Synopsis: Lando’s least favorite repeat call becomes the one he secretly starts hoping for when the woman living in the “toaster house” makes every emergency a little harder to leave.
Pairing: Firefighter!Lando Norris x Reader
Warnings: Mentions of house fires, grief, and loss of loved ones (reader mentions her grandparents who passed away).
Author’s note: Hiiiii! This one is a little longer, but I had so much fun writing it that I could not bring myself to cut it down. I hope you enjoy reading their little moments as much as I enjoyed writing them! Also, a hug to anyone dealing with the loss of a loved one (like I am). I hope you’re being gentle with yourself and taking care of yourself. ♡
. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁ The problem was exactly where you’d said it was.
A section of old wiring behind the living room wall had overheated, likely from years of handling more than it was ever meant to. Lando had seen it plenty of times before. Old houses had their quirks, and sometimes those quirks turned into something that sent a fire engine racing down the road in the middle of the night.
He crouched near the wall while one of the other firefighters checked the surrounding area, making sure there wasn’t any damage spreading somewhere they couldn’t see. The house was quiet now, apart from the occasional creak of old wood settling and the rain tapping steadily against the windows.
You stayed nearby, watching them work.
He’d noticed that about you over the last few calls. You never hovered close enough to get in the way, never asked a hundred questions while they were trying to figure something out, but you were always there. Curious. A little worried. Like you needed to see with your own eyes that everything was actually okay before you could relax.
“You can sit down, you know,” he said after a while, glancing back at you.
“You’ve been standing in the same spot for ten minutes.”
You looked down at yourself, then back at him. “Have I?”
You huffed out something like a laugh and finally sank onto the arm of the sofa, mug abandoned somewhere on the side table. “Force of habit. I keep thinking if I look worried enough, the house will behave.”
“Has that worked so far?”
“You’re literally in my living room for the fourth time. What do you think?”
Lando huffed, testing a section of exposed wire with careful fingers before nodding to himself, satisfied. “Good point.”
Oscar called something from the other room about the fuse box, and Lando answered without looking up, easy and automatic, the kind of shorthand that came from working alongside someone long enough to not need full sentences. You watched the exchange with faint curiosity.
“Have you two always worked together?”
“Four years now.” Lando reached for his kit, pulling out a roll of electrical tape. “Feels longer some days.”
“Depends on the day. Ask me after this shift.”
That earned a real laugh, quiet but genuine, and something in Lando’s chest eased at the sound of it, like he’d been waiting to hear it since he walked in.
He worked in silence for a few minutes after that, aware in the kind of way he didn’t examine too closely of exactly where you were sitting, exactly how the mug had gone cold in your hands, exactly how the rain outside had softened into something gentler than before.
“There,” he said eventually, taping off the last section. “That should hold till the electrician can come take a proper look tomorrow. No more buzzing, no more flickering.”
“No more fire trucks at midnight?”
“Can’t promise that. This house seems to have something against me.”
You smiled down at your hands, and when you looked up, something had softened in your expression, more than politeness, less than anything you’d say out loud yet. “Thank you. Actually. Not just for tonight, for not making me feel like an idiot every time I call.”
Lando straightened, meeting your eyes properly for the first time all night. “You’re not an idiot. Old wiring’s old wiring. Not your fault.”
“Still. You didn’t have to be so,” you gestured vaguely, searching for the word. “Nice about it.”
“Would you have preferred I wasn’t?”
“No,” you admitted, and the honesty of it caught you both off guard. “No, I really wouldn’t have.”
The quiet that followed wasn’t uncomfortable. If anything, it stretched a beat too long, charged with something neither of you moved to name.
Then Oscar appeared in the doorway, took one look at the two of you, and grinned like Christmas had come early. “Am I interrupting something?”
“I was going to say,” Oscar said, entirely too pleased with himself, “that for a man who ‘finished up two minutes ago,’ you’re taking your sweet time saying goodbye.”
Lando didn’t answer, mostly because there wasn’t a version of the sentence that didn’t make it worse. He climbed into the truck instead, staring straight ahead while Oscar settled into the seat beside him, still grinning like this was the best part of his week.
The engine pulled away from the curb, rain streaking sideways across the windscreen. Oscar let the silence sit for exactly as long as it took to be unbearable.
“You didn’t even ask her name tonight,” he said, far too casually for how pointed it was.
Lando’s jaw ticked. “I know her name.”
Lando didn’t answer that either, and this time the silence said plenty on its own.
The fifth call came almost two weeks later, and this time there was real smoke (not much, just enough to blacken the wall behind the stove where a spark from the same tired wiring had caught the edge of a dish towel someone had left too close). By the time Engine 81 arrived, you’d already smothered it with a lid, and you met them at the door looking more furious at the house than afraid.
“It tried to kill my kitchen towel,” you said, before anyone could ask. “I’m considering pressing charges.”
“Against the house?” Lando asked.
“Against whoever wired it in 1974 and called it a day.”
Captain Zak Brown, hanging back near the truck, caught Lando’s expression before he had a chance to arrange it into something more professional, and filed it away with the quiet satisfaction of a man who didn’t miss much.
By the sixth call (a breaker that blew hard enough to spark visibly through the panel) Lando had stopped pretending to himself that this was just part of the job. He’d catch himself at the station, hosing down the truck or restocking the medical kit, wondering what you were doing. Whether the electrician had ever actually come by. Whether you’d started keeping the fire extinguisher somewhere more accessible like he’d suggested, half-joking, the last time.
He learned your last name almost by accident, glancing at the incident report Oscar filled out at the scene. He learned you were in your final year at university when you mentioned, offhand, that you’d be pulling an all-nighter for a deadline the same night the smoke detector had gone off for the fourth time that month (“brilliant timing, as always”). He learned you lived alone when Oscar asked, casually, if there was anyone else in the house they should account for, and you said no, just you, like it was nothing.
He learned about the tea because you always had a mug of it, no matter the hour, no matter how bad the night had been. He learned about the records because he spotted the shelf of them by the window on the seventh call, and made the mistake of asking, and got a twenty-minute answer he hadn’t expected and hadn’t minded in the slightest.
Back at the station, it became a running joke he could feel building momentum he had no way to stop.
“Chertsey Road again?” Zak would say, deadpan, scanning the call sheet, and somehow always find a reason to look directly at Lando when he said it.
“It’s not funny,” Lando said, more than once, to increasingly less effect each time.
“It’s a little funny,” Oscar said, mimicking Lando’s own words back at him with visible glee.
“The toaster house has a crush on him,” someone from B shift said, one afternoon, and Zak didn’t even bother denying it, just grinned into his coffee.
“I think,” Zak said, “that Lando here has a crush on the toaster house.”
“I have a crush on nothing,” Lando said. “It’s faulty wiring. It’s a coincidence.”
“Seven coincidences,” Oscar pointed out.
“Old houses have old wiring.”
“You know her records collection alphabetically.”
Lando did not have a response to that one, mostly because it was true, and everyone at the table knew it, and the collective silence that followed was somehow louder than if they’d all laughed at once.
He didn’t mind it, not really. Not the way he minded most things people teased him about. He just didn’t have a good answer for why a house two miles off his usual route had started to feel like a place he looked forward to being called to, or why he’d started noticing things like the exact shade the sky turned right before a call came in, the particular creak of your front step, the way you said his name like you’d been testing it out before you said it, that had nothing to do with wiring at all.
The eighth call, he told you, without quite meaning to, that you were clever for spotting the burning smell before the alarm even went off.
“Smart girl,” he said, easy, the way he might’ve said it to anyone.
You went quiet for a second too long, something flickering across your face that you didn’t quite manage to hide, and Lando, filing that reaction away the same way Zak filed away everything, decided, privately, that he liked it far too much.
The ninth call started with a smell. Faint, electrical, the kind that made you second-guess yourself for a full ten minutes before you finally gave in and dialed. By the time Engine 81 arrived, you’d already gone through the house twice, sniffing at outlets like a woman losing her mind, and still couldn’t pin down where it was coming from.
“I swear it’s not nothing,” you said, meeting them at the door, arms crossed like you were bracing for someone to tell you it was.
“Didn’t say it was,” Lando said, already stepping past you into the entryway.
It took them the better part of twenty minutes to trace it, an outlet behind the bookshelf, warm to the touch, wiring beginning to scorch just under the surface without ever quite catching. Nothing dramatic. But close enough that if you hadn’t trusted your own nose, it might have gone very differently by morning.
“Good instincts,” Lando said, once it was capped off and safe. “Most people would’ve talked themselves out of calling.”
It was quiet after that, the kind of quiet that came from adrenaline draining out of a room once the danger had actually passed, and it left enough breathing room for the question that had apparently been sitting in the back of Lando’s mind for weeks.
He asked it while packing up the kit, careful to keep his tone light, like it was just curiosity and nothing more. “Can I ask you something?”
“Why do you still live here? House tries to kill itself every other week. You’re clever enough to know a lost cause when you see one.” He said it with half a smile, testing the ground before he put his full weight on it.
You didn’t answer right away. You looked toward the entryway light instead, now steady, like the house had decided to behave for the moment. “It’s not really about the wiring.”
Lando waited. He’d learned, over the last few calls, that you talked more freely when he didn’t fill the silence for you.
“My grandparents raised me,” you said eventually. “Since I was seven. This was their house.” A small, humorless breath escaped you. “They passed last year. Four months apart, almost to the day. My grandad first, then my nan. I think she just didn’t know how to be here without him.”
Lando’s hands had gone still on the kit. “I’m sorry.”
“Everyone says that.” You said it without any bite to it, just tired honesty. “It’s fine. It’s just, they left me the house. And I know it’s falling apart, and I know the wiring’s a nightmare, and I know a sensible person would sell up and let someone else deal with it. But it’s theirs. It’s the only thing that still feels like them, some days.” You glanced at him, like you were bracing for whatever came next, pity, or the kind of sympathy that made grief feel like something to be fixed.
He didn’t offer any of that. “So you keep calling us instead of moving out.”
Something in your shoulders loosened, grateful for the shift in tone. “Efficient, I know.”
“I mean, at this rate we’re basically on a first-name basis with your fuse box.”
That got the laugh he’d been angling for, small but real, and it settled something in his chest he hadn’t realized had gone tight. “You could just say you don’t think I should sell.”
Lando didn’t argue the point. He just zipped the kit shut and let the quiet stretch, comfortable this time, while outside Oscar leaned against the truck pretending very hard not to be watching the two of you through the open door.
Oscar didn’t let it go. Of course he didn’t.
“So,” he said, the next morning, far too pleased with himself as he leaned against the locker beside Lando’s. “You gonna ask for her number, or are we doing this the hard way where you just keep finding excuses to drive past Chertsey Road on your days off?”
“I don’t drive past on my days off.”
“You drove past on Tuesday.”
“The coffee place is in the opposite direction.”
Lando didn’t have an answer for that, which Oscar seemed to take as its own kind of victory, grinning the rest of the way to the truck bay. It became the theme of the week, Oscar finding new and increasingly unsubtle ways to bring it up, Zak occasionally chiming in with a comment about wedding invitations, someone from B shift leaving a joke Valentine’s card taped to Lando’s locker with your future toaster house wife scrawled inside it in Oscar’s handwriting.
Lando let most of it roll off him. He was used to being teased, it came with the territory of working alongside people who spent entire shifts crammed into a truck together with nothing to do but wind each other up.
But underneath the teasing, quieter, was the part he didn’t say out loud to any of them, that he kept thinking about the way you’d talked about your grandparents. The four months between them. The way you’d braced for pity and gotten none, like you weren’t used to people just letting you finish a sentence about grief without trying to fix it. He thought about the house differently now, too. Not as a nuisance that kept dragging his engine across town at odd hours, but as something you were holding onto with both hands because it was the last place that still felt like the people who raised you.
He thought, more than once, that he should ask for your number. He thought about it enough that Oscar’s teasing had started to feel less like a joke and more like a countdown.
He was still thinking about it four days later when the call came in.
Structure fire. 4 Chertsey Road.
Not your voice on the line. A neighbor’s, panicked, breathless, saying they’d seen flames in the upstairs window and they didn’t know if anyone was inside.
Lando was moving before dispatch finished the sentence.
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