Through The Lens
Pairing: Toto Wolff x fem!reader
Summary: You spend your race weekends photographing the ordinary moments inside the Mercedes garage - the ones most people never stop long enough to notice. Somewhere between coffee cups, forgotten gloves, mechanics laughing, and quiet conversations, you begin noticing Toto Wolff a little more than you probably should. As the season unfolds, your camera keeps finding him, while he keeps trying to understand what makes you stop in the first place.
Warnings: fluff, slow burn, mutual pining, colleagues to something more, age gap, f1 garage, photography, emotional intimacy, cat cameo, happy ending.
Word count: 6.5k
a/n: I never thought I'd end up liking someone this much just from watching Formula 1😅 I wanted to start watching for the hot drivers, ended up liking the science behind this sport but somehow I also ended up falling for Toto instead🥹🫠🫣Seeing him smile on tv genuinely changed something in me and I finally found my ideal type in a human form🥹❤️✨️ Seeing photos of Toto always makes me smile (and blush, if I'm being honest😅🤭), I knew I wanted to write something about his smile this time, and the word capture kept coming to mind. I love photography, I don't get to do it as much now, but whenever I get the chance, I go absolutely wild taking photos on my phone. That's where the idea for this story came from, I kept imagining myself quietly capturing Toto through my camera, smiling to myself, noticing all the little things about him.❤️✨️ I also think a part of this story came from wanting to be noticed😅 Maybe that's why photography has always meant so much to me. A photograph is such a simple way of saying, "I saw you. I noticed this little moment, and I wanted to keep it." I think, deep down, that's what I was really writing about. I wasn't just writing about taking photographs, I was writing about what it feels like to be seen. And if I ever have a partner (hopefully they're just like Toto... personality, traits and appearance), I already know I'd have thousands of candid photos of them on my phone haha🤣❤️✨️ This definitely wasn't an easy story to write😅 Describing the garages, the race weekends, and all the little behind-the-scenes details and their dialogues was challenging. I'm grateful I had AI to help me research and describe some of the technical aspects. It made writing those scenes a lot less intimidating while still letting me tell the story I wanted to tell😄👍🏻 Also... I have absolutely no idea if a cat casually wandering into an F1 paddock is realistic😅 I just really wanted a cat cameo, so Bijou exists because I said so😼😹❤️ This one is special and I genuinely had so much fun writing it, even when it challenged me❤️ I'd love to hear your thoughts, favourite moments, or any feedback you have in the comments.. Thank you❤️✨️
📷☕🤍🐈✨📷☕🤍🐈✨📷☕🤍🐈✨
The garage was already alive by the time you arrived.
Morning sunlight spilled through the tall glass windows along the paddock building, casting long bands of light across the floor. Somewhere nearby, an impact wrench buzzed to life before fading back into the familiar rhythm of another busy day.
Your camera rested comfortably against your hip as you stepped inside.
You'd spent long enough around the Mercedes garage to know the best photographs were almost never the obvious ones. They lived in the ordinary moments between everything else.
Almost immediately, you found your first photograph of the day. A mechanic balancing three coffee cups while trying to nudge open a door with his elbow.
Click.
He never noticed. You smiled at the preview before continuing.
Morning light reflecting off polished carbon fibre. Click.
Someone laughing in the corner of the garage. Click.
A pair of grease-stained gloves forgotten on a workbench. Click.
Your pace slowed naturally. It always did. Photography had a way of making the world feel quieter.
Then -
Across the garage, you saw him.
Toto stood beside one of the cars, sleeves rolled neatly to his forearms, listening far more than he was speaking. One of the younger mechanics was explaining something with animated gestures, and Toto watched him with complete attention, nodding every now and then before asking another question.
No cameras. No interviews. No performance. Just Toto.
Something about the scene made you stop walking. The morning light caught the edge of his profile. The mechanic laughed. And for the briefest second - so did he. A real smile. Small. Unaware.
You lifted your camera almost on instinct.
Click.
Your heart immediately protested. Please don't turn around.
He didn't. The conversation continued. You let out the smallest breath. One photograph. That was enough.
You lowered the camera, trying very hard to convince yourself to keep walking.
Instead, you stayed exactly where you were. Just long enough to watch him thank the mechanic before turning away.
Only then did he look up.
His eyes landed on you almost immediately.
Your stomach dropped. Oh no.
For half a second, neither of you moved.
Then he started walking in your direction.
He wasn't in any particular hurry. That was the first thing you noticed. No phone in his hand. No tablet tucked beneath his arm. Just an unhurried walk in your direction.
Which, under normal circumstances, wouldn't have been alarming.
These were not normal circumstances.
Your camera suddenly felt far too obvious. Think. You glanced around, looking for something, anything, that would justify having it raised a moment ago. Your eyes landed on the nearest stack of silver equipment cases lined neatly beside the garage entrance. Perfect. You lifted your camera with an amount of enthusiasm that would have convinced absolutely nobody.
Click. One more. Click.
You leaned sideways, pretending to inspect the angle with great professional seriousness.
Behind you, footsteps slowed.
"... should I be jealous?"
You lowered the camera just enough to look at him, and immediately regretted it. It was one thing when Toto was across the garage. It was another thing entirely when he was standing close enough that you had to actually form sentences.
"Jealous?" It came out higher than you meant it to.
"Those equipment cases." He nodded toward the neat row of silver flight cases you'd suddenly become very invested in. "They seem to be getting an awful lot of attention this morning."
"They're -" You stopped. Started again. "The light's good on them. Right now. Currently."
Currently. You wanted to disappear.
He didn't seem to notice, or was kind enough not to mention it. He just followed your gaze toward the cases, where the aluminium edges caught the early sun in a thin line of gold before fading into shadow.
"I've walked past these every race weekend for years," he said. "Never once thought about photographing them."
"It's not really about the cases," you said. "It's the light - catching the edge of them, just for a minute or so. Then it's gone and they're just boxes again."
He looked at the cases properly this time, like he was actually trying to see what you meant.
"I'm looking forward to the day I finally understand what you keep seeing."
A small smile tugged at your lips. "You'd have to slow down to catch it next time."
You heard yourself say it a half-second after you'd already said it.
Did I just tell the Team Principal to slow down.
You felt your face grow warm and busied yourself with the camera strap, suddenly wishing you'd thought before speaking. Boss. Friend. Crush. None of those categories mixed particularly well.
But Toto just smiled, easy as anything. "I've been told that before."
"... have you." You still didn't quite trust your own voice.
"Not quite like that."
His smile answered before he did - quiet, unhurried, like he was in no rush to take it back.
"Toto!" a voice called from inside the garage.
He glanced over his shoulder. "I'm coming."
You managed something that might have passed for a smile. It wasn't until he'd disappeared back inside that you let yourself breathe properly again.
His smile stayed with you longer than you wanted to admit - longer, certainly, than a two-minute conversation about flight cases had any right to last. Eventually, like most things, life carried on.
---
It was nearly a month before you found yourself back in the garage with your camera in hand - a different circuit, a different city, the same particular quiet before a race weekend properly woke up.
The garage had a particular kind of morning quiet - not silence, never silence, but a hum low enough that you could hear yourself think between the impact guns and the radio chatter. You liked it best like this. Before the day filled up with noise that had somewhere urgent to be.
You crouched by the pit boards without quite deciding to, one knee against the cold concrete, camera held loosely until it wasn't loose anymore - until your whole body went briefly, completely still, the way it always did the half-second before you actually meant it.
Click.
You checked the screen. Not satisfied. You shifted your weight, tried again from lower, elbow braced against your knee for something steadier than your own arms could manage.
Click.
That one made you smile - small, private, gone almost as soon as it arrived, the kind of smile that only ever appeared when you'd finally caught the thing you'd been chasing.
A mechanic glanced over as you stood, brushing dust off your knee. "Good one?"
"Getting there."
"Still chasing it?"
"Always."
He laughed and went back to his cable ties without another word.
You moved on. Paused by the tyre blankets, still warm enough to send faint ribbons of heat up into the light. You waited there longer than the shot probably deserved - shifting an inch left, then back, tilting your head like the picture might arrange itself if you were patient enough with it - until finally your shoulders dropped and your finger found the shutter almost on its own.
Click.
You exhaled. Rolled your neck once, the small stiffness of having held one position too long. Somewhere behind you, a mechanic called out that you were blocking the trolley path, and you apologized without any real embarrassment, already stepping aside, already looking for the next thing.
That was the part nobody noticed. The failed attempts. The recalibrating. The quiet, stubborn patience it took to wait for something that might never come - and the small, real happiness that slipped across your face on the rare occasions it finally did.
---
Across the garage, Toto stood beside an open chassis, listening to three mechanics argue good-naturedly about something on the sidepod. Nobody looked stressed. Nobody was rushing.
He wasn't saying much. Just listening - really listening, the kind of attention people forgot to give each other most days. His sleeves were pushed up past his forearms, one hand resting against the sidepod, and you found yourself noticing, not for the first time, how solid his forearms were - the veins standing out faintly beneath his skin, his fingers loosely curled against the carbon like he'd forgotten they were there at all. The morning light had found the side of his face, catching the sharp line of his jaw and the familiar lift of his right eyebrow as he actually considered what the mechanic was saying instead of just waiting for his turn to speak.
You noticed you'd stopped walking. You didn't examine that too closely.
One of the mechanics laughed at something he'd said. You watched his shoulders loosen, his hand uncurling slightly against the carbon, and something in his expression eased with it. Not the practiced smile. The other one. Small, unguarded, the kind that never made it into any official photograph of him.
Your chest did something you chose to ignore.
Click.
You lowered the camera and made yourself keep moving before you could think about why your hands weren't quite steady. Two was enough.
You drifted further in, toward the fabrication area, where a young engineer stood frowning at a laptop screen, headphones around her neck, a half-drunk coffee going cold beside her.
She reached for it without looking, missed the handle, caught it just before it tipped.
Click.
Nearby, someone had left a checklist taped to a monitor, every line crossed off except one. You liked lists like that. The one thing left undone always told you more than the ones already finished.
Click.
You kept moving. A trolley wheel had scuffed a faint arc into the concrete, catching the light at exactly the wrong angle to be anything but beautiful.
Click.
You found Toto again near the toolboxes, crouched beside one of the younger mechanics, working through some problem with a torque setting. In no hurry at all, despite how long it was clearly taking.
From where you stood, the light caught the clean line of his jaw as he looked down at the mechanic's laptop, completely absorbed in whatever was being explained. A loose strand of hair had escaped across his forehead, and he brushed it back absently without ever taking his attention off the conversation. There was something quietly compelling about the way he listened, giving people his full attention as though nothing outside that small exchange existed until they'd finished speaking. It was such a simple thing, and somehow one of the things you found yourself noticing most. He nodded once, said something quietly, and the mechanic laughed.
You told yourself you were watching the light. You weren't entirely sure that was true.
You didn't think about it. Your hand had already moved.
Click.
He didn't look up. You checked the screen. The light had caught the side of his face just right - unposed, unaware. It was one of those photographs that couldn't have been asked for, only waited for. You stood there a beat too long, just looking at it, before you remembered to lower the camera at all.
You smiled, and moved on, already looking for whatever the garage had left to give you next, and doing your very best not to think about why your pulse hadn't quite settled yet.
---
By your third visit to the garage that season, you'd stopped pretending to yourself that you weren't looking for him at all.
He was standing near the debrief room, one shoulder against the glass partition, laughing at something a strategist had said, head tipped back just slightly. The light through the glass had gone soft and grey, the kind of overcast that flattened everything except faces, and his came through it sharper than usual - the line of his jaw, the crease at his eye, the kind of laugh that never survived a press photograph.
You didn't even think about it this time.
You lifted the camera.
Click.
He was already turning.
Not toward you exactly - toward the room, toward whatever came next - but his eyes swept the garage on the way, the way anyone's did, and for one horrible half-second you were directly in the path of it.
You didn't think. You pivoted toward the partition itself, camera already rising, and pressed the shutter twice at the glass like you'd been documenting it for the last five minutes.
Click. Click.
"Photographing the walls now?"
Your whole body flinched - a full, undignified jolt, the camera nearly slipping out of your hands before you caught it against your chest. You hadn't heard him move at all; one second the debrief room, the next he was simply there, close enough that his voice landed right at your ear.
Omg. Omg, he's right there.
"You -" You pressed a hand flat against your sternum like that might slow your heart down through sheer force of will. "I didn't hear you."
"I gathered." He looked entirely too pleased with himself about it.
He came to stand beside you, close enough that you had to work slightly harder to keep your voice even. He looked at the glass - his own faint reflection in it, the garage doubled and ghostly behind him - with the particular expression of someone trying very hard to see what you'd apparently already seen.
"I don't think I've ever looked at my own reflection in this thing."
You opened your mouth. Nothing came out.
He was still standing close enough that your thoughts had begun dissolving into static. You busied yourself with the lens cap, buying yourself a second you desperately needed, willing your pulse to do literally anything other than what it was currently doing.
"Most people don't," you managed finally, a beat too late to sound casual. "It's not flattering enough to bother with."
"That's reassuring." He tilted his head slightly. "So what makes it worth a photograph if it isn't flattering?"
"It's not really about flattering. It's about -" You paused, trying to find the shape of it. "The garage looks different in here. Softer. Everything's a little less sure of itself."
He studied the reflection again, properly this time, like he was trying to see it the way you'd described it rather than the way it actually looked to him.
"I don't think I'll ever understand how you decide what's worth stopping for."
"I don't decide. Not really."
"No?"
You shook your head. "If I have to think about it, it's usually already gone."
That seemed to genuinely interest him, more than the technical talk usually did. "So it's instinct."
"Mostly."
"Can that be learned?"
You glanced at him, surprised by the question, by how serious it sounded underneath the easy tone. "You're asking if you could learn to see like this?"
"I suppose I am."
"I don't know. Maybe. It's less about learning to see and more about -" You searched for it. "Learning to wait longer than feels comfortable."
"That sounds difficult."
"It is. Most people give up before anything happens."
"And you don't."
"I've had a lot of practice not giving up on things that take a while to show themselves."
He didn't say anything right away, just looked at you with the same attention he'd been giving the reflection a moment ago -like you were something else he was trying to figure out how to see properly.
"I think," he said finally, "I've been doing this all wrong. All these years, looking for the obvious things."
"There's nothing wrong with the obvious things."
"No. But I'd like to know what I've been missing."
Before you could answer that, someone leaned out of the debrief room and said his name, and the moment folded itself away as easily as it had opened.
"Duty," he said, with a small, resigned smile, already stepping back toward the door.
"Go save the strategy."
"I'll ask you more about this later."
"You always do."
He laughed at that - properly, the real one - and disappeared into the room, leaving you standing by the glass with your camera still warm in your hands and absolutely no idea what to do with the way your chest felt.
---
Weeks passed the way they always did during a season - race weekends blurring into travel days, travel days blurring into the next race weekend, until you'd genuinely lost count of how many times you'd stood in this garage or one just like it. Then, one afternoon, everything happened to line up quietly in your favour.
The afternoon had turned into one of those rare, unhurried stretches - no urgent deadline hanging over the garage, no crisis pulling everyone in six directions at once. Just the ordinary work of getting ready for a weekend that hadn't quite arrived yet.
You'd wandered toward the pit wall, chasing the last of the good light before the clouds finally made good on their threat, when you found the shot you'd been waiting for all day without knowing it: a mechanic crouched at eye level with a stray cat that had somehow wandered in from the paddock fence, offering it half a sandwich with the solemn patience of someone negotiating a treaty. The cat considered him for a long moment, then took it.
You held your breath through the whole exchange. Waited for the exact second the cat's ears relaxed.
Click.
"Did you get it?"
You hadn't heard him approach - you were getting embarrassingly used to that by now - but this time you didn't jump. You just turned the camera screen toward him on instinct, the way you might have shown anyone standing close enough to ask.
He leaned in to look.
You hadn't accounted for how close that would put him. His shoulder was nearly against yours, his head tipped toward the small screen, and for a second you forgot entirely about the photograph and became very aware of how warm someone standing that near to you could apparently be, even outdoors, even in October.
"That's Bijou," he said. "She turned up yesterday. Half the garage's been trying to make friends with her ever since."
"She stayed still for him."
"Hm." He studied the screen a moment longer - the cat's ears, the mechanic's careful hand, the exact angle of the light. "I still don't see what you saw."
"You'll get there."
"Will I?"
"You've started slowing down."
"Have I?"
"A little. You've stopped asking what I'm photographing."
"And started asking whether I got it."
"Progress."
He straightened up, putting a normal amount of space back between you, though you found yourself, unhelpfully, missing the warmth of the last thirty seconds almost immediately.
It was another hour before you found the second one - the one you hadn't expected him to ask about at all.
You'd been photographing two mechanics near the back of the garage: one crouched to fix the other's collar before a sponsor walkthrough, smoothing the fabric flat with the unthinking care of a parent sending a child to their first day of school. Neither of them said a word about it. The one being fixed didn't even look down. It was over in four seconds, gone before either of them could have called it anything at all. Toto was a few feet away at the time, mid-conversation with a strategist, his attention seemingly elsewhere. You didn't think he'd caught it at all.
Click.
You were still looking at the screen, quietly pleased with yourself, when Toto's shadow fell across it.
"Mind if I see?"
You held it out without thinking twice this time - it had stopped feeling strange to let him look, somewhere over the last few weeks, though you couldn't have said exactly when.
He went quiet.
Properly quiet, not the polite pause people gave photographs before saying something nice and moving on. He looked at it for a long moment, long enough that you started to feel strange about it, like you'd shown him something more private than a collar being straightened.
"I was standing right there," he said finally. "Ten feet away. I didn't see this happen at all."
"Most people don't."
"I would have walked straight past it." He looked up at you, and there was something different in his expression now - not curiosity, not the easy amusement you'd gotten used to. Something quieter. "I don't mean that as a compliment to be polite. I mean I was looking directly at them and I missed it."
You didn't quite know what to do with that, so you didn't say anything.
He handed the camera back carefully, like it was something that deserved to be handled with more attention than a camera usually got.
"I think," he said, "I've been assuming I notice more than I actually do."
"Everyone assumes that."
"Do you?"
"No," you admitted. "But I've had a lot of practice being wrong about what I almost missed."
He almost smiled at that - not quite, something more thoughtful than a smile - and for once, neither of you filled the silence that followed with anything at all.
Later, packing up near the pit wall as the light started to go properly grey, you caught one more - a reflection this time, the garage doubled in a puddle left over from an earlier hose-down, the whole upside-down world of it rippling gently whenever someone walked past.
Click.
Toto wandered over, unprompted this time, already looking at the puddle before he'd even reached you.
He squinted at it. Tilted his head. Squinted again.
"Still don't see it."
You laughed - you couldn't help it, it came out easier than you expected. "You're getting closer."
"I don't feel closer."
"You're not supposed to feel it. That's the whole point."
He looked at the puddle for another few seconds, like he half-expected it to finally reveal itself if he just outlasted it, then gave up with a small, good-natured shake of his head and went back to whatever he'd been doing before.
You watched him go, smiling more than the moment probably warranted.
The last one came without any warning at all.
It was nearly time to pack away for the day - most of the garage already thinning out, mechanics drifting off toward the hotel shuttle, the noise of the place finally dropping below its usual hum. You'd almost put the camera away entirely when you caught sight of him near the far wall.
He wasn't talking to anyone important. Just a young engineer - the same anxious one from before, you realized, though she didn't look anxious now - who'd apparently just been told something good. She was beaming, both hands pressed briefly to her mouth like she couldn't quite believe it yet.
Toto wasn't taking any credit for it. He'd already half-turned away, letting her have the moment to herself, watching from a small distance with his hands in his pockets and an expression that had nothing performed about it at all. Not pride, exactly. Something quieter than that. Something that looked almost like relief on someone else's behalf.
You didn't decide to lift the camera. Your hand simply did it, the way it always did by now, faster than you could think about it.
Click.
He didn't turn around. You didn't linger. You lowered the camera, and something about this one - you couldn't have said what - made you check the screen twice before finally putting it away.
The light was almost gone now, the garage slowly emptying around you. You looked at the photograph one last time before switching the camera off.
It felt worth waiting for.
Somewhere between all those separate mornings and unremarkable Fridays, it stopped feeling surprising when he appeared beside you after the shutter clicked. You kept photographing him anyway - more often now, if anything, no longer bothering with the decoy objects half the time - and he kept finding his way over, still asking the same questions in slightly different shapes. Neither of you named it. There didn't seem to be a need. It had simply become the shape of a season - the two of you, a camera, whatever a given garage happened to be offering that day - and by the time the calendar had properly turned over, you'd stopped counting how many race weekends it had been going on for at all.
---
"Can I finally see what you've been seeing all season?"
You looked up from the laptop, studying him for a second.
It wasn't an unusual request anymore. He'd asked some version of it for weeks. You'd always laughed it off, promised "later," or distracted him with something else.
Tonight, for reasons you couldn't quite explain, "later" didn't feel necessary anymore.
"Fine," you said, and meant it. "Sit."
He sat on the crate beside your workstation while you pulled the laptop toward you, plugging in the card, watching the thumbnails populate in their long, indifferent grid. You knew exactly what you were going to show him. You'd been half-composing the folder in your head for the last hour without admitting that to yourself.
For Toto.
You made the folder. Started dragging things in. The cat. The puddle. The collar. A shot of coffee steam you were still proud of. The reflection in the debrief room glass. The safe ones - the ones that were, technically, about anything other than him.
"Nearly," you said, not looking up, already reaching to open the folder properly so you could hand it over in order.
Someone called your name from across the garage - a quick question about tomorrow's call sheet - and you answered without thinking, clicking something to dismiss it, closing a tab, already halfway into the answer you were giving out loud.
By the time you turned back, you'd handed him the laptop.
You didn't check which window was open.
You went back to packing lenses into their cases, only half paying attention, listening to the small, satisfied sound of him scrolling. You expected quiet appreciation. A few questions. Maybe that same unhurried hm he gave everything.
Instead, there was nothing.
No sound at all.
You glanced over.
The screen wasn't on the folder you'd made.
It was the card itself - the whole unsorted roll, every photograph from the entire season laid out in the order you'd taken them, no filtering, no curating, nothing held back.
Your stomach dropped straight through the floor.
Oh no.
Oh no, oh no, oh-
You almost reached for the laptop. Your hand actually moved. But he was already scrolling, slow and steady, and something about interrupting him now felt worse than letting it happen. Like grabbing something out of someone's hands halfway through a sentence.
So you didn't.
You sat very still, a lens cap forgotten in your hand, and watched him find out.
He scrolled through the early ones almost lazily - coffee, a checklist, someone's discarded gloves - nothing slowing him down. Then he stopped.
"... Oh." A short exhale, almost a laugh, like he'd caught himself somewhere he hadn't expected to be. "I'm in this too?"
You didn't answer. You weren't sure your voice would cooperate if you tried.
He kept scrolling, but slower now - you could tell he wasn't just moving through the roll anymore. He was looking for himself in it, lingering a half-second longer on every frame that might be him before deciding it wasn't.
He found the garage photograph next - him, listening to the mechanics near the open chassis, caught mid-attention, unaware. He went quiet, thumb hovering over the trackpad.
"I remember standing there," he said slowly. "I didn't know you were -" He didn't finish it. Scrolled on.
He found himself again a few frames later, watching two mechanics near a sponsor walkthrough, one straightening the other's collar.
"I was standing right there." A pause. Quieter this time. "I really was."
Then again - crouched by the toolboxes, head bent over a mechanic's laptop, one hand still absently pushing a loose strand of hair off his forehead. "I remember my knees killing me by the end of that one," he said, with a short, almost embarrassed laugh. "Didn't realize anyone was still pointing a camera at me by then."
He kept scrolling.
Another photograph.
Another.
"I keep finding myself in here," he said, not quite to you.
"You do that a lot," you managed. "Show up."
That got the ghost of a smile out of him. It didn't last.
He found himself once more, near the end of that stretch - the young engineer, beaming, hands pressed to her mouth, and him turned half away in the frame, unwilling to take any of it for himself.
"I remember this too," he said, so quietly you almost missed it. "I didn't know you'd caught it."
He sat back slightly. Then he started scrolling again, slower this time - no longer collecting himself out of the roll so much as counting.
"You've never photographed me speaking," he said slowly.
He scrolled again, checking.
"Or leading."
Another.
"Or celebrating."
Another, further back, from a press day you barely remembered shooting.
"Or giving interviews." He looked up at that one properly, something almost stunned behind it. "I know you were there for at least two of those. I remember seeing you in the room."
"I was."
"You didn't take a single photograph."
You didn't answer that. There didn't seem to be a version of the truth that wouldn't sound like exactly what it was.
He looked back at the screen, at the whole scattered sequence of himself laid across it - a dozen small moments, none of them posed, none of them performing anything for anyone.
"Every single photograph," he said quietly. "I'm looking at someone else."
He looked at the screen again.
"... and somehow you were looking at me."
He didn't say anything for a moment after that. Then, slowly, he started scrolling again - and this time you realized he wasn't looking for himself at all. He was looking at everything around himself.
The equipment cases first. "... should I be jealous," he murmured, mostly to himself, and huffed something like a laugh. "You weren't photographing the cases at all."
The reflection in the debrief room glass - his own faint ghost caught inside it, the garage doubled behind him. "The garage looks softer," he said, quoting you back to yourself without seeming to realize he'd memorized it.
He lingered a moment longer on the puddle photograph - the garage doubled and rippling in it - and let out a short breath of a laugh. "I still don't see it," he admitted. "But I like that you kept trying to show me anyway."
The coffee. The checklist. The cat, mid-negotiation with a sandwich.
"10:42," he read quietly, eyes flicking to the timestamp. "Coffee." He scrolled. "10:44. Me." Scrolled again. "11:03. Someone's checklist." Another. "11:05. Me again."
He looked up at you slowly.
"It's just... one day," he said quietly, like he was only now working out how to say it. "The coffee. The checklist. The cat." A pause. "Me."
You didn't trust yourself to answer that.
He turned the laptop a fraction toward you - not really asking you to look, more like he needed to say it out loud with something in front of him. "This is what you actually do." He tapped near the checklist, then the collar, then, finally, one of himself. "You notice something worth keeping. And I happened to be standing in it. Some of the time."
"I thought," he said, quieter now, "I was the one who'd been noticing things. Watching you work. Learning to see the way you see." He looked up at you properly, something unguarded and slightly stunned in his face. "I didn't realize you'd been doing the exact same thing this whole time."
He smiled faintly. "You always looked so still when you took a photograph. I thought it just... happened." His eyes drifted briefly to the screen again. "I didn't realize how much waiting came before it. The way you'd crouch, shift an inch, roll your neck, look again." He looked back at you. "I was watching that too."
Oh god. You had no idea what your face was doing right now, and no way to check.
"You didn't just notice me," he said, before you could find anything to say at all. "You noticed me the same way you notice everyone worth noticing." He paused, like even he was surprised by what he was about to say. "That's not nothing."
For a moment neither of you spoke. Then he closed the laptop, gently, and turned to face you properly, like the conversation deserved more than a screen between you.
"Can I ask you something?"
You nodded, hoping he couldn't hear how hard your heart was pounding.
"Why me?" He said it plainly, no performance in it at all. "Out of everyone in that garage. Why did I keep ending up in your camera?"
You thought about deflecting - reaching for some safe, nearby object the way you always had. There wasn't one this time.
"Because you were worth waiting for," you said instead. "The same as everything else I photograph. I didn't choose you because of who you are. I think I just -" You searched for the shape of it, the way you searched for every photograph. "I kept finding you in the moments I was already looking for."
He was quiet for a long moment, turning that over.
"I think," he said finally, "I've been doing the same thing. Without a camera."
You looked at him. "Have you?"
"For a while now." A small, unsteady smile. "I just didn't have a word for it until tonight."
You didn't know what to do with that - with the sheer size of it, the way it settled somewhere in your chest and made itself at home. You'd spent months learning to notice people so quietly they never even knew it was happening. You hadn't planned for what it would feel like to find out someone had been doing the same thing back.
"I don't think anyone's ever noticed me like that," you said finally, the words feeling small and enormous at the same time. "I'm usually the one behind the camera. Nobody really -" You stopped, tried again. "Nobody looks at the person who's always looking."
"I notice you too," he said simply, like it was the easiest true thing he'd said all night.
You didn't trust yourself to say anything back to that yet. He seemed to know it, and didn't rush to fill the silence. He simply held your gaze - steady, patient, as though he wasn't expecting an answer at all.
Only after a long moment did he speak again.
"You once told me if you have to think about it, it's usually already gone." A pause, quieter. "I didn't have to think about this one at all."
Something in you loosened, quiet and complete, like a shutter finally releasing after holding too long.
The garage had gone almost completely quiet around you both. Somewhere far off, a door closed. A last set of footsteps faded toward the exit.
Neither of you said anything else for a while. But this time, at least, you both knew exactly what the silence meant.
---
The next race weekend arrived the way they always did - too fast, too loud, the paddock filling back up with its usual controlled chaos before you'd fully caught your breath from the last one.
You were photographing coffee again. A fresh cup, steam rising in a thin, unhurried line, catching the early light exactly the way it always seemed to on the good mornings. You'd taken a hundred photographs like this one by now. You still couldn't walk past it.
Footsteps approached, unhurried, familiar enough by now that you didn't need to look up to know whose they were. You smiled anyway, just slightly, down at the camera instead of at him.
He stood beside you. Didn't ask what you were photographing. Just looked where you were looking, quiet for a few seconds longer than felt like nothing.
"I think I see it," he said.
You looked up, surprised enough to actually check. He wasn't looking at you. He was looking at the coffee - the steam, the light, the small, ordinary thing you'd have walked straight past on any day you weren't paying attention.
You laughed before you could stop yourself. Not because the coffee was beautiful, though it was. Because he'd waited. He'd actually, properly waited, the whole ten seconds it took the light to do what it was doing, without once looking at his watch.
He reached into his jacket and produced something you hadn't expected - a small, slightly battered film camera, the kind nobody used anymore.
"You said I had to slow down." He held it out. "I thought I should probably start practicing."
You took it slowly, turning it over once in your hands before looking back up at him.
"Want me to show you?"
"I was hoping you would."
Later that afternoon, you found yourself photographing a mechanic threading a bolt with far more concentration than the bolt strictly required - the kind of small, unremarkable focus you'd learned, over the course of an entire season, was usually worth waiting for.
You lifted the camera.
Across the garage, mid-conversation with an engineer, Toto noticed. The conversation paused. He said something you couldn't hear, excused himself, and crossed the garage toward you.
He didn't ask what you were photographing.
He simply came to stand beside you, close enough that his shoulder nearly touched yours, and looked in the exact direction you were looking, and said nothing at all.
He'd learned the language, somewhere along the way, without either of you ever deciding to teach it to him.
You pressed the shutter.
Click.
You lowered the camera and checked the screen - and then, for the first time in the whole of this story, you turned it toward him before he had to ask.
He looked at it for a long moment. Then he smiled - the same quiet smile you'd spent an entire season learning to wait for.
Then, without taking his eyes off the picture, his hand found its way to the camera itself - steadying it, or steadying you, you weren't entirely sure which - his palm settling warm over the back of your hand where it still rested against the camera body.
No announcement. No question. Nothing that needed saying out loud.
Just the quiet, unremarkable fact of his hand over yours, exactly as ordinary and exactly as easy to miss as everything else you'd spent all season teaching him to see.
Somewhere across the garage, someone laughed. A radio crackled. Coffee steamed quietly between forgotten conversations. The light shifted, the way it always did, the way it would keep doing whether or not anyone bothered to notice.
Neither of you moved.
There would be other races. Other photographs. Other ordinary moments that most people would never think to notice at all.
You had a feeling the two of you would keep waiting for it together.
---
It took Toto a while to work up the nerve to use that film camera on someone other than a stationary equipment case - and, true to form, he chose to practice on the one subject you'd never once let him see coming.
You didn't notice him lift the film camera. That was, you'd think later, rather the point.
It happened quietly, the way most important things seemed to in your life.
You'd been crouched by the timing stand, chasing a shaft of light that had slipped between two motorhomes, entirely absorbed in getting the angle right. You hadn't heard him approach. You certainly hadn't heard the small, unfamiliar click of a shutter that wasn't your own.
You only found out later, when a plain envelope appeared on top of your keyboard. No name on the front. Nothing to announce what it was.
Inside was a single photograph - slightly overexposed, a little soft at the edges the way real film always was, nothing like the clean precision of your own camera. It was you, crouched by the timing stand, camera raised, caught in the exact half-second of stillness before you meant it. He'd gotten the moment right. He'd waited for it, just as you'd taught him to.
Beneath the photograph was a handwritten note in the careful, deliberate script you'd only just started to recognize.
"You spend so much time preserving everyone else's moments. I thought someone should preserve one of yours. You once told me nobody looks at the person who's always looking. I do. I think I always have. Thank you for teaching me how to see. Liebe."
For a long moment, you simply stared at the photograph. Not because it was perfect. It wasn't. Somehow, that only made you love it more.
All you could think was that someone had waited for you. Someone had seen you the way you'd spent an entire season seeing everyone else.
Your thumb brushed carefully over the edge of the photograph, as though it might somehow disturb the moment it had captured.
You smiled before you even realized you were doing it. So this, you thought, was what it felt like to be noticed.
You slipped the photograph into your bag instead of your desk drawer. Some things, you'd learned, were worth keeping close.❤️✨️
📷☕🤍🐈✨📷☕🤍🐈✨📷☕🤍🐈✨
a/n: If you've made it this far, thank you so much for reading❤️✨️ I had the reveal planned from the very beginning, so I'd love to know what you thought of the reveal😅🫣🤭 At what point did you realize Toto had been noticing the reader too? Or did you only realize when she did? I'd love to know!😁❤️✨️
