Chapter Text
The system was perfect. That was the worst part.
The shared calendar synced flawlessly across time zones. The good morning texts landed like clockwork, a digital kiss on the brow at the precise moment the other was brewing their first coffee or contemplating a late-night snack. The video calls were HD, the audio crisp. They had inside jokes that spanned continents, Spotify blends that told the story of their weeks, and a photo album titled 'Future' filled with screenshots of apartments they couldn’t afford and landscapes they promised to visit.
It was a masterpiece of modern long-distance love. And some days, Lando wanted to throw his phone into the Thames.
It wasn’t Oscar.
It was the absence of Oscar.
The system was a brilliant, beautiful bridge over a canyon, but Lando was forever on one side, shouting across, his voice echoing back to him slightly distorted. The connection was perfect. The separation was absolute.
The ache didn’t strike during the big moments—the birthdays spent on FaceTime, the Christmas where they’d watched the same film simultaneously, crying at different hours. It was the small, empty spaces in between.
It was reaching for the milk in the fridge and seeing the last of the biscuits Oscar liked, gone stale because no one else would eat them.
It was getting a grade back on a project and turning, instinctually, to share the triumphant grimace with an empty chair.
It was the phantom weight of a head that should be on his shoulder during a boring lecture, the missing commentary in his ear.
It built up slowly, a quiet pressure behind his sternum. He’d find himself snapping at Charles over whose turn it was to buy toilet paper, or staring blankly at a design sketch for twenty minutes, the lines meaning nothing. The 'Oscar Hoodie,' once a comfort, started to smell more of London damp and less of Sydney sunshine, and that small loss felt like a tragedy.
One Thursday, after a call where they’d both been tired and a little distracted—Oscar preoccupied with lab data, Lando with a looming deadline—the pressure valve blew.
Lando was in the campus library, trying to focus on tensile strength calculations for a chair design.
His phone buzzed. A meme from Oscar. A silly cat video. It was something Lando would normally find hilarious. He’d send back three crying-laughing emojis.
Instead, he stared at the screen until the pixels blurred.
A hot, sharp wave of something dangerously close to resentment crashed over him.
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that a pixelated cat was what he got. He wanted to shove Oscar, playfully, for sending something so dumb while he was trying to work. He wanted to hear the real, un-digitised laugh that followed. He wanted to rest his freezing feet on Oscar’s warm legs under the library table.
He put his head in his hands, breathing heavily, guilt immediately swamping the resentment.
You’re ungrateful. He’s trying. The system is perfect. You’re broken.
.ೃ࿔ ✈︎ *:･
In Sydney, Oscar’s low-frequency hum had spiked into a persistent, grinding whine.
It happened after a good week. He’d aced a quiz. George and Alex had dragged him to the beach. The weather was glorious. He’d sent Lando a sunset picture, and Lando had replied with a heart and a 'wish I was there.'
That was it. The trigger. Wish I was there.
He wasn’t there.
He was here, in perpetual summer, while Lando was wrapped in scarves against a grey British autumn.
He was surrounded by friends who loved him, in a city that was objectively brilliant, and he would have traded all of it in a heartbeat for one rainy afternoon on Lando’s lumpy dorm sofa, watching terrible TV.
The efficiency Nico had noted about him, had now become manic.
He reorganised not just the spice rack, but the entire kitchen inventory into a numbered database. He deep-cleaned the bathroom grout with a toothbrush. He ran until his lungs burned, trying to outpace the feeling.
The worst was the physicality of it.
He’d be walking to class and get a memory-flash so vivid it was disabling: the specific weight and warmth of Lando’s hand in his.
The exact texture of his curls under Oscar’s fingers. Not a generic 'missing someone.' A cellular-level craving for a specific person’s specific touch. It left him winded on a street corner, feeling stupid and hollow.
He knew Lando felt it too. He could see it in the slight tightness around his eyes on their calls, in the way he’d sometimes just stare at Oscar’s face on the screen, not speaking, as if trying to download him through sheer willpower.
Their Rule, established in a tearful, snotty mess during their first month apart, was simple: If it hurts too much to carry alone, you put it down in front of the other. No blame, no solutions required. Just listen.
It was Oscar who cracked first.
The pressure built during a tutorial, peaked on the walk home, and by the time he was in his bedroom, the silence was screaming. He didn’t schedule a call. He just video-called Lando, right then.
Lando answered, hair sticking up, charcoal smudged on his cheek, clearly in the depths of his studio. He took one look at Oscar’s face—pale, strained—and his own playful greeting died.
“Hey. What’s wrong?”
Oscar opened his mouth. No sound came out. He just shook his head, his throat working.
“Oh, Osc,” Lando breathed, his own defences crumbling at the sight. The camera wobbled as he moved, finding a quieter corner. “Is it… is it the ache again?”
Oscar nodded, finally finding his voice, which was rough. “Yeah. It’s… it’s really loud today. I’m sorry. I know we talked two days ago. I know everything’s fine. It just… hurts.”
“Don’t apologise. Don’t you dare.” Lando’s own eyes were glistening. “Mine’s been bad all week. I got your meme today and I wanted to throw my laptop out the window. Not because of the meme. Because it wasn’t you.”
The confession was a relief so profound it was almost painful. “Yes,” Oscar choked out. “Exactly that. The system… it’s so good, Lan. We’re so good at it. Why does it still feel like this sometimes?”
“Because we’re not computers,” Lando said, wiping at his cheek with a dirty wrist. “We’re just… two people. Who are really, really far apart.”
They sat in silence for a moment, just looking at each other, allowing the shared, ugly, ungrateful truth to exist in the space between their screens.
There was no fix. No hack. This was the un-optimisable part.
“I miss the way you smell,” Oscar said quietly, the admission ridiculous and profound. “Not your cologne. Just… you. I miss the way the air changes when you walk into a room.”
Lando let out a wet laugh. “I miss your stupid, steady heartbeat. I miss annoying you while you’re trying to read. I miss… I miss the boring bits. The bits the calendar doesn’t schedule.”
It was a confessional.
They listed their lacks like atonements: the missing goodnight kisses, the shared silences that weren’t punctuated by ‘are you still there?’, the inability to just hand the other a cup of tea.
“We’re not ungrateful,” Lando said finally, as if convincing himself. “We’re just… in love. And it’s big. And the world is big. And the gap between those two things aches.”
Oscar nodded, spent but lighter. The jagged, lonely feeling hadn’t vanished, but it had been halved. Shared. Witnessed.
“I love you,” he said, the words anchoring them both back to the core of it all. “Even when it aches. Especially when it aches.”
“Infinity,” Lando whispered. “Even on the shit days.”
They didn’t talk much after that.
Oscar propped his phone up, and Lando did the same. Lando went back to shading his chair design. Oscar pulled out his thermodynamics textbook.
They worked in parallel, the video call a quiet, open line. Not filling the absence, but sitting beside it together, through it together.
In London, Charles, passing by Lando’s door to borrow a charger, heard the soft scratch of charcoal and saw the glow of the screen.
He saw Lando’s face, calm now, focused, occasionally glancing up and giving a tiny, soft smile to his phone. He backed away silently.
In Sydney, George, coming to ask about dinner, saw Oscar through the door, frowning at a equation, his posture no longer rigid with suppressed misery, but relaxed in concentration. The phone on his desk showed a smudged, frowning Lando biting his lip over a sketchpad.
The system was perfect.
The love was vast. And the ache was the honest, unromantic proof of both.
They couldn’t bridge the canyon. But tonight, they’d built a small, steady fire on opposite sides, and the light, at least, reached across.
.ೃ࿔ ✈︎ *:･
Nico and Lewis's café, Gridlock, was a sanctuary.
Tucked into a sun-drenched corner of suburban Sydney, it was a haven of exposed brick, thriving fiddle-leaf figs, and the rich, constant scent of Nico’s single-origin espresso blends warring with the buttery, cinnamon-laced perfume of Lewis’s baking.
The building, a three-story converted warehouse, was their kingdom. The café hummed on the ground floor. Their apartment, a tasteful clash of minimalist art and warm, lived-in comfort, occupied the first.
The top floor, with its high ceilings and big windows, housed their three unofficial wards: Oscar, George, and Alex.
It was a system born from chance and solidified by affection.
Lewis had mentored a teenage Oscar at a karting club, recognising a mind as precise as it was quiet.
Nico, who’d been looking for a business investment that wasn’t engineering-adjacent, had bought the building.
When Oscar mentioned the rising cost of student housing, Nico had shrugged and said, “The top floor is empty. Rent would be cheap. Just don’t burn it down.” George and Alex, Oscar’s two closest friends, had slotted in seamlessly.
Over two years, the dynamic had crystallised. Nico and Lewis were not parents. They were… custodians of chaos. Curators of young adulthood. (Lewis, after two glasses of wine, had once referred to them as “the lads,” and Nico had never let him forget it.)
Lately, however, the top-floor chaos had a muted quality.
The usual sounds—George’s dramatic gaming losses, Alex’s dry commentary, the steady hum of Oscar’s study playlist—were still there. But underpinning it was a new frequency: a quiet, persistent melancholy emanating from their resident engineer.
It was most visible in the café.
Oscar came down every morning at 7:15 AM, exact as a metronome.
He’d take his usual corner table, the one with the power outlet and a view of the street but not the door. He’d order a long black from Nico and, if Lewis had baked them, a ginger crunch biscuit. Then he’d work, his focus intense, his posture perfect.
But Nico, who had spent a lifetime reading micro-expressions in office meeting rooms and colleagues, saw the dullness in his eyes.
He saw the way Oscar’s gaze would drift from his laptop screen to the window, fixing on nothing, his thumb absently stroking the edge of his phone. He saw the slight, unconscious sigh that escaped him when a particular song came on the café playlist—something indie and wistful that Nico knew Lando had recommended.
“He’s fading,” Nico said one Tuesday morning, watching Oscar pack up his things with methodical slowness. “Like a plant that needs repotting.”
Lewis, wiping flour from his hands as he emerged from the kitchen, followed his gaze. “He’s just missing his boy. It’s a long stretch between visits. He’ll perk up when they plan the next one.”
“It’s more than that,” Nico insisted, his voice low. “It’s the countdown. He’s marking off days on a calendar that’s too long. He’s running a marathon with no mile markers. It’s draining him.”
Lewis studied Oscar’s retreating back as he headed upstairs.
There was a stiffness there that wasn’t usual. A lack of the easy, contained energy that usually characterised him. A pang of something surprisingly paternal hit Lewis in the chest.
“What do you want to do, Nico? We can’t teleport Lando here.”
“No,” Nico said, a familiar, competitive glint entering his eyes. It was the look he used to get when analysing files or reports at his previous boring life, searching for a weakness.
“But we can maybe… shorten the track.”
Lewis raised an eyebrow. “Meaning?”
“Meaning you, Mr. ‘I-Find-Loopholes-in-Sporting-Regs-for-Fun,’ are going to find a loophole in a university syllabus.” Nico leaned across the counter.
“There has to be a way. Accelerated completion. Advanced placement. Extra credits. Something. You used to do it all the time to skip ahead. Get him out of this purgatory faster.”
Lewis blinked. “That was different. That was me. This is Oscar’s degree. I can’t just…”
“He’s your son,” Nico said bluntly, deploying the nuclear option.
Lewis spluttered. “He is not my—“
“You bought him racing gloves for his birthday. You helped him rebuild that old motorbike in the garage. You threatened to ‘have words’ with that idiot tutor who marked down his thermal dynamics paper. You, Lewis Hamilton, are a mother hen in a cashmere sweater. Now, are you going to use your powers for good, or am I going to have to hack the university system myself?”
Lewis stared at him, a battle warring on his face.
The part of him that valued rules and due process was affronted.
The larger part of him—the part that saw the quiet ache in a brilliant young man he cared deeply about, and the even larger part that could never resist a strategic challenge—won out. He sighed, a long, surrendering sound.
“Fine. But I need a pretext. I can’t just ask for his academic transcript.”
“Leave that to me,” Nico said, a sly smile on his face.
The pretext arrived two days later, cloaked in genuine concern. Nico ambushed Oscar as he came down for his afternoon coffee.
“Oscar, a word?” Nico gestured him to a quiet table. “Lewis and I… we’re thinking of setting up a small scholarship. For engineering students from non-traditional backgrounds. Mentoring, plus some financial aid. We were wondering if you could give us a sense of the course structure at Sydney Uni? The key modules, credit load, that sort of thing. So we can tailor it properly.”
It was a perfect lie.
Philanthropic, plausible, and flattering enough that Oscar wouldn’t question it. His eyes lit up with genuine interest. “That’s a great idea. Of course, I can help. I can send you the full programme outline, my course guides, everything.”
“That would be brilliant,” Nico said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Send it to Lewis. He’s handling the admin side.”
That evening, Lewis found a meticulously organised email from Oscar in his inbox, with PDF attachments and clear summaries. As he scrolled through the detailed degree requirements, the old instincts fired up.
This was a puzzle. A set of regulations to be maximised.
He started cross-referencing. He looked at credit requirements, at elective options, at recognition of prior learning clauses buried in the university handbook. He researched Oscar’s specific internship, noting the partnership between the university and the aerospace firm. He dug into the policy on ‘Demonstrated Excellence and Early Completion.’
It took three nights of late-night digging, cups of tea gone cold beside his laptop. Nico would bring him a fresh coffee, peering over his shoulder at the dense academic language.
“Anything?”
“Patience. Loopholes are like truffles. You have to sniff them out.”
Finally, on the fourth night, Lewis found it. He leaned back in his chair, a slow, triumphant smile spreading across his face. “Got it.”
Nico rushed over. “Talk to me.”
“Look here,” Lewis said, pointing at the screen. “The final year project. It’s weighted as a double module. Oscar’s internship is with a Tier-1 partner company. The rubric says exceptional, commercially viable work presented directly from an internship can be submitted for assessment in lieu of the final project and its associated exam cluster.”
“So if his internship work is good enough…”
“He doesn’t just get credit for the internship,” Lewis said, his finger tracing the lines of text.
“He can submit it as his capstone. And the policy states that students who successfully do this, and who have already accrued extra credits through these advanced optional modules—” he clicked open another tab, showing Oscar’s stellar grades in supplemental courses, “—can apply for early course completion. No final exam sitting required. Degree conferred upon assessment of the final submission.”
Nico’s eyes widened. “When? How early?”
Lewis did some quick mental maths, cross-checking the academic calendar. “If he pulls everything together, gets his supervisor to fast-track the commercial assessment… theoretically, by the end of October. Early November at the absolute latest.”
A silence hung in the room. November. Lando’s birthday was mid-November.
Nico looked at Lewis, a mirroring grin on his face. “We’re geniuses.”
“We are meddlesome old men,” Lewis corrected, but he was still smiling. “Now comes the hard part. We have to make him find this himself. We can’t just hand it to him. He has to own it.”
The next day, Nico casually mentioned to Oscar over his coffee that Lewis had been 'geeking out' over the degree structure and had some 'interesting thoughts about optimisation' Oscar, ever the engineer, was intrigued.
Later, Lewis bumped into him in the garage.
“Oh, Oscar, about that scholarship thing. I was looking at your course guides. Amazing structure. Very rigorous. It reminded me of my old karting days—always looking for the most efficient line through a set of rules.”
He then proceeded to ask a seemingly innocent question about the relationship between the internship and the final project, framing it as a query about 'practical application for scholarship candidates.'
He saw the moment the spark hit Oscar’s brain. A slight frown of deep thought, a distant look in his eyes. “You know… I’d have to check the specific wording…” Oscar murmured, already pulling out his phone to access the university portal.
Lewis just smiled and went back to polishing a carburettor. “Just a thought, mate. You’re the expert.”
He didn’t see Oscar for the rest of the day. Upstairs, the door to Oscar’s room was shut, the sound of rapid typing and the occasional rustle of papers leaking out.
George texted the group chat from the living room.
iamnotwoody: Alert. Piastri has entered Hyper-Focus Mode. Unknown catalyst. He’s muttering about ‘accredited outcomes’ and ‘substitution clauses.’ I’m scared.
woody'sbf: Lewis was talking to him in the garage earlier. Correlation?
brittneyisurmom: No idea what you’re talking about. Carry on.
That night, Oscar emerged.
He came down to the café just before closing, his eyes tired but blazing with a light that had been absent for months. He walked straight up to where Lewis and Nico were closing up.
“I found it,” he said, his voice quiet but vibrating with intensity.
“Found what, mate?” Lewis asked, playing innocent.
“A loophole. A path. If I consolidate my internship data, present it as a full commercial viability report, and submit it under by-law 7.4C… I could be done. By November. Before the finals session.”
The air left Nico’s lungs in a quiet whoosh. He looked at Lewis, who was giving Oscar a look of deeply impressed, paternal pride.
“November, you say?” Lewis said, rubbing his chin. “That’s… quite an acceleration.”
Oscar nodded, a wild, hopeful, disbelieving smile breaking across his face for the first time in weeks. “It’s a long shot. I’d have to work like a demon. My supervisor would have to agree…”
“But it’s possible,” Nico finished for him, unable to hide his own smile any longer.
“It’s possible,” Oscar repeated, as if tasting the words. He looked between them, the cogs in his mind visibly turning, the dullness completely burned away by the fire of a new, audacious plan. The countdown had just been dramatically, irrevocably shortened.
He didn’t thank them.
He didn’t need to.
The new energy radiating from him was thanks enough. He just gave a sharp, determined nod and turned, already pulling out his phone to email his professor.
As he disappeared upstairs, Nico slid a fresh coffee across the counter to Lewis. “Told you he was your son.”
Lewis took the coffee, his gaze soft on the empty staircase. “Our son,” he corrected quietly, and took a sip.