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clove! 𑣲.She/her. twenty. canadian. lando norris' pr manager. fics as well as general content. inbox is open - come talk to me!! requests are also open! ۶ৎ

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#pin post!#ln4 #lando norris #formula 1 #lando norris fic

verstarris

DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

There was only one rule in Oscar and Lando’s friendship: you, Oscar’s sister, were completely off-limits. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Lando Norris had never been very good at following rules.

pairing. fratboy! Lando Norris x Piastri! fem! reader.

warnings. non-f1 au; university au. romance, humor, friendship, 15k words, implied smut; brief talk of sex. brother’s best friend, slow burn -ish. sorority/fraternity culture; partying, alcohol & cigarettes use, profanity. title from/insp. by dirty little secret by the all-american rejects.

LANDO DIDN’T KNOCK.

He never did. He was the kind of person who moved through the frat house like every door belonged to him, like every room was already waiting for him to burst in with some half‑finished sentence. So when the door to Oscar’s room swung open hard enough to rattle the frame, it wasn’t surprising. It was just Lando being Lando.

“Mate, have you seen my lapt—”

The words stopped. They didn’t fade or trail off. They just… died.

Oscar was sitting at his desk, one hand still resting on his keyboard, clearly in the middle of talking to someone. And you were on his bed, legs crossed, a soft blanket bunched under your hands like you’d been sitting there for a while. The room felt different with you in it—quieter, warmer, almost like Lando had stepped into the wrong place entirely.

His gaze flicked between you and Oscar, and suddenly the laptop didn’t matter at all.

clovermoters

so cute i’m obsessed!!

#lando norris x reader #cloves list of fics that she adores

landojournal

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁ TOAST!

Part 3 of 3

Synopsis: Lando’s least favorite repeat call becomes the one he secretly starts hoping for when the woman living in the “toaster house” makes every emergency a little harder to leave.

Pairing: Firefighter! Lando Norris x Reader

Warnings: Mentions of house fires, grief, and loss of loved ones (reader mentions her grandparents who passed away), loss of home, major injuries, hospitalization.

Words: 7,737.

Author’s note: Hiiiiii! I’m so sorry this chapter took as long as it did, it was supposed to be up last Sunday, but it’s been such a busy week at both of my jobs that finding even one minute to write, let alone read and re-read everything before posting, has been hard. Thank you so much for your patience with me! ♡ Again, thank you to my friend @clovermoters for reading this first and helping me work through my ideas for this part, this chapter would honestly not be what it is without her, and that’s why I named a character after her! Anyway, I hope you enjoy this last chapter as much as I loved writing it. ♥︎

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁ The truck hadn’t fully stopped before he was out of his seat.

“Lando—” Zak called.

“I’m fine.” He wasn’t. He grabbed his gear anyway, hands moving on muscle memory alone while his mind stayed fixed on one single thought: she’s in there.

The neighbor who’d called it in was standing at the edge of the property, wrapped in someone else’s coat, shaking too hard to get full sentences out. “I don’t know if she’s— I saw her car, I don’t think she— the lights were on upstairs and then I heard something, like an alarm, and then—”

“Did you see her leave?” Oscar asked, already moving toward the hose line.

“No. No, I didn’t see her leave.”

That was all Lando needed to hear.

Zak was already barking orders, splitting the crew, calling for a second line, but Lando had stopped processing any of it. He’d done this job for five years. He knew procedure. He knew you didn’t run into a burning structure without a plan, without backup, without confirming exactly what you were walking into.

He went anyway.

“Lando!” Zak called, more urgent this time, but Lando was already through the front door, heat rolling over him in a wall thick enough to feel through his gear, smoke folding low and black across the ceiling. The house he’d come to know in pieces — the hallway light, the bookshelf of records, the kitchen with its stubborn faulty outlet — had become something unrecognizable, ceiling groaning somewhere above him.

“Upstairs,” he said into his radio, voice steadier than he felt. “I’m going up.”

“Lando, wait for—”

He didn’t wait.

The staircase held, barely, groaning under his weight as he took the steps two at a time. He knew this house’s layout only from months of standing in its doorway, from glimpses through open rooms while he worked on some new electrical failure, and he prayed, in the wordless way people prayed when there wasn’t time for anything more formal, that his memory of it held.

Your door. He found it on instinct more than sight, shoulder hitting the frame hard enough to jar something loose in his own chest.

“Y/N!” His voice cracked on your name in a way he’d deny later, if anyone asked. “Y/N, can you hear me?”

Nothing.

Smoke hung heavy across the room, and for one horrible second he lost his bearings entirely, until he saw you, collapsed near the window, like you’d been trying to reach it, one hand still outstretched toward the latch you hadn’t managed to open.

“No, no, no—” He was across the room before he finished the thought, dropping to his knees beside you, fingers finding your throat with a desperation he didn’t have the presence of mind to hide. A pulse. Faint, but there.

“I’ve got her,” he said into the radio, voice breaking now in earnest. “Second floor, west bedroom, I’ve got her, I need—”

The ceiling groaned again, louder, closer, and Lando didn’t wait to hear the rest of his own sentence. He hauled you up into his arms, the weight of you slight and terrifyingly still, and turned back toward the door with the kind of focus that left no room for fear, even as some distant part of him understood, clearly, that fear was exactly what he should have been feeling.

The staircase had grown worse in the minute he’d been gone. Smoke thicker, heat closer, something structural groaning somewhere below that he chose not to think about. He took the steps as fast as he dared with you cradled against his chest, your head tucked beneath his chin, willing you to breathe, willing the house to hold together for thirty more seconds, willing his own legs not to give out beneath the two of you.

He made it to the front door as something behind him gave way with a sound like the world tearing in half.

He was three strides past the threshold when it happened. A deep, structural groan that seemed to come from the house’s very bones, followed by a crack loud enough to swallow every other sound on the street. Behind him, the staircase he’d just descended folded in on itself, the upper floor giving way in a rush of flame and collapsing timber, a wave of heat and pressure shoving hard against his back like the house itself was trying to pull him back in.

Lando didn’t look back. He couldn’t afford to. He curled his body around you instead, one arm braced over your head, and half ran, half stumbled the last few feet off the porch as the front windows blew outward behind him, glass scattering across what used to be your grandmother’s flowerbeds.

“Lando!” Zak’s voice, close now, hands suddenly at his shoulders, at your legs, helping bear the weight of you the second he was in reach. “I’ve got her, I’ve got her, let go—”

He didn’t want to let go. Some part of his brain had locked around the idea that if he set you down, if he let anyone else carry you, something would slip through his fingers along with you. But his training surfaced through the panic just enough to remind him that you needed more than his arms right now. You needed a stretcher. Oxygen. People who could do something more than carry you.

He laid you down on the gurney, the paramedics rushed forward with hands that weren’t quite steady, and for one suspended second, kneeling there on the wet pavement with the house roaring behind him, all Lando could do was look at your face and try to remember how to breathe himself.

“Pulse is weak but there,” one of the paramedics, Clover, called out, already fitting a mask over your face. “Possible smoke inhalation, unresponsive, let’s move—”

“I’m coming with her.” It wasn’t a request. Lando was already on his feet, already reaching for the edge of the stretcher, and something in his voice must have carried enough weight that nobody argued, not even Zak, who caught his eye for one long second and then simply nodded, like he understood exactly what he was looking at and had decided, for now, not to say anything about it.

Lando climbed into the back of the ambulance still in half his gear, soot smudged across his jaw, hands trembling now that there was nothing left to do with them but hold onto the stretcher rail as the doors slammed shut and the sirens picked back up, tearing off into the night.

Behind them, what was left of 4 Chertsey Road folded quietly into itself, flames finally beginning to lose their hold now that there was nothing left to consume.

Zak watched the ambulance pull away for exactly as long as he could afford to, then turned back to the fire like a man setting something aside to deal with later. “Line two, now!” he shouted, voice cutting through the chaos with the flat authority of someone who’d learned a long time ago that panic helped no one. “We’ve lost the structure, we’re not losing the block. Oscar, exposure check on the neighboring properties, go.”

Oscar was already moving, but some part of him was still back on the porch, still watching Lando disappear into smoke he had no business walking into alone. He shoved the thought down. There’d be time for that later. Right now there was a wall of heat radiating off what used to be a house, close enough to threaten the wooden fence line and the property beside it.

“Clear on the east side,” he called back, hose already braced against his shoulder, water arcing up in a wide defensive sweep. “West side’s got exposure, we need a line on that fence before it catches.”

“On it.” Zak redirected two of the crew with a jerk of his hand, already calculating containment lines in his head the way he’d done a thousand times before, though rarely with this particular knot sitting behind his ribs. He’d seen Lando’s face before he tore off through that front door. He knew exactly what that expression meant, and he knew exactly how badly it could have gone.

It hadn’t. That was the only thing keeping his voice level now.

The house continued its slow collapse, timber giving way in stages, sending up sparks every time another section gave up the fight. What had been a staircase an hour ago was now unrecognizable, folded into the growing wreckage of the ground floor, flame chewing through what remained of a life built up over decades. Furniture, photographs, whatever this house had held onto for the person who’d lived in it and the people who’d raised her in it before that.

Oscar kept the water trained on the fence line, jaw tight, watching flame reflected in the wet pavement. “Think she’ll make it?” he asked, not looking away from the fire, voice pitched low enough that it wouldn’t carry past Zak.

“Don’t know.” Zak’s answer came just as quiet, just as clipped. “Pulse when they loaded her wasn’t nothing. That’s something.”

“And if she doesn’t.”

Zak didn’t answer that one at all. There wasn’t a good answer, and both of them knew it, so instead they worked in the kind of silence that came from twenty years combined of doing a job that occasionally demanded you not think too hard about the parts you couldn’t control.

It took another forty minutes to get the fire fully knocked down, the structure reduced by then to a blackened shell, roofline gone entirely, the record shelf by the window nothing but ash and warped vinyl fused into something unrecognizable. Oscar caught sight of it near the end, one melted, twisted shape half-buried under debris, and felt something tighten in his chest that had nothing to do with smoke inhalation.

He thought about the way Lando used to talk about that shelf. Alphabetized, he’d said once, half-laughing, half-something else. Oscar hadn’t teased him about it that time.

By the time they finally called it, hose lines coiled and the last hot spots doused, the sky had gone from black to the grey edge of early morning, and Zak stood for a moment surveying what was left, hands on his hips, chest heaving with exhaustion he wouldn’t admit to in front of the crew.

“Someone needs to go stay with Lando at the hospital,” he said eventually, voice quieter now that the adrenaline had nowhere left to go. “Make sure he’s actually looked at himself for smoke inhalation instead of just standing there staring at her.”

Oscar huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “You know he won’t leave.”

“I know.” Zak exhaled, long and slow, watching the last curl of smoke rise off the wreckage and disappear into the grey morning sky. “Go anyway.”

Oscar found him exactly where he expected to. A plastic chair dragged as close to the hospital room door as the nurses would allow, elbows on his knees, staring at a spot on the floor like it owed him an answer. He was still in half his gear, jacket unzipped, soot dried into the creases of his knuckles. Nobody had managed to get him to change, apparently, or even look at his own oxygen levels, which was exactly the kind of thing Zak had predicted with irritating accuracy.

“You look like hell,” Oscar said, dropping into the chair beside him.

“Feel like it too.”

“Did anyone actually check you over? You went in after her without—”

“I’m fine, Oscar.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Lando didn’t answer that, which was answer enough. Oscar let it go for now, filing it away the way he filed away everything, and looked instead through the door to the room, where you lay still beneath a tangle of monitor wires, an oxygen mask fogging faintly with each breath. Small. Impossibly small, in a way people always seemed to look in hospital beds, stripped of whatever context made them feel like themselves.

“How is she?” he asked, quieter now.

“Stable.” Lando said the word like he’d been repeating it to himself for the last hour, like saying it enough times might make it feel more solid than it currently did. “Smoke inhalation, some burns on her hand, nothing— nothing they’re worried about. They said the fact that she made it out when she did—” He stopped, jaw working, and didn’t finish the sentence.

Oscar let the silence sit for a moment before he spoke again. “You went in without backup.”

“I know.”

“You know Zak has to write that up.”

“I know, Oscar.”

“I’m not lecturing you.” Oscar’s voice softened, dropping the teasing edge it usually carried. “I’m just saying it out loud so you hear what it sounds like. Five years on the job, and you’ve never once broken procedure. Not once. And then—” He gestured vaguely at the window, at the girl behind it, at everything the last few hours had been. “That.”

Lando was quiet for a long moment, gaze fixed on the slow rise and fall of your chest through the door, like he needed to keep watching it to believe it was still happening. “I couldn’t leave her in there.”

“I know you couldn’t.” Oscar’s voice had none of its usual edge left in it now. “That’s what worries me.”

Lando finally looked at him, something raw and unguarded in his expression that Oscar rarely got to see outside of the very worst calls. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if—”

“Don’t.” Oscar said it firmly, cutting him off before he could finish that thought out loud. “Don’t go there. She’s alive. You got her out. That’s the only version of tonight that matters.”

Lando exhaled, long and unsteady, and let his head fall back against the wall behind him, eyes closing for the first time since the fire. “House is gone, Oscar.”

“I know.”

“Everything in it. Everything that was—” He stopped again, throat working. “That was her grandparents’. All of it.”

Oscar didn’t have anything to say to that. There wasn’t a version of comfort that fit a loss that size, so instead he just sat with it, shoulder pressed against Lando’s, the two of them staring through the glass at the same still, quiet room, saying nothing else for a long while.

Eventually, Oscar stood, resting a hand briefly on Lando’s shoulder. “I’ll get someone to check your levels. Don’t argue with me on this one.”

Lando didn’t argue. He just nodded, eyes drifting back to the window, and stayed exactly where he was.

You didn’t wake that first day. Or the second.

Lando stayed as long as they’d let him, folded into that same plastic chair until his back ached and the nurses started giving him looks that walked the line between sympathy and warning. He went home when they told him to, showered because Oscar physically stood outside the bathroom door until he heard the water running, ate because Zak put a plate in front of him and didn’t move until it was empty. He did all the things he was supposed to do.

Then, instead of sleeping, he drove to Chertsey Road.

It looked worse in daylight. Fire always did, there was something almost merciful about the dark, the way it hid what had been lost until morning came along and rendered it in unforgiving detail. The house was a blackened shell now, roofline collapsed entirely, the porch where he’d first heard you laugh reduced to a few scorched boards jutting up out of the rubble like broken teeth.

He stood at the edge of the property for a long moment before he let himself go any closer, hands shoved deep in his pockets, the morning cold enough that his breath fogged in front of him. Someone had taped off the worst of it, though there was nothing left worth protecting. Just ash. Just the skeleton of a life that had existed here for decades before the wiring finally won.

He found the record shelf without really meaning to look for it, or what remained of it, vinyl warped and fused together in the shape of the collapsed shelving, unrecognizable except for the faint, stubborn curve of one sleeve that hadn’t fully burned through. He crouched beside it for a while, not touching anything, just looking, thinking about the twenty-minute answer you’d given him the first time he’d asked about it, the way you’d lit up describing an album he’d never heard of like it mattered more than anything else in the world.

It probably had. It was one of the only things in this house that had been entirely, unapologetically yours, rather than something inherited or left behind.

He thought about the mug on the porch step. The hallway light. The particular creak of the third stair that you’d once told him you’d meant to fix for two years and never had. All of it gone now, folded into ash and blackened timber, and somewhere in a hospital bed two miles from here, you didn’t know yet. You were going to wake up to nothing. No house. No shelf. No proof, beyond memory, that any of it had ever existed at all.

Lando stayed longer than he meant to, crouched in the cold at the edge of what used to be a living room, until his knees ached and the sun had fully risen over the wreckage. He didn’t cry, exactly. He wasn’t sure he had the right to, given that none of this was his to grieve. But something sat heavy in his chest the entire drive back, heavier than exhaustion, heavier than the ache still lingering in his shoulders from the night before.

He understood, with a clarity that scared him a little, that he wasn’t just going to keep showing up at that hospital because it was the decent thing to do.

He was going to keep showing up because he didn’t know how to do anything else anymore.

Oscar was still there when Lando got back, exactly where he’d left him, chair pulled up beside the bed now instead of out in the hallway, arms crossed, looking entirely unbothered by the fact that he’d spent the last two hours sitting with someone who was, technically, a stranger to him.

He looked up when Lando walked in, taking in the state of him. Soot still on his jeans, the careful way he was holding something wrapped in a scorched pillowcase against his chest, and didn’t say anything for a moment.

“What is that,” Oscar asked eventually.

Lando set it down gently on the small table by the window, unwrapping it with more care than the object probably warranted, given its condition. Two records, half-melted, edges warped beyond saving, but the sleeves still — miraculously — legible enough to make out a name and a year.

“From the shelf,” Lando said. “Thought she’d want—” He stopped, not entirely sure how to finish that sentence. “I don’t know. Something. Anything.”

Oscar looked at the records, then at Lando, then let the silence stretch just long enough to make his point without having to say it outright. “You went back to a burned-down house at six in the morning to dig two ruined records out of the ash.”

“I wanted her to have something.”

“Lando.”

“What.”

“You know what.” Oscar’s voice wasn’t teasing now, none of its usual edge to it. Just steady, and a little tired, like he’d been carrying this particular observation around for weeks and had finally run out of patience for pretending he hadn’t. “People don’t do that for a victim. They don’t sit outside a hospital room for two days straight. They don’t drive to a wreckage at dawn looking for salvage because they think it might matter to someone.”

Lando didn’t answer right away, gaze fixed on the two ruined records like they might offer him an easier response than the one Oscar was clearly waiting for.

“She doesn’t have anyone else,” he said finally. “Her file— there’s no next of kin. No emergency contact that picked up. That’s not— that’s not nothing, Oscar.”

“No. It’s not.” Oscar leaned back in his chair, watching him carefully. “But that’s not why you’re here, either. Not really.”

Lando exhaled, long and unsteady, and finally lowered himself into the chair on the other side of the bed, elbows braced on his knees, staring at your still face like it might give him permission to say the next part out loud. “I don’t know when it happened.”

“I do,” Oscar said, not unkindly. “Toaster house. First night. You laughed at something she said and you didn’t even notice you were doing it.”

Lando huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh, rubbing a hand over his face. “This is not fair.”

“Yeah.”

“She just lost everything, Oscar. Everything that was theirs. I can’t—” He shook his head. “It’s not the time. It’s not fair to even be thinking about it right now.”

“Probably not,” Oscar agreed. “Doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

Lando looked up at that, something tired and a little raw in his expression, like he’d been waiting for someone else to say the thing he hadn’t let himself say yet. “I think I’m in love with her.”

Oscar didn’t look surprised. He just nodded slowly, like a man finally getting confirmation on something he’d suspected for months, and reached over to clap a hand against Lando’s shoulder, firm and steady. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I know.”

He fell into a routine without quite deciding to. Between shifts, before shifts, on the handful of hours he was supposed to be sleeping, Lando found himself back at the wreckage more often than he probably should have, picking through ash and warped debris like it mattered more than it probably should, looking for anything that had survived.

It wasn’t much, most days. A ceramic mug, chipped but intact, that had somehow weathered the collapse better than anything around it. A photo frame, glass shattered and the picture beneath it burnt at the edges, an older couple on a porch step, squinting into the sun, arms around each other in the easy way of people who’d been doing it for fifty years. A single, miraculously undamaged teacup that must have been tucked in a cupboard, spared by whatever strange logic decided what fire took and what it left behind.

He brought all of it to the hospital. Set it up quietly on the windowsill of your room, the small table by the bed, arranging it with a kind of care he didn’t examine too closely, like if he got it right, if he made the space feel less sterile and more like something that belonged to you, it might make waking up to the rest of it hurt a little less.

The nurses noticed. One of them, older, kind-eyed, caught him rearranging the photo frame for the third time one evening and said, gently, “You’re not on the visitor list as family, you know.”

“I know,” Lando admitted.

“Doesn’t seem to be stopping you.”

“No,” he agreed. “It doesn’t.”

She didn’t argue further, just gave him a look he couldn’t quite read and let him keep doing what he was doing.

Oscar teased him about it, at first. Asked if he was planning on redecorating the entire room, wondered aloud whether the hospital charged extra for turning a patient’s space into what was, essentially, a small, curated museum of her old life. But even Oscar stopped joking eventually, the day he walked in to find Lando carefully wiping soot from the edge of the photo frame with the corner of his sleeve, jaw tight with a focus that didn’t leave room for teasing.

Zak saw it too, on the one visit he made himself, arms crossed as he took in the windowsill: mug, teacup, photo, the two ruined records propped carefully against the wall. He didn’t say anything about it directly. Just looked at Lando for a long moment, then nodded once, like something had been confirmed that he’d already suspected, and left it alone.

Lando didn’t know, exactly, what he was building toward. He wasn’t foolish enough to think a few salvaged objects could undo what had been lost, or that they’d make the house any less gone. But he thought, if you woke up to gray walls and hospital sheets and absolutely nothing familiar, it would hurt in a way that felt impossible to get past. And if you woke up instead to your grandmother’s teacup on the windowsill, catching the afternoon light… maybe, just maybe, it would hurt a little less.

It was the only thing he knew how to do. So he kept doing it, day after day, until the room looked less like a hospital and a little more like something that might, eventually, feel like home again.

The call came through at the station just after two in the afternoon, right in the middle of equipment checks, and Lando had his phone to his ear before it had even finished its first ring.

“She’s awake,” the nurse said, without preamble, clearly having been given very specific instructions on who to call the second your eyes opened. “She’s a little disoriented, which is normal, but she’s asking for you.”

“I’m coming.” He was already peeling off his gloves, already halfway to the door.

“Lando.” Zak’s voice, not stopping him, just steady. “Go.”

He broke every speed limit on the drive over, and by the time he reached the hospital his hands weren’t entirely steady on the wheel. He made himself slow down in the hallway outside your room, made himself breathe, made himself remember that whatever came next wasn’t about him. It was about you, waking up to a version of your life that had changed completely while you were unconscious.

You were sitting up when he stepped inside, propped against the pillows, an oxygen line still under your nose, looking pale and impossibly tired but awake, eyes finding his the moment he walked in like some part of you had been waiting for exactly that.

“Hi,” you said, voice rough from disuse.

“Hi.” He didn’t trust himself to say much more than that at first, just crossed the room and sank into the chair that had become unofficially his over the last two days, close enough that he could reach you if you needed him to.

You looked around the room slowly, taking in the windowsill, with the the teacup, the photo frame, the mug, the two ruined records propped carefully against the wall, and something in your expression shifted, understanding arriving in pieces. “Those are—” Your voice caught. “That’s from the house.”

“Yeah.” Lando’s throat felt tight. “I went back. Found what I could.”

You reached toward the photo frame with the hand that wasn’t bandaged, fingers hovering just above the glass without quite touching it, like you weren’t sure yet if it was real. Your grandparents looked back at you, squinting into some long-ago sun, arms around each other. “The house,” you said quietly. Not quite a question. Like you already knew, and just needed someone to say it out loud so it would be real.

Lando didn’t look away from you, even though it would’ve been easier. “I’m so sorry. We couldn’t save it. The fire had already taken most of the ground floor by the time we got there, and after we got you out, it went fast. There wasn’t—” He stopped, throat working. “There wasn’t anything left to save.”

You were quiet for a long moment, gaze still fixed on the photograph, and Lando watched something complicated move across your face. Grief, obviously, but something steadier beneath it too, something that looked almost like it had been braced for this exact answer since the moment you opened your eyes and didn’t recognize the ceiling above you.

“I think I knew,” you said eventually. “Before you said it. I just— I didn’t want to ask.”

“You don’t have to talk about it right now. Not if you don’t want to.”

“No, I—” You exhaled, unsteady, blinking hard, and Lando had never wanted so badly to fix something he had absolutely no power to fix. “I just lost them four months apart. And now the house too. Everything they—” You stopped, pressing your good hand briefly against your eyes. “It feels like I’m losing them all over again.”

“I know.” He reached out, carefully, and closed his hand around your uninjured one, grounding rather than presumptuous, giving you every chance to pull away if you needed to. You didn’t. “For what it’s worth— it wasn’t nothing, what we got out. I know it’s not the house. I know it’s not them. But it’s something.”

You looked at the windowsill again, at the mug you recognized instantly, the one your grandmother had used every morning without fail, and something in your face cracked gently open, tears slipping free without the sob that usually came with them, just quiet, tired grief, finally allowed to surface. “You went back for that.”

“I went back for all of it.”

“Why?”

Lando held your gaze, and didn’t have it in him, not in this moment, to hide behind something easier. “Because I couldn’t stand the thought of you waking up to nothing familiar. Not after everything.”

You didn’t say anything to that, not right away. You just tightened your fingers around his, holding on like it was the only steady thing left in a life that had, in the space of a few days, lost almost everything else.

The days after you were discharged were, without question, some of the worst of Lando’s life. Worse, in some strange way, than the fire itself, because at least the fire had given him something to do with his hands.

You’d gone to stay with a friend from university, someone who’d shown up at the hospital the day after you woke, hugging you so hard and crying so openly that Lando had quietly excused himself to give you the room. It was the right call. You needed people who’d known you longer than a handful of house calls, people who could offer you a spare room and familiarity instead of a stranger in uniform, however much that stranger had come to care.

He knew all of that. It didn’t make the not-knowing any easier.

He caught himself checking his phone between calls, at meals, during the two hours of downtime the station allowed on a slow shift, half-hoping for a text that rarely came, because why would it. You were healing, you didn’t owe him updates on said healing, you had an entire life outside the four walls of Chertsey Road that had nothing to do with him. He knew all of that too. It didn’t stop the worry sitting low and constant in his chest, the specific kind of worry that came from caring about someone whose day-to-day existence he no longer had any window into.

Oscar noticed, obviously. Oscar noticed everything.

“You’ve checked your phone four times in the last ten minutes,” he said, not looking up from the truck he was restocking.

“Have not.”

“Five times, now.”

Lando shoved the phone back in his pocket and said nothing, which Oscar seemed to accept as its own kind of concession.

It was six days after your discharge when you finally showed up, not with a text first, not with any warning at all, just the station door opening mid-afternoon while half the crew was scattered around the common room, and there you were. Bandaged hand mostly healed, color back in your face, hair pulled back the way he remembered from all those late-night calls, holding two large tins that smelled, even from across the room, unmistakably of something baked.

Lando was on his feet before he’d fully processed that it was you.

“Hi,” you said, a little shy, glancing around at the room full of firefighters now watching you with open curiosity. “I, um. I wanted to say thank you. Properly. Not while I was half-conscious in a hospital bed.”

Zak was the first to recover, stepping forward with the easy authority of someone used to greeting people at the door. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I wanted to.” You held up the tins. “I made way too much. Banana bread, and some shortbread, because I didn’t know what anyone liked, so I panicked and made both.”

That earned a laugh from the room, tension breaking easily, and within minutes half the crew had descended on the tins with the enthusiasm of people who never turned down free food. Oscar took his slice and immediately migrated toward Lando’s side, watching the exchange with poorly concealed delight.

You made your way through the room slowly, thanking people individually, the ones who’d fought the fire itself, Zak for command, a couple of the guys from the second engine who’d handled containment. And then, finally, you reached Lando, and something in your expression shifted, softened, like you’d been saving this particular thank-you for last on purpose.

“Hi,” you said again, quieter this time.

“Hi.” He was suddenly, acutely aware of every person in the room, though none of them seemed to be paying attention anymore, except Oscar, who was very obviously paying attention, and doing an equally obvious job of pretending not to.

“I wanted to say thank you,” you said. “For the room. The— everything you brought back. I don’t think I said it properly, before. I was still trying to process the house, and I don’t think I told you what it meant, waking up to something that still felt like them.”

“You didn’t have to say anything.”

“I wanted to.” You held his gaze, steady despite the crowded room around you. “It meant more than you probably realize.”

Lando didn’t trust his voice for a second, so he just nodded, something warm settling behind his ribs that had nothing to do with the shortbread Oscar was eating three feet away.

“How are you doing?” he asked eventually. “Really.”

“Better.” You said it like you meant it, mostly. “Staying with my friend for now. Figuring out— everything, honestly. Insurance, and where I actually live now, and all of it. But better.”

“If you need anything—”

“I know.” Something soft crossed your face. “I know where to find you.”

You held his gaze a moment longer, like you weren’t quite ready to let the moment go, then glanced back toward the door.

“Walk me out?”

Lando didn’t need to be asked twice.

“Let me just—” He glanced back at the room, where Oscar had very obviously stopped pretending not to watch, eyebrows raised so high they threatened to disappear into his hairline. Lando shot him a look that promised retribution later. Oscar only grinned wider and gave him an exaggerated thumbs up behind your back.

“Ignore him,” Lando said, already steering the two of you toward the door.

“I always do.”

The afternoon had gone soft and golden outside, that particular hour where the light turned everything a little more forgiving than it had any right to be. You walked slowly, in no apparent hurry, empty tins tucked under one arm, and Lando matched his pace to yours without thinking about it, the way he’d apparently been doing since the very first night.

“So,” you said, after a stretch of comfortable quiet. “Banana bread. Verdict?”

“Better than the shortbread.”

“Liar. You had two pieces of shortbread.”

“I was being thorough.”

“You were being greedy.” But you were smiling when you said it, glancing sideways at him, and Lando felt that smile land somewhere just beneath his ribs, same as it always did.

They reached your car, borrowed, he assumed, from the friend you were staying with, and you stopped beside it, turning to face him properly instead of getting straight in, like you weren’t quite ready for the conversation to end yet either.

“Can I ask you something?” you said. “And you have to actually answer honestly, not just deflect the way you do.”

“I don’t deflect.”

“You absolutely deflect.”

He huffed, caught, and gestured for you to continue. “Fine. Ask.”

You hesitated for just a second, fingers tightening slightly around the tins in your arms, like you were gathering nerve for something you’d been sitting on for a while. “Why did you keep coming back? To the hospital, I mean. And bringing things from the house. That’s— that’s not standard procedure, is it?”

“No,” he admitted. “It’s not.”

“So why?”

He could have deflected. Could have said something about procedure, about victims with no next of kin, about doing right by someone the job had put in his path. It would even have been half true. But you were looking at him with an expression that made it very clear you already suspected the real answer and simply wanted him to be brave enough to say it.

“Because I didn’t know how to stay away,” he said finally. “I tried telling myself it was just— professional concern, or whatever. But it stopped being that a while ago. Honestly, I think it stopped being that around the third call, when you stood on your porch in that ridiculous university hoodie and made me laugh so hard Oscar never let me hear the end of it.”

Something flickered across your face. Surprise, maybe, though not quite enough surprise to suggest you hadn’t hoped for exactly this answer. “Third call,” you repeated softly.

“Third call,” he confirmed. “Give or take. I’ve lost count of how many times I told myself it was nothing.”

You laughed, but it came out a little unsteady, like the sound was covering for something else entirely. “Can I confess something, then?”

“Please.”

“The second time I called— the socket in the bedroom, it wasn’t actually that urgent. I could’ve waited until morning, honestly, could’ve just switched the breaker off myself and dealt with it properly the next day.” You were looking somewhere just past his shoulder now, like it was easier to admit this to the air than to his face directly. “But you’d made me laugh the first time, and I liked how it felt, laughing and being the reason someone laughed like that. So I called anyway.”

Lando stared at you for a long second, something warm and disbelieving spreading slowly through his chest. “You’re telling me you set your own wiring on fire on purpose.”

“I did not say that.” Your mouth twitched, fighting a smile. “I said I was maybe a little less urgent about calling than I let on. There’s a difference.”

“That’s insane. That is actually insane behavior.”

“I panicked! You have a very good laugh, okay, it’s not my fault!”

“You could have just asked for my number like a normal person.”

“Could I? Genuinely, in what version of that scenario do I just walk up and ask a firefighter for his number while my kitchen smells like an electrical fire?”

“The version where you don’t nearly burn your house down four separate times.”

“It was three and a half times, and the fourth one was real, so I stand by my methods.” But you were properly laughing now, the sound easy and warm in a way that made something in Lando’s chest ache pleasantly, and he found himself laughing along despite himself, despite the absurdity of it, despite the fact that this entire conversation had somehow turned into a confession disguised as banter.

The laughter faded slowly, leaving something quieter in its place, both of you standing closer than the conversation had technically required for a while now, the space between you narrowing without either of you quite deciding to close it.

“For the record,” Lando said, voice lower now, “you didn’t need an excuse. I would’ve laughed either way.”

“I know that now.” Your voice had softened to match his, gaze steady on his face in a way that made it very hard to think about anything except the six inches of space still separating you. “Wish I’d figured that out before setting three small fires.”

“Two and a half, by your own count.”

“Don’t correct my math right now.”

“Wasn’t planning on it.” He reached out, slow enough that you had every chance to step back if you wanted to, and brushed a strand of hair back from your face, fingers lingering a moment longer than the gesture strictly required. “Can I ask you something now?”

“Turnabout’s fair.”

“Was I as obvious as everyone at the station seems to think I was?”

You huffed a laugh, leaning almost imperceptibly into the hand still resting near your jaw. “Yes.”

“Brilliant.”

“For what it’s worth,” you added, quieter now, “I liked it. Obvious looked good on you.”

That was apparently all the invitation either of them needed. Lando closed the last of the distance between you, tins forgotten somewhere against your hip, and kissed you. Soft at first, almost testing, like some part of him still couldn’t quite believe this was allowed to happen. You made a small, surprised sound against his mouth before melting into it fully, one hand coming up to fist gently in the front of his shirt like you needed something to hold onto.

It wasn’t rushed. There was no fire behind you, no siren waiting to pull him away, nothing but the quiet gold light of a late afternoon and months of almost finally resolving into something neither of you had to pretend about anymore. When you finally broke apart, foreheads still resting together, Lando was grinning in a way that felt entirely unfamiliar on his own face.

“So,” he said, a little breathless. “Dinner. Actual dinner, not an emergency callout.”

“Is that you asking properly?”

“I’m asking properly.”

You smiled, the kind that reached your eyes fully, unguarded. “Took you long enough.”

Behind you, muffled through the station’s front window, came the unmistakable sound of Oscar’s triumphant whooping, followed almost immediately by Zak telling him to get back to inventory before he embarrassed them all further.

Neither of you moved to acknowledge it. For once, Lando didn’t care who was watching. Maybe Oscar had been right from the start, the house really had been haunted. Just not by anything either of you had expected.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁ EPILOGUE!

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁ Zak dug the twenty out of his wallet with the particular reluctance of a man who genuinely believed he should have won.

“I still think this is fraud,” he muttered, slapping the note into Oscar’s waiting palm. “You said two weeks. It took him four months.”

“I said two weeks after the fire.” Oscar folded the twenty with theatrical satisfaction and tucked it into his pocket. “You bet he’d cave before the fire even happened. Completely different bet. You lost fair and square, my friend.”

“I’m reasonably sure you’re just making up the terms retroactively.”

“I have it in writing.” Oscar said, with the stance of a man who’d been waiting weeks for this exact moment, a crumpled napkin from three months prior, on which was scrawled, in his own handwriting: Lando caves after the fire. 20 quid. Signed, Zak (reluctantly).

Zak stared at it. “I don’t remember signing that.”

“You were tired. Doesn’t make it less binding.”

Across the common room, entirely unaware he’d just been the subject of a formally settled wager, Lando was laughing at something on his phone, thumb moving rapid-fire over the screen with the soft, unguarded look he’d been wearing for weeks now, the one that had cost Zak twenty pounds and, if he was honest, hadn’t surprised anyone in the building even a little.

“Toaster house,” Oscar said fondly, watching him. “Never stood a chance.”

“None of us did,” Zak agreed, and went to go find something else to lose money on.

Four months later…

The smell hit you the second you stepped through the door of the new flat. Faint, acrid, unmistakably electrical, and you froze mid-step, keys still in hand, a small bag from the corner shop dangling from your other wrist: milk, and the specific brand of biscuits Lando had been not-so-subtly hinting at for a week, a five-minute errand that had somehow been enough time for the entire kitchen to apparently declare war again.

“Lando.”

“I smell it.” He was already moving, following the scent toward the kitchen with the calm, methodical focus of a man who’d spent five years professionally not panicking about exactly this sort of thing. Sparky, the dog you had adopted a month ago, trotted along at his heels, tail wagging, entirely unbothered by the crisis unfolding around him, more interested in the possibility of dropped toast than in whatever emergency his humans seemed to think they were having.

He found the culprit within seconds: the toaster, valiantly smoking from one slightly singed slice of bread that had gotten stuck and refused to pop.

He unplugged it, waved the smoke away from the detector before it could shriek, and turned to find you still standing in the doorway, hand pressed dramatically to your chest.

“It followed me,” you said, entirely serious. “The wiring curse. It followed me here.”

“It’s toast. Regular, non-cursed toast that got stuck.”

“That’s exactly what a haunted toaster would want you to think.” You glanced down at Sparky, who had abandoned all pretense of concern and was now sitting hopefully by Lando’s feet, eyeing the slice like it might still be salvageable. “Even Sparky knows something’s wrong. Look at him.”

“He looks like he wants to eat evidence.”

“That’s what I said. Suspicious.”

Lando set the offending appliance down and crossed the kitchen, biting back a smile he wasn’t quite managing to hide, stepping neatly over the dog now attempting to herd him back toward the toaster. “You do know I’m off duty right now.”

“I’m aware.”

“So this isn’t technically a callout.”

“No,” you agreed, looping your arms around his neck as he reached you, “but you showed up anyway. Some things don’t change.”

“Some things,” he murmured, leaning down, “I’m perfectly happy never changing.”

Behind them, forgotten, the smoke detector let out one single, unimpressed chirp, as if even the house had opinions about how long this kiss was taking. Sparky, unimpressed by all of it, finally gave up waiting for permission and helped himself to the toast.

Tag list: @daddyrafeslittleslut @tiffanyab0228 @im-lame-irl @winters-queen @llando4norris @deleteidentity @indigo123789

clovermoters

my beautiful darling firefighter lando has become a staple amongst anyone who i’ve ever spoken too, which meansss my writer friends have blessed the world with their versions of him. GO READ THIS MASTERPIECE!!! 🍀

#lando norris #lando #lando x reader #lando norris x reader #lando x you #lando norris x you #firefighter!lando #f1 #f1 fanfic #formula one

that’s my boyfriend

#lando norris #ln4 #i need to give him the biggest kiss ever #mwah mwah #kisses #clove yaps

TROPHY KISSES 😽😽😽😽

#lando norris #ln4 #formula 1 #clove yaps #finally a win yayayayayay #so proud of him i could cry #i could kiss him too #preferably that #lando wanna kiss?#???#anyways.

INJECT IT

#BABIES FIRST POLE AS CHAMPION YAYYYY #lando norris #ln4 #formula 1 #LN1 #cloves commentary #i’m crying tears of happiness

clovermoters

LN1: hidden embers

pairing firefighter!lando norris x paramedic!reader

warnings non-f1 au; firefighters, romance, hurt/comfort, friends-to-lovers, secret relationship, smut (oral f receiving). Oscar and Max Fewtrell are victims of their stupidity, pet names, minimal use of y/n, injuries related to fire.

word count 13.1k

authors note we are so incredibly back!! this all started because of a fan art I saw on tiktok and a binge-watch of 8 seasons of chicago fire. A heartfelt thank-you to @landojournal & @landopoet for all your support on this one, love you too bad! let me know in my inbox if you would like to see more of these two because i've fallen in love with them. As always enjoy, lots of love, clove! 🍀

──────────── ঌ ─────────────

For the first time in a blue moon, the firehouse was quiet while you stood in it.

Naturally, you rarely stood still since you set foot in Station 41 almost five years ago now. Paramedics were needed for anything up to a gut feeling nowadays.

It was an interesting job, but you loved it. The unpredictability of what awaited you once you walked in every shift made your brain itch for more.

#ln1 #self reblog #thinking about them 😵‍💫

WEEEEEEEWIE

#lando norris #ln4 #formula 1 #clove yaps

hidden embers pinterest board!!!

#lando norris #ln4 #formula 1 #clove yaps #lando norris fanfic #lando x reader #f1 fanfic #f1 x reader #lando norris fic #dw that’s not me in the added by pfp #it’s a random pinterest girly #and i’m abt to change it so nobody go looking for my pinterest thanks

clovermoters

LN1: hidden embers

pairing firefighter!lando norris x paramedic!reader

word count 13.1k

──────────── ঌ ─────────────

For the first time in a blue moon, the firehouse was quiet while you stood in it.

Naturally, you rarely stood still since you set foot in Station 41 almost five years ago now. Paramedics were needed for anything up to a gut feeling nowadays.

It was an interesting job, but you loved it. The unpredictability of what awaited you once you walked in every shift made your brain itch for more.

#timezone reblog #self rb #ln1 #lando fluff

LN1: hidden embers

pairing firefighter!lando norris x paramedic!reader

word count 13.1k

──────────── ঌ ─────────────

For the first time in a blue moon, the firehouse was quiet while you stood in it.

Naturally, you rarely stood still since you set foot in Station 41 almost five years ago now. Paramedics were needed for anything up to a gut feeling nowadays.

It was an interesting job, but you loved it. The unpredictability of what awaited you once you walked in every shift made your brain itch for more.