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.
Alex hadn't changed, really, over the last year. Still tall, still tan. Still gut-achingly handsome. Really, the only difference from this time to the last is that last time, Logan had been the one bleeding.
Logan was across the clearing in three quick, clean strides. Alex was sliding to the ground, back against a tree, and he hadn't noticed Logan yet. Or if he had, he hadn't recognized him. The wound across his arm bled lazily, as if it were tired of pumping out blood and taking a bit of a breather. A bad sign, more like than not.
On his knees in front of Alex was a place that Logan had always hoped to find himself. Not like this, exactly, but something.
"Hey," Logan said, soft, like speaking to a spooked horse. Last time, Alex had laughed at him, even as he'd carefully wrapped strips of his own cloak around Logan's bloodied stomach.
Alex groaned. His eyelids were flickering like candlelight, lips parted into a perfect, blood-spattered flower.
"Alex," Logan said, and he put one hand on Alex's knee, where he wasn't so obviously injured. Alex's eyes came into focus and then unfocused again. There wasn't any obvious recognition in his face, but his perfect mouth quirked into such a perfect smile that Logan felt a lot like he'd been the one slashed to hell and back with the business end of a blade.
"Logan," Alex said. "S'that... huh."
Like he was surprised, but like it was a happy surprise.
It felt like theft, when he leaned in to kiss Alex on the lips. It felt like he was taking something that didn't belong to him, only it'd been so long since he'd last seen Alex, and Alex had smiled at him like he'd missed him.
So Logan kissed him. Alex didn't stop smiling. Even as his body sagged and he sighed, passing out with a whisper of a breath, he kept smiling. He did keep breathing, too, which was the important part.
For a moment, Logan let himself look. In sleep—never mind that it was a sleep induced by blood loss—Alex looked so peaceful that it made Logan's heart hurt. So he kissed him again, on the corner of his mouth, and he didn't say anything stupid like I missed you or I love you, actually.
Instead, Logan settled in, closer, and unclasped his cloak to shred for bandages.
kiss prompt game 💘 (fake relationship / mutual pining)
It doesn't hurt all that much anymore.
It'd only taken a year for Mclaren to suggest the literal worst idea Max had ever heard. For someone to say, hey, what if our drivers were dating? and for someone higher up to say wow, yeah, that's not a fucking nightmare plan at all!
Lando had called him nearly in tears laughing about it. Mate, isn't that insane? Isn't that absolutely batshit? Probably illegal, too.
Turns out that yes, it was insane, and absolutely batshit. But not illegal.
There'd been some loophole in the contracts, apparently, that some complete nutjob had gone through and found behind everyone's (read: Lando and Oscar's) backs. Some tripped up wording that'd allowed Mclaren's upper management to quite literally tell Lando and Oscar that yes, you two are dating now. Sorry about your girl, Oscar. Sorry about your—oh, Lando, you're single anyway. No big deal.
They'd laughed about it for about a thousand years. Laughed and laughed because, well. Oscar's a friend and everything but there'd been something barbed in the way that Lando had talked about him having to dump his longterm girlfriend for the team. Something like satisfaction in Oscar having to give up his life the way that Lando's given his.
So they'd laughed, and Max'd felt bad for Oscar, and more quietly he'd felt bad for himself. He hadn't had anything to complain about. He's the one who hadn't wanted to out himself in the first place. They'd been a secret for years already. Lando's whole fake relationship situation wasn't going to change that.
It's been long enough now that Max has gone through something adjacent to the five stages of grief. Denial, mostly. But he's fine now, watching Mclaren's socials pop up photos of their drivers giggling together. Nudging each other, shoulder-to-shoulder, Lando grinning at Oscar with the same all-teeth smile that he beams at Max. Holding hands. Lifting each other's arms into the air, champagne-soaked, bits of confetti clinging to damp skin.
The kissing still gives Max a bit of a stomachache, but it could just as easily be something he ate. The way Oscar holds Lando's face in both hands—on the podium, and it's a bit cringe to be that public anyway—makes something tense up in Max's chest, but he could just be having a heart attack. He's not had a physical in a minute.
It really isn't all that bad, when he doesn't think about it.
Hey ho! Challenge time - open your Spotify Daylist, find the 8th song on the list and write a quick drabble based on the 3rd line of lyrics🎵
Send this to 5 friends and feel free to change the song or lyric number 🖋️ have fun!
so he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions
The worst place for it to happen is on track, so that's where it happens, of course.
Alex is setting the quali lap of his life. Genuinely—it's one of those laps that feels like the car's on rails, like he's pushing everything to the exact limit and then taking it one step further, like the Monza lap record is nothing and he's about to piss all over it. He's never felt this good in a car. Williams or otherwise.
It's in the last sector that something goes—calling it wrong feels like the understatement of the century.
There's someone on the track. Someone right on the fucking racing line.
Alex veers right on instinct. It's too hard and sharp. The car jerks and goes into a wild, violent spin, stomach swooping like gravity's lost its grip on him. He's going to break the sound barrier. He's going to unstick from the earth and spin off into space and—
He hits the fencing. The car lifts, and he's sideways, off the ground. The car drops. Everything stops.
He aches all over. The car is steaming or smoking or maybe it's on fire, already, and maybe he's going to be baked alive, squinting at the hazy treeline looming over him. His radio is crackling. Beeping and fizzing to life, and his name prickles through his ears over the ringing.
"Alex, respond if you can hear—"
His head twinges when he moves it. The trees are a blur but he still catches movement. Birds, he thinks at first, and then blinks and sees limbs. The shape of a body, human. Torso legs arms head. Dangling from the branches like it's been thrown there, drooping, limp and loose.
"Alex—"
"There was someone on the track," he says. Wheezes. The wind's been knocked out of him and his lungs ache and seize in his chest. He has to gasp for a breath. "There was someone—there's someone—"
James says something, and then the other James says something, and Alex has the vague awareness that someone's coming to get him.
That could mean anything, he thinks, and then wonders why.
The body is still hanging from the tree when he looks back up. For some reason he thought it'd be gone when he looked again. Like a hallucination, some sort of migraine aura that's taken the shape of a person, dangling like it's had its strings cut. He can't make out any of the details like this. His brain is impact-scrambled and his back aches and his eyelids keep fluttering.
He thinks the body might be looking at him. He thinks the body's lifted its head and has opened milky-blank eyes and is looking at him.
"Did I hit someone," Alex gasps. He still can't catch his breath, he's forgotten to hit the radio button and pressing it is a massive effort. "Did I hit someone?"
Silence that pinches like needles. One second, two, three, four.
"No," James says, finally. He sounds wary. Alex looks down at his lap. The chassis has collapsed, and his legs are covered in bits of shredded carbon fibre. "No, Alex, you didn't hit anything."
Alex looks back up. He should be expecting it when the body's gone, but it still catches him so startlingly off guard that he passes out in the crushed remains of the car.
not to go back to may 2024 (fucking christ it was THAT long ago??) but like you do has had me in a chokehold for i guess almost a year and a half now... 1 for like you do? and 11 and 14 also (or instead, if 1 isn't the vibe)
fic asks 🌟
1. write a scene from like you do in another character’s POV
It's not intentional. The text is at least 90% an accident—Jon's text thread had been, like, a millimeter away from Oscar's, and once Lando had misclicked, well. Seemed like too much effort to go back and try again, hadn't it?
And like, it's not like he'd actually expected Oscar to say yes. He's not expecting his reasonably-new teammate to ask him what colour Gatorade he wants. He's not expecting Oscar to be his Uber Eats driver. Really. Even once Oscar confirms he's en route (your delivery driver is on the way!), Lando's still not really expecting him to rock up at the door, still sleep-rumpled and puffy-eyed and smelling like a fucking gourmet meal.
It's not Lando's intention—really—to keep Oscar there either. Oscar offers, and Lando's not going to turn down company or attention when he's about a quarter of a second from the pipes bursting, if you catch his drift. He really should've packed another suppressant or ten. Never mind that Jon's got backups for days.
He'll die on the hill that he'd never make a plan like this—poor sweet, airheaded Lando? He's never plotted a thing in his life! Perish the thought.
But it really doesn't turn out all that bad. Oscar's rather good with his mouth, Lando finds out quick. Arguably even better with his dick, but the throes of it all have made it a bit of a challenge to remember where one thing ends and the other begins as far as, er, pleasure goes. It all ends up a bit muddled by the time the heat's steamed off a bit. And it turns out that Oscar's not bothered that he's been tricked—not tricked, he came here on his own, didn't he—into bed with Lando, and it seems like he's up for another go sometime, so. There'll be time to figure it out.
11. what makes a fic 'successful' in your opinion?
answered here :)
14. what makes you happiest? new fic comments, kudos, bookmarks, user subscribers, story subscribers, or tumblr asks?
comments of course but tumblr asks!!! oh my god it feels crazy to wish for asks ever but it's my favourite form of engagement ever. like love a comment LOVE feedback but i feel like the response to a comment is comparatively limited? and if someone cares enough about a thing to stumble into my askbox like genuinely it's the highest honour. i've never received an ask about a fic that didn't make me cry in like actual joy
It's so blatant that it probably can't even be called a metaphor; that Lando waits for Oscar like he's in the fucking pit lane, poised, weight-of-the-world pressure on his shoulders.
It's necessity, when it comes down to it. They can't stay away from each other because the wear is too much, because eventually one of them will end up stripped to the bone if they don't strip to the skin first.
It's not funny but it makes Lando want to laugh. That even in this it's how he thinks about it, that opening his hands and waiting for Oscar to fall into them makes him think about tyres, shredded and blistering.
send me a ship and single word prompt and i'll write you a five sentence fic
Lando likes Oscar best when he's like this. The record-scratch squeak of his laugh, pitchy while he's pitching forward like Lando's the funniest person to ever have existed. The complex origami fold of his face that hides his eyes and shows off his teeth like a cat yawning.
Oscar is dry, and Oscar is even, and Oscar can be flat. But a flat note can still be played at top-fucking-volume.
send me a ship and single word prompt and i'll write you a five sentence fic
It's a hand around the neck, the throat, the nape.
It's the hard grip at a shoulder, where it's easiest to twist and leverage balance, to pin to a wall or a floor or a bed.
It's Carlos' voice, thick and irritated, keep quiet, and his hand over Oscar's mouth, and his chest against Oscar's back. It's Carlos' body, holding him down and steady and still while he takes what he wants and he thinks that he's won and what it isn't is victory—for Carlos or for Oscar. Just another deadlock, another stalemate, another failed tug-of-war.
send me a ship and single word prompt and i'll write you a five sentence fic
