Chapter Text
Lando Norris had wanted Oscar Piastri before Oscar Piastri knew what to do in a Formula 1 paddock.
Not the version he softened for himself on better days. Not admiration. Not curiosity. Not professional respect for a junior driver with a terrifying record and a face that gave away nothing. Those were easier words. Safer words. Words that made Lando sound like a normal person looking at a future teammate and thinking, yes, he’ll be quick, he’ll be trouble, he might make me better.
All of that was true.
But none of it was the whole truth.
The whole truth was that Lando had noticed Oscar years before McLaren made it official, before Alpine turned his life into a public contract war, before Zak Brown looked far too pleased with himself and announced that Oscar would be wearing papaya.
Back then, Oscar had been a name people said with the kind of certainty that made other drivers uncomfortable. Formula Renault champion. Formula 3 champion. Formula 2 champion. Always calm. Always controlled. Always standing there with that careful, flat expression, as if the whole world had been built too loudly and he was waiting for it to embarrass itself.
Everyone noticed the kids coming up.
Everyone watched the next threat.
Everyone in Formula 1 understood that a seat was never only a seat. It was a target, a clock, a warning.
So at first, Lando told himself that was all it was.
Professional awareness.
A driver watching another driver who might one day become a problem.
Then he started noticing other things.
The way Oscar listened more than he spoke.
The way his mouth tightened before he said something dry.
The way he seemed to measure every word before spending it.
The way he looked almost bored when he was winning, as if dominance was less a thrill than a completed task.
The way he watched rooms like he understood more than he intended to admit.
The way he seemed built from restraint.
That had been the first hook.
Oscar had always looked like a locked door.
Not just closed. Not just private. Locked. Deliberately. Carefully. Like there was something underneath the blank face, the dry answers, the polite little smiles that barely moved his mouth. Something hidden. Something disciplined into silence.
Lando was not built from restraint.
He had learned how to perform it, sometimes. He knew how to sit through debriefs with his face arranged into professionalism while something inside him sparked and spat. He knew how to smile for cameras after a shit strategy call. He knew how to make a joke before someone could see where he hurt.
But Oscar seemed to have been born with silence inside him.
Lando wanted to put his hands around that silence and find out what it took to break it.
That was not a good thought.
He knew that.
He had known it for years.
It became impossible to ignore when Oscar signed with McLaren.
The first time Lando saw him properly in papaya, standing in the MTC with his new kit and his calm eyes and his careful rookie politeness, something in Lando shifted so violently he almost hated him for it.
Oscar was not a name anymore.
Not a junior career. Not a headline. Not a future threat.
Not a like or comment under his posts on Instagram.
He was there.
Across the garage.
Across the table.
Across every briefing, every content shoot, every team photo where Lando could feel him standing just close enough to make the air sharpen.
Lando wanted him instantly.
Not gently.
Not sweetly.
Not in the kind of way he could turn into a joke in an interview, laugh off with a self-deprecating grin, and let people clip for edits.
He wanted Oscar’s attention.
His real attention.
Not the professional version Oscar gave engineers, journalists, managers, mechanics. Not the faintly amused look he gave when Lando said something stupid in content shoots. Not even the careful respect of a rookie measuring himself against the teammate who had survived McLaren’s worst years and somehow come out the other side still standing.
Lando wanted Oscar’s irritation.
His respect.
His rare laugh.
His unguarded glance.
His anger, if that was all Oscar would give him.
He wanted to be the thing Oscar could not calmly file away.
He wanted Oscar to look at him and lose the ability to be still.
That was the ugly part.
He knew a good person would have wanted something softer: friendship first, trust, a slow connection built without pressure. He knew a better man would have respected the quiet boundaries Oscar seemed to carry without ever needing to name them.
But Lando had never been as good as people thought he was.
People loved giving him soft edges. They liked making him nervous, funny, harmless. They liked the curls and the jokes and the awkward little laugh that came out when he didn’t know what to do with too much attention.
They liked forgetting that Formula 1 did not keep harmless boys for long.
Lando was not harmless.
He had learned to survive by making people underestimate how badly he wanted things.
And he wanted Oscar Piastri.
By May 2023, wanting anything at McLaren felt almost embarrassing.
The car was shit.
There were more polite ways to say it, and everyone used them because they were paid to. Difficult window. Development path. Correlation issues. Not where we want to be. Clear direction for upgrades. Long-term project.
Lando hated all of it.
He hated dragging the car through weekends where points felt like charity from chaos. He hated smiling after qualifying sessions that made his skin itch. He hated watching other teams move forward while McLaren spoke in careful future tense. He hated being told to be patient by people who were not the ones standing in front of microphones after another miserable Saturday.
Oscar handled it better.
That annoyed Lando too.
Oscar handled everything better, at least from the outside. Bahrain had been cruel, Saudi messy, Australia chaotic enough to give them something to cling to, Baku and Miami both reminders that McLaren were still too far from where they wanted to be. Through all of it, Oscar remained composed. He listened. He learned. He gave feedback in that flat, precise way of his. He did not complain loudly. He did not dramatize. He did not make the garage orbit his frustration.
It made him look mature.
It made Lando want to throw something at him.
Because Lando could see the tension underneath. Or at least he thought he could. The way Oscar’s jaw tightened after bad sessions. The way his answers got even shorter when he was disappointed. The way he looked at the data like he could force the car to become better through sheer concentration.
Oscar was not unbothered.
He was disciplined.
Lando wanted to ruin that discipline.
Not on track. Not professionally.
He wanted Oscar fast. He wanted him sharp. He wanted him dangerous enough to make McLaren better, to make Lando better, to give the team two drivers worth fearing once the car finally stopped humiliating them both.
But outside the car?
Lando wanted a crack.
A reaction.
A look that lasted too long.
A mistake.
And Oscar, infuriatingly, seemed determined to remain impossible.
He was polite.
He was focused.
He was fast enough to be annoying even in the terrible early-season McLaren. He asked useful questions. He absorbed pressure like it was data. He stood beside Lando in orange and black and gave the media dry little answers that made people laugh only after a two-second delay.
And after every race, after every debrief, after every careful little moment where Lando thought maybe, maybe, there was something under Oscar’s surface that responded to him, Oscar would go back to Lily.
Lily Zneimer.
Lando had nothing against her.
That was almost the worst part.
It would have been easier if she were awful. If she were arrogant, rude, dismissive. If she treated Oscar like a trophy or looked at Lando like he was a threat. Then Lando could have built something clean out of dislike.
But Lily was fine.
Pretty. Polite. Private. Gentle in a way that did not ask the paddock to notice her. She was not hungry for the cameras. She did not float around McLaren pretending she belonged to the sport more than the people working in it. She did not demand attention from Oscar in public or perform romance for strangers with phones.
She simply existed beside him.
Comfortably.
Familiar in the way people became familiar when they had known someone since before the world started looking at them.
Oscar did not parade her around. There were no dramatic paddock entrances, no constant touching for cameras, no forced smiles, no staged affection. When Lily appeared, she stayed close to him without claiming space that was not hers. Their closeness looked old. Quiet. Lived-in.
The kind built from years before Formula 1 sharpened everything.
Lando could not hate that.
He tried once.
It didn’t work.
Oscar smiled differently around her. Not dramatically. Oscar did nothing dramatically. But there was a quiet ease to him when she was near, a little loosening in his shoulders, a softer attention. He answered her texts during breaks. He stepped away to call her when he could. He looked, in those small moments, like a person with something outside racing that still mattered.
Lando resented that more than he wanted to admit.
Not because Lily had done anything wrong.
Because she had something Lando didn’t.
A place in Oscar’s life that did not need to be earned every weekend.
History.
Certainty.
A version of Oscar that existed before McLaren, before papaya, before Lando had any right to want him.
That should have been enough to make Lando back off.
It wasn’t.
If anything, it made him worse.
Because Oscar did not look possessive with her.
He looked steady.
There was something almost domestic about it. Something unshowy and real. A relationship without performance, without needing to prove itself to anyone.
Like a pattern learned young and never questioned.
Like something that had always been there, so Oscar never had to decide whether he still wanted it.
Lando wanted him to decide.
Worse, Lando wanted him to decide badly.
The idea came properly after Miami.
Not as a full plan at first. Just a thought. A mean little spark in the back of his mind while he sat in yet another hotel room, scrolling through photos he should not have been looking at.
Oscar and Lily earlier in the season.
Oscar walking through the paddock with her.
Oscar’s hand near her back, not passionate, not possessive, not even especially noticeable to anyone who wasn’t already looking for reasons to be ruined.
Habitual.
That was what made it unbearable.
He was not jealous of Lily.
That was what he told himself.
Jealousy was too simple a word for it. Too obvious. Too humiliating.
He was irritated by the imbalance.
That sounded better.
Oscar had someone. Lando didn’t. Oscar had a stable thing, a person who had known him before the cameras. Lando had a phone full of group chats, friends who knew him too well, and a public image that seemed to shift depending on what people wanted from him that week.
He had been linked to people before. He had been photographed, discussed, turned into headlines. Most of it was noise. Some of it was useful. Some of it was annoying.
But he had never really used it.
Not intentionally.
Not strategically.
The thought should have disgusted him back then.
But now, a girlfriend would be useful.
That was the cleanest way to look at it.
He was twenty-three. He was famous. He was a McLaren driver, frustrated, overanalyzed, watched by fans who could turn one facial expression into a theory. Having someone beside him would make him look grounded. It would give gossip something else to chew on. It would make him look less like a man whose entire emotional state depended on whether a rookie teammate looked at him for half a second too long in a garage.
And if Oscar noticed?
Well, that would be useful too.
The opportunity came through Max Fewtrell, because of course it did.
Max had an annoying habit of looking at Lando and seeing too much. It was part of why Lando loved him and part of why he sometimes wanted to block him for several months. They had been friends long enough that Max no longer pretended Lando’s silences meant nothing.
They were in London, a few days before Monaco, tucked into a booth in a restaurant Lando had picked because it was private enough and Max had mocked because it was “rich-boy sad.”
Lando had spent most of the meal moving food around his plate.
Max watched him for ten minutes before sighing.
“You’re doing that thing again.”
Lando didn’t look up. “Eating?”
“Pretending to eat while thinking about something stupid.”
“Could be something important.”
“It’s you, so no.”
Lando gave him a flat look.
Max grinned, then softened slightly.
“You’re wound up.”
“My car's still shit.”
“That explains some of it.”
“That explains all of it.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
Lando looked back down at his plate.
Max was quiet for a second, which usually meant he was deciding whether to be annoying or unbearable.
He chose unbearable.
“You need a life outside that garage.”
Lando laughed shortly. “Thanks.”
“I mean it.”
“I have a life.”
“You have golf, Quadrant, streaming occasionally, and a growing emotional dependency on your rookie teammate.”
Lando’s fork stopped moving.
Max noticed.
“There it is,” Max said.
“There’s nothing.”
“You’ve got a very dramatic nothing face.”
“Fuck off.”
Max leaned back, pleased with himself.
For a moment, Lando considered denying everything. He could do it. He had done it plenty. Max knew him well, but not perfectly. Nobody knew him perfectly.
But he was tired.
And jealousy had been sitting under his skin for weeks with nowhere to go.
So he said, “He has Lily.”
Max blinked.
“That was a very revealing sentence.”
Lando reached for his water and took a drink just to have something to do.
Max studied him.
“You’re jealous of his girlfriend?”
“No.”
Max stared.
Lando’s jaw tightened.
“No,” he repeated, less convincingly.
“Right.”
“I’m not jealous of her. She’s nice. She’s fine.”
“Fine,” Max repeated.
“She is.”
“That makes it worse, doesn’t it?”
Lando hated him.
Max smiled like he knew.
Then he said, “Pietra has a friend.”
Lando looked up slowly.
“No.”
“You don’t know what I’m going to say.”
“Yes, I do.”
“She’s Portuguese too. Beautiful. Knows cameras. Model. Actress. Knows how this world works. Been a WAG before. She’s single enough for gossip and smart enough not to believe it.”
Lando stared at him.
Max’s smile widened.
“That silence is very loud.”
“I’m thinking.”
“About the beautiful Portuguese girl or about Oscar seeing you with her?”
Lando leaned forward.
“Do you ever shut up?”
“Not when I’m right.”
Lando looked away, jaw working.
The worst thing was that Max had said it so easily. Like the thought had been visible on Lando’s face before Lando had even fully admitted it to himself.
Oscar seeing him with someone.
Oscar looking across the paddock and finding Lando beside a woman people would talk about. Oscar having to process it with that infuriating blank face. Oscar maybe, just maybe, feeling something he could not explain.
It was petty.
It was manipulative.
It was exactly the kind of move Lando should not make if he wanted to remain the good, soft, harmless version of himself everyone seemed so fond of.
But he had never been harmless.
“Send me her number,” Lando said.
Max let out a low laugh.
“You’re so fucked.”
Lando smiled.
“Maybe.”
Magui Corceiro was more direct than Lando expected.
That was the first thing he liked about her.
They met two nights later in a hotel bar in London, arranged through Max and Pietra with just enough casualness to pretend it was not a setup and just enough discretion to make sure nobody photographed them before Lando wanted them photographed.
Magui arrived five minutes late and looked like she had done it on purpose.
She was beautiful in a way that made people turn around and then pretend they hadn’t. Blonde hair, blue eyes, relaxed posture, a white blazer over a black top. She carried herself like attention was a room she knew how to walk through without bumping into furniture.
Lando stood when she reached the table.
“Magui.”
“Lando.”
Her smile was polite, assessing.
Not dazzled.
Good.
They sat.
For a few minutes, they talked like normal people. Monaco. Mutual friends. Travel. How bizarre it was that motorsport made adults live like badly rested luggage. Magui was easy to speak to, but not easy in the way that meant simple. She listened closely. Her questions had edges. She watched Lando the way someone watched a person who had asked for a meeting without yet explaining the real agenda.
Eventually, she said, “So, are we pretending this is a date, or are you going to tell me why I’m here?”
Lando paused with his glass halfway to his mouth.
Then he smiled.
“Max said you were direct.”
“Max likes to warn people when a woman has a personality.”
“I’m not scared.”
“No,” she said, looking at him properly. “You’re not. That might be the issue.”
Lando set his glass down.
“I need a favor.”
“That sounds expensive.”
“It can be.”
Magui leaned back, amused but not fooled.
“You want to be seen with me.”
Lando looked at her for a second.
“Yes.”
“Because?”
“Because it would be useful.”
“For your image?”
“Partly.”
“For gossip?”
“Partly.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly, not in suspicion but interest.
“What’s the other part?”
Lando could have lied.
He had planned to lie.
He had a version ready: he wanted to shift attention away from McLaren’s performance, he wanted something that looked light and harmless during Monaco, he was tired of being discussed only in relation to bad results and team pressure.
All true enough.
None of it so useful.
Magui would hear the lie.
He could tell.
But making a new friend now might also be helpful, so he gave her a piece of truth.
“I want to make someone jealous.”
Magui’s smile changed.
“There it is.”
Lando looked at her.
“I’m not asking you to get dragged into anything ugly.”
“You are, actually.”
His mouth curved faintly. “Maybe.”
“At least you know.”
“I’m trying to be honest.”
“No,” she said. “You’re trying to be just honest enough to get what you want.”
Lando laughed despite himself.
“You’re good.”
“I know.”
For the first time that evening, Lando relaxed.
Not fully. But enough to begin to trust her.
Magui folded her hands on the table.
“Who is she?”
Lando’s expression did not move.
Magui noticed.
Then, after a second, she tilted her head.
“Or who is he?”
Lando’s pulse gave one hard kick.
He hated that she saw it.
Her eyebrows lifted slightly.
“Oh.”
Lando leaned back.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to.”
The air shifted.
Not dangerously.
Not with judgment.
Just with recognition.
Magui did not look shocked, which Lando appreciated more than he expected.
“I’m not naming them,” he said.
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“You were about to.”
“I was deciding whether I cared.”
“And?”
She shrugged lightly.
“I care if this becomes humiliating. I care if I’m used to hurt someone who doesn’t deserve it. I care if there’s another woman involved who gets made to look stupid.”
Lando looked down.
There was Lily again, a quiet shape at the edge of everything.
“I don’t want to hurt her.”
Magui’s gaze sharpened.
“Her? Fuck, there's actually a woman involved in this.”
Lando looked up.
“She hasn’t done anything wrong.”
“The girlfriend?”
Lando said nothing.
Magui nodded once.
“That makes this worse.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
The question was not cruel.
That made it harder to brush off.
Lando looked away toward the bar, toward the gold lighting and the bottles and the quiet movements of staff who had no idea the conversation in the corner had turned into something that felt too close to confession.
“I just want him to look at me.”
Magui studied him for a long moment.
Then she laughed softly.
“You’re very pretty for someone so obviously dangerous.”
Lando looked back at her.
“So are you.”
That made her smile.
Not flattered. Entertained.
“Here are my terms, you have to be honest with me” she said. “No kissing for cameras. No grabbing me without warning. No making me look desperate. No pretending we’re in love. No lying to me about the situation if it gets more complicated.”
“Fine.”
“And if I decide I don’t like what this is becoming, I leave.”
“Fine.”
“And I want something out of this too.”
“Visibility?”
“Partly,” she said, echoing him. “But mostly I want to watch. Don't hide anything from me.”
Lando laughed.
“You want to watch?”
“I think whatever you’re doing is going to either work very well or burn down your life.”
“Comforting.”
“I like stories.”
“This isn’t a story.”
Magui’s expression suggested she did not believe him.
“Everything is a story if people are watching.”
Monaco made sure people watched.
It always did.
Monaco was made for being seen.
And Monaco was the perfect place for Lando to show off his brand new girlfriend.