Lando knows, technically, before Oscar joins.
Zak tells him first, in the vague, careful way Zak says things when he tries to sound casual about something that is absolutely not casual. Andrea tells him again later, more formally, in the sort of voice people use for incident post-mortems, contracts, and minor explosive hazards.
Lando stares at him. “What, like Toyota?”
Andrea only folds his hands on the table and looks at Lando with the grave patience of a man who has already decided not to rise to anything today. “It is private medical information. It does not affect his ability to race.”
Which is apparently the McLaren way of saying your new teammate is part wasp, please don’t make it weird.
And Lando doesn’t. Mostly because there is nothing to make weird.
Oscar looks normal. Annoyingly normal, actually. Normal hair, normal hands, normal ears, normal little mouth that quirks when Lando makes a joke that is not even that funny. He doesn’t have wings. He doesn’t click his mandibles. He doesn’t crawl up walls or hiss at jam. He wears his team kit properly, sits through meetings with his arms folded, and answers questions in that calm, clipped way that makes Lando want to poke him just to see if anything interesting falls out.
Oscar is just his teammate, a quiet guy who feels entirely too dense to be knocked off balance, standing his ground right up until he puts three tenths on you where it hurts.
Aside from the biggest red flag is that he drinks Coca-Cola mixed with water like it is an acceptable life choice, which frankly seems more alien than the wasp thing.
Not fully. There is always a part of him that knows, tucked away with all the other things he has been told once and is meant to behave normally about. The same way he knows where the exits are in a room, which mechanics walk behind him in the garage, which corners punish him if he gets greedy.
Until Singapore. Because heat does something to Oscar.
At first, Lando thinks it is just the usual Singapore misery. Everyone is sweaty. Everyone is irritable. The paddock feels boiled in its own plastic wrapping, all stale air and humidity trapped under lights that never seem to switch off. After FP2, Oscar’s fireproofs cling to him, his hair damp at the temples, colour high in his cheeks. He looks tired, which makes sense. They all do. Singapore makes everyone look like they have been lightly poached and then served under fluorescent lighting.
Then Lando sees the ridge.
It happens in the garage, quick enough that he almost misses it. Oscar bends over the sidepod, one hand braced on the halo as Tom talks him through front wing changes. His race suit is half down, sleeves tied at his waist, fireproof stretched across his back.
Under the fabric, at the base of his spine, something moves.
A hard dark shape pushes against the material—segmented, glossy—then sinks back under his skin like it was never there.
Lando stops drinking, and water spills down his chin.
Oscar’s head turns. For half a second, his face goes completely blank. Not surprised, exactly. More like every shutter in him comes down at once.
Then he says, very evenly, “Missed your mouth there.”
Lando wipes his chin with the back of his hand. “Yeah. Noticed.”
After that Lando can’t stop seeing things.
The shadow under Oscar’s skin when he’s overtired, low and slow, like something shifting in sleep. The dark hook that appears beneath his waistband when he stretches and disappears before Lando can look directly at it. The way Oscar goes perfectly still whenever anyone touches too low on his back, even by accident, like his whole body is closing around a secret while his face works out what expression to make.
Small things. Things nobody else notices.
Lando notices all of them.
Sweet at first. Barely there. Lando catches it in the driver room corridor and assumes someone has opened an energy gel. Something sugary, sharp, almost floral, sitting oddly under the usual motorhome stink.
Then Oscar walks past, and Lando’s whole mouth fills with spit.
“I’m fine,” Lando says, which is a lie with shoes on and a hat.
Oscar doesn’t move. His eyes move over Lando’s face, quick and controlled.
The smell thickens. Hot sugar. Ozone. Sweat. Something chemical enough to make Lando’s skin prickle all over.
Oscar’s jaw tightens. “Don’t follow me,” he says.
Which obviously makes Lando want to follow him so badly he nearly blacks out.
Oscar shuts himself in his driver room for twenty-three minutes. Lando knows because he stands in the corridor pretending to scroll through his phone. He stays there like an idiot, staring at the flooring, breathing through his mouth when the smell leaks faintly through the doorframe.
When Oscar comes back out, he’s changed shirts. His hair is damp, like he has dunked his head under the sink. His face is calm again, but too pale around the mouth, and he keeps one hand close to his stomach for a few seconds before he catches himself and lets it fall.
“Everything okay?” Lando asks.
Oscar glances at him. “Yes.”
“You smell like a melted battery.”
Lando winces. “Bad wording.”
“You should stay away from me when it happens.”
“Because you’re clearly affected.”
Lando laughs, too high and too fast. “No, I’m not.”
Oscar looks pointedly at Lando’s hand.
Lando realises he is gripping Oscar’s sleeve. He lets go. “Static,” he says.
“That’s not what static is.”
Oscar’s mouth twitches, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.
That’s the bit that stays with Lando. Not the ridges or the smell or the shadow shifting low under Oscar’s skin.
It’s the way Oscar looks embarrassed by his own body. Like every strange part of him is a mistake he can usually keep zipped under a suit.
And maybe Lando would’ve left it alone, if Oscar hadn’t started avoiding him.
Oscar’s avoidance is shit.
He still sits next to Lando in debrief because that is where his chair is. He still answers when Lando asks him things, still makes dry little comments under his breath that only Lando catches. But he stops standing close. Stops letting their shoulders touch in hospitality. Stops leaning in to look at Lando’s phone when Lando starts laughing at something stupid.
That last one is offensive.
“You’re being weird,” Lando says eventually.
Oscar doesn’t look up from his rice. “No.”
“You’re eating lunch two seats away from me.”
Oscar looks at the empty chair between them. Then back at his rice. “It was free.”
“It’s always free. This is McLaren.”
There it is. Warning tone. Soft enough that no one else clocks it, but Lando feels it under his ribs anyway.
Lando leans back in his chair, pretending his pulse hasn’t jumped. “What?”
Oscar keeps his voice low. “I’m trying to be sensible.”
Oscar’s eyes flick to him.
Lando knows. Not the details. Not yet. But enough to feel the room tilt a little.
The next time it happens, Oscar doesn’t even make it to his driver room.
It is after qualifying, late enough that the garage has started to empty out. Mechanics move around in that exhausted, efficient way, getting in the last few setup changes before curfew.
The air is still hot. Singapore refuses to cool properly, even at night, turning from wet heat into something heavier and stickier, clinging to the back of Lando’s neck as he cuts through the corridor behind hospitality.
He finds Oscar half hidden between flight cases and the service wall, one hand pressed flat to the panelling, the other low on his stomach. His race suit is still half-zipped, and his shoulders are shaking.
Oscar’s head snaps up. “Don’t.”
From ten feet away, Oscar looks fine in the way Oscar often looks fine when he absolutely is not: sweaty, pale, pissed off, normal Oscar in normal McLaren kit, glaring like Lando has interrupted him doing taxes.
Then something moves under his shirt. Low. Wrong.
Oscar’s mouth pinches shut. Lando forgets how to breathe.
Oscar laughs once, sharp and ugly. “Yeah.”
“Not if I get away from you.”
That lands strangely. “Me?”
Oscar’s eyes are too dark. “You make it worse.”
Lando should have a joke for that. Any joke. He has thousands, most of them unusable, most of them terrible, and usually one turns up even when it should not.
Oscar’s hand slips lower, fingers pressing into the orange fabric at his waist. His breathing stutters.
“Go get Mark,” Oscar says.
Oscar’s eyes narrow. “Lando.”
“You told me not to follow you last time.”
The smell rolls over them again, hot-sweet and unbearable. Lando’s knees soften with it. His brain goes syrupy at the edges, everything narrowing to Oscar’s mouth, Oscar’s hands, the tremor in Oscar’s thighs, the dark flicker beneath his skin.
That’s when Lando gets it.
Oscar isn’t hard to be around because he looks like something inhuman. He’s hard to be around because most of the time he doesnt. Because he can sit in briefings and answer questions and laugh quietly at Lando’s shit jokes while something ancient lives under his skin, waiting for the exact wrong temperature, the exact wrong season, the exact wrong boy standing too close in a corridor after qualifying.
Lando takes one step closer.
Oscar’s back hits the wall.
“Don’t,” Oscar warns, weaker this time.
Lando stops just outside arm’s reach. “Tell me what’s happening.”
For a second Lando thinks he’ll refuse. Then Oscar looks at the floor and says, flat as a blade, “Mating season.”
Lando’s brain leaves his body, walks into traffic, and dies there.
He manages, somehow, “Right.”
Oscar’s laugh is barely a breath. “That’s it?”
“What else am I supposed to say?”
Oscar shuts his eyes. Beneath the fireproof top, something shifts again, low under his abdomen. Dark. Hooked. There and gone.
Lando’s mouth goes dry. Oscar opens his eyes.
And Lando, because he has never once in his life made the sensible choice when the stupid one has teeth, says, “Okay.”
Oscar stares. Lando steps closer.
“You don’t even know what that means.”
“No,” Lando says, voice rough. “But I know what you look like when you’re trying not to ask for help.”
Oscar’s face goes very still.
The corridor hums around them. Distant voices. The faint clank of equipment being packed away. Someone laughs outside, completely unaware that Lando Norris is about to make several catastrophic life choices beside a hospitality fire extinguisher.
Oscar’s hand twitches at his side.
Then Oscar says, so quietly it barely survives the air between them, “Physio trailer.”
Oscar glances towards the narrow door at the end of the service corridor. The McLaren physio trailer sits tucked between freight cases and cooling units, lights still on, blinds drawn. Meant for stretching, ice baths, recovery.
Nothing about this is recovery.
His voice drops lower. “Lock it behind you.”
Lando’s pulse kicks hard enough to hurt. “Osc.”
Oscar’s jaw flexes. He’s still braced against the wall, still trying to stand like nothing is happening while his body betrays him by degrees. The sharp sweet smell of him clings to the back of Lando’s throat.
“If you come in,” Oscar says, very carefully, “you stay until I say.”
The sensible answer is to get Mark. The sensible answer is to back away, breathe through his mouth, pretend he hasn’t seen the dark flicker shifting beneath Oscar’s skin. The sensible answer is probably written down somewhere in a McLaren emergency protocol nobody thought to show him, because nobody expected him to be this stupid.
Oscar’s fingers curl against the wall.
Lando reaches for the door handle. “Ready?”
Oscar’s eyes close for half a second. Something moves across his face—quick, unguarded—and then it’s gone, tucked back behind the usual composure. The careful mouth. The stubborn set of his shoulders.
Lando opens the door and Oscar follows him in, and the smell comes with them, sweet and thick and inescapable, and Lando pulls the door shut and locks it and doesn’t think about how easily he made that decision.
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