I wish you'd write a fic where Lando and Oscar are hooking up while they both have girlfriends and there are all kinds of unspoken rules about what is and isn't allowed and little by little more and more rules get broken
i wish you would write…
landoscar | 1075 words ⤿ now available on ao3
The first rule they break is no kissing, which Oscar should have expected.
It happens the third time they have sex, and the first time they have sex in one of their flats. Time one and time two were in hotel rooms and fueled largely by post-race adrenaline and alcohol. Lando’s turned out to be a bad influence in more ways than one, not least of all how he’s consistently able to convince Oscar to drink on a Sunday night before they have early-morning flights the following Monday.
He’s not all that surprised when Lando smears himself along Oscar’s front, all post-coital and melty, and kisses Oscar with a soft, open mouth. He gets all starry-eyed after an orgasm. All pink in the cheeks and gilded in the late afternoon sun in ways that would probably affect Oscar more if he were an artist. He still looks good.
So he’s not surprised, and he lets it happen, because he’s a bit melty too. This is also the first time they’ve had sex sober. He should have been more prepared for this version of Lando to come out; the version that wants to kiss after they fuck, that wants to cuddle, that wants to nuzzle into Oscar’s neck like he could make a home there.
Not that anyone’s counting, but they break rules two and three that day too. Two being no hooking up in broad daylight and three being no fucking where any evidence could be found.
Oscar’s careful, though. The second Lando’s gone he peels all the sheets off the bed and throws them into the washing machine that he doesn’t know how to use, and he slings the duvet over the balcony railing to air out, and he checks every crevice of his room for any left-behind socks or underwear or god forbid jewelry. It’s a fit of uncharacteristic mania on his part. He can admit that to himself.
Rule number four is no staying over. They break that one the sixth time they have sex, because they have sex in Lando’s hotel room and Oscar’s room is occupied, and for him to creep back there would break their fifth rule. Rule number five, which they haven’t broken just yet, is never ever mention Lily.
Rule number six only comes into play when Lando makes it official with Magui, and even then it’s really a rule five-and-a-half. Never ever mention Magui.
The rule that says never mention this to anyone at all is unspoken. It doesn’t need a number, because it’s the only one they really, truly, can’t ever break.
To both of their surprises, Oscar is the one who ends up breaking rule five. Oscar, who spots a hickey on Lando’s collarbone that he knows he didn’t put there, and says, “Magui a biter?”
Lando gives him the strangest look Oscar’s ever seen on him, and he’s seen a lot of strange looks on Lando Norris.
Lando says, “Sure,” and Oscar realizes what he’s done, and he drops it.
Maybe Oscar starts losing track of the rules. Maybe he starts losing track of a lot of things as the season goes on. He is, contrary to popular belief, very much aware of how he sounds on the radio these days. Aware of the things being said about him, and about Lando, and about the championship.
Rule number seven is, obviously, not to talk about the championship. They follow this rule nearly as closely as they follow rule zero. They’re friends, and they’re… friends, also, and bringing this type of work to bed with them is the final ingredient in what’s already a recipe for disaster. This does, unfortunately, fall off a bit when Oscar DNFs.
And this is one of those things that eats at him. Not just the fact that he binned it into a wall on the first lap like he’s an absolute amateur, but the fact that afterward he can’t stop himself from bringing it to bed with him. Can’t stop himself from bullying Lando onto the mattress and taking it out on him, muttering all the while about the car until Lando bullies back. And then Oscar ends up on his back, and he stops thinking about much at all. Lando’s pretty good at that.
So that eats at him too. Caterpillar vs leaf style, gnawing away at his edges, because Lando’s already DNFed twice this season and he kept it out of the bedroom. Apologized in the media when it was his fault, apologized to Oscar privately, moved on. The consummate professional.
Oscar’s never seen himself as much of a rule-breaker. But he’s always learning something new.
Neither of them are, contrary to popular belief, cracking under the pressure. But it is stressful. It’s incredibly fucking stressful to have fingertips on the championship, to feel the texture of it as it spins out of grip. It’s not out of reach. If it ends up there, out of bounds, foul ball, both of them would only have themselves to blame. Realistically.
Under that weight, rules five and five-and-a-half get more slippery. Lando’s somehow still better at this than Oscar—he’s lovely to Lily in person, and he doesn’t mention her name or make jabs about her when they go to bed together. He keeps everything tidily compartmentalized in a way that makes Oscar deeply suspicious about how many times he’s done this before. So it’s Oscar that makes jabs about it. Oscar who actively avoids Magui, because for no reason it pisses him off to watch them nuzzling each other like Lady and the Tramp in hospitality. Oscar who, when they inevitably fuck again, presses down on love-bites left on Lando’s shoulders like he could rub them away with his thumb.
“She really—” He starts, and Lando surges up with that weird, wiry, unexpected strength that Oscar’s always startled by.
“Come on, mate,” Lando says. That’s not a rule, but Oscar hates it anyway—to be called mate in bed, to have that tidy slice between teammate/friend/fuckbuddy laid out so clearly in one word. “Chill.”
Oscar chills. Lando’s on top now, anyway, and Oscar’s got no choice but to chill.
It’ll get worse before it gets better, Oscar thinks. Something’s gotta give, or whatever, unstoppable force versus immovable object. Someone or something’s going to crack at some point and he doesn’t want it to be him.
He doesn’t want to admit that it’s probably going to be him.
i wish u would write lily finding out about lando and oscar (as an add-on to ur infidelity landoscar one)
i wish you would write…
landoscar | 1590 words | sequel to this prompt fill
The bracelet isn't really Lily's style, but she's never been an ungracious gift receiver.
More surprising that it's not entirely to her tastes is that Oscar's bought her a gift at all. He's more of an acts of service type of boy, or quality time, or some combination of the two. He gets her gifts on her birthday, and for Christmas, but he's not really spontaneous like that otherwise. He's reliable, is what he is. They go on vacation in the off season like clockwork. Valentine's is always dinner and a walk and then a little... Well. Quality time.
She's just a little bit puzzled, is all, by the whole situation. Why Oscar would buy her a Swarovski bracelet in the first place, and why he would buy it months before her birthday and before Christmas, and more urgently why he somehow thought leaving it under the bed was a good idea.
She's not been snooping. She's tidying up the flat while she waits for him to get back from a lunch date with Mark, because he still has the sense of cleanliness of a teenage boy, and the maid won't be in for another couple of days. The bed has to be made, the laundry has to go in the hamper. It's easy stuff, really. At least it looks like he's made an effort this time. The duvet's out on the balcony, and the sheets are a soggy heap in the washing machine that she'd had to heave into the drier all by herself, even though they probably weighed more wet than she does.
After a long moment of consideration, she tucks the bracelet in the bedside table's drawer on Oscar's side of the bed. She's very good at acting surprised. He's always been rather terrible at keeping secrets.
—
“Oscar,” says Lily, “You really have got to stop leaving garbage everywhere.”
Oscar, eyeballs deep in a protein shake, peers at her blearily. She’s only just arrived today, noon sharp, to find Oscar still in bed when she’d let herself into the flat. Now he’s feeding himself without much enthusiasm, and she’s making up the bed.
She brandishes the condom wrapper at him. He chokes on his shake.
“Really,” she says, and she’s truly doing her best not to sound like a nag. But really. “I’ve not been here in weeks. You must have stomped over this about a hundred times since then.” She’d found it because she had stomped over it, just the once, and found it sticky and stuck to her bare foot. She hadn’t realized the lubricated kind would stay, well, lubricated so long.
Oscar mutters something that could be an apology. He’s really quite red in the face, and around the ears. She knows what he looks like when he’s embarrassed.
This isn’t quite it.
“Really,” she says again, and she lets her arm fall, because for some reason she’s expecting Oscar to lunge over the table and snatch the wrapper out of her hand. “I’m not your mum.”
Oscar nods slowly. He’s doing his very best to keep his eyes on her face, but they keep darting back to her hand. She goes to the bin. Might as well put him out of his misery. She notes, in the way someone might note body language at a poker game, the brand on the packet.
She startles, dropping the wrapper into the bin. Oscar’s come up behind her and slipped both arms around her waist, and he’s hauling her back, and kissing her neck.
“I missed you,” he says. His voice is still thick with sleep. She lets him grope at her chest through her shirt and then, when she thinks about how much she missed him, too, lets him turn her around and lift her up onto the counter.
—
Lily isn’t stupid. She’d immediately clocked that the condom wrapper was a completely different brand and size than the ones Oscar uses with her.
She’s known Oscar for a long, long time. She knows when he’s lying. When he’s really embarrassed or when he’s keeping secrets. For months, now, he’s been all of those things. For months, now, she’s known he’s been unfaithful.
She finds it in herself to forgive him before she even brings it up in conversation. It makes sense; he’s always in one country or another, and while they are together about eighty percent of the time he is a man. She’s not friends with the other girls—the WAGs, which she refuses to call herself—but she knows them well enough to have heard the stories. Almost everyone she’s spoken to has had the same experience.
Drivers are cheaters, Rebecca had told her, once, sloppily drunk but not unkind. It’s just the way they are.
—
Lily decides early on that she’s not going to talk to Oscar about it. Not yet. She’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but she also knows he’ll try very, very hard to lie to her face if she confronts him. He really is a terrible liar. She’d rather not shatter what she’d thought was the solid bedrock of their relationship by misstepping.
She does, however, go out of her way to talk to Lando.
He’s always been lovely to her. She hadn’t expected it, if she’s being honest—she’d anticipated some sort of venom from him, being that she’s partner to his closest competitor. But he’s always been at minimum cordial. Most of the time he’s an outright delight.
When she runs into him in a cafe in Monaco, he beams at her and pays for her cappuccino. He’s nothing like Oscar, Lily thinks. The opposite in most every way—where Oscar’s pale and curved, broad in the shoulders, Lando’s all dark tan and slender, shapely limbs. He’s easy to smile. He’s very easy to like.
“I have a strange question,” she says, as they sit outside the cafe and sip coffee like old friends. Lando’s bracelet glitters in the sunlight as he sets down his cup.
“Sure,” he says.
Lily presses her lips together. “Is—can I ask how long? You and Oscar, I mean.”
Silence. Silence like a wall, like slick, cold marble. She’d anticipated Lando not having much of a poker face, but it stays frozen in a cooler parody of the easy smile he’d started with. She thinks he’s probably a better liar than Oscar. From what she’s heard, he’s had a lot more experience with this sort of thing.
“Beginning of the season,” he says, and she really hadn’t expected him to answer at all, much less be honest.
“Hm,” she says. More to herself than anything; she’s surprised that she believes him.
“Sorry,” says Lando. He doesn’t sound all that sorry, really. He plucks at his bracelet; shoots it a rather dirty look when he probably thinks she isn't watching.
“It’s alright,” says Lily. “Thank you for being honest.”
—
Her options are thus:
Confront Oscar; risk the relationship they’ve spent the better part of a decade building, go back home to live with her parents while she finishes school. Sleep with Lando; not for revenge, exactly, just to see what’s out there, and more importantly what she’s up against. She thinks he’d probably do it, even though he’s also got quite a lovely partner. Maybe Lily could reach out to Magui. They could make a little club about it. Maybe she could sleep with Magui, too, but she doesn’t think her heart would be in it.
Or she can drop it. Just drop the whole thing. Pretend that she doesn’t know her boyfriend has been not only having sex with someone else but having sex with another man, pretend that he’s not a truly awful liar. Pretend he’s not being objectively quite awful all around.
She’ll have to mull it over.
—
“I know, by the way,” Lily says, unabrasively. She’s just let Oscar make love to her without a condom, which is the easiest way to butter him up for anything.
Oscar says, “Hmmm?” He’s basically half-asleep, the way he always is after they have sex. Lily’s lived with the secret for too long to be bothered by it when she wonders if he’s fallen asleep in Lando’s arms before.
“About Lando,” she says.
The brick wall of silence doesn’t bother her. She sits up and starts to work the tangles out of her hair. Oscar doesn’t move, or speak, but she feels him watching her. She’d like a shower, sooner rather than later, to at least avoid staining the sheets.
“I don’t mind,” she adds, because she doesn’t anymore. “I understand.”
Part of her wants him to apologize. The part of her that loves a good romance film wants him to sit up and take both her hands in his, promise to end it with Lando, that it didn’t mean anything, to tell her he loves her and commit himself to her. Part of her wants this very, very badly.
The other part of her knows what she’s going to get.
Oscar does sit up. He sits up and he watches her and she feels his hand twitch abortively to touch her.
“I’m, um, sorry,” Oscar says.
Lily pats his bare shoulder; the nearest thing she can reach. She’d like to shrug but she thinks he’s probably feeling rather vulnerable right now. “It’s alright,” she says, climbing out from under the sheets. She really is a mess. “I’m going to go clean up.”
She knows him well enough that she doesn’t expect him to say anything as she goes.
i wish you could write a fic where oscar’s age gap fixation with lando can be manifested - stepbro landoscar? timetravel landoscar? dealer’s choice 🎲
i wish you would write…
landoscar | stepbrothers! | 664 words
Oscar says, "Happy birthday," the way that most other people would say, you come here often?
Lando, having only known Oscar for a year and some change, can't be sure that this is like, a regular thing for him. If he wishes everyone many happy returns with bedroom eyes and a tone of voice that says he'd like to be involved in those happy returns, if you catch his drift. Lando does know that in April, when Oscar'd turned twenty, he'd looked weirdly disappointed about it. What twenty year old doesn't love a birthday?
Of course, Lando had been twenty-one then. Now he's twenty-two, and Oscar's making that face, and Lando's brain is working in overtime to piece together what's going on. Like a weirdly horny edition of Clue.
"Feel old yet?" Oscar asks him. He licks his lips.
"I mean," Lando says, "I guess," even though he hadn't really thought about it that way. He's never been all that bothered by the whole ageing process thing. A birthday is just another day for a party. His parents—their parents, Oscar's mum and Lando's dad—insisted they both come stay a few nights to celebrate with family, and with a fridge packed full of drinks.
Oscar looks him up and down with all the subtlety of a dog eyeing your dinner up on the table. Waiting for the right moment to strike. He's had more than a few beers—Lando had made a couple of jabs about him being a baby, is he even allowed to drink, et cetera—and has been blotchy pink in the face for the better part of an hour. Because of the drinks or the jabs, who can really be sure.
"You're two years older than me now," Oscar says.
"Am I not... always?"
Oscar shakes his head so slowly that for a second Lando's not sure if he's moved at all. He doesn't elaborate, either, just keeps staring up at Lando from his spot on the floor. This isn't anything that Lando has any reference for. He's always had younger sisters, never a younger brother. Maybe this is how a younger brother is meant to act? Then again, Lando's never been like this to his brother.
"I like it," Oscar says finally. He's up on his knees now, crawling across the floor. "That you're older."
"Oscar," Lando says. "I'm barely older. You're taller than me." This seems like an important thing to mention. Now that he's starting to understand the shape of it—kind of, sort of—he's half-wary and half extremely into it.
One of the few things Lando's actually learned about Oscar over the last year is that his mum had forced him to come back home right before the wedding. Apparently he'd been living with someone else, an older man and his wife, and Lando'd taken it for an honourary uncle situation until he'd caught the way Oscar staring, like, mournfully at a photo on his phone. The older man. A pair of dogs. Oscar, tucked into the older man's side with a big, genuine grin on his face.
Lando's no genius detective, or whatever, but he can put two and two together to find four.
Oscar has somehow ended up between Lando's knees, both hands spreading Lando's thighs open. He's got delicate, long-nailed hands, like a girl's. It's instinct that has Lando putting a hand in Oscar's fine hair and holding him still by the head. Oscar's working Lando's fly open, and Lando's brain feels like the ice cream about to fall out of the cone.
Possibly he should stop this. The stepbrother thing isn't Lando's kink by any means, nor is the pseudo-older man thing. But he's not going yuck anyone's yums.
He's also not exactly one to turn down a birthday BJ. If Oscar wants to pretend like Lando's much, much older than him, well. At least Lando's going to get something out of it.
All he can really hope is that Oscar doesn't start calling him daddy.
Lando's like, halfway to sober when he gets home. This isn't saying all that much. He's been clinically wasted for the last six hours and halfway back to sober from that is still wasted, probably, but he only wobbles a little on the way into the flat, and he only accidentally walks into one doorframe, and he remembers to kick out of his shoes in the hall before he gets to the bedroom.
He doesn't super remember that Oscar's asleep in bed when he falls into it, jeans around one ankle and half-stuck in his jumper. But Oscar's a solid sleeper anyway, and only says, "Mrrghghgh," when Lando flops fully onto him.
"Sorry," Lando whispers, only he's been at the club and his voice is a bit hoarse so it comes out full-volume anyway.
For a second he gets a flash of Oscar's eye—just the one, shining in the moonlight, and if Lando knew what a word was he could get real poetic about it—before Oscar hunkers back down under the covers. It could have been a glare, Lando thinks, but he's wriggling in behind Oscar anyway.
Lando says, "Hiiii."
Oscar makes a sound that might be a word. Lando snuggles in closer, pressed up against Oscar's bare back, nuzzling into the nape of his neck.
He's a bit horny, is the thing. A quick drunk wank before bed never hurt anyone—probably it's healthy, really.
He starts kissing Oscar's nape with the kind of focus he usually reserves for Sundays on a race weekend. Careful, soft, not wet because his mouth is dry and he probably should've got some water in him before bedtime but it's a bit late for that. Oscar's all warm and soft, stomach twitching under Lando's hands, sagging when Lando kisses his way up his shoulder.
"Yeah," Lando dumbly. "Yeah, you like that?"
Oscar hums. Lando keeps kissing his way down Oscar's arm, rubs his mouth against his tricep and when Oscar sighs he's got to grin.
"S'that turning you on?" Lando asks, all drunken-horny-boldness.
And Oscar, in the softest, sleepiest, most sincere voice, says, "Feels nice."
It somehow has the effect of replacing every horny bone in Lando's body with softer, squishier, more Play-Doh-esque bones. Like he just sort of melts about it, curling around Oscar like a beloved stuffed animal or pet and rubbing his nose against the back of his neck while he grins like a fucking idiot.
"You're cute," Lando whines. "Why're you cute."
Oscar's hand looms out of the dark and pats at Lando's face, long nails narrowly missing an eye.
"Shhhh," says Oscar, and he leaves his hand across Lando's face. It's a bit like he's trying to suffocate him, but Lando's not all that offended by it.
It’s a startling case of post-nut clarity that does it, in the end. The season wrapping up, the stress mounting like a feral dog, Mark Webber’s ill-placed attempts at manipulation. It all comes to a head, coincidentally, while Lando’s giving him head.
“I’m going to fire Mark,” Oscar gasps, right as he comes.
read on ao3 🔒
for @16wheelerhorse via the @f1playlistficexchange!! thank you sm to the organizers <3
landoscar, bodyswap AU, song number 4 or 81 pls ty!
spotify wrapped writing game
4┈stomach it (acoustic) by crywolf / landoscar/oscarmark, 1191 words
stomach it (consider this an au of an au)
-
This isn't Lando's bed.
When he wakes up in the middle of the night he knows he's not in his own bed because the sheets are much, much too old, worn so thin and soft that they feel like nothing on the skin. The duvet is thick and heavy, which is what Lando prefers in a duvet, but this one has some kind of weird wallpapery pattern on it that he doesn't recognize.
It's not that he's all that bothered about it. It's not at all the first time that he's woken up in a bed that isn't his. He wakes up in unrecognizable, unfamiliar places all the time.
There's something off about it. He can't place it, but he's got to piss like a motherfucker, so he gets out of bed before he can start thinking too hard. Thinking this early in the morning never leads anywhere good.
He finds the bathroom in the dark with exactly zero trouble, which is a hint that something isn't right. His body gets there like it's been there a hundred times. Follows the walls without clipping them with his shoulder, turns without walking into the doorframe. Maybe he's still dreaming. Maybe once he whips out his dick for a wee he's going to end up pissing the bed. It wouldn't be the first time for that, either. It'd be incredibly annoying, he thinks, and then he also thinks that he wouldn't be thinking quite so hard in a dream. Would he?
He finds the toilet with the same precision he found the bathroom. The seat's already up when he gropes around for it in the dark. Also strange, but his back aches in its lowest parts, so clearly he's not gone home with a girl. Unless she'd been a bit of a freak, which also would not be a problem.
It's when he wrangles himself out of his underwear that he realizes something is wrong. He is, as any self-respecting man should be, extremely intimately familiar with his own dick. How it feels, the weight of it, the way it fits into his hands.
There's something wrong with his hands. And his dick.
He's already pissing before he can process all of this. Still half-asleep, still swaying in the dark, listening to the silence of the house. He is in a house. Last he remembers, he was in Monaco, maybe at a club. Drinking with the intention to forget is great until you actually forget where you are and how you got there, if that there is a big, silent house. There's nothing like this in Monaco.
He's pretty sure he drips a bit on the floor in his rush to get to the lightswitch. He doesn't care all that much. Fumbling himself back into his underwear and then slapping the light on as if seeing the room will tell him anything new about where he is.
It's—Jesus Christ. What the fuck.
What is wrong with his hands—and his dick, but he's not going to look at that again just yet—is that they're not his at all. The palms are small, the fingers are slender, the nails are long. They're pale, too, pink around the knuckles and nailbeds. Lando can't remember the last time his nails were anything but bitten to the quick.
It still startles him when he looks up, even knowing what he's going to see in the mirror.
He's not himself. He's not Lando at all. He's Oscar.
Oscar's pale neck strains when Lando makes a noise that in his own body might be a whine, but comes out here as a groan. His cheeks are blotchy and pink, ruddy with cold where every other bit is white with panic. When Lando slaps a hand to his—to Oscar's—chest his heart is pounding, an unfamiliar rhythm against an unfamiliar palm. In his own body, he thinks he might dissolve into something like an actual panic attack. In this body, the eyes widen and then narrow. The mouth pinches and puckers and the jaw clenches and the slender fingers curl into cold fists.
Lando breathes. Fills Oscar's lungs with air. Stiffly washes his hands because it's what the body wants and then turns off the light.
There's—he's heard of it happening, once or twice. Teammates that are particularly caught up in each other swapping bodies in a moment of high stress. Daniel had told him it'd happened with him and Max once, ages ago, and that he's pretty sure Lewis and Nico had swapped a handful of times. More than once! Jesus fucking Christ.
He pads back down the hall, bare feet sticking and unsticking to the floor, toes curling against knots in the hardwood. Unfamiliar to Lando's brain, but Oscar's body is expecting every shift in texture. Oscar's body steers him away from a spot that will creak underfoot. Oscar's body twitches to one side to avoid a table in the hall.
Fucking weird. It's so fucking weird.
He slips back into the bedroom with the intention of finding his—Oscar's—phone. It's the middle of the night, or at least so late it's started to be early, but Lando's got Oscar's number on bypass so it'll at least ring when Lando calls him. What can he even say? Don't fuck up my body?
The bed is still warm when he slides back under the covers. It's what the body wants, even though Lando's brain wants very badly to snatch up Oscar's phone and sprint back to the bathroom like there's a fucking demon after him. But the body aches to be warm, to lay down. To drift back into a comfortable sleep in a bed that is familiar to it.
Before Lando can slide the phone off the sidetable, an arm wraps around him.
He only doesn't lurch away because Oscar's body doesn't jump out of its skin. This arm is a normal thing to it; this body behind him is familiar, and warm. A hard chest that he's pulled to and a stubbly face that burrows into the back of his neck.
"Tried to run off, did ya," says a sleepily gruff voice. This voice is familiar, both to Oscar's ears and to Lando's brain.
"Nah," Oscar's voice says back, convincingly sleep drunk while Lando's brain bounces off the walls like Flubber. "Go back to sleep, Mark."
Mark Webber mumbles something incoherent and then presses this achingly soft kiss to the top knob of his—Oscar's—spine.
Lando doesn't move. He doesn't sleep, either, though the body wants badly to drift off again. How the fuck can he sleep when he knows that Oscar's been fucking Mark Webber?
Worse, that he's fucking Mark Webber and not Lando.
In less than twenty-four hours he'll be back in his own body and Oscar won't say anything about being in Lando's, so they won't talk about it at all. When he wakes up at home, with his familiar hands and his familiar dick in his familiar, empty bed, he will call this a very fucking weird nightmare brought on by championship stress.
(Dream or not; he'll never be able to look at Mark the same way.)
The car is bad. They know from day dot that the MCL40 is… well. Andrea calls it disagreeable. It's just the new regulations, he insists, a whole set of new things to contend with that make having a technorganic car a thousand times more difficult than they already are. He says these things like they're simple. Like it's just another obstacle to overcome as a team.
But Andrea isn't the one who has to climb in and fight it. And from the first fittings, it's abundantly fucking clear that they're going to be fighting it all year long.
The pre-season session is immediately awful. Having to watch Lando come limping out of the fitting room, white as a sheet, completely nonverbal when Oscar asks him how it's gone. He manages a shrug. The shrug also makes him wince.
After Oscar’s gone in, he tries to convince himself it's not all that bad. He tries to convince himself that the car isn't holding him tighter than it used to, that it's not keeping him longer, that it's not meaner than last year. He tries to convince himself that when it curls around him and shoves inside of him he's only misremembering the gentle touch of the MCL39.
We'll just have to try something new, the team keeps saying. Back to the drawing board. As if it’s that easy. As if any of them have to go through what he and Lando do.
A third of the way through the season, he's let into the fitting room before Lando leaves. One of the new things that they just have to try is having some overlap in the time spent with the car. Privately, Oscar is wary that they'll try to pack the two of them into the seat at once. Like Pacific Rim with some distinctly niche anime touches.
When he gets inside, Lando is already propped up against the opposite wall, wrapped in a towel like he's just out of the shower. He's wet enough for it. Drenched with sweat, curls plastered flat to his head.
"D'you think," Lando says, and then interrupts himself to hiccough up a mouthful of the dark iridescent fluid Oscar recognizes is from the car. It runs down his chin, his chest, his stomach. Soaks into the already darkly stained towel around his hips. "Sorry, Christ. You reckon Kimi's going through this shite?"
It's a sort-of-kind-of running joke between them, that the Mercedes boys might be going through anything near this level of hell. The only thing their car has in common with Mercedes' is the power unit. As far as Oscar is aware, no one else on the grid is running a car the way McLaren is.
"George, maybe," Oscar offers. Because if anyone's suffering anywhere near as much as the two of them this year, it's George Russell.
It gets a laugh out of Lando, which also pulls another round of black spit-up out of him. It looks effortless. Like he's so full of it it takes nothing at all to push it out.
"Fuck, that's gross," Oscar says. Lando laughs again, bitter this time. He wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand and it leaves an oil-slick smear across his cheek.
"She's not nice today," Lando says grimly. He keeps calling it she this year.
The agreement for this round is that Lando goes first, like a test run, because he's been doing this for years longer than Oscar has. Then, Oscar will go in, and Lando will stick around to see if he gets any vibes or whatever. Lando had laughed about it for ages when they'd first worked it out. The official vibe-checker of the team. He really should get a raise.
So Oscar strips, too nervous to be self-conscious. The seat looks the same as it ever does, innocuous, or as innocuous as a plastic tub of semi-sentient ooze can be. He thinks about making a joke as he goes to climb in. Thinks about batting his lashes at Lando, like, you're not going to give me a hand in? because it's something that Lando would do to take the edge off for them both. But when he glances over, Lando's just watching, face tight, body tighter. He's shaking a little. Someone should've brought him a blanket. Oscar climbs in without another word.
The second he slides in the car is all over him.
It always feels a little bit like being consumed, swallowed up in the thick dark of the car. But this time it feels like it's really, truly trying to eat him. Like there are tiny teeth prickling over his body, like a cat's tongue or like shark skin and it's all over. He always does his best to stay quiet during fittings. He knows they've got cameras all over the place, for obvious reasons, and he's not interested in giving some McLaren tech any wank fantasy fuel by making weird noises. But it's so startling that he yelps—mouth falling open around an alarmed sound that twists into a moan that is and isn't just pain. The car takes advantage of this by plunging down his throat.
Lando wasn't kidding. Not nice, as it turns out, is the understatement of the century. Not nice at all.
The press of it in his mouth is all-consuming, all at once. As far as being penetrated goes, normally he's most unnerved about it going up his dick, mainly because he'd been shocked and frankly embarrassed to find it felt pretty good. Up the arse and down the throat is whatever at this point. He's used to these things. But this time the car spears him hard at both ends, no adjustment, no allowance for any time to think at all. Just in, in, in, as deep as it can get, as much as it can get.
He can feel it in places that should probably not be felt. He can feel it writhing around up his arse, which again, he's used to. But he can feel every inch of it slinking down his throat, wriggling the length of his esophagus until it has to be directly in his belly. It's so far down there's nowhere else it could be.
In previous sessions, Oscar has tentatively compared the fittings to fucking. Because that's kind of what it is—the car inside of him, him inside of the car. The car working him and itself to completion, whatever that means for it.
This time, once it’s seated in him, there's no hesitation before it starts to pump him full of itself. There's no reciprocity, no introductory hey-how-are-ya orgasm. It feels clinical. Like a factory line. Like Oscar's a can, or a cow, something to be stuffed full and emptied out later. The MCL39, Oscar thinks, was as close to warm as you could get with something like this.
His body convulses. Somehow he never forgets to breathe when he’s here. He’s never been afraid of suffocating or choking to death, and even now it’s only a dim, distant footnote. Still, his body understands that he’s too full, too fast, and it understands that it wants less of that. Less of everything.
He isn’t expecting it when he quite literally overflows.
The car has been pumping him full and full and fuller for an amount of time you couldn’t pay him to track, and eventually, he knows, it all has to go somewhere. It’s more normal when it’s just his arsehole. When it fucks him full and then thins itself so it can ooze out of him, lets him drip dry while he comes down in what was the safe cradle of the seat.
Distinctly less normal: his stomach squeezing so suddenly that he has no time to process what’s happening. His whole abdomen jerking and curving, his throat spasming around the car. A rush of bitter-thick fluid that spurts out of the bare space between his lips and the car’s tendril.
Now he’s choking. Now there’s some deeper part of him that realizes he might actually be in danger and if he could force out words he’d be calling for help. If he could move he’d be trying to climb out of the car. It’s the kind of reaction he’d have to crashing on track, and the engine catching fire. The desperation to get out and to get out quick.
He spits up more car goo, and then more, and more, until he realizes it’s not going to stop. Until he realizes the car isn’t slowing down.
All at once he realizes he won’t be able to take this. He’ll drown here, or suffocate, or—something. It’s all just a little too familiar, in the end. The muscle memory want to hit a brake pedal that isn’t there. The looming dread, the anticipation of a wall.
“Oscar.”
His eyes move on their own, flicker up and around, roiling in their sockets. Lando’s face beams down on him like the sun. Oscar wants to reach for him.
“I’m here,” Lando says, and he reaches in, which is distinctly against every rule Oscar’s ever been told. You’re not supposed to touch once a driver is in the car. Something about contamination. Something about tainting the process.
Oscar heaves. He spits up another flood of fluid, and he lifts his elbow, and the car lets him free enough to grab for Lando’s hand. That’s all it is; Lando doesn’t yank him out of the car, and the car doesn’t yank Lando in. Suddenly Oscar is just there, like he always is, but Lando is holding his hand. Lando is telling him he’s okay. Oscar is oozing out of the corners of his mouth and a little out his nose but Lando says he’s okay. So maybe he is.
It feels like it doesn’t take all that much longer, after that.
The car recedes, slow, easing out of him and slinking back into whatever form it takes when it’s not being touched. Oscar gags a little on the way up, and he feels the flood between his legs before he spits up again. He’ll be leaking for days, he thinks. There’s no way he’ll drip dry after this. There’s no way he’s going to sit here long enough to let it happen.
“Up you get,” Lando says softly. His hand wraps around Oscar’s wrist, big and strong and solid. Oscar clutches at him even though his fingers won’t close tight enough to get a proper grip. It’s enough, though, Lando hauling him up and then dragging him out of the car. Neither of them have the strength for this. Once Oscar’s out of the seat, he slips, and Lando’s too feeble to hold him upright, so they both end up on the floor. Oscar, naked. Lando, also naked. Oscar wonders where his towel’s gone.
It takes Oscar a minute to catch his breath. A minute longer to stop drooling up what the car’s left him with, to tip his face away from the puddle he’s made on the floor and press his face into Lando’s neck.
“Car’s bad,” Oscar grunts against his skin.
Lando laughs. Oscar feels the jump of his pulse against his lips. He’s still sweaty. They both are. They both smell like petrol left too long in the sun, sweet like they’ve been caramelized.
