“It literally is.”
“No, it’s a fact,” Max corrected. “They’re my parents. But why does that automatically mean I love them?”
“Because they raised you. They looked after you.”
“Some people barely know their parents and spend their whole lives wanting their approval. Some people are adopted and love the people who raised them more than the people they share blood with. So what’s the scientific rule?”
Lando rolled his eyes. “There isn’t one.”
“Exactly.”
“That doesn’t prove soulmates exist.”
“I didn’t say it did. I’m saying love exists even though we can’t fully explain why it attaches itself to certain people and not others.” Max glanced at him briefly. “I know I love Pietra. I can tell you things I love about her, obviously, but that still doesn’t explain why it’s her. There are millions of clever, funny, beautiful women in the world. Why did my life change because of that one? Why does being away from her feel different from being away from everyone else? Why would I choose her even on days when she annoys me so much that I want to walk into the sea?”
“That sounds healthy.”
“She’d say the same about me,” Max replied easily. “My point is that love isn’t logical. You can explain the chemicals involved, the attachment, whatever happens inside the brain, but that still doesn’t explain the person. It doesn’t explain why your body can react to one person as though it already knows something your mind hasn’t caught up with.”
Lando’s eyes returned to the window.
He did not want to hear that. He especially did not want to hear it said in that particular way.
Max continued, quieter now. “There are different kinds of love, aren’t there? The love you have for your parents. For your friends. For a child who has only existed for a few minutes and hasn’t done anything to earn it. Soulmates love is no different. None of those feelings are exactly the same, but we don’t decide one of them is imaginary just because it works differently from the others.”
“Soulmates are different.”
“Why?”
“Because people act like it’s inevitable.”
“Maybe it is for them.”
“That’s exactly the problem.”
Max frowned. “Why is inevitability a problem?”
Lando looked at him but found he could not answer honestly.
Because it was frightening.
Because the idea that something inside him could choose another person before he had agreed to it felt less like romance and more like losing ownership of himself. Because, if the pain in his chest meant anything, if Paula’s face appearing in his mind had not been a coincidence, then something impossible might already be happening to him. And he had no proof that it was real. No mark appearing on his skin. No undeniable sign that Paula felt the same thing. Nothing except pain, guilt and a strange pull toward a woman he had spent years insisting he disliked.
“It bothers me because there’s no choice,” he said eventually, the words flatter than the fear beneath them. “You’re told this person is meant for you, so that’s it. Your entire life is decided.”
Max considered that. “I don’t think being soulmates means you stop having choices.”
“It means you can’t love anyone else.”
“From what people describe, they don’t want anyone else.”
“That’s worse.”
“Why?”
“Because how do you know the feeling is yours?”
Max’s expression changed.
Lando realised too late that he had said too much.
He looked away again, but Max had already caught it.
“Is that what you’re afraid of?” Max asked. “That you might feel something and not know whether it’s real?”
“I’m not afraid of anything.”
“I’m trying to understand why someone who has spent his entire life saying soulmates are nonsense suddenly looks terrified whenever we talk about them.”
“I don’t look terrified.”
“You do a little.”
Lando glared at him.
Max sighed. “Look, I understand why the idea bothers you. You like control. You like having a reason for everything. You don’t even order food without reading the entire menu three times, so yes, the idea that your body might recognise someone before your brain gives permission probably sounds horrifying to you.”
“That isn’t funny.”
“I wasn’t trying to be funny.”
“You were.”
“Only a little.” Max’s expression softened. “But I don’t think a soulmate bond creates feelings that aren’t yours. I think it’s more like…recognition.”
The word seemed to settle inside the car. Lando’s fingers tightened against his leg.
“Recognition of what?” he asked, despite himself.
“The person, I suppose.”
“That means nothing.”
“It means people who have experienced it say they just know.” Max shrugged. “Not because there’s a mark or a name written somewhere. They meet someone and something inside them recognises that person as important. As theirs, in a way. Not ownership,” he added quickly when Lando’s expression tightened. “Just belonging. Like arriving somewhere you’ve never been and somehow knowing you’re home.”
Lando stared at him.
Max smiled faintly. “A physical mark would make it too easy, don’t you think?”
“It would make it believable.”
“Maybe the point is that you have to trust what you feel.”
“That’s convenient.”
“Well it make it more real don't you think,” Max said. “Choosing and loving someone as your soulmates even though there is no physical proof she is?”
Lando turned his face away before Max could read anything else in it.
The pain in his chest had faded again, leaving behind only a dull pulse and the memory of pressure. He took a careful breath, testing it. Air entered his lungs without resistance, but he could not shake the feeling that his body was waiting for him to say the wrong thing again.
Neither of them spoke for the rest of the journey.
When they arrived, the paddock was already alive, too full of voices and movement and the relentless machinery of spectacle. Race day had a different pulse to it, especially in Monaco.
All morning, he did not see Paula.
At first, he told himself it was good.
It was good that she was not there when he passed through hospitality with Max at his shoulder and his sunglasses hiding the worst of the night from people who would not know what to do with it anyway. It was good that he did not see her near the coffee station, or tucked beside Pietra, or standing awkwardly by the screens with headphones on and a guarded look on her face. It was good that he could walk through the McLaren space without feeling his body tighten around a name he did not want to think.
It was good.
He repeated that to himself enough times that it started to sound like a threat.
It was good when she was not in the guest area.
It was good when she was not outside in the paddock.
It was good when he went to the garage for the first pre-race checks and saw his parents, saw Max, saw Pietra briefly on her phone near the side, but not Paula.
Good.
Except every time he entered a room, his eyes searched for her before he could stop them.
It started small enough to deny it.
A glance toward the far corner of hospitality. A pause at the entrance, as if he had forgotten something. A sharp turn of his head when someone with long hair moved through the crowd. Each time he caught himself, irritation followed instantly. Not with her this time. With himself. With the sheer absurdity of it.
He did not want to see Paula.
There was no rational reason to want it.
They had fought yesterday. Not even fought, he had gone to apologise and turned it into another wound, another disaster, another moment where she had looked at him like he was the worst people on earth. She had every reason to stay away from him. He had every reason to be grateful for that.
And yet.
His heart lifted and dropped every time he thought he saw her.
There was a physical reaction. Immediate. Unwanted. His pulse jumping like a startled animal whenever a flash of blue caught his eye, whenever laughter from somewhere in the crowd tilted close enough to resemble hers, whenever he saw Pietra and, for one insane second, expected Paula to appear beside her.
The absence became a presence. That was the only way he could understand it.
She was not there, and somehow that not-being-there filled every room more completely than she ever had.
By late morning, the feeling had changed from unease into something closer to ache. A quiet pull beneath his ribs. Not pain exactly, but a pressure moving in the direction of someone who was missing. It reminded him of standing too close to the edge of a cliff and feeling, horribly, the body’s impossible awareness of falling.
He found himself looking toward the hospitality entrance while one of the engineers spoke to him.
He missed half a sentence.
“Lando?”
He blinked and turned back. “Yeah. Sorry. Say that again.”
The engineer repeated the question. Something about tyre prep and the expected opening laps if he remained behind the top two. Lando answered. He answered well enough. He had done this too long to fail at sounding present. But as he spoke, another guest moved behind the glass, and his chest tightened before his brain caught up.
Not her.
The disappointment was so sharp it made him furious.
What the hell was happening to him?
Max noticed as they were standing near the back of the garage and he leaned closer to him and muttered, “You’re doing it again.”
Lando didn’t look at him. “Doing what?”
“Looking around as if you're searching for someone.”
“I’m not looking.”
“You are.”
“I’m checking the garage.”
“For what?”
“Is Paula here?” Lando asked before he could stop himself.
The question came out low. Almost harsh.
Max’s expression changed.
There it was. The moment the concern shifted into something else.
“I don’t know,” Max said.
Lando looked away.
“Why you ask about her?” Max asked.
“No reason.”
“Lando.”
“No reason,” he repeated, sharper.
Max was quiet for a second, then said carefully, “Pietra hasn’t said anything.”
That was not an answer. Lando’s stomach turned.
“She probably doesn’t want to be here,” Max added. “After yesterday.”
Lando laughed once, barely a sound.
“Yeah. Shocking.”
Max looked at him. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Pretend you don’t care, I know you do, maybe more than you actually realised.”
Lando’s jaw tightened.
“I have a race in a few hours, then maybe let’s not do this.”
Max nodded once, though nothing in his face suggested agreement.
“Fine.”
It wasn’t fine. Nothing was fine.
The hours narrowed toward the race with brutal inevitability.
Lando went through the motions because motion was the only thing that had ever saved him. Driver briefing. Final strategy notes. Food he barely tasted. More water than he wanted because everyone was watching him like he might break. A moment with his parents where his mother squeezed his hand too long and looked at him with a softness that made guilt rise in his throat again.
When he went to get ready, the garage felt larger than usual and impossibly close all at once. His race suit was clean and heavy. His fireproofs clung to skin that still felt wrong from lack of sleep. His hands moved through each part of the ritual with rehearsed efficiency, but the mind beneath them remained fractured.
He thought of Paula. He thought of not thinking of Paula.
He thought of her not being there.
He thought of the doctor in his bedroom saying a man had felt grief so strongly it had damaged his heart.
He thought of the first night, Paula holding out water.
He thought of yesterday, Paula holding back tears.
He thought of the insane possibility that her pain had somehow crossed the distance into him only once he had finally let himself understand that it had always been real.
Then he thought of the race because he had to.
He climbed into the car with the question still sitting in the center of him like a foreign object.
Why would he want to see her?
It made no sense.
Rationally, none of it made sense. He knew her. He knew what they were. Years of bad history, sharp exchanges, public tension so familiar their friends treated it like weather. Their conversations ended badly because they always had. He had no reason to seek her out, no reason to feel as though something in him was leaning toward her across the paddock with a need too deep to be pride and too sharp to be curiosity.
But as the mechanics strapped him in, as the belts tightened and the cockpit settled around him, the ache intensified.
Not enough to stop him. Enough to follow him.
The world closed into the familiar shape of race day: helmet, visor, steering wheel, gloves, radio, engine noise vibrating up through the bones. Usually, that was where everything else fell away. The car was a hard border. A place where the self became functional. Once he was strapped in, there was no space for anything but inputs and consequences.
This time, the border did not hold.
As he rolled toward the grid, the thought of Paula came with him.
His engineer spoke in his ear, calm and precise. Lando answered. The words came out normal enough but the thought of her came back anyway.
Paula.
The formation lap began. Tyre temperatures. Brake temps. The crowd a blur of colour and motion on either side. Monaco roaring around him, old stone and modern steel and impossible pressure pressed into one glittering, merciless circuit.
Paula.
He breathed through it.
It was only a thought.
Thoughts could be ignored. He had ignored worse. Fear before a start. Anger after strategy calls. Panic after crashes. The mind could produce anything; the body did not have to obey.
Except this did not feel produced by his mind.
It felt like something underneath it.
A spell was the wrong word because spells belonged to stories and Lando did not believe in stories, or had not, or had spent years laughing at them loudly enough to drown out the possibility that one might be waiting for him.
But it felt like a spell anyway. Like an ache in his heart had learned her name.
The race began eventually. For the first few corners, instinct won.
It had to.
The start demanded him entirely. The clutch release, the launch, the short violent sprint, the narrowing of space as cars lunged and defended and the whole field tried to survive the first corner. Lando held his position.
After that, the race settled into its cruel little pattern.
Follow. Manage. Wait.
The walls flashed close. The car moved beneath him, familiar and precise. He drove as he had learned to drive through anything: with a part of himself so deeply trained it could function even when the rest of him was coming apart.
But the thought of Paula did not leave.
Every lap, it returned.
Sometimes as an image: her blue eyes in the service corridor, her face closed off against him. Sometimes as a fragment of memory: the bottle of water, the club lights, her hand rising to her face as she left the garage. Sometimes only as a name, striking the inside of his skull with unbearable regularity.
Paula.
Paula.
Paula.
It grew louder.
Not in sound. In presence.
The need to see her became more absurd with every lap, and more urgent. It moved from thought into body until he could feel it everywhere, in the hand too tight around the steering wheel, in the breath he kept having to control, in the ache expanding under his sternum like something opening where nothing should open during a race.
He tried to crush it under focus.
For a few seconds at a time, the track reclaimed him, then the ache returned.
By lap twenty, he was angry at himself. By lap thirty, he was frightened.
By lap forty, the feeling had become so constant he stopped being able to tell where it ended and he began.
His engineer told him Oscar had a problem. At first the information did not land.
“Repeat?” Lando asked.
“Oscar has a mechanical issue. He’s slowing. He may have to stop.”
Lando’s eyes flicked to the dash, then back ahead. The race rearranged itself in his mind with the automatic speed of a driver trained to calculate opportunity before emotion. If Oscar stopped, Lando would inherit P3. A podium in Monaco, from a qualifying that had felt like punishment, from a weekend that had started cracking apart in front of him.
Normally, something would have surged.
Adrenaline. Opportunity. The sharp predatory focus of a result suddenly available where none had seemed possible. He would have pushed into the space left behind, sensed blood in the water, thought about P2, thought about pressure, thought about every little opening the race might still offer.
But the joy did not come, not properly.
Instead, something sharp went through his chest.
Lando’s breath caught so violently that for half a second he lost the rhythm of the car.
It was not as brutal as the pain from last night, but it was enough. A sudden, precise stab beneath his sternum, deep enough that his left hand tightened on the steering wheel and his vision seemed to narrow for one terrifying heartbeat.
The wall at the exit of the corner came too close.
He corrected by instinct.
The car twitched beneath him, alive and unforgiving, and fear shot through him so cold and clear it cut through everything else.
He was going to crash.
The thought arrived complete, without drama, without exaggeration.
He was going to put the car in the wall because something inside his body had started failing in the middle of the Monaco Grand Prix, and there would be no space to explain, no time to understand, no mercy from concrete barriers only centimeters away.
His thumb found the radio button before pride could stop him.
“Something’s wrong.”
His voice sounded distant even to himself. Thin. Strained. Out of breath in a way no driver ever wanted to sound on an open channel.
There was a beat of silence.
“With the car?” his engineer asked, immediately alert.
Lando swallowed hard, dragging air into lungs that seemed to resist him.
The car. If only.
If it had been the car, they could have seen it. Data would have shown it. Temperature, pressure, electrical fault, braking issue, something clean and technical and external. Something they could name, manage, tell him how to survive.
But this was not the car. This was him.
This was Paula’s name striking through his mind again and again until it stopped feeling like a thought and became a call.
Paula.
Paula.
Paula.
His engineer’s voice returned, calmer now but sharper around the edges. “Nothing from our side. Data looks okay. You are okay, Lando. Just keep pushing. Stay focused.”
Stay focused. The words were almost obscene.
Lando tried, he truly did.
He fixed his gaze on the strip of track ahead, on the precise line between barrier and kerb, on braking points he knew as intimately as the shape of his own hands. He tried to make the world small again. He tried to reduce himself to input and reaction, to steering angle and brake pressure, to the cold discipline that had carried him through fear before.
But the call inside him only grew louder.
He needed to see her.
The need did not make sense inside a race car, it did not belong there.
It had no place among speed and carbon fibre and radio messages and the violence of Monaco’s walls. Yet it filled the cockpit more completely than the heat, more completely than the engine vibration, more completely than the sound of his own breathing trapped beneath the helmet.
He needed to see her now.
This minute.
Not later, not after the chequered flag, not when the race had finished and the podium had been done and the world had allowed him to become a person again. Now.
The realization terrified him so badly his fingers almost slipped on the wheel.
He was afraid of what would happen if he found her eyes again. Afraid of the pain. Afraid of the recognition. Afraid that whatever had begun tearing through him would finally become undeniable. Afraid that if he looked at her, the fragile remaining structure of his disbelief would collapse entirely and leave him with nothing to hide behind.
He could not survive not seeing her but he was not sure he could survive seeing her either.
“I can’t,” he said.
The words came out before he could stop them.
His engineer’s voice sharpened. “How so? What is happening?”
Lando’s pulse hammered.
For one deranged second, he almost told him. Almost said her name over the radio.
Almost confessed, at two hundred kilometres an hour and surrounded by broadcast channels, pit walls, engineers, FIA recordings, and the whole merciless machinery of Formula One, that he could hear Paula's name in his head like a distress signal and his heart hurt when he could not find her.
He imagined it leaving his mouth.
Paula. I need Paula.
The horror of that was enough to snap his jaw shut.
No, not here.
Not when the radio could be heard by anyone. Not when his team was listening. Not when something strange, vulnerable, half-mad and impossible could be clipped, repeated, misunderstood, exposed.
He forced air through his teeth.
“No,” he said finally. “Nothing.”
“Lando?”
“Nothing,” he repeated, harsher this time, because if he did not sound angry he would sound afraid. “I’m fine.”
The lie sat in the cockpit with him.
His engineer was silent for a moment, probably reading more in his breathing than Lando wanted him to.
Then came the careful reply.
“Understood. Stay with us. Keep it clean.”
God, he was trying.
He kept the car out of the wall by instinct and terror alone, his hands remembering what his mind could barely hold. The lap continued. The race continued. Monaco continued, indifferent and narrow and bright around him.
But beneath the helmet, beneath the visor, beneath all the things that made him a driver and not a man falling apart at speed, there was only Paula.
He hated himself for it.
Hated that the part of him built for racing, the part that should have been alive with calculation and want, was being drowned beneath the repetitive, impossible pull of a woman who had every right not to look at him again.
The last laps blurred into endurance.
He made no mistakes because some deep, cold part of him refused to let the race become another thing ruined by whatever was happening in his chest. He drove cleanly. Professionally. He held P3. He brought the car home.
But by the time he crossed the finish line, the world felt far away.
“Well done, Lando. P3. Podium in Monaco.”
Voices followed. Congratulations, relief, careful excitement. A result salvaged from a difficult weekend. Something to celebrate.
Lando’s own reply sounded distant in his ears.
“Yeah. Thanks. Good job, everyone.”
He knew he should say more but he couldn’t.
Everything after the chequered flag became fragmented, overexposed, too bright at the edges.
The in-lap. Waving without feeling his hand move. The harbour on one side, barriers on the other, crowds standing and shouting and flashing like fever. The steering wheel coming off. His body moving with practised compliance, helmet under one arm, head nodding, brief touches on shoulders, forced smiles, the choreography of a podium finish.
He saw orange shirts, faces he loved, people who had worked all weekend for this and deserved his happiness as much as his thanks. He tried to give it to them. He let himself be embraced. He said things, good work, tough race, thank you, but they came out of some automatic part of him while the rest remained turned toward an absence he could not explain.
The cool room was even worse
Someone was speaking about tyre management. Someone else laughing softly. A replay on the screen showing Oscar’s car slowing, the inherited position, his own McLaren crossing the line. Lando watched himself in the race replay and felt no recognition.
He was there and not there.
By the time he walked toward the podium, the ache had sharpened again.
The crowd opened below in layers of noise and colour. The podium rose above them, formal and unreal, one of those moments every driver imagined as a child without ever imagining how strange it would feel to stand there while something inside him was quietly going wrong.
Lando stepped onto the third step.
He should have felt disappointment and pride tangled together. Should have felt the complicated satisfaction of salvaging something from a weekend gone wrong. Should have looked down at his team and remembered all the years it had taken to stand here as a world champion still hungry for more.
Instead, he felt her absence so violently it had become almost identical to pain.
The ceremony began.
He stood where he was supposed to stand. He clapped when he was supposed to clap.
He accepted the trophy when someone handed it to him, the weight of it settling into his hands with a dull, metallic reality that briefly anchored him.
Then, for some reason he still ignore, he looked at the crowd and then and saw her.
The world stopped. It was brutal.
She was not in the front row. Not placed where anyone would have thought to look first. She stood behind a cluster of people, half-hidden by shoulders and raised phones and team members leaning over barriers. There were hundreds of faces below him, maybe more, all blurred by distance and movement and the haze of heat and champagne and sound.
But his eyes found hers immediately.
As if there had never been anyone else in the crowd at all.
The same blue from the door. From the corridor. From the garage. From the service hall. From the fragment of a club years ago that had been rotting under his memory until Max dragged it into the light.
Her expression changed the moment their eyes met.
He saw it happen from the podium: surprise first, then something like fear, then the sharp bright shock of recognition.
Recognition.
The word tore through him.
Suddenly, the pain came back.
Sudden. Violent. Centered exactly where it had been in the night. A fist closing around his heart.
The trophy nearly slipped from his fingers. His hand flew to his chest before he could stop it, pressing hard against the place where the ache split open into something unbearable.
He heard someone say his name. Maybe Charles, maybe someone beside him, maybe no one at all.
It did not matter.
He could not look away from Paula.
For one terrible, clear second, it was like seeing her for the first time.
Not because he had not looked at her before. He had looked at her for years. Looked at her across tables, in clubs, in corridors, in garages, always through the distortion of resentment and old cruelty and the stories he had told himself to make his anger feel clean.
Now all of that fell away.
And what remained was devastating.
Not annoying Paula. Not impossible Paula. Not the girl who ruined rooms by being in them. Not the enemy he had invented because hating her was easier than whatever this was.
Paula.
The girl who had once watched him on TV and been nervous to meet him.
The girl who had brought him water.
The girl he had humiliated.
The girl he had kept hurting, again and again, because some cowardly part of him had mistaken her pain for hostility and punished her for refusing to let it disappear.
The ache in his chest grew sharper. It felt like apology trying to claw its way out through bone.
He wanted to go to her, the want was not thought. It was a command.
He wanted to climb down from the podium, cross the distance, fall to his knees in front of her if that was what it took. He wanted to tell her he was sorry. He wanted to say it until the words broke, until she believed him or didn’t, until there was nothing left in him but the truth.
He wanted to hold her.
That thought frightened him more than the pain.
Because it arrived with the same terrible certainty as the rest. Not desire in the simple sense. Not attraction. Not even comfort. It was a need so deep and old it felt older than memory, older than choice, something buried beneath years of denial and cruelty and then suddenly unearthed while the world watched.
His hand pressed harder into his chest.
The pain intensified as the crowd noise warped.
A ringing began in his ears, thin at first, then louder. The podium shifted under his feet. Or he did, he can't tell. The trophy was no longer in his hands; someone had taken it, or it had been set down, or maybe he had dropped it. His vision narrowed around Paula until everything else became brightness and sound and movement at the edges.
Her eyes widened.
She knew. The thought came with terrifying simplicity. She knew something was wrong.
Maybe she had known all along, maybe she had felt this first.
Maybe every time he had been cruel, every time he had walked away, every time he had sharpened himself against her just to win, something in her chest had answered too. Maybe that was why she had looked at him yesterday not only with hurt, but with exhaustion. The exhaustion of someone who had been carrying a bond alone while he mocked the very idea of it.
The thought was unbearable.
He took one step forward.
Someone’s hand reached for him.
“Lando?”
The voice was clearer now. It was Charles talking to him, visibly. alarmed by his state, but Lando did not respond.
His eyes never left Paula’s.
The distance between them looked impossible. A crowd, a barrier, a drop from the podium, a whole world full of cameras and ceremony and expectation, all of it standing between him and the one person his body had suddenly decided it could not survive being apart from.
He took another step. Too far, too unsteady.
Because the world tipped, for a breathless second, he realised he was no longer standing where he should be.
Then he fell from the podium.
The sound from the crowd erupted instantly, a sharp, collective gasp that hit like a wave. Hands lunged for him, too late or not quite enough. The edge of the podium disappeared beneath his feet, and then there was impact, bright pain through one side of his body as people shouted around him. The ringing in his ears grew louder. Cameras flashed. Someone cursed. Someone called for medical.
He barely felt the ground. Actually he did not care about the ground.
He only cared that he could still see her.
Somehow, through the sudden chaos, through bodies rushing toward him and officials bending down and drivers stepping off the podium in alarm, his eyes found Paula again.
She had moved forward.
Not far. The crowd held her. People blocked her. Pietra was beside her now, one hand gripping her arm, and Paula looked as if all the blood had left her body. Her mouth was slightly open. Her eyes were locked on his with such pure panic that for a second he felt it in his own chest, indistinguishable from the pain already tearing through him.
Someone tried to help him sit up.
He resisted weakly.
Not because he wanted to be difficult, because sitting up meant looking away.
“Lando, stay still.”
“Can you hear me?”
“Don’t move him too quickly.”
“Is he conscious?”
The voices came in fragments.
He heard none of them properly.
His hand was still pressed to his chest so hard his fingers hurt. His lungs refused to fill all the way. The pain had become huge now, too large to fit inside him, spreading through ribs and throat and eyes until tears gathered without permission. It was not like last night. Last night had been terror and guilt in darkness. This was something else. Something wilder. More complete.
More like a calling.
The word rose from somewhere he did not recognise.
Not a belief, a verdict.
Here she is, his soulmate.
His mouth moved, at first no sound came out.
Someone leaned closer. “Lando? What is it?”
He tried again.
“Paula.”
Her name was barely a whisper. But saying it changed something.
Her face broke.
Something in her expression cracked so visibly that even through the haze he saw it. The panic deepened.
He tried to move, to get to her, to tell her it was all okay, that he was here now, a weird senses of protectiveness emerged in him, as if he wasn't the one that had caused her pain for the last few years.
But hands held him down gently but firmly, preventing him to go see her.
“Stay with us, Lando.”
He wasn’t with them, he was with her.
In the blue of her eyes, in the panic on her face. In the impossible pull dragging through him as if every lie he had ever told himself had been cut loose at once and left only the truth.
He had spent years saying he would not notice his soulmate.
The universe, if it existed, had chosen a cruel moment to prove him wrong.
His vision darkened at the edges, the ringing in his ears became a roar.
Faces blurred above him. Charles maybe. A medic. Someone in McLaren orange.
All he could see clearly was Paula.
All he could think was her name.
Paula.
Paula.
Paula.
It repeated with every broken beat of his heart, too loud now, too painful, too late.
He tried to say it once more.
Maybe he did. Maybe it never left his mouth.
The last thing he remembered was the blue of her eyes and the panic in his own chest, folding together until he could no longer tell where his fear ended and hers began.
Then the world went black and Lando collapse at the foot of the podium scene.
I would LOVE TO SEE a part just for the dynamics of the soulmate universe!! I feel like it could be really helpful going forward!!
However, I also ADORE the idea of discovering things piece by piece and doing all the connecting the dots stuff. So maybe you could do a special chapter maybe in the middle of the story so it’s like a recap or (I’m not sure if you can do this on Tumblr) a part that you update with new information once it releases in the chapters.
The second option sounds like a lot more work tbh, so maybe not. BUT definitely a special chapter wirh the rules whenever you see fit!!
I’ve actually been obsessed with the plot of soulmates (it is one of my favorite tropes to read) and I absolutely adore that you didn’t choose the easy way of writing or signs being in front of them their entire life as a way to figure out the soulmate bond. As you said it would make it too easy, and that’s not something we want 🙂↕️
Most of all, I’ve always wanted to write a soulmate au!! But at the same time I suppose it takes a LOT of planning, so I’m also curious (if you’d like to share) how this idea came to you and if there was any research going into this!! Like how did you create this universe??
ALSO!!! Just seen that you’re going to spoil us wirh TWO chapters per week?? That’s INSANE! 🙂↕️ CANT wait!! More yapping coming your way then 🤩🤩🤩!! Do you think you’re going to update on specific dates or just whenever they’re ready?? (Both ways works more than fine for me, I don’t want to pressure you!!)
My last question is also about your writing process and is how do you not get burned out from writing? I suppose that having new ideas is a great way to avoid burnout, but personally I’ve been going through a rough patch wirh my ff so I’m looking for any advice to not leave it incomplete and move on with my life 😔
- 🪸
Hi again anon 🪸!
I think I will definitely make a soulmate guide somewhere around the middle of the story, once you have learned a little more about the universe and how the bond works. That way, it can clarify and recap everything without spoiling the discoveries that are supposed to happen gradually. Honestly, it could be useful for me too because I’m also starting to get lost in all the rules I created sometimes hahaha.
As for how I started writing this soulmate AU, soulmates are ALSO one of my favorite tropes ever. I had wanted to write a story about them for such a long time, but I always knew that, if I finally did it, it would become a very long story. It took me quite a lot of time and many different drafts to make sure everything was clear in my head.
I also have to say that I was really inspired by the soulmate series written by @moonlightwritingf1! I think the story is currently on pause, but it is genuinely one of the best Lando soulmate series I have ever read, and I really recommend it if you haven’t read it already!
About my writing process, I almost always work in the same way. The second I have an idea, I start writing IMMEDIATELY. I don’t begin directly on Tumblr, I write everything in a Word document first. When I get a new idea, I can sometimes write for hours because I genuinely cannot stop once I have the scenes playing in my head. It is only afterwards that I divide everything into chapters and transfer them into my Tumblr drafts.
This method also means that I normally have a few chapters written in advance, even though they are rarely completely finished. I still have to go back, reread them, edit certain scenes, change details, and sometimes add entire new parts depending on what I wrote in the previous chapters. For this story, I currently have the first ten chapters in my drafts! I just need to have another very intense writing session soon to continue the story and hopefully draft the final chapters too.
This year, I also started working at a hotel reception during the weekends, and there are sometimes barely any clients during my working hours. Apparently, boredom makes me productive because most of what I have written this year was written at the reception desk hahaha. Then, during the week, I usually only need to edit everything and correct a few things.
And honestly, about burnout, I don’t think I have the perfect solution because it happens to me too. What helps me the most is writing the scenes I am genuinely excited about, even when they happen much later in the story. I don’t always force myself to write everything chronologically. Sometimes writing one future scene is enough to make me excited about the entire story again.
I also think you shouldn’t put too much pressure on yourself to finish something immediately. Taking a break does not mean you are abandoning the story. Sometimes you just need to leave it alone for a few days, or even longer, and return when you actually miss the characters again. You can also reread the scenes you loved writing the most or write down all the future moments you are excited about, even if they are only messy notes. That usually reminds me why I wanted to tell the story in the first place.
And please, never hesitate to send more yapping my way because I absolutely LOVE reading it🤩 Two chapters a week apparently also means twice as many opportunities for you to analyse everything and expose all my little clues hahaha.
I actually have no words for this chapter. And not because of your writing, which is excellent as always!! I wanted to take a moment to tell you once again that you truly have a gift for describing feelings!! It’s in the way you always manage to put into words the sensations which usually are so abstract amazes me every single time!! I wish I had an example but really it’s the way you described the tension of the apartment with the contrast to the almost fake calmness of Monaco left me speechless.
But back to the plot. I now am SURE that Paula KNEW lando was her soulmate before meeting him. However, her being an F1 fan makes this whole thing so much more sweet and tragic at the same time.
Paula my babie you are so dear to me 🥺
But this would explain why she might’ve been shy around him.
However, I still don’t buy into the WHY lando reacted that way in the club. I feel like it must’ve been something to do with the bond, cause thah just seemed SO out of character for him.
And speaking of the bond.. I was giggling the entire time lando was suffering 🤭 i know how that sounds but HEAR ME OUT!!
Him seeing her face and having this reaction of all the hurt he made her go through was chefs kiss!! Actually while reading max explaining their history to lando my first thought was, and maybe you’ve explained it and I just forgot or missed it, but how would they know for sure someone is their soulmate?? Like yes the bond, but is there any other proof that might help someone realize??
So yeah I was thinking “I wonder how lando will actually know that Paula is his soulmate” and then the chest pain happened and I was like OH. Now I get!! So it is my theory, please correct me, is that they can feel the emotions of the other? Or maybe in lando’s case, because he finally “acknowledged” the bond he’s feeling all the repressed feeling of Paula?
Maybe this would make sense as to why Paula is also mean to him sometimes. Like maybe she’s feeling his irritation and can’t really go any other way??
Idk I always feel like I’m throwing random ideas at you with these theories. I feel like that meme of the conspiracy theorist 😔
So yeah back to my final thoughts!! I really can’t wait to see lando’s change in behavior now that he knows or sort of thinks Paula is his soulmate. And, most of all, I can’t wait to see him getting her back!!
Actually one more question! I noticed that, so far, all chapters are written from lando’s pov. I can’t remember if in your other stories you also chose to stay within one pov, but I was wondering if we’ll ever see Paula’s pov in this story??
As always, everything you write is amazing and I was SO happy when I saw you posted the chapter (it was a nice distraction from my own disastrous ff about lando). AMAZING WORK!! CANT wait to read the rest or just see your response to my yapping sessions! I enjoy them just as much as you do, truly!! 🩷
- 🪸
Hi anon 🪸
First of all, thank you so, so much for your message and all your lovely compliments! 🥹🩷 It genuinely means so much to me, especially what you said about the way I describe feelings and atmospheres.
Now, back to the plot because, once again, you have so many good theories haha.
About the why behind Lando’s reaction to Paula at the club: that it is connected to the soulmate bond. It will be explained much more clearly in the next few chapters (there are so many things left to resolve, I know, I’m sorry 😭) but for now, the main thing to understand is that his reaction was linked to the fact that they are soulmates. You’ll basically discover the exact explanation at the same time as Lando does, because even he doesn’t fully understand what happened yet.
As for how someone can know for certain that another person is their soulmate, that will also be explored more in the following chapters, but I can explain the general idea a little bit now!
I didn’t want there to be an obvious physical sign, like matching marks, names appearing on their skin or anything like that, because I thought it would make everything a little too easy haha. What I imagined instead is that, once two soulmates truly recognise each other, they simply feel it deep inside themselves. It’s almost instinctive, something in their body and soul just knows that this is the person they are meant to love, cherish and remain connected to for the rest of their life. There isn’t necessarily any concrete proof they can show to other people, it is simply an absolute certainty they feel within themselves.
At least, that is how it is normally supposed to happen, because, as you have probably guessed, Lando is a bit of an anomaly in this situation. Things definitely did not happen for him the way they usually do.
And your theory about soulmates feeling each other’s emotions is correct!!! That is exactly what I was trying to suggest when Lando experienced the chest pain. It happened because he had finally started to realise that he was the person causing Paula so much pain. For the first time, he began to feel some of what she had been carrying for all those years. He was physically hurting because he finally understood how deeply he had hurt her.
It will also be connected to another phenomenon that will start being explored properly in the next chapter: the symptoms caused by a delayed recognition of your soulmate. As you guessed, Paula has known from the beginning, while Lando did not recognise the bond at all. That delay, and the fact that he rejected and fought against something that is supposed to be his destiny, is going to have a very serious impact on him.
And yes, Paula partly reacts the way she does because she can feel his anger and irritation too! Their emotions affect each other so strongly that, when one of them approaches the other with anger, defensiveness or resentment, the other instinctively reflects it back. They are so connected that when one of them is angry or cruel, the other struggles to respond with anything except the exact same energy. So, in a way, they have been trapped in this terrible cycle of constantly feeding each other’s anger without fully understanding why 😭
Also, your conspiracy theories are never random! You are actually noticing so many things I hoped people would notice, and I absolutely love reading all your ideas. Please never stop sending them because I genuinely enjoy our yapping sessions just as much as you do haha.
The next chapter will still be from Lando’s point of view because there is a lot happening inside his head now that he is beginning to understand the truth. However, the story is still far from being finished, so I would really love to include Paula’s point of view later, possibly even through some flashbacks, because I think seeing everything she has experienced from her perspective could be very important.
I hope all of this was clear and understandable and that my answer wasn’t far too long haha. I have actually been thinking about making a little “soulmate guide” explaining the rules of the bond in this universe, perhaps as a bonus chapter, because I know there are a lot of different symptoms, rules and exceptions involved. Let me know if that is something you would be interested in reading!
And once again, thank you so much for your message, for your theories and for always taking the time to share your thoughts with me. I’m so happy the chapter could offer you a distraction, and I refuse to believe your own Lando fanfiction is disastrous! 🩷
Summary : In a world where soulmates exist, Lando Norris has never believed in fate, bonds, or the idea that one person could be made for another. He always said that if he ever met his soulmate, he probably wouldn’t care.
But what if he had already met her years ago?
Genre : soulmates AU, angst
Pairing : Lando Norris x oc (female)
Words count : 7,4k
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Series Masterlist
The evening sat over Monaco like something expensive and rotten.
From the windows of Lando’s apartment, the city looked exactly the way people always imagined it should: impossible lights spilled across the harbour, yachts floating like polished lies in the black water, terraces glowing gold against the dark, the entire principality dressed in wealth so thoroughly that even the silence seemed curated. From above, it was beautiful in the way certain dangerous things were beautiful, so sharp and clean you almost forgot how easily they could cut.
Inside, the apartment felt close.
Not small. It was not a small place. Nothing in Monaco that belonged to men like Lando ever truly was. But there was a pressure in it that night, something stale and unmoving in the air, as if all the words that had not been said since they left the paddock had followed them home and settled thickly into the room. Even the lights seemed wrong. Too low in some corners, too pale in others. The television filled the silence with some forgettable show he wasn't watching properly, voices from the speakers rising and falling in the room without ever managing to sound alive.
Max sat at one end of the couch.
Lando sat at the other.
They had been like that for the better part of forty minutes, two glasses of something untouched on the coffee table, the television on because silence had started to feel accusatory and yet somehow only becoming more so with every passing minute. Max had not lectured him. That, in some ways, was worse. He had been civil when they got back. Too civil. No jokes, no easy attempts to pull the mood into something livable.
Just this.
A flat, exhausted tension.
Lando had changed out of his McLaren kit, showered, pulled on old grey joggers and a black T-shirt that smelled faintly of detergent and home. None of it had helped. His body felt wrung out, his skin too tight over nerves that had never properly settled after qualifying. Every time he closed his eyes, something from the day surfaced: the helmet hitting the floor, Paula’s face, his mother’s voice, Max in the corridor asking what the fuck was wrong with him, the media pen twisting his words into something almost but not entirely unlike the truth.
The show on the television laughed at one of its jokes. Neither of them reacted.
At some point Lando realised he had no idea what had happened in the last ten minutes of it. He reached for the remote, paused the screen, and the room fell into such immediate stillness that he felt it in his teeth.
Max looked over, not startled. Just waiting.
Lando turned the remote over in his hand once, then set it down carefully on the coffee table. The city lights from outside reflected faintly in the glass. Somewhere lower down in the street, a car door slammed and was swallowed by distance.
Max was the one who broke first.
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped loosely in front of him, staring at the black television screen for a moment as if he could say what he needed to say without having to look directly at him.
“You crossed a line today,” he said.
Lando’s head turned slightly, but he did not answer, not immediately, because some part of him had known this was coming from the second Max had followed him back from the paddock in that terrible silence. Max looked up then, and whatever restraint he had been holding onto seemed to thin around the edges.
“No, actually, you crossed about five lines, and I don’t think you even understand that, which is the worst part. You went to apologise to her and somehow managed to make her cry again. Do you realise how insane that is? You were meant to fix what happened in the garage, and you made it worse in a corridor where no one else could even pretend it was just nerves or racing stress or a bad day.”
Lando opened his mouth, the defence rising automatically because that was what he did when cornered, what he had always done, even with Max. “She wasn’t exactly...”
“Don’t,” Max cut in, and the word came out sharper now, hard enough to make Lando stop. “Don’t do that. Don’t start listing what she said, don’t try to make this even, don’t try to turn it into one of your usual little battles where if you can prove she was sharp too then you don’t have to look at what you did first. I saw her face when she walked out. I saw yours too, by the way, and I know you know you messed up, so don’t sit there and insult both of us by pretending this is just Paula being Paula.” He exhaled, dragging one hand over his face, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped into something more tired, more disappointed, almost older.
“I’ve never really said anything before. Not properly. Maybe I should have. Maybe we all should have. We’ve all laughed it off for too long, the way you two snap at each other, the way the whole room changes when she walks in and you decide to act like her breathing is some personal attack on you. We made it a joke because it was easier. But it’s not funny anymore. I don’t even know if it was ever funny.”
Lando looked down at his hands. They were clasped loosely between his knees, but his fingers had started pressing into each other until the knuckles paled. “I know I shouldn’t have shouted at her in the garage,” he said quietly. “But I was stressed, and the helmet...”
“The helmet was fine,” Max said. “Everyone knows the helmet was fine.”
“I know.”
“And she apologised immediately.”
“I know.”
“So what was it really?” Max asked, and for the first time there was no accusation in the question, only confusion sharpened by worry. “Because I’m trying to understand you, mate, I really am. You’re my best friend. I know you can be a prick when you’re under pressure, but this thing with Paula… it’s different. It’s like she brings out the worst version of you before she even says a word. You see her, and suddenly you’re defensive, rude, cruel sometimes, and for what? What has she actually done to deserve it? Because from where I’m standing, she can be sharp, she can be difficult, but you act like you’re always responding to her when half the time you’re the one starting.”
Lando swallowed hard, shame and irritation moving together in him because Max was saying things he did not want to hear and because some ugly, cornered part of him still wanted to reject them simply because they were true. “She hates me,” he muttered.
Max gave him a look so exhausted it almost hurt. “And you never wondered why?”
The question landed harder than Lando expected.
He looked up.
Max leaned back against the couch, shaking his head faintly. “That’s what I don’t get. Every time you hurt her, you use the way she reacts as proof that she deserved it. Do you realise that? She snaps because you were mean, then you say, ‘See? She’s impossible.’ She gets defensive because you humiliated her, then you say she’s dramatic. She cries, and somehow you still find a way to make it about how uncomfortable it makes you feel.”
Lando flinched at that, small but visible.
Max saw it and softened for half a second, but not enough to stop. “I’m not saying she never says things to hurt you too. But was on you. And the garage was on you. And whatever happened in that corridor after you went to apologise? That was on you too, because you had one job, Lando. Say sorry and mean it. Just sorry. And you couldn’t even do that?”
Lando’s jaw tightened. “I tried.”
“I know,” Max said, and somehow that was worse than if he had denied it. “That’s the sad part. I think you did try. I think you went there wanting to do the right thing, and the second it didn’t go exactly how you wanted, the second she didn’t soften and thank you and make it easy, you got angry because her pain didn’t behave in a way that made you feel forgiven.”
Lando looked away.
The city lights blurred faintly through the window.
Max’s voice lowered. “You can’t keep doing this to her.”
“I know,” Lando said, but it came out too quiet, too insufficient for the size of what sat between them.
“No, I need you to hear me. You need to stop being awful to her. Properly stop. Not just when people are watching, not just when your mum tells you she’s disappointed, not just when you want to feel like the good guy after. You need to stop making her the place you put whatever the hell you don’t know how to deal with.” Max paused, searching his face. “Because I’m starting to think you are the one who hate her for no reason, and I don't want to be friend with a guy like that.”
Lando’s eyes snapped back to him. “What?”
Max did not look away. “I said what I said.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“Then why does she get under your skin like that?”
“Because she’s annoying.”
“So are lots of people.”
“She’s always there.”
“So are we.”
“She just...” Lando stopped, because the sentence had no end that made sense. She just what? Looked at him too directly? Made the air shift? Turned every room into somewhere he could no longer relax properly? He hated the feeling that rose in him when Max waited for an answer, hated that his own anger suddenly felt thin in his hands, less like truth and more like a curtain he had been pulling closed for years without knowing what stood behind it.
Max watched him struggle, then sighed. “You need to ask yourself, because from the outside, it doesn’t look normal. The way you react to her, the way she reacts to you, the way you two can ruin each other’s mood from across a room without even speaking. There is something there, and maybe it’s just old resentment, but whatever it is, you need to deal with it before you hurt her worse than you already have.”
Lando sat very still.
For the first time that night, the irritation had no strength left to hold him up. It drained out slowly, leaving behind something colder and more frightened. He wanted to defend himself, wanted to say Max was exaggerating, that Paula had always been cruel too, that none of them understood what it felt like to be near her, the constant tension, the way she seemed to know exactly where to press before he even knew he was exposed. But the words would not come now, because all he could see was Paula’s face in the corridor, her eyes wet, the exact moment she had said she had believed he came there to mean it. Max was right.
“I don’t know why I’m like that with her,” Lando said at last.
Max’s anger softened into concern. “Then figure it out.”
Lando nodded once, though the movement felt heavy.
“And start by not hurting her again,” Max added.
“I’ll try.”
Max gave him a tired look. “Try harder than you did today.”
That should have stung. It did. But Lando deserved it, and for once he had no clever response to hide behind. He only nodded again, staring down at the floor between his feet, the pressure in the apartment heavier now but cleaner somehow, like Max had finally opened a window in a room that had been rotting behind expensive glass.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
The television remained paused, the black screen reflecting them faintly: Max hunched forward with worry still written in every line of him, Lando opposite, smaller than he had any right to look in his own apartment.
And because there was no clean way to ask what he needed to ask, because it was humiliating from the first syllable and would remain humiliating no matter how gently he tried to shape it, Lando said it cautiously, as if the wrong tone might make the whole room collapse in on itself.
“Max,” he said. “Do you know since when… or why… things are this tense between me and Paula?”
The question hung there.
Max did not answer immediately.
His expression changed in slow degrees, first confusion, then something closer to disbelief, and finally a sort of stunned incredulity that would have been almost funny if Lando had not already felt sick.
“What are you talking about, you don’t remember?” Max asked.
Lando forced himself not to look away. “Not really.”
“You’re serious?”
“Yes.”
Max sat back slightly, staring at him as if he had just confessed to forgetting his own name.
“Lando,” he said at last, slowly, “it was like the event in the group for months. It was all anyone talked about. It had been super tense between you two ever since.”
Lando frowned.
He could feel shame rising already, irrationally early, as if some part of him had heard the shape of what was coming and wanted to retreat before the words made it real.
“What?” he asked. “No. I don’t remember.” He rubbed his thumb once along the side of the remote, a stupid nervous motion.
Max kept looking at him.
There was something unsettling about the quiet in his face now. Less outrage, more grim recognition. As if he had just understood, all at once, that Lando had not spent years being careless about that night. He had spent years walking around a hole in his own memory large enough to swallow a person.
“It was years ago,” Max said finally. “The first time she ever properly came out with all of us.”
Lando said nothing.
“I don’t think you’d really seen her before that,” Max went on. “Or if you had, not properly. It was after your podium here in Monaco. We all went out to celebrate.”
Something inside Lando shifted.
A podium in Monaco.
The phrase should have called up something bright: champagne, noise, the electric unreality of doing well there in front of everyone, the city feeling suddenly like it belonged to him. But what rose instead was fragmented and unstable: music too loud, light flashing blue and white over faces, the sour burn of too much alcohol, a crowded club where everyone had been pressed too close together to breathe properly.
He looked at Max. “Really?”
Max gave him a short, humourless laugh. “Yeah. Really.”
Lando searched himself for something more solid and found nothing he could hold.
“No,” he said. “I don’t… I don’t remember her being here. What happened ?”
Max leaned forward, forearms on his knees now, fingers linked together.
Max gave him a look like he wasn’t sure whether to be irritated or sorry for him.
“Yeah,” he said. “You.”
Lando stared.
Max went on more quietly now, as if he had understood that they were no longer discussing gossip or some old group drama but the architecture of something that had quietly ruined itself years ago and never been repaired.
“She’d watched you on TV before,” Max said. “A lot.”
Lando paused. “She had?”
That sounded stupid the second it left him. Not because it was impossible that someone had watched him race, thousands of people did, millions even, but because of the sharp private shock of picturing Paula in that role. Paula sitting somewhere in front of a screen, already knowing his face, already having formed some version of him in her head before they ever stood in the same room.
Max’s expression softened into something darker than amusement. “Yeah,” he said. “She’s a huge F1 fan, mate. Why do you think she always wants paddock passes?”
Lando didn’t answer.
He had, in fact, spent years assuming Paula asked for passes simply because she liked access, liked the glamour of it, liked being difficult in very expensive places. He had never once considered that perhaps she had wanted them because the sport itself mattered to her.
That hurt in a strangely quiet way.
Max exhaled through his nose and kept going.
“Anyway,” he said, “that night… she was nervous. Kind of shy around you, actually.”
Lando almost laughed.
Paula? Shy?
The version of her he knew now seemed physically incapable of it. Paula now was all sharp edges and direct eye contact and words chosen like weapons. There was nothing shy left in her anywhere that he could see.
But Max wasn’t smiling.
“She kept trying to get your attention,” he said. “All evening, really. Just little things. Talking to everyone else, laughing, trying to join in when you were around. And you kept ignoring her.”
Lando’s stomach turned.
“At some point,” Max said, watching him carefully now, “she came over to give you water.”
Max’s voice was very quiet.
“She was trying to do something nice.”
The sentence sat there between them.
Then Max said, “And you were awful to her.”
Lando felt himself go very still.
“What did I say?”
Max looked at him for a long time.
When he finally answered, he spoke without any embellishment. No attempt to soften it. None would have survived anyway.
“You said you didn’t need her help,” Max said. “You told her no one wanted her there.”
Lando’s breath caught.
Max continued.
“You told her she should just leave. That she was not welcome here. That she didn't belong here.”
The words seemed to hit the room one at a time, each one settling into him with the heavy, irreversible weight of something true.
For a second he genuinely could not speak.
He just looked at Max, as if there might still be some version of this where his friend was exaggerating, or mistaken, or misremembering under the distortion of years.
Max held his gaze without flinching.
“No one knows why you snapped like that,” he said. “There was no reason for it. None. She hadn’t done anything. She was being kind to you.”
Lando swallowed, his mouth was dry.
A new fragment rose, sharper than the others.
That day back at hospitality, the morning before FP1, where he had said this exact same words you are not welcome here, and how she reacted. Now, with this context, he understand her reaction better, but he hate himself even more for even saying that.
Max’s voice seemed to come from a distance now.
“She just went quiet after that,” he said. “Completely quiet. Then she started crying.”
Lando felt sick.
He had to look down at his hands to anchor himself in the present. They were clasped too tightly, knuckles pale, the tendons standing out beneath his skin.
“Then you left the club,” Max said. “And no one really knew what to do. You never brought it up again. Never apologised. Nothing.”
The apartment was silent except for the hum of the paused television and the distant, muffled life of Monaco outside the windows.
Max leaned back again, tired now rather than angry.
“I think she was furious you never said sorry,” he said. “And after that… I don’t know. Everything between you two just calcified. She got sharper with you. You got annoyed by her for what looked like no reason. And after a while everyone sort of forgot what came first because the fighting became the thing.”
Lando didn’t move.
“Did I really say that?” he asked at last.
His voice sounded wrong to his own ears. Thin. Distant.
Max’s expression tightened.
“You don't remember?” he said.
Lando shut his eyes.
There was no dramatic rush of memory waiting behind them. Just the beginning of an understanding so ugly it made him want to come out of his own skin. Shame was one thing when it belonged to a single bad day. A single bad reaction. Something sharp and regrettable but recent. This was different. This was discovering rot in the foundation. Realising the whole house had been built over something cruel he had done and then, worse, in some ways, forgotten.
“Why?” Lando asked.
He was not even sure who he was asking anymore. Max. Himself. The room.
“Why would I say that?”
Max shook his head once. “I don’t know.”
“I don’t get why I don't remember”
He looked up at the dark window, at the city reflected back over itself, and felt suddenly and viciously trapped inside his own history.
“I always thought she started it,” he said.
Max was quiet.
“I always thought…” He stopped, because the sentence could not survive contact with what he now knew. “I thought she just hated me for no reason.”
Max looked at him with something close to pity now, though he was trying not to let it show.
“Mate,” he said, “you gave her one.”
The truth of that did not strike like a blow, it settled more slowly than that. A weight rather than an impact.
Something dense and black lowering itself into place inside him.
All those years of irritation. All those times he had rolled his eyes at her, answered sharply, decided she was impossible, decided she had always been looking for a fight. He had built an entire version of her in his head out of reaction, out of habit, out of resentment, while the original injury, the first one, the one that mattered, had come from him.
He opened his mouth, closed it again, then said quietly, “Why did I forget?”
Max didn’t answer at first.
He looked away, toward the dark screen of the television, as if the paused frame there might offer something easier than the truth.
Then he said, “Maybe because it was easier.”
Lando stared at him.
Max met his eyes again.
“Maybe because the morning after, everyone was awkward and nobody wanted to start another fight. Maybe because you just carried on and it got buried under everything else.”
He paused.
“Or maybe,” he said more softly, “some part of you knew exactly how awful it was and didn’t want to look at it.”
The apartment fell silent again.
Lando could not tell which explanation was worse.
He saw Paula differently now, and he hated how immediate the shift was. Hated what it revealed about himself more than about her. All those years, he had looked at her sharpness as if it had appeared from nowhere. As if she had simply chosen hostility because that was the kind of girl she was. But now he could see another possibility, and it was unbearable.
“Jesus Christ,” Lando said.
The words came out as a whisper.
Max did not reply.
Lando leaned forward, elbows on his knees, both hands pressing against his mouth now as if he could physically contain the nausea rising in him. The apartment was too warm. Or maybe he was. He could feel heat in his face, the dull pounding of blood behind his eyes.
He thought of every argument after that.
Every time she snapped first. Every time he’d let himself believe her anger was aggression instead of memory. Every time she had looked at him like she was bracing for something and he had still gone ahead and given it to her.
Then the cruelest thought of all came quietly, with no drama to warn him.
She had liked him once.
Enough to watch him race. Enough to want his attention. Enough to bring him water because he was drunk and she wanted to be kind.
And he had taken that softness and crushed it for sport, or out of drunken carelessness, or out of some ugly instinct he still did not understand.
No wonder she hated him.
Lando lowered his hands and stared at the floor.
“I really did that?” he said.
Max nodded slowly.
The honesty of it hurt more than comfort would have.
Outside, a siren sounded somewhere far off and disappeared. The lights in the harbour kept shimmering, indifferent and unreal.
Lando sat in the middle of all that impossible Monaco beauty and felt filthier than he ever had after any night out, any bad result, any public mistake. Because this wasn’t a mistake in the clean, accidental sense. It was a revelation. A private exhumation. The discovery that the ugliest thing Paula had ever thought about him might actually have been true from the beginning.
He swallowed hard.
“I thought she was the one making me feel insane,” he said.
Max was quiet for a moment.
Then he said, “Mate, she was reacting to something that already made her feel that way first.”
Lando shut his eyes again.
This time the darkness behind them felt deserved.
He stayed like that for a long while, breathing slowly, the room silent around him, Max beside him and not pushing, which was merciful because there was nowhere to go with any of it yet. Nothing he could say that would clean the shape of what he had done. Nothing he could think that would turn the past into something less ugly. There was only the truth now, sitting between his ribs with all the weight of something that had waited years to be named.
When he finally spoke again, his voice had gone very flat.
“Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
Max looked at him carefully before answering.
“We assumed you knew,” he said. “After a while it just became the atmosphere between you two. People stopped talking about the origin because the damage was already there.”
Lando nodded once.
That made sense. That was the worst part. Everything made sense now. Too much of it.
The strange bitterness in Paula, the way she never fully softened around him, the way every apology attempt curdled before it finished.
He did not know how long they sat there after that.
Eventually Max reached for the remote, turned the television off completely, and the room dropped into full darkness.
Lando did not protest.
He sat very still in the darkened apartment, looking out at Monaco and thinking of a younger Paula holding out water to a man she admired, and of himself: cruel, careless, taking that small act of kindness and teaching her exactly what to expect from him instead.
And for the first time since all of this began, the question was no longer why Paula hated him.
It was why, after becoming the reason for it, she had remain near him.
That night Lando did not sleep.
At some point Max had gone to bed, insisting he will stay near him for tonight. The city beyond the windows had carried on without them, Monaco always did, glittering against the black water as if no human ugliness had ever happened beneath its lights. The yachts remained still, the roads still shone, the terraces still glowed softly in the dark. It was the kind of beauty that only made Lando feel worse. There was something almost offensive in how untouched the city looked when he felt as if something inside him had been split open and left there.
He stayed on the couch for a long time after Max disappeared down the corridor. Long enough for the lights on the harbour to blur. Long enough for the shame in him to stop feeling like an emotion and become something denser, more physical. Then, eventually, because dawn would come whether he slept or not and because his body was exhausted even if his mind refused to follow, he went to bed.
It changed nothing.
He lay in the dark on his back, hands folded over his stomach at first as though if he held himself still enough his thoughts might do the same. They didn’t. Every time he closed his eyes, he heard Max again.
You told her no one wanted her there.
The sentences came back with the patience of punishment.
He could not outrun them because there was nowhere to go. Not in the apartment, not in the city, not in himself. They circled, repeated, sharpened. At first they stayed verbal, just words replaying inside his skull until language itself began to feel cruel. But somewhere in the middle of the night, something shifted.
The memories started coming back in fragments.
They returned like broken glass: bright, partial, cutting at random places when he reached for them.
A club full of heat and moving light, music loud enough to rattle the bones, his own body heavy with alcohol and triumph and the ugly carelessness that sometimes followed both: Paula, younger, quieter than the woman he knew now. Standing a little too straight because she was trying not to look nervous. Watching him with the kind of hope he had not earned and would never have deserved even if he had tried, a bottle of water in her hand, her mouth opening to say something kind.
Lando rolled onto his side and dragged a hand over his face.
It was no use.
He saw her again anyway.
Not only that first version of her, the one Max had described and his memory had finally begun to betray back to him, but all the versions that had followed.
He pressed the heel of his hand into his eyes until light burst behind them.
At some point he must have drifted, not into sleep exactly, but into something thinner and more treacherous, because the next thing he knew he was waking violently with his hand clutched to his chest.
For one blank second he didn’t understand what was happening. Then the pain hit properly.
It was not vague. Not an ache. It was pain. Deep, crushing, wrong. A vicious pressure right in the center of his chest, as if something invisible had closed around his heart and squeezed. Breathing turned difficult at once. Every inhale came in short, shallow pieces that did not feel like enough air. His whole body went cold beneath the sweat already gathering at the back of his neck.
He sat up too quickly and the room tilted.
Paula’s face was there again, not in front of him, but in him.
That make the pain sharpened.
Lando’s mouth opened on a breath that never properly arrived.
“What the fuck...”
He pressed harder against his chest as if pressure from the outside could answer pressure from within. It felt impossible, surreal, obscene, the idea that memory alone could do this to a body. But it did not feel like memory. It felt present. Active.
The idea was so irrational that under any normal circumstances he would have rejected it immediately. But there was nothing normal about this. Not the force of it. Not the way grief and shame and terror seemed to have crossed some invisible threshold and become flesh. It was as if all at once his body had stopped observing what he had done to Paula and begun, too late, too violently, to understand it from the inside.
His vision blurred.
Tears came before he could stop them, hot and disorienting, mixing with the helpless humiliation of not being able to control his own breath. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, meaning to stand, meaning to go to the bathroom, get water, do something sensible.
Instead he made it halfway upright before the pain punched through him again and he fell hard to his knees beside the bed.
The carpet burned against his skin.
He bent forward, one hand braced on the mattress, the other still gripping his chest as if the exact place of the pain mattered. His breaths came short and ugly. The room seemed too far away from itself, the edges of furniture blurred and unreal in the darkness. He could hear his own pulse in his ears, too fast, too loud.
He had enough presence of mind to know this was wrong.
His phone was on the bedside table. For a few terrible seconds it seemed impossibly far away. He reached for it blindly, almost knocked it to the floor, caught it with clumsy fingers and forced the screen awake. His hands were shaking so badly he nearly mistyped the number.
When someone answered, the sound of another human voice nearly undid him.
“Emergency, what is the reason for your call?”
Lando swallowed and tried to speak.
“I...” The word came out torn. He dragged in another breath that hurt. “I can’t...I think I can’t breathe. My heart,” He pressed his hand harder into his chest, as though showing it to the voice would help. “It hurts.”
The dispatcher’s tone changed immediately, flattening into trained calm.
“Sir, listen to me. I need your address.”
He mumbled it, stumbling over the numbers once before getting them right. The dispatcher asked questions after that: his age, whether the pain radiated into his arm, whether he had taken anything, whether he was alone. He answered what he could and forgot half of it the second he said it. The voice told him help was coming and to try to stay still, to unlock the door if possible, to keep breathing slowly.
It would have been almost funny if he had enough air to laugh.
He did not remember much after that except ending up back on the couch, half sitting and half collapsing into the pillows, tears still wet on his face in a way that felt wildly humiliating and entirely beyond his control. He pressed his fist against his mouth to try to quiet the sounds his breathing kept making to avoid awaking Max, but his door eventually opened and Lando heard his panicked startled voice, footsteps, too many sounds layered too close together.
By the time the medical help arrived, his breathing had begun to steady in uneven rythme. The worst of the crushing pain had receded, not entirely, but enough that he could speak in short sentences without feeling as though his ribs were being cinched tighter with every word. That made the whole thing feel even more surreal. As if his body had erupted into crisis and then, seeing it had finally been taken seriously, withdrawn just enough to make him doubt himself.
The paramedics examined him where he sat propped against the couch, pale and shaking and exhausted. They checked his pulse, blood pressure, oxygen, listened to his chest, asked him questions twice when his answers came slow. Max stood near the living-room door, hair disordered from sleep, looking alarmed and tired in equal measure.
Eventually one of the doctors lowered his stethoscope and said, “At the moment, everything looks stable.”
Lando looked at him blankly.
“So what the hell was that?” Max asked before he could.
The doctor gave a small shrug that was not dismissive so much as careful. “Probably a panic attack.”
Lando stared.
A panic attack.
The phrase sounded too small for what had just happened.
The doctor seemed to read some of that disbelief on his face, because he added, “It can feel like dying. Chest pain, shortness of breath, trembling, a sense of losing control. Very real physical symptoms.”
He glanced at Lando’s face more closely. “Have you been under stress recently?”
“Yes,” Lando said automatically.
The answer came from habit, from convenience, from the first explanation that would not expose how profoundly unwell the truth would sound.
“With racing,” he added. “The Monaco weekend and everything.”
The doctor nodded, unsurprised.
That was probably the sensible answer, the acceptable one.
But even as he said it, Lando knew it wasn’t the real one.
Yes, there was pressure. There was always pressure. There had been pressure since he was a teenager. Pressure did not wake him gasping with tears in his eyes and the feeling of someone else’s pain pressing through his own ribs. Pressure did not bring Paula’s face into bed with him like a curse. Pressure did not make the memory of a woman crying in front of him feel like a hand wrapped around his heart.
No.
The only thing in his mind tonight had been Paula.
The doctor gave him a few instructions with a steady patience: rest tonight, drink water, call again if the symptoms return or worsen. They could reassess in the morning before the race if needed, but for now the immediate danger seemed to have passed.
“For now,” the doctor said, “you need to stay calm. Alright?”
Lando nodded.
Calm felt impossible. But he nodded anyway.
The medical team began gathering their things. The machines were packed away. Max moved aside to let them pass, still silent now, his shock settling into something more watchful. The apartment slowly resumed the shape of an apartment rather than a scene of emergency.
The older doctor was nearly at the door when Lando heard himself speak.
“One more thing.”
The man turned back. “Yes?”
Lando hesitated.
How the hell was he supposed to ask this without sounding crazy?
The doctor waited.
Lando looked down at his own hands first, at the faint tremor still moving through them, and then back up.
“Is it possible,” he asked slowly, “to feel physical pain from hurting someone?”
The question landed strangely in the room.
Max’s head turned sharply.
The doctor studied Lando for a second longer than before, as if recalibrating the kind of conversation they were now having. Then he answered carefully.
“Emotions can affect the body very strongly, yes.”
Lando frowned. “No, I mean, not stress.” His hand drifted back to his chest unconsciously. “Can it actually cause pain? Real physical pain?”
Something changed in the doctor’s expression.
He took one step back into the room. “I once had a patient say something like that to me,” he said.
Lando sat up a little straighter despite the exhaustion pulling at him.
“Yeah?” he asked. “And?”
The doctor glanced briefly at Max, then back at Lando.
“It was a man,” he said. “He had just lost his wife in a car accident, he was the one driving and he was blaming himself for it, he kept saying it was his fault. He told me he felt actual pain right here.” The doctor touched two fingers lightly to the center of his own chest. “Not as a figure of speech. Not grief described poetically. Real pain.”
Lando’s pulse stuttered.
“And?”
“We ran tests because of the severity of it,” the doctor said. “And he actually had a cardiac problem. His heart had gone into distress.”
The room went still.
Max said quietly, “From grief?”
The doctor nodded once. “There are cases. Rare, but real. Extreme emotional shock can affect the heart. Most people know the phrase broken heart as if it’s only romantic language. Sometimes the body is less symbolic than we think.”
Lando swallowed hard.
His voice came out lower now. “And… what happened?”
The doctor was quiet for a beat.
“He died a few weeks after her,” he said. “From what he told us, she was his soulmate.”
The word seemed to change the air.
Hearing it there, in his dark appartement after an ambulance call, from the mouth of a doctor describing the body as if it could be dragged into emotion against its own will, made it land differently.
Lando could barely breathe again, though this time from something colder than panic.
“He had a good life before that,” the doctor continued. “No known heart condition. Young. Healthy. But after she died…” He gave a small helpless movement of one shoulder. “The damage began immediately.”
Lando stared at him.
“How old was he?”
“Twenty-five.”
The number passed through him like a blade.
The doctor added, not carelessly but with the caution of someone stepping outside strict medicine and into the uneasy territory where belief and anecdote crossed, “I suppose some bonds are intense enough that the body suffers with them.”
No one spoke for a few seconds.
Then the doctor said, more gently now, “But I'm sure you'll be fine, try to rest. And if it happens again, call immediately.”
Lando nodded once.
“Thank you, doctor.”
The man gave a brief, professional incline of his head and finally left.
The apartment fell quiet again after the door closed behind the last of them. Not the same quiet as before. This one felt altered. Disturbed. As if something had been dragged up from the floorboards and left in the open where no one knew what to do with it.
Max stayed in the doorway for a moment.
He looked like he wanted to say something, probably several things, but whatever he saw in Lando’s face seemed to stop him. Eventually he just asked, “You okay?”
No.
The answer was so complete it almost amused him.
But he only said, “Yeah.”
Max looked at him long enough to make clear he didn’t believe it, then nodded anyway.
“I’ll be in the other room.”
When he left, Lando was alone again.
He went back to his bedroom and lay back slowly, the sheets cold and twisted around his legs, the room smelling faintly of antiseptic and night air and the ghost of panic. His heartbeat had settled into something more regular now, but he could still feel the place where the pain had been, like an echo pressed into muscle.
He stared at the ceiling.
The doctor’s words repeated in his mind with dangerous clarity.
His wife was his soulmate.
The damage began immediately.
Some bonds are intense enough that the body suffers with them.
It would have been easy, once, before all this, to dismiss it. To call it romantic nonsense. A story people told because stories were easier than randomness.
But that was not what it felt like tonight.
Tonight, Lando had woken with pain so sharp it had sent him to his knees, pain tied not to his own immediate panic, but to Paula. To the memory of hurting her. To the unbearable sense, irrational and overwhelming and impossible to ignore, that what had torn through his chest had not belonged only to him.
It had felt borrowed. Or shared. Or mirrored.
The thought should have terrified him more than it did.
Instead it sat beside another one, darker and infinitely worse.
What if it wasn’t only guilt?
What if he had not simply remembered what he had done to Paula, but felt some late, savage echo of what it had done to her?
What if all those years, while he laughed off soulmates and called the bond a story people told themselves, his own body had been indifferent only because it had never truly been forced to look? And now, because he finally had, because the truth had surfaced and Paula’s pain no longer had the protection of his ignorance, something inside him had answered.
He turned his head toward the dark window.
His own reflection looked back, pale, hollow-eyed, older somehow than yesterday.
He thought of Paula in the club. Paula at the garage. Paula in the corridor.
And then he thought, with a sudden chill that moved all the way down his spine:
What if there is a reason he had reacted like this when he first saw her?
The room seemed to narrow.
Lando shut his eyes. He did not want to think about it.
Did not want to even think of this possibility because naming it would make it real in a way fear alone cannot describe it.
But the thought was there anyway.
Soulmate.
Lando opened his eyes again and stared into the dark until it began to grey with the first suggestion of morning.
He did not sleep.
He only lay there, one hand over the place in his chest that had hurt, feeling the faint lingering throb beneath his palm, and understood with a kind of cold despair that whatever happened to him was not only a pannic attack, he was sure of that now.
It was something deeper.
More dangerous.
Something that had reached past pride and memory and lodged itself in his body.
And for the first time in his life, Lando Norris was afraid that the thing he had spent years mocking might not only be real.
I actually saw that someone beat me this time (my fault, I saw you posted the chapter yesterday and couldn’t read it cause I had plans.. I kept thinking about this chapter my whole evening)
But back to the point. I won’t analyze lando too much cause I feel the same as the other anon, but I did want to ask some questions for the future!!
Like I adore the scene with Cisca and how she’s so stern in making lando apologize and how she won’t take any of his bullshit. So I was wondering if lando’s parents will play a role in the story or will they be more spectators? I feel like a mom is always needed when a son does some thing stupid and I get the feeling that lando will do plenty more stupid things.
Similar question for Max, will he be more present? I feel like so far he’s only been saying “stop” or “get your shit together” and it seems that he never has intervened or tried to get to the bottom of the hatred.
Speaking of the hatred.. CANT wait to see how the met and what happened between them!! One thing that Paula said in their argument was about how she knew long before not to “fix things” and now I’m wondering WHAT things need to be fixed, or what were broken in the first place!! Uhhhh.. so many questions!! I can’t wait another week, please!!
But I do have to spend a moment on lando cause he is just so mean for really no reason!! I wonder if that could be because of the soulmate bond. maybe it has something to do with the fact that if you “reject” it it somehow turns on you so you have to feel it more?? Idk I’m just throwing ideas at you but it would make sense as to why lando is so irritated everytime he sees Paula, and also why he can sense her before seeing her.
Also, the scene in the garage made my blood run cold so I don’t know how Paula is feeling but I know lando will have to do more than apologize to even BEGIN making things even.
And last but not least I wanted to point out the interview. The fact that the accident got twisted is nothing new, but I do wonder if this will become something more present in the story and something weighting on Paola for the rest of the story.
I think that’s all I had to say or can remember. As always amazing work and I CANNOT wait to read the next part!!!
- 🪸
Hi, anon 🪸
First of all, thank you so, so much for your analysis, and I’m sorry I’m only replying now! I’ve been quite busy lately, but I was genuinely so happy to see you back in my inbox 🥹
To answer all your questions: yes, we will see Cisca again in the following chapters! I can’t really say that she will have a crucial role in the story, but she will definitely be there to guide Lando and watch him navigate this completely new journey. And you’re right, a mother is always needed when her son is about to make a lot of stupid decisions, and Lando will probably make quite a few of them before the end of this story, haha.
As for Max, until now, his group of friends hasn’t really said much because of the complicated history between Lando and Paula. They have also, in a way, become “used” to the way they behave around each other, even though they obviously know it isn’t healthy. But Max is going to become more and more involved from now on, especially when it comes to putting Lando back in his place. We will already have a confrontation between them in the next chapter, as well as a pretty important revelation from Max 👀
Haha, I know I left a little teaser about what happened between Lando and Paula! You will learn a lot more about their history in the next chapter, how everything started. I don’t want to say too much, but some of your questions will finally be answered!
And about Lando being so mean to her for seemingly no reason…you are completely right. It is linked to the soulmate bond, even though he has absolutely no idea about it yet. In my head, the soulmate bond has a lot of different rules, and one of them is that when someone ignores or rejects the bond, it begins to manifest through their emotions and behaviour instead.
For Lando, it manifests as anger, irrational irritation and this uncontrollable annoyance whenever Paula is near him. It is also connected to the way he can sense her presence before he even sees her. He doesn’t understand what he is feeling, so his mind interprets all of it as hatred, because that is the only explanation he is willing to accept right now. But this will become much clearer in the next chapter, and I really hope I haven’t already revealed too much by explaining that, haha.
And yes, the garage scene was supposed to feel especially horrible because, at that moment, Lando crossed a line. Paula has dealt with his attitude for a long time, but humiliating her like that in front of everyone is something that a simple apology will never be enough to repair. He is going to have to do much more than say he is sorry if he wants to even begin making things right.
Thank you again for taking the time to share all your thoughts with me! I always love reading your theories, especially when you notice little details.
I can’t wait to know what you think after the next chapter because there will be a lot for you to analyse!
Another great chapter! Man, lando needs to fix up because this narrative he’s written about their dynamic and how it’s a give and take, I’m an asshole to you because you’re a bitch to me, is slowly being shattered before his eyes with everyone there to witness his bullshit.
I wonder what’s going on with Paula because clearly on this race weekend his bullshit is getting to her more than usual. I’m guessing some of it is because of his soulmate comment/belief and him being on his worst behaviour. Honestly heartbreaking :(
Thank you so much!! And yes, exactlyn the whole story Lando has convinced himself of, that their hatred is completely mutual and that he only treats her badly because she treats him the same way, is slowly falling apart in front of him. And the worst part is that everyone else can see it too 😭
In the next chapter, you’ll learn much more about their history: how they met, what happened between them, and why they supposedly hate each other, or, more accurately, why Paula seems to hate him so much. There is definitely more to their dynamic than Lando currently understands.
I don’t know if you noticed it already, but Lando has also started feeling and acting strangely whenever Paula is around. He notices her even from across a room, gets irritated without really knowing why, and seems constantly affected by everything she does. In the next chapter, he might finally begin to understand where some of those feelings are coming from…
And as for Paula, yes, she did see the interview, and it definitely affected her attitude throughout the weekend. However, Lando has always been very open about not believing in soulmates, and since they are part of the same friend group, this isn’t the first time she has heard him say things like that. But still… hearing him say it so publicly affected her in a way that Lando doesn’t understand yet
Summary : In a world where soulmates exist, Lando Norris has never believed in fate, bonds, or the idea that one person could be made for another. He always said that if he ever met his soulmate, he probably wouldn’t care.
But what if he had already met her years ago?
Genre : soulmates AU, angst
Pairing : Lando Norris x oc (female)
Words count : 7,1k
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Lando arrived early again the next morning.
Qualifying day in Monaco was not something he could walk into carelessly. Nothing about Monaco allowed carelessness. It was the kind of track that punished even the smallest fracture in concentration, and there was already too much at stake without adding avoidable mistakes to it. Saturday here mattered more than Sunday.
And his parents were flying in from the UK that morning.
The thought of seeing them had been one of the only uncomplicated things in his head when he woke up. He had not slept particularly well again, but the knowledge that they would be there, that his mother would fuss over whether he was eating properly and his father would pretend not to be nervous in that specific way only fathers of racing drivers are nervous, gave the day a shape he could hold onto.
He wanted to do well.
Not in the professional way drivers were expected to want it. Not in the polished, media-trained way people always phrased ambition for public consumption. He wanted it with something uglier and more private than that. Wanted to get back in the car and drive until everything else dropped away. Wanted the clean violence of precision. Wanted the relief of being good at the one thing in his life that still made perfect sense when everything else blurred.
The morning went well. Better than well, really.
FP3 gave him exactly what he needed: confidence without comfort, enough pace to sharpen him rather than soften him, enough control to make the walls feel close but not predatory. The car felt alive beneath him in the right way. He could place it where he wanted, feel the grip arrive when he asked for it, feel the balance settle instead of fight him. Every lap tightened something inside him, not with panic, but with focus.
And he had not seen Paula once. It was, he told himself, a relief.
He could finally focus.
On the car. On the track. On the weekend. On the fact that Monaco required him whole, and he was tired of giving pieces of his mind to someone who irritated him so deeply she seemed capable of altering the temperature of an entire day simply by existing.
By the time the session ended, he could almost believe he had regained control of himself.
He did a quick meeting with his engineer around two o’clock, talking through setup, front-end response, tyre prep, the rhythm he wanted for qualifying. He stood with one hand braced on the desk, nodding, asking the right questions, looking at overlays on the screen while the afternoon light sharpened through the garage entrance and turned everything hard-edged and bright.
When the meeting ended, he left for the setup in the garage feeling almost calm.
Almost.
That illusion lasted until he saw her.
She was in the guest part of the garage, just behind the screens set up for the session, headphones on, standing half-turned toward one of the monitors. For a second he did not even really process what he was looking at. His eyes registered the shape of someone in the corner of the space, then the pale line of bare arm, the dark fall of long hair over one shoulder, the tilt of her head as she watched the screen with a seriousness that made her seem removed from everything around her.
His body recognised her before his mind did.
Paula.
Of course.
Lando stopped for a fraction of a second in the middle of the garage.
It was ridiculous how immediate the effect was. Inside him something tightened at once, a small hard knot pulling into place beneath his ribs. Something that always arrived before he was ready when she was near, like his own nerves turning against him.
She had not seen him yet. Or if she had, she gave no sign of it.
The headphones shut her off from the room, and for once she looked… not careless, exactly, but absent from herself. Not her usual sharp, alert version. Like she had come there to disappear behind the screens and hoped no one would ask anything of her.
Then his parents saw him.
His mother lifted a hand at once, smiling, and his father did the same with that quieter warmth Lando had inherited more than he liked to admit. They were standing only a few feet away from Paula, close enough that ignoring them would have been impossible without seeming cruel.
He had no choice but to go over.
The garage was already beginning to fill with that dense pre-qualifying atmosphere, something electric and tightly wound. Mechanics moved around the car with quiet purpose. Engineers had headsets on, voices low and quick. Screens glowed with data, timings, camera feeds. There was the usual smell of hot equipment, tyre rubber, fuel, machine oil, and the cold filtered air of a space built for performance rather than comfort.
Lando crossed into the guest area and forced himself not to look at Paula.
“Hi,” he said, and his voice came out warmer for his parents than it had for anyone all day. He leaned in to hug his mother first, then his father, letting the familiarity of it settle him for a second.
“Good to see you,” his mother said softly, one hand briefly on his cheek in that thoughtless, affectionate way she had never quite grown out of.
His father squeezed his shoulder. “FP3 looked good.”
“It felt good,” Lando said. “Car’s in a decent place.”
“We saw,” his mother said, smiling. “You looked happy in it.”
He laughed lightly. “Terrifying that you can tell.”
“Mothers can tell everything,” she said.
He smiled because with them it came more naturally than almost anywhere else. He put his helmet down on the low wall that marked the edge of the guest area, close enough to grab when he needed it, far enough from the rush of the garage that it should have been fine there for thirty seconds.
He expected it to stay there.
That was his first mistake.
The second was forgetting, even for a moment, that somehow things always became worse when Paula was involved.
She still had her headphones on. She was only a step or two away, just next to his mother, and as Lando answered something his father was saying about the traffic from Nice airport, Paula lifted both arms to gather her hair. It was such an ordinary movement but he noticed it without trying to, her fingers sliding through the length of it, elbows lifting, head tipping back slightly.
Then as she moved more sharply than intended, her arm knocked his helmet.
The sound it made hitting the ground was loud enough to slice through the garage noise like a blade. A hard, sickening crack against the floor.
Everything in Lando stopped, Paula froze too.
The headphones slipped around her neck as she turned, eyes widening immediately at the sight of the helmet on the ground. Her face changed at once, shock first, then real alarm.
“Oh my God,” she said, already bending. “I’m sorry, I didn’t...”
Something in him snapped.
“Are you fucking serious?”
His voice cracked through the garage much louder than he intended.
Paula straightened abruptly, staring at him.
Lando stepped forward, the anger already ahead of thought.
“This is fragile,” he said, his words cutting out sharper and harsher with every syllable. “Of course you have to make it drop.”
Her mouth parted.
“Why do you always have to be in the way?” he went on, his voice rising higher than he expected, high enough that it echoed. “Can you not be careful for once?”
Silence hit the garage all at once.
Mechanics looked up. Engineers stopped mid-motion. A couple of team members near the tyre blankets turned toward them with expressions that were first confused, then stunned. Even the people who had not heard every word understood enough from his tone.
The whole garage had gone still around him.
Lando’s breath felt too loud in his own ears. And then he looked at Paula properly.
Her face had gone completely white. And there were tears in her eyes, actual tears.
He saw the moment she realised everyone was looking.
Saw shame flood her face faster than anything else, deeper even than the hurt. Her hand went instinctively to the headphones at her neck as if she could hide behind them, as if any part of her could still be made private after that.
“I’m sorry,” she said under her breath.
It was barely audible. The sort of apology a person makes when they already know it won’t help.
Then she turned and left the garage.
Pietra moved immediately after her.
She didn’t say anything to Lando, but she didn’t need to. The look she threw him as she passed was dark enough to feel physical. Not the easy irritation friends sometimes used when they thought he was being a prick.
This was colder than that.
Lando stayed where he was, he should have said something.
He knew that. Even then, with his pulse still hammering and the whole garage watching. He should have gone after her, should have called her name, should have done anything other than stand there with his hands half-curled at his sides like he had no idea what had just happened.
But he was too stunned by himself.
Because the helmet was fine.
He could see that now, absurdly, too late. One of the team members had already picked it up and was checking it with the calm efficiency of someone trying very hard not to look at the scene he had just walked into. There was no dramatic damage. No visible crack. No disaster.
The outburst had been bigger than the mistake. Much bigger, and everyone knew it.
His mother's face had changed in a way that made something collapse in Lando’s chest. She looked stricken first, then profoundly disappointed. As if she had just seen something in him she had always hoped was not there.
It felt worse than anger would have.
A member of the team stepped in before the silence could become unbearable.
“Lando,” he said quietly, holding out another helmet for him to take. “You need to go to the car now.”
Lando looked at him without really seeing him.
“Come on,” he repeat, softer now.
The garage had begun moving again, but only because it had to. Voices returned at half-volume. Headsets crackled. Someone near the front wing pretended very hard to be busy with something urgent. The air felt thick. Contaminated.
Lando took the other helmet, his fingers felt numb around it.
He did not look at the doorway Paula had disappeared through. He could not. He was afraid of what he would see if he did, afraid she might still be there, afraid she might not, afraid of what either possibility would make him feel.
He turned to go.
Lando had never felt so ashamed in his life. The feeling arrived inside his chest all at once, complete and merciless.
Not as a passing stab. Not as embarrassment. As something darker. Something suffocating. It moved through him like cold water poured straight into the center of his chest, making his lungs feel too small, his skin too tight, his own name unbearable inside his own head.
He wanted to say something.
Nothing came.
There was no time for words anyway. Not now. Not with qualifying seconds away and the entire team already rearranging itself around the fact that he had to get in the car and perform as if he had not just humiliated a girl to the point of tears in front of half the garage and his own parents.
So he walked.
Helmet in hand. Mouth dry. Heart beating too hard for reasons that had nothing to do with qualifying.
He walked past the screens and the engineers and the mechanics who were trying not to meet his eyes.
He walked toward the car.
And with every step, one thought repeated itself with the ugly rhythm of a punishment.
Why did I do that ?
Because there had been no real reason.
Because the helmet had not been broken, because she had apologised immediately. Because she obviously didn't do that on purpose.
It had been about something else.
When he reached the car, the world narrowed by force rather than relief.
Hands moved around him. Someone adjusted something near the cockpit. His engineer’s voice came into his ear, steady, professional, careful. The halo cut the world into pieces. The straps tightened across his shoulders. The routine closed around him like armour.
And as he sat there, strapped into the car, seconds away from being sent out into the most important session of the weekend, Lando understood with a kind of dread that went all the way down to bone that whatever had just broken in that garage had not been carbon fibre at all.
And the reason why it trigger his anger so easily was what preocupped him the most.
Qualifying ended like a punishment.
P4.
In Monaco, fourth was not almost good. Fourth was a locked door. Fourth was looking at the top three from the wrong side of the glass and knowing that, short of rain, a miracle, or someone else’s mistake, Sunday had already narrowed itself into damage limitation. Around here, the barriers were too close, the streets too tight, the race too stubborn. Overtaking was a theory more than a plan.
P4 meant he had failed in the only session that truly mattered.
The car had felt good all morning. FP3 had given him confidence. The balance had been there. The grip had been there. The track had opened beneath him the way it sometimes did when everything aligned and he could feel the lap arriving before he had even finished it. He had gone into qualifying thinking he could do something with that.
Then the day had split in half. There was the part before the garage, and the part after.
After, everything had been wrong.
He had still driven. Instinct and training and years of repetition had carried him through the motions. He had put the visor down, taken instructions, built the tyres, pushed when told to push. But none of it had felt clean. His mind kept snagging on things that had nothing to do with sector times and traffic windows.
It kept coming back to her.
By the time he climbed out of the car, the frustration inside him had hardened into something almost unmanageable. It had nowhere good to go. Not into the team, because they had done their jobs. Not into the car, because the pace had been there. Not into Monaco itself, though he wanted to blame the track for existing. So it turned inward and stayed into his chest, hot and poisonous.
Then came the media pen, he hated the media pen after bad qualifying sessions.
It was always worse when he had underperformed just enough to be asked why, but not enough to be pitied. They wanted to know whether he had cracked, whether the car had disappointed him, whether he was angry, whether the championship pressure was starting to show again even a year after he had already won the thing that should have bought him peace and somehow never had.
He walked into the lights with his shoulders still tight and his face already arranged into something neutral.
It lasted approximately thirty seconds.
One journalist asked about the final lap. Another asked whether Ferrari’s pace had surprised him.
He gave clipped but usable answers, each sentence polished by habit into something they could quote without taking too much from him.
Then one of them said, “Lando, there was apparently an incident in the garage before qualifying.”
He froze.
The journalist kept going.
“Some people heard you scream at one of the guests. What happened?”
For a second he genuinely did not understand the question.
Or rather, he understood it too well and could not understand how it had escaped the garage at all.
How did they know that?
He could feel his PR manager somewhere to his left, not yet intervening, probably hoping the question would die if he answered it carefully.
The journalist, sensing that he had landed somewhere, pressed on.
“Apparently it was a young woman, a guest,” he said. “Do you find it annoying, the fact that VIP guests are so close to your personal space at work? Would you prefer the team only invited families?”
“No,” Lando said at once.
The word came out too fast. He forced himself to breathe.
“No,” he repeated, more controlled this time. “That’s not what it was.”
The journalist nodded, though not in agreement. More like encouragement.
“Because apparently,” he continued, glancing down at his notes, “she made your helmet fall, and of course those are very expensive. Will she be paying for the damage?”
Lando stared at him.
There was something obscene about hearing it phrased like that. The accident turned into a little story, his own temper was translated into the language of financial inconvenience, as if the problem had been the cost of the helmet and not the way he had spoken to her.
The journalist leaned in immediately. “Then why scream at her? It must have been pretty serious.”
Lando said nothing and the silence lengthened.
The lights felt hotter. The microphones closer. Somewhere behind the cameras someone shifted their weight, and the quiet sound made the whole moment feel even more exposed.
He could hear his pulse in his ears.
The truth sat there, obvious and impossible: because I lost control. Because I was ashamed before I shouted and ashamed after. Because for some reason every interaction with Paula turns rotten in my hands before I understand what I’m doing. Because the only way I found to communicate with her is through anger.
His PR manager stepped closer and lowered her voice enough that only he could hear.
“Change subject,” she whispered. “Now.”
Lando blinked once.
Then he said, with a stiffness he could not quite smooth out, “I think we should focus on the race tomorrow and not this sort of futile moment.”
The word hung there the second he said it. He knew it had landed wrong.
The journalist nodded, thanked him, and moved on to someone else with the efficiency of a man already composing the article in his head.
Lando walked away before anyone could stop him again.
His phone buzzed before he was halfway back to McLaren hospitality.
He looked down out of reflex, thumb unlocking the screen before common sense could intervene, and there it was already: an article pushed up by some racing account hungry for outrage.
LANDO NORRIS LOOSING HIS TEMPER IN THE GARAGE BEFORE QUALI SAYING VIP GUEST ARE USELESS AND FUTILE.
He stopped walking. For a moment he simply stared at the words.
It’s really not what he said.
He locked the phone and shoved it back into his pocket.
The paddock around him felt blurred and hostile. Too many people. Too much light. Too many possible faces that might already have seen the headline, already have an opinion, already be building a cleaner version of his worst moment than he deserved.
He kept his head down and went straight to his driver room without speaking to anyone.
Inside, the silence hit differently.
He shut the door behind him and exhaled, long and ragged, finally letting his shoulders sag. The adrenaline from qualifying had soured into exhaustion. He wanted five minutes alone. Five minutes to sit down, take off the rest of his gear, not think, not explain, not defend himself to anyone.
But he saw his mother.
She was sitting in the chair by the far wall, hands folded in her lap, posture too still for someone at ease.
Lando stopped, for a second neither of them spoke.
And because he knew immediately, from the way she was looking at him, why she was there, dread moved through him so cleanly it was almost a relief.
“Please, Mum,” he said quietly. “Not now, okay?”
He tried to make his voice tired rather than defensive. Tried to make it sound like a request and not what it really was: an attempt to escape.
He needed her to leave. Not because he didn’t know what she was going to say. Because he knew exactly. And he know she was right.
His mother stood.
“No,” she said. “You won’t avoid this, young man.”
He closed his eyes briefly.
“Mum...”
“Who raised you exactly?” she asked.
The question was not loud. It didn’t need to be. There was more force in the hurt beneath it than there would have been in shouting.
He looked away.
“Not now, Mum,” he said, trying again, weaker now. “Please.”
“No, Lando,” she said, stepping closer. “Tell me. Because this isn’t how I educated my son.”
The shame that had been following him all afternoon seemed to settle heavier in his chest.
He didn’t answer.
His mother’s voice changed then, not softer exactly, but less like anger and more like grief.
“You clearly saw she didn’t do it on purpose,” she said. “The helmet was fine. I saw that, everyone saw that. So why did you have to scream at that poor girl?”
Poor girl.
The phrase stung more than he expected.
Because his mother did not know Paula the way he knew Paula. Did not know the years of friction, the endless snapping, the feeling that every room sharpened when Paula entered it. To his mother, this was simple. A mistake, an apology, an ugly reaction. And maybe simplicity made it worse, not better, because stripped of all the old history he liked to hide behind, what was left of his behaviour was exactly what it had looked like: cruel.
“I was nervous,” he muttered.
The excuse sounded pathetic even to him.
His mother’s eyebrows lifted. “And?”
Lando swallowed.
She did not let him look away.
“Does being nervous allow you to be rude?” she asked.
The word pressed at the back of his throat before he gave it permission.
“No,” he said finally. “No, it doesn’t.”
He was ashamed enough now that even hearing himself speak felt embarrassing. There was no real defiance left in him. Only the stupid instinct to wriggle away from consequences and the deeper, heavier knowledge that he did not deserve to.
His mother nodded once.
“Good,” she said. “Now you will apologise to her properly.”
He stared at her. For one stupid second he thought maybe he had misheard.
“Mum, come on,” he said, the old reflexive protest rising immediately. “Please don’t do that.”
“Lando. It’s not negotiable.”
The warning in her voice stopped him halfway through whatever excuse he had been about to offer.
He laughed once, softly and without humour, and dragged both hands over his face. “You don’t understand.”
“Then explain it to me.”
“It’s not…” He dropped his hands and looked at the floor. “I know her.”
His mother waited.
“She’s Pietra’s friend,” he said. “She knows me. It’s not like that. She knows I can be intense sometimes.”
There was a beat of silence.
Then his mother said, with devastating calm, “And that excuses it?”
He looked up. She was watching him with a steadiness that made lying impossible.
“No,” she said before he could try. “It doesn’t. It excuses nothing. You made her cry.”
The sentence landed between them with a horrible finality.
His chest tightened.
“She didn’t know where to put herself after,” his mother went on. “I saw her after, she was mortified.”
He said nothing.
There was nothing to say.
He remembered Paula standing there, the whole garage silent around her. He remembered the way she’d apologised under her breath as if trying to disappear without taking up any more of the air he’d already poisoned. He remembered Pietra’s look. His father’s face. The mechanics pretending not to see.
And now, hearing it described from his mother’s mouth, he was forced into the perspective he had been avoiding since the moment it happened.
Not his anger. Not his nerves. Not his ruined qualifying. Hers.
Her humiliation. Her tears. The fact that there had been nowhere for her to hide.
His mother took another step toward him.
“You will go to her, and you will apologise,” she said quietly.
He let out a breath that was almost a laugh, almost a groan. “Mum…”
“Lando.”
He looked at her and she held his gaze without blinking.
The room felt very small.
Part of him wanted to argue. To say it would only make things worse. To say Paula didn’t want to hear from him. To say they had history, that this wasn’t some random act of cruelty dropped out of nowhere, that everything between them had always been wrong and jagged and exhausting.
But none of it would matter.
And beneath the excuses, beneath the stubbornness, beneath the humiliation of being lectured like a child after one of the worst qualifying sessions he could remember, there was another truth he could not look away from anymore: She deserved an apology. A real one.
Because he had hurt her.
He had hurt her in public, and no amount of shame on his side changed what she had been made to stand through.
His mother’s expression softened then, but only a little.
“I know you’re angry,” she said. “I know you’re disappointed. I know this hasn’t been the day you wanted. But none of that gives you the right to take it out on someone else.”
Something inside him winced at the phrasing, because she was right and because he hated that she was right.
He had taken the worst of himself and thrown it at Paula because apparently being cruel to her had become too easy. Easier than admitting what had actually been wrong.
“I know,” he said.
His voice came out hoarse.
His mother looked at him for another second, as if checking whether he meant it.
Then she nodded once. “Good."
He found her almost twenty minutes later, after walking the length of the paddock twice with his pulse still wrong in his throat.
At first he told himself he was only looking because his mother had cornered him into it, because there was no version of the evening where she let it go, and because if he didn’t at least try, he would have to sit through dinner under the full weight of her disappointment. But that explanation did not survive long once he was actually out there, moving through the thinning crowds with his eyes cutting over every face, every hospitality entrance, every quiet corner where someone might go to gather themselves after being humiliated in public.
His mind was split between the bitterness of P4, the media mess already building around the garage incident, and the increasingly unavoidable fact that no matter how many excuses he assembled for himself, he found no real explanation to why he had snap at her like this.
By the time he found her, the sky had gone darker and the paddock had started to hollow out.
She was standing in one of the quieter service corridors near the back of the hospitality area, close to a side exit that opened toward the harbour. Not completely hidden, but removed enough to suggest she had chosen the place carefully. There was a bench against the wall, a dim overhead light, a stack of unused equipment cases pushed to one side. Through the half-open door beside her, he could see a strip of night and the distant blur of lights on the water.
She was alone.
Pietra must have left her for a moment.
Paula had one arm wrapped around herself and her phone in the other hand, though she was not looking at it. Her shoulders were squared in the way people held themselves when they were trying very hard not to look hurt in case anyone saw them. Her hair had been tied back now, not neatly, just enough to keep it out of her face. In the low light, she looked tired in a way he had never really noticed before.
For a second he only stood there, watching her.
Then she sensed him and looked up, the moment she recognised him, something in her face shut immediately.
Lando’s throat felt dry.
“Paula.”
She did not move.
“What?”
The word was flat. Tired. Defensive in the way tired people became when they had no energy left for performance.
He shoved his hands into his pockets because otherwise he would have been standing there with them useless at his sides, every bit as awkward as he felt.
“Can we talk?” he asked.
Her mouth twitched once, without humour.
“We do that all the time,” she said. “It never goes well.”
He exhaled slowly. “Privately.”
Paula looked past him, as if checking whether anyone had followed.
Then back at him.
“We already are private.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes,” she said. “I do. That’s why I’m suspicious.”
The old instinct rose immediately, the one that made him want to answer the sarcasm instead of the meaning underneath it. It was almost physical with her, that pull toward the worst version of himself. But he forced it down.
“Please,” he said, and hated how strained it sounded. “Just five minutes.”
She stared at him long enough that he thought she might refuse.
Instead she said, “Fine.”
She pushed away from the wall and stepped further down the corridor. Lando followed, the distance between them never quite closing. He stopped a few feet away from her.
For a moment neither of them said anything.
The silence wasn’t empty. It was packed with too much history. Too many ruined conversations. Too many versions of them facing each other like this with one of them armed and the other one not yet pretending not to bleed.
Paula folded her arms.
“Well?” she asked.
Lando looked at her and realised, with fresh irritation at himself, that he had rehearsed none of this. He had been so consumed by the fact that he had to apologise that he had somehow not thought through the actual shape of it. How to begin. Which words to choose. Whether saying sorry would sound like enough when it clearly wasn’t.
“I came to apologise,” he said at last.
Paula’s expression did not change. Not even slightly.
“That’s new,” she said.
It was the tone that got him, polite in exactly the wrong way, cool and brittle and carrying just enough contempt to make apology feel immediately impossible.
He frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Nothing. You came to apologise. I'm not used to it, that's it.
“There,” he said, irritation sharpening already. “You do this every time.”
“Do what?”
“This. That tone.”
She stared at him as if he had just stepped off a cliff in front of her and expected applause.
“My tone?” she repeated.
“Yes.”
Paula actually looked at the ceiling for a second, then back at him.
Lando clenched his jaw.
He had come here to do the right thing. He had come here with humiliation already raw under his skin, with his mother’s words still in his ears, with the very genuine intention of telling her he had been wrong and that she had not deserved any of it. And somehow within two minutes Paula had managed to make him feel cornered again, like he was the one being mocked for showing up at all.
“I’m trying to do the right thing,” he said.
Paula laughed again, but this time it cracked against something harder.
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
“Because from where I’m standing,” she said, “it sounds a lot like you’re pretending to be sorry.”
The words hit cleanly. Too cleanly.
Lando’s expression hardened. “I’m not pretending.”
“You are,” she said, quieter now, and somehow more cutting for it. “You came here because you know you behaved like a prick and now you want me to stand here nicely and let you feel better about it.”
His temper flared so fast it frightened him.
“That’s not what it is.”
“No?” Paula said. “Then what are you doing here?”
“I came back to apology, at least let me talk.”
She blinked at him once, like she genuinely had not expected him to say something so stupid out loud.
“Oh,” she said. “Excuse me I've stop you in your pathetic attempt of an apologie.”
Lando dragged a hand through his hair, already feeling the conversation slipping somewhere further away, drowned under the familiar rhythm of this: her sharpening, him answering, the old war machinery of them grinding into motion before either of them had even properly chosen it.
“I came to say I was sorry,” he said through his teeth.
Paula looked at him for a long moment.
Then she said, “Did you. Or did your mother make you?”
The corridor went still.
Lando felt the humiliation of that land all over again, his mother’s face, her voice, the unbearable clarity of being sent out into the paddock like a child told to clean up after himself.
He should have said yes.
Should have said it honestly, even half honestly. Yes, she told me to, but I also know I should.
Instead his pride moved first.
“That’s not the point.”
Her eyes narrowed. “So that’s a yes.”
“It’s none of your business.”
Paula gave him a look full of exhausted disbelief. “You came here to apologise and you’re already lying to me. That has to be some kind of record, even for you.”
“I’m not lying.”
“Please.”
“It’s not just because of her.”
The second he said it, he knew it sounded defensive instead of sincere.
Paula heard it too.
She let out a small breath and looked away, toward the crack of night beyond the side door. “God.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Say it.”
She turned back to him, anger finally sparking properly now.
“No, actually,” she said. “Why should I? So you can twist it around and tell me my tone is wrong again?”
“You always do this,” he snapped. “You say half of something and then act like I’m insane for reacting.”
Her face changed.
Not into softness. Into hurt sharpened by anger.
“Reacting?” she repeated. “That’s what you call screaming at me in front of half the garage?”
“You know that's not what I meant”
“Then why am I standing here feeling like I’m the one that should say sorry for dropping your helmet by accident?”
“You’re turning this into something it isn’t.”
She stared at him.
For a heartbeat the anger left her face completely, and what remained was something much worse, disbelief so deep it looked almost like resignation.
“Something it isn’t ?” she repeated.
Lando knew he should stop. He couldn’t.
It was like watching himself walk further into fire and still being unable to turn back.
“You know what I mean,” he said. “You act like...”
“Like what?”
He hesitated.
Paula stepped closer, just one step, but it changed the shape of the space between them completely. Her eyes were bright now, not with tears yet, but with the effort of holding them back or killing them before they arrived.
“Go on,” she said. “I act like what?”
Lando’s pulse beat hard in his throat.
“This is why I didn’t want to do this,” he muttered.
Something in him recoiled and struck back before he could think.
“I say one thing,” he snapped, “and suddenly I’m the villain all over again. Like always.”
“All over again?” she said. “You mean because you keep doing it?”
His anger surged.
“At least I say it to your face.”
Paula looked at him with naked contempt. “Do you want a medal?”
“No, I’d just like one conversation with you that doesn’t turn into this.”
She stared at him in genuine disbelief. “You came to find me.”
“And I’m regretting it.”
“Believe me,” she said, voice shaking now, “that feeling is mutual.”
There was a silence after that, hot and ugly and breathing.
Somewhere outside the service door, footsteps passed and faded. The harbour lights trembled in the distance. The air smelled faintly of metal and sea.
Lando could feel how far he had wandered from what he had meant to do, and the awareness only made him angrier. At himself, at her, at the fact that with Paula everything became a fight for territory in seconds. It was never about the original wound for long. It was always about who would leave with the final word lodged like a blade between the ribs of the other.
He heard himself say, “You know, maybe if you didn’t take everything so personally...”
Paula actually flinched.
“...then maybe we wouldn’t have to do this every single time.”
For one terrible second she looked like he had slapped her.
Then her expression went cold enough to freeze the air around them.
“Take things personally?” she said quietly. “You just screamed at me in front of your whole team.”
“I said I wanted to apologise.”
“No,” she said. “You wanted to get through the apology. There’s a difference.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is.”
“You don’t know what I want.”
Her laugh came again, broken this time.
“No,” she said. “Clearly I don’t know anything about you, do I?”
The sentence landed harder than it should have.
“Great,” she whispered. “Then this should be easy for you.”
He frowned. “What should?”
“Just say that you hate me and let's all get over with this,” she said.
The words came out flat. Not dramatic. That made them worse.
“I don’t hate you.”
Paula smiled, and it was one of the saddest expressions he had ever seen on another human being because it wasn’t really a smile at all. Just her mouth pulling into the shape of one because the alternative was too exposed. He hate it so much for a reason he cannot comprehend.
“Please,” she said. “At least be honest to me, I know you despise me.”
He felt anger and shame collide inside him so violently that for a second he could barely separate them.
“No, you're the one who hate me for some reason,” he said. “That’s the problem.”
“For some reason?” Paula shot back. “I've every reasons to not like you Lando.”
That answer hit him with enough force to leave him speechless.
Because he don't understand what she is saying. And worse he didn't understand why it hurt him so bad to hear her say it aloud.
Paula looked furious now, properly furious, but beneath it was too much hurt to hide anymore.
“I’ve watched you with everyone else,” she said. “Sponsors, journalists, fans, your team, strangers in corridors. You can be patient. You can be kind. You can be careful. So why is it that every time it’s me, you act like the worst version of yourself and then stand there pretending not to know what happened?”
Lando felt himself go still. Because there was no good answer.
Paula shook her head once, as if she had gone too far already and could not bear the sight of what she had finally said aloud.
“Forget it, it's pointless trying to solves things with you, I knew it a long time ago” she muttered and her eyes suddenly feeling with tears once again.
He opened his mouth to answer, and realised he don't know what to say, for once he didn't have the last word, all that remain inside him was an uncomfortable feeling that he don't have the full picture.
But before he could try to saya nything, the corridor door flew open hard enough to slam into the wall.
Pietra came in first while Max was half a step behind her.
Both of them stopped dead when they took in the scene: Paula tears, Lando rigid with anger he no longer understood, the air between them so charged it felt almost visible.
“What the hell is going on?” Pietra demanded.
Paula looked away immediately, wiping her tears furiously under her eyes with the heel of her hand as if she hated that anyone could see her cry.
Max swore under his breath.
Lando stepped back at once, as though distance might make all of this look less ugly.
“It’s nothing,” he said.
Pietra turned on him so fast the movement was almost violent.
“Oh, shut up.”
The words cracked through the corridor.
Lando stared at her.
Pietra moved straight to Paula’s side, one hand going to her arm instinctively, protective without asking permission. Paula didn’t pull away, which told Lando more than anything else about how badly this had gone.
Max stayed where he was, but his eyes went from Paula to Lando and hardened in a way Lando had never seen directed at himself before.
“I thought you were going to apologise,” Max said quietly.
“I tried.”
“Jesus Christ,” Pietra muttered, “You came here to apologise and made her cry again?”
“I didn’t...”
“Don’t,” Max cut in. “Don’t even start.”
Lando’s anger flared reflexively at being cornered, at all of them looking at him like this, at the fact that once again the whole thing had slipped beyond his control and turned into a shape he hated.
“She said things too.”
The second it left his mouth, he knew how childish it sounded.
Pietra stared at him in disbelief. “Are you hearing yourself?”
“She was...”
“Enough,” Max said.
Lando stopped.
Max did not raise his voice. He didn’t need to. There was something in the flatness of it that cut far deeper than shouting would have.
“Enough,” he repeated. “You do not get to stand here and make this worse because you can’t stand not being right for five minutes.”
The words landed like a slap.
For once, Lando had nothing ready.
Pietra was already guiding Paula toward the door, her hand still firm around her arm. Paula kept her face turned away now, as if even looking at him had become intolerable.
The service door swung shut behind them with a hollow metallic sound that seemed to echo far longer than it should have.
Silence fell.
Max stayed where he was for a second, watching Lando with a mixture of anger and disbelief so severe it was almost unreadable.
Then he shook his head.
“Mate,” he said, and his voice had gone rough in a way that made it worse, not better. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
He did not wait for an answer, he turned and left too.
He had gone there to apologise. That had been true.
And yet somewhere between her first answer and his first defensive reply, the apology had become secondary, then irrelevant, then entirely swallowed by the older instinct between them.
Something within himself is always turning into something wrong the moment he is next to her.
