On the brink of losing his career due to mounting scandals and a reckless reputation, Lando Norris found an unexpected solution—a marriage of convenience. Once seen as a playboy and party boy, his image transformed overnight when he married his best friend, not for love, but to salvage his public image and silence the media.
EP. 01 - Mr and Mrs
EP. 02 - The Apartment We Won't Share
EP. 03 - Mad at You
EP. 04 - Ride Home
EP. 05 - Something so heavenly
EP.06
EP.07
Unreleased episode:
5 Times Lando Norris Was Close to Exposing His Feelings (and 1 Time He Finally Did)
On the brink of losing his career due to mounting scandals and a reckless reputation, Lando Norris found an unexpected solution—a marriage of convenience. Once seen as a playboy and party boy, his image transformed overnight when he married his best friend, not for love, but to salvage his public image and silence the media.
word count: 2497
pairing: lando norris x reader
content: best friends to fake marriage to real love (this one will be a rollercoaster)
warning: contains themes of emotional distress, anxiety, self-doubt, crying, internalized guilt, fear of disappointing others, family conflict, and pre-wedding stress.
Image of Us masterlist
rese notes: hi… ik it’s been a long long time and here you go my lovies
episode title: EP 05. Something so Heavenly
song: sa bawat sandali by amiel sol
“Fuck it, we’re bailin’,” she thought, slumping into the vanity chair. It was supposed to be simple—just a civil wedding, no fuss, no extravagance. Yet the routine felt heavier today. Her usual makeup motions, the familiar brush against her skin, all felt different without Lando nearby. He was off at one of the guys’ apartments, getting teased about how unlucky it would be to see the bride before the ceremony.
At least she wasn’t alone. Lily, Alex’s girlfriend, and Carmen, George’s, had shown up early to help. Their chatter filled the quiet room, light but grounding.
“What do you want for your hair?” Lily asked, fingers brushing through the strands.
“Something neat, clean,” Y/n murmured, more to the mirror than to them.
Carmen, ever practical, smirked. “A simple bun will do. Elegant without trying too hard.” She began brushing with steady hands, like she’d done this a hundred times.
Y/n’s gaze drifted toward the window. Sunlight poured in, golden and warm, painting the walls in reassurance she didn’t quite feel. It really was a perfect day for a wedding. The soft silk of her robe against her skin reminded her just how real it was—this wasn’t rehearsal, this wasn’t a joke. Today was the day.
When she looked back in the mirror, the reflection startled her. She looked… different. Almost radiant. Almost like someone ready to be a bride.
The door creaked, and Lily entered, cradling the dress. Her tone softened as she laid it on the bed. “This dress… it really reflects who you are. It’s elegant, but not too much. Just you.”
Y/n smiled faintly, though her chest felt tight.
“Do you ever think marriage is… something else?” she asked suddenly, eyes flicking to Carmen’s reflection.
Carmen paused, brush mid-air. “What do you mean?” she asked carefully, brows knitting.
“I mean…” she swallowed. “Do you think marriage is really that important?”
Carmen tilted her head, considering. “Depends how you see it. Some people need it, some people don’t. Why?”
She shook her head quickly, staring back at her lap. “It’s nothing.”
But Lily, who’d been smoothing out the dress, looked up with a knowing expression. “Marriage is its own kind of journey,” she said gently. “Even if you’re in love, even if you’re settled—it can still get messy. Love never comes out perfect in marriage. It just… changes. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes not.”
The words lingered in the air, heavier than Y/n expected. She nodded, but the quiet sigh that escaped her betrayed her nerves.
After finishing her hair and makeup, the girls helped her slip into the dress. The fabric settled against her skin like it had been waiting just for today. Lily stood behind her, carefully fastening the tiny buttons one by one. They’d changed the back at the last minute—buttons instead of a zipper—and Y/n found herself quietly mumbling worries to Lily as she worked.
“It feels too tight,” she whispered.
“It’s just nerves,” Lily murmured back, her voice calm and steady, like she’d practiced this role of anchor before. “You’re okay.” She nodded along, letting Y/n’s words spill without judgment, her hands never faltering on the row of buttons.
“You look beautiful,” Carmen said from across the room, watching with a smile that was more sincere than playful this time. “Like… the version of you he fell in love with.”
Y/n’s hands brushed over the smooth fabric, trembling slightly. She lifted her gaze toward the mirror, almost afraid of what she’d see.
And there she was. Not the girl who used to lounge in sweats, not the one who’d rushed through late nights with Lando, laughing and messy-haired—but someone new. Her reflection glowed under the soft light, her posture straighter, her face softer, her eyes brighter.
“I look…” Her breath caught in her throat. She tilted her head, studying the reflection as if it belonged to someone else. “…different.”
The room fell quiet for a moment, the weight of the day settling in around them. Lily smoothed the last fold of fabric, her touch grounding. Carmen only nodded, her smile saying everything words couldn’t.
Meanwhile, at Alex’s apartment—where Lando was staying—the place felt almost too crowded. Or maybe it was just his nerves making it seem that way. Carlos, Charles, George, Alex, and of course his best friend Max were all there, buzzing around him like a pit crew before a race.
“Mate, you just need to man up,” Carlos said with a grin, offering him a shot glass.
George immediately snatched it away. “The last thing we need is you showing up drunk at your own wedding,” he scolded, half-serious, half-teasing.
“Oi, don’t get cold feet now,” Max muttered as he crouched down, literally warming Lando’s feet with his hands. “Not on my watch.”
Charles and Alex, meanwhile, were tearing through the room like they’d lost a car part on the grid. “Where’s his tie?!” Charles exclaimed, rifling through a drawer.
“I swear I set it right here,” Alex argued, pulling clothes from a chair.
Lando sat in the middle of it all, pale and fidgeting, running a hand through his hair. The noise, the chaos, the voices—everything was colliding at once. And yet, in some strange way, it felt right. Surrounded by his friends, nerves and all, he was exactly where he needed to be.
Suddenly, George’s voice cut through the chatter. “Wait—do you even have a ring?”
Lando blinked, startled, then gave a quick nod. He reached for the small velvet box on the coffee table, his hands just a little shaky.
When he flipped it open, the room fell silent.
The ring glimmered under the soft light. A slim platinum band, elegant yet understated, held a brilliant diamond at its center—cushion-cut, framed by tiny accents that caught the light like stars. It was timeless, classic, but with just enough sparkle to feel her.
“Bloody hell,” Charles breathed, leaning in closer. “How did you even pull that off?”
Lando swallowed, staring at it like the weight of the entire day rested in that little box. “Do you think she’ll… like it?” he asked quietly, his voice breaking at the edges.
Max immediately snorted, shaking his head. “Idiot. That’s not just a ring. That’s her ring. The one she always said she wanted.” He clapped Lando’s shoulder, grinning. “If she doesn’t like that, I’ll eat my shoes.”
Carlos let out a low whistle, impressed. George folded his arms but smiled faintly, like he’d just seen proof Lando was more ready than he thought.
The laughter that followed loosened the knot in Lando’s chest for a moment. But when he closed the box and held it in his palm, he cradled it carefully—as if it wasn’t just jewelry, but the symbol of the promise he was about to make.
“Vows,” Alex reminded as he rifled through the table, grabbing the folded sheet of paper and slipping it into Lando’s suit pocket. “Don’t forget these, mate.”
George, ever the voice of reason, straightened Lando’s jacket and gave him a steady look. “Just breathe. Keep it simple. Don’t overthink, and don’t be nervous—you’ll be fine.”
Lando blinked, exhaling shakily before forcing a small smile. “I think I can handle that.”
Max leaned back against the couch, smirking. “Yeah, sure—just don’t wet your pants at the altar. Not exactly the grand entrance you’re going for.”
The room broke into laughter, easing the tension for a moment, while Lando rolled his eyes. Still, his hand instinctively brushed against the pocket where the vows rested—words he hoped would be enough when the moment finally came.
She sat in the bedroom, watching the clock as the minutes ticked by. Her hands rubbed together nervously, the soft sound filling the quiet between sighs.
“The paper—it’s in your purse,” Lily said gently, breaking the silence.
Y/n looked up at her, then at the small Birkin resting on the chair. It was her go-to bag, the one she always carried when she needed something familiar. She nodded slowly, almost in relief, realizing she hadn’t forgotten it after all.
“I’ll handle it during the ceremony,” Lily offered with a reassuring smile. “You don’t need to worry about it.”
Y/n exhaled, shoulders easing just slightly, grateful for the calm Lily always seemed to carry with her.
The room was quiet as she sat on the edge of the bed, her fingers twisting together. For a moment, she asked herself if things would really get better if she went through with this. Or would it only make everything worse?
Was this the right choice? Would she regret it in the end? The thought of her parents finding out made her chest tighten—would they rage at her, or worse, turn away completely?
Her throat burned as a tear slipped down, and she quickly wiped it away. Her hands shook, her breathing uneven, as if her body was betraying the calm she desperately wanted to keep.
She tilted her head back toward the ceiling and muttered, “For fuck’s sake, don’t be a baby.” The words sounded harsher than she meant, but she hated how her emotions always swelled up, bigger than she could contain, making everything feel impossible to handle.
The room was quiet as she sat on the edge of the bed, her fingers twisting together. For a moment, she asked herself if things would really get better if she went through with this—or would it only make everything worse?
Was this the right choice? Would she regret it in the end? The thought of her parents finding out made her chest tighten—would they rage at her, or worse, turn away completely?
Her throat burned as a tear slipped down, and she quickly wiped it away. Her hands shook, her breathing uneven, as if her body was betraying the calm she desperately wanted to keep. She tilted her head back toward the ceiling and muttered, “For fuck’s sake, don’t be a baby.... you're a big girl already.” The words came out harsher than she meant, but she hated how her emotions always swelled up, bigger than she could contain.
The door creaked, breaking the silence. George stepped inside, his eyes softening as they landed on her. He let out a quiet sigh—concern laced in the sound—before leaning casually against the doorframe. Growing up, he had known her first as the small neighbor down the street, then later through Lando, and somewhere along the way, their paths had intertwined more closely than he expected.
“Now, why would the beautiful darling bride be crying?” he said gently, his voice carrying the warmth of someone who felt almost like the brother she never had.
She looked up, a small, sad frown tugging at her lips as she sniffled. “I’m not,” she whispered, trying to deny it, though her watery eyes betrayed her. The sight of her—brave on the surface but trembling underneath—almost broke his heart.
George sighed softly and crossed the room, his steps unhurried but steady, as if not to startle her. He crouched down beside the bed, close enough that she could feel the quiet steadiness of his presence. Reaching for the tissue box on the table, he carefully pulled one out and leaned closer, dabbing gently at her cheek.
“Your makeup’s going to smudge,” he muttered, his voice low and warm, his touch gentle enough to steady her shaking. For a moment, his eyes lingered on hers, softened by a concern he didn’t need to say out loud.
Then, with a faint smile tugging at his lips, he added, “Now, Lando wouldn’t appreciate it if he found out you’re crying here.” The playful tease in his tone cut through the heaviness in the room, like sunlight breaking through a cloud.
She let out a shaky, teary chuckle, the corners of her lips lifting despite the ache in her chest. Somehow, with him beside her, the weight she carried didn’t feel quite so impossible anymore.
George looked at her and muttered, “You know he’s probably shitting himself back at Alex’s apartment while they’re making fun of him right now.”
That made her chuckle, while George’s mind kept replaying the ridiculous scene: Carlos barging straight into Lando’s room with Alex in tow—only to find Lando standing there in nothing but his boxers. Lando stumbled backward, nearly tripping over the edge of his bed as he yelped, “Mate! Ever heard of knocking?!”
Carlos, unfazed, just leaned against the doorframe with a smirk. “Relax, we’ve all seen worse,” he teased, while Alex doubled over laughing.
The more George thought about it, the funnier it became—Lando’s horrified expression mixed with Carlos’s smug confidence was comedy gold.
“I don’t know why I suddenly feel scared,” she admitted.
George scoffed and nudged her arm. “You’re not about to compete in some spelling bee, and no one’s forcing you to do dancesport,” he teased.
She looked at him then, her voice quieter. “I just… feel like I’m going to disappoint someone.”
That single sentence made George pause. The teasing smile on his face faded as he studied her expression. He realized it wasn’t just stage fright—there was something heavier weighing on her, something unspoken. For the first time, George understood that her fear wasn’t about the performance itself, but about the expectations she carried. And in that moment, he felt a tug of protectiveness he hadn’t expected.
“I… George, it feels like a sin to do this, you know? It’s like a slow torture for me,” she whispered, her eyes fixed on her lap. Her fingers twisted together as if holding on to the weight of her words.
“I don’t know if I should care about what others think… or think about myself—and how I’ve loved him for years,” she added, her voice soft but heavy with longing.
It was a quiet confession, one she pressed close to her heart as though afraid that letting it go would break her completely.
George froze. The playful retort he had on the tip of his tongue died instantly. He’d never heard her sound so raw, so fragile. For a moment, he just watched her—shoulders hunched, eyes downcast—as if she were bracing for judgment. And instead of teasing, he felt a knot in his chest tighten.
Without thinking, he reached out and gently placed a hand over hers. “Hey… you don’t have to carry that alone,” he said softly, surprising even himself with the tenderness in his voice.
“Do what you want. What’s the point of living if you don’t take risks? You’ll never know what chance might be waiting for you,” he said, his eyes fixed on hers.
“And if I lose things along the way?” she whispered, her voice trembling as though the fear itself might shatter her.
George shook his head firmly. “That won’t happen. People don’t just turn into strangers because of the truth. There’s nothing wrong with confessing what you feel.”
His tone carried no hesitation—only a quiet certainty, as if he wanted her to borrow his courage when her own felt too small.
Heyy i hope you’re doing okayy. You havent updated for a while and though i really miss image of us i hope things are going well in college!!!
Hiii lovie, sorry for keeping you wait on the next chapter ;(( will soon post about it dw and things are doing well in college (went through a lot of struggle)
5 Times Lando Norris Was Close to Exposing His Feelings (and 1 Time He Finally Did) LN4
word count: 1393
pairing: lando norris x reader
warning: contains themes of mild language, emotional themes, romantic tension
Image of Us masterlist
rese notes: back from the college dead! had to welcome the freshies and etc but dw will soon post next chapter of our fav oblivious and GOD LET THEM KISS couple <33 enjoy this small snippet of them
1. The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress
He was still in karting then, and she’d sometimes come to support him—with her parents’ approval, of course. Lando hated how the other boys would look at her and shyly talk to her, while she’d just stare at them weirdly, gripping the strap of her bag and mumbling, “I don’t know,” before walking away and heading straight toward him.
One time, he was too busy glaring at a boy who was talking to her to notice his dad nudging him. Adam Norris had already figured it out—his son fancied the girl in the polka dot dress. She even helped Lando with homework sometimes.
“Glare harder, son. Maybe the boy’ll melt,” Adam said with a smirk.
Lando blinked, then quickly looked away. “She doesn’t like boys like that… they’re too loud and a bit…” He made a vague gesture, describing everything opposite of what Y/N liked, but stopped himself before saying too much.
“I’m just saying that as her best friend, Dad,” he added quickly.
Adam only hummed, nodding like he didn’t believe a word.
2. Superman to the Rescue
One thing she was terrible at? Predicting the weather.
She was stranded at the bus stop, nearly drenched from the rain, having forgotten her umbrella again. No cabs in sight, her phone close to dying, she wrapped her jacket tighter and muttered, “Please… someone, anyone, show up. I promise I’ll finish my homework, stop slacking off—”
That’s when a car pulled up in front of her. The window rolled down.
“Always in trouble, huh?” Lando grinned.
She looked like a sad, wet puppy. “Are you just going to laugh at me?” she huffed.
He chuckled. “No. Get in before you catch a cold.”
The ride was mostly her mumbling that she could’ve handled it, to which he said, “Then why’d you let yourself get soaked?”
She shot back, “Then why did you pick me up?”
He wanted to say, Because I wouldn’t let my dearest darling get soaked in the rain.
But instead, he blurted out, “Gut feeling, you know.”
She looked at him, then away. “Gut feeling... okay.”
He bit his lip, close—so close—to confessing. But not yet. One day, he promised himself.
3. Snoopy Lover
Lando knew how much she adored Snoopy. She had all kinds of Snoopy merch, but there was one she desperately wanted: an F1-themed Snoopy plushie. Sadly, it was always sold out.
One day, when he visited her apartment in London, he found her looking particularly upset.
“Snoopy didn’t come home?” he asked casually.
She sighed. “Snoopy’s always sold out, for Christ’s sake.”
So, for Christmas, he got her something special. She warned him that if the box contained a rock again, she’d throw it at him. (It happened once. She nearly strangled him.)
When she opened the box, she froze.
“You’re joking…”
Their families looked at her nervously. Then she screamed.
“SNOOPY IS HOME!”
She cradled the Snoopy plushie in a McLaren kit like it was her child, gushing over how cute it looked.
Lando just smiled.
She didn’t notice the small note tucked inside the box, at least not at first. It read:
To my darling wife who loves Snoopy more than she loves me.
A joke… for now.
4. His Lucky Charm
He always kept anything she gave him. She’d hand it over with a quiet, “It’s a charm—to keep bad luck and bad energy away from you.”
That’s why he was now tearing apart his driver’s room, searching for the small note she’d once given him. He always kept it tucked away, a reminder that someone was waiting for him to come home safe.
“Where is it…” he muttered, panic rising. He couldn’t lose it.
Finally, he found it and let out a relieved sigh. Carefully, he placed it inside his helmet, close enough to feel like she was with him as he prepared for his race.
He didn’t notice her walking in—until she spotted it.
“I didn’t know you kept it all this time,” she said softly.
He jumped a little, startled. “Of course I kept it,” he replied, clearing his throat. “It… grounds me, I guess.” He tried to make it sound casual, to mask how close he was to saying it meant she grounded him.
She tilted her head, a teasing smile forming. “That’s a foolish thing to keep. I only gave you that note as a silly good-luck thing.”
“Well, maybe,” he said, holding his helmet a bit tighter, “but it makes me feel safe. At some point, that’s more than just luck.”
Her smile faltered for just a second, her eyes flicking to the helmet before she looked away, pretending not to read between his words.
5. If the Whole World Starts to Overwhelm You, I’m Here
She didn’t mean to turn their apartment into a sudden sad, cloudy storm.
It just happened—one moment she was fine, and the next she was curled up on the couch with a pint of cookies-and-cream ice cream, her thoughts spiraling. Was she doing the right thing? Were her parents proud of her work? Was she even on the right path?
The weight of it all made her want to go back home—not to a place, but to the comfort of curling up in her mother’s arms.
She didn’t hear the door open or Lando’s cheerful greeting as he stepped inside after a long meeting. He stopped mid-step when he saw her sitting quietly on the couch, ice cream in hand, staring out toward the balcony.
Her expression was distant. Sad.
He dropped his keys on the counter and walked over slowly, concern written on his face. “Hey… what’s going on?”
She blinked and looked at him, her eyes glassy. “Just… thinking,” she murmured.
Without another word, he sat beside her, took the ice cream from her hands, and pulled her into his arms. “If the whole world starts to overwhelm you,” he said softly, “I’m here. Always.”
She let out a shaky laugh, leaning into him. “You’re really bad at ice cream theft, you know that?”
“Yeah, well… I’m better at making sure you don’t go through storms alone,” he replied, meaning every word—even if he didn’t say the other thing that had been stuck in his chest for years.
And One Time He Finally Said It
The night was cool and quiet, the only sound in the apartment the faint hum of the city beyond their window.
Lando lay awake, unable to sleep, his gaze fixed on her sleeping form beside him. She was curled slightly toward him, her breathing slow and steady, strands of hair brushing against her cheek.
He’d seen her in so many moments—laughing, frustrated, tired, stubborn—but there was something about seeing her like this, peaceful, that made his chest ache in the best way.
Leaning closer, he whispered so quietly it was almost a thought instead of words.
“Someday… we’ll get those things you want. Whatever you want, love. The house you’ve always talked about, all the little things you’ve dreamed of… I’ll make sure you have them.”
His eyes softened as he reached out, brushing a loose strand of hair from her face.
“I’ll follow you anywhere, as long as you’re comfortable. And when I’m your husband… I’ll be a good one. I promise.”
He hesitated for a moment, his heart pounding, before adding in a voice even softer than before,
“Just wait… I’ll give you the most beautiful ring you wanted and… and I’ll love you. I really would.”
It wasn’t just a promise—it was his truth. He had already planned for it, already imagined her smile when those dreams became real.
And for the first time, the word slipped out without hesitation—love. Not in a joke, not hidden behind a grin. Just the truth, spoken into the quiet night.
He let out a slow sigh, closing his eyes at last, the tension in his shoulders finally easing as sleep began to claim him.
She stayed still, her breathing steady, but her eyes slowly opened just enough to see him beside her. She had heard every word.
“I would do things for you as well,” she whispered into the dark, so quiet that only the night could hold her reply.
On the brink of losing his career due to mounting scandals and a reckless reputation, Lando Norris found an unexpected solution—a marriage of convenience. Once seen as a playboy and party boy, his image transformed overnight when he married his best friend, not for love, but to salvage his public image and silence the media.
word count: 2942
pairing: lando norris x reader
content: best friends to fake marriage to real love (this one will be a rollercoaster)
warning: contains themes of emotional vulnerability, intense romantic attachment, and mild anxiety around familial expectations and cultural pressure (e.g., fear of judgment, marriage secrecy, and family scrutiny).
Image of Us masterlist
rese notes: hellooo! here u go ep. 04 and peace out college is tired af dw I'll still post babes mwa mwaps!!! also watch lando be giggling and blushing
episode title: EP 04. Ride Home
song: ride home by ben&ben, someday by the ridleys
The wedding preparations were something Lando expected to be hectic, but thanks to her planning everything months ahead, things were surprisingly calm. It gave them space to breathe—even if he was still on the road for another race weekend. He had asked if she wanted to come along, but she gently declined, overwhelmed with deadlines and back-to-back meetings.
That afternoon, in between reviewing reports at her desk, she glanced at the sandwich she barely touched and decided to send him an update.
"eating lunch like you told me to 🙄"
Lando’s phone buzzed during a debrief. He saw the preview on his lock screen and instantly smiled. She always made it seem like he was annoying, but he knew she liked being reminded to eat.
"Good. You should be eating, not drowning another cold cocoa or hot coffee ☕️🥶"
He paused.
Should he add an emoji? Maybe something playful… something caring? His thumb hovered over the screen and—accidentally—he tapped one and hit send without thinking.
“😘"
His eyes widened.
“Shit,” he muttered under his breath.
He stared at the message in horror. That wasn’t just a little flirty—that was obvious. Too obvious. Before he could unsend it, the three dots appeared.
"Okay, honey ❤️"
He leaned back in his chair, heart racing. Was she teasing? Serious? That had to be teasing… right? But the “honey”… and the heart. That wasn’t nothing. He couldn’t stop smiling, and worst of all, he couldn’t stop rereading it.
Across the city, she was biting her lip, staring at her screen.
He sent a kiss emoji. That wasn’t a mistake, right?
But instead of overthinking it, she typed quickly—almost impulsively.
"Okay, honey ❤️"
The moment she hit send, her face warmed.
“Why did I say that?” she muttered, dragging a hand down her face, trying to focus on her work—but she couldn’t. The texts stayed open on her phone like a secret she couldn’t stop peeking at.
The whole week, Lando was practically glowing—giddy like a man who’d woken up in a world made of sunshine and butterflies. He was humming while walking around the paddock, smiling to himself between meetings, and looking at his phone like it was the best thing that ever happened to him.
Oscar caught him doing it again—just standing there with that weird dreamy grin while staring at a message. He raised an eyebrow. “Mate… are you okay?”
Everyone on the team noticed. Lando being in a good mood wasn’t unusual—but this was different. This was suspiciously happy.
Zak leaned toward his trainer during a briefing and muttered, “Did he take something?”
The trainer didn’t even blink, just shook their head with a slight smirk. “Nope. Just woke up happy, that’s it.”
But for Lando, it was a big deal.
She called him honey.
That one message from earlier in the week—“Okay, honey ❤️”—had been living rent-free in his head. He’d reread it so many times he could probably recite it from memory. Honey. He was her honey.
That sounded… really nice.
And just like that, the name stuck—quietly, naturally, and neither of them brought it up again.
A few days later, she sent him a random update between work emails.
“Made it through the worst meeting of my life 🙃 bought myself cake to cope lol"
Lando smiled, thumb hovering over the screen before typing without hesitation.
“Proud of you, honey 🍰"
Her reply came a minute later.
"Thanks, baby 😌"
He choked on air. Baby?
He sat there, stunned, a goofy grin slowly creeping in. He couldn’t even focus on his engineering notes after that.
The next day, another update popped in from her:
"Hot coffee count today: 3 ☕️☕️☕️ send help.
"Baby, that’s not hydration 💀 have some water pls 🙏" he replied
She then responded
"Yes sir 🫡 anything for you, honey."
At this point, it became their thing. No explanations. No teasing. Just casually calling each other honey and baby as if they’d been doing it forever.
And for Lando, that felt… right.
He didn’t need to question it.
He was her honey—and honestly, he liked the sound of that more than any race win.
The whole week, Lando was practically glowing—giddy like a man who’d woken up in a world made of sunshine and butterflies. He was humming while walking around the paddock, smiling to himself between meetings, and staring at his phone like it was sending him love letters. And honestly? It kind of was.
Oscar was the first to notice.
And it scared him.
He watched Lando take a sip from his coffee, immediately grimace, and still go, "It’s fine," with a soft smile.
That was not fine. That was deeply alarming.
“You okay?” Oscar asked, cautiously peering at him like he might start floating. “You’re acting… possessed.”
Lando just shrugged, eyes flicking back to his phone.
Smile. Tap. Smile again. Like clockwork.
Oscar’s jaw dropped. “No. Nope. What the hell is going on?”
Even during the strategy meetings, Lando barely paid attention. He was glued to his phone—thumb flying, grinning like a teenage girl in love.
It got so weird that the other drivers noticed.
Alex gave him side-eyes. George nudged him at lunch just to check if he was real.
Carlos even leaned over during media duties, whispered under his breath, “My mother knows someone if you think this is a curse.”
Lando just laughed—genuinely laughed—and said, “I’m not cursed, mate. I’m just in a good mood.”
Carlos looked at him, serious. “That’s what cursed people say.”
But Lando didn’t care.
Because in his mind, he was still reading her last message.
“Yes sir 🫡 anything for you, honey.”
And before that—
“Thanks, baby 😌”
And before that—
“Okay, honey ❤️”
She called him honey. Then baby. Then both.
It was nothing official. Nothing serious. They hadn’t talked about it. But it was there—in the texts, in the quiet exchanges, in how naturally it all slipped in.
And Lando?
He was her honey.
And yeah, maybe that was the reason for the sunshine, the butterflies, and the terrifying concern of his friends.
But it felt good.
Too good to stop smiling.
In the garage, just before heading out for the formation lap, Lando sat quietly in his chair, helmet resting in his hands. The space around him buzzed—radios chattering, mechanics rushing, engineers calling out final checks—but he had tuned it all out.
What mattered most in that moment was the tiny letter charm tucked carefully into the padding of his helmet.
It was hers.
A small, delicate thing she had given him years ago—"for luck,” she had said shyly, tucking a scribbled note behind it. Something simple, maybe silly to others, but to Lando? It was everything.
She was superstitious. Always had been. And over the years, she’d slipped other small charms into his life—threaded onto zippers, tucked into pouches, pinned discreetly to his travel bag. Most people didn’t even notice them. But he never raced without them. Especially not without this one.
Every race weekend, he made sure it was still there. Then, right before putting on his helmet, he’d give the spot a soft, careful pat. A silent ritual. A grounding gesture. Like carrying a piece of her onto the track with him.
And he thought no one noticed.
But Oscar did.
He’d seen it more than once—how Lando would pause with his helmet in hand, glance at the same spot, then tap it gently. Not to adjust, not to tighten—just… a touch. Almost reverent.
Oscar squinted at him one afternoon, finally asking, “What’s that about?”
Lando shrugged, playing it off with a casual, “Just… superstition.”
Oscar didn’t press. But the way Lando smiled afterward—soft, distant, almost dreamy—told him everything he needed to know.
It wasn’t just superstition.
It was someone.
And it meant everything.
That week had been more than good—it was nice. Really nice.
Lando managed to bring home a P2 finish, Later that night, the team celebrated.
The music was loud, the lights were flashing, and champagne flowed like water. People were cheering, dancing, clinking glasses in his honor. Lando smiled, posed for a few pictures, accepted every pat on the back and “well done, mate.”
But his heart wasn’t there.
Not really.
Between toasts and cheers, he found himself checking the time, wondering if she’d already fallen asleep in Monaco. He thought about the soft glow of her apartment, the way her voice would sound if he called her right now, even half-asleep. He could already imagine her waiting on the balcony in one of his shirts, mug in hand, sleepy but smiling.
So while the music pulsed and his teammates laughed around him, Lando quietly slipped out the back. No goodbyes, no fuss.
He just wanted to go home.
It hadn’t been official. Not yet. But the lines were already blurring.
She technically still had her own apartment, but she hadn’t been back there in a while—maybe once or twice to grab more clothes or pick up some mail. Most of her things were already scattered around his place anyway: skincare bottles in the bathroom, socks in the laundry, and her laptop permanently plugged into a corner of his desk.
They hadn’t talked about it, but they didn’t really need to.
It was late afternoon on her day off. She’d spent most of it sleeping, wrapped in the blankets and surrounded by the quiet hum of his flat. But as she stirred awake, stretching with a lazy groan, her foot bumped into something—or rather, someone.
She blinked, frowned, then pushed herself up on one elbow.
There he was—Lando—fast asleep beside her, shirtless and in boxers, his cheek smushed against the pillow like he hadn’t slept in days.
Her brows furrowed. “The fuck?”
She hadn't expected him until Wednesday. It was only Tuesday.
Still groggy, she gave him a soft kick to the side. He didn’t budge, just mumbled something unintelligible and shifted closer to the pillow.
She scoffed. “You could’ve at least warned me,” she muttered, rolling onto her back and rubbing her face. “I would’ve suffocated you if you didn’t tell me…”
He didn’t respond. Just breathed slowly, deeply—completely at home.
That was the thing. He always made himself at home. But lately… so did she.
They hadn’t called it “living together,” but it was starting to feel like it. More than once, she’d caught herself thinking our place when looking around his apartment.
They still hadn’t made it official. But the way things were going, it was only a matter of time.
They had brunch together, with her cooking for the both of them. She muttered under her breath, “You’re home early... I thought you weren’t coming back until Wednesday.”
“Missed you,” he mumbled into her neck, his voice low and muffled as he wrapped his arms around her from behind. He clung to her back like a sleepy koala, ignoring her half-hearted attempts to shrug him off.
“Seriously, Lando, do you want burnt eggs?” she warned, trying to peer around him to check the sizzling pan. She shook her head, lips twitching. Of course he’d come home early just to throw off my routine.
He only grumbled something unintelligible and tightened his grip, clearly not planning on moving any time soon.
She found herself having a lazy day on the couch, watching MasterChef on the TV while Lando lay across her stomach, still dozing off after brunch. Her fingers absentmindedly brushed through his curls—a casual habit between them by now, one that neither of them questioned anymore. It was comfort, routine, and something that felt quietly like home.
She wasn’t sure when it started—this quiet intimacy—but it had become second nature, like breathing. And somehow, the thought of it ever ending unsettled her more than she cared to admit.
They found themselves sorting through a pile of documents, just a few days left before the wedding. Everything was already in motion—Lando had informed his team and manager, letting them know it would be a private ceremony. Just a small circle. He had invited a few of the guys, labeling them as “witnesses,” though it was really just them and a handful of close friends.
She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, going through the guest list for what felt like the hundredth time. “Okay, so we’ve got Carlos and Rebecca, George and Carmen, Alex and Lily…” she listed, holding a pen between her fingers. “Your other group too, the sim-racing boys.”
Lando nodded along, barely looking up as he skimmed through papers. “Yeah, yeah. Told them already.”
“And Max?” she asked.
“Yep,” Lando replied, a hint of a grin forming. “Told him to dress nicely. Proper.”
She raised an eyebrow. “And he said…?”
Lando snorted. “‘Bullshit,’ obviously. I told him it’s a surprise.”
She laughed. “Poor guy’s going to show up thinking it’s some fancy brunch and end up witnessing a wedding.”
“Exactly the plan,” Lando said, smirking as he looked over at her. “He’ll deal.”
She looked down at the list, taking notes and going over everything one last time. Then, almost hesitantly, she said,
“I’m scared of how Ma and Da will react to this... I mean, I’m doing fine—got a stable job here in Monaco that I actually love—but this?” She sighed, rubbing her temple. “I think I’ll be the main course at every family event from now on.”
She hated how her family fussed over things like this. If they ever found out she got married—secretly married—it wouldn’t just be a celebration. It would be a full-on fiesta in the barangay. They’d probably bring out a lechon, even if it was just a Tuesday.
Her smile faltered for a moment. “I just... I don’t want them to think I did this without thinking it through.”
Lando glanced up from the papers, a soft grin tugging at his lips. “Hey, at least you’ll be the star. Isn’t that what everyone secretly wants?”
She gave him a deadpan look. “Not if it means being the opening act and the dessert.”
Lando laughed and nudged her foot with his. “Well, if there’s lechon, I’m not complaining.”
“Not funny,” she muttered, shaking her head at the memory.
There was that one time she brought Lando to a family event, and her titos and titas instantly assumed he was her boyfriend. The moment they figured it out—or thought they did—it was game over. Her titos handed Lando drinks left and right, clapping him on the back and saying, “Welcome to the family, pare!” Her titas weren’t any better, fussing over him like he was already part of the clan, piling food onto his plate and telling him, “Eat, anak, you’re too skinny!” They even brought out dessert like it was a wedding reception.
Meanwhile, her cousins wouldn’t stop teasing her, wiggling their eyebrows and whispering, “Finally, she’s settling down.”
Lando had looked overwhelmed, but somehow charmed by all of it. At one point, he leaned over and whispered, “I thought I was just coming for pancit.”
She wanted the earth to swallow her whole—especially when her lola started asking how many grandkids they were planning to have.
Now, just days before the actual wedding, the memory made her groan. “That was chaos.”
Lando smirked, clearly amused. “Honestly? Kinda loved it.”
She shot him a look. “You would.”
Later that day, she found herself on the couch, organizing the invitations before sending them out. She double-checked each one, making sure everything was correct—no typos, no missing names, no mistakes. It had to be right.
Her eyes drifted to the one resting on the coffee table. She reached out, her fingers slowly tracing the soft, minimalistic design. It was simple—elegant without being overdone—and somehow perfectly reflected both her and Lando’s personalities. No frills, just honest and quietly beautiful.
Her gaze settled on the text printed in soft ink: The Wedding of Lando Norris and Y/N L/N.
It still didn’t feel real.
Like a fever dream she hadn’t quite woken up from.
She leaned back into the couch, invitation in hand, and let out a soft, almost disbelieving laugh. How did we even get here?
Meanwhile, Lando was in the bedroom, shuffling through the closet. After a bit of rummaging, his fingers finally landed on the small velvet box. He pulled it out from its not-so-clever hiding spot—buried beneath a pile of socks—and let out a quiet breath of relief.
The ring.
He had bought it in secret weeks ago. Somehow, by some miracle, she hadn’t found it. Not even during her occasional habit of stealing his socks. Honestly, that was a close call.
He ran a hand through his hair and muttered to himself, “Brilliant hiding skills, Norris.”
Opening the box, he stared at the ring inside, his thumb lightly brushing over the surface. It was beautiful—more than that. It was her.
She had once mentioned, half-laughing during a random conversation, that she’d want a Harry Winston ring someday. “They’re too nice,” she’d said. “But they’re classics. Simple, timeless... like how love should feel.”
He never forgot that.
She had a few pieces of jewelry, nothing too extravagant, but this… this was different. This was a promise. One he’d thought long and hard about before buying. The Classic Winston Oval-Shaped Engagement Ring with Tapered Baguette Side Stones—elegant, understated, and quietly dazzling.
He could already picture it on her finger.
Would she cry? Or punch him in the arm first for not telling her sooner?
He chuckled at the thought, but his heart panged with nerves.
Soon.
Just a little longer—and this ring wouldn’t be sitting in a sock drawer. It would be on her hand, right where it belonged.
Lando Norris has finally achieved the life he always dreamed of—except he did it without her. Years after parting ways, a chance encounter during the holidays reunites them, but everything has changed. She’s now a mother, and he’s just a memory of what could have been. Over coffee and quiet glances, Lando confronts the bittersweet truth: he let go of the only future he ever truly wanted.
word count: 688
pairing: lando norris x reader
content: totga (the one that got away fr)
warning: contains emotional themes of lost love, heartbreak, and the pain of unfulfilled promises.
rese notes: can't stop listening sienna by the marias and it made me think to write this piece... angst
He did it. He finally achieved the life he always wanted—but he did it without the person he once promised to share it with. That thought echoed in his mind as he stood on the podium, looking proudly at his team for winning. His life had changed completely since then. It felt like something was missing, but he pushed those feelings aside and focused on this championship.
But without her, who even is Lando Norris? She was the love of his life—the one he promised he would give everything she ever wanted. She used to laugh whenever he said that, telling him not to be like that, saying she was already grateful for whatever he could give, as long as he was with her. And for her, that was enough.
She sat in her apartment, staring at the TV screen as it showed him on the podium, smiling as the anthem played. Her eyes remained fixed on the screen as she thought, “He finally did it.” She took a sip of the wine she had bought earlier that day and continued to stare, the sound of the TV echoing through the silence of her apartment.
It was just an old memory.
The sound of a baby crying snapped her out of her thoughts. She blinked and found herself in the kitchen, making lunch. She quickly went to the living room, where the baby on the playmat was crying, tiny arms flailing. Gently, she scooped the baby into her arms and softly hushed, “It’s okay… Mama’s here,” as she rubbed the baby’s back. She couldn’t help but think how different her life was now—completely different from how it used to be back then.
It was December, and she found herself strolling through the market, picking up groceries for Christmas dinner. She pushed the stroller while scanning the items around her, but in a distracted moment, she accidentally bumped into someone. She quickly turned to apologize—only to find herself face to face with Lando.
He was just as stunned, momentarily speechless, before finally saying, “…It’s fine.”
It had been so long since he last saw her. His gaze slowly shifted to the stroller, landing on the baby who was gurgling softly.
“Congratulations are in order, I guess?” he said.
She looked at him and gave a small nod. “Yeah… they are.”
Then, as if nothing had changed and everything had changed, he invited her for coffee at a nearby café.
It felt strange to see her holding a baby, Lando thought, as he watched her gently cradle the child in her arms. The baby cooed softly, eyes wide with curiosity.
“Sorry,” she said with a small smile. “She’s very interested in her surroundings.”
Lando chuckled. “It’s fine. At least she likes it here… and she’s pretty—just like you,” he added, gently shaking the baby’s tiny hand. The baby babbled happily in response.
As she reached for her drink, her sleeve shifted—just slightly—and that’s when he saw it.
The ring.
Simple. Silver. Worn.
His heart stilled.
It wasn’t the flashy kind. It wasn’t the kind someone wore for show. It was the kind you wear when you mean it.
Married.
He stared at it for a moment too long. She didn’t notice.
And in that quiet second, something in him broke a little.
He could’ve been the one.
If only he hadn’t let distance grow. If only he hadn’t chosen the sport over slow mornings and steady love.
He could’ve been there when she felt the baby kick for the first time.
He could’ve been the hand she held during every doctor's appointment.
He could’ve been the one to wake up to midnight cries and whispered lullabies.
He could’ve been her forever.
But someone else was.
He took a slow breath, forcing a smile as he looked away from the ring and back at the baby—now fast asleep in her arms.
“You seem happy,” he said, voice softer than before.
She looked at him for a moment, unsure of how to answer. Finally, she said, “I think I am.”
And he nodded, swallowing down the ache. “That’s good. You deserve that.”
in which the whole school is invested in your rivalry with your fellow student council member, george russell.
a/n: twitter au with only a few pics cus like i wanted to test my patience with layouts and i have no storage for a lot of screenshots ... </3 IGNORE THE TIME STAMPS ON THE TWEETS PLEASE IM TOO LAZY TO CHANGE THEM THANKYEUWWHHS
kinda inspired by cinnamorussell 's uni au tell all your friends that i'm crazy (i'll drive you mad) im shy to tag them go read it !! ts is so goated the plot the layout the everything *chefs kiss
⎯
RU FW | rufreedomwall · 20mins
ts frying me
↳ user1 which admin is this 😭
↳ rufreedomwall 🤫
👤 | user2 · 18mins
rigged i say!
↳ user3 real bc i voted oscar and wdym he became academic affairs director
👤 | user4 · 15mins
lance stroll as treasurer and alex albon as extracurricular affairs director oh our events will be so fun
👤 | user5 · 15mins
y/n as vice president oh yes!
↳ user6 i think u mean oh no bc george russell is president.
👤 | user7 · 13mins
GABI BORTOLETO SECRETARY IN HIS FRESHMAN YEAR ???
George | georgerussell63 · 10mins
thank you, everyone, for trusting me with the responsibility to be your president. wishing you all a good school year!
↳ yourusername 100% ai generated message btw
↳ georgerussell63 that's not enough text to check if its ai or not btw.
↳ user8 god help us all
⎯
MESSAGES: gr DNI 🚫
[10:39 AM]
gr DNI 🚫: congratulations!
gr DNI 🚫: looking forward to working with you once again
gr DNI 🚫: 😊
[10:41 AM]
you: congratu fuck you lations
[10:42 AM]
gr DNI 🚫: cmon just one more school year of dealing with this and you're free
gr DNI 🚫: why are my messages not going through?
gr DNI 🚫: did you seriously block me.
[10:45 AM]
you: i can't wait to graduate so i never have to deal with you again.
[10:46 AM]
gr DNI 🚫: aww likewise.
⎯
👤 | user9 · 30mins
thanks admin i cant unthink that now
George | georgerussell63 · 28mins
is that supposed to be a bad thing?
↳ yourusername the president caring about petty things such as the opinion of the school's freedom wall admin says a lot
↳ georgerussell63 trying to start a scandal with a fellow officer before the school year even starts says a lot about what kind of vice president you'll be
↳ charles_leclerc hey as the public relations officer i should say that this isn't good for BOTH of your reputations!
👤 | user10 · 25mins
based on the previous thread how long do u think it will take the school before they take this page down
↳ user11 THEY WILL NEVER SILENCE THE VOICE OF THE YOUTH
↳ user10 okay calm down now!
⎯
lando | landonorris · 20mins
"yay i won't have a rival to erotically argue with anymore!"
↳ antitheticaldreamgirl WHAT PART OF THIS IS EROTIC
↳ landonorris the part where you say you despise every 🤨 part 🤨 of him 🤨
↳ landonorris and despite "hating" him, you somehow always end up in the same org or whatever with him ???? 🤨
↳ antitheticaldreamgirl i should kick you out of this account
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👤 | user12 · 30mins
is it too late to back out 💔
👤 | user13 · 29mins
bless their souls
aka | kimiantonelli · 28mins
can someone tell me the lore between the sc president and vp because why was the tension so high when they were touring us around
↳ oscarpiastri how much time do you have? this is a long story
⎯
🤍 | yourusername · 2mins
yikes!
↳ landonorris and yet somehow you're early to THIS particular tweet
👤 | user14 · 2mins
hi how do i submit a confession?
↳ rufreedomwall hii ! just email us at [email protected] :) -💌
arthur | arthur_leclerc · 1min
did y/n submit this?
↳ yourusername ?????? i'd die before saying shit like this
↳ landonorris yeah u keep telling yourself that
albono | alex_albon · 1min
i SO agree btw georgerussell63
↳ georgerussell thanks i guess
⎯
RU FW | rufreedomwall · 20mins
i'm a senior and can confirm the workload does not get better -🎮
👤 | user15 · 17mins
i should've listened to the girl who approached me and told me it's not too late to back out 😞
👤 | user16 · 15mins
guys i promise just wait until ur first halloween party and you'll have fun here
↳ user17 but first you'll have to walk through hell (midterms)
⎯
👤 | user18 · 40mins
AS PATRICK AND KAT FROM 10TIHAY TOO UGHHH ME WHEN
👤 | user19 · 38mins
could've been us but he's ghosting me 😒
arthur | arthur_leclerc · 35min
this is all the confirmation i need!
↳ oscarpiastri they've been flirt-fighting since we were freshman i can't believe we finally get to see it happen
↳ yourusername THIS MEANS NOTHING ITS JUST A COINCIDENCE
↳ charles_leclerc yeah and me and max accidentally kissing at our sophomore halloween party was just an inchident
↳ maxemilianverstappen I THOUGHT WE AGREED TO NEVER SPEAK OF THAT EVER AGAIN?????????
↳ arthur_leclerc woah what the fuck why am i hearing about this just now
⎯
MESSAGES: gr DNI 🚫
[11:26 PM]
you: wow yiu are sp obsessed wit hme
[11:26 PM]
gr DNI 🚫: you wish
gr DNI 🚫: don't drink too much. we have a meeting tomorrow
[11:27 PM]
you: ill dowhat i want.
⎯
arthur | arthur_leclerc · 10mins
hey sis wrong account...
lando | landonorris · 10mins
so was supposed to be a freedom wall submission or for the dump
👤 | user20 · 9mins
yes queen speak your truth! do not let them silence you!
👤 | user21 · 9mins
do you still want your bacon avocado?
gabi | gabrielbortoleto_ · 9mins
is the meeting tomorrow cancelled
↳ oscarpiastri i mean they're still playing beer pong rn so
↳ georgerussell63 meeting is NOT cancelled bc there will be faculty heads there and we need to start planning for the november & december events
↳ charles_leclerc also there's a leakage in my dorm i need to bring that up to the staff
This tweet was deleted.
⎯
GROUP CHAT: FW admins 👅👅
[7:29 AM]
lando 🎮: y/n, george told me to tell you you're excused from the meeting
[7:30 AM]
you: I DID NOT MEAN TO POST THAT
you: PLS TELL ME HES NOT GOING TO HAVE ME REMOVED FROM MY POSITION
you: jesus christ im so hungover
[7:30 AM]
lando 🎮: your public image is so cooked
[7:32 AM]
you: I KNOW.
you: i cant deal with this good lord
[7:33 AM]
isack 🥖: i'll type up a public apology statement for you dw
[7:33 AM]
you: THIS IS WHY ILY ISACK 💗💗💗💗💗
you: lando u get naughty cat of the day.
⎯
👤 | user22 · 15mins
the pr officer got to her 😭
↳ user23 not charles 💔💔💔
↳ charles_leclerc hey i didn't say shit! this came from the goodness of her heart!
↳ yourusername well now it sounds fake thanks a lot. 😐
👤 | user24 · 12mins
something unhinged always happens at the halloween party
↳ user25 i swearrrrr it's cursed atp
↳ user26 when someone asks me to put on a horror movie is so i make them watch RU halloween parties
↳ user25 wait until u hear about the new years parties though
George | georgerussell63 · 10mins
apology accepted 😊
↳ yourusername thank you for finding it in yourself to forgive me for my actions.
↳ yourusername JUMP OFFFFFFFF
⎯
MESSAGES: curious george 🐒
[10:02 AM]
you: what are the plans for the next 2 months?
you: and also what will happen to the the water leakage in charles' dorm
[10:04 AM]
curious george 🐒: gabi will send the minutes of the meeting in a bit.
curious george 🐒: and i didn't know you cared that much about charles. he has a girlfriend am i right?
[10:05 AM]
you: i'm trying to have a conversation with you jfc i could care less about charles (im joking i care as a friend)
[10:05 AM]
curious george 🐒: well the attempt is there indeed
[10:06 AM]
you: oh fuck off
you: my reputation has been damaged immensely
you: i can't be nice for another SECOND or i might throw up
[10:08 AM]
curious george 🐒: throw up because you have a black heart or bc you are terribly hungover
[10:09 AM]
you: throw up because of how the thought of you makes me sick to my stomach
[10:09 AM]
curious george 🐒: you want me that bad huh?
curious george 🐒: i'm joking
curious george 🐒: again????????????
curious george 🐒: ffs
curious george 🐒: enjoy ur fall break.
⎯
👤 | user27 · 1hr
this is my least fav holiday for this exact reason
↳ user28 i'm a vetmed student and i became vegan bcs of this 😭
↳ user29 in what universe are any of those statements related
👤 | user30 · 50mins
guys i went to the dinner arranged by student council for those who won't be going home
↳ user31 congrats you get a sticker?
↳ user30 the food was bomb you all missed out istg
⎯
👤 | user32 · 28mins
TAYLOR SWIFT REFERENCE!!!!!!!!
🤍 | yourusername · 22mins
didn't know the grinch listened to taylor swift
↳ georgerussell63 taylor swift was literally #1 on your spotify wrapped
↳ yourusername ACA-SCUSE ME?!
↳ user33 glad to know they got over the halloween party incident
↳ yourusername do not mention that in my presence ever again thank you!
👤 | user34 · 19mins
final exams and then war is over ⛓⛓⛓
↳ user35 my roommate's final project is making the perfect bread and i have not eaten anything besides bread for the past 2 days
↳ user36 i actually ran out of bread if you still have some pls let's meet
↳ user35 SAY LESS dm me
🐻 | olliebearman · 19mins
first finals, kinda nervous 😜
↳ arthur_leclerc you should be
⎯
GROUP CHAT: SC Officers '25-'26
[5:15 PM]
you: congrats on making it through the first semester everyone!!
you: enjoy your christmas break :)
❤️ 5 reacts, 👍 1 react
⎯
MESSAGES: grinch russell
[6:41 PM]
grinch russell: are you going home for the holidays?
[6:41 PM]
you: didn't know we were on casual talk basis
you: yes i will, why
[6:42 PM]
grinch russell: hey you were the one who wanted to have a conversation with me
[6:42 PM]
you: yeah....
you: over a month ago.......
you: but fine what do you want
[6:42 PM]
grinch russell: not sure actually
[6:42 PM]
you: jesus christ
you: i'm wasting my time
[6:43 PM]
grinch russell: last time we spoke over the holidays was freshman year about what changes we would make in the student council
grinch russell: before we hated each other as much as we do now
[6:43 PM]
you: 2 things
you: first hate is a strong word, second are you suggesting we talk over the break?
[6:45 PM]
grinch russell: yk, student council reasons like what's our plan for next sem
grinch russell: full circle type shit
[6:46 PM]
you: yeah no thanks i think i wanna rest
[6:47 PM]
grinch russell: fine
grinch russell: ok ykw i expected this
⎯
👤 | user37 · 10mins
GIRL I LIVE ON THE 3RD FLOOR AND I SMELL IT.
↳ user38 please order doordash or something before you burn the school down 😭
↳ user39 but hey if you want to ACCIDENTALLY burn the school down yk yk
↳ user40 encouraging arson is crazy
👤 | user41 · 6mins
never let bro cook again 💀🙏
↳ user42 never let them NEAR the kitchen even
lance | lance_stroll · 6mins
i can sponsor your food delivery just don't burn the place down please, that's WAY more expensive than 3 meals a day for a month
[11:57 PM]
lando: [sent 1 image]
lando: HA HA HA HA HA
[11:57 PM]
alex: SINCE WHEN WERE YOU THE FW ADMIN??
[11:58 PM]
lando: junior year BTU THATS NOT IIMPORTANTTTT
lando: george stop seening us just bc you got caught
lando: own up to yiur feelings LIKE A MAN
[11:59 PM]
george: there are no feelings i'm just being nice
[11:59 PM]
lando: ahuh sure m8
😆 1 react, 👍 1 react
⎯
RU FW | rufreedomwall · 4mins
i'm ITCHINGGG to reveal who sent this -🎮
↳ rufreedomwall hey how come i didn't see this submission in the inbox? -💌
↳ rufreedomwall oh because it was a dm -🎮
↳ rufreedomwall to who -💌
↳ rufreedomwall my personal acc -🥖
↳ rufreedomwall thank you isack ure the goat -🎮
🤍 | yourusername · 1min
thank you anon !! merry christmas as well :)
⎯
MESSAGES: george
[12:02 AM]
george: merry christmas
george: still?
[12:02 AM]
you: still what?
[12:03 AM]
george: nothing
george: did you unblock me just to say merry christmas?
[12:10 AM]
you: i'm going back to campus for new years
[12:11 AM]
george: "i'm going back to campus for new years" is the new merry christmas now apparently
[12:12 AM]
you: oh shut up
you: when are you coming back
[12:15 AM]
george: tomorrow
[12:15 AM]
you: i see
you: okay
[12:20 AM]
george: dare i ask why you're coming back before the 2nd semester starts
[12:21 AM]
you: i've never celebrated new years in school
you: figured i'd see how it's like before i graduate
[12:22 AM]
george: if you're graduating this year 😊
[12:22 AM]
you: OH WHO IS YOU
[12:22 AM]
george: dont get your hopes up
george: it's just a halloween 2.0 party
[12:23 AM]
you: is that so?
you: i'll not get too drunk this time
[12:25 AM]
george: oh good luck with that
george: wouldn't want another issue before your last semester starts
[12:30 AM]
you: merry christmas.
⎯
👤 | user43 · 4h
i saw them like 2 days ago in the library talking like FRIENDS ???? wtf happened during christmas please share w the class
↳ landonorris i asked y/n about it and she deadass said "sc things" BITCH BE FR RIGHT NEOW (it probably is about council shit but PLEASEEEE)
👤 | user44 · 3h
they are NOT sober rn but they're doing a duet to best part by daniel caesar what is going awnnnnn 😭🙏
↳ user45 been rooting for georgeyn since freshman year but why is ts happening so quickly hello i'm getting whiplash
↳ user46 RIGHT they need to calm down
↳ user47 the way everyone's just live tweeting about it
↳ user48 fomo who!
👤 | user49 · 30mins
HAPPY NEW YEAR. THEY FUCKING KISSED.
↳ user50 DON'T PLAY W ME RN ARE YOU SERIOUS I NEED PROOF??????
↳ user51 to new years day by taylor swift playing in the background too WHAT THE FUCKKKKKKK someone pinch me is this real omg 😭😭
oscar | oscarpiastri · 28mins
please tell me someone got a video
↳ arthur_leclerc I DID 😈😈😈😈😈
↳ alex_albon SEND RN
👤 | user53 · 19mins
2026 is off to a great start this MIGHT be my year
↳ charles_leclerc see i say this every year and it ends up shit
↳ landonorris but when have any of your years started with your otp kissing
↳ charles_leclerc alexandra spends new years with her family so i never get to kiss her on january 1
↳ maxemilianverstappen im right here
⎯
MESSAGES: george
[1:18 PM]
you: seems like i wasn't the only one who couldn't handle their liquor last night
[2:59 PM]
george: yeah sorry
george: can we just forget about it?
[3:03 PM]
you: oh
you: mhm
you: for sure
[3:03 PM]
george: it was just an accident
[3:04 PM]
you: oh yeah totally!
you: like max and charles' sophomore halloween thing
[3:05 PM]
george: haha exactly lol
george: you good?
[3:21 PM]
you: just terribly hungover
⎯
arthur | arthur_leclerc · 10mins
funny seeing this from you after last nights events
↳ antitheticaldreamgirl yeah well it was an accident
↳ landonorris FYM ACCIDENT?
↳ antitheticaldreamgirl his words not mine
lily he | lilymhe · 8mins
how did the conversation go?
↳ antitheticaldreamgirl "sry can we forget abt it pls?" "yeah ofc" "it was just an accident" "oh yeah. like max and charles' halloween kiss" "haha"
↳ lilymhe girl did he actually say that
↳ antitheticaldreamgirl [image]
↳ lilymhe hey so thats actually crazy are you okay
↳ antitheticaldreamgirl well hes the boy ive hated for years so yes im fine why wouldnt i be
↳ landonorris wait off topic but does max still want charles
↳ arthur_leclerc HE DOES but charles is with alexandra so its 😵💫
⎯
👤 | user54 · 20mins
bedrotted the whole time but its my last year so yk fuck it we ball
👤 | user55 · 15mins
please no i'm not ready yet 😣😣
👤 | user56 · 15mins
i know y/n and george had a great holiday szn
↳ user57 the ny party live tweeting will always be unmatched
↳ user58 i was on the edge of my seat waiting for updates as if i was THERE
⎯
👤 | user59 · 40mins
dude i sat next to y/n in the library then george came up to her to remind her of the council meeting later AND HOLYYYY the air was so thick
↳ alex_albon now imagine sitting through the whole meeting with them
⎯
MESSAGES: gr (BLOCK ASAP) 🚫🚫🚫
[8:42 PM]
gr (BLOCK ASAP) 🚫🚫🚫: are you seriously letting what happened on new year affect the job
gr (BLOCK ASAP) 🚫🚫🚫: real professional of u
[8:49 PM]
you: oh IM the one letting it affect our job?
you: you're the one out here making a scene
you: ignoring my questions in the group chat??? taking the long way around campus so our paths don't cross??????????
you: but yeah sure it's my fault
you: let me remind you that YOU were the one who pulled me in.
[8:51 PM]
gr (BLOCK ASAP) 🚫🚫🚫: and let me remind you that you kissed back
[8:51 PM]
you: YOU SAID IT YOURSELF IT WAS A MISTAKE
you: jesus christ i shouldn't have went to that fucking party.
[8:52 PM]
gr (BLOCK ASAP) 🚫🚫🚫: i said it was an accident not a mistake
gr (BLOCK ASAP) 🚫🚫🚫: i don't think it was wrong to kiss you
gr (BLOCK ASAP) 🚫🚫🚫: okay no thats not what i meant
gr (BLOCK ASAP) 🚫🚫🚫: actually i don't know what i mean
gr (BLOCK ASAP) 🚫🚫🚫: whatever you blocked me again anyways
Submission: "I'm sorry please let's start over -gr"
Sent from my iPhone
⎯
not y/n ꗃ | antitheticaldreamgirl · 10mins
THE NERVE OF SOME PEOPLE.
↳ isackhadjar there's something about him that just needs to be studied
↳ antitheticaldreamgirl U GET ME
↳ landonorris WAIT WHAT AM I MISSING
↳ isackhadjar check email bro
👤 | user60 · 3mins
how many people have gr initials in this school 🤨
↳ user61 me personally i only know one (our beloved sc president)
↳ user62 unrelated but i read "gr initials" as genitals i am so sorry
↳ user60 IM PISSING MYSLEF HASUHADGASHAF
⎯
MESSAGES: "accident" 🤡🤡 (gr)
[11:45 PM]
you: the nerve you have
you: [sent 1 image]
[11:45 PM]
"accident" 🤡🤡 (gr): how sure are you that that's me?
[11:46 PM]
you: oh please
you: you're pathetic
[11:48 PM]
"accident" 🤡🤡 (gr): [voice message]
"I'm sorry. really, I am. I didn't mean that you was a mistake. It was just something that we never intended to happen then, or like at all. In fact, you're a good kisser! Actually I shouldn't have said that. Oh God, your ego is going to be huge after this. Sorry for avoiding you, I wasn't sure what was going to happen honestly or how to act and I... have nothing else to say. Sorry."
"accident" 🤡🤡 (gr): god this is so stupid
[11:50 PM]
you: damnnn you think i'm a good kisser 😏
[11:50 PM]
"accident" 🤡🤡 (gr): please stop talking!
"accident" 🤡🤡 (gr): so... back to normal?
[11:51 PM]
you: yeah yeah yeah so emotional and for what!!!!
[11:52 PM]
"accident" 🤡🤡 (gr): lot of talk for someone who cried when she was called a mistake
[11:52 PM]
you: EXCUSE ME
[11:53 PM]
"accident" 🤡🤡 (gr): i need to know though
"accident" 🤡🤡 (gr): was i a good kisser?
[11:53 PM]
you: im going to bed i hate you
[11:54 PM]
"accident" 🤡🤡 (gr): so that's a yes 😊
[11:59 PM]
you: NO.
you: BYE.
⎯
👤 | user63 · 3h
everyone drop what songgram your partner sent you!
↳ user64 Plot Twist by NIKI
↳ user65 she's always a woman billy joel
↳ user66 cornelia street - taylor swift
↳ lilymhe She will be loved - maroon 5 💕💕
↳ user67 passenger seat
↳ user68 THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY 😭😭😭😭
↳ user69 GIRL GO GET UR MAN BACK OMG
↳ user68 im lesbian
↳ user69 GIRL GO GET UR WOMAN* BACK OMG
👤 | user70 · 1h
my ex just sent my the man who can't be moved... do i go back?
↳ user70 he cheated 3x btw
↳ user71 no you stay right where you are. do not go back to that evil man
lord perceval | charles_leclerc · 55mins
my ex bf just sent get him back! by olivia rodrigo 😦
cs55 | carlossainz55 · 55mins
just sent my ex bf get him back! by olivia rodrigo
↳ landonorris he has a girlfriend now btw...
↳ carlossainz55 i want to get him back 🤷♂️🤷♂️
👤 | user72 · 25mins
MY SITUATIONSHIP FROM SOPHOMORE YEAR JUST SENT ME ABOUT YOU??????? BUT IM ENGAGED NOW?????????? WTH....
↳ user73 may this type of love never find me 🥀🥀🥀
⎯
🤍 | yourusername · 20mins
is this real?
👤 | user74 · 19mins
IF IT WASN'T GEORGE WHO SENT THIS IDK ANYMORE
↳ user75 "my VP" THIS HAS GYAAATTTTT TO BE GEORGE CMON NOW
👤 | user76 · 19mins
"your mistake" Y/N GIRL YOU WON 😭😭😭😭😭😭
↳ user77 GEORGE I WAS NOT FAMILIAR WITH YOUR GAME
↳ user78 mistake referring to their new years kiss omg i didn't know they were on that level alreadyyyy.......
oscar | oscarpiastri · 19mins
one kiss and the four-year rivalry goes down the drain
↳ logansargeant love is a crazy thing, my friend
↳ oscarpiastri i know i have a girlfriend
⎯
GROUP CHAT: FW admins 👅👅
[4:27 PM]
you: [sent 1 image]
you: be honest LANDO who sent this
[4:27 PM]
lando 🎮: yk damn well who
[4:27 PM]
you: I CAN'T FIND HIS SUBMISSION IN THE INBOX
you: DONT FUCKING LIE TO ME RN
[4:28 PM]
lando 🎮: IM NOT LYING I SWEAR
lando 🎮: [sent 1 image]
lando 🎮: HE MESSAGED ME HIMSELF
[4:29 PM]
you: this has to be a prank
[4:29 PM]
lando 🎮: idk ask him yourself!
⎯
MESSAGES: "accident" 🤡🤡 (gr)
[4:30 PM]
you: [sent 2 images]
you: is this a joke?
[6:12 PM]
you: russell answer me goddamnit
[8:33 PM]
you: dude you can't just say shit like that and dip wtf is wrong with you?
⎯
👤 | user79 · 2mins
guys i don't think george was the one that sent this because he's making out with some other girl right now 🥲
↳ user80 NO MY PARENTS??
↳ user81 say sike rn...
↳ rufreedomwall heyy do you have any proof?
↳ user79 [video] 🥲🥲🥲 idk she looks nothing like y/n
↳ rufreedomwall oh my god that's crazy?? thank you for this
↳ user79 yw admin 😅
⎯
MESSAGES: gr (SC President)
[10:19 PM]
you: [sent 1 video]
you: go to hell
You have blocked this contact.
⎯
GROUP CHAT: SC Officers '25-'26
[11:04 AM]
you: thank you for attending the meeting today on short notice 😭
you: have a nice spring break my lovelies <3
❤️ 5 reacts
[11:05 AM]
charles: is anyone going to talk about wtf is up between y/n and george
charles: dude it felt so suffocating every time they spoke to each other
[11:05 AM]
lance: hey mate i think you got the wrong gc...
[11:06 AM]
george: no actually you're right
george: what was up with that, y/n?
[11:07 AM]
you: don't pin this on me.
you: and guys this isn't the time and group chat for this matter hahah
[11:07 AM]
charles: we're all friends here dw go ahead say what you need to say
charles: it's been like this for the past month since valentines
[11:07 AM]
alex: honestly it's getting tiring. just let it out, this won't leave the gc lmao
[11:08 AM]
george: well all i know is one day we were talking about potential plans for the next 3 months then the next i was blocked
[11:09 AM]
you: oh you can't think of anything that made me block you because you're "too perfect" to do anything wrong?
[11:09 AM]
george: what even is this about, y/n? just tell me
george: for fucks sake you're so confusing.
[11:10 AM]
you: I'M the confusing one?
you: the AUDACITY good god.
[11:10 AM]
oscar: it was the songgram, george
[11:10 AM]
you: this isn't the right place to talk about these things. sorry guys.
⎯
MESSAGES: gr (SC President)
[11:15 AM]
gr (SC President): this is so stupid
gr (SC President): i mean honestly
gr (SC President): what are we even doing anymore
gr (SC President): oh i did not expect that to go through
[11:16 AM]
you: you infuriate me, george russell.
you: you're CONFUSING and a pain in the ass and annoying and irritating and i cant think of any other synonyms through my anger but OH MY DAYS.
[11:17 AM]
gr (SC President): are you done?
[11:17 AM]
you: fuck you
[11:18 AM]
gr (SC President): i sent the songgram while i was drunk.
gr (SC President): i didn't mean to kiss her but i did and i don't know why
gr (SC President): vodka cranberry does funny things to you
[11:18 AM]
you: what so you just kiss everyone when you're drunk and i just so happened to be one of your victims?
you: news flash that's NOT A FUCKING EXCUSE.
[11:18 AM]
gr (SC President): what are we even fighting about at this point
gr (SC President): before it used to just be council positions and ideas now i don't understand it anymore
gr (SC President): the kiss? the songgram?
[11:19 AM]
you: THAT SONG MEANT SOMETHING GEORGE.
you: THAT FUCKASS MESSAGE YIU LEFT WIYH IT MEANT SOEMTHING TOO
you: IT MEANS SOMETHIBG TP ME AT LEAST
you: RHATS NOT SMTH U JSUT SAY TO ANYKNE
you: AND THATS NTO SOMEHTING U SYA TO SOMEONE THEN KISS SOMEONE WLSE
gr (SC President) is calling...
You declined the call.
[11:19 AM]
you: no DON'T call me in the statw im in right now.
you: [voice message]
"I don't— I don't even know what I'm mad about anymore... It's like I wouldn't even call this jealousy it's just how can you say shit like that then go on and kiss someone else. Jeez it's so hard to word this. It's just I don't know why it's so hard to hate you now. It used to be so easy when we were fighting for positions, making better ideas for our orgs or for the council and now? I don't even know anymore. For once I can't think of anything."
[11:21 AM]
gr (SC President): i understand
gr (SC President): everything's been weird lately.
gr (SC President): especially with graduation coming up in a few months
gr (SC President): and i'm sorry for acting that way drunk, not an excuse. i know.
[11:21 AM]
you: mhm
you: they're right, senior year is indeed exhausting
[11:22 AM]
gr (SC President): do you want to start over?
gr (SC President): yk just to get rid of all the bad blood between us
[11:22 AM]
you: fine. sure, why not
you: it's our last few months anyways. might as well stop fighting atp
[11:23 AM]
gr (SC President): well i'm george russell. president of the student council. ntmy
[11:25 AM]
you: OH we're starting that far okay
you: y/n l/n. RIGHTFUL president of the student council. my position was robbed from me. pleasure to make your acquaintance!
[11:25 AM]
gr (SC President): 😒🤝
[11:25 AM]
you: 😊🤝
⎯
👤 | user82 · 30mins
spring break was NOT 1 week it felt like an hour 😭🙏
↳ user83 all i did was watch the owner of the 24k gold 𝓵𝓪𝓫𝓮𝔀𝓫𝓮𝔀
↳ user84 MY FAV RAGEBAITER
albono | alex_albon · 25mins
im not ready to graduate yet 😣
↳ georgerussell63 you can always fail finals
👤 | user85 · 20mins
it feels like it was just last year we were watching y/n and george fight for the presidential position and now they're not at each others throats anymore 🥹🥹🥹
↳ user86 well i mean that was just last year??
↳ user87 not tgt but not enemies anymoreee i count it as a win
↳ arthur_leclerc so that kiss was nothing?!??!?!?!?!!
👤 | user88 · 10mins
CAN'T WAIT FOR GRAD BALL 😝😝😝 i get to go with the man i've been plotting on since freshman year!
↳ user89 bro is a mastermind 😮
↳ user90 TEACH ME UR WAYSSSSS
⎯
👤 | user91 · 1h
MY FAV SENIOR IS FINALLY GRADUATINGGG 😔😔😔
👤 | user92 · 56mins
bye batch '26 :( your batch had the most fine shyts :(
↳ user93 dare i say batch '27 has more
↳ user94 oscar piastri 😍 arthur leclerc 😍 logan sargeant 😍 yuki tsunoda 😍
↳ user95 why are they all men
↳ user96 REAL LIKE what abt alexandra saint-mleux and lily zneimer !??!
↳ user97 WHY ARE MOST OF THEM TAKEN UGHH 💔💔💔
👤 | user98 · 29mins
i married the man i danced with at grad ball 💕 congratulations class of 2026 👍👍
↳ user99 omg what batch are uuu
↳ user98 class of 2000, dear :)
👤 | user100 · 28mins
ik they're sorta old news but i'm still kinda hoping something happens with georgeyn
↳ arthur_leclerc me too lol
👤 | user101 · 10mins
why do they have to rehearse to graduate 😭
⎯
👤 | user102 · 3h
y/n just yapping and george staring at her as she entertains everyone gbye im gonna miss our otp so much
👤 | user103 · 1h
WHO IS IN CHARGE OF THE PLAYLIST WHY IS ALL TOO WELL PLAYING
↳ user104 they're making us relive EVERY part of uni oh wow idk if i wanna laugh or cry 😓
↳ landonorris mb gng
👤 | user105 · 1h
can we pls live tweet grad ball im having so much fomo rn
↳ user106 the very first night by taylor swift is playing :3
↳ user107 george is staring at y/n with THOSE eyes as she dances w her friends to it omg.
↳ user108 i fear nothing will be able to top the new years 2026 live tweeting
↳ user109 it's too iconic to be recreated 😢
👤 | user110 · 25mins
GEORGE ASKED Y/N TO SLOW DANCE W HIM 😭😭😭😭 UGHRHHGRGRHGR MY PARENTSSSSS
↳ arthur_leclerc wait can you video pls charles isnt picking up his phone i wanna see
↳ user111 WHAT SONG IS PLAYING
↳ user112 BE MY MISTAKE THE 1975
↳ user113 OH MY GOSSSHHHHHHH
↳ user114 STOP THE SONGGRAM FROM GEORGE BEING SIGNED AS "your mistake" I CANTTTTTT
↳ user115 did she say yes?!??!?!?!?!?
↳ user116 duh!
👤 | user117 · 15mins
they hugged guys 🥀 we got a hug 🥀
↳ user118 idc we went from "imgonnakillyou" rivals to friends in the span of 6 months im counting it as a win for the georgeyn nation
↳ user119 i fear no other ship in school will match georgeyn
↳ user120 we are so parasocial but ykw to be cringe is to be free
⎯
MESSAGES: george russell
[9:57 AM]
you: seeing you walk up that stage was so... bittersweet? somehow.
you: end of an era i guess hahah thank you for 4 years of agony 🤍
you: congratulations, russell.
[12:00 PM]
george russell: happy graduation, VP
george russell: oh okay i didn't think you'd actually block me anymore now that we're... friends? in a way?
george russell: congratulations for finally making it out of this school as valedictorian. i know how hard you worked for it.
george russell: i suppose my only regret is that our story started too late. if we got over this petty hatred toward each other a lot sooner i’m sure our senior year would’ve been a lot less dramatic. still, i wouldn’t have it any other way. thank you for this rollercoaster of a school year, my vice president. and thank you for 4 years of keeping me on my toes and pushing me to be the best when we all know i could never be half the person you are. i hope our paths cross again.
⎯
👤 | user121 · 10mins
I FEEL LIKE I JUST FOUND OUT WHO SPIDERMAN IS WHAT
👤 | user122 · 9mins
valedictorian, sc vp, shit ton of extracurriculars, AND freedom wall admin??!??! did you ever get a break queen??
↳ yourusername im basically batman
↳ user123 yall sleeping on lando getting latin honors, being a student athlete, and a fw admin
albono | alex_albon · 8mins
biggest surprise here is lando being cum laude
↳ landonorris i don't know how to take this tbh
↳ alex_albon cheer bc u graduated
👤 | user124 · 6mins
how long before we get an admin 🥖 reveal
↳ rufreedomwall secret 😉😉 -🥖
aka | kimiantonelli · 3mins
i wanna be a fw admin too
↳ olliebearman honestly same
↳ rufreedomwall wait i'll dm u guys -🥖
⎯ end
THIS IS SO LONG OMG MY PATIENCE WAS FR TESTED HERE HOPE U LIKED ITTTT not the last time im gonna make something like this but i think i will go back to the instagram layouts for a while
On the brink of losing his career due to mounting scandals and a reckless reputation, Lando Norris found an unexpected solution—a marriage of convenience. Once seen as a playboy and party boy, his image transformed overnight when he married his best friend, not for love, but to salvage his public image and silence the media.
word count: 3738
pairing: lando norris x reader
content: best friends to fake marriage to real love (this one will be a rollercoaster)
warning: contains themes of unspoken emotional longing, romantic grief, and cultural wedding traditions, with mentions of emotional suppression, stress, and light verbal frustration.
Image of Us masterlist
rese notes: cooked asf but here you go babes ep. 3 of the idiots who r stupid of their own feelings
episode title: EP 03. Mad at You
song: Mad at you by Why Don't We, Can't Take My Eyes off You by Frank Sinantra, Hold On, We're Going Home by Drake
“I always loved him… but who am I but a friend—his dearest friend? That’s the line drawn between us. But God, I always wonder… would things have been different if I had just gathered the courage to tell him?”
The shrill ring of the alarm clock pulled her from the dream that still haunted her—the one where she almost confessed everything to Lando.
She blinked slowly, her eyes adjusting to the soft sunlight seeping through the curtains. Her chest ached with the weight of thoughts she never said.
What if I had told him that night?
What if he felt the same?
What if we weren’t just two people dancing around unspoken feelings?
What if I hadn’t been so afraid of losing him… and lost him anyway by staying silent?
She mumbled under her breath, “Maybe in another lifetime, I would’ve…”
Her hand reached out to silence the alarm, but she stayed in bed a moment longer, letting the quiet wrap around her. The echoes of her “what ifs” still clung to the air like ghosts.
Eventually, she got up, shaking off the weight of memory. It was her day off, and despite the heaviness in her heart, she moved through her apartment with purpose—determined to check off her to-do list, to be productive, to distract herself from dreams that no longer belonged to her present.
She looked like a housewife—bandana tied over her head, hair messily bundled up, sleeves rolled as she moved with purpose through her small apartment. The morning had started with nothing but a half-empty cereal box she found buried in the back of the cupboard. Thankfully, it wasn’t expired. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to get her through the day.
With a sigh, she picked up where she left off, trash bag in one hand and frustration in the other. Old receipts, empty takeout containers, crumpled reminders of days she barely remembered—she tossed them out without hesitation.
She wiped down every surface she could reach, but the gloves she wore made her feel clumsy, disconnected. The sponge slipped, the cloth dragged awkwardly, and after another failed swipe, she snapped.
“Ugh, forget it,” she muttered under her breath.
Ripping the gloves off, she tossed them aside and dove in bare-handed. It was faster. More satisfying. Maybe even a little therapeutic. There was something raw and grounding about feeling the mess with her own hands—something that matched the storm she was quietly cleaning up inside herself too.
With music blasting in the background while she cleaned, she didn’t hear the doorbell ringing repeatedly. She paused, trying to focus as it continued, and finally stopped the song—“Mad at You” by Why Don’t We—before heading to the door.
As she opened it, she came face to face with him.
“What is it now…” she muttered, eyeing Lando as he stood awkwardly on her doorstep.
“I… uhm, brought you a gift,” he said, holding up a small bag.
She raised an eyebrow but stepped aside to let him in. The moment he entered, he was hit by the strong scent of cleaning products.
“Shoes off,” she warned quickly, and he obeyed without a word.
“What’s the gift?” she asked, nodding at the bag as she wiped her hands on the cleaning cloth.
When she opened the bag, she froze.
Inside was a pair of porcelain swans—delicate, pristine, and gracefully curved so their necks met in the shape of a heart.
Her breath caught in her throat.
She hadn't seen these in years.
Growing up, her parents had the exact same pair in the cabinet by the living room window. They were never moved, never touched—except by her mother, who cleaned them carefully every Sunday. She used to tell her the swans were a symbol: love, balance, and a promise to always meet halfway.
“No matter the argument,” her mother once said, dusting the swans gently, “we always face each other again. Like these two. That's how love works—you choose to come back to one another, every time.”
She blinked quickly, brushing away the sting behind her eyes.
“It’s… beautiful,” she whispered, voice cracking just slightly.
She had dreamed of having something like this. But not just the porcelain—not really. She longed for the kind of love her parents had: steady, enduring, quietly fierce.
She looked at Lando. He wasn’t saying anything, just watching her closely, nervously even. He always got like that when things were serious.
“How did you… know about these?” she asked, her fingers barely grazing the swans as if they’d shatter under her touch.
He shrugged, a small smile tugging at his lips. “You told me once. You were drunk, talking about your mom... and how your dad used to make her laugh when she was mad.”
She let out a soft laugh, the memory crashing in again.
It was that night—they’d been up until 3 a.m., lying on the floor, just talking. She didn’t even realize he’d remembered.
“Thank you,” she said quietly, and this time she looked at him like she meant it.
Really meant it.
Warm cups of tea sat between them, steam curling gently into the quiet. Their voices were low, hushed like a secret shared between just the two of them. It was an intimate moment—but to them, it was nothing out of the ordinary. This was simply how they were: soft conversations, shared silences, comfort without effort.
They were talking about the wedding.
She took a slow sip from her cup, letting the warmth settle in her chest, her eyes quietly studying him as he spoke. The way his brows moved when he thought, the curve of his mouth mid-sentence—what a sight he was, she thought.
Then, almost out of nowhere, she said softly,
“A simple dress would do fine. It’s just a civil wedding, after all.”
He paused, then turned to look at her.
“And I want you to look beautiful that day,” he said, nudging her knee with his. “Come on… give yourself some credit.”
She smiled faintly, but he wasn’t finished.
“You look beautiful when you don’t even try,” he added, voice quieter this time, almost as if he was afraid of saying too much. “In that hoodie, hair a mess, half-asleep with a cup of tea… and yet—” he let out a breathless laugh, “somehow, that’s still my favorite version of you.”
She blinked, caught off guard. Her fingers tightened slightly around the mug, heart thudding in her chest.
He didn’t press her to respond. He just looked at her, his gaze warm and steady, like he’d meant every single word.
They were seated in a cozy bakery that specialized in wedding cakes, the scent of vanilla and buttercream thick in the air. Lando sat beside her, fork in hand, clearly enjoying himself as they sampled slices of cake laid out in front of them.
She scribbled notes in her notepad, jotting down flavors and thoughts like a diligent planner. Meanwhile, Lando was far too focused on devouring the samples.
“Don’t finish that!” she hissed, stopping his hand mid-air just as he was about to polish off another slice. “The last thing I want is us getting kicked out because you’re eating like this is an all-you-can-eat buffet.”
He grinned, completely unbothered.
She muttered under her breath, “Lamon nang lamon, kala mo naman 'di pinapakain”—stuffing your face like you haven’t been fed in days—and gave his arm a playful slap.
“Ow!” he chuckled, rubbing the spot. “Hey, I’m just making sure we pick the right one. Gotta be thorough, right?”
She rolled her eyes, but there was a smile tugging at her lips. He always managed to turn everything—even cake tasting—into something chaotic and somehow charming.
The owner chuckled at their antics, clearly amused. “It’s perfectly fine,” she said warmly, waving off the concern.
Lando grinned and took that as a green light to sneak another bite—until he felt her glare burning into the side of his head. He froze, fork hovering mid-air, and slowly set it down with a guilty smile.
They continued sampling a few more slices, scribbling notes, laughing quietly between bites, until a pistachio cake was placed in front of them.
Before she could even react, Lando quickly said, “Oh—she’s allergic to nuts. Maybe… no nuts?”
The owner blinked, caught off guard, and immediately apologized.
“It’s fine,” she reassured them quickly, waving it off as they took the plate away.
Another slice was brought out, something nut-free and safe. She turned to Lando, a little surprised.
“You remembered that?”
He shrugged, like it was no big deal. “Of course I did.”
But the way he looked at her—soft and casual, as if remembering details about her came as naturally as breathing—said otherwise.
Both of them continued tasting slice after slice, occasionally exchanging glances or comments as they evaluated each one like a pair of overqualified food critics. Some were too sweet, others too dense—but then came the tiramisu.
She took one bite and her eyes lit up. “This one,” she said immediately, her tone final.
Lando took a bite too and nodded in agreement. “Okay, yeah… that’s really good.”
They looked at each other, both silently agreeing it was the one.
She turned to the owner with a small smile. “Can we go with this one, please? Maybe just write Just Married on top… nothing too much. Oh, and maybe a little cream around the edges? Something simple for the borders.”
The owner nodded enthusiastically, jotting down notes. “Absolutely! Clean and classic.”
Lando glanced at her, a soft smile tugging at his lips as she spoke. Even in choosing a cake, she somehow made everything feel calm, thoughtful, and effortless.
“You’re really good at this, you know,” he murmured.
She looked over at him, eyes playful. “At what? Cake tasting?”
He laughed. “That too. But I meant… making things feel right.”
She blinked, caught slightly off guard by his words—but didn’t respond right away. Instead, she just smiled, eyes dropping back to her notepad.
After the cake tasting, the two of them wandered through the nearby streets, enjoying the fresh air and the soft golden hour glow settling over everything.
She walked a step ahead of him, hands gesturing animatedly as she rambled, “We’re actually getting through the list. Cake—done. Flowers—also done. I swear, we might actually pull this off without a meltdown.”
Lando smiled as he listened, letting her talk. He loved when she got like this—slightly overwhelmed, but in control, listing things off like she had the whole world to organize.
“For the bouquet, I kept it simple,” she continued, flipping open her notepad. “No full blooms or anything too dramatic. Just soft, subtle stuff.”
She read off her list aloud, almost proudly:
“Waxflower—white or pale pink.
Lisianthus buds—only buds, not full blooms—blush, mauve, or cream.
Dried lavender for that soft purple accent.
Baby’s Breath, of course—for the airiness.
Scabiosa pods, because I like the texture.
And eucalyptus or dusty miller to finish it off—nothing too bold, just soft greens or that silvery tone.”
She glanced at him as they walked. “It’s all styled in a really simple way. Nothing fancy, just… enough.”
He looked at her, quietly impressed. “You say ‘just enough’ like you didn’t spend hours thinking about every detail.”
She gave him a mock-offended look. “Excuse me—I’ll have you know simplicity requires thought. Minimalist is an aesthetic, thank you very much.”
He laughed. “No complaints here. Sounds perfect.”
And for a few moments, they just walked—no more planning, no more lists. Just quiet steps and an unspoken comfort between them.
Their steps were slow and unhurried as they strolled down the quiet street, the golden hour light casting everything in a warm glow.
She was quiet for a moment, then spoke softly, almost like she wasn’t sure if she should bring it up.
“I’ve been thinking about… looking at dresses soon,” she said, eyes fixed ahead.
Lando glanced at her, giving her the space to continue.
“I don’t know if I should go for it,” she added, pulling out her phone and scrolling through her saved images. “I mean, it’s just a civil wedding. Nothing big, no aisle, no dramatic entrance. But still…”
She turned the screen toward him, showing him a few options she’d bookmarked. “What do you think?”
One was a simple satin slip dress—elegant and understated. Another had delicate lace sleeves, soft and vintage-inspired. A third was a structured midi dress with clean lines and a subtle bow at the back.
She looked at him, waiting.
Lando studied the photos carefully, then pointed to the second one—the one with the lace sleeves.
“This one,” he said, without hesitation. “It’s you. It’s… soft, but still kind of bold. Like you’re not trying too hard, but you still somehow look incredible.”
She blinked, caught off guard by his sincerity.
“You really think so?” she asked, her voice quieter now.
He nodded. “Yeah. But honestly? You’d look beautiful in all of them.”
A flush crept up her neck as she looked away, pretending to scroll again.
“Okay… maybe I’ll try that one on.”
They walked a few more steps in silence, the kind that felt full rather than empty. And this time, the future didn’t feel so distant or uncertain—it felt a little more real.
While Lando was off training at the gym, she found herself alone in her apartment, curled up with her laptop and a cup of lukewarm tea she’d forgotten to drink. What started as a casual scroll turned into something deeper. More serious.
She wasn’t just browsing anymore—she was truly looking.
Despite how simple the wedding would be, she realized she wanted the dress to matter. Not in a flashy, over-the-top kind of way, but something meaningful. Something she could wear again, perhaps at another event or dinner—where the memory of that day would follow her gently like perfume.
Her eyes stopped on one particular dress.
It was ivory cream, etched with faint floral patterns that seemed to bloom quietly across the fabric, like secrets only revealed when the light touched just right. The flutter sleeves draped softly over the shoulders, revealing her collarbones like a whisper. It hugged the waist gently, then flowed out into a graceful A-line, the hem kissing the floor with every imagined step.
It wasn’t extravagant. It didn’t need to be.
There was something in its quiet elegance that spoke louder than any jewel, bead, or shimmer ever could. And in her mind, she saw herself in it—standing under the soft light of a small ceremony, heart racing, Lando smiling at her like he always did when he forgot other people were watching.
Her fingers hovered over the trackpad.
Do I need a veil?
Every wedding she’d attended lately, the veil was optional—forgotten even. But tradition whispered differently. In her culture, a veil wasn’t just symbolic—it was believed to protect, to ward off bad energy that clung to newlywed couples in their most vulnerable state. And part of her—quiet, hopeful—thought maybe, if she did it, it might help. Maybe it would work.
She searched again. This time, for veils.
And then she saw it.
A two-tiered tulle veil—sheer, soft, and weightless. It cascaded down the back, edges kissed with lace embroidered in patterns that echoed the delicate blooms of her chosen dress. It framed the body in the gentlest way, adding grace without excess. A poetic contrast: lightness and structure, elegance and innocence.
She stared at it for a long moment, not moving. Not scrolling. Just… imagining.
She wasn’t the kind of girl who dreamed of her wedding day. But now, sitting alone with that dress and that veil glowing quietly on her screen, it didn’t feel like a dream.
It felt like a decision.
Time was ticking.
The soft ticking of the clock blended with the quiet hum of her laptop, the occasional rustle of paper, and the steady clink of her spoon against ceramic. She had long lost count of how many cups of tea she’d consumed—each one poured with the promise of calm, then forgotten as soon as the next task took over.
She was multitasking—desperately.
Wedding tabs were open beside work emails. She was replying to a client, editing a document, and at the same time scribbling in her notebook:
Her handwriting grew increasingly rushed, squeezed between the corners of schedules and margin notes. Her eyes flicked between spreadsheets and inspiration boards, her phone buzzing beside her with another reminder—call venue for confirmation.
She took another sip from the half-cold tea, letting it sit on her tongue a second too long. Her body was still, but her mind moved in ten different directions.
The screen glowed with open tabs: links to minimalist heels, subtle jewelry, city hall outfit regulations, marriage license deadlines. On one side of her desk, a pile of receipts and printed quotes teetered dangerously close to spilling.
She let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding.
This wasn’t the wedding she imagined—not that she had really imagined one. But somehow, it mattered more than she expected. Every detail felt personal. Quiet. Honest. And that’s what made her want to get it right.
Even if it meant staying up late again. Even if it meant another cup of lukewarm tea.
Because for once, she wasn’t just planning an event. She was planning a beginning.
“Freaking boxes,” she muttered under her breath, glaring at the towering stack of cardboard sitting in the middle of her living room.
The packages had finally arrived—everything she ordered over the past few weeks, all at once. She let out a deep sigh, hands on her hips.
Please don’t let me get scammed, she thought, eyeing the biggest box—the one that held the dress.
She carefully opened it, fingers moving slower than usual, heart racing. Inside, the dress was wrapped delicately in tissue, and to her relief—it looked right. It looked real. The color, the fabric, even the faint floral etching that she’d studied so many times online.
She carried it into her room and decided to try it on immediately.
At first, she struggled with the zipper, arms awkwardly reaching behind her as she twisted and turned in front of the mirror.
This dress is going to skin me alive, she thought dramatically, teeth clenched.
But after a few frustrating minutes, she finally got it on. And when she stood still, catching her breath, she couldn’t help but stare.
It fit. Almost perfectly. She ran her hands down the soft fabric, letting the skirt flow around her feet.
She didn’t hear the front door open.
“Hey!” Lando called out casually, stepping inside. “I brought pastries—your favorite ones from that place by the station.”
No response.
“I swear if you’re deep in that wedding spreadsheet again—” he trailed off as he wandered into her bedroom, only to come face to face with her in the middle of the room, in the dress.
She spun around, startled, and screamed.
“Lando! GET OUT!” she shouted, grabbing the nearest pillow and chucking it at him with impressive aim.
He barely managed to block it, eyes wide in panic. “I—sorry! I didn’t—!” he blurted out, hands up in surrender as he backed out of the room.
The door slammed shut behind him a second later.
A muffled, exasperated voice followed:
“You’re supposed to knock!”
From the other side of the door, he replied with a weak, “Noted!”
She leaned against the door, flushed and flustered, heart still racing. Of all the moments…
And in the hallway, Lando stood frozen, a bag of pastries in his hand… and a very stupid smile tugging at his lips.
“Don’t fucking smile!” she yelled from behind the door, her voice sharp and flustered.
Lando froze in the hallway, still holding the pastry bag, caught red-handed—though he hadn’t even done anything… not really.
“How did you know I was smiling?” he called back, half-laughing.
“Because I know you!” she snapped. “And it’s bad luck if the groom sees the dress before the wedding!”
“I didn’t even see it!” he defended, though it wasn’t exactly true. He caught a glimpse—just a flash—but not enough to ruin anything… or so he hoped.
Inside the room, she groaned and cursed under her breath, carefully wriggling out of the dress. The zipper refused to cooperate again, clinging like it wanted to start a fight.
“You better hope you didn’t see anything,” she muttered, yanking the fabric free. “I swear to God, Lando, if this wedding goes to shit because you couldn’t knock—”
“I said I was sorry!” he replied through the door. “Besides, I brought pastries! That buys me some forgiveness, right?”
There was no answer—just the thud of a hanger being pulled from her closet and the soft shuffle of fabric being tucked away.
He waited in silence, smiling despite himself.
Because even though she was clearly annoyed… it was also kind of cute.
She finally opened the door, now dressed in a shirt and loose shorts, hair slightly tousled from the battle with the dress. Her expression was a mix of narrowed eyes and lingering embarrassment.
As she stepped into the kitchen, she caught sight of Lando casually bent over, rummaging through her fridge like it was his own.
Without hesitation, she raised her hand and slapped his back with the kind of force that could only come from someone who used to spike volleyballs for fun.
He winced immediately, groaning. “Ow—Jesus! That’s abuse at this point.”
“You’re lucky I didn’t hit harder,” she said, brushing past him to grab a glass. “That’s for not knocking.”
“I did knock,” he muttered, rubbing his back. “You just didn’t hear me ‘cause you were too busy panicking in your princess dress.”
She shot him a glare.
“I didn’t see it,” he added quickly, hands up in defense. “Swear on the pastries. Just caught a flash of white, that’s it. Could’ve been a curtain for all I know.”
She narrowed her eyes, still not convinced, but chose not to push further. She poured herself some water, took a long sip, then sighed.
“I seriously thought I was going to rip the zipper. That dress was not designed for people with shoulders.”
“You looked good—from the half-second I maybe didn’t see anything,” he teased.
She smacked his arm again.
“I’m going to break your spine,” she said sweetly.
He laughed, stepping away before she could follow through.
across the room, you laugh at something one of the junior nurses says, and george doesn’t look. he just keeps writing. keeps working. keeps pretending he didn’t feel that one laugh like a suture being pulled a little too tight across his ribs.
ꔮ starring: emergency physician!george russell x emergency medical technician!reader.
ꔮ word count: 11.2k.
ꔮ includes: romance. alternate universe: non-f1, alternate universe: hospital. depictions of blood, injuries; mentions of death, food; profanity. feelings realization, sunshine vs. grumpy trope, medical terms i’m not 100% sure about (all inaccuracies are mine!!!), alex & lando haunt the narrative.
ꔮ commentary box: i had webmd open for a vast majority of this fic, but i’m bouncing off the walls because it’s genuinely been a while since i’ve liked something i’ve written the way i enjoyed this!!! was inspired by this instagram reel, which i’ve been thinking of since it first came out *checks smudged handwriting on palm* over fifty weeks ago. bwoah. dedicated to @hello-car-fandom, whom i love from the bottom of my hypothalamus 🫀 𝐦𝐲 𝐦𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭
♫ waiting room, phoebe bridgers. slow dancing in a burning room, john mayer. there she goes, the la's. every breath you take, the police. lovers rock, tv girl. i look in people's windows, taylor swift.
The first sign of your arrival is not the siren. It’s your voice.
“We brought you a gift, doc! Thirty-two, male, witnessed syncope on the football pitch. GCS fifteen but woozy, borderline hypotensive, sweaty enough to make you think he just left the sauna instead of Sunday league.”
George doesn’t look up from the tablet in his hand. He doesn’t have to. He knows that voice. Knows the cadence, the pitch, the infuriating little smile you fold between your words like some sugar packet in a bitter espresso.
He taps through the patient chart in front of him with surgical precision, then finally lifts his gaze.
You’re already halfway through wheeling the gurney in, bright-eyed and annoyingly chipper, like A&E is your own personal stage and George is a very grumpy audience.
“Unresponsive?” George asks, eyes flicking to the patient.
“For about ten seconds, maybe twelve,” you reply, checking the IV line. “Eyes rolled back and everything. Bit dramatic if you ask me.”
George arches a brow. “You say that like you haven’t had three syncopal episodes from dehydration this summer.”
“Oh, darling,” you sigh, feigning affront as you tuck a loose glove into the bin, “I swoon artfully. There’s a difference.”
He doesn’t laugh. He just gestures toward the trauma bay. “Let’s get him on the monitor. Vitals?”
You rattle them off like it’s a grocery list, which it might as well be, given how many patients the two of you have bounced between over the last year and a half. George has memorized the rhythm of your handovers, the sly curve of your mouth when you say something deliberately out-of-pocket, the moments your eyes sharpen beneath all that sunshine.
When you first started at Silverstone Tow Hospital, he thought you were unserious. Too smiley. Too flirtatious. Like you mistook the emergency department for a cocktail party and your gurney was the hors d’oeuvre tray.
But then he watched you intubate a twelve-year-old on the roadside with blood on your boots and no backup for fifteen minutes. He hasn’t underestimated you since.
Not that he’d ever say it aloud. God forbid you get wind of the fact that he actually respects you. You’d never let him live it down.
George pulls on a pair of gloves and begins his primary survey, steady hands and a steadier voice. “Can you squeeze my fingers?” he asks the patient, who blinks groggily and manages a weak grip.
“Good,” George murmurs, then adds with a glance at you, “Better grip than you had last Friday when you tried to carry a loaded stretcher alone.”
“You wound me,” you gasp, dramatically placing a hand over your heart. “I was being efficient.”
“You were being a liability.”
“A sexy liability,” you wink.
George sighs. Loudly. It’s the kind of sigh that could rival the windstorm from a helicopter rotor.
And yet, the corner of his mouth twitches. He hates that it twitches.
You lean against the wall, arms crossed, watching him work. Not interfering. Never that. You know when to back off. When to shut up. It’s another reason he’s grown used to you, despite your penchant for disrupting his carefully cultivated calm.
“He’ll need fluids, maybe a 12-lead to rule out arrhythmia,” George mutters, mostly to himself.
“Already gave him a litre in the rig,” you say. “No meds. He wasn’t brady. Ticked all the boxes for heat syncope.”
George hums in acknowledgment.
Behind the clinical notes and monitors, there’s still a flicker of something between you—like the static hum between radio stations. It never quite lands on a clear frequency, but it’s persistent.
You push off the wall and head for the doors.
“Page me if he codes,” you call, already halfway out, “and Doctor Russell? Try not to miss me too much.”
He doesn’t respond. He’s too busy logging vitals. Too busy being professional. Too busy pretending he wouldn’t miss you if you were gone.
Later that day, George’s break lasts precisely nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds.
He knows this because he’s timing it. Not out of some obsessive need for control (although Alex might argue otherwise), but because peace in this place is fleeting. A single moment of quiet is like spotting a unicorn in the car park: beautiful, improbable, and probably about to be run over by a trauma alert.
He’s sitting in the staff lounge with his trainers kicked off, scrubs wrinkled at the knees, and a half-warm coffee balanced precariously on his knee. Across from him, Alex Albon is trying to solve a crossword with the same concentration he reserves for stitching up toddlers who think bike helmets are optional.
“What’s a ten-letter word for self-inflicted misery?” Alex mumbles.
“'Healthcare,’” George replies dryly, taking a sip of his terrible coffee.
“Was going to say ‘dating you,’ but yours works too,” Lando Norris says as he slides into the lounge, tossing a bag of crisps onto the table and nearly knocking over George's coffee in the process.
George doesn’t flinch. He's long since accepted that relaxation around Lando is a contact sport.
“‘Dating you’ is only nine letters,” George points out.
Lando lets out a beleaguered sigh. “I’m dyslexic.”
Alex chimes in. “Doesn’t work like that,” he says without looking up from his crossword.
They’ve known each other since medical school, the three of them. Lando, the overgrown golden retriever who accidentally passed his trauma certs with flying colours because he thought the practicals were a game. Alex, the mother hen with a penchant for stuffed animals and neon Crocs. And George, the one with the spreadsheet brain and a carefully laminated five-year plan, now crumpled somewhere beneath the weight of A&E rotations and god complexes.
“Do you mind?” George gestures at his drink. “This is the only hot beverage I’ve had all week that hasn’t been coughed into.”
“You’re welcome for the company,” Lando grins. “Anyway, someone had to check you hadn’t died of having a stick up your arse.”
“I persist. Alive, caffeinated, and annoyed.”
Peace reigns for another thirty-two seconds, then comes the knock.
More accurately, it’s a rhythmic tap-tap, tap-tap-tap on the door that sounds suspiciously like the beginning of a knock-knock joke.
Lando perks up immediately. George just closes his eyes.
“Please be maintenance,” he mumbles like a prayer. “Please be a power outage. Please be literally anyone else.”
The door creaks open.
“Sorry to interrupt your boys’ club,” you chirp, leaning against the frame with all the casual elegance of someone who’s very much not sorry. “Lando, we’ve got a lift request from the transport team. Need your charming muscles.”
“Ooh, are they finally letting me do something fun?” Lando springs up like a Labrador hearing the word ‘walk.’
George exhales through his nose. “Define ‘fun’.”
You beam at him. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
George opens his mouth, thinks better of it, then takes a long, scalding sip of coffee instead. Alex watches the exchange as if he’s observing a nature documentary.
“By the way,” you add, turning to George with mock sincerity, “I love what you’ve done with your hair today. The angry middle part is very in right now.”
“Thank you,” George deadpans. “I was going for ‘mildly electrocuted.’”
“Nailed it,” you singsong.
Lando slings an arm around your shoulder as you both exit. “We’ll bring you back a souvenir,” he calls to Alex.
George mutters, “Bring back silence.”
As the door swings shut behind you, peace returns. Briefly.
Alex waits exactly three beats. Then, “So, your girlfriend—”
George doesn’t look at him. “She’s not my girlfriend.”
“You know that’s not a denial, right? That’s a thesis statement waiting for peer review.”
“Albon.”
“Fine, fine.” A pause. With faux-innocence, he goes on. “But if she were, it would explain why you let her get away with calling you electrocuted and still looked vaguely pleased about it.”
George gives him a look that could curdle milk.
Alex just hums and returns to his crossword for self-inflicted misery. “Still going with ‘healthcare,’ by the way,” he chirps.
The doors to A&E swing open with all the subtlety of a brass band, which can only mean one of two things: an actual emergency. or you.
George glances up from a chart with the wariness of a man who has already seen too much today—and it’s only 3 P.M.
It’s you.
You’re wheeling in a teenage boy holding his arm like it might detach at the elbow. He’s pale, clammy, and muttering something about handlebars and gravity being a scam. Behind him, you wear the kind of grin that usually precedes emotional devastation.
“Delivery for Dr. Russell,” you half-yell. “Fifteen, male, possible dislocation, probable concussion, definite liar. Says he ‘didn’t cry at all.’”
George steps forward, jaw tight. “Bay three,” he says. “Watch the IV line.”
That’s it. No sarcastic quip. No annoyed eye-roll. Just instructions.
He doesn’t even look at you as he starts assessing the patient. You push the gurney into place, watching the mechanical efficiency in how George moves—like he’s running on fumes and caffeine, but hasn’t realised he’s out of both.
He asks the kid to rate his pain. The boy says nine. George grunts to himself like that’s generous.
You wait until vitals are logged and the chart handed off before you say, lightly, “Did I miss the staff memo on replacing your soul with sandpaper today?”
George doesn’t bite. Not really. “Busy shift.”
“It’s always a busy shift.”
“Well, maybe I’m just tired of your running commentary.”
There it is. A little too sharp. A little too true. You tilt your head, all playfulness evaporating in the same way George disappears into his work when he’s had too much.
“Okay,” you say. “What’s actually going on?”
He pulls off his gloves with more force than necessary. “Nothing. Just—a million things. One of the new juniors froze during a code. We’re short a nurse. And I haven’t had a meal that didn’t come out of a vending machine since Thursday.”
Your mouth opens, like you’re about to offer one of those terrible, hopeful reassurances. But then you stop. You nod. “Got it.”
No pep talk. No sunshine-injected optimism. You just back off. It’s unnerving. George watches you leave with the faint guilt of a man who kicked a puppy.
He doesn’t even remember falling asleep. One minute, he’s sitting in the corner of A&E during the lull between codes, head resting back against the wall, and the next—
He blinks awake to the harsh light overhead and the too-familiar hum of machines.
And a coffee.
It’s sitting next to him on the floor. No note. No name. It’s merely a takeaway cup with condensation beading down the side and a lid that’s slightly ajar like someone checked it before leaving it there.
He frowns at it, sniffs it. Too sweet. He can already smell the sugar from here.
He takes a sip anyway. It tastes like vanilla syrup and a not-so-subtle apology.
He drinks the whole thing.
Two days pass. Not that George is counting. He’s just acutely aware of time lately, that’s all. Of how hours bleed into one another here, fluorescent lighting washing out everything except exhaustion and the persistent buzz of pagers. The A&E moves on, undeterred, chewing through bodies and paperwork with the grace of a woodchipper. George has learned to adapt.
And yet, when you wheel in your next patient, it takes him a second longer than usual to look up.
Maybe because you’re humming. Cheerfully. Like you’re in a baking show intro montage and not pushing a man with a suspected tibial fracture across a blood-stained floor.
“Ankled himself trying to do a backflip off his mate’s shed roof,” you announce, absolutely zero judgment in your tone, which almost makes it worse. “Landing was not ideal.”
“I thought it was gonna be sick,” the patient groans.
George can’t keep the wry tone out of his voice. “And instead you were sick on the lawn. Congratulations.”
You snort. “Be nice, Doctor Doom. He’s suffered enough.”
George leans in to examine the leg. The swelling is impressive. Purple and angry-looking, the kind of injury that practically demands an ice pack and several poor life decisions reconsidered.
You lean in, too, pointing something out on the patient’s shin. And then you pause. A beat. Another.
You shift slightly closer. Just enough.
“You smell like... vanilla,” you say, a little too fast. Then you balk, as if realizing this is not a conversation to have above a suffering patient but it’s too late to back down. “Coffee. I mean—obviously. Not just vanilla, that would be weird. But like. Coffee with vanilla. Like that coffee. From…”
Your voice tapers off like a train derailing in slow motion. George keeps his eyes on the patient’s leg.
“Astounding deduction, Sherlock,” he says to you. “Should we check for a concussion?”
You scowl. The patient laughs, then winces. George finally glances up, just for a second. You’re flushed. Slightly. It’s rare. He catalogues it like a specimen under a microscope.
“It was too sweet,” he says simply.
You cross your arms, recovering. “So you didn’t like it?”
He wraps the ankle expertly, voice steady. “Didn’t say that.”
Another beat. The patient’s eyes flick between the two of you, looking increasingly like he regrets .
George double-knots the bandage, then says, almost casually, “Whoever left me that lifeline probably saved someone from getting yelled at for breathing too loudly, so.”
You smile. Poorly hidden. It creeps in around the edges of your mouth like sun through blinds.
“I’ll pass the message along,” you say.
George stands. “Please don’t. That would be humiliating.”
The patient groans. “Can someone just tell me if my leg’s broken?” he snipes.
“Probably.” George pats his shoulder. “But the emotional trauma will heal first.”
You bite back a laugh, and George, despite everything, doesn’t bother hiding his ghost of a grin.
It’s Lando who brings in the next patient.
Which should not feel strange. Except it does. A little.
Enough for George to register it before burying the thought under a blanket of professionalism and blood pressure readings. Like noticing your favourite mug is missing from the break room and pretending that it doesn’t bother you, even as you drink from a chipped one instead.
Lando barrels into A&E, unfazed and unaware. “We’ve got a special tonight, folks! Fourteen-year-old male, non-verbal, autistic, presented with seizures en route. Vitals stable-ish, parents panicked, and he’s currently very much not a fan of flashing lights.”
“Right,” George breathes, already motioning to a quieter bay. “Let’s dim the overheads and lose the chaos. Lando, you’re not helping.”
“Helping is subjective,” Lando says, grinning. “I bring vibes.”
George doesn’t dignify that with a response. He sets his jaw and gets to work.
The kid is seizing again by the time they get him on the bed. It’s brief, controlled quickly with a low dose of midazolam, but the boy’s mum is crying and George finds himself talking more gently than usual. He guides. He grounds. He keeps his hands steady, like the calm at the eye of a storm.
And still—he thinks of you. Of how you’d have cracked a dumb joke to loosen the tension. Of how you’d crouch low beside the stretcher and make a paper crane out of a vomit bag just to get a scared kid to smile. Of how your voice could find a way to sound like music even in the middle of controlled chaos.
He doesn’t think about you until he does. Once it’s all over, George figures he needs a breather.
The hospital roof is technically off-limits. Which is why George doesn’t go there.
Instead, he steps out the side door to the loading bay. Fresh air, in theory. Reality: a gentle breeze of antiseptic, petrol, and damp pavement. Still better than whatever recycled tragedy is waiting inside. His lungs expand, grateful for anything that isn’t the scent of bleach or stress sweat.
He doesn’t expect to see you there.
You’re crouched low beside one of the ambulances, the metal bulk of it casting a long shadow. Your uniform is rumpled, hair messier than usual. You’re rolling something between your fingers.
For a second, he thinks it’s gauze. Maybe tape. It isn’t, and George can’t help his indignation.
“Seriously?” George says, voice dry. “You’re in healthcare. That’s borderline treason.”
You glance up, unsurprised. “It’s a singular cigarette. I get one per year.”
“Like some sort of self-destructive birthday wish.”
“Exactly.” You don’t light it. Just keep rolling it back and forth between your fingers, thumb pressing along the seam like muscle memory. “Haven’t decided yet if I’m cashing it in.”
George leans against the wall, arms crossed. He should go back in. Someone is probably bleeding or coding or arguing about discharge papers. But you’re unmoving in a way that prickles at him. A warning light blinking in his peripheral vision.
“Rough call?” he asks, aiming for ninety percent of what hits healthcare professionals the hardest.
You don’t answer right away.
“The kid,” you say finally, and some perverse part of George thinks bingo. “Lando brought him in. Reminded me of someone.”
George doesn’t ask who. He just nods once, like he’s flipping a page over in his mind.
You let the silence stretch. A silence with shape, with edges. It feels more honest than talking.
Eventually, you sigh and pocket the cigarette. Your hands linger at your sides, as if unsure what to do now that they’re empty. “Don’t worry, Doctor Morality. Your lungs are safe for another year,” you breathe.
“That makes it sound like you’re doing me a favour.”
You glance at him sideways. “Aren’t I always?”
It’s a joke. Light, flimsy. But your smile doesn’t quite reach your eyes. Your voice wobbles just enough that George clocks it. And your hands—your hands are still shaking, just a little.
He doesn’t press. Doesn’t offer platitudes or pressure or a shoulder to cry on. He just shifts slightly and nudges his shoulder into yours, solid and brief. An anchor.
He doesn’t time being around you.
The two of you walk back into A&E without speaking.
Which is strange, because usually, you speak. Or whistle. Or tap your pen against the side of the gurney like it’s a snare drum and the trauma bay is your stadium.
But now you’re just quiet. Not heavy with it, not brooding. Focused. Composed in a way George hasn’t seen since the one time a patient tried to throw up directly onto his lap and you, ever the opportunist, tried to offer him a bib. (He hadn’t laughed. He’d wanted to. Still bitter about that.)
The same kid Lando brought in is now settled in Observation. There’s a line of vitals on the monitor. You’re checking on the patient’s IV when George catches himself watching.
You crouch to talk to the boy’s mum again, your voice low and steady. You’re good at this. Too good to be reduced to punchlines and irreverent banter, though you seem to enjoy both.
“You’re staring again,” comes Lando’s voice, practically skipping over with delight. He’s balancing a chart, a coffee, and his overgrown ego in both hands. “Kind of romantic, in a broody-Edward-Cullen-meets-urgent-care way.”
George scowls. “Don’t you have vitals to misread?”
“Rude. Accurate. But rude.”
George flips to a page on his notebook and starts writing, refusing to rise to it. This is normal. All of this. Standard. Routine. The chaos of medicine is the constant; what you do with it—the way you carry it—that’s the variable. You’re the variable.
Across the room, you laugh at something one of the junior nurses says, and George doesn’t look, doesn’t look, doesn’t look. He doesn’t have to. The sound slots into the noise of A&E like a missing puzzle piece. Everything’s loud, but it’s not the same kind of loud without you.
He just keeps writing. Keeps working. Keeps pretending he didn’t feel that one laugh like a suture being pulled a little too tight across his ribs.
George barely has time to wash the dried blood off his hands before there’s another shout of, “Incoming!”
You burst through the A&E double doors like you’ve just kicked them down yourself—hair wind-tossed, adrenaline in your eyes, and pushing a stretcher with the determination of a woman who has seen too much.
“Fifty-two-year-old male, syncope with hypotension, responsive to sternal rub but GCS fluctuating,” you rattle off, crisp and sharp. “History of cardiac stents, recent flu-like symptoms, likely dehydration-induced vasovagal—”
“You gave him fluids?” George interrupts, already reaching for the chart you’ve half-filled.
“Yes,” you snap. “He was dry as hell and crashing.”
“If this is cardiogenic, you could've overloaded him.”
You plant your hands on your hips. “And if we waited, he’d be flatlined in the ambulance bay.”
It escalates quickly.
George, always a slow burn until he’s not, bristles. “You don’t get to gamble with a heart like this and hope for the best. You call it in, you wait, and you don’t play doctor.”
You stab a finger into George’s chest. “I called it. You didn’t pick up. And I’m not playing anything, Russell. I made the call. That’s the job.”
The patient groans between you, a breathy whimper escaping his lips like a ghost too tired to haunt. Somewhere across the trauma bay, a heart monitor bleeps with awkward timing, like a laugh track in the wrong scene.
George looks like he’s ready to hurl the nearest clipboard.
“Oi,” Lando’s voice slices through, no grin in sight. “Enough. He’s not dead yet. Maybe stop yelling over him like he’s not here?”
George’s fingers twitch at his sides. You exhale through your nose, sharp and practiced.
You both move as you should.
It’s clinical. Cold. Efficient. You hook up the leads while George places a central line. You call out vitals while he orders labs and adjusts the oxygen flow. No more words. No more fire. Only two people trying to outpace a ticking clock.
Somewhere between blood cultures and a second bolus, George sees it.
The pulmonary edema he feared isn’t there. Lungs are clear. JVP normal. The heart’s pumping sluggishly, sure, but it’s a volume issue. Not pump failure.
You had been right.
And he’d said things. Horrible things.
You don’t play doctor.
He wants to swallow the words, scoop them off the floor, and shove them back in his mouth like bad medication. But they sit there. Festering.
You don’t look at him as you help wheel the patient toward cardiology. You just walk beside the bed, hands on the rail, back straight, eyes forward.
George follows in silence, wondering when, exactly, he stopped deserving the benefit of your doubt.
He catches sight of you near the locker corridor as he’s leaving Resus. You’re uncharacteristically still, sat halfway on the bench. Half out of your uniform, scrolling through something on your phone with a vague frown. The bright overhead lights make everything look sterile. Skin, fabric, emotion.
He slows. You’re usually gone by the time he ends his shift. Still mid-banter with Lando or one of the nurses, tossing sarcasm like candy. But today, you’re pulled in, civil. George hates how well he recognises that it’s his fault.
“You’re clocking out early,” he says, pretending he’s only mildly interested. “Very unlike you. No second wind? No miraculous five-minute recovery followed by another four-hour shift?”
You look up with a small smile that doesn’t quite land. “Shockingly, I have a life. Plans. You ever heard of those?”
He smirks, but it’s stiff. “I’ve heard rumours of them.”
“Wild concept, I know.”
You shove your phone into your bag and stand, zipping your jacket up. Something about the mechanical precision of the motion makes him wince.
“Listen,” George starts. Then stops. Then tries again. “About earlier—”
You wave him off with a too-bright shrug. “Don’t worry about it. Water under the bridge. Heat of the moment. White coat syndrome. All of it.”
“No.” George’s voice is firmer than even he expects. “I’m not going to let you just file it away like paperwork you don’t want to do. You were right. I was wrong. And I said things that were—”
“Accurate to your character?” you offer dryly.
“Unfair,” he finishes. “Arrogant. Patronizing. I don’t want you to have to assume an apology. You deserve a real one.”
You stare at him. Not mocking. Not disbelieving. Just taking him in.
Then, in the softest tone he’s ever heard from you: “Thanks, Doctor Russell.”
He opens his mouth to say more, something vaguely poetic and wildly inappropriate for a fluorescent-lit hallway.
But you reach out and squeeze his arm gently. “I’m going to be late,” you say, like it’s both a reminder and an escape hatch.
He nods. You pause, just long enough to let a real grin flicker across your face. “Don’t think this means you’re off the hook for being a tosser.”
And then you’re gone, leaving. Jacket swishing behind you. The faint scent of your soap or your shampoo—or maybe your presence—still lingering in the air like static.
George exhales and rubs his hands over his face.
He is, categorically, not off the hook. A part of him is convinced he’s been hooked on you since the day he met you.
It’s Lando again.
George doesn’t sigh, doesn’t frown, doesn’t even blink longer than necessary. That’s growth, frankly. In the beginning, he would’ve asked where the hell you were within three seconds. Now, he simply listens to Lando’s brisk summary—dislocated shoulder, rugby pitch, remarkably foul-mouthed teenager—and goes through the motions.
But George does check the ambulance bay.
Once. Maybe twice.
Purely out of habit, he tells himself, like muscle memory. Like an old injury that still aches when it rains.
You’re not there.
He makes it through the consult and discharge, and then, because he is a grown adult with impeccable time management, he wastes his entire break wandering the hospital like a man with a mission and no idea what the mission is.
The staff lounge is empty. The stairwell is empty. The vending machine near paediatrics is, insultingly, both empty and mocking. He loops around back toward the elevators and debates just going outside for air, when he spots movement near the maintenance corridor.
You.
Sitting on the tile floor, one knee drawn up, sleeves shoved to the elbow. You’re trying to open a packet of sterile wipes with your teeth, which George considers a crime against both medical protocol and common sense.
He rushes in. “What the hell happened?”
You freeze like a schoolkid caught smoking behind the bike sheds. “Hi, Doctor Russell,” you say with a half-hearted wave.
“Don’t deflect.” He crouches down. There’s a gash along your leg, not deep but angry and swollen, like it’s been scrubbed hastily and not dressed at all. “Is this from that seizure case?”
You hesitate just long enough.
“Jesus,” George mutters, already reaching into his coat pocket. His fingers tremble slightly around his penlight, which is unhelpful, since this is not an eye exam.
“It’s fine,” you say quickly. “Just a scratch. I didn’t want to make a thing of it.”
“You work in an actual hospital.”
“Yeah, well,” you shrug, wincing as the motion pulls your skin. “Pride’s a hell of a drug.”
The thing is, he gets it. The stubbornness. The instinct to downplay. The razor-thin line between strength and stupidity that every single person in this godforsaken field has danced along at some point.
But that doesn’t mean he likes seeing you bleed.
George isn’t sure when exactly he starts hovering—but one minute you’re brushing him off with a wince and a half-hearted smile, and the next he’s throwing your arm over his shoulder and grumbling something about how you’re obviously concussed if you think you’re walking back on your own.
You protest, of course. Loudly. Colorfully.
“This is humiliating,” you hiss, clutching at the lapel of his coat like it might drag you underground.
“I warned you not to be reckless,” he says, ignoring the way your weight shifts unevenly against him. “This is me, exercising restraint.”
You mutter something unkind about his bedside manner.
He wills himself not to smile.
Halfway through the hallway, the two of you run into Alex.
Alex, who takes one look at the situation—George with his hair mussed and his hands full of EMT—and has the audacity to whip out his phone.
“Smile!” Alex sings.
George flips him off with a flair only a man at the end of his shift can manage.
His office is technically a converted supply closet with a window the size of a postcard, but it has a clean sink, a worn couch, and a locked cabinet of supplies, so it’ll do.
You settle on the couch with the exaggerated care of someone trying not to swear audibly. George crouches in front of you, glancing at your leg. A shallow gash, nothing dramatic, but it’s bleeding enough to stain the cuff of your trousers.
He cleans it in silence. You watch him.
He’s thorough in that George Russell way: antiseptic, gauze, the gentle press of fingers that aren’t as clinical as they should be. He doesn’t say anything when you flinch. He only works with precision, like the rest of the world can wait its turn.
“You’re being really gentle,” you murmur. “Is this because you feel guilty?”
“No,” he says, deadpan. “This is because I’ve taken the Hippocratic Oath, and unlike some people, I take it seriously.”
You laugh, sudden and sharp, and it loosens something in him.
“That so?”
“Yes. ‘First, do no harm.’ It’s not just a slogan we slap on mugs, you know.”
“I’ve seen you slam back coffee from that very mug you’re judging.”
“And I’ve seen you try to climb into a moving ambulance. Shall we call it even?”
A beat. Then your smile softens. “Thanks,” you say, “for this.”
He tapes the last bit of dressing down and looks up at you, close enough to see the faint lines of fatigue around your eyes.
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“I don’t want you to assume my gratitude, Doctor Russell.”
He hesitates. Something about the inside joke, the way you look, the cadence of your voice—it undoes him. “You can call me George,” he says, “when it’s just us.”
Your gaze flickers to his, something unspoken shifting in the air between you.
“George,” you amend, and it sounds a lot like the beginning of the end.
That was not the moment where George realized he might be in love with you.
That was just another Tuesday. A very average, paperwork-stuffed, understaffed Tuesday where someone clogged the staff bathroom and a patient tried to name their newborn ‘Matcha.’ Business as usual.
It wasn’t when you brought him coffee the next morning, either. Still too sweet, still not his order, but you’d scribbled a crooked smiley face on the cup like a seven-year-old. He drank it in four sips between patients, barely registering the taste, except to note that the bitterness was more tolerable than usual. Possibly the smiley helped.
It definitely wasn’t when you fell asleep in the ambulance bay on a slow night, curled against the wall like a stray cat who’d finally found a patch of sun. You had your arm draped over your eyes and were snoring softly, one shoe half-off. George stood over you for a full minute before covering you with his jacket. It was clinical, he told himself. Preventing hypothermia. Protecting team morale. You would’ve done the same for him, probably. Maybe. Unless you were feeling particularly annoying, which, in fairness, was half the time.
It wasn’t even when you called him by his first name again, during some offhand moment when it was the only the two of you in a hallway. The way you’d said it—soft, like it was an apology and a dare in one—should’ve knocked something loose in him. Something fundamental. Nada. George, in all his emotionally constipated glory, simply nodded and muttered something about sterile gauze and infection risk.
It was like watching a man dodge a grand piano falling from the sky only to trip over a pebble.
The Moment happens on a Thursday.
It’s loud. Everything always is in the A&E, but today especially. Alarms beeping, a child screaming bloody murder over a scraped knee, someone vomiting in the corridor while a porter yells for backup. There’s a guy swearing loudly about the NHS being a conspiracy and someone else trying to light a cigarette under the fire alarm. George is elbow-deep in an electronic chart, trying to remember whether “elevated troponin” still means what it used to, when he hears your voice.
“Coming through! Trauma, blunt force to the head, suspected internal bleeding!”
It’s your usual pitch. Businesslike, brisk, just this side of shouting. But George looks up—and his heart promptly forgets how to function.
You’re covered in blood.
Not a little. Not a dramatic splatter across the collar. This is full-red, horror movie special. It’s Jackson Pollock’s lesser-known ER period. It’s on your sleeves, your chest, your throat. Your gloves are slick with it. There’s a smear on your cheek, just beneath your eye, and a fleck in your hair.
George is on his feet before he’s aware of it. “Are you—”
He stops himself. He’d sounded too panicked, so he tries again. (He does not sound any less panicked.) “Are you bleeding?”
You roll your eyes like it’s the dumbest question in the world. But there’s a crack in your voice. Just a little one. Like the adrenaline hasn’t quite worn off yet, and the corners of your calm are fraying. “What? No. It’s his.”
You jerk your head to the gurney you’re wheeling in, and only then does George notice the patient. Pale, moaning, a makeshift pressure dressing applied with the kind of brutal efficiency that only EMTs and war veterans can muster. There's a splint fashioned from what looks like a clipboard.
Still, George doesn’t look away from you until he’s sure. Absolutely, undeniably sure. His chest is a vice.
George clears his throat and moves to the patient’s side. “Right. Let’s work, then.”
And you do. He does. Like his brain hasn’t just rewired itself in the span of three heartbeats.
Because it wasn’t the blood, not really. It was the split second before you spoke, when he thought you might be hurt and every single thing inside him tilted wildly off axis. Like someone opened a trapdoor beneath him and he freefell straight through.
That was The Moment.
George Russell, congratulations. You absolute idiot. You’re in love.
Not the Hollywood, Netflix original kind. The kind where you keep checking the back of someone’s neck to make sure they’re still standing. The kind where one smear of blood across a cheek turns you into a man on the verge of cardiac arrest.
It’s inconvenient. It’s absurd. It’s probably going to end in disaster. But it’s true, and it’s there, and George is suddenly no longer the smartest man in the ward.
George is pretty sure there’s a clinical term for what’s happening to him. Some kind of emotional arrhythmia, maybe. A persistent fluttering of the heart followed by full-body embarrassment. Unfortunately, there’s no ICD-10 code for ‘realized-you’re-in-love-with-your-colleague-and-now-you-don’t-know-how-to-function.’
Which is why he finds himself lurking by the vending machines, awkwardly holding a protein bar like it might offer divine insight. Across from him, Alex and Lando are mid-discussion about a guy in Resus who, quote, “tried to vape with a chest tube in.” Normal Thursday things.
“Hypothetically,” George begins, and he already hates himself for it, “if someone—not me, obviously—realized they might have... feelings... for a colleague…”
Alex squints. “What kind of feelings? Like, homicidal or the other kind?”
“The, uh, softer kind.”
Lando looks delighted. “Oh no.”
“Again, not me. Just a friend,” George says, very unconvincingly.
There is a long, weighted silence in which George begins to regret all of his life choices that led him to this point. “Okay,” Alex says slowly, using his talking-to-kids voice. “What does your ‘friend’ want to do about these “feelings’?”
George exhales through his nose. “Well, he might be considering saying something. But only if it wouldn’t jeopardize, you know, the professional relationship. Or make things weird. Or make her stop bringing him coffee, which I—I mean, he—looks forward to more than is probably healthy.”
Lando raises an eyebrow. “So your friend wants advice on how to confess his undying love without losing access to his morning caffeine dealer. Got it.”
“It’s not undying,” George grunts. “Just... persistent.”
Alex, to his credit, tries to stay serious. “Well, what’s the worst that could happen? She says no?”
“Yeah, and then I have to see—he has to see her every day and pretend he doesn’t remember how she looked covered in blood but still cracking a joke about dry-cleaning.”
“Hyper-specific,” Lando notes.
Alex hums in morose agreement. “Unusually vivid.”
Without breaking eye contact, Alex reaches into his pocket and produces a crumpled fiver. Hands it silently to Lando.
“What is that?” George asks, bewildered.
“Bet,” Lando says, grinning. “On how long it would take you to crack. I had ‘blood-related epiphany’ on my bingo card.”
George flips them both off. Simultaneously. Ambidextrous rage.
Alex pats him on the back. “Look, Georgie, just talk to her. Worst case, she mocks you gently and turns it into a punchline. Best case, she likes you back and you die of happiness or something.”
“People don’t die of happiness,” George deadpans.
“You could be the first.”
The vending machine whirs as his protein bar drops. George takes it and contemplates the absurdity of modern romance blooming between bodily fluids and fluorescent lighting. Whatever happened to normal courtship rituals?
George decides he can’t confess. Not yet.
That would require a heart-to-heart, and George is currently operating on a strict no-vulnerability-before-coffee policy. But he can ease into it, maybe. Start with a breadcrumb. An amuse-bouche of affection. Nothing too dramatic. No grand gestures.
It begins when you wheel in a patient like you’re leading a parade—only instead of confetti, there’s vomit and the faint sound of someone retching. The patient looks like they’ve been on the losing end of a pub crawl and an ill-advised kebab. You’re narrating the symptoms with your usual dramatic flair, throwing in theatrical pauses for effect as if you’re presenting at the BAFTAs.
George, mid-chart, looks up, and it’s like the sun breaks through the fluorescent lighting. Which is ridiculous. It’s just you. Covered in bodily fluids again. He stands, lets instinct and professional training take over while his brain yells nonsense like, Tell her she’s competent! And possibly radiant!
The patient has tachycardia, low BP, and an unfortunate tendency to gag every time George says the word ‘appendix.’ You and George work around it, finishing each other’s assessments like some grotesque waltz. You even hand him a clamp before he asks for it.
Once the patient’s stabilized and the chaos has retreated to a low simmer, George clears his throat. Here it is. Time for the breadcrumb.
“You, uh,” he starts, eyes on the floor. Then he looks up, directly at you. “Handled that really well.”
A pause. You turn to him. Slowly.
“Thank you?” It comes out like a question, like you’re suspicious he’s about to follow it with an insult. Fair enough. George’s love language thus far has mostly been sarcasm and passive-aggressive vitals charting.
He waves it off, already backtracking. “I’m just saying. It was... efficient.”
You’re smiling now. It’s soft and a bit uneven, like it surprised even you. You open your mouth to say something else, but a nurse calls your name, and just like that, you’re gone.
George stares at the empty space where you were, wondering how something as basic as a compliment made him feel like he was fifteen again and trying to flirt with the headmaster’s daughter using Latin root words.
He shakes his head and returns to his chart, scribbling down vitals with far too much pressure. Step one complete. Sort of. He’ll call it a win. Or a draw. A medically supervised draw.
George doesn’t think he’s bad at flirting. Not in theory, anyway.
In practice, however, he’s apparently incapable of communicating anything more than “I respect your clinical acumen” and “that pressure dressing was very efficiently done,” which, as it turns out, is not the universally accepted preamble to romantic intrigue.
You’d think it would be easier. God knows he’s trying. He’s been workshopping his tone, casually leaning against things (unsuccessfully), and once, in a truly pitiful moment, tried to smile at you in what he assumed was a rakish fashion and nearly bit the inside of his cheek clean through.
Today, you wheel in a cyclist who’d gone arse over handlebars on an uphill climb. Your voice is animated, already mid-sentence with the nurse as you guide the stretcher in, and George’s heart does the stupid thing again. The thing where it skips like a faulty EKG and then settles back into a rhythm just off enough to make him feel like he’s maybe catching something.
“Helmet took most of the impact,” you say, pulling gloves on. “Some superficial lacerations, possible concussion, vitals holding steady. He’s all yours, Doctor Russell.”
He doesn’t know when Doctor Russell started sounding so good coming from you, but it does today.
George gets to work. Efficient. Focused. Or, you know, pretending to be. You’re watching, as you always do, eyes alert in a way that makes him feel vaguely scrutinized and somewhat flattered. After everything’s stabilized and the cyclist is off for scans, George clears his throat.
“You were good in there,” he says.
Your head tilts, amused. “I’m always good in there.”
Right. Of course you are. He scrambles.
“No, I mean—you’re good. In general. The way you handled the bleed was—clean. And fast. I admire that.”
Slowly, a grin begins to unfurl. “George,” you say, tone mock-gentle, “are you trying to flirt with me using vascular trauma praise?”
He makes a sound. It is not dignified. And so: new plan.
A few days later, another patient. Something mundane, ankle fracture from a stairwell slip. You roll them in with your usual unbothered flair, chatting as if this were a grocery run. George pretends not to notice the way your hair’s come loose from its usual bun, the way your sleeves are pushed to the elbows, exposing your forearms.
He says nothing as you run through your report. Patient is stabilized. Bandaged. Sent for imaging. The moment hangs there, lazy and loose, like a paper lantern.
George breathes in. Then out. Then: “You look really nice today.”
Silence.
This time, you sound more than surprised. You sound disbelieving. “What?” you squeak.
He wants to dissolve into the linoleum.
“I mean—you do. It’s not relevant to the case. Obviously. But it’s true. That’s all.”
You stare at him like he’s just declared himself heir to the throne of France.
“Well,” you say after a moment, a bit breathless. “That’s… very kind. You look nice too. For what it’s worth. The scrubs are doing things. Not bad things.”
Now it’s George’s turn to stare.
You both stand there, blinking at each other, mutual fluster painted across your faces. Lando, passing behind with a chart, mutters, “For fuck's sake,” and keeps walking.
George says nothing. He’s too busy recalibrating the entire universe.
George has it all planned.
It’s not elaborate. This isn’t Grey’s Anatomy. There’s no flash mob, no Post-It notes, no soft indie music playing while he bumbles through a declaration in the rain. But there is a plan. Or, at least, the shaky skeleton of one.
Step one: find you. Step two: say something charming and suave. Or, failing that, something intelligible. Step three: ask you out. Casually. Breezily. Like it’s the most natural thing in the world and not the thing that’s been keeping him up for three consecutive nights.
What actually happens is this:
He finds you, yes. Tick. Step one. You’ve just offloaded a patient and are engrossed in paperwork, hair tied up in that chaotic bun that does things to his blood pressure. You greet him without looking up. “If you’re here to steal my pen again, I’m going to file an HR complaint.”
“No, I—” George clears his throat. “I was wondering if you wanted to, you know. Grab something. Later. To eat. Together. If you're free.”
Your brow furrows. “Oh. Yeah, I’m starving. I haven’t eaten since, like, 7 A.M.”
There’s a hopeful flicker in his chest—
You keep talking. “We could swing by the canteen before it closes. I just need to update the chart first.”
Oh. That’s not—well. Not quite what he meant.
But you’re already slinging your bag over your shoulder, tugging him toward the lifts like this was your idea in the first place. George glances down at his invisible note cards (read: internalized disaster plan) and burns them all in effigy.
You grab a prepackaged sandwich and a sad-looking banana. George gets a tray because he is committed to the bit. When you start heading for the exit, he stops you.
“We could, uh—sit? Just for a minute.”
You arch a brow. “In here?”
“Why not? It’s got… chairs. And tables.”
You laugh, which is both a victory and a curse. George pretends not to hear how stupid he sounds.
You both settle across from each other, a laminate table between you that has seen the worst of humanity in spilt soup and rehydrated lasagna. For a few seconds, it’s awkward. Utterly, blindingly awkward. You unwrap your sandwich too loudly. George stabs at his potatoes with unnecessary focus. It’s so quiet, the flickering of the overhead light becomes a main character.
Then you snort.
“This is ridiculous,” you say. “It feels like detention. Like we’ve been caught doing something bad and now we’re being punished with egg salad.”
George cracks a smile. “To be fair, the egg salad is punishment enough.”
You grin at him across the table. Something in your face softens. “I like this, though. It’s stupid, and weird, and feels like we’ve dropped into a badly written episode of The Good Doctor. But I like it.”
George stares at you, heart doing the jittery thing again. He thinks, wildly, that he’d eat egg salad for the rest of his life if it meant he could have moments like this.
“Me too,” he says, and it’s not smooth or clever, but it’s honest.
The dinner continues, such as it is. Two overworked professionals hunched over trays of food that only technically qualifies as nourishment, under the flickering lights of the A&E canteen. George is very aware of how tragically not-date this is.
A romance conducted beside a vat of grayish mash and aggressively boiled peas. If this were a film, the director would be fired. Or knighted. Hard to tell these days.
He stabs at another potato halfheartedly. Says, out of nowhere, “What’s your favorite color?”
You pause mid-banana chew. “What?”
“Color. Just—what’s your favorite one?” He tries to sound casual, as though this is something he routinely asks colleagues over beige fish fingers.
You tilt your head, narrowing your eyes. “Are we playing twenty questions now?”
“No. Maybe. Oh, bollocks. Humor me for once.”
A beat. Then, to his complete shock, your face lights up. “Forest green. Like—deep, mossy green. Like enchanted woods, not traffic lights.”
George feels something ridiculous flutter in his chest. He blames the sodium in the canteen soup.
“That’s oddly specific,” he says.
“You asked.”
He clears his throat. Stares at his peas like they’ve personally offended him. “Alright. Favorite animal?”
“This is dangerously close to an icebreaker sheet from Year 7.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t go to many sleepovers.”
You laugh at that, and it hits him square in the sternum. He decides he wants to make you laugh again. Forever, if possible.
“Otters,” you declare. “Because they hold hands when they sleep. You?”
George considers this. “Elephants. Big ears. No notes.”
You laugh again, and he tries to memorize the exact cadence of it.
More questions follow. Book or movie? (You say both.) Sweet or savoury? (Depends on your mood.) Weirdest scar? (You lift your sleeve to show the faint line from a bike accident when you were eight. He squints at it, and somehow that feels like something sacred.)
Your pager goes off mid-sentence. You glance at it, and your mouth twists.
“Damn. GSW coming in.”
George nods. Tries not to look too disappointed. “Right. Go save a life, superhero.”
You rise, tossing your half-eaten dinner in the bin, then glance back at him with a regretful smile. “This was fun. Like, weirdly fun. Thanks for the pop quiz.”
He gives a half-wave, watching you disappear down the corridor.
When the door swings shut behind you, George exhales. He stares at the empty seat across from him, the ghost of your laughter still ringing in the fluorescent air.
He hasn’t let himself want things for a while. Not properly. Not tenderly.
But right now, he wants, wants, wants.
George should have known that not all good things hold.
Really, he should’ve carved it into his desk or tattooed it on the inside of his wrist. Maybe then he wouldn’t be caught so flat-footed by the universe’s penchant for whiplash.
Because it’s the very next shift.
He’s sorting through discharge summaries—his pen running dry halfway through a sentence, because why wouldn’t it—when the doors burst open. You’re pushing a stretcher with one gloved hand and applying compressions with the other. There’s another paramedic shouting vitals, a family member wailing in the background, but George doesn’t register any of it.
He sees you.
You’re not smiling.
You’re not doing that thing where you narrate injuries like a game show prize. No dry jokes. No lifted eyebrows. There’s blood on your chin. You don’t notice.
“Fifty-eight-year-old male, found unresponsive,” you say, eyes not leaving the chest you’re compressing. “Unknown downtime. We got ROSC en route, but he’s bradycardic again. Might be circling the drain.”
George is already moving. The room responds like muscle memory. Crash cart, monitor leads, adrenaline. There’s shouting, counting, paddles.
The heart rhythm flatlines. George calls time of death.
And that’s that. No miracles today.
You stand at the edge of the room afterward like a ghost, gloves bloody and still half-on. George watches you stare blankly at the wall, the pulse line still dancing on the monitor with no heartbeat to trace.
“Come on,” he says quietly.
You don’t ask where. You just follow.
George’s office is too bright and too quiet. He flicks the light off. You sit down on the small, lumpy sofa in the corner like you’re not sure your legs will keep holding you up. George shuts the door and leans against it, unsure of what to do with his hands. Or his guilt. Or his heartbreak.
You sigh. It’s long and low and rattling, like a pressure valve giving up.
“That one got to me,” you confess in a murmur. No bravado, no shields.
George sits down across from you, on the floor. Not too close. Not yet.
“You did everything right,” he offers, knowing full well it’s the most useless sentence in medicine.
You nod. “Doesn’t mean anything today.”
Silence again.
And then you say it—simple, small. “Hurts less, having someone to sit with.”
George can only a manage an equally soft, “Yeah.”
He means to say more. Something about how he gets it, how he’s grateful too, how he doesn’t know when this started mattering so much. He doesn’t. Instead, he just lets the grief spool out between you, a kind of shared vigil.
For the first time, it feels like neither of you is alone in it.
There is no grand epiphany with swelling music and slow-motion glances across the trauma bay. Instead, the truth seeps in like IV fluid through a catheter line. Slow and steady until suddenly everything’s changed and it’s already too late to stop it.
He really is in love with you.
It settles within him sometime after the code, after the paperwork, after the office silence where sadness spooled like spilled saline between you. You wipe your face. Straighten your spine. You bounce back like the shift doesn’t still have its claws buried in your chest. Because you have to. Because you’re only as good as your last patient.
He watches you laugh at a nurse’s joke two bays down. There’s still a smudge of blood near your collarbone, and George wants to both wipe it away and preserve it. Frame it. The absurd, mundane poetry of survival.
He’s in love with the way you still get his coffee order wrong. Religiously. It’s become a thing now. You hand him something caramelized and sweet with foam art resembling roadkill, and he drinks it anyway. Every time. He even looks forward to it. Like some deranged Pavlovian response to artificial vanilla.
He’s in love with the way you blush when his compliments actually land. Not the professional ones. Not “clean intubation” or “efficient tourniquet placement.” No, it’s when he says you look good with your hair up. Or that he likes your laugh. The words often tumble out like they’ve slipped on a wet floor, and you always stare at him like you can’t believe he said it.
Sometimes you say his name like it means something. Soft, like a secret, like a hand brushing over piano keys. Sometimes your touch lingers at the small of his back, brief and deliberate. Sometimes your eyes find his across the chaos of a double trauma call, and it feels like you’re the only two people in the room who know how the world ends.
George can’t help but wonder—hope, maybe—if you love him back.
Just a little. Just enough. Enough for it to survive inside these sterile walls, between bloodied gloves and outdated vending machines. In the lull between codes. In the breath held between one life and the next.
George sneaks up to the rooftop like he’s committing a felony, not just being a bit of a rebel with his badge still dangling from his neck and his trainers sticking faintly to the stairwell landing from someone else’s spilled energy drink. It’s been a shit day—unrelentingly so—made better only by the fact that you were in it.
You, with your crooked grin and that ridiculous laugh that escaped when he joked about the broken CT scanner sounding like a dying whale. He thinks about that now. The way your mouth tilted up in spite of the chaos, how the sound lodged in his chest and reverberated through twelve hours of relentless code blues, admin errors, and one spectacularly misguided intern who stapled their own glove to a chart.
The rooftop is off-limits. The signs say so in bold, threatening font. That doesn’t stop anyone. It’s the worst-kept secret in the building: the unofficial sanctum for overworked medics, chain-smoking porters, night-shift romantics, and whoever else needs to pretend they’re alone for a while. George figures he deserves ten minutes of illicit fresh air and a protein bar with all the emotional nutrition of a soggy cardboard confession.
He pushes the heavy door open with a creak that sounds louder in his head than it probably is. The sky greets him in hues of orange and pink, like someone up there got carried away with a watercolor set. And—
You’re already there.
Of course you are. Perched on a cinderblock like it’s a throne, wind teasing the edges of your hair, hospital fleece draped around your shoulders. A shoddy cape for a reluctant superhero. You’re rolling your unlit cigarette between your fingers with the kind of focus usually reserved for bomb defusal. You look like you’re waiting for an answer that hasn’t arrived yet and probably won’t.
“Oh,” George says, eloquent as ever. A master of language. Shakespeare reincarnated. “Fancy seeing you here.”
You look towards him, surprised for only a half-second, before snorting. “We have got to stop meeting like this, doc.”
He ambles toward the edge, careful not to make it look like he’s following you (he is), and squints at the city skyline, smeared in dusk. Rooftop etiquette dictates at least a full minute of silence. You’re both seasoned enough to observe it.
Then, glancing sideways, he nods at the cigarette. “Your patients weren’t that bad today.”
You shrug, but it’s the kind of shrug that says you’re carrying more than your standard trauma kit. “No one bled out on me, if that’s what you mean.”
“Then what’s that for?”
You glance at the cigarette like it just appeared in your hand, as if you’re not sure whether it’s a prop or a ritual. “Habit. Reflex. A bit of both. It’s stupid,” you say, too fast and too blank, which means lie, lie, lie.
The question escapes him before he can think better of himself: “Can I have it?”
You balk. You actually freeze, as if trying to verify that the George Russell—type A, cross-training, vitamin-supplementing, caffeine-policing George—is asking to hold a cigarette.
"What? You?"
“I need to do something with my mouth,” he says, dry as ever, “or else I’ll say something incredibly stupid.”
You raise an eyebrow, eyes flicking with interest now. “Like what?”
And George thinks—well, he’s already here. Emotionally bruised, wind-chilled, heart thrumming like it’s trying to page someone. There are worse places for truth to fall out of your face.
“Like how I’m in love with you, maybe,” he says. “That sort of stupid.”
There’s a beat. A heartbeat. Another. Time hesitates, maybe on purpose.
You stare at him for what feels like several eternities squeezed into a few seconds. Then your lips twitch, and you say, voice low and warm and without a hint of sarcasm, “I have something you could do with your mouth.”
And you kiss him.
George, in typical fashion, had not planned for this.
He planned for stat doses and catheter malfunctions, for awkward consultant encounters and broken vending machines. He planned for blood sugar crashes and night shifts and the exact millisecond he could reasonably abandon his shoes in the locker. But this—your mouth, your words, the way his heart is trying to chest-thump its way to freedom—this wasn’t in the risk assessment.
So, when you kiss him, he doesn’t immediately kiss you back.
Not because he doesn’t want to. Christ, he wants to. No, his body just took a full three-second sabbatical. All systems stunned into a temporary shutdown. His lips stay still, his hands useless at his sides, like he’s running a particularly slow diagnostic.
You pull away.
The shift in pressure is sudden. Your brows are halfway up your forehead, a confused little wrinkle forming between them. “I—I thought—” you’re stammering, and it occurs to George that you think you did something wrong. “God, sorry, I thought you—”
But he doesn’t let you finish.
His hands are on your waist, and then your back, and then he’s kissing you like he just remembered how lungs work. His mouth is warm and certain and a bit clumsy, like he’s making up for lost time and poor reflexes. You laugh into him, your shoulders shaking as his chest bumps yours, and he pulls back a fraction just to smile at you, really smile, teeth and all.
“That was a delayed reaction,” you say, breathless and grinning.
“I panicked,” he says, forehead resting against yours. “My brain bluescreened.”
You giggle again, this time softer, like you’re trying not to wake the sleeping city beneath you. “I love the sound of your life, you know.”
“What does that even bloody mean?”
“Your laugh,” you clarify, eyes dancing. “Your bitching. Your bad jokes. Your rants about surgical notes. It’s stupid, but every time I crashed through those double doors with some poor sod bleeding out, I was hoping I’d get to annoy you. Just to hear you.”
George lets out a huff, overwhelmed by the idea that someone might find his chaos endearing. “If you keep kissing me like that,” he says, lips brushing against yours, “I might even start smiling on purpose.”
“Dangerous territory, doc,” you tease, tracing the edge of his collar. “People might start thinking you’re nice.”
“I’ll always be nice to you,” he replies, and kisses you again, because he can.
It’s not cautious. It’s not gentle. It’s not even neat. It’s two overtired medics smashing timelines together, trying to carve a moment of softness from the jagged edges of the day. The cigarette has fallen from your hand, landing between you with the finality of a dropped scalpel.
George forgets every chart, every protocol, every night he spent wondering if he was imagining it all. Turns out, you were right there with him, too.
The first sign of your arrival isn’t the siren. It never is.
It’s your voice. Bright, theatrical, and a little too loud for seven in the morning, like you’ve mistaken resus for a West End audition.
“Morning, team! Got a present for you. Forty-six-year-old male, syncopal episode on the building site. GCS fifteen now but gave us a scare. BP’s low-ish, but he swore it’s just ‘cause he skipped breakfast.”
George doesn’t look up right away. He’s pretending to finish reading a patient chart, but really, he’s buying time to wipe the smile off his face. He’s trying not to look like someone who spent half the night kissing the woman now wheeling a gurney into his trauma bay.
He finally lifts his head and finds you already halfway through wheeling the patient in, hair slightly wind-tousled, mouth smirking in a way that should be illegal before caffeine. You toss him a look. The kind that says, Guess who’s had three hours of sleep, a protein bar, and still managed to be the highlight of your morning?
“Skipped breakfast?” George says, arching a brow. “So did I. Should I be horizontal and woozy too?”
You tilt your head. “You’d be cuter if you were.”
“You would know, I’m sure.”
You shoot him a grin that’s too practiced to be anything but genuine. It lingers in the air between you two like static. Like a held breath. Like a secret you’re both absolutely rubbish at keeping.
On the surface, nothing’s changed. You’re still infuriatingly cheerful. He’s still emotionally constipated. The emergency department is still a chaotic blend of human frailty, malfunctioning air conditioning, and that one porter who always smells faintly of tuna. But there are cracks in the professional facade now. Glances that last one second too long. Shoulder brushes that aren’t entirely accidental. Conversations held just a decibel lower than necessary. Everything dialed to just under suspicion.
Like when he moves to the trauma bay and you follow, ostensibly to assist, but really just to be near. He doesn’t complain. He’s not stupid.
You rattle off vitals and hand over the case while George begins his survey, his gloves snapping on with practiced efficiency. But your fingers graze his wrist when you pass the chart. Not necessary. Not entirely innocent. Not the first time.
He clears his throat. “Anything else?”
“Yeah,” you murmur, a little softer now. “Dinner tonight. Not the canteen. My place.”
George’s heart thuds in a way that has nothing to do with caffeine deficiency or impending cardiac arrest. He doesn’t look at you. He doesn’t need to. That warmth is crawling up the back of his neck again, and if he meets your eyes, the whole department’s going to see the truth written on his face like a neon sign that reads, Completely Gone for Her.
“Text me,” he says below his breath, which is code for yes, obviously yes, and also: if I could, I’d kiss you right here beside the sharps bin.
You wink. It’s obnoxious. He loves it.
Then you’re gone, disappearing through the swinging doors with a rustle of fleece and a final glance thrown over your shoulder. He catches it, because of course he does. He catches everything now.
He finishes assessing the patient, notes the improving vitals, and hands off care to a junior. His hands are steady, his tone neutral, but his brain’s still up on the rooftop, in the echo of your laugh, in the way your mouth curved before you kissed him, in the cigarette that never got lit and never hit the ground.
The ambulance bay’s already teeming again. Another shift, another flood. Somewhere, someone’s yelling for more gauze. Someone else is panicking over a febrile toddler. Life, in all its messy glory, continues its noisy march through the ED.
But George feels lighter. Like something’s been recalibrated. Like he’s found a frequency worth tuning into.
And yeah, it’s complicated. Secret. Probably inadvisable. HR would have a coronary. Maybe even two.
But when you say his name now, even across a crowded trauma bay, it hits different.
Like a promise.
Like something worth breaking the rules for.
EPILOGUE.
The breakroom is a kingdom of expired yogurt and broken dreams. The vending machine hums like a dying animal. Someone’s half-eaten banana loaf has been fossilizing on the counter for three days.
In the middle of this domestic horror scene sit Alex and Lando, two overcaffeinated gossip goblins in scrubs, staring intently at a laminated 3x3 bingo card.
“You can’t count the shoulder touch twice,” Alex says, pointing with the precision of a man who has lost three bets to Lando and refuses a fourth. “That’s one square. One. No multiplying affection like it’s mitosis.”
Lando kicks his feet up on the table, nursing a diet soda with the reckless bravado of someone who absolutely has not read the department email about the rat infestation. “I can if it was the left shoulder and then the right shoulder. That’s a full-body commitment. That’s basically foreplay in George language.”
Alex snorts. “Please. George’s version of foreplay is re-alphabetizing his medication cabinet.”
“And yet,” Lando says, dragging out the words like he’s narrating a wildlife documentary, “there he was. Letting her brush his elbow for a full two seconds yesterday. Right by the central line trolley. I timed it.”
“You timed it?”
“With my watch.”
Alex sighs and jots something in the corner of his clipboard. There are tally marks, a sketch of what might be George’s brooding frown, and a doodle of you wearing a cape.
“Fine,” Alex concedes. “‘Elbow linger’ gets a square. But only because I caught them emerging from the janitor’s closet looking suspiciously winded after ‘restocking gauze.’”
“George still tried to pretend he had a leg cramp,” Lando mutters, eyes rolling skyward. “They’re exhausting.”
“Deliciously exhausting,” Alex corrects. “Like a seven-course meal of denial.”
They both lean over the bingo card.
Top row reads:
George crashes a gurney while distracted
They show up with matching coffees ‘by coincidence’
Prolonged eye contact during a code blue
Middle row:
Overheard giggling behind curtain 3
Shared umbrella in the rain
George refers to her as ‘my paramedic’ and immediately chokes
Bottom row:
She steals his pen and keep it
They get caught kissing in a wardrobe by Q3
George admits he “might be fond” of her while under anaesthetic
“Alright,” Lando says, popping the cap off his highlighter. “What’s the wager? Winner gets the good parking spot or free lunch for a week?”
“Winner gets to officiate the wedding. Loser has to do a night shift with Alonso.”
Lando pauses. Measures the stakes. Nods, sage and serious. “You cruel, glorious bastard. You’re on.”
in which you take carlos to intramuros, a historical place built in manila during the spanish colonization of the philppines.
requested by anon !
a/n: super short smau :P FILIPINO TRANSLATIONS INCLUDED (not all are direct) & google translate spanish 😣 !!! spanish colonization in the philippines is my fav historical event to learn about so writing this was so fun >:)
Pasilyo - SunKissed Lola
⎯
tagged: carlossainz55
yourusername taking him to intramuros so i can yap about philippine history!
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user1 you took him to enemy territory 😭
yourusername not really enemy territory if the spaniards were the ones who built this place!
↳ user1 ok valid
user2 INTRAMUROS DATE WITH CARLOS SAINZ 🔥🔥🔥
user3 the filo aus are gonna be bomb
user4 MAKE HIM EAT PUTO
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user5 make him eat WHAT
carlossainz55 this is concerning me
lando can you tell him to bring the pig skin snack that's really crunchy next race?
user6 CRUNCHY PIG SKIN SNACK 😭😭😭
↳ lando I DONT KNOW WHAT ITS CALLED
↳ yourusername ITS CHICHARON HAHAHAHAHAH
user7 when jose rizal said "ang kabataan ang pag-asa ng bayan" i don't think this is what he meant? [translation: "the youth are the hope of the nation"]
⎯
now playing: Demonyo (Redefined) - juan karlos
carlossainz55 ciudad insigne y siempre leal [translation: Distinguished and ever loyal city]
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user1 long sleeves polo in manila is a choice indeed
user2 kaya pala biglang uminit [translation: so that's why it got hotter here]
user3 i'm getting deja vu and i wasn't even alive in the 1600s-1800s
user4 HELLO GINOO 😍😍🔥🔥 [ginoo = sir]
user5 congratu-fucking-lations whoever got to see him 😒
user6 i saw him and y/n, they were buying street food and they were so sweet i got a pic and he even bought me isaw!!!
↳ user5 DONT CARE DIDNT ASK STOP RUBBING SALT IN MY WOUND
user7 The Spaniards after Intramuros was built 1571 (colorized) #rp612fic
user8 CARLOS SAINZ IS A JUAN KARLOS LISTENER CONFIRMED
user9 so did y/n teach him abt philippine history or...
⎯
The two of you walked around Intramuros. Trying food, buying useless stuff and souvenirs, and occasionally taking pictures with some fans.
You then got to Fort Santiago, a place you were excited to show Carlos because of its significance during the Spanish colonial period and WWII.
You talked a lot like you were a tour guide on a field trip giving out fun facts. He was not fazed by how much you talked no matter how detailed the explanations were.
The more he listened to you talk, the more and more he fell in love with you. Your voice which was comparable to an angel's and your knowledge on your country's interesting history captivated him so much.
⎯
now playing: Pahintulot - shirebound
carlossainz55 she had me translate the entire wall (i love her)
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📌 yourusername i'm gonna have you read the original noli me tangere and el filibusterismo too
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user1 u should include florante at laura for the added lore
↳ yourusername oooh ur right
user2 i hope made she made you pay for everything as revenge for what your ancestors did to our ancestors
user3 pls i can imagine carlos' face as y/n explains all the pain and suffering filipinos went thru bcs of the spaniards 😭😭
user4 I WAS JUST THERE FOR A FIELD TRIP UGHHHH
user5 field trip? how old are you?
↳ user4 ano kinalaman nun [translation: what does that have to do with anything]
↳ user6 did you just call user5 an ass
↳ user4 no i just asked what
↳ user6 ¿que?
↳ user4 ano?
↳ user5 ANONAS 😛😛😛😛😛😛
oscarpiastri can i get a history lesson too?
yourusername of course! hahah
↳ lando can i join
↳ carlossainz55 lando you don't even like history
↳ lando but y/n makes it sound interesting
user7 di naman ako naiinggit or anything. [translation: i'm not envious or anything. (sarcasm)]
user8 i too want my gf to take me to intramuros and explain in great detail its significance to the history of the philippines
user9 can i hire you to translate my spanish hw pls
user10 so the 333 years meant nothing to you yourusername
user11 333 mentioned i miss maxiel
↳ danielricciardo me too
↳ user12 ARIANA WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE
user13 the katipuneros are rolling in their graves rn
user14 not emilio aguinaldo! he's probably grinning ear to ear
user15 u could pull off a jose rizal cosplay tbh
user16 ANG LAYO [translation: THEY LOOK NOTHING ALIKE]
user17 more of marcelo del pilar tbh
↳ user18 i see him as antonio luna
↳ user19 nono hear me out: alexander hamilton
↳ user20 how did we go from rizal to fucking hamilton
user21 fym cosplay these are REAL people btw 💀
⎯
You both walked back to where you left the car. The last stop of the day would be at San Agustin Church, the oldest church in the Philippines.
Carlos was quieter than usual. Fiddling with his fingers and keeping his hands in his pockets.
"Are you okay?" You asked him. Maybe you infodumped too much on him?
"Yes, mi amor," he smiles, "I've never been better."
You got to the church and took a few minutes to admire its beautiful design. Carlos on the other hand, could not take his eyes off you. He could always go back here whenever he wanted. But he doesn't want to do it if he wasn't going to be with you.
Without warning, he gets on one knee.
"Y/n L/n," he starts, "ikaw ang pinakamagandang babae sa mundong ito." [translation: you are the most beautiful woman in this world.]
People started to gather, but in that moment, nothing mattered to the two of you except each other.
"Mahal, maaari ba kitang makasama habang buhay?" He asks nervously, with hope in his eyes. [translation: May I be with you for the rest of my life? (aka. will you marry me?)]
"Yes!" You say through tears. He puts the ring on and immediately goes in for a kiss, not caring about how many people was watching.
⎯
now playing: Pasilyo - SunKissed Lola
carlossainz55 apelyido ko'y maging iyo yourusername [translation: my last name will be yours] [TITLE MENTIONED WOAAAAHHH]
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📌 yourusername GUYS HE LEARNED TAGALOG SO HE COULD PROPOSE TO ME IN MY OWN LANGUAGE 😭😭😭😭
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carlossainz55 i asked help from your mother
↳ yourusername FROM MY OWN MOTHER IM CRYINGG ILYSM
user1 omfg he is the standard
user2 my boyfriend should take notes
lando MATE THIS IS CRAZY
lando IM SO HAPPY FOR YOU MAN
user3 MAMA Y PAPAAAAA
user4 NANAY TATAYYYYY [translation: mother, father]
↳ user5 gusto kong tinapay [iykyk hahahah it won't make sense if i translate]
user6 SO THATS WHY HE WORE A LONG SLEEVED POLO IN THIS WEATHER
user7 this is so unexpected i need a moment in time
user8 i too would propose if my gf never stopped yapping about philippine history
user8gf taking notes btw
↳ user8 BABY?
charles_leclerc congratulations 🎉
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alex_albon we better be invited (congratulations my goat)
yourusername if he doesn't invite you i will
fernandoalo_official 😮👏
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user9 a man of many words
user10 he's said enough
user11 "ikaw at ikaw" UGH WHAT DO I NEED TO DO TO HAVE WHAT THEY HAVE [translation: "it's only you" ;; a lyric from this song]
user12 kahit ikutin ko pa buong manila di pa rin ako magkakaganto [translation: even if i go around the whole manila i still won't find a relationship like theirs]
user13 "paboritong panalangin ko'y ikaw" 🥹🥹 my parents [translation: "you're my favorite prayer"]
user14 colonizer 😧🫵 (of y/n's heart 😻😻😻)
user15 colonizer x colonized trope is crazy 😭
lando does this mean i can get unli chicharon... yourusername
yourusername sure why not 🔥
↳ lando SCORE
⎯ end
super rushed & really short 😭 but i just wanted to post something heheheh :P majority of this is just me geeking out and there was almost no plot tbh!
i'm working on a george smau idk when i will finish it lol hopefully before school starts
