Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

I.

As soon as Lando taps in for double bogey – two over fucking par, for the third hole in a row – there’s no denying it anymore: Lando Norris is in a generational rut.

He can feel Max’s eyes on him as he steps off the green, the ball already dropped into the hole. At least it had the decency to go in clean, no lip-out this time – but the damage is done. Another red number on the scorecard. Another small, precise cut into whatever’s left of his composure after Sunday.

“Fuck me, man,” Lando mutters, turning back toward Max, who’s still by the tee a few metres away, watching him like you’d watch a lame horse making its last slow lap around the paddock.

There are a couple of older blokes waiting behind them, clubs in hand, so Lando swallows the urge to take his iron and hack a trench into the turf – just to feel something give. Instead, he exhales sharply, jaw tight, eyes fixed somewhere past the fairway like it’s personally offended him.

He crouches by the hole and plucks the ball from the cup. Turns it over in his gloved palm, slow, deliberate – like it might offer something up if he stares at it long enough.

Hey, Magic Eight Ball, how do I stop being such a generational washout?

The dimpled little bastard doesn’t answer, of course. Just sits there, marked with the faintest scuff from that shanked shot on the last hole.

And Lando knows it’s childish. Knows it’s pointless. Knows he’s definitely not doing himself any favours.

Still – he turns, and hurls the ball down into the small lake tucked into the dip of the course. It hits the surface with a sharp plunk, scattering a cluster of deeply offended ducks.

Then, as though he hasn’t just completely lost it and taken it out on a fucking golf ball, he turns on his heel and treks back across the green toward Max, who’s waiting by the bags, half leaning on his driver, the clubhead sinking slightly into the soft, wet turf.

One of the blokes up next steps forward as Lando reaches him, handing his club off to Max to stow in the bag.

“You finished here?” the man asks.

Lando bites back a sharper reply – something along the lines of, No, I was actually thinking of chucking the rest of my balls into the lake as well. Maybe toss in the irons for good measure. I’m never going to play again. Never going to do anything again, actually. Not after Sunday.

Instead, he settles for strained politeness. “Yeah. All yours.”

The older bloke nods, and for a second Lando thinks that’s the end of it. But then his expression shifts; softens into something perilously sympathetic.

“You must be gutted about what happened on Sunday,” he says, like Lando’s been dying to hear it from a complete stranger on some course in the middle of nowhere England. He jerks a thumb back at his mates. “We all were, I can tell you that. Would’ve been nice to have a British champion again. But sometimes things just don’t go your way, do they?”

He claps Lando on the shoulder – harder than necessary – and Lando just stares at him, briefly considering saying something impolite.

But the man looks faintly important. And with Lando’s luck, he’d end up mouthing off to someone Zak’s parading around next week as a new sponsor.

So he forces a thin smile, then turns back to Max, who’s already waiting by the edge of the tee box, wearing that same expression Lando’s been seeing everywhere lately – on friends, on family.

Concern. Care. That hushed, conscientious look that says: It’s okay to sulk. We’re here once you want to talk.

But Lando doesn’t want to talk. He wants to play.

Or: he wanted to. Right up until he carved a blood-red scorecard, hurled his best ball into a lake in a fit of rage, and trudged back across damp grass in a thin December drizzle.

Max hands him the bag.

“Lunch?” he asks, like he can read Lando’s mind.

Which – honestly – doesn’t take much. Not when Lando just threw a ball into a lake instead of teeing off on the next hole.

“Yeah,” he says, glancing at his watch. Half past eleven. They weren’t meant to be done until one, but it’s obvious Lando’s finished here. “Bit early for lunch, though.”

“Drinks, then?” Max sounds faintly hopeful.

Usually, Lando doesn’t drink during the season – but that ended three days ago, spectacularly badly, and since then he’s been just a little bit inebriated most of the time. Not out of celebration – because, as his grid-mate Fernando Alonso likes to say, second place is just a euphemism for first loser – but there has to be some upside to being out of the title fight.

Like waking up at ten. Rolling out of bed. Opening the door to an impatient, aggressively doorbell-ringing Max Fewtrell – who he was supposed to be golfing with – and not having anyone in his ear about training, sim time, or perfecting his gear shifts.

“Drinks,” Lando agrees, already tired, glancing back over his shoulder.

The older bloke steps up to the tee box and, after barely a second’s thought, sends off a clean, effortless drive.

“That’s it,” Lando says, turning back to Max. “I’m officially washed. Even this geriatric can make par on this hole.”

“You’re not washed,” Max says, but there’s a thread of exhaustion in his voice, like he’s trying to convince Lando more than he actually believes it. “You’re just burnt out. You’ve had a hell of a season.”

Right. That much is true.

“More like a season that put me through hell,” Lando mutters. “And for what, Max? For what?”

The strap of the golf bag digs into his shoulder, even through the rain jacket. The ground’s slick underfoot – wet enough that he nearly loses his footing.

“A runner-up trophy,” he goes on, “and a front-row seat to watching Verstappen turn himself into probably the greatest driver of all time. Five titles in a row.”

He turns back to Max – and catches it, just before his best friend can smooth it away. That flicker of exhaustion. Of someone who’s had this exact conversation too many times already.

Seventy times, maybe. And it’s only been four days.

“Oh, is my misery getting on your nerves, you fucking muppet?” Lando says, shoving his bag at him. “Here. You carry it.”

Max just stares at him. “Fuck no. Carry your own shit. You bring half the pro shop with you every time because you’re incapable of picking clubs in advance.”

“I just lost my second championship in a row to the same guy and you’re making me carry my own golf bag?” Lando turns to him, dialing up the biggest set of puppy eyes he can manage. “This is how you treat your best friend?”

Max groans, grabs the bag anyway, and slings it over his other shoulder. “We should’ve taken a fucking caddie.”

“Nah,” Lando drawls. “We’re not seventy, Max. We’re high-performance athletes.”

“You might be,” Max mutters. “I didn’t make the cut, remember? I’m just your lowly business partner.”

Lando swings back toward him. “Excuse me – only one of us gets to mope at a time. And I think I take priority here. Considering I just lived through my own Ides of March.” A beat. “Ides of December, in my case.”

Max raises an eyebrow. “How the fuck do you even know what the Ides of March are, you illiterate high school dropout?”

“I helped Magui rehearse lines for an audition,” Lando says. “It was some retelling of Julius Caesar set in a high school – everyone competing for the lead in the school play. I took the piss out of her because she’s still booking high school roles even though she’s, like, pushing thirty – and she hit back by saying I’ve been in the sport longer than she’s been acting and still haven’t won a title.”

“Magui is twenty-three,” Max says, with a long-suffering sigh. “Your maths skills are just as tragic.”

“As what?”

They step back onto the path leading toward the clubhouse and car park, both already visible through the drizzle.

“Nothing,” Max says, deciding – for once – to keep his mouth shut and quickly change the subject. “I, for one, can’t wait to get out of this goddamn rain.”

“But Max,” Lando says, turning back to him, already a few steps ahead on the path – unencumbered, unlike Max, who’s struggling under the combined weight of both bags, his face set with the effort of keeping up.

“What?”

“Release your inhibitions.”

Max stares at him. “I hate to repeat myself. But – what?”

“Feel the rain on your skin. No one else can feel it for you.”

Max clocks it instantly – especially when Lando’s voice goes a little sing-song on the last line. “Fuck no, Norris. I’ve been very patient with you these past few days, but you are not dragging me into one of your gay little musical numbers.”

“What the fuck, Max,” Lando shoots back, almost genuinely offended. “It’s Natasha Bedingfield. You don’t have to be gay to appreciate her.”

“I suppose not,” Max sighs. “But I thought you being miserable was at least going to spare me from you whipping out obscure early-2000s pop trivia. For a week, at least.”

“I can be miserable and appreciate the musical genius that is the 2004 breakout hit Unwritten,” Lando says, rolling his eyes. “Remember when McLaren made me do that ‘Finish the Lyric’ challenge and I wiped the floor with Daniel? And he already knows loads of songs.”

“Bet you wish you had him back now, huh?”

Max steps fully onto the path and pauses for a second, drawing in a steadying breath under the weight of both golf bags.

“Oh yeah,” Lando says, unable to keep the edge out of his voice. “I’d take anyone over that backstabbing, brainrot-infested Brutus.”

“He learned from his hero,” Max mutters, shifting the bags on his shoulder. “Verstappen would never listen to team orders – and it looks like Gabriel’s taking after him.”

“One fucking point, Fewtrell,” Lando says, the urge rising to snatch the bag back, pull out an iron, and smash it against the path until something gives. “One point I would’ve had if Bortoleto had given those places back in Monza.”

Max lets out a long sigh, and Lando can’t even tell if it’s from hauling both bags or from having this exact conversation for the third time today.

“I know,” he pants, already bracing for it – cutting in before Lando can spiral. “He should’ve. The team fucked you with that early pit stop, he never should’ve been in undercut range, and he definitely shouldn’t have kept the position. But he did. And yeah – those points cost you the championship against Max Verstappen.” A beat. “It’s a tragedy. Proper Shakespeare. We should egg his house.”

Lando snaps his fingers, pointing at him. “Exactly.” He groans and leans back against the railing beside one of those informational signs about local wildlife – birds, frogs, whatever the hell lives out here. “Do you realise that with a teammate I actually got along with, I’d be world champion right now?”

“To quote a very wise man: if my mum had balls–”

Lando shoots him a flat look. “Don’t even start. I do not want to think about Max Verstappen for the entire off-season.”

Max exhales sharply. “Fine. Whatever.” He dumps Lando’s bag back into his hands. “I don’t care that you lost the championship. You’re carrying your own bag again. I’m not your fucking caddie.”

Lando takes the bag, fully aware Max has already done the hard part hauling it up the slope. The rest is easy in comparison. He swings it over his shoulder again, letting out a long sigh.

They make their way back to the clubhouse in silence, and Lando fishes his keys out of his pocket, clicking open his McLaren parked right by the entrance in the VIP spaces.

He doesn’t come to this particular club often – he spends most of his time in Monaco, in places far more exclusive – but there’s something about England he needs after a loss like this. Something grounding. Like coming back to his own soil, finding a kind of quiet solace he can’t quite put into words.

They toss the bags into the boot, lock the car again, and head inside.

Warmth hits them immediately – the low crackle of a fire burning in the hearth – and Lando is suddenly very aware of how soaked his jacket is, rain clinging to the fabric. It’s branded, of course, the McLaren speedmark stamped across it like on nearly everything he owns – one of the side effects of being the team’s public face since his teens.

A hostess approaches them almost instantly.

“We’ve kept your usual table free, Mr. Norris, as soon as we saw your car pull up,” she says with a bright, practiced smile.

Usual table. That’s funny – he comes here maybe three times a year, at most. But whatever makes them feel like they’ve got a regular. Even without a fucking title, Lando knows his presence still counts for something.

“Thank you,” he says, forcing a smile. She’s just doing her job – recognising important people, making them feel looked after. It’s not her fault he suddenly wishes he could stop being perceived.

At least this week. And maybe next. Maybe all of December. And January. Possibly February, too.

Come March – once he’s back in the car – they can look at him all they want. Because this time, he’s going to do it. 

Third time’s the charm.

He follows Max and the hostess over to a table by the window, overlooking the far end of the course, barely visible through the drizzle.

He doesn’t even glance at the menu before ordering a gin and tonic, which earns him a raised eyebrow from Max.

Max usually reads him like a book – and a gin and tonic is a bit of a conservative choice for Lando. He knows that. But right now, he just wants something familiar.

The hostess takes Max’s order as well, lets them know their waitress will be right over, then pivots and leaves them alone.

The bar area is almost empty – it’s not even noon yet – but Lando’s glad for the quiet. Not that people in places like this tend to whip out their phones and start filming him. But they still stare.

Max scrolls through his phone while Lando – who has absolutely no intention of letting the outside world intrude on what little peace and quiet he’s managed to carve out here – keeps his eyes on the room instead.

The bar is done up like the inside of Balmoral or something along those lines: lacquered wood, heavy rugs, oil portraits lining the walls. It’s a far cry from Monaco – but, Lando has to admit, it feels familiar in a way that settles something in him.

When their drinks arrive, Max finally puts his phone down. Lando, meanwhile, starts fiddling with his napkin, idly swirling his drink so the ice clinks softly against the glass.

Max watches him for a moment, faintly irritated, then leans back in his chair, fixing him with a look.

“You know what I was thinking about?” he says after a beat.

Lando turns toward him, abandoning his previous activity – which had mostly consisted of staring up at the chandelier and deliberately unfocusing his eyes until the crystals blurred. God, not being on his phone is making him weird.

“What?” Lando asks, leaning forward, batting his eyelashes at him. “Quadrant stuff?”

“Kinda,” Max says, holding Lando’s gaze, squinting slightly like he’s sizing him up. “I think you should start streaming again.”

That – Lando hadn’t expected. He knows he’s been slacking when it comes to streaming. It used to be something he genuinely enjoyed alongside racing – especially during the pandemic, when everything slowed down and he found himself actually having fun sitting in front of a camera, playing games or just chatting with his grid mates and friends outside the paddock.

He’d kept it up for a while after that. Fairly regularly, even. 

But the last two years… yeah. Those had been different, with his two title fights and everything narrowing down to one thing.

“Streaming?” he asks, frowning slightly. “Where’s that coming from?”

Max sighs, flipping his phone face down on the table as it buzzes again.

“Everything you do,” he says, “you do competitively. And don’t get me wrong – you should. You’re a Formula One driver. Competition’s basically your bread and butter.” He leans forward a little, lowering his voice just enough to feel purposeful. “But when was the last time you did something just because it was fun?”

“Just now,” Lando shoots back, raising his eyebrows. “We played golf.”

“We abandoned our round because you kept hitting double bogeys,” Max says flatly, shooting him a look. “Be honest with yourself, Lando. You’re burnt out. You need a reset.”

Lando has to stifle the urge to laugh. Burnt out. That’s not even a category he’s allowed to think in.

That’s for people with soul-crushing office jobs; people with routine, commutes, set wake-up times. Not for someone like him, who wakes up in a different time zone every week. Who spends half his life on private planes, flying across oceans, staring at the faint orange glow of the sun bleeding along the horizon, the constant hum of the cabin in his ears.

Not for someone like him, who’s lucky enough to call this his job – something so varied, so competitive, so saturated with adrenaline it overpowers everything else. 

Not for someone who gets showered in praise, in money, in opportunities everywhere he goes.

“Burnt out?” he repeats, rolling the glass in his hand, ice clinking softly against the sides. “Nah. That’s ridiculous, Max.”

“Think about it,” Max says, something like urgency and care threading through his voice – soft enough that it makes Lando want to do two opposite things at once: bolt, or lean in. Let himself get wrapped up in it. In the idea of being thought about, even when he’s not there. Of taking up space in someone else’s head.

“You’ve been putting so much into this,” Max goes on. “Your time, your energy, yourself. Into this… this push to become champion. During the season, you’re just going and going and going, not even noticing how much it’s draining you, because you’re always investing forward. Always expecting a return.”

“And then a pesky Dutchman makes sure I’m not collecting,” Lando cuts in with a laugh that doesn’t carry any real humour. “So how exactly is streaming meant to fix that? Me not putting in enough work and not getting results?”

Lando can tell Max bristles a little at that – but, true to form, he doesn’t back off.

“It doesn’t have to be streaming,” Max says. “Just – something else, for once. Pick up a new hobby. Paint. Take piano lessons. Learn Spanish.”

That earns him a smile. Lando props his chin on his hand, studying him. “Learn Spanish? For what – so I can impress my ex-ex-teammate by asking for directions to the library?”

Max leans forward too, grinning. “Speaking of Carlos – you could also try dating more.”

Lando immediately rolls his eyes, leaning back in his chair as he takes a sip of his gin and tonic, the burn spreading warm across his tongue before he swallows.

“Nah,” he says. “I’m done with dating.”

“You’re done with dating?” Max echoes, incredulous. “You – the horniest person I know. Done with it.”

Lando starts tearing his napkin into thin strips. “Yeah. I mean, I’m not above a hookup now and then, but the whole dating thing? Completely overrated. People put way too much weight on it. It’s just… another thing that was stressing me out.”

“Magui’s literally there to handle the rumours, Lando,” Max points out. “That’s why we brought her in.”

Lando groans. “Yeah, and I’m grateful. She’s a huge help – gives me way more freedom with my, uh, nocturnal activities. But I’m not looking to settle down.”

“No one said anything about settling down.”

Lando raises an eyebrow. “Then why are you so invested in my love life? Trying to get me out of your hair?”

“Genuinely? Yeah,” Max says, without missing a beat. “If you had a bloke, you’d be off golfing with him or whatever, and I could actually get around to planning our next quarter.”

“I don’t know,” Lando says, almost subconsciously glancing around to check if anyone’s listening – but of course the bar is still empty at this hour. And anyway, Max would never have brought it up if there was even a chance of being overheard. He’s careful like that. More careful than Lando, most of the time.

“I just don’t think someone I’d actually want to date would be into golf.”

Max frowns. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, I don’t want my partner to be a carbon copy of me. Doing all the same things.” Lando shifts in his seat, already trying to tuck one leg up underneath him – he hates sitting properly for too long. “You get me?”

“All I’m hearing is you don’t want to date someone like me.” Max scoffs, and Lando laughs – genuinely, this time.

“You’re my best friend, Max. One of the most important people in my life. My business partner. My better half.” He pauses, then adds, “But fuck no, I would not want to date you.”

Max presses his lips together, fighting a grin. “Lando, this is getting really hard not to take personally.”

“Besides, if I dated someone like you, you’d get jealous. Start thinking I was replacing you.”

“Not true.”

“Very much true.” Lando smiles at him – just a little too fond. “I’m perfectly happy third-wheeling with you and Pietra, anyway. I really don’t want to date right now. I’m not in that era of my life.”

Max laughs. “How did you put it? You’re pushing thirty.”

“I literally just turned twenty-six.” Lando shakes his head, taking another sip of his drink. “No. Absolutely not interested in getting tied down.”

“If you were straight, you’d be in a four-year relationship by now,” Max says after a moment. “You’re a relationship guy. You’re just – understandably – scared of getting hurt.”

Lando really doesn’t want to go there. 

Doesn’t want to get into the reality of being a closeted high-performance athlete in one of the biggest sports in the world – a reality that follows him everywhere, a constant current under everything he does. Like he’s under surveillance from himself. Always calculating, second-guessing how much of him he can show before people start calling him gay in his Instagram comments again. And then Magui – reliable, patient Magui – has to step in, play her part, stick her tongue down his throat in the paddock so people back off for a few weeks.

“You’re projecting,” Lando says lightly, deflecting as easily as breathing. “You’re just jealous I’m still getting around while you’re tied down. Trying to drag me down to your level.”

“I’d never trade Pietra for anything,” Max says.

And the worst part is – he means it. That soft, resolute look in his eyes gives him away every time he talks about her.

“But fine,” Max says. “Let’s change the subject. No dating for you this off-season. But I am begging you to pick up something – anything – that isn’t racing.”

Lando opens his mouth. Max cuts him off immediately. “No. Not karting either.”

Lando groans, slumping back in his chair. “I haven’t streamed in ages. Don’t even know if I’ve still got it in me.” He tilts his head. “What have you been up to, streaming-wise?”

“I told you this,” Max says, rolling his eyes. “I’m doing that tournament at the end of December.”

Lando just stares at him – completely blank. Now that Max mentions it, he vaguely remembers something. Max definitely told him about it at some point. But Lando had been deep in the final stretch of the season at the time – too busy and wired, probably throwing darts at a cutout of Gabriel’s face taped to his door to retain any actual details.

He hazards a guess. “Something with Will Lenney, wasn’t it?”

Will Lenney – co-owner of Quadrant alongside Lando – but, first and foremost, a content creator. Someone Lando had watched religiously for years before bringing him on board to strengthen the e in esports, while Lando handled the sports side of things. They’d talked more than once about Lando joining one of Will’s events, but it had never quite worked out. His schedule always got in the way.

“No, actually,” Max says, looking faintly embarrassed now. “I’m doing a Minecraft tournament.”

Lando raises both eyebrows. “Minecraft, huh?”

Max takes a sip of his drink, buying himself a second to think. “I know it sounds nerdy as hell, but it’s a fun concept. The organiser actually reached out to you back in August – I was handling your inbox, obviously – but I didn’t think you’d be interested, so I turned it down. I turn down most stuff I don’t think you’d care about.”

“So he offered you my spot?”

“Yeah,” Max says. “But if you are interested, I’m happy to switch. It was yours to begin with.”

“What’s the concept?”

Max blinks. “What?”

“You said it had a fun concept.”

Lando doesn’t even know why he’s asking.

Maybe it’s the nostalgia. Like everyone his age, he has a soft spot for Minecraft. It was everywhere when he was growing up – him and his siblings sinking hours into it. Oliver and him trying to survive the night, fending off mobs, while Flo built horse farms and Cisca focused entirely on making everything look nice – their houses, paths, farms; the whole lot.

He still remembers it – coming back from school, kicking off his shoes and jacket somewhere in the vast foyer of their sprawling house, then racing up to the first floor to boot up the game.

He remembers playing for hours, until his neck went stiff, until the sound of cicadas started drifting in through the open windows – blending softly with the game’s piano soundtrack. Even back then, it had carried this strange sense of nostalgia, like it was reaching forward in time, already marking those moments as something he’d one day miss.

“It’s a speedrunning tournament,” Max says after a moment, clearly a bit thrown by Lando’s sudden interest, “but for people who’ve never actually speedrun before.”

Lando looks back at him.

“They compete against each other,” Max continues, “but the twist is they’re coached by some of the best speedrunners in the world.”

“Speedrunning?” Lando frowns slightly. “Like finishing the game as fast as possible? By what – killing the Ender Dragon?”

Max raises his eyebrows. “Didn’t know you knew that much.”

“I loved that game,” Lando says, grinning. “Never actually killed the dragon, though. I think.”

“Yeah, that’s basically it,” Max says. “There’s proper strategy behind it – triangulation, set routes, inventory management, all that. There’s even a ranking system for the top runners. Like an international leaderboard that updates every month or so.”

“And people are actually that good at it?” Lando shakes his head. “Good enough to be ranked?”

Max gives him a look. “Says the man whose entire job is driving a car in circles – and being so good at it there’s also a leaderboard.”

Lando snorts. “Okay. Fair.”

“Basically, those top players each take two noobs under their wing, coach them for two weeks, and then let their protégés compete in the tournament. It’s big for them too – their performance as coaches feeds directly into their own rankings. And even if they’re all friends, streaming together and all that, they’re still competitors at heart.”

Max doesn’t need to spell it out for Lando to see the parallel. Alex. George. Some of his closest friends off-track – people he still has to fight every weekend. He gets it.

“That does sound fun,” Lando admits, finishing his drink with one last swig. He should probably order food – otherwise he’s in no state to drive home. “You reckon you could still get me in?”

“Like I said, you can have my spot.” There’s a slight crease in Max’s forehead as he says it – and Lando’s not oblivious enough to ignore that.

“No, fuck off,” Lando says immediately. “I’m not stealing your spot. Just send me the organiser’s number. Or handle. Whatever. I’ll ask him myself.”

“Lando, the draft’s on Saturday.”

“What draft?”

“That’s the whole thing. The noobs get drafted by the coaches. It’s apparently brutal – they just sit there and tear you apart, talk through all your weaknesses right in front of you. I watched some from previous events. They’re ruthless.”

Lando absently starts peeling apart his napkin again, reducing it to thin layers. “Max, be honest. Would it bother you if I joined too?”

“No,” Max says, after just a fraction too long. Lando clocks it, files it away for later. “It wouldn’t. If I can get Tubbo to squeeze us both in – short notice or not – it could actually be fun. Competing against each other again.”

“Tubbo?”

“The organiser,” Max says. “Nice guy. One of those Minecraft YouTubers who blew up during the pandemic. I think he’s done some stuff with McLaren before – and he’s a big fan of yours. That’s why he reached out to Quadrant in the first place. Figured he’d give it a shot, since you stream.”

“Yes, please ask him,” Lando says after a moment. “I think it sounds fun. It’s exactly what I want right now.”

“It’s two weeks of training straight after the draft,” Max adds. “Then the tournament itself – three days.” 

There’s still something in his tone that almost sounds like he’s giving Lando an out.

“You know my schedule,” Lando says, rocking slightly back on his chair. “December’s basically empty. I think they’re letting me sulk for a bit.” He huffs out a quiet laugh. “And they know that if they pair me up with Gabriel for sponsor stuff, I’m going to gouge his eyes out.”

Max studies him for a moment, eyes narrowing slightly.

“Alright,” he says at last. “Consider it done. I’ll check with your rep – make sure they’re fine with you jumping into another competition – but it shouldn’t be an issue. And if Tubbo can’t squeeze you in, I’ll give up my spot. It was yours to begin with.”

“Max–”

But his best friend just shakes his head. “No. I want you to do this. I told you to pick something up again – you’re just doing what I asked, for once. I have to follow through on that.” He leans forward, resting his elbows on the table, fixing Lando with an assessing look.

“Although,” he adds, “it doesn’t escape me that you’ve picked yet another competition. You really can’t help yourself, can you? Always chasing something. Even in the off-season.”

Lando has to fight down a smile. “It’s my nature, I’m afraid.”

II.

It takes him right back to the height of the pandemic – the entirety of it; the soft light from the LEDs behind his desktop setup, his webcam pointed at him, the OBS interface on one monitor, Discord on the other, the steady trickle of chat on the screen closest to him.

For a moment, he allows himself to be almost overtaken by nostalgia. It was only four, five years ago – back when George, Alex, Charles and him used to stream, back when no one was allowed to leave the house and it made sense to spend your evenings broadcasting slow conversations and sub-par gameplay with your friends.

Max helped him set the stream up again, as he’s continued streaming even beyond the pandemic – while Lando, as well as the others (the “Twitch quartet,” as they’d been dubbed), had slowly started slacking, had returned to their other hobbies, and had simply grown out of streaming, out of dawdling away time on game-sector staples like Euro Truck Simulator.

Lando hadn’t expected to reach his pandemic viewer numbers, but already on the starting screen overlay they’ve shattered them. It makes sense, of course – Formula One’s viewership has doubled in the last few years, it’s a Saturday evening that would usually be occupied by quali, and there are probably a fair few people tuning in just to see if he crashes out on stream.

The last they’ve seen of him were clipped, uncommunicative post-race interviews, an Instagram post with the Constructors’ trophy – and his insolent teammate beside him, who always seems to look at Lando like he’s actively holding himself back from saying the exact thing he knows would send him over the edge.

Naturally, people are gathering in this little corner of the internet he’s carved out for today – probably expecting him to talk about the fiasco of a season closer, drop a few snarky comments, or whatever. But tonight, Lando’s not talking about racing at all.

He spends a minute or so just silently reading chat, slowly spinning in his chair – fingers pressed against his chin as he tries to get used to the ever-accelerating scrawl of text rushing past on his monitor.

One question stands out, repeated over and over again in different variations, with increasing urgency.

☾ ln4_enjoyer: LANDO IS IT TRUE THAT YOU’RE  JOINING THE MIDOFFS?

He lets a few more questions like that trickle in, neither confirming nor denying anything; even though he knows the official Midoffs Twitter account – Midoffs being the very fitting name for this speedrunning tournament of absolute beginners – put out a tweet just a few hours ago announcing a “major” last-minute surprise contender.

Max had replied to it with a well-timed 👀 – and since he’d already been announced on the roster almost a month ago, people had, of course, started speculating who it might be. And when Tubbo, the event organiser, liked a few tweets asking if it was – perchance – Lando Norris himself, the internet – or at least Lando’s corner of it – had promptly exploded.

☾ idkwhatsgoingon: LANDO DO YOU EVEN KNOW HOW TO PLAY MINECRAFT??

Lando still doesn’t reply to any of it, just watches the messages trickle past, while he waits for Max to come back from the other room.

He’s on the phone – sorting out something Quadrant-related, as always – and waiting on the takeaway they ordered. Lando, meanwhile, switches over to the other window he already has open: Tubbo’s stream, where the Midoffs draft is about to start.

He’d talked to him for the first time today – a quick Discord call with him and Max, where Tubbo, who could barely keep his voice from shaking with nerves and excitement, had given him a rundown of the event.

Nice guy, Lando had decided. Warm, a little frantic. Clearly trying very hard to make him feel welcome.

“Really, I can’t even put into words how fucking stoked I am that you’re taking part in this,” Tubbo had said – more than once, and his voice had sounded so young that Lando had pulled up his profile mid-call, finding out in real time that the organiser of the tournament was only twenty-one.

But it made sense. He was part of that wave – kids who’d started streaming Minecraft on the same servers during the pandemic and somehow blown up off the back of it.

☾ norris_nation223: HELLO? IS THIS THING ON? ARE YOU IGNORING US?

Lando can’t help but grin at that. “No, I’m not ignoring you,” he finally says – the first thing he’s said on stream since clicking away the starting overlay. “I was just waiting on Max. He should be here any minute.”

Chat immediately explodes – bursts of excitement over Max Fewtrell being there as well – and when Lando tabs over again to click into Tubbo’s stream, he catches a glimpse of the coaches’ roster. Seven in total, for fourteen candidates. He hasn’t had time to look at any of them.

“Any of you actually familiar with Minecraft speedrunning?” he asks, hiding his grin behind his hand.

☾ slipstream_11: are you ignoring what happened in abu dhabi and starting over as a mc speedrunner now?

☾ mvmvmvmv333: DU DU DU DU MAX VERSTAPPEN  🇳🇱🇳🇱🇳🇱

Oh, boy. He’s really going to need mods if he wants to keep streaming over the next month. Maybe he’ll just ban “Max Verstappen,” “Gabriel Bortoleto,” “Abu Dhabi,” and “generational bottler” altogether, for good measure.

☾ itsfridayyyythen: lando i am not even joking. i cried real tears. i love minecraft so much and i love you, this is the best day of my life

“We’re about to go over to Tubbo’s stream,” Lando tells chat, “but I wanted to catch up with you a bit first.”

It still feels strange – talking to the chat again. Something that, for a few months during the pandemic, had felt like the most normal thing in the world, and that he’d quietly fallen out of the habit of. Addressing this faceless mass in the corner of his room like some all-knowing eldritch entity.

He flicks his eyes over to his phone, checking if Max has texted him anything – where the hell is the fucking food? – but there’s nothing. So Lando turns back to chat.

☾ 100_cycle_causeisuck: somewhere in australia, op81 just fell to his knees HAHAHAHAH 

☾ intentionalgamedesign: @100_cycle_causeisuck lmao no cause that is LITERALLY what I immediately thought of

Lando is used to chat not making much sense to him, so he mostly glosses over it – skimming the ever-scintillating broadband of fragmentary contributions to what is, at its core, a massive, loosely connected attempt at conversation, interspersed with colours and emotes that pepper the dark chat overlay.

☾ landosjolly: i literally screamed when i got the streaming notification. i thought you forgot your password or whatever 

“No, I didn’t forget my password,” Lando says, absent-mindedly fidgeting with a random stress ball lying on his desk. “Nor did I get locked out of my account. I just had a lot on my mind. But now that the season’s over, I thought I might as well start streaming a bit more.”

A lot more, if he looks at the schedule in the private tab Tubbo sent him. Of course, he’s not obliged to stream his training sessions with his coach – but it’s expected, and it makes sense. People need to actually watch him struggle – and, ideally, improve – if any decent performance in the tournament is going to feel like a win. And streaming the tournament itself, of course, is non-negotiable.

☾ norris_nation223: SO? don’t EDGE US, LANDO NORRIS. are you or are you not competing in the midoffs??

Lando rolls the stress ball between his fingers, slouched deep in his chair, idly clicking between tabs.

“Well,” he says, “all signs point towards it, don’t they?”

Chat – predictably – explodes. For a moment, it’s impossible to read anything at all as messages streak past at the speed of an F1 car down a straight. When it finally settles again, a couple of names keep popping up, repeated across different messages.

☾ 100_cycle_causeisuck: LMAO Fine and OP are in chat, haha

☾ parasocial_1bdf: fork found in kitchen…

Lando switches back to the other tab where the coaches – the expert speedrunners – are listed. And yeah. Fine must be Feinberg, and OP is almost certainly OP81 – two of the coaches.

He immediately feels a flicker of self-consciousness at the thought that they’re here to scout him as a potential pick for the draft – but it’s not like he’s about to boot up Minecraft and prove he still has auto-jump turned on or something. Not even he is enough of a noob to embarrass himself like that in front of an audience like this.

Instead, he just watches chat for a while longer, as Tubbo in the other tab finally starts gearing up for his introduction.

Lando switches the tab so his stream can see it too – and keeps an eye on chat, scrolling back to catch what the two speedrunners have actually typed in his chat.

He scrolls up to the first instance, and it’s the speedrunner called Feinberg who said something first.

☾ Feinberg: you owe me a 100 dollars @OP81

☾ OP81: fuck

Lando clicks on both of their names. Feinberg has never typed in his chat before – and when he clicks on OP81, he’s met with a whole litany of old messages, stretching back four years, all the way to the pandemic era, when Lando and the others used to stream every week.

He’s also been a subscriber for about five years – sporting the little green LN icon next to his name – and Lando starts to realise that this OP81 might actually be a fan.

Which… puts the chat messages from before into perspective.

Most of OP81’s messages over the years are inconspicuous – emotes, or the occasional dry comment that Lando now, five years later, has no chance of tying back to anything specific. Probably something about his PUBG gameplay, which, at times, definitely deserved a dry comment or two.

But until today, the last message had been nearly three years ago – so he must have stopped watching once the pandemic ended and, apparently, gone off to do his own thing. Like becoming a Minecraft speedrunner.

Before Lando can continue digging through his chatter history, the door behind him opens and Max walks in, two paper bags in one hand, his phone balanced awkwardly in the other.

“Hi, Lando’s chat,” he says, as the overlay immediately speeds up again at the sight of him.

Max starts looking around for a second chair, while Lando leans over the bags, rummaging for his food – just as Tubbo, on the stream he’s pulled up for chat, begins introducing the candidates for this year’s Midoffs.

“Did the draft start already?” Max asks, and Lando turns his attention back to the stream – to the overlay on Tubbo’s broadcast, where the coaches have now been introduced, and the same is being done for the candidates – fourteen of them, double the number of coaches.

“About to,” Lando tells him, still digging through the food. “Max, why is there shrimp on my noodles?”

Max manages to free one of Lando’s chairs from the pile of boxes stacked on it, rolling it over and nudging Lando aside just enough so he can sit within the camera frame as well. He checks their positioning in the preview – Max on the right, Lando on the left; the dark room behind them lit by LEDs outlining the Quadrant logo.

“Because those are mine, you impatient muppet.” He snatches the box out of Lando’s hands and passes him another. “These are yours.”

Lando peers into the fogged-up container. “There’s shrimp in this one too, Max.” He turns to him with a look of genuine betrayal.

“Hogwash,” Max says – but Lando yelps, turning the box toward the camera.

“Tell me that’s not a fucking shrimp, chat.”

Chat, unfortunately, sides with Lando. Max rolls his eyes, takes the box back, opens it, and picks the shrimp off the top of the noodles, dropping it onto his own.

“Sorry, mate,” Lando says, shaking his head as Max tries to hand the box back. “I can’t eat that. It touched the shrimp.”

Max just stares at him, something like pure exasperation flickering across his face – before he scoops up a generous portion of Lando’s noodles, everything that might have come into contact with the offending sea creature, and transfers it onto his own plate.

Lando accepts the bowl with a little bow, blowing him a kiss with one hand – while Max watches him with a deliberately blank expression.

“You believe this guy, chat?” he says, turning to the camera. “Twenty-six years old. Makes me fix his food like he’s five.”

Lando scrolls through chat, checking if the two speedrunners are still lurking somewhere, but he can’t spot their names anymore – and chat doesn’t bring them up again either. So instead, he turns his attention back to the draft, where a few more candidates are being introduced.

He recognises some of the names – streamers and content creators, some of them fairly big – but others clearly have very little experience with Minecraft or speedrunning. Makes sense. Keeps things fair, and gives the coaches people they can actually shape.

Lando and Max watch in silence, eating their dinner – until Max’s name is called.

“The next candidate,” Tubbo announces in a mock-booming voice, while the broadcast cuts to clips of Max in his karting days, followed by some Quadrant content and a few collaborations with the Sidemen, “is a self-declared Minecraft aficionado who has never actually tried speedrunning. So – no personal best, no PBs in any category – but he says he’s very open to learning and willing to put in the time to grind the game.”

Max gives a mock salute. “I swear, if I get passed over by everyone in this draft, I’ll never recover.”

☾ 100_cycle_causeisuck: don’t worry, Max, i think lando’s going to be the one to have the honour of getting passed on by everyone.

Lando finally swallows the bite he’s been chewing on for the past minute, gesturing in exaggerated offence. “What? Why would I be the one getting passed on?”

It doesn’t take long for Tubbo to circle back to that on the main stream, moving quickly through the remaining candidates – some Lando knows personally, some from their content, some not at all.

“And now,” Tubbo says, “it is one of my greatest honours in all my time as an event organiser to introduce a surprise addition to our roster – one final candidate competing for the title of King of the Midoffs.”

His grin is infectious.

“Someone who doesn’t really need an introduction. Someone who usually spends his days driving the fastest cars in the world – and very nearly turning that into a championship.”

Lando scoffs into his noodles – but he lets it slide. It’s not exactly wrong. Chat, on the other hand, is losing it; somersaulting across the overlay.

“He’s also a streamer,” Tubbo continues, “and he’s personally told me he’s very interested in trying out this whole Minecraft speedrunning thing – now that his day job is in the off-season.”

The screen cuts to Lando on the podium earlier this year – a supercut of race wins – and Lando pointedly looks away, focusing on chat instead.

“It is my great honour to introduce Lando Norris as our surprise addition,” Tubbo says. “He hasn’t played Minecraft in nearly ten years, has never killed the Ender Dragon by his own admission – but he’s absolutely open, and coachable, for the training period over the next few weeks.”

Lando watches both his own chat and the chat on Tubbo’s stream speed up to triple pace as the announcement lands; his own chat dissolving into a mess of overexcited channel emotes he hasn’t seen in ages – now that what they’d been suspecting all along (or at least for the past few hours) has finally been confirmed.

Tubbo reappears on screen just as a giant spinning wheel pops up beside him – each segment labelled with one of the fourteen candidates.

“With Lando Norris as our fourteenth candidate, we can start the bidding,” Tubbo says. “Each candidate gets their turn after being selected by the wheel, and each coach has ten points they can bid. But they’ll need to be careful – if they spend everything on one player, they might miss out on a strong second pick. And any points left over at the end go toward the coach leaderboard.”

A complicated-looking table appears on the overlay, and Lando – still chewing on his food while Max has already finished his, tossing the empty container into the bag behind him – tries to make sense of it.

He mutes his mic and glances over at Max. “Do you get that?”

Max shrugs. “It’s not that complicated. The better you perform, the more points your coach gets because he picked you. But the smarter the bids early on, the more points they keep.”

“I see,” Lando says – while chat immediately starts yelling at him to unmute. “So they’re going to go for the better players first?”

“Probably,” Max says, clearing his throat. “There are some proper gaming heavyweights in there – not necessarily Minecraft players, but they’ll pick it up quickly.” He leans forward, pointing at the screen. “And then there are Minecrafters who don’t speedrun. They know the mechanics, which is a big advantage.”

“And then there’s us.”

Max laughs. “And then there’s us.”

Lando leans forward, unmuting his mic and undeafening the stream just as the wheel spins – and lands on none other than Max.

“Welp,” his best friend says, as chat immediately ramps up again.

Lando leans in, noticing that all seven speedrunning coaches are in a shared Discord call, their icons lighting up whenever one of them speaks – broadcasted to Tubbo’s stream.

“Feinberg?” Tubbo prompts. “How many points do you bid on Max Fewtrell?”

There’s a short pause. Then Feinberg replies, his American accent clear through the speakers. “I’m sorry, but I’ll pass on him.”

Max clutches his chest dramatically, like he’s just been shot – while chat floods with a cascade of Ls.

“Ouch,” Tubbo says. “Couriway?”

The next speedrunner passes. And the next. And the next. Until it’s OP81’s turn – the one who’d been lurking in Lando’s chat earlier. The one who might actually be a fan.

“Pass.”

His voice comes through Lando’s speakers – low, a little rough around the edges. Just one word, but enough to catch on. Lando’s pretty sure there’s an accent there.

“Okay,” Tubbo says, clearing his throat. “That doesn’t bode well for the other candidates – but I get that you’re all a bit hesitant to put your points on the line this early. Max goes back into the pool for now, but he’ll cycle back around.”

☾ season_ofthestyx1: NOOOOO this is so mean!! i feel so bad for max :((

☾ fewtrells_12: right?? if anyone should be passed on it’s lando. max plays minecraft from time to time at least

Lando – who’s almost finished his noodles – scrolls through chat as the next candidate is picked and immediately draws a four-point bid from Feinberg and another speedrunner called Infume.

He gestures in mock offence.

“Excuse me?” he says. “I should not be the one getting passed on. I reckon out of all these people, I’ve probably got the best reflexes.”

☾ 100_cycle_causeisuck: reflexes alone maketh not a good speedrunner

“Oh, please,” Lando scoffs, rolling his chair back so he can reach his mini-fridge and pull out one of his own branded Monster Energy – yellow and black, like his helmet, like everything else about him. He cracks it open. “What else is there to the game?”

☾ intentionalgamedesign: famous last words ig

The candidate – a family-friendly Minecraft streamer from one of the bigger SMPs – gets picked up in a bidding war by a speedrunner called Lowkey, while Lando drifts back to reading chat.

Most of his chat is still hung up on Max getting passed over – calling the speedrunners arrogant, unfair – while others point out that, realistically, it makes sense.

☾ 100_cycle_causeisuck: guys i get that y’all are mad about max getting passed on, but chances are that lando’s gonna perform even worse. there’s no one willing to take that risk. these points count toward the mcsr rankings too. they have to be smart about it, it’s not disrespect.

That one catches his eye. Blunt, but well informed. Whoever it is clearly knows both the Minecraft scene and Lando’s audience, and is probably part of both.

Lando clicks on their messages, scrolling back to see what else they’ve said. They’d replied to OP81’s earlier message with a laughing emote – and a bit further down, he spots them answering someone else’s question about draft predictions.

☾ 100_cycle_causeisuck: i think both lando and max are going to be second picks – though i don’t know who’ll take them. as much fun as it would be if OP really went for lando, considering the constant glazing and fanboying, he still has to think about the championship. i think infume’s too competitive to risk it, even as a second pick

☾ landosjolly: i’m so fucking new to this, i only watch f1. can someone tell me where i can find their rankings? i didn’t even know minecraft speedrunning had a championship hahaha

☾ 100_cycle_causeisuck: @landosjolly sure, here you go mcsrranked.com/stats

While Max watches the stream – completely absorbed in the draft, seemingly already over the fact that he wasn’t exactly a hot pick in round one – Lando clicks the link.

It takes him to a leaderboard, where he’s immediately greeted by most of the names currently sitting in that Discord call, like a panel of Roman emperors deciding the fate of their gladiators.

The ranking reads:

1 🇦🇺   OP81.  2847

2 🇺🇸   Infume   2801

3 🇺🇸   Feinberg   2789

4 🇭🇰   hackingnoises   2686

5 🇨🇦   silverruns   2565

…

Ah. Australian. The flag next to the name finally places the voice – and, in hindsight, Lando’s almost surprised it took him that long, considering he’d spent four years teamed up with Daniel Ricciardo.

And apparently, his fanboy – or whatever OP81 is supposed to be – is currently ranked number one. With a comfortable gap to second place.

Lando scrolls further, then clicks on OP81’s profile, which opens up into a full overview. Highest rank: Netherite. Links to Twitch, YouTube, Discord.

He glances over his shoulder. Max is still watching the draft. So Lando quietly minimises the window – just in case – and continues.

OP81’s YouTube channel sits at nearly a million subscribers. The latest uploads are all unedited speedruns.

Lando mutes the tab before clicking into the newest video – and immediately, the Minecraft loading screen flashes up, cutting into a first-person view sprinting forward, dropping into a ravine, moving at a pace that barely makes sense. The entire video is nine minutes long.

“You can beat the entire game in nine minutes?” he asks, incredulous. 

He remembers barely managing to find a sheep in that time – just to make a bed and survive the first night.

“Hmm?” Max says, not really listening. 

Chat, on the other hand, is very much paying attention.

☾ 100_cycle_causeisuck: lmao lando are you stalking the guys’ rankings? 

“I’m not stalking anyone,” Lando says, scoffing. “I’m merely seeing what I’m getting myself into.”

His new favourite chatter clearly has an opinion on that, too:

☾ 100_cycle_causeisuck: a little late for that, don’t u think so? 

Lando clicks back to the YouTube tab – OP81 has already entered the Nether at one minute fifty. It looks nothing like the one Lando remembers – a lot more varied than the flat, hellish landscape he used to stumble through.

He notices there’s no facecam; and when he scrolls down, the top comment reads: oh my god he was so locked in he forgot to talk.

Before Lando can fall any further down that rabbit hole, his attention is yanked back to the stream – his name being called as the wheel lands on him. 

Even though he knows it doesn’t really matter, not in the grand scheme of things, he feels a small jolt of nerves pull at him as he takes a sip from his Monster, as casually as he can manage.

“Oh, very nice, it’s Lando’s turn,” Tubbo says – and Lando notices both chats spike again, anticipation rippling through them. “Couri, you’re up first. How much do you bid?”

The Discord icon of the addressed speedrunner lights up. “Once again, I’m going to pass.”

“Not even for a second pick?” Tubbo asks. “You’ve already got your first.”

“No, sorry. I just don’t think we’d be a good fit.”

Max lets out a laugh. “Oh my god. This hurts, Lando. Not even second pick.”

Lando rolls his eyes, taking another sip from his drink – but he can feel the heat creeping into his cheeks, and he hopes the lighting’s dim enough that the camera doesn’t pick it up.

Feinberg – the same one who’d been lurking in his chat earlier – passes on him too, and Lando responds with a mock-offended gesture, lifting his can again. Maybe he should spike this goddamn Monster with vodka. It always tasted better that way.

“And what about you, OP?”

Lando doesn’t expect much; someone who’s casually dropping sub-nine-minute runs on YouTube is hardly going to be interested in coaching him. And he’s not even offended about it. Not really.

Still: when he glances over at Max, his best friend gives him something almost like an apologetic look.

Then OP81’s Discord icon lights up. “Seven points.”

Lando almost chokes on the last sip of his Monster, and Max’s jaw drops clean open. On screen, Tubbo looks just as stunned.

“Excuse me, did I hear that correctly? You’re wagering seven of your coach points on him?”

Lando’s chat goes ballistic – faster than it’s been all evening – and the same goes for the main chat on Tubbo’s stream. 

Almost instinctively, Lando tabs back to OP81’s ranking profile and clicks the little Twitch icon next to his name, opening his stream in a small window beside Tubbo’s.

And yeah, he’s live, watching the draft. But, frustratingly, still no facecam.

OP81’s chat is just as scandalised as Lando’s, messages flying past too fast to properly read – though a few stick out, all of them some variation of disbelief.

☾ t_hipp2: OP??? ARE YOU FUCKING GOOD?

☾ opberg:  oh god oh god he’s really done it

☾ elmooo_: as much as i appreciate your commitment to the bit, op, i don’t think anyone thought you’d actually go through with it

☾ t_hipp2: OH MY GOD THIS FANBOY FUUUUCK ME this season is basically over just because OP couldn’t pass up the chance to hang with lando norris lmao

Lando is starting to realise that OP’s chat is not happy about his bid – and when he looks back at the main stream, it becomes obvious the other speedrunners aren’t thrilled either. He instantly notices the shift. It is subtle, but there.

One of their own putting that many points on the line – for him, someone who hasn’t touched the game in years – seems to have them second-guessing themselves. Like they might have missed something when they skimmed his “credentials.”

Tubbo regains control of the room, clearing his throat.

“Okay. OP has bid seven points on Lando Norris. Does anyone want to match that?” He glances between the names. “Silver? Hax? Infume? Anyone?”

There’s a brief pause. A beat where no one answers – where they all seem to be thinking.

Then, Silver says: “I’ll match. Seven points.”

Tubbo’s eyebrows shoot up, and Lando glances sideways at Max – who’s now leaning forward, elbows on his knees, watching it unfold with the same kind of focus he’d have watching Lando pull off a last-lap overtake on Max Verstappen.

“OP?” Tubbo prompts.

“Eight points.”

OP81’s voice slides through Lando’s speakers – low, drawn-out. And now that he’s listening for it, the Australian accent is unmistakable. Strong, even through how little he actually says.

“Silver?”

A beat. 

“Nah. I’m out.”

Tubbo nods, like that’s exactly what he expected.

“Alright,” he says, still sounding a little dazed. “Then Lando Norris goes to OP81 as his first pick.” He glances at the roster updating live. “Congratulations? I guess.”

III. 

Max crumples up Lando’s Monster Energy can in one hand, tossing it into the paper bag he holds in the other. The stream has been offline for almost three minutes now – and neither of them has quite found it in themselves to say anything.

Lando is still sitting in his chair, slowly spinning from side to side, idly skipping through his playlist, even though the stream is over. Chat had fizzled out with one last collective BYE LANDO cascade after Tubbo’s stream – and with it, the draft – had ended.

It feels like they’d been less reluctant to let him go this time; knowing he’ll be back soon. 

Or, at the very least, that they’ll be able to watch him somewhere else – on OP81’s stream.

Max keeps tidying up the room – just as drained as Lando from the stream. Nearly three hours of interacting with chat, being on camera, reacting to the slow, mildly humiliating process of getting passed over for two full rounds – until Couriway picked him up for exactly one point in the final round.

Lando had been safe – but he’d felt bad for Max; knew, objectively, that he deserved to be there with him, at the bottom of the picks.

And yet: Lando had been snapped up in an instant. After that, he hadn’t paid much attention to the rest of the draft.

Instead, he’d made it his priority to find out as much as possible about his new coach – quietly, carefully, because chat had been watching him like a hawk the entire time. And so had Max – who kept glancing over at Lando’s second monitor, trying to catch what he was up to.

But he soon realises there isn’t all that much to find. There are, in fact, only five things known about OP81 on the internet.

Firstly, he is Australian. That much is obvious to anyone who hears him speak for more than a moment. He has a very flat way of speaking – a memorable voice – and Lando found himself perking up every time it cut through the broadcast. His tone is deadpan, almost unreadable, though there’s something faintly amused threading through it. His accent draws the words out just enough to soften the edges, fitting that flat delivery in a way that makes it linger.

Secondly, despite persistent rumours, he is not forty-four. Lando hadn’t even considered it – but apparently, early in OP’s career, people had questions about the number in his name. According to his Speedrun Wiki, OP denied that the 81 referred to his birth year, claiming instead that he was, by his own admission, “approximately two decades younger than that.” The actual meaning behind the number remains unclear, though he’s been quoted on stream saying he just “liked 81 because it is a perfect square.” A very nerdy answer – and, somehow, one Lando finds endearing.

Thirdly, OP81 started playing Minecraft at eight, but he only began speedrunning seriously at seventeen, and since then has remained a constant presence near the top of the leaderboards.

Fourthly, none of his friends – none of the people he spends hours with, competing against, streaming with – know what he looks like. Feinberg once claimed OP had sent him a mirror selfie, but since no one has ever actually seen it, most people assume Feinberg was greatly exaggerating; if there was a picture at all. 

There’s fanart, of course. Plenty of it. Lando finds it easily – dark hair, dark eyes, soft features – but it might as well be as accurate as every painting of white Jesus. A blend of confirmation bias and artist’s interpretation – since one really knows. The artists just build on each other’s versions, tirelessly constructing a shared image: a boy with dimples, standing shoulder to shoulder with the others – Feinberg’s anime counterpart, Couriway’s crowned persona, and so on.

And fifthly: There is exactly one thing that comes close to rivaling OP81’s devotion to Minecraft speedrunning. Formula One.

This, of course, is what piques Lando’s interest the most.

While Max is being passed on for the second time, and Lando throws him a vaguely pitying look, he is, at the same time, already knee-deep in a Twitter thread titled A Comprehensive Chronology of OP’s Formula One Obsession. Painstakingly compiled by someone with Lando’s face as their profile picture and a reference to OP’s name tucked into their username, it more or less gathers every instance of OP ever talking about F1.

Lando finds out, in a quick pass-through, that OP apparently watched Formula One as a kid; and was a huge fan of Mark Webber – which, as an Australian, tracks – and then of his fellow countryman Daniel Ricciardo. Until, of course, Lando Norris entered the scene in 2019.

Apparently – and the thread’s author seems to take this as some kind of crowning proof of OP’s fanboying – he had already been a fan of Lando back when he was still in F3 and F2, and had immediately begun supporting him the moment he made the jump.

There are many such instances. Little fragments. Mentions. Offhand comments. Entire stretches of him glazing Lando, if one were to believe the replies.

Miami 2024 comes up more than once: Lando’s first win. According to the thread, OP had started a watchalong mid-stream, even though he and Feinberg had been grinding sub-15 runs. Lando can’t watch the clip with sound, but the author insists that OP had never sounded as excited – not before, not after – not even when he got the any% random seed glitchless world record at an incredibly sub-seven.

Lando has no idea what that means, but it must be good. And apparently, it still hadn’t compared to his exaltation over Lando’s first win.

Lando refreshes the thread by accident – switching tabs a little too quickly when Max tries to sneak a glance at what he’s doing – and the author has already quote-retweeted the whole thing with a: WHO’S HERE AFTER OP JUST PICKED LANDO AS HIS CANDIDATE FOR MIDOFFS????

These are the things that are known about OP81. Everything else is up for debate.

His name – though many assume it begins with an O, OP likely being his initials. Oliver, people tend to say, as though repeating it often enough might make it true. His age – though most place him somewhere in the twenty-first century, piecing it together from the offhand comments he’s made about when he played certain games. His life outside of speedrunning. His appearance.

All of it – uncertain.

Lando realises that while most speedrunners in this scene keep parts of themselves private, OP81 has turned it into something else entirely.

An absence.

Because once one of the five things people know about you is that you are a Formula One fan, you’ve succeeded at staying lowkey.

Max brushes past him, angling over his shoulder to grab one of the discarded Monster Energy cans. He seems oddly intent on cleaning up – probably to give his mind something to latch onto – and Lando isn’t quick enough to switch tabs, still hovering somewhere on OP81’s speedrunning profile on the MCSR leaderboard.

Max leans over the backrest of Lando’s chair, committing to the view, and Lando lets him.

There’s nothing nefarious about it. Looking into his coach. A coach who has – and this is the part Lando can’t quite seem to shake – caused a minor upset by picking him out of a roster of far more promising candidates.

It’s only natural, really. Wanting to know more.

Lando feels Max’s breath against his cheek as he lingers there, watching him lazily scroll through the overview of OP81’s recent matches.

Win. Win. Win. Loss. Win. Win. Win.

“Now do my coach,” Max says, once Lando has made it all the way through the season.

Lando hesitates, then gives in, clicking over to Couriway’s profile. Thirtieth in the world – respectable, but nowhere near OP81’s level. Still, he has far more subscribers, clearly leaning more into content than raw speedrunning.

After a while, Lando loses interest and switches back to Twitter, where the Midoffs account has already posted the official draft results.

“Do you know her?” he asks, zooming in on the curly-haired girl next to his name – OP’s second pick whom he snagged with just one point.

“Lily?” Max says, taking in the heart-shaped face, evoking the soft voice they’d briefly heard on stream – the one who’d lingered a little longer on camera, close to Tubbo. “Not really. But I’ve heard she’s good. Tough. Better than the whole cutesy cherry-wood builder aesthetic suggests.” He pauses, then adds, almost offhand, “I think she’ll outlast you.”

Lando turns around in his chair, eyebrows raised. “Why exactly are you being such a negative Nancy right now?”

Max is still leaning over him, lips pressed together, the trash bag hanging loosely from his hand. “I’m not being negative,” he says. “I’m just being realistic.”

But Lando knows him too well to let that pass.

“You think it’s unfair,” he says, watching him closely. “That I got picked straight away, while you had to sit through two rounds of passes before someone finally took pity on you.”

“No,” Max says – but there’s something guarded in it. “I’m happy for you.”

For a moment, Lando considers letting it slide – but then he says, “OP81’s apparently a fan of me.”

Max doesn’t move, but a small, almost indecipherable scoff slips from his lips. “Oh, really? I couldn’t tell. I thought he just saw something in you no one else could.”

“Well, maybe he did,” Lando says after a moment, turning his chair so Max has to let go of the armrest. He looks up at him, something almost defiant in it. “You have to consider – my reflexes are probably the best on the entire roster.”

“Sure,” Max says.

And just like that, the tension drops from his face – the exact moment he decides not to take the bait. Not to turn this into something competitive.

He never does. Not with Lando.

“I’m curious to see what OP makes of you,” he adds instead, leaning over him to grab the last empty can from the desk and tossing it into the bag. He sets it down, then finally takes the other chair, rolling back slightly now that he no longer has to fit into frame.

“What have you heard about OP?” Lando asks, glancing down at his phone, scrolling through the messages he missed during the stream. His brother’s text catches his eye – something about being glad Lando’s streaming again. “You’re much better informed than I am about… all of this.”

Max looks at him for a long moment. Head tilted, like he’s weighing something up.

“I don’t know much,” he admits. “I don’t think there’s much to know. Except that he has some extremely loyal fans.” Max clears his throat. “I think the whole, uh… faceless thing has its own appeal.”

Oh, he bets.

It’s the exact thing that draws Lando in, almost immediately – that there is someone on the internet who has managed to become competitive at what he does, revered even, without ever having to trade that exact, favourable blessing the gods of talent have bestowed upon him for his dignity.

Sure, OP’s fame is marginal, niche, compared to Lando’s – who is one of the top athletes in one of the biggest sports in the world. 

But still. He likes it. This idea of anonymity. Of walking down a street unseen, unrecognised, and still being known – somewhere – as undeniably great.

Lando absently starts chewing on the string of his hoodie, clicking between tabs again.

“I wonder if he’s suited to being a coach,” he says after a moment. “From my experience, the best players are often rubbish at explaining things – and vice versa.”

“You’ll have plenty of time to figure that out,” Max says lazily, tapping his phone against his leg. He looks at Lando through hooded eyes, clearly exhausted – it’s been a long day. They flew back to Monaco from London this morning, spent the rest of it in Quadrant meetings, and then straight into the draft.

“Do you want to crash on my couch?” Lando asks – an olive branch, really. Something to make up for letting that edge of competitiveness slip back into their friendship again. Something he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do.

“Nah, it’s not far.”

“But, uh… we’ve spiked the Monster with vodka.” Lando clicks through the tabs, landing, again and again, on OP81’s YouTube channel. “You shouldn’t be driving.”

“I’ll walk,” Max says, shaking his head – and Lando recognises the line being drawn. “I need to clear my head anyway. And I promised Pietra I’d call her after.”

“Fine,” Lando says, pouting. “I see. You don’t want to spend time with your best friend.”

Max groans – and even though he plays it off, Lando can see the flicker of something pleased in it.

“You’re so clingy,” he says, exactly as expected. “If you could, you’d have me sleep in your bed like we used to back in karting.”

“Yeah,” Lando says, without a trace of shame.

Max sighs. “This is why I told you you should date.”

“It’s not worth the hassle,” Lando insists, turning fully toward Max now. “This whole thing of trying to get to know someone. Sitting across from each other in some fancy restaurant that makes everything feel stilted, rattling off the same old questions. What’s the point of it all?”

Max looks like he’s too tired to let Lando spiral into the same old tirade he always launches into whenever the topic comes up. 

“The point is, Lando,” he says instead, “to reach the end goal.”

“Which is?”

“Finding someone who’s as clingy as you are,” Max grins. “Someone who’s as obsessed with you as you are with them. Someone who matches your freak.”

“I’ve had that before and it didn’t satisfy me,” Lando says. “Like when–”

“I’m not talking about sex.” Max shakes his head, and there’s a thread of impatience running through his voice now, like he’s had this exact conversation too many times and Lando still refuses to get it. “That’s part of it, sure. Ideally a big part. But as your exact life model has already proven – sex alone isn’t enough to replace real intimacy.”

There’s a part of Lando that bristles at that. At Max pontificating like this. Like he’s an expert on relationships just because he and Pietra have been steady for a few years now. Like Lando is the one who needs to be taught something.

He knows all of it – of course he does. There’s a reason casual dating and hookups don’t work for him. Because Max is right.

Sleeping with someone is nice enough, and Lando has learned over the years that he doesn’t need to know the person he’s with – it’s enough to be overwhelmingly attracted to them. But most of the men he ends up with seem far more taken with the idea of fucking a closeted Formula One driver than with anything that comes after.

Lando can’t remember the last time he woke up with his face tucked into the crook of someone’s neck. Can’t remember the last time he fell asleep next to someone he actually wanted – without already having had sex with them.

It’s not like he hasn’t tried. This whole relationship thing.

But there’s no one who’s willing to sign up for that level of commitment – for understanding that, as long as Lando races in Formula One, any relationship will always come second to the life he already has on track. That as long as he is active in this sport – and the sport is active in countries that would quite literally outlaw him – there will always be restrictions.

Which is why he’s fucked, basically.

The ones who might want more than something casual – more than hooking up whenever he happens to be in their city – aren’t willing to live like that. A life of denial. Of half-truths and omissions.

And the others – they’re perfectly content with the idea of having had a Formula One driver pinned beneath them. Not so much with having the rest of him, too – with everything that comes attached.

“I am perfectly okay with how it is right now,” Lando insists, trying to ignore the dull ache in his chest, the one that feels like something inside him is folding in on itself. “I told you. I’m not in a phase of my life where I should be dating.”

Max looks at him for a moment longer. Then he shrugs. “Sure,” he says. “It’s your call.”

But Lando can tell he doesn’t believe him. There’s a part of Max that knows him too well. That sees straight through it – through the aching, festering hollow space in his chest he’s trying not to acknowledge.

And Max, for all his faults, is what Lando would call an empathetic hedonist – someone who, when he’s happy, wants the entire world to feel the same. And right now, he’s deeply, almost annoyingly happy with Pietra – who is, objectively, entirely out of his league.

So of course he wants that for Lando, too.

It looks like Max is about to say something else – when his phone buzzes, the sound cutting clean through their heavy silence, vibrating sharply against his knee.

He glances down, brow furrowing as he reads – then a grin spreads across his face.

“Oh, this is sweet,” he says, looking back up. “Couriway just DM’d me on Discord.”

“Oh?” Lando asks, unable to keep the curiosity at bay. “What did he say?”

“That he’s excited to coach me – and he’s already sent over a bunch of times for tomorrow so we can get everything set up.” Max scrolls through the message, eyes flicking across the screen. “He says he’s also looked at some of my gameplay. Thought at first I’d have bad habits he’d need to unteach – but then he actually checked, and apparently…” He lets out a short laugh. “…there’s basically nothing there to fix.”

“That’s nice of him,” Lando says after a moment, switching over to his own Discord.

There’s a single ping in one of the main Midoffs channels – just an @everyone announcing the start of the draft. Nothing meant specifically for him. When he clicks into his private messages, there’s no red notification. No new contact. Nothing.

It seems like Couriway has been quicker than OP to set something up – but if there’s one thing Lando has gathered, it’s that Couri takes this seriously. He’s the defending champion coach, after all. Last season was won by one of his players. So of course he’d already reached out to Max.

There’s a system to it, a reputation to uphold. Still–

Lando feels something uneasy settle in his chest at the absence of a message. Shouldn’t OP be reaching out as well?

Especially considering Lando was his first pick. While Max had been… second.

Is OP having buyer’s remorse? Is he realising that staking eight points on someone who hasn’t properly touched the game in years might not have been the smartest move, if winning this whole thing is the goal? Has he already messaged his other player?

Lando catches himself chewing on his bottom lip, clicking between tabs again without really focusing on any of them.

Max looks up from his phone and clocks it immediately – the restlessness, the tension sitting in Lando’s shoulders, the way his posture seems to fold inward on itself. There’s something almost pitying in the look he gives him.

“He’s gonna text,” Max says, finishing his reply before slipping his phone into his pocket. He stretches as he stands, pushing the chair back out of frame. “Don’t worry your pretty little head about that.”

Max grabs the trash bag and makes his way toward the door, switching off the LED lights behind the Quadrant logo as he goes – wisely enough, knowing Lando will forget about them the second he leaves this room to go doomscroll Twitter in his bedroom until three in the morning.

In the doorway, he turns back once more, blowing Lando something that passes for a sarcastic kiss.

“Looking forward to competing against you once again, Norris.”

Lando takes it for what it is – a peace offering – and a smile tugs at his lips. The one he usually reserves for his friends. Lazy. Wide. Fond. “Likewise, Fewtrell.”

He hears Max rummaging around the flat for a few minutes longer while he stays where he is, still on Twitter, scrolling through every mention of his name in conjunction with OP’s.

There are hundreds.

Most of them clustered around May 2024 – when Lando won his first race – and when, apparently, a good portion of OP’s audience had realised, for the first time, just how deep that enthusiasm for Lando ran.

Now that he’s no longer on stream, he can finally watch the clip. The one where OP81 had gone live for the final laps of the Grand Prix, once it became clear that Lando would take the win after Max Verstappen’s botched safety car strategy.

Lando catches himself biting at his thumbnail as the video plays.

The frame is split down the middle – a paused Minecraft world, somewhere in the Nether, and the familiar sight of the Miami Grand Prix. His papaya McLaren leading the field.

The clip opens on OP’s voice – Australian, drawling; and already instantly recognisable. No facecam, of course.

“No, I’m not switching back to the run right now. We’re watching the culmination of someone’s four-year-long dry spell finally end. I need to see this.”

Someone in chat must have asked what they’re even watching, because OP replies, a second later–

“I know the American mind can barely comprehend this, but F1 is fucking great. The fastest cars ever made. The pinnacle of engineering.”

Another message flashes by – something that makes OP snort. “Someone just said I’m only doing this because I’m obsessed with Lando Norris.”

Oh. Lando lingers on the way he says his name.

There’s something familiar in it – something that reminds him faintly of Danny – but threaded through with something else. Something drier. More aware. Like OP knows exactly how ridiculous it is, carving out this space in his stream for someone else’s moment. Broadcasting it like it belongs to him, too.

“I’m not obsessed with Lando,” OP adds. “I’ll have you know I’ve been a fan of this sport since I was a kid. Since Webber.”

Another chat message is quick to prove him wrong.

“Did you seriously go through my likes?” OP scoffs. “I am allowed to like some of his tweets. Oh, and fuck you – you all tweet at me or Feinberg or any other massive Minecraft streamer all the time, but the second I reply to a few tweets from my favourite athlete, suddenly I’m the parasocial one? Jesus Christ.”

His accent makes it sound lighter than it should. More like: Jesus Chroist. Lando presses his fingers against his mouth to stifle a laugh.

Another message flashes by – lost to posterity unfortunately – but OP latches onto it.

“Thank you for the insightful question,” he snorts. “And for your interest, of course, in my personal ties to Lando Norris. I can assure you – there are none. I’ve just always liked what I’ve seen of his personality. The fact that he streams, plays games. I used to watch him all the time during the pandemic.”

A brief pause. Messages trickle in, one after the other.

“Stop calling me parasocial, oh my god,” he mutters, exhaling sharply – his voice turning rougher, a little grumpier around the edges. “Okay, fine. Maybe I am a bit parasocial. I just think he’s the kind of guy I’d get along with. And I firmly believe he deserves to win. He’s got heaps of talent – he’s just been cursed with a complete shitbox of a car.”

Another pause, longer this time, as he reads chat again – while Lando on screen lines up for the second-to-last lap.

God. He remembers it like it was yesterday. The way it felt pulling onto that final straight. Knowing that, unless something went catastrophically wrong in the last few seconds, he’d done it. 

He’d finally done it.

But before the memory can settle, OP cuts back in–

“Explain it in Minecraft terms?” He groans. “Guys, seriously. Just watch F1.”

A beat. “But if I had to–” He huffs out a breath.

“It’s like the nicest dude you know playing on atrocious ping, with absolute dogshit piglin RNG, his GPU bottlenecking the whole thing – and somehow he’s still pulling off a sub-20.” A pause. “That’s what you’re watching right now. I don’t think there’s anyone in the world who isn’t absolutely elated watching him pull ahead like this.”

Unfortunately for Lando, the clip ends there, cut off just before the part he wants most, and as much as he searches for it – scrolling, refreshing, diving deeper into threads that branch into other threads – he cannot find more of that stream, not the moment he crosses the line, not the moment where OP apparently gets more excited than anyone has ever seen him in his entire career. It somehow bothers him more than it should, that there exists a version of that moment he cannot access, cannot witness.

He checks his phone again, the Discord server, flicking between channels with increasing impatience, but there’s nothing – no message from OP81, no offhand hey, no practical question about specs or setup or anything that would signal intent, just an absence so complete it begins to feel almost insulting.

So Lando exhales, sharp and quiet, and decides to download Minecraft, because if nothing else he can at least not be caught unprepared, not give OP any reason to think he’s a lost cause before they’ve even begun. 

He doesn’t have the game on this computer – not anymore – and while the download crawls along, he finds himself opening his dating apps instead, the familiar, empty carousel of faces tied to a neat, fabricated version of himself, the one that exists purely for convenience, for anonymity of a different kind.

There’s Raya too, of course, where his real face and name are attached to; but that one is set to women – because appearances, because optics, because it is easier to maintain a fiction than to explain a truth that cannot safely exist in most of the places his life requires him to go.

By the time the game finishes installing and he has managed to reconnect it to his old account – some faint scrap of legitimacy, in case OP ever decides to check, to verify, to confirm that he is not entirely hopeless – it is already well past one in the morning, and exhaustion begins to settle into his bones in that dull, creeping way that makes everything feel slightly washed out. 

He has meetings tomorrow, sponsor obligations, and Magui has already texted him about some gallery opening, something about free promotion and dragging her fake boyfriend along for very real attention (“It’s free promo, chuchu, of course I’m making use of you”), and he will go, of course he will, because she has been generous with him lately, because the teary-eyed make-out session beneath the Abu Dhabi podium – half performance, half necessity – had left them both faintly nauseous but had done exactly what it was supposed to do.

The cameras had been on him, relentlessly so, on the championship loser, and he had given them something to look at, something to circulate, something to believe in. A version of himself that can exist cleanly, without question, projected outward so that the real him could remain, for once, unexamined.

It buys him time. It buys him space. It buys him a life that fits more neatly into the world he inhabits. And for now, that is enough, because he intends to make use of it.

After uselessly drifting around his apartment for a while, opening cupboard doors for no other reason than to delay the moment he inevitably has to go to bed, he decides to take a shower. He briefly considers jerking off, then realises he’s not even in the mood, and that it’s undignified as hell to wank out of boredom. Instead he ends up taking a shower that runs almost an hour too long, singing Unwritten on loop in tandem with his Bluetooth speaker.

He chuckles at that, briefly. Not even the most courageous effort from Magui’s part could save his reputation if anyone ever caught sight of him like this. But Lando feels himself slipping out of that controlled persona, the one he steps into with the first fitting of his race suit each season. That athlete persona, which is, in the end, just that – a persona – is something he has very complicated feelings about.

On one hand, there is something close to parental affection. Not least because he’s been building that version of himself for years, ever since he realised three things in quick succession: firstly, that he was really fucking good at this whole driving cars thing; secondly, that he was absolutely uninterested in girls; and thirdly, that the second thing could very easily become a snare for the first.

Looking back, like with most things he did at that age, he feels a certain leniency toward his younger self. A sense of quiet understanding. Not least because he is, now, at least a little more settled in who he is. It doesn’t make him writhe sleeplessly in bed at night anymore that he loves being fucked by big, beefy dudes, that he loves taking it in the ass; and he knows he owes that, at least in part, to that younger version of himself who was putting in the work.

Strangely – paradoxically, almost – being in this sport, the very thing that forces him to conceal so much, has also made him more forgiving with himself in private. He’s done a lot of work this season. With the championship lead slipping through his fingers, and then, inevitably, inexplicably, losing it all to Max Verstappen, he’s come to realise that a lot of his rigor, his severity, the almost punitive instinct he falls back on when things don’t go his way, might come from the fact that he is, fundamentally, at odds with himself.

Not in the boring, trite sense of being unable to accept his sexuality. He’s past that. But in the way he and Max had circled around earlier.

Does he want this – casual sex, endless, convenient, profiting off the fact that he’s in a different city each week – or does he want what Max has been suggesting, quietly but persistently, for a while now?

Lando wipes down the mirror, fogged over from his long shower, and studies his reflection. His hair is still damp, the frizz of his curls already pushing through again; there is almost nothing that can keep them in place for more than a minute. He looks tired as shit – and has ever since last Sunday, since the moment he crossed the finish line in second place, already knowing it wouldn’t be enough. That Max Verstappen had done it again, and that Lando had maybe squandered his one real shot at a title, his one real shot at a competitive car, all because Gabriel Bortoleto had decided to be an uncooperative little shit.

Of course, Lando knows his rookie teammate must be regretting his recalcitrance by now. In his defence, he could never have anticipated that a single petulant decision, one moment of misplaced rigidity against those bothersome Papaya Rules, would end up costing Lando the championship at the very last moment.

In some ways, Lando almost feels bad for him. Gabriel has been relentlessly criticised for that move – by the press, by other drivers, and by the team itself. Lando knows that Zak Brown had been pushing for his replacement as early as Monza, floating names like Alex Dunne in response to his impertinence, but Andrea Stella had, after considerable deliberation, convinced him to reconsider.

A decision that has drawn widespread criticism – not only because McLaren is now left with a driver line-up of two people who do not trust each other in the slightest, but also because there are those who believe that this kind of insubordination should not be rewarded.

Lando knows that if he could, Gabriel would undo what happened in Monza in a heartbeat – not least because of the sheer amount of vile, hateful disdain being heaped on him, both online and in the press. And Lando is almost certain he’s already gearing up for some kind of apology tour, trying to salvage what’s left of his reputation, trying not to go down in history as the guy who cost a very likeable bloke a very deserved maiden title over one moment of heated petulance.

There are no winners here. Well, except Max Verstappen.

Who is, of course, also the only one singing Gabriel’s praises to the press, going on about his upstanding moral character, about not backing down to team politics, about refusing to play along in what he calls a race clearly fixed in Lando’s favour – something that had made Lando want to lunge at him across the paddock and break his nose.

Lando slathers a generous amount of moisturiser onto his face, watching himself in the mirror as he does it, as though he could somehow will the dark circles under his eyes into submission. They’ve become chronic at this point. 

Back in his bedroom, he pulls on a pair of boxers and slides under the covers, his hair still damp against the pillow. He scrolls through Grindr again, aimlessly, window-shopping more than anything – before switching back to Discord, where there is still no fucking message waiting for him.

He’s got half a mind to text OP at this point. He clicks onto his profile through one of the public channels and sees that he’s online. So why the hell hasn’t he messaged him yet?

Lando sighs. OP’s probably staring at the MCSR leaderboard right now, mourning his impulse decision to spend a chunk of his valuable coach points on someone who is, essentially, a complete and utter noob. 

He exits Discord and switches to his clock app to set an alarm for no later than eight; otherwise, Max will be on his ass again for showing up to their meeting looking like he just rolled out of bed. There’s something with a notary tomorrow. Lando isn’t entirely sure what it’s about, but as co-owner he has to be there, and he trusts Max to handle that kind of thing.

After setting the alarm, he opens Twitter one last time, just to check. He searches for OP81’s account and immediately notices the small tag – Follows You. After a brief moment of hesitation, he taps Follow Back, then starts scrolling through OP’s tweets. There hasn’t been much lately, just the occasional link to Twitch when he goes live. Lando checks anyway, but there’s nothing about last Sunday either. Nothing about the championship, about him coming up short. After a moment, he decides he’s glad about that. Though it probably also means OP doesn’t follow him as closely anymore.

Out of instinct, he clicks into OP’s liked tweets. And there it is.

He doesn’t even have to scroll. It’s right at the top, stretching on for what feels like three entire pages. Tweet after tweet lamenting, bemoaning, outright deploring the result of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, and the fact that Lando Norris did not, in fact, become World Champion. He’s liked an absurd number of them.

Lando doesn’t want to react to it, but he still finds himself smiling.

Well. That settles that. OP clearly has a very definite opinion on how things turned out – which, if Lando isn’t completely off, probably means he’s still a fan after all.

Out of curiosity, he clicks back onto OP’s profile and opens the DMs, half-expecting to find some old trace of that quiet fixation – and, indeed, there is. Just a string of messages, the last one sent roughly a year and a half ago. Lando bites down on his knuckles to stop the grin from splitting his face clean in two.

your frames dropped every time you turned in fights

10/11/20 – 10:01 pm

 

looks CPU limited

10/11/20 – 10:01 pm

 

lowering view distance should help

10/11/20 – 10:02 pm

 

it looked annoying

10/11/20 – 10:02 pm

He scrolls further, and it becomes clear that OP had simply been using these one-sided DMs to comment on Lando’s technical issues during streams and offering fixes, – messages Lando had never seen, of course. At the time, OP had just been another blank profile picture occasionally liking or replying to his tweets.

The last message comes from May 2024. The day Lando won his first Grand Prix.

hey :] i know you’re never going to see this, and me typing it is kind of useless – borderline embarrassing and parasocial, even – but congrats. genuinely so, so happy for you, dude. you deserved it. i’ve followed you loosely since f3, and honestly, you have what it takes to be wdc one day. you’ll see :]

06/05/24 – 02:02 pm

That’s where it ends.

Lando turns onto his side, pressing his face into the pillow for a moment, biting down on his finger. God.

There’s something about it. About the fact that this clearly very talented dude – someone with his own life, his own skills to hone – had taken the time to type all of this out into a void. To offer him fixes to problems Lando was having on stream. To send him something this personal on a day that had meant so much.

Lando, of course, knows that this message isn’t meant for him. OP couldn’t possibly have known he would ever see it, so he sent it for himself. To leave something behind. To mark the fact that he had been there that day, had watched Lando win for the first time – and that it had, in some way he can’t fully make sense of, touched him.

They’re probably around the same age, Lando thinks. Maybe OP sees him as someone to loosely mirror, someone whose life runs along a parallel track, hitting milestones at roughly the same time.

Maybe that’s why he sent it. To mark the moment Lando reached that goal – and that now it was OP’s turn to follow suit. Lando wonders if he did. If he reached whatever goal he had set for himself, chasing after that same kind of milestone.

He closes Twitter and switches back to YouTube, scrolling through OP’s channel. As he’s already noticed, the videos are mostly unedited speedruns, most of them under twenty minutes. Lando leans back against his pillow, pulling the sheets up to his nose, and clicks on one at random.

Immediately, things start happening on screen that don’t make sense to him. This isn’t the Minecraft he used to play with his brother. There’s an overlay of numbers and stats, some kind of pie chart, a greyed-out table in the corner. OP doesn’t even go for a tree to gather wood like you normally would. Instead, he runs straight into the ocean and dives down to a shipwreck, looting it in less than ten seconds.

He doesn’t speak at first, but Lando can hear faint clicking in the background, which means the mic is on. And sure enough – about five minutes in, already deep in the Nether – OP starts talking, tossing gold ingots at piglins and complaining under his breath.

“Fuck me, man,” he drawls, his accent stretching the words. “This is like my third lava housing in seven matches. This game really hates me today.”

It’s the only time he speaks for the entire run. Lando watches it all.

Lando scrolls further and clicks on another video, titled “set seed glitchless WR attempt, PB, sub 7 + hand cam.” It has over one and a half million views, and he opens it out of sheer curiosity, still not entirely sure what half of that even means.

This time, there’s still no facecam – but a hand cam. A top-down view of OP’s hands.

The comment section is split down the middle in a way that’s impossible to miss. Some people are going on about his gameplay – his clutch, his reflexes, the way he seems to make the right decision on instinct. And then there’s… the other half.

One comment reads: women of culture, we meet again.

It has almost two thousand likes. It takes Lando a second to understand what they’re talking about.

His hands.

He looks back at the video, properly this time, and realises – yeah. They’re actually… nice.

He finds himself watching them more closely now. The way they move across the keyboard, quick and precise, almost effortless. The way they hover, then strike, then shift again, everything fluid, controlled. Tendons moving faintly under pale skin.

There’s a bracelet on his wrist – one of those friendship ones – half-hidden beneath a plain sports watch.

Lando forces himself to close the window, then clicks back onto OP’s profile, where he now notices a second channel linked – one with VODs. He opens it immediately, and to his quiet delight, it’s filled with supercut highlights from his streams. When he clicks on one at random, he’s instantly met with his voice.

So he does talk on stream. Quite a lot, actually – just not when he’s attempting a world record run.

Before Lando can keep watching, though, he switches back to Discord to check for a message.

Nothing. The same blank, gaping emptiness in his chat with OP.

So, fuck it. If OP won’t make the first move, he will. He’s got the upper hand here, anyway. Doesn’t he?

landonorris

feeling buyer’s remorse?

That’s all he sends. 

He’d meant to write something less snippy, something a little more casual, but it’s late, he’s tired, and he’s just spent the last two hours digging through every corner of OP’s online presence. 

That’s enough. It’s time to go to bed. Time to leave this whole Minecraft thing alone for a bit.

He closes Discord, turns onto his side – and within two lazy, unfocused swipes, he finds himself back on YouTube.

Lando presses his teeth into his lower lip as he clicks on another random video from OP’s VOD channel, plugs in his phone, and sets it down beside him, dimming the screen.

There’s something oddly soothing about his voice.

He realises it just as sleep begins to creep in – slow, syrupy and heavy. It’s low in a way that settles somewhere deep in his chest, like it belongs there.

OP is ranting about… flies, maybe?… while he’s grinding runs. Lando can’t quite tell. He’s too tired to follow any of it properly. But the sound of it – the steady clicking, the low cadence of his voice, the warmth of that accent dragging gently through each word – blends together into something that feels almost hypnotic.

It pulls him under.

He’s out like a light, and dreams of ghostlike fingers moving across a keyboard, of a warm undercurrent in a raspy, sarcastic voice; fragments of a man he doesn’t yet know.

IV.

His body jolts him awake before the alarm has a chance to do its job. It’s still dark outside, and when he turns his phone toward him, he sees he’s got four minutes left anyway before it would’ve gone off.

He knows immediately why he woke up. 

It’s been a week.

A full week since he lost the championship to the man who had seemingly come out of nowhere – and the memory hits him all at once, dull and physical, like his body hasn’t quite processed it yet.

“Fuck Gabriel Bortoleto,” he mutters, the usual morning mantra, before reaching for his phone again.

He scrolls through his notifications, dragging down the panel, and there it is – sitting at the bottom, because he doesn’t have Discord notifications turned on. He taps it before his eyes have even properly focused.

OP81 sent at 6:11 am

oh no, i’m so sorry, dude. didn’t mean to leave you hanging, haha.

 

OP81

when do you have time to go over specs? i’m like… free throughout. but i figure a busy guy like you is on a bit of a schedule.

 

OP81

i figured we’d only do your set-up today, off-stream. maybe get to know each other a bit so maybe streaming isn’t as awkward.

 

OP81

but if you don’t have time that’s cool too.

 

OP81

generally, how much time do you think you can spare for training? two hours a day? that would be the minimum for this to not end in humiliation for both of us, i think, haha.

 

OP81

okay, sorry for spamming. it’s the ass crack of dawn where you live, so you’re probably asleep.

 

OP81

let me know about your availability.

And then – one more message, almost fifteen minutes later, if the timestamp is anything to go by.

OP81

and uh, no. i don’t feel any buyer’s remorse. i think you’re an asset actually. we can win this.

Lando rubs his eyes, still struggling to focus on the messages. They feel swollen from too little sleep – and from the fact that he’s probably been drinking a bit too much these past few days, which always leaves his eyes puffy in the morning.

He decides to leave the messages for now and rolls out of bed. He’s shivering in his boxers, immediately reaching for a cashmere cardigan and a pair of white socks before trudging into the kitchen to make himself a coffee on his portafilter machine. Just as he cleans out the grounds, his eight o’clock alarm goes off in his hand, loud enough to make him flinch and drop the container like a startled cat.

“Fuck,” he mutters under his breath, relieved the powder didn’t spill across the spotless granite floor. He silences the alarm and leans against the counter, heart thudding in his chest.

God. He’s been especially jumpy lately.

Maybe he should stop drinking so much caffeine.

He probably should cut it back altogether – the off-season would be the perfect time to rein in some of the bad habits he picks up during the final stretch of the season – but then again, why deny himself one of the few things Jon, his coach, actually lets him have, just because it sometimes makes him feel like there’s a pigeon flapping around inside his chest?

Lando waits for the machine to heat up and scrolls through his messages, finally replying to his brother about this whole Minecraft renaissance. He types something about getting on a game together, inviting their sisters too. For old times’ sake.

Even as he sends it, he knows it’s not going to happen.

They’re all too busy now. His brother has a wife and two kids, Flo’s tied up with her own competitions, and Cisca is always doing something. He tries not to dwell on it.

Instead, he opens Discord again, scrolling back to OP’s messages – this time actually reading them, not just skimming. Then he flips over to his calendar. There’s a meeting with Max until eleven, lunch after that with Max, Pietra, and Magui, and then the gallery opening later with his wonderful fake girlfriend.

He exhales, thumbs hovering over the keyboard for a moment. 

Then he types:

landonorris

no worries! figured u were busy haha.

 

landonorris

i’m free after 4 pm, central european time. no clue what that is in your timezone. if you live in australia you’ll probably be asleep by then.

He sets his phone down on the counter, face down, and runs a blank shot of hot water through the portafilter. Then he walks over to the window, staring out at the dull, overcast morning.

Monaco isn’t particularly pretty without the sun. Which is, all things considered, a pretty fucking fitting metaphor for Lando’s life. Probably why he lives here.

He slides the balcony door open and steps outside in his deeply questionable outfit – fuzzy cardigan, boxers, socks – and leans against the railing, listening for the ocean. He never actually hears it. The city sits between him and the water like a wall of noise, a constant buffer. 

After a minute, he gives up. It’s too cold. He steps back inside, shuts the door behind him, and drifts back into the kitchen, checking his phone out of habit.

And, well. That’s new. A message.

It has come through quietly, stacked at the bottom of his screen, since he still doesn’t have notifications turned on.

OP81

my sleep schedule’s fucked anyway. ur 4 pm works for me :]

Ah. There it is again. That weird, boxy smile. Lando hasn’t seen anyone use :] in at least seven years.

He taps into the chat, half-expecting more, but there’s nothing else. So he just reacts with a thumbs-up and sets his phone aside, turning back to his coffee grinder.

It lets out a noise so violently unpleasant it makes him wince. A grinding, screeching cacophony he hates with a passion – despite the fact that he regularly sits in machines louder than anything engineering has any right to produce.

He’s halfway through scrolling Instagram when his phone locks up; Max’s face taking over the entire screen.

Lando sighs and accepts the call.

“Yeah?” he says, yawning.

“Good morning to you too,” Max replies, sounding faintly amused. “Didn’t expect you to pick up that quickly.”

“You thought I was still asleep, didn’t you?” Lando says, putting him on speaker as he tamps down the coffee.

“Considering it’s 8:06, I assumed you were still in your first snooze cycle, yeah,” Max says. At least he’s honest. “What’s with the early morning enthusiasm? Turning over a new leaf?”

“Enthusiasm?” Lando scoffs. “I’m just awake. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

“Right,” Max says, his voice trailing off. “I have to admit, this call doesn’t really have a purpose beyond making sure you’re awake. Which you clearly are. So–”

“You’re a control freak, Max Fewtrell, you know that?” Lando grins, leaning against the counter, absently chewing at his thumbnail.

“Well, Lando Norris, you make me one,” Max says, sounding deeply exasperated. “I’ll pick you up in thirty minutes.” A beat. “Please make sure you’re dressed by then.”

“I am already dressed.” Lando can’t hold back his grin. “Do you know what I’m wearing right now?”

“Do I want to know?”

“White socks, boxers, and a cardigan.”

Max sighs, long-suffering. “I hate that I even have to say this, but please don’t be wearing that when I get there.”

“Spoilsport,” Lando pouts. He stretches against the counter like a cat before turning back to the phone. “Oh, Max, you know what happened?”

“Hm?”

“OP finally texted me.” He grins. “Kind of spammed me, actually. His messages read like a stream of consciousness. But he was weirdly self-aware about it. And apologised straight away.”

Max laughs. “I’m not surprised. He probably creamed his pants, considering he’s a fucking fanboy.”

For some reason, the phrasing – crude as it is, and used often enough to have lost most of its original weight – still makes Lando flush a little.

“We’re meeting at four,” he says instead. “Off-stream. Going over specs.”

“I’m actually kind of curious what he’s like,” Max says after a moment. “I watched some of his streams the past few weeks, once I knew I’d be in the Midoffs. He’s impressive. I mean, they all are – I could never grind a game like that – but he’s genuinely entertaining.”

Lando swallows, pointedly not thinking about the fact that he fell asleep to one of OP’s VODs last night.

“He seems nice enough,” he says after a moment. “Maybe a bit young. Probably younger than me. You know how young these streamers are. I still can’t believe Tubbo is only twenty-one.”

“You were nineteen when you started in F1,” Max reminds him. “Trust me, people said the same thing about you.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Lando exhales. “I followed him on Twitter yesterday. There were… a lot of DMs.”

Max makes a strangled noise. “Oh my god. No way. I’m seated. Tell me everything.”

That reaction alone makes Lando regret bringing it up. Max makes it sound like OP is just some annoying little fanboy – and sure, Lando hasn’t exactly given him reason to think otherwise. But there had been something… sincere about those messages. Something he doesn’t feel like sharing. Something he wants to keep to himself.

“Nothing dramatic,” Lando says with a shrug. “He just kept sending fixes for all the issues I had on stream over the years. Actually good ones, too.”

“No way,” Max laughs, delighted. “A backseat gamer.”

“In a very low-key way,” Lando says, still faintly irritated by how quickly Max turns it into a joke. Whatever.

He stretches, groaning. “I’ve gotta go. Otherwise you’ll be on my ass for not being ready.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Max says, letting him go without much resistance.

Lando ends the call, finishes his coffee, and flips from Instagram to Twitter – and the first thing that greets him is a fresh tweet from OP. Four hours old already, and sitting on a decent number of likes.

OP81

@opeightyone

asking for a friend: how the fuck do you delete twitter dms. please this is important. please.

Lando actually guffaws, nearly spitting out his coffee. He scrolls through the replies. 

One of his fans has already chimed in: does this have something to do with a certain world class athlete following you?

OP’s reply sits right underneath it.

:(

Lando exhales through a grin, something soft and amused slipping through despite himself. He gives the tweet a like before continuing to scroll.

His timeline has already adjusted to the deep dive he went on earlier, and now it’s flooded with tweets about him joining the Midoffs – clips of the draft, reactions to OP picking him immediately, speculation threads. A few streaming news accounts have picked it up too, including Dexerto, running headlines about the whole thing.

Apparently, him following OP has already netted the guy thirty thousand new followers overnight.

Objectively a smart move from OP, someone writes under the Dexerto tweet. Norris fans are obviously going to migrate if he treats their baby well. It’s basically free promo. Surprised none of the other streamers thought of it.

Another reply counters it almost immediately: Nah, you don’t get how competitive these guys are. Sure, clout’s nice – more viewers means more donos means more sponsors – but most of them are in it for the game. OP might’ve gained on the fame side with Norris, but he’s almost definitely going to lose for it. And that’s going to hit his ranking. If they drop early, he could lose his elo lead to Infume.

Lando scrolls a little further, realising quickly that the speedrunning community is split cleanly down the middle – half of them praising the move, the other half convinced it’s a mistake.

Same as always. Different game, same people.

Lando’s been in that world since he was nineteen. He knows better than to take any of it seriously.

He finishes his coffee, heads back to his room, and changes into something a little more presentable before drifting into the bathroom to start his skincare routine. It’s boring as hell, as always, so he props his phone against the mirror and pulls up the VOD he fell asleep to last night.

Turns out, OP was ranting about flies.

Apparently they’re a full-blown menace wherever he lives – which Lando still doesn’t know for sure, but it’s almost definitely Australia, judging by the heat he keeps complaining about and the fact the video’s only two weeks old.

Lando starts shaving, half-listening, half-watching – and ends up laughing out loud more than once as OP’s rant about a fruit fly infestation escalates into something borderline Shakespearean, all while he’s casually beating a Blaze to death with a stick.

Yeah. Okay. He has to admit it. 

He’s kind of charmed by him.

And the more he listens, the more certain he becomes that they might actually get along.

So when he’s finally done in the bathroom, he switches back to Discord and types:

landonorris

be honest. did you take so long to text me because you were scouring the internet for any traces of your fanship toward me?

He hasn’t even put on his shoes yet when he checks his phone again to see if Max is already waiting downstairs – and notices OP has replied almost instantly. He’s basically spawn-camping the chat.

OP81

that might’ve had something to do with it

 

landonorris

lmao, so for the record – so this doesn’t get weird between us: i did see your dms. and your chat logs

 

OP81

that is unfortunate news

 

landonorris

please don’t tell me you’re actually worried about that. they were nice messages, dude. i appreciated them. even if i only got to read them now

 

OP81

it was actually worse than i remembered. i was genuinely considering deactivating

 

landonorris

shut up, man. they weren’t bad

 

landonorris

i’m honoured you think i’m wdc material though. should i send some pundits your way who DEFINITELY disagree? maybe you can convince them

With that, he locks his phone and slips it into the pocket of his coat, already four minutes late for Max.

He doesn’t check it again – not during the meeting, not during the extended lunch with Max, Magui, and Pietra afterwards. And, if he’s being honest, it restores his energy more than he expected.

It always does. Spending time with his friends.

In those darker stretches, when everything feels tight and suffocating and getting out of bed already takes more effort than it should, he tends to forget that. Forget that racing isn’t everything – even if it’s a massive part of his life.

Even if it’s the part he loves most. Especially when it doesn’t always love him back.

The gallery opening with Magui is fun, too. They’re there to support a friend of hers, who’s practically glowing at the fact that a Formula One driver showed up to her vernissage. Lando has no idea what he’s looking at half the time, but that hardly matters. He and Magui drift through the exhibition together, playing at being art critics, coming up with increasingly ridiculous interpretations until they’re both barely holding it together.

To everyone else, they must look completely, hopelessly in love.

The way they cling to each other. The breathless laughter. The way their outfits match just enough to look intentional.

And Lando revels in it – in the fact that no one knows it isn’t real.

This isn’t so bad, he thinks, glancing down at Magui as she smirks up at him, right there in the middle of the crowd. People move around them in slow, looping patterns, like a carousel, while the two of them stay anchored – held in place by the easy familiarity between them.

Maybe the pretending isn’t so bad. Not when it’s with someone like Magui.

This smart, warm, accomplished woman; full of strange little habits. The kind of person who can’t go five minutes without making an inappropriate joke to save her life – and who meets him exactly where he is, without ever talking down to him.

She clocks it immediately – the way he’s drifting to a softer place, somewhere a bit too close to sentimental – and stomps on his foot before he can spiral.

“Get yourself together, Lando Norris,” she mutters under her breath. “Or people are going to start engagement rumours, and as much as I love you, I will actually kill myself if anyone ever says that about me.”

He grins, lets himself be pulled back, and slips an arm around her waist instead. “Can we go? I’ve got an appointment.”

She raises her eyebrows, lips brushing his ear. “A dick appointment?”

Lando giggles, cheeks warming. “No, fuck you,” he murmurs back. “I’m getting my PC set up so Minecraft doesn’t blow up on me or whatever.”

“You’re such a nerd, oh my god,” she says, pinching his cheek. “My nerdy little boyfriend.”

“You’re going to hear me talk about Minecraft a lot over the next few weeks,” Lando says.

“No, I won’t,” Magui replies flatly. “Not if I cover my ears and go lalala.”

“Fuck you,” he shoots back, grin still there. He presses a quick kiss to the corner of her mouth – close enough to sell it – and pulls away. “I’m doing an Irish goodbye.”

“As you always do,” she calls after him. 

Lando throws her another kiss on his way out and heads for the stairs, already moving fast. It’s quarter to four.

On a good day, it takes twenty minutes to get back to his apartment from the city centre. Today is not a good day. Traffic is building, slow and stubborn, and he can already feel the minutes slipping.

As he jogs to the car, he checks his phone again. Nothing. The chat with OP is quiet.

He shrugs, sliding into the driver’s seat. Maybe he finally went to sleep. Good for him.

landonorris

might be 10 min late. traffic’s hell

By the time he’s buckled in, there’s already a reply.

OP81

sure np

Lando makes it home at five past. He’s at his desk by eight. His coat ends up somewhere on the floor of the streaming room as he boots up his PC, already cracking open another Monster. The familiar hiss cuts through the quiet. With one hand, he types:

landonorris

call?

 

OP81

yes

The call comes through almost immediately. Lando accepts it on his PC, rifling through a drawer for his headphones as the connection settles.

A faint crackle. Then–

“Hello?” 

“Hi,” Lando says, and he can’t quite stop the smile that slips onto his face.

V.

In countless stories about undying love and devotion – especially between people who don’t begin in the same place – there’s always that phone call at the very start.

The one that stretches on for hours, and begins as something practical, almost incidental, and then, somewhere along the way, it shifts, turns into something else entirely. Two people lingering, finding excuses, inventing reasons to keep talking long after there is anything left to say.

Lando has always found stories like that a little ridiculous.

He’s invariably been skeptical of the logistics alone. At some point, it has to get tiring, doesn’t it? Talking and talking and talking for hours on end – what is there even to say?

Maybe he’s always been a bit of a hater in that sense.

Because to him, those retellings of the first call – the one that somehow stretches into the early hours – have always felt like an attempt to legitimise something after the fact. A way of translating a connection into terms people recognise. Of saying: it was there all along. From the very beginning. From the moment the line connected, there was something inevitable about it. Something that outlasted everything else – the ache of headphones pressing into ears, the slow creep of hunger, the pull of sleep, the flicker of unstable connections or dying batteries.

Lando’s first call with Oscar lasts twelve hours.

He doesn’t recognise it for what it is at the time. He doesn’t even know Oscar’s name yet. As far as he’s concerned, the length of the call is purely practical – a byproduct of the sheer hassle of setting up a computer for Minecraft speedrunning over voice chat.

They’re done with that by seven in the evening, which is when a normal call would have ended.

But this call doesn’t.

By that point, Lando is on his third can of Monster, and the pigeon in his chest is back in full force – fluttering, restless, making him jittery as he watches OP take over his PC remotely.

He’s already asked how to open the console at least ten times, and OP – who insists on doing everything through directories like the absolute nerd he is – has long since given up trying to guide him through it verbally.

“I think we should boot up the game at least once,” OP says, his voice coming through Lando’s headphones just as Lando tosses the empty can somewhere behind him. It lands with a dull thud on the rug. “Just to make sure everything’s working properly for training. And I’d really like to set up your hotkeys.”

“Sure,” Lando says.

He hasn’t done much for the past few hours. Mostly just watched OP work – digging through his system, checking specs, pulling apart his GPU, CPU, everything. Lando’s watched him go through RAM allocation, tweak setting after setting until the whole thing feels like a different machine entirely.

They’ve moved on to mods after that. Performance tweaks. Brightness adjustments – something OP insists will be crucial for the actual gameplay.

He’s also, without hesitation, deleted the version of Minecraft Lando had already installed, explaining that speedrunners use an older version optimised for runs – effectively wiping out whatever little progress Lando had managed to scrape together.

Ruthless.

But: Lando has to admit it. He likes listening to him.

The way OP talks him through everything, step by step, explaining what he’s doing, why he’s doing it – turning the whole process into something almost methodical. Lando had asked him to do that at the start, mostly to fill the silence, to smooth over the awkwardness of the first few minutes.

Turns out, OP talks a lot when he knows what he’s doing, and when he is passionate about something.

Which is how Lando ends up on his fourth Monster by seven, mostly just listening.

He knows it’s a good sign – that everything OP explains actually makes sense to him, that it clicks in a way he hadn’t expected. And that OP is good at this. Really good.

But more than that – Lando can’t get enough of his voice.

The tone of it. The cadence. The way his accent drags certain words just slightly, softens others.

There are voices Lando can barely sit through without his mind drifting somewhere else, but this isn’t one of them. With OP, he’s locked in.

There’s a brief pause, and then OP’s voice comes through Lando’s headphones again faintly amused. “Well, do you want me to boot up the game, or are you going to try yourself?”

Lando scoffs. “Sorry, man. I’ve gotten so used to you putting training wheels on me that I didn’t even realise you’d given me permission to move my mouse again.”

He clicks his way to the Minecraft launcher, booting it up until the familiar loading screen fills his monitor. The sight hits him with a quiet rush of nostalgia, dragging him straight back to the hours he sank into this game as a kid.

“Crazy to be back,” Lando says after a moment, stretching out his shoulders before he moves to hit Start Game.

“When was the last time you actually played?” OP asks – and immediately yanks him back into the menu to rework his keybinds.

“McLaren made me do some promo stuff back when we had a graphics card sponsor,” Lando says, picking absent-mindedly at his lip. “But that doesn’t really count. Last time I properly played, I was, like, fifteen. With my brother and sisters.”

OP changes another setting that means absolutely nothing to Lando and doesn’t respond, so Lando fills the silence.

“And you? When did you start?”

“Basically as soon as the game came out of alpha,” OP says. “I was ten.”

Lando does the math automatically. “So you’re twenty-five now?”

There’s a beat – just enough to register. “Twenty-four, actually,” OP replies, sounding faintly sheepish. “My, uh… my birthday’s in April.”

“Ooh,” Lando says, immediately entertained. “Taurus?”

“Aries.” A scoff. “You believe in that stuff, do you?”

Lando laughs, unfazed. “Not religiously. But sometimes it kind of fits.” He leans back in his chair, slowly spinning. “You’re younger than me. I knew it.”

“How?” OP asks, scepticism creeping into his voice.

“Just a feeling,” Lando says, chewing on the drawstring of his hoodie. “You’ve got young vibes.”

“I’m literally eighteen months younger than you.”

Oh. Memorised his birthday, then?

Lando can’t help the small, satisfied smile that slips through, tongue pressing briefly against the inside of his cheek. God, this is way more fun than he expected.

Because somewhere along the way, he’s realised something else, too. OP might genuinely be one of the smartest people Lando has ever had a conversation with that lasted longer than five minutes – and that’s saying something, considering he spends most of his time surrounded by engineers who could probably build a car from scratch in their sleep.

There’s something about the way OP thinks. The quiet competence. The ease with which he solves every problem Lando’s chaotic, temperamental PC throws at him.

It leaves an impression. And still – knowing that someone like that, someone who could probably beat Lando at anything remotely brain-related with his hands tied behind his back, is intimidated by him… that he’s spent years following his career, rooting for him, getting swept up in it–

It does something to him. Something close to a quiet, private kind of elevation.

“And did you always speedrun?” Lando asks, while Oscar tweaks his keybinds in ways Lando doesn’t even attempt to follow.

“No,” OP says, sounding faintly amused. “God, no. I only started a few years ago. During the pandemic.”

“And then you got good quick.”

“Good,” OP echoes, like he’s weighing the word. “I guess.”

“Oh, don’t be modest. You’re more than good. I checked the leaderboard.” Lando lets the words linger, just a little deliberate. “Highest Elo. Most points.” A beat. “Top rank. Netherite.”

Silence. At the other end, OP’s mouse stops moving. There’s a faint shuffle – fabric against something – that the mic picks up.

“Yeah,” OP says after a moment. “I guess you could say that.”

“You’re like Max Verstappen, but for Minecraft speedrunning.”

Lando pushes it on purpose, curious how far he can go before OP folds. Turns out – not very far.

There’s another pause before OP replies, a little rough around the edges. “I don’t know. I’m more of a Lando Norris fan myself.”

Lando grins, slow and pleased. “Oh, really? Hadn’t noticed.”

“Shut up,” OP mutters.

Lando laughs, softer this time. “Come on. It’s charming as hell, OP. And you did spare me the humiliation you and your little council handed my dear friend Max.”

A sigh on the other end. “I felt bad for him,” OP admits. “I thought about picking him, but I didn’t want–” He cuts himself off.

Lando leans forward, eyebrows lifting. “You didn’t want two bad players dragging you down? Is that what you’re saying?” He’s grinning now, openly. “So why me, then? Eight points, OP. That’s a lot of faith.” A pause. “I read a couple of takes from people who actually know what they’re talking about, and even they couldn’t figure it out.”

“I was making an investment,” OP says, calm. “Because we’re going to win.”

Lando lets out a short breath. “OP, I appreciate the confidence, but–”

“We’re going to win,” OP repeats, completely unmoved.

Lando huffs out a laugh. “Alright, then. We’re winning.” He leans back in his chair. “Wouldn’t mind having at least one championship this year.”

The reaction is immediate. A strangled sort of sound on the other end – like OP wasn’t expecting him to go there so easily. To say it out loud.

Lando shrugs it off. “What? I can take the piss out of myself. I’m actually quite good at that.”

“Are you?” OP pushes, a note of scepticism threading through his voice. “Because the post-race interviews didn’t exactly scream self-aware. I mean – I get it, obviously. I can’t even imagine what that must’ve felt like. And then having to stand there and answer questions about it.” A beat. “But you were absolutely killing people with your eyes every time someone brought up Monza.”

Lando laughs, full and unguarded. “Oh, you caught that?”

“I think everyone did,” OP says – and Lando can hear the smile now.

It changes his voice. Warms it. Slows it down, like it’s spilling instead of snapping. 

Lando rolls his eyes, though he’s smiling. “Yeah, well. It was still fresh. And my absolute nightmare of a teammate was hovering somewhere nearby, and I knew I still had to go celebrate the constructors with him, so, yeah. I wasn’t exactly in a forgiving mood.”

A quiet exhale. “You don’t have to justify it,” OP says. “I get it. Honestly, I think I was in a worse mood about it than you were. At least part of the time.”

Lando takes a slow sip of his Monster, grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Oh, were you?”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” OP says, almost offhand, “but my mood kind of hinges on how well you do on race weekends.”

“Oh, yeah?” Lando grins. “Why’s that?”

A small pause. “I don’t know. Why is anyone a fan of anything?” OP says. “I guess I just found you early. Found you relatable. And now I’m emotionally invested in however many points you score each weekend.”

“Hm.” Lando clicks idly through the menus, now that OP seems to be done with the setup. “Have you ever been to a race? Is there one near you?”

“Melbourne, I guess,” OP says.

There it is. Confirmation of something Lando suspected all along. “How far?”

He knows how big Australia is – knows that “nearby” can mean something entirely different over there.

“Like… two kilometres?”

Lando sits up straight. “Oh, so you’re from Melbourne?”

He’s already pulling up a map on his phone, zooming in on the area around Albert Park, as if he might somehow narrow OP down to a street.

There’s a beat of silence. Then–

“Yeah,” OP says, a little more carefully now. “I’ve never actually told anyone that. Most people just know I’m somewhere in Australia.”

“Don’t worry,” Lando says, still dragging his fingers across the map. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

“I guess that means I get something in return,” OP replies, and there’s a flicker of something more teasing there now. “You know. To even it out. So I’ve got something to hold over you.”

Lando raises his eyebrows, amused. Forward. He didn’t expect that. 

He takes another sip of his Monster. “I don’t even know what I could tell you that you don’t already know,” he admits. “You know I live in Monaco. That’s hardly breaking news.”

“Is it actually just for the taxes?”

Lando laughs. “Yeah. I mean – what do you want me to say? It is.” He pauses, then adds, “Also because most of my friends are here. And I’m barely home anyway. But, yeah. Mostly taxes.”

“I’ll take it,” OP says. “You admitting to tax evasion should be enough to keep my secret safe.”

Lando huffs out a laugh, leaning back in his chair. “So you go to the race every year, then, if it’s that close to your house?”

There’s another pause. Slightly longer this time. Then OP clears his throat.

“I changed your keybinds,” he says, just a little too quickly. “Do you want to run a test world? See how it feels? I can show you some inventory management stuff. How to set up your hotbar properly.”

Lando blinks, caught off guard by the shift. “Sure,” he says slowly. “Do I just… start a new world?”

“Yeah,” OP says. “I’m going to guide you through it.”

It turns out there’s a massive difference between playing Minecraft with your siblings after school and doing it like this. Competitively.

OP is obsessively precise about even the smallest things – like how Lando arranges his hotbar, or how his inventory needs to look at different stages of a run. He drills him for the better part of an hour, throwing items at him and forcing him to react instantly – slotting them into the right place, equipping them fast enough – or getting punished for it.

A loud buzzer blasts through Lando’s headphones every time he messes up, making him flinch so hard he nearly jumps out of his chair.

“And you’re dead,” OP says, flatly.

Buzz.

“You’ve fumbled the clutch.”

Buzz.

“Piglin’s got you.”

Buzz.

“You placed a birch block instead of a door. You drowned.”

Buzz.

“You just hit a Blaze with a piece of bread.”

Buzz.

Lando yanks his headphones down a notch, groaning in frustration. “I once saw you kill a Blaze with a stick.”

A beat.

“You once saw me kill a Blaze with a stick?” OP repeats, and Lando can practically hear the raised eyebrow. “Where exactly did you see that?”

Lando laughs. “You think I didn’t do my research on you?”

There’s some faint clicking on the other end. A pause. Then– 

“Ha. I knew it.”

“What?” Lando swivels lazily in his chair, grin tugging at his mouth.

“You watched the VOD from two weeks ago, didn’t you?”

“I might have,” Lando shrugs. “You think I wouldn’t check you out? Especially after those very heartfelt DMs?”

“You’re insufferable,” OP says.

But there’s something off about it – not irritation. 

Embarrassment. It flattens his voice just slightly, strips it of its usual ease.

“Says the guy torturing me with a buzzer,” Lando shoots back.

“I’ve learned that negative reinforcement is more effective for building habits,” OP replies.

“Not for me,” Lando says immediately. “I need constant praise. That’s just how I work. Honestly, you compliment me once and I’ll probably love you forever.”

There’s a small pause. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Please do,” Lando says, leaning back and letting his hands fall away from the keyboard. His fingers ache from the constant snapping between number keys – he’s used to fast inputs, sure, but this is different. Much less forgiving.

“Alright,” OP says after a moment, something amused slipping back into his voice. “Try again. I’ll… attempt positive reinforcement.”

And so they do – and Lando isn’t sure what’s changed. Whether it’s the training beginning to take hold, the caffeine threading focus through his veins, or the shift in OP himself – the absence of that relentless buzzer, replaced instead by a different approach. Praise, maybe. Or whatever his version of it amounts to.

When Lando manages to slot the right items in place within a split second, OP rewards him with the occasional, “Good job,” or, “Faster than I expected. Nice.”

It’s not nearly the level of praise Lando claims to need to function – but he likes the way it sounds in OP’s voice. Careful. Slightly reluctant. Like someone who isn’t used to handing out compliments at all.

They move on to inventory sorting after that.

Lando joins a private server, where OP teleports him into different stages of a run, flooding his inventory with complete junk that he then has to sort through as quickly as possible.

OP demonstrates first, sharing his screen – and Lando actually has to bite his lip a little when he sees it.

It’s ridiculous. Two seconds, maybe. Everything cleaned up, perfectly arranged.

“Fuck, that’s fast,” Lando mutters. “I’ll never be able to do that.”

“I play eight hours a day,” OP says, completely deadpan.

Lando blinks. “You do?”

“Yeah.” A pause. He almost sounds embarrassed. “I do.”

Lando tilts his head, watching the screen. “Do you, uh… do anything else?”

There’s a small silence. Then–

“I, uh… surf.”

“Like, on water?” Lando asks.

A quiet snort. “Yeah, Lando. Like, on water.”

“That’s so fucking Australian of you,” Lando laughs, still wrestling with the seven glass panes OP has somehow forced into his inventory. He shift-clicks blindly, trying to throw them out, half guessing which slots are even occupied. “The surfing, I mean.”

“I live right by the ocean,” OP says, who is genuinely just trolling him at this point – especially considering half the junk in Lando’s inventory isn’t even visible. “Usually I go early. Mornings. Before it gets crowded.”

“Are you good?”

“I’m not winning any medals anytime soon,” OP replies dryly.

Lando tries to run from him – OP’s Minecraft avatar hovering above in creative mode, an absolute menace, dropping items and generally making his life miserable. The skin is simple: light blue, a black 81 stamped across the back. It hangs there above him like a threat.

“So you play Minecraft and you surf,” Lando sums up. “Anything else?”

“Not really,” OP says. “I get emotionally terrorised by Formula 1 every other weekend, but besides that…” A pause. “Isn’t that enough?”

“So streaming’s your full-time job?”

“Basically.”

“Basically?” Lando presses.

A soft snort. “It is. My full-time job.”

Lando tries to dig himself into the ground to escape, but before he can even get two blocks down, he’s yanked back up – teleported straight into another inventory full of garbage.

“You’re not a very open person, are you, OP?”

“I don’t show my face on the internet,” OP replies, casually dropping anvils on him from above. “What do you think?”

One of them lands. Lando’s health plummets instantly.

“Oi, stop that,” he groans. “Or at least give me some food next time you decide to ruin my life.”

There’s the sound of typing; and suddenly, his health snaps back to full.

“Or that,” Lando mutters, slumping back in his chair.

“So do you actually look like the fanart people make of you?” Lando asks, sighing as he opens his inventory and finds – again – seven stacks of chicken eggs sitting there.

OP snorts. “No.”

“So you’re not some dainty, dark-haired anime boy with big soulful eyes?” Lando starts clearing it out, shift-clicking through the mess.

“Ha. No.”

“So, no dark hair?”

“No.”

“Blonde?”

“Also no.”

Lando hums. “Is it darker than mine? Or lighter?”

“Lighter,” OP says. A pause. “Are you trying to distract me with all these questions so I stop refilling your inventory?”

Lando grins. “Maybe I just want to know what you look like.”

“I’m not telling you,” OP replies, a quiet laugh in his voice. “Many have tried.”

“Why?” Lando pouts. “Are you ugly?”

“Oh, terribly,” OP drawls.

“Let me be the judge of that.”

“Absolutely not.”

And, as if to punish him, Lando is instantly teleported straight into lava.

“Oi!” he yelps, the sound of his character burning filling his headphones. “What was that for?”

“Nosiness,” OP says calmly. “It will not be tolerated. You already know too much.”

“I know nothing.”

“You know I surf,” OP shoots back. “I’ve never told that to anyone online before.”

“Oh, wow. Deeply personal,” Lando teases – but he can’t quite suppress the flicker of satisfaction that runs through him at that.

By the end of this call, he’ll know what he looks like. He’s already decided.

“It is,” OP insists. “And I only told you because I got embarrassed when you implied all I do is play Minecraft.”

“I see,” Lando says, clicking Respawn – only to find himself enclosed in an obsidian box. 

Of course, he’s spawn-trapped him. The oldest trick in the book.

Above him, OP hovers in creative mode, raining arrows down like some kind of vengeful god.

“So embarrassment is the trick, then?” Lando asks, already trying to punch his way through the obsidian with his bare hands. “That’s how I get you to tell me things?”

OP groans. “God. I shouldn’t have told you that.”

“It’s too easy with you, OP,” Lando says, grinning, even as his health gets shredded again.

“Easy?” OP scoffs. “You can’t even get out of a box. You’re trapped in there forever.”

“This is not a fair fight,” Lando complains. “You’ve got admin powers, I’m in survival with nothing, and you keep killing me before I can even break a block.”

“Well, that’s what you get for being nosy.”

Lando laughs. “I wasn’t being nosy. I was making a friend.”

He respawns – only to get two-shot immediately, the death screen flashing up again.

“Oh?” OP says, amused. “You’re trying to be my friend now?”

Lando spawns again, immediately hammering at the same block. “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

“Or,” OP counters, “you just don’t like the fact that there’s something you don’t know.”

Lando grins wider. “Both can be true.” 

A beat.

“Oh, you’re not slick,” OP says. “Is this you trying to play into the whole parasocial thing?”

“I don’t even know your name,” Lando shoots back, dying again mid-sentence. “That’s hardly fair.”

“I’ve known Feinberg for almost five years,” OP says. “He has no idea what I’m called.”

“But it starts with an O, right?” Lando says, respawning – and immediately getting one-shot again.

“I’m not disclosing anything.”

“Please,” Lando says. “I’ll do anything.”

OP laughs, low and disbelieving. “You’ll do anything to find out the name of someone you just met? I’m starting to think this is a power thing for you.”

“You think so little of me,” Lando sulks. “I can’t be your friend if I don’t even know your name.”

“Well, what if I don’t want to be your friend?”

He’s teasing – Lando can hear it in the softness of his voice, the way it dips just slightly at the end.

“Then you’ll break my heart,” Lando says easily, respawning again.

“Don’t put your heart on the line that quickly, then,” OP shoots back – and Lando is almost certain there’s the faintest hint of a squeak in his voice. “Has your mother never told you not to befriend strange men on the internet?”

“I’m a big boy,” Lando quips. “I make my own bad decisions now.”

“Fine,” OP says. “I’ll tell you my name if you manage to get out of that obsidian box.”

Lando freezes. “Oh my god – you would?”

OP sounds genuinely thrown. “Lando, it’s impossible,” he sighs. “I never said I’d stop shooting at you.”

“A duel, then?” Lando counters immediately. “I used to PvP with my brother all the time.”

“Sure,” OP says, clearly unconcerned. “A duel.”

“I get full diamond gear, and you’re naked.”

“We have Netherite now,” OP replies. “It’s better than diamond.”

“Yeah, I think I’ll manage with diamond.”

There’s a pause. A long one.

“Lando,” OP says slowly, “do you actually think you can beat me in PvP?”

“You’re a speedrunner, not a PVPer,” Lando shrugs. “Feels like we should be evenly matched.”

OP laughs – properly this time. It’s warm, a little rough around the edges, and Lando can’t help but notice how easy it sounds.

“Alright,” OP says. “Best of three. You win, I’ll tell you my name.”

The obsidian block above Lando disappears, and he immediately jumps out, triumphant.

“Ha! I tricked you. I’m out of the box,” he declares. “You said if I got out, you’d tell me your name. I got out. That counts.”

“Absolutely not,” OP snorts. “I would’ve let you out eventually anyway. Now come on. Let’s PvP.”

Lando groans. “OP, I stand no chance against you.”

“I thought you said we were evenly matched?”

“I said that to manipulate you into letting me out,” Lando admits cheerfully, biting at his lip as he waits for the reaction.

A scoff. “Oh, you’re trying to manipulate me now?” OP says. “Bold move; antagonising your coach before the tournament’s even started.”

Lando grins. “Alright, alright. I’ll stop.” He exhales, though there’s still a trace of sulk slipping into his voice. “I’ll just call you OP, then.”

“Thank you,” OP says, and Lando can’t quite place it. There’s something in his tone. Relief, maybe. Or something else. Something closer to disappointment, almost, like he hadn’t quite expected Lando to let it go that easily.

“I think we’re done here,” OP adds after a moment. “We’ve been at it for over four hours already. I don’t want to take up more of your time.”

“Oh, I’m free tonight,” Lando says, almost too casually. “If there’s anything else you want to go over before training starts tomorrow, I’ve got time.” He idly nudges his mouse, punching at the obsidian block he’s just escaped from. “Unless you want to sleep, obviously.”

There’s a pause. And Lando feels it.

This is where it should end.

They’ve done what they set out to do. The setup is finished, the keybinds are sorted, the basics are in place. There’s no real reason to keep going – not for OP, not for him.

This is the moment where they say goodbye. Where the call drops and the room folds back into silence.

For a second, Lando is sure that’s exactly what’s about to happen – that OP has already started easing them toward it with that polite line about not taking up his time, that he’s just waiting for the right moment to end it cleanly.

To leave Lando alone in the dim quiet of his room again.

“Guess we could do clutches,” OP says after a beat. “If you’re still up for it. It’s a useful skill. Especially for bastions. A lot of runs die because people slip off those walls.”

Lando doesn’t even try to hide it – he silently pumps his fist. “Perfect.”

Over the next two hours, Lando starts to physically regret his decision.

OP drills it into him relentlessly – water bucket clutches, boat clutches, ladder clutches, speedbridging, parkour along the sides of bastion walls. It’s relentless, punishing. And honestly, watching OP move through the game borders is unreal; he’s effortlessly fast, precise to a fault, never misplacing a block, completely in sync with everything happening on screen.

Lando isn’t rubbish either.

Like he’d assumed before even touching the game, his reaction time carries him through most of it. It doesn’t take long before he’s landing water bucket clutches consistently, and even though speedbridging feels unnatural at first – shift, place, shift, place in rapid succession – he starts to get a feel for it.

OP teaches him how to pillar, how to pearl clutch – and every time he demonstrates something, Lando asks him to do it again. And again. Not just to copy it, to memorise the timing, but because he can’t quite help himself.

It’s genuinely impressive.

It’s past ten by the time OP finally seems satisfied with what Lando’s doing. Lando groans, grabbing his phone to switch back to Discord before sliding off his chair and onto the carpet beside his desk, his back tight and aching.

“Fuck, man,” he groans, stretching against the floor, trying to work the stiffness out of his muscles. “How do you do this? Eight hours a day?”

“That’s why I surf,” OP replies, and Lando is pretty sure he can hear him eating something. “An hour in the morning, one in the evening. It helps. Otherwise I’d start seeing blocks everywhere.”

“Not bad,” Lando mutters, feeling his stomach rumble in quiet agreement.

He should probably hang up. Get food. Maybe text Max or Magui, see if they’re out somewhere – do something that pulls him back out of this strange tunnel he’s been in for the past few hours, trying to brute-force himself into becoming a Minecraft speedrunner overnight.

“You know what?” OP says. There’s a faint shift on the other end – chair, mic, something. “That was actually pretty impressive.”

Lando perks up immediately, like a dog catching a sound. “It was? You think so? I was doing well?”

OP laughs. “Oh, you weren’t kidding about the praise thing.”

“Oh, come on,” Lando pouts instantly. “Don’t play with my heart like that.”

There’s a small, awkward cough. 

“No, I mean it,” OP says, a little more firmly now. “That was genuinely very, very good, Lando. You’re a fast learner. And your reflexes are–” a brief pause, like he’s choosing his words “–actually kind of insane.”

“I wish you could see my face right now,” Lando says, turning his head toward the phone lying on the carpet beside him. “I think I’m actually blushing, OP.”

There’s the slightest delay. Then: “Send proof.”

Lando scoffs. “Absolutely not. You won’t even give me your name and now you want a picture of me flushed because you graced me with a compliment?”

Still – he opens his camera. Snaps a picture.

The flush in his cheeks isn’t just from the compliment. It’s the past hour of effort, the heat, the headphones digging in just enough to leave him looking a little more dishevelled than usual. A little more… unguarded.

“I can give you a hint,” OP says.

Lando pauses. It’s a good trade.

A picture he’s already taken – one where, frankly, he looks good, even like this – for something about OP; something no one else knows.

“Deal,” he says.

He fumbles slightly as he switches to Discord, fingers clumsy from the position he’s been lying in. The call timer catches his eye – six hours. Not bad.

Lando attaches the blushy, pouty photo and sends it, then locks his phone and drops it onto the carpet beside him, staring up at the ceiling.

There’s a pause, stretching suspiciously long. 

A faint click echoes through the call. Mute. Then unmute again.

“Sorry,” OP says when he comes back, his voice rougher now. “Thought someone was at the door.”

Lando turns his head again, narrowing his eyes slightly.

“Did I deliver?” he asks. “Can I have my hint now?”

“You may,” OP says, offering no comment on the picture.

That – unexpectedly – makes Lando second-guess it. He grabs his phone again, glancing at the photo. It’s… fine. He’s stretched out on the floor, shirt open, necklace slipped sideways against his throat. His cheeks are flushed, his eyes a little too bright – the manic edge he always gets when he’s fully locked into something.

It’s not bad. Just… not something he’d usually send. Whatever.

“As long as you hold up your end,” Lando mutters. “So?”

A beat. “OP are my initials.”

Lando groans, pushing himself upright. “Oh, come on. I already knew that.”

“No,” OP corrects, almost smug. “You suspected it. That’s different.”

Lando snorts, grabbing his phone as he gets to his feet and makes his way out of the room toward the kitchen, already checking cupboards in passing.

“Fine,” he says. “Am I allowed to guess now?”

“You can,” OP replies. “I’m just not going to confirm anything.”

Lando lets out a small, frustrated sound. “Come on, OP. Otherwise I’m just going to pick a random name that starts with O and call you that for the rest of the tournament.”

“How about no?” OP replies lightly. “Don’t get greedy. You already know more about me than anyone else does.”

“Yeah,” Lando scoffs, leaning against the counter as he opens the fridge – empty, of course. “That you live in Melbourne, you surf, your name starts with an O, and that you’re neither blonde nor dark-haired.”

“You could practically dox me with that,” OP jokes.

“Is that what you’re worried about?” Lando asks, nudging the fridge door shut with his hip. “I’ve got better things to do than that.”

“No,” OP says, a little more evenly. “I just like being anonymous.”

“Why?” Lando asks.

There’s a brief pause before OP answers. “I know this might be hard to understand for someone with eleven million followers on Instagram, but I like that no one knows me. No one knows my face.”

Lando snorts softly. “You think I race for the fame?”

“No,” OP says. “Of course not. I just… I just don’t think you really get it. And that’s fine.”

Lando exhales quietly, not quite willing to let that stand. “I do get it,” he says after a moment. “I’m not asking you to share anything publicly. I just want to know your name.”

“Why?”

They circle back to the same point, and Lando realises he doesn’t have a clean answer for it. It should be simple, but it isn’t. He just feels like it’s something he should know. After six hours of talking, of getting along this easily, it feels strange to still be held at arm’s length over something so basic. Maybe it’s the idea that OP sees him as a risk, as someone who might compromise that anonymity.

Which he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t tell anyone. He knows better than most what it means to have parts of your life that need to stay private.

“I don’t know,” he admits, running a hand through his hair. “A name just feels like the easiest thing to give. It’s the first thing you tell someone when you meet them face to face.”

“We didn’t meet face to face, though.”

Lando huffs out a quiet breath. There’s not much he can say to that.

“I feel like this is a matter of principle for you,” Lando says finally, sinking to his knees to rummage through the freezer for something edible. There’s a frozen pizza in there, which is honestly more than he could have hoped for, and besides, gaming and frozen pizza have always gone wonderfully together.

“Maybe,” OP says. “Or maybe the more you push for it, the funnier it gets to keep denying you.”

Lando preheats the oven, chewing on his lip. “You’re playing hard to get, I see. Well, I’ve got stamina, OP. I will make you give up your name.”

“There are approximately two hundred male names starting with O in the English language,” OP replies. “Find comfort in the fact that if you read through a list, you’re almost definitely going to hit it eventually.”

“Ha! So it is an English name?”

OP groans. “Fuck.”

“I’m telling you, your inability to shut up is going to cost you your name,” Lando says, gliding back to the freezer to pull out the cardboard box with the pizza inside. “Common name too, then, I guess.”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re not called the same thing as my brother?”

“No,” OP says. “It’s not Oliver.”

Lando grins. Oh, he’s a superfan, then. Not everyone knows his siblings’ names off the top of their head. He opens Google and types: top 200 english boy names starting with o.

“You’re googling, aren’t you?” OP sighs, as though he expected nothing less. Lando just hums. “That’s not going to help you. I’m not confirming or denying anything.”

“Owen?” Lando asks at random.

“Fuck no. I’m not fifty.”

Lando laughs, delighted. “Didn’t you just say you weren’t confirming or denying?”

“That was the plan,” OP says, long-suffering. “But I can’t have you thinking my name’s fucking Owen.”

Lando starts rattling off names from the list, but OP keeps his word and doesn’t answer any of them, even though Lando can feel how much restraint it takes him not to react to some of the more outlandish choices.

So Lando tries a different approach, sliding down the side of the counter until he’s sitting on the floor in front of the preheating oven.

“Do you have siblings?”

“Not telling you that.”

“Why not?”

A deep sigh. “It wouldn’t help you anyway. Their names are too different from mine. I’ve got the boring name, they’ve got the weirder ones.” He groans immediately, realising he has, once again, given away too much in an attempt to conceal something else.

God, Lando’s playing him like a fiddle.

“More than one sibling,” Lando says, biting his lip. “And you have the boring name, while they have the outlandish ones.” He starts tearing at the plastic wrap around the pizza. “You’re the oldest, aren’t you?”

There’s a pause. “What makes you think that?”

“It’s unlikely your parents would randomly start handing out a boring name at the end or in the middle of the line-up,” Lando says, grinning. “So you must have been first. They didn’t dare go too wild yet. Then your siblings came along, and they decided to really go for it.”

“It’s a good theory,” OP says, “but you’re forgetting another equally plausible explanation.”

“Which is?”

“I’m a dude and they’re all girls. People tend to be more creative with girls’ names.”

“Hmm.” Lando considers that. “That’s also a good theory. But I’m sticking with mine. I think it makes more sense. And you have older-brother vibes. Being so patient with me.”

“Well,” OP says, with a deep sigh that tells Lando he knows exactly what he’s doing, “both are correct.”

“Ha!” Lando grins triumphantly. “I knew it. Oldest brother of a lot of girls, then. Their names now, please, good sir.”

“Absolutely not,” OP scoffs. “You’d be able to find us in a heartbeat. That combination of names doesn’t appear often in the Melbourne region.”

“I’m not trying to dox you,” Lando says, pouting.

“And I’m not trying to have my old school picture show up.”

“Another piece of information offered freely. You went to school.”

OP laughs. “Masterful detective work, Norris.”

“You leave me no choice, then, but to keep reading names until you offer up something useful.”

There’s a brief pause on the other end of the call, then OP speaks, the grin audible in his voice. “Mm, nice. ASMR.”

“You’re a dickhead,” Lando sighs, stretching his legs out across the kitchen floor, getting more comfortable. “I should just hang up on you.”

“Do it, then,” OP calls his bluff immediately. “And admit you lose.”

Lando already knows he’s not going to hang up, so instead he changes the topic, decides to wait him out, to lead him somewhere else entirely – take him on a detour through the thicket of his mind, that strange, springy thing that never has the same conversation twice. He’ll get where he wants to be eventually.

“What do you like about surfing?” he asks instead, watching the temperature display on his powerful-ass oven – which he only ever uses to heat up frozen food – climb higher.

Lando hears faint clicking in the background, which means OP is probably still at his desk, doing something absent-mindedly while he talks.

“I don’t like it when it’s crowded,” OP says after a moment. “I really only enjoy it in the mornings. Best during golden hour.”

“So you don’t actually enjoy surfing,” Lando says, frowning slightly. “You just like the idea of having the ocean to yourself.”

“No,” OP objects. “I do like surfing too. I like how peaceful it feels. I’ve always liked being in the water, but I find swimming boring. I can’t really explain it.” A pause. “Have you ever tried it?”

“Yeah, actually,” Lando says. “In Portugal. With Max and my girlfriend.”

There’s a short pause on the other end of the line again, then OP asks, “And you didn’t like it?”

“I wasn’t very good at it immediately, so I kind of lost interest.”

“Oh,” OP says. “So you’re a perfectionist.”

“Of course I am,” Lando replies, putting his feet against the warm edge of the oven. “Do you even have to ask?”

“Right,” OP says. “You’re, like, the most self-critical guy in post-race interviews. It’s like you already anticipate what the press is going to throw at you, just ten times worse.” Another short pause. “Though you didn’t take much shit in the Abu Dhabi post-race interviews.”

“Yeah,” Lando sighs. “It’s like my entire media training went straight out the window the moment someone said Monza or Gabi Bortoleto anywhere near me.”

There’s more clicking and keyboard tapping in the background. He’s definitely playing Minecraft.

“I’ve always wondered,” OP says, sounding faintly curious now. “What does media training actually entail?”

“It’s so fucking boring,” Lando groans. “It’s a lot of mock interviews where there’s some designated ragebaiter, some shit-stirrer trying to get under your skin, and you have to respond as neutrally and unbothered as possible.”

“That’s shit, though,” OP says. “You should be allowed to fight back.”

“I totally agree.” Lando laughs, balancing his phone on his knee as he slides further down the side of the counter. He has never been able to sit still for long. “But unfortunately, if I do, the entire internet’s on my ass again for two months straight.”

“You do have a talent for enraging them.”

“Who?” Lando asks. “People on the internet? I know. I fear it’s just who I am.”

“I used to argue on your behalf in comment threads or whatever,” OP says. “But then, one sunny day, I realised I’m a grown-up and I should probably invest my time in different things.”

Lando has to hide his grin behind his hand, warmth creeping into his cheeks again. “They really weren’t kidding when they said you’re a fan of me.”

“Who’s they?”

“The streets,” Lando shrugs. “You know.”

More clicking in the background. “Yeah, well,” OP says after a moment. “Maybe I was. I am. Whatever.”

“It’s not embarrassing,” Lando says. “And you can never be too grown-up for that. I’m never going to stop being a fan of Valentino Rossi. I almost went into MotoGP instead of F1 because of him.”

“I’m glad you ended up in cars.”

“Why?”

“We wouldn’t be having this call, then,” OP says – and for the first time, it doesn’t sound deflected, or embarrassed, or wrapped in sarcasm. “Because I’m not into MotoGP.”

“Who knows? Maybe we still would’ve met. I still could’ve joined the Midoffs.”

“Yeah,” OP says, not sounding very convinced. “But I never would’ve picked you.”

Lando laughs, something triumphant threading through his voice. “So you admit it? You picked me because you’re a fan.”

The clicking in the background picks up pace, grows a little more frantic, a little more uneven, and Lando decides – mercifully – not to push it any further.

“Are you just playing Minecraft instead of focusing on our conversation?”

“I can play Minecraft and focus on our conversation,” OP replies. “In fact, I can do almost anything and play Minecraft.”

Lando bites his lip. He really tries not to say it. But it’s late, his blood sugar’s somewhere in the gutter, and the amount of caffeine in his system could probably reanimate a corpse at this point. And he’s always been a little hopeless anyway – his mind slipping exactly where it shouldn’t. After all, he’s the guy who asked Lance Stroll on a Netflix doc if he’d managed to wank with two broken wrists.

“Do you think you could have sex and play Minecraft?”

OP groans immediately. “I knew that was coming. I fucking knew it. The second I said it, I knew.”

Lando giggles, properly this time. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I mean, I’ve never tried,” OP says, and there’s something in his voice, a slight roughness, his accent coming through a little stronger now. “I guess I could. It’s muscle memory at this point. Though I’m not entirely sure how the logistics would work.”

“Not bad,” Lando says, genuinely impressed.

His oven finally beeps, and he frees the pizza from its plastic wrapping with both hands before sliding it into the oven. The heat hits his face as he closes the door again. He wipes his hands on a dish towel, settling back against the counter.

And the whole time, OP has clearly been thinking. Because, of course, he comes back to it. 

“Could you?” he asks after a moment. “Like driving an F1 car?”

“Fuck no,” Lando laughs. “Even if we ignore the logistics – which would already be worse for me than for you – absolutely not. I’m way too sensitive for that. The car would be in the wall instantly.”

OP clears his throat, and a second later Lando hears it; distinct, unmistakable. The sound of a Minecraft character burning.

“Fuck,” OP mutters. “I fell in lava.”

Lando’s grin is immediate, wide, uncontrollable. “What were you doing? Scaling bastion walls?”

“Yeah,” OP sighs. “But I’m done now.”

“Are you going to bed?” Lando asks, shifting his weight slightly. “Isn’t it, like, seven in the morning for you?”

There’s a beat.

“Are you trying to get rid of me?” OP asks, and Lando can practically hear him raise an eyebrow.

“No,” Lando says quickly, still grinning. “I was offering you an out. In case you’re done with me after that… turn in the conversation.”

When OP doesn’t reply immediately, Lando keeps going, softer now, more curious than teasing.

“So when do you actually sleep?” he asks. “Because I’ve known you for, what, twenty-four hours now, and I don’t think you’ve went to bed during that time.”

“That’s true,” OP says, and he sounds embarrassed again. “I’ve been awake for almost thirty hours.”

Lando nearly drops his phone. “Are you insane? How the fuck are you surviving that?”

“I can sleep ahead,” OP says. “And living in Australia while most of the guys I stream with are in Europe and America means I’m the one who has to bite the bullet and stream at ungodly hours.”

“You must be fucking driving your roommates insane, then,” Lando says, warming his feet against the oven again.

“I, uh, live alone,” OP replies. “Fortunately. I’d hate having to be considerate.”

Lando laughs. “Words of wisdom, OP.” He leans back against the counter. “So what did you do after school? Since we’ve established you went to school – given that somewhere out there, there are school photos of you.”

“You’re not giving up, are you?”

“Oh, come on,” Lando scoffs. “It’s hardly a personal question to ask if you went to uni.”

“That’s also something no one else knows.”

“So?” By now, Lando knows he’s special, and he pumps his fist in silent celebration when OP – again – gives in.

“I did go to uni.” He sighs, like even that much is a chore to admit.

“You see? Wasn’t that hard.” Lando grins. “What did you study?”

“Nope,” OP says, the wall snapping back into place. “Not doing that.”

“Fine,” Lando sighs. “I’ll settle for your name, then.”

“Not going to happen either.” He snorts. “I was actually counting the minutes until you’d bring it up again. You made it exactly eleven minutes without pestering me.”

“Alright,” Lando says. “I’ll bring it up again in two hours. And then you tell me.”

Incredibly, two hours later, Lando is sprawled across his sofa, a half-eaten pizza abandoned on a plate beside him, tossing a stress ball into the air and only catching it about half the time. His phone is plugged in, running hot by now, but OP is still on the other end of the line.

The time has slipped past unnoticed: they’ve talked about streaming, about games, about Formula One. And when Lando tries to take stock of it, he realises how little OP has actually given away – at least nothing that would qualify as a personal detail.

No, what he has instead is everything else.

He knows exactly what OP thinks about his grid mates – Fernando Alonso being “obviously the coolest,” while Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc are, apparently, “pretty nice as well.” He knows his opinions on every major game released in the past decade – Elden Ring “severely overhyped,” Kingdom Come: Deliverance II “robbed of Game of the Year.”

They even veer into films, where OP makes fun of Lando for naming Finding Nemo as his favourite, only to counter with some obscure Guy Ritchie movie, because of course he does.

So, in a small lull in the conversation – one of those rare pauses where neither of them immediately fills the silence – Lando checks the time. Almost half one in the morning.

He tries again.

“OP, I think you’ve realised by now that I’m not giving up. I need to know your name.” He yawns, dragging a hand over his face. “Otherwise I can’t go to bed, and if I can’t go to bed, I’ll be rubbish in training tomorrow. Do you want that? Do you want to prove all those people right who think you’re insane for picking me?”

“It’ll be embarrassing for you as well,” OP counters.

Lando hasn’t heard any clicking in a while. It’s quiet on the other end – too quiet for someone still at their desk. Maybe he’s on his phone now. Maybe he’s moved.

Lando imagines him elsewhere.

On a balcony, maybe – if he has one – overlooking the ocean. It would be close to noon for him by now, summer in Australia. When Lando closes his eyes, the image comes too easily. He sees him there. Fluffy hair, he decides. Something between brown and honey. His face, though – that stays blurred, frustratingly out of reach. But somehow, in his mind, OP smiles exactly like the :] he uses in chat. He definitely has dimples. And from the hand cam, Lando knows about the faint scatter of moles along his arm, so he lets them carry upward, imagines them on his face as well.

It’s strange, actually. His hands had looked pale. Not what Lando would expect from someone who surfs.

But then again – early mornings, wetsuit, limited sun. It tracks.

“Not as much as for you,” Lando says, absently, now changed into gym shorts and a hoodie, chewing on the string.

“It’s not that I don’t want to tell you my name,” OP says after a moment. “But if we stream together a lot, and you use it in private, it’ll slip. And then everyone’s gonna know.”

Lando exhales quietly. He can’t argue with that. It’s solid logic. Still, he hates not getting what he wants.

“Then they know,” he says. “It’s just a name. What’s in a name? That’s Shakespeare, isn’t it?”

“Mm,” OP hums. “And before you ask, no, it’s not Othello.”

Lando huffs out a laugh. “If your name was Othello, I’d absolutely understand why you wouldn’t want people to know.”

“Shut up, Lando Calrissian,” OP shoots back, and Lando can practically hear the eye-roll. “Besides, yeah. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if people knew my first name. But still. I don’t want that.”

“It won’t slip,” Lando says, softer now, more earnest. “I’m a public figure too, OP. You have no idea how much shit I’m hiding.”

“Cancellable offences?” OP asks immediately – curious in that very internet personality type of way – and Lando can’t help but smile. Of course that’s where his mind goes.

“Depends who’s doing the cancelling,” Lando says. “But yeah. Definitely.”

There’s a beat.

“I might be persuaded,” OP says slowly, “for a trade.”

Oh. So that’s the angle.

But Lando can’t exactly come out with it – can’t just say it plain. Every woman I’ve dated has been my friend doing me a favour. I’m so fucking gay, you have no idea. The thought flickers through him, sharp and immediate, but it stays where it is. Unsaid.

“Oh, so now you want my secrets?” Lando teases instead, a lighter tone draped over something heavier. “After fighting me tooth and nail over something as simple as your name?”

There’s another pause in the conversation, and this one stretches – longer than the others, long enough for it to settle somewhere uneasy in Lando’s chest.

It makes him nervous.

He doesn’t know where this is going. Whether he’s made sense to OP at all – whether he understands that whatever fear he has is misplaced when it comes to Lando – or whether, instead, he’s realising that he drew a line, and Lando keeps trying to step over it.

For a moment, Lando thinks he’s pushed too far.

And then–

“You’re right,” OP says quietly. “It’s just a name.”

Lando straightens immediately, the exhaustion falling off him in an instant, like it had never been there to begin with. “Are you serious right now? You’ll tell me your name?”

“Yeah,” OP says.

And then – again – that pause. Longer this time. It feels almost suspended.

Lando waits.

“My name’s Oscar.”

“Oscar,” Lando repeats.

The name sits on his tongue like a fizzy drink, effervescent  – like champagne, like a victory he’s worked for, like standing on the podium after a race, sweat-soaked and shining, looking out over a world that is, for one fleeting moment, entirely his.

It fizzes. And blooms. And sticks. He rolls it around his mouth like it might dissolve if he’s not careful.

Never has a name tasted sweeter. Never has something so small felt so earned.

Oscar, he thinks, greedily, the thought slipping in before he can stop it – deeply instinctive, the part of him that never quite knows when enough is enough. The part that wins once and immediately starts reaching for the title.

I’ve got your name now. Soon, I’ll get the rest of you, too.

“Lando,” Oscar says, and there’s something faintly amused in it – like he’s watching him from the other side of the line. It snaps him out of it.

“It’s not a boring name at all,” Lando says quickly, too quickly – like he needs to say something before the moment settles deep in his bones. Though part of him wants to say it again. Oscar. Just to feel it once more. “Oscar. What does it mean?”

“Deer-friend,” Oscar says, scoffing.

And immediately, unbidden, Lando thinks of dark brown eyes.

“Oh,” he says lightly, a grin tugging at his mouth. “Are you?”

“Don’t think I’ve ever seen one, mate.”

“So you haven’t been to Japan, then?”

“Once, when I was younger.” Oscar’s voice sounds different now – lighter, almost – like giving Lando his name has loosened something in him. “But no deer magically flocked around me.”

A small pause settles between them. Then: “You’re happy now?”

“Extremely happy, Oscar,” Lando says, repeating his name just because he can. “Especially in knowing that no one else except for me knows.”

“Ha, I knew this was a power thing,” Oscar scoffs. “I feel almost bad for giving it up now.”

“Almost?” Lando teases. “There’s a part of you that doesn’t regret this yet, Oscar?”

Oscar snorts. “The way you pronounce my name is so fucking English, by the way.”

“How?” Lando finds his stress ball again and throws it up toward the ceiling. “I’m saying it completely normally.”

“Oscah,” he imitates him immediately. And Lando can see where he’s coming from.

“Yeah, well, you say Layn-doh.” Lando reaches for his best attempt at an Australian accent. “But please don’t stop on my account. I think it’s adorable.”

He’s pretty sure they’re friends now.

It is the fastest he’s ever struck up a friendship; but you don’t stay on call for ten hours and not become friends.

Especially not when they have long given up on Minecraft, on keybinds and inventory sorting. The past four hours have been nothing but getting to know each other better. Oscar is halfway across the world, and still – Lando can almost feel him here. Like he’s just out of sight, leaning against the counter, like all Lando would have to do is turn his head to find him there.

“Are you not tired?” Oscar asks after a moment. “It’s 2 a.m. in Monaco.”

“Yeah,” Lando yawns. “I’m getting a bit sleepy, but I want to keep talking to you.”

The silence between them stretches again, then Oscar’s voice – almost sceptical. “Why?”

“I don’t know. You’re funny.” Lando shrugs. “And you are so unnecessarily cagey about your life. It makes me want to know more.”

“There’s nothing there,” Oscar says, and Lando tries to listen for any sort of emotion his tone might betray. Does he sound amused? Pained? “Trust me.” Another brief pause. “And I don’t believe that someone with a life like yours should be interested in what a Minecraft speedrunner gets up to.”

“The top Minecraft speedrunner,” Lando corrects him. “Game recognises game.”

He gets up from the sofa, leaving his plate there, and slides over to his bedroom where his bed is still unmade from when he got out of it this morning – back when he had still thought this was going to be an entirely normal day, and not end in the longest phone call of his life. How fast the course of your life can change.

He throws himself onto his bed, and apparently the sound of the fabric crinkling gets picked up by his mic, because he hears Oscar pause.

“Are you in bed?”

“Maybe,” Lando murmurs, voice already softening, slipping at the edges. “I’m a bit sleepy.”

“I’ll hang up then,” Oscar says, quieter now, careful.

“No,” Lando protests immediately, a soft, almost childish whine. “I’m not ready yet.”

A breath on the other end. Something like a laugh, low and disbelieving. “Okay.”

“Tell me something,” Lando says, eyes already closed, fumbling blindly for his charger. “Walk me through what tomorrow’s gonna look like.”

“Well…” Oscar starts. “We’ll begin with your overworld splits.”

“Mmh.”

“There are five different overworld types,” Oscar continues, settling into it, into the rhythm of explanation. “You’ll need to learn all of them.”

It’s strange – he’s fallen asleep to his voice yesterday as well, but back then that voice had been for everyone. Right now, it’s only for him. Just for him. Every word Oscar says is just for him. The way he pronounces a word, the cadence of his voice – just for him.

“You’ve got such a nice voice,” Lando mumbles, already half gone, the words slipping out before he can think better of them. He doesn’t hear what Oscar says in return.

Sleep takes him almost immediately, pulls him under mid-thought, the phone still glowing faintly beside him, casting soft light over his face.

Oscar hangs up half an hour later. Lando never knows.

He doesn’t know that Oscar is standing on a balcony in the thick Australian summer, the Pacific stretching out in front of him in an endless sheet of blue – exactly the way Lando had imagined it.

He doesn’t know that Oscar stays there long after the call ends, phone still in his hand, staring out at the horizon as though it personally owes him accountability for what he has just been subjected to – by whatever forces preside over the fate of this world.

Or that, eventually, he leans forward and softly bangs his forehead against the railing.

Once. 

Then again.

And again.

Eyes squeezed shut, jaw tight, something unraveling under his skin.

“Fuck,” he breathes.